Relentlessness
The Ready Team was led by John Dawlish, a character if there was ever a character, a Gryffindor once trusted by Albus Dumbledore and assigned as a special officer to the Minister's office who had ended up supporting Voldemort and surprisingly ineffective. After being wounded before the Battle of Hogwarts, he had been rehabilitated, demoted, and ultimately ended up commanding wizard detachments on the Eastern Front, where he had demonstrated some renewed competency. And then, perhaps surprisingly, some of his Gryffindor love of right had reasserted itself—or he just had flashes of competence as a human weathervane, Bellatrix wasn't sure—and he joined the revolt in the Crimean. Bellatrix had not promoted him, but he was competent commanding a company-strength force of wizards in the Black Guards, and reliable enough for the job at hand with an element of his force, the rest dispersed through the divisions.
"Major Dawlish, you will provide cover for me," Bellatrix instructed as she stepped up, looking over the team—sixteen of them. More than enough. "I'll chain us there, I know the location personally."
"General, a fair number of my people will be disabled by that…"
She sniffed. "That's why there's so many of you." Bellatrix plucked her wand from her hair and ear and extended her gloved hand. Somewhere under the fabric and leather there was living enchanted gold, and it ached very faintly, to remind that it was April, in Preston, in the rain.
Bellatrix's wrenching power was more than adequate to bring them all at once, though half were on their knees vomiting a heartbeat later. They stood on a hillside to the northeast of the Belmont reservoir. "Come on, Dawlish, get 'em up!" She cackled, and stepped out onto a knoll to boost her tiny height. Raising her wand, she magnified the image to see the earthen dam holding back the reservoir, and the A675 running down through the valley between the hill she was on and Great Hill. The lead elements of the artillery brigade as they retreated were pulling down it…
And then a Maxima Bombarda slammed into the grass nearby, erupting a huge quantity of earth and rock. Bellatrix laughed. "The wizards with them had their detection charms up and ready. Good show. I said cover me, Dawlish! Get your rogues up and fighting!"
She imperiously flipped a Protego out that deflected the next spell, nonetheless, and then turned her attention toward the dam.
"Sorry about that, General! Quite sorry!" Dawlish had finished rousting his squad from the ridiculous chain apparation, and they quickly knocked up a series of shields that completely disspelled the incoming magic.
Completing a complex weