A/N: Hello everyone! Here is the next installment. It's the last major exposition chapter, don't worry XD I tried to keep it interesting, regardless. Thank you for your ongoing support, my lovely readers. Please continue to share your thoughts with me. :) I hope you enjoy the story.
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Once everyone had settled down, curiosity replaced mirth and the content of the prophecy was slowly mulled over.
"So, the Potters were the parents of the child in the prophecy? Your friend, Harry?" asked Mary.
Hermione nodded. "It ended up that way, yes. There was another family that it could have referred to, but Voldemort chose to go after the Potters instead." She tilted her to the side pensively and added, "Harry always thought that Voldemort picked him instead of the other boy, our friend Neville, because Harry is a Half-blood like Voldemort; and not only that - he's a Half-blood who, at the time, had everything that Voldemort was deprived of: two loving parents, a safe and welcoming home, wealth and social standing... In essence, he saw Harry as an equal in blood, but resented him for his good fortune.
"In any case," she sighed, "one of Voldemort's followers at the time overheard the prophecy while it was being delivered to Dumbledore, and he took what he knew straight to his master." Hermione's features suddenly took on a strange expression; anger, sadness, and reluctant understanding seemed to wage war in the crease between her eyebrows, in the coffee-and-ochre-and-cinnamon of her irises, in the rigid set of her mouth.
"When Voldemort decided to move against the Potters in order to eliminate Harry, the same man who told him of the prophecy turned to Albus Dumbledore to warn him of Voldemort's plans. That man's name was Severus Snape," Hermione said, undeniable heaviness in her tone, "and he was in love with Lily Potter, who had been a close friend of his during their childhood. As soon as it became apparent that Voldemort didn't care for Lily's survival - she was 'just a Mudblood' to him, after all," she spat, "Snape ran to Dumbledore, and made a bargain with him to protect Lily, and her family by extension, in exchange for his services as a spy. Dumbledore agreed, and set the Potters up in a cottage that was under a protection spell known as the Fidelius charm. The nature of the Fidelius is that it counts on the loyalty of a trusted friend or loved one of those in need of protection to keep the secret of their location safe. Once a Fidelius charm is in place, that person becomes the only individual beyond those protected who knows where they are and who can reveal their location to other people. For that reason, they're called a Secret Keeper.
"Now, while James Potter was at school, he had a very close-knit group of friends. They called themselves the Marauders," Hermione noted with wistful smile, "and they were incredibly talented pranksters. There were four of them: James, of course; and then Sirius Black, who was for all intents and purposes his adopted brother; Remus Lupin, the most rational and humble of the four of them by a long stretch; and, finally, Peter Pettigrew." She uttered the last of the names with undiluted derision and had to take a harsh breath to calm herself.
Sherlock's gaze traced over the tensed plains of Hermione's face in the quiet before he spoke. "Pettigrew was chosen as Secret Keeper and betrayed the Potters." The words were a statement rather than a question.
Hermione nodded, and despite the fact that she'd regained control of most of her facial features and arranged them into a stoic mask, her eyes spoke clearly of the tumultuous emotions she was holding back from within.
"Yes," she confirmed. "The logic, so I've been told, was that Sirius was too obvious a choice and that Remus had too much contact with the werewolves aligned with Voldemort to be counted on to keep the Secret safe - Remus himself was a werewolf, incidentally," she clarified. "There was a likely possibility that he would be ambushed by the others, brought to Voldemort, and killed under interrogation. That left Pettigrew. He was a rat, and in more ways than one." She scowled viciously. "He turned out to be an undercover Death Eater, and the information that he provided Voldemort brought about the extinction of an entire family line, as well as the near-eradication of another, and that was even before the Potters.
"In the end, though, Pettigrew betrayed James and Lily like the coward he was, and so Voldemort set out for Potter Cottage in Godric's Hollow on the Halloween night of 1981. They'd thought they were safe," Hermione murmured sadly. She looked up, and seeing the concerned expressions of her audience members, she gave a shaky smile of reassurance. "I'm sorry. It's just that I've seen the memory of it, so speaking of what happened is rather difficult." At their obvious confusion, her smile grew slightly more genuine. "I'll explain that some other time. Just ... suffice it to say that Harry was forced at one point to relive his parents' murders from Voldemort's perspective, and that I have been privy to those memories thanks to my ministry position and the fact that Harry wouldn't trust anyone but me with his memories. I don't blame him at all, either. He's been through some horrendous experiences, things that I certainly wouldn't be willing to share with a stranger. His parents' murders..." She shuddered.
