Step 9
GELLERT GRINDELWALD MURDERED, the headline read, and Hermione couldn't prevent a cry of shock and dismay upon seeing it.
There was a small picture of Mr. Grindelwald and the minister together, and then another one (larger and more recent) of Minister Dumbledore in black, clearly mourning his lost friend. The dark colour looked wrong on the usually bright and cheerful man.
She scanned the article desperately but it had few answers. He had been found dead in his home the previous night and they were certain it was the killing curse. There were no suspects.
"Hey, what's wrong?" Harry asked, concerned. Her face was a mask of horror.
"I-" But how could she put it into words? The man wasn't at all what she would consider good, and he'd never been overly kind, but he had been... a prominent figure in her life. Powerful and knowledgeable. At times, even likeable.
And now he was dead. What did it mean that such a wizard could be murdered in his own home?
Hermione shoved the paper at her friend wordlessly. He scanned the front page.
"Oh..." he had the courtesy to look saddened, if only for her sake. Harry had made no secret of the fact that he disliked Mr. Grindelwald. "I'm sorry."
She nodded faintly, and whispers flurried around the Great Hall as the students heard the news. Hermione felt unsure of herself and what she should feel, and wondered randomly if she ought to send a note or flowers. Did Mr. Grindelwald even have family? He'd never spoken of any relatives. To the minister then, who was his closest friend. Closer even, if rumour were to be believed. It seemed a courteous thing to do.
With that thought in mind, she stood and headed to the greenhouses, Harry scrambling to follow and asking if she was all right.
She was not. But she was certain that she would be, given a little time to adjust.
The next morning, Hermione received an elaborate invitation from the beak of a majestic owl. It was an invitation to Mr. Grindelwald's funeral. At the bottom of the impersonal missive there was a hand scrawled message:
I will see to it that you may attend. A.P.W.B.D.
The date was set for next Saturday, the weekend before her O.W.L.s were scheduled. But she would be there; some things were just more important than studying.
The day of, Hermione donned her black school robes (for lack of anything else to wear) and followed Professor Prewett to the headmistress's office where she was told to floo to the Ministry of Magic.
"The ceremony is being held in the atrium," Professor McGonagall said. "I will follow right behind."
Hermione nodded and threw a handful of floo powder into the fireplace. After declaring her destination, she stepped into the green flame...
...and stumbled out into a huge, long room with gilded fireplaces along each wall and a dark wooden floor lined with chairs. Professor McGonagall stepped from the fireplace right after her, and other, unfamiliar witches and wizards entered from the fireplaces on either side.
People milled around the atrium or found a seat, chatting quietly. As it was a Saturday, few were in the Ministry for reasons other than attending the funeral. It was an unexpectedly well attended event for someone who, to Hermione's knowledge, held no official position within the Ministry itself and had few friends.
At one end of the atrium by the golden gates that lead to the Ministry proper there was a raised table where the body lie. It was here that the minister stood, frozen, and here that the headmistress guided Hermione.
"My deepest condolences for your loss," Professor McGonagall told the minister softly, and he nodded absent-mindedly, staring fixedly at the body.
"I'm sorry," Hermione said simply. Minister Dumbledore turned his head slightly to look at her, and she was startled to be the focus of his intense, solemn gaze. Even with the same features, he hardly resembled the kindly man she once saw every Yule. He seemed far older, far wearier.
The headmistress began to lead her away again, but the minister called,
"Wait." They stopped. "Miss Granger, yes?" She nodded, and he reached a hand to grip her shoulder tightly with a sad attempt at a smile. "I'd like you to sit beside me," he said. Professor McGonagall gave them a hesitant nod before moving on to find her own seat.
Hermione stood silent, nervous, while the minister resumed staring at the remains of his friend. He didn't seem to realize that he was still holding her shoulder. She reluctantly followed his gaze to see Mr. Gindelwald. Or what was purportedly him. Just a body now, his soul was gone. And the actual face was, thankfully, covered. Hermione found that she couldn't look away, either. There was a certain stillness and aura that radiated death, the absence of life, and it was disconcerting. No one could have mistook him as being merely asleep.
