Written as the Keeper for the Arrows, QLFC Round 8 (Prompt: What new laws do the Death Eaters and/or Voldemort make?)

WC: 1647

VoldemortWins!AU

Some people swear that they saw that day coming when it was still rolling towards us, barely a line on the horizon. Personally, I thought it came like a dream, like a cloud not yet formed.

Then, one day, the cloud finally formed and dumped all of its rain on me.

Those people also swear that if they had just run a little faster, or tripped someone else, or hid, they could've made it.

I haven't had the time to think about all the hypotheticals and all the alternate universes. I'm still standing in the rain as the cloud continues to pour, getting soaked through the bone. I'm still shocked.

It's hard to place where the beginning began. Playing the blame-game devolves into blaming everyone who was ever involved, because why couldn't each of you have done something different, and so on.

But I'll start at the beginning as I know it, directly after Harry Potter died.

When You-Know-Who took over, things went as expected for a while. He and his Death Eaters stormed the Ministry, sparing no one. Once they took over there, the rest of Europe called it a "rebel coup," and Apparated in aid, and they died in an unorganized battle. The aid was too late. Britain's Ministry of Magic had sent out distress calls, but the rest of the European council was too slow to decide how to respond as a group. It took fifteen minutes for You-Know-Who to topple the government, mostly because most employees had fled, and much of the Auror team was out defending residential areas that were also being targeted.

You-Know-Who and his followers swept over Britain, leaving behind their signature skull in Muggle towns and cities as graffiti on the walls or smoke in the sky. The Death Eaters were careful, though. They made sure to hide their identity as wizards and witches; someone in the group had informed them of the power of Muggle military tools and weapons.

I was born a few years later, a complete accident. My mother won't lie to me and say that she initially wanted me; not many people want a child during a war. She calls me a happy accident, instead.

The Death Eaters gathered strength and more members, some of whom were afraid not to join, until they could singlehandedly place wards around all major Muggle military bases. When they did so, it was just a matter of time until they shuffled everybody into compounds.

I wonder if any government had planned for a noseless wizard to try to take over their military bases and succeed without killing anyone.

In the compounds, there were a few rules. Most of them involve curfews, what kind of items you can own (no wands, no radios, no telephones, no floos, for example), and what kind of things you can do. The overarching idea is that work buys privilege. We grow food for the Death Eaters here, though I hear that in other compounds their job is different. We aren't allowed to communicate between compounds.

I remember that once I was walking to the park when a Death Eater, who you can tell apart by the black cloak and gelled hair (none of us have access to stuff like that anymore), pulled me inside.

"You must wear your badge." He tapped his left chest expectantly.

My heart flew into a frenzy as I tried to remember where I had put the badge. How could I have lost it in my own home? "I-I forgot," I managed through chattering teeth.

"Now, put this on." He reached into his robes and pulled out a badge, an armband sporting a triangle with a circle in the middle and a line going from top to bottom. "Wear this always."

I nodded vehemently to convince him of my honesty. I was eight.

He flung me against the wall with a flick of his wrist, aided by a wand. "So you remember," he said, before sending me on my way.

At first the compound wasn't a labor camp or anything, just a small area of a city designated for the people who weren't Pureblooded, which included both Muggles and Magical folk. You-Know-Who believed that we would either rebel or contaminate his population of Purebloods with our "risky blood" and "bad genetics."

One of my strongest memories is of the seers, or those faking to be seers, told their fortunes in this area of the city. Besides the fact that they were trapped here too, these compounds were the only place where anyone needed the hope that one gets from hearing an optimistic fortune. The seers sat up their red tents that made an ornate room inside full of strings of beads and exotic plants. Behind the table in the center, the seer would sit, and on the table would sit a covered lantern. The seers would pull off the cloth that shrouded the lantern whenever they felt a passenger walking by the tent. Their thin bodies would grow as shadows against the red tent, and I would pass by, feeling sorry for them. It was no longer fashionable to be thin.

When I went in once, giving into my curiosity, I was immediately brought over by one of the seers.

"Would you like the future told?"

"I'm just here to look around," I said.

"This isn't a store, my dear. Sit." The seer pushed me into a chair and sat me down with a cup of tea.

When I escaped from that tent, I only remembered one thing about the future: that the walls were going to fall down one day, and I was going to survive it.

I believe they told that to everyone, just to fuel us with enough hope to get us through the next few months.

Then, the Death Eaters realized they needed to eat, and setting fire to Britain wasn't a great idea. It was just their luck that they had us at their disposal.

We didn't expect much in the compounds. These conditions were what most of the elders considered good conditions. "At least You-Know-Who didn't kill us," they'd mutter to their ungrateful children yearning for more than this life. "At least we get to be around people like us. Living here isn't so bad."

It wasn't so bad, yes. It was better than war.

But I still felt like something could be better. I hope you don't blame me. I grew up in the compound. My family was made up of two important Order members, Hermione Granger and Ronald Weasley. Though the Order was mostly now an underground communications network that made plans that never followed through, the status of my parents gave me a bit of safety in the compound. I never knew the touch of a field of grass, or the blanket of a meadow of flowers. The grey of the compound and the pain of my wanderlust were the only things reminded me every day, so I put both things in my brain and mashed them together. I would wander the compound, instead.

The morning of the attack, when things really began to rain down from the sky, my mother said this: "Rose, would you go out to the market today to trade these buttons in for some red ones?" My mother waved her hand to Accio the buttons that she wanted to return.

My mother once told me of an era when those with magic in us had wands that could channel our power into doing complex rituals and spells. When You-Know-Who captured non-Pureblood wizards and witches, he snapped their wands.

"You know that we should trade in our goods now so you can get back in time," she said.

"Yeah," I responded. Ever since a few months ago, the rules had been getting stricter. We had been required to register a strand of our hair in a bank (many people opted to shave their heads, bodies, and eyelashes instead), curfew was earlier, and the Death Eaters took to beating us more often.

Remembering this, I nodded to her, reached out my arm to take the buttons, and left.

On my way back home, I felt something papery and warm tickle my face. I put my hand up to my cheek and came away with ash. Ash was falling instead of rain.

I stared up at the little wedge of sky that was visible from the bottom of the compound. The rubble of the walls exploding made me think that heaven was breaking down one brick at a time. Not that this place was heaven, but I always thought that something better would come in the sky when I passed, and here the sky was, swirling black.

The skull was unforgettable.

It seemed completely unexpected, and I started to quake, sitting down on the side of the street as people ran around me. The screaming hurt my ears, so I covered them, letting the buttons I had tumble from my palms.

"Why?" I shouted. Nobody heard.

When was enough enough? Why couldn't the Death Eaters be satisfied with the lashings in the square, the grain that we sent, and the people that we sacrificed?

I became coated in a layer of ash as I sat through what seemed like the last tragedy I would ever witness. I screamed until I felt bitterness in my throat.

When I was rescued from the rubble, with broken limbs, bruised face, and all, I was told I was liberated from the Death Eaters for good. I learned that the Death Eaters had increased beatings to cover for the fact that they were stretched very thin over their empire of the world, and that Voldemort hadn't held out long enough, and that a war had been going on outside the borders of my compound for years and years.

I still do not feel liberated.