"They were in their sitting room playing with Harry when Voldemort came through the front gate and they realized that he had come for them. Because they'd thought they were safe, both Lily and James were unarmed. James yelled for Lily to take Harry and run." Hermione's voice had become monotone and her eyes, lifeless, as she detached herself from the memory. "She ran up the stairs to the nursery and James tried to head Voldemort off to buy her time. Voldemort laughed, struck him down with the Killing Curse, and stepped over his corpse to get up the stairs. Lily tried to physically barricade herself and Harry in the nursery, but it was no use. Voldemort broke into the room and ordered Lily to stand aside from Harry, but Lily refused. She kept begging," Hermione said, her voice breaking on the word, "begging him to kill her instead, to spare her son."
As Sherlock and Mycroft listened, they forcibly rendered their expressions impassive, but the way they sat in their chairs as stiff as a pair of painstakingly chiseled ice sculptures betrayed the degree of their disturbance. Mary's eyes were glistening in dismayed horror and she kept one arm curled around her stomach while her grip on John's hand turned vice-like. The doctor didn't seem to notice the loss of circulation in his increasingly pale fingers, fixed as he was on Hermione's pallor; his jaw was taut, his eyes grim and quietly enraged. Mrs. Hudson's cheeks were wet with tears and she had deliberately set one hand on Hermione's forearm in a gesture of comfort. The witch sucked in a ragged gasp of air and soldiered onward.
"He murdered her in cold blood, in front of her infant child. Dead with a bit of Aramaic and a flash of green light. Magic is so fickle," Hermione whispered. "It can do such wonderful things in one moment and such horrible things the next. It just depends who's using it. And that's where Lily Potter comes in, because she used her death to do the unthinkable. Instinctively, she invoked an ancient form of Blood magic that allows a person to sacrifice themselves in order to save a loved one from death at the hands of a sworn enemy. So, when Voldemort turned on Harry and tried to use the Killing Curse on him as well, because of Lily's sacrifice, the curse rebounded, and it forced Voldemort's soul from his body, weakening him immensely.
"It didn't kill him, though," Hermione continued, and her tone grew dark once more, "because Voldemort had rendered himself immortal in the most disgusting way possible. The magic he used," she shook her head vehemently, "is among the foulest branch of the Dark Arts.
"You see, the existence of the soul is contested in the Muggle world, but it's a fact in the magical world. Our magic even allows us to see souls in certain circumstances. They are magi-scientifically tangible, or in other words, they have been proven through the magical scientific process to exist and to have real substance, although the nature of that substance is extremely complex. In terms of purpose, though, they are what gives us our essence, our individuality, for lack of better terms. The Killing Curse - it literally rips the soul from the body. It's said to be painless, but nonetheless, it's a violation of natural law. Our souls are supposed to leave our bodies in their own time. To strip someone of their essence, of their soul, prematurely, in an act of cold-blooded, apathetic murder ... it taints your own essence and physically damages the soul.
"Intent matters, though," she added as an aside. "If a person kills in self-defense, for example, or if they perform euthanasia, the act does not have the same effect. But it's not as if Voldemort was performing mercy killings." Her lips arranged themselves into a crude mockery of a smile.
"No, he willingly mutilated his soul through murder. He wanted to damage it enough so that he could actually rip pieces of it away from the whole, to be stored in magical objects." Hermione paused to look the two Holmes men, first Mycroft, then Sherlock. The lines and the specks of her irises were moving, circling her pupil, and the brothers watched in silent astonishment as, for a brief moment, her eyes gave off the faintest amber glow. As she read their features, she seemed to realize what they were seeing, because in the next second she'd shut her eyes, and when she'd reopened them, they were back to normal.
"To do that," she resumed her explanation, "to damage yourself in such a perverse way especially at the cost of other lives and other souls is an abomination against nature and magic," she seethed. "It destroys any lingering remainder of sanity. But in tethering his soul to those objects, Voldemort made himself essentially immortal, because a person can't die unless their entire soul is available to pass through the Veil. The items containing the pieces of soul, called Horcruxes, have enchantments on them that keep the fragments from rejoining with the one inhabiting the body. So, when Voldemort was hit with the Killing Curse, although what was left of his soul was separated from his body, it did not pass on. He retained spirit form.