"He doesn't have his wand," she blurted out, surprised, and then winced at her insensitivity. But it was a shock since wizards were usually buried with their wand unless they decided to pass it down to a son or daughter. And yet Mr. Grindelwald's hands were empty and unadorned.
"Yes. Curious, isn't it?" Minister Dumbledore said darkly, his lips twisting in a grimace.
A number of people approached to offer the minister their apologies, and they looked at her curiously. When Minister Dumbledore hardly replied, they quickly retreated.
A bell rang to signal the beginning of the ceremony, and the minister slowly escorted her to their reserved chairs in the front row. A few made an attempt to speak with him, but he was steadfastly silent. A small, tufty-haired wizard made his way to the raised table and turned to speak.
The speech was long and boring and had very little to do with Mr. Grindelwald, personally. Hermione struggled to sit still, feeling the press of hundreds of people's eyes behind her. She thought that Mr. Grindelwald would have hated this pretentious, elaborate, and most of all... political show.
Eventually, the wizard presiding gave Minister Dumbledore a little nod, who stood from beside her and walked to the table. He turned and faced his audience, apparently about to say a few words in remembrance.
The minister was silent for several moments, however.
"Most of you didn't care for Gellert one whit, and I can assure you that the loathing was mutual," he said finally, bluntly. A few people chuckled nervously, thinking it a joke. "I'm grateful to those few who did, and the rest of you..." His eyes watered and his voice grew hoarse. "I will be candid, in his memory—the rest of you can go hang. I can't be arsed to care right now, for your sycophantic toadying."
He whirled around and placed a hand on the table. The minister, his friend's body, and the table carrying it all disappeared from the atrium rather abruptly with a pop, almost as if by portkey.
There was a shocked silence interrupted by the light applause of a few brave souls. And then the atrium exploded with a storm of whispers, echoing loudly in the large chamber.
The tufty-haired wizard who gave the eulogy shakily thanked everyone for coming, dismissing the crowd, but he was hardly heard.
Professor McGonagall came and escorted her to a fireplace silently. They flooed back to Hogwarts and Hermione headed back to her common room to study. It had been a short ceremony. Odd, too. But Hermione thought that Mr. Grindelwald would have been proud of its finale.
It only occurred to her days later that she saw no aurors at the funeral, despite it being a high profile event and surely in need of security.
The O.W.L.s were half-way over when the news reached them that the Minister for Magic had resigned from his position due to grief after a record-breaking sixty-four year term. Or at least, that was what the papers said, the Ministry-approved explanation. Rumour said something entirely different.
Rumour said that it wasn't so voluntary or bloodless, that the aurors staged a coup d'etat and overthrew him.
No matter how it happened, however, their newly appointed minister (by vote of the Wizengamot) was a wizard by the name of Voldemort. An unknown on the political scene. No last name given, or first if that was his last. And no picture either. No background information. It was very odd and worrisome, Hermione thought.
The whole situation left the students and staff on edge. No one put much effort into their exams, and even Hermione was ashamed to admit that she wasn't at her best. Speculation ran rampant instead. Harry was particularly ill at ease.
After a tearful good-bye at the portkey station in Hogsmeade, Hermione returned to Diagon Alley expecting that everything would have changed. It felt like everything already had. But instead, things had the appearance of being exactly the same as when she left last summer.
Still, she waited. There had to be some consequences, after all, to their world shifting off-balance.
The first hint that something was changing came when Harry sent an owl informing Hermione that his mother had lost her job as a clerk in the Ministry. Low-paying though it was the position was work, he explained, and without it they couldn't afford to continue living in Godric's Hollow. Payments on their modest home took the bulk of the Potters' income, it seemed. They would be moving to Hogsmeade that summer, a decent town-house, he assured her.
It still left her anxious and reminded her of the dirty, crowded streets of Hogsmeade she'd seen with Mr. Grindelwald. Might Harry end up there, someday, unable to attend Hogwarts? Mr. Prince even seemed to be concerned when she told him about it, which wasn't at all comforting.
"Did the boy tell you why?" he asked, looking at her seriously. But Hermione shook her head. How Mrs. Potter had lost her job, she hadn't even thought to wonder.