"He fled to hide in the woods of Albania, an old hideaway of his, for all of Harry's early childhood. Eventually, a precocious young man named Quirinus Quirrell came in search of him, and Voldemort convinced - or even more likely compelled - Quirrell to serve him. When he found out that Quirrell had a teaching position at Hogwarts, Voldemort followed him there and upon arriving performed a particularly disgusting ritual involving unicorn blood in order to manifest himself physically on the back of Quirrell's head. Quirrell wore a turban to conceal his master.
"That year was - not coincidentally - the first year of Harry's schooling at Hogwarts. He had been raised by his non-magical family, who were verbally abusive and who treated him like a servant. He'd been sent to them so that he would be out of the public eye in the magical world and, more importantly, because Dumbledore had enacted a blood protection spell tied to Harry's aunt, Lily's sister, Petunia, that would protect him from Voldemort should he have found out Harry's location and sought to harm him. Harry grew up knowing nothing of magic or what had really happened to his parents.
"His first altercation with Voldemort occurred at the end of that year, when he was eleven years old," she revealed. "There was an object hidden at Hogwarts called the Philosopher's Stone, an alchemical invention that produced the Elixir of Life, whose effects, I think, are self-evident." She received a series of nods and gave a slight smile. "Harry figured out that Voldemort was after it and our friend Ron and I insisted on coming with him when we discovered where it was being kept and thought that he was going after it. We'd found out that there was a series of obstacles in the way and we knew that he'd need help getting through. Funnily enough, we originally suspected Severus Snape of helping Voldemort; he seemed much more menacing than Quirrell ever did. Anyhow, Harry was the only one to reach the end of the course and he confronted Quirrell and Voldemort on his own. His mother's protection saved him again; Quirrell tried to strangle him but ended up turning to stone and crumbling into dust because of it. Voldemort's spirit was forced to leave Quirrell's body and again, it fled.
"And that was just the start," mused Hermione. "Every following year, something related to Voldemort would happen, usually culminating in some kind of horrific event at the end of the final term." Then, as succinctly as she could, Hermione detailed the events of each year at Hogwarts: second year, with the Chamber of Secrets, her petrification, and unbeknownst to them at the time, the destruction of the first Horcrux; third year, with the escape of Sirius Black from Azkaban, the discovery of the Marauders, the truth about the Secret Keeper, and the escape of Pettigrew; fourth year, with the Quidditch World Cup, the Triwizard Tournament that ended up having four participants, the impersonation of Mad-Eye Moody by Barty Crouch Jr., the death of Cedric Diggory, and the resurrection of Lord Voldemort; fifth year, with the Ministry's propaganda, Dolores Umbridge, the prophecy, the battle at the Ministry between the Death Eaters, a bunch of schoolchildren, and the Order of the Phoenix, Sirius's death at the hands of Bellatrix, and the possession of Harry by Voldemort; and finally, sixth year, with the branding of Draco Malfoy, the looming war, Harry's Horcrux lessons, Horace Slughorn, Dumbledore's death, and the revelation of Half-blood Prince.
By the time Hermione reached that point, not only were the Holmes brothers, the Watsons, and Mrs. Hudson completely transfixed by her story, but they were stunned and horrified by the fact that Hermione and her ilk had gone through the entire ordeal as teenagers.
At one point in her long tale, the witch took a moment to enumerate some of the better known Death Eaters and list their particular talents. Lucius Malfoy, she told them, was an abusive master and a man wretched enough to sneak an innocent girl a Horcrux because of his rivalry with her father. Walden Macnair, she said, had a fetish for slaughtering magical creatures. Antonin Dolohov was a rapist. Fenrir Greyback was werewolf so feral that he purposefully turned children such as the young Remus Lupin into werewolves and eventually resorted to cannibalism because of his addiction to the taste of human flesh. The incestuous Carrow twins, Alecto and Amycus, tortured schoolchildren and forced those same children to torture their classmates with the Cruciatus curse. The Lestrange brothers were torture enthusiasts, and Bellatrix Lestrange ... well, Bellatrix didn't need to be further discussed.
"I'm sorry," Hermione said for the second time, surveying the pale faces staring back at her after she ended her diatribe. "I know that this is horrible to hear. But if I'm right about what's going on, then you do need to hear all of it because you need to understand what Voldemort and his followers were capable of. Many of the Death Eaters were just as twisted as he was and incredibly eager to learn from him. If he taught them anything in the same realm of magic as the Horcruxes..." Hermione sighed, rubbing her forehead tiredly, dread entrenched in every line of her face. "But we'll get back to that," she promised.