"Do you think you know...?" she queried. Mr. Prince acted as though he would say something in the affirmative, but then shook his head and turned away.
"No, I haven't the slightest idea," the wizard said curtly.
But Severus did, in fact, have a very good idea. The papers had suspiciously little to say about the new minister, but the name was enough for Severus to deduce a large amount of information. Most importantly, that Tom Riddle was not dead as the public had been lead to believe.
Voldemort was a name that was once spoken in hushed whispers among the staff of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, even when Severus was employed there. Those with lesser positions who had never met Riddle themselves tried to make a bit of a joke of the name and the department head's desire to be treated as some sort of nobility. But even they felt a healthy sort of fear and respect which prevented such talk from moving outside of the department.
Severus had spoken with the man once, right after completing his requisite three years of auror training. His supervisor, Mulciber, had taken Severus to meet Riddle and introduce him as "someone to look out for." (Later he would prove to be a "disappointment" to his mentor.)
Upon entering the department head's office, Mulciber fell into a low bow of the sort that fell out of favour decades ago. Severus scrambled to follow suit, while Riddle barely looked up from his work.
"What?" the man snapped, and Mulciber said in an adulatory tone,
"I've brought a new recruit, My Lord. I think he has potential."
Riddle stared straight at Severus, acting only mildly interested.
"Oh?" he said, and Severus was inexplicably captivated, for several minutes, by the other man's eyes. "Possibly," Riddle said dismissively, and returned to his work.
As the two bowed again and left, Severus found himself feeling unaccountably exhausted. Something about the exchange had left him certain that Tom Riddle was not a wizard to cross.
Thankfully, he hadn't had to deal with Riddle personally after that and instead only saw him occasionally from a distance as the man stalked through the halls. Severus never failed to stop, along with the rest of his colleagues, and lower his head until the man passed through.
The point, however...
Though Riddle was a half-blood, himself (with a muggle parent, even, according to gossip), he absolutely despised mudbloods. It was a view that had attracted many a bigot to his side over the years. Riddle refused to hire any mudbloods when he was "alive," and his successor kept up the tradition so far as Severus knew; not a single one could be found in the entire department.
So if Riddle was now the Minister for Magic... well. It was no wonder that had Lily lost her job.
Hermione's second clue that things were different now came when she was shopping with Mrs. Figg for school supplies for the coming year. The woman led her away from the stores they usually frequented, and toward those that carried second-hand goods.
"Um..." she hesitated to question, but Mrs. Figg understood and sighed sadly.
"I'm afraid we're on a very tight budget this year, Hermione," the squib explained. "The Ministry has seen fit to... withdraw our funding. At the moment, we're making do with the help of a few generous sponsors."
Oh. That explained the rather unappetizing food they'd been dining on for the past few weeks...
"I hope your old robes still fit?" Mrs. Figg asked anxiously, and Hermione nodded. They were a bit faded and the hems torn up, but they'd do.
At least she had some coins still, which Mr. Prince had given her for helping out at his shop, in case she really needed anything small. The other orphans didn't have that.
Interacting with Mr. Prince required another period of readjustment, as he was really a wizard unlike any other she knew. It was not as easy to remain unintimidated and unhurt by his sneers and snide remarks as it used to be. But she fell into an easy comfort much sooner than last summer. There were, after all, far more important things to worry about than one man's good opinion.
The girl was back at Hogwarts, and Severus found himself relieved. Not that he wanted Granger gone (she was much more bearable now that she'd gotten over that awkward stage and had tempered her over-eager need to share everything that was on her mind) but Hogwarts seemed safe. It was a bloody castle, after all. And Wizarding Britain was feeling increasingly unsafe recently.
There was a tension in the air that made Severus recall the months in '89 after the Berlin Wall fell, when he thought the people might rise in rebellion. Witches and wizards everywhere were unhappy, it seemed, and the Ministry's efforts to quell that were only making it worse.
The aurors had become even more reckless and arrogant; they had no inhibitions, now, about cursing someone in the street who so much as looked at them funny. Occasionally there would be news of a raid conducted on a group accused of "plotting treason." Large pictures of houses in flames, the skull and snake symbol of the aurors floating warningly above the destruction, frequently graced the front page of the Daily Prophet.
There was nowhere for the building tension to find release, he thought, and dreaded the possibilities. There was no centre to the rebellious movement or organized method, so far as he could tell. And any attempts to effect change would fail if they didn't go beyond rioting and protest when dealing with a wizard like Riddle. Their new minister likely had no qualms about massacring his citizenry, and there was no outside political forces pressuring him to deal with things peacefully, either. Blood-shed was the only outcome he could see.
So Severus holed up all the the more in his apothecary. If he could keep his nose clean until all of it blew over, he might just make it through alive.
To Hermione, it seemed that Hogwarts had lost some of its innocent cheer. The students returned to the castle with grim expressions, and even when they were lost in laughter and fun, there was an unspoken something hanging over all of their heads, reminding them that things weren't the way they should be.
Well, most of the students. There were a few in each house, but more in Slytherin, that seemed to bask in the fearful atmosphere. These were the ones that took it upon themselves to torment Hermione and the other orphans at every possible chance.
"Hey mudblood, wait up."
She walked faster. Harry beside her looked furious and ready to retaliate if she so much as breathed an encouragement.
"I said wait!"
A tripping hex took her down, and Hermione barely managed to drop her books in time to prevent landing flat on her face. Her hands scraped painfully against the stone floor.
Harry whirled around while drawing his wand with a snarl, but very quickly he was disarmed and put in a full-body bind. Hermione carefully sat up and looked at their attackers
It was the Lestrange cousins. The worst of the lot, they'd taken the current political clime as a personal call to arms.
"So sorry," Marius said with a sneer, "But you just wouldn't listen."
"He's pretty torn up about it," Ramona smirked. Her cousin nodded.
"I just wanted to check in, you know," he said, faux-innocent as he twirled his wand, "See how you're adjusting, now that our minister has the guts to put you in your proper place."
"Your robes don't look so nice, now," the girl observed with glee. "How does it feel, being poor? I wouldn't know, you see, so I'm curious."
Hermione opened her mouth to say something cutting, but she found herself silenced and her wand taken from where her fingers were inching toward it. She suddenly wished she had applied herself more in defence lessons.
"You know, I don't think she looks miserable enough," Marius said with a cruel smirk. "I think that'll change, though. Just give the minister some time."
"We can do something about it right now," Ramona suggested, lifting her wand.
"Hey! What are you lot up to?" a voice shouted from down the hall, and Hermione was for once very relieved to see a familiar red-headed prat.
"I don't think that's any of your business, Weasley," the girl-Lestrange said snottily.
Ron got closer and observed the scene with a frown. Hermione and Harry were on the floor, wandless, Harry bound, and the Lestranges were standing over them, wands out. It must have been obvious even to him what was going on.
"It is my business, as a prefect," he said firmly, and Hermione couldn't be more glad of that at that moment. "I think ten points, each, from Slytherin should convince you to move along?"
Ron quickly undid the body bind on Harry, and Marius snarled.
"Please. If you think a few points is going to convince me of anything, you're even dumber than I thought."
Hermione stood slowly and reached for her wand as Harry did the same.
"Are you okay?" Harry whispered beside her, and she nodded shakily. Just a bit scraped up.
She almost cried in relief when she saw Professor Flitwick walking toward them from the other end of the hall, chatting with a few young Ravenclaws.
The two boys arguing saw the professor, too, and abruptly stopped snipping at each other.
The deputy headmaster eyed the five of them suspiciously, their drawn wands and their defensive postures, Hermione's and Harry's things on the floor.
"Everything all right, here?" he asked mildly. As one, the students nodded and protested that "everything's fine." If anything could unify them, it was a desire to deal with their own problems rather than run to the adults for help.
"Well, then," Professor Flitwick said, and continued slowly on his way. Hermione and Harry made sure to walk closely behind him, although they'd originally been going the other direction. Ron joined them, leaving the Lestranges seething.