Then, in more thorough detail, she spoke of the year that she, Harry, and Ron had spent on the run. She expounded upon all of the important elements, related the level of fear and despair and paranoia that the trio had experienced, spoke of the hunt for the Horcruxes and all of its complications, the Battle of Hogwarts, and the final, great secret: that Harry himself was a Horcrux. She told them of Harry's alleged death, the final exchange between him and Voldemort, and the duel in the courtyard. She told them of the aftermath of the battle: the ridiculously high body count, the cleanup, and how after finishing her schooling at Hogwarts and abroad, she had returned to Britain to work at the Ministry. And then, finally, she told them of her status as an Unspeakable and her connection to the Minister for Magic.
"And that is where your brother comes in, Mr. Holmes," she explained, addressing the younger of the two Holmeses, "and where I need your help. Now, I understand that you have not informed the Watsons or Mrs. Hudson of what occurred at the Museum of London yesterday?"
Sherlock stared at Hermione defiantly before giving a petulant, jerky nod, and the witch found herself having to hold back an ill-timed rush of amusement. Instead of commenting on Sherlock's childishness, Hermione turned to the parties in question and squared her shoulders. "Right. Well," she began, "there is no easy way to put this, so please, brace yourselves."
She paused.
"Yesterday, in the early morning, Jim Moriarty was caught on the security footage of the Museum of London."
Mary's face blanched, Mrs. Hudson stared at Hermione in unadulterated shock, and John abruptly let go of Mary's hand and staggered to his feet.
"No," he said. "No." The doctor turned to the Holmes brothers in desperation, searching their faces, hoping to find some kind of assurance that this Hermione Granger was wrong, was joking, was lying. He flinched at Sherlock's stubborn look and then again at Mycroft's cold, removed facade. Horrified, John faced Hermione once more.
"No," he repeated, his eyes wild. "It must be a fake. An impostor. Your people can do that, right? That has to be it."
Hermione just looked at him, and as he examined her expression, he saw no trace of dishonesty or relief - just compassion and shared dread.
"I'm sorry, John," she said, addressing him by his given name for the first time, "but he is back," her eyes flicked over to meet Sherlock's hardened gaze, "and I think he's been revived by one of Voldemort's old followers using Dark magic. Not to mention that whoever is responsible for raising Moriarty wants me and Mycroft involved, specifically. I'm afraid that the spectacle at the museum was almost certainly intended for us."
"You and my brother have never met before today, Ms. Granger," stated Sherlock, his blue stare razor-sharp, "so I'm assuming that it's your shared political importance that connects you?"
"That's our assumption as well," she confirmed grimly. "I was not supposed to be meeting with your brother today, Mr. Holmes, but the Ministry representative who usually attends such meetings has been missing for over a week, so when asked, I agreed to stand in for him. I also just so happen to be extremely well educated on the subject of Death magic, including the kind that would be necessary to revive Moriarty to this degree. With no other sufficiently feasible explanation for Moriarty's reappearance based on the evidence we have so far, it seems too much of a coincidence to me."
"I'm inclined to agree," said Mycroft. "Our meeting was almost definitely orchestrated. The facts of Ms. Granger's unique expertise and my connection to Moriarty through my position in the government and through you, Sherlock, makes one thing fairly clear in my mind: someone is toying with the two of us. Whoever did this wants to play a game."
"What is it with these sick bastards and their bloody shenanigans?" muttered John. Hermione gave a snort of agreement, and while the doctor was initially startled by the uncouth sound, he quickly gave the witch a closed-lip grin of camaraderie.
"I could get into that, but I'd really rather not," she said, shooting the doctor a commiserative grimace. "Besides, we have more pressing matters at stake. You see, as wretched as this whole thing is, there is something that we can do about it. However, it involves a significant invasion of privacy and a great deal of inconvenience on the part of everyone here. I am completely prepared to accept it in order to do what needs to be done, but I wanted to explain to you who I am and what kind of world you're going to be dealing with before forcing you to make any decisions." Hermione took a deep breath and sat back in her armchair, having finished her piece. "Mycroft?"
The elder Holmes rose from his seat and walked the few steps over to the fireplace. As he stared into the hearth, he began to speak.