"Thank you," Hermione whispered and Ron shrugged bashfully, saying.
"Yeah, well. You know. It's my job and all."
"That's never meant anything before," she reminded him sceptically. He frowned.
"There's a difference between having a bit of fun and what those bastards were doing," Ron snarled, and Hermione exchanged a surprised glance with Harry.
"We had no idea you cared, Weasley," Harry teased with a grin and Ron scoffed, red-faced. Though the two boys were team mates, neither of them cared much for the other and avoided interacting outside of practice. It drove the team captain, Katie Bell, crazy.
"I don't!" he protested. "So don't you be getting any ideas about me liking you, or something." He peeled away from the group and started walking.
Hermione and Harry laughed, if only to take their minds off of what had just happened.
They would be more careful in the halls after that.
Severus returned home one evening, exhausted after dealing with a complete dunderhead who refused to believe that no, consuming a draught of living death would not actually kill you. Merlin, he would be a happy man if he just didn't have to be polite about it!
He didn't notice, at first, that his mother was gone. She was so quiet and frequently forgot to turn the lights on that it was often easy to forget she even lived there. He noticed only when dinner was ready to eat and he tried to bring a tray to her. But she was not in the sitting room, and she was not in her bedroom, and he very quickly exhausted all other possibilities.
She was simply gone.
It was maddening, because his mother hadn't left the house in years. Severus didn't think she had it in her. And where would she go? Any friends she once had gave up on her long ago, and he didn't think she knew where he keeps his coins. He checked, to be sure, but they were all accounted for.
Severus struggled to suppress his panic and think of some course of action to take short of running through the darkened streets of Hogsmeade... when there was a knock on the door. He regarded it with dread. His mother wouldn't have knocked, and who else would it be? No one good, certainly.
This was confirmed when he opened the door and was faced with Evan Rosier. Shite. What did the auror want?
"Yes?" he forced out harshly, scowling. The grim expression on the wizard's face wasn't reassuring.
"Hey, Severus. Look, uh, I don't suppose your mum is here?" Rosier asked, and didn't look at all surprised when Severus shook his head. "Yeah... There's no real good way to put this. I need you to come help identify a body. I saw it and... I think it's hers."
The next few hours were a blur. Severus accompanied Rosier to St. Mungo's, and then followed him to the mortuary. The sheet was pulled back...
The eyes were clouded, the face frozen in torment, but there was no doubt that it was Eileen Prince.
"It's her, then?" Rosier asked, and he nodded.
"How-?" Severus asked faintly, still staring at his mother's cold corpse.
Rosier explained that a couple aurors found her at the edge of Hogsmeade trying to get though the Wall. After they disarmed her she had simply clawed at it with her hands, sobbing. They warned her to stand back, and when she hadn't...
"They were a bit wand-happy, I guess," he said, looking embarrassed. "She wasn't right in the head, from the sounds of it, and got a tad violent when they pulled her away."
"Who-? No... don't tell me, I would really rather not know," Severus said, his features pinched.
"I'm really sorry, mate," Rosier said with an impressive amount of sympathy, considering, and gave him a clap on the shoulder. "But maybe it's better, yeah? If she was off her rocker, like they said ..."
The auror chuckled nervously, and Severus stared at him with incredulity.
"Erm... They can keep the body here until you're ready for the burial," Rosier told him, so sensitive, as always, to the feelings of others. "Just give them a floo call when you have things figured out. You need help getting back home?"
He shook his head and left the room quickly, wanting to put as much distance as possible between himself and the very tangible reminder that his mother was now... dead.
Severus ate dinner alone that night and every night thereafter, feeling keenly the gaping hole where his mother once was... silent, yes, but a beloved human presence whom he could at least have one-sided conversations with. If, occasionally, a few tears escaped his eyes as he sat alone... Well. He certainly had reason.
The funeral, a week later, was a very small affair held in the graveyard in Hogsmeade. A few former schoolmates of his mother's were there, and they departed immediately at the end after offering their condolences. He invited no one else.
Severus cast the spell to entomb his mother's body in the ground himself, and placed a nice bouquet of flowers at the grave marker.
She was buried next to his father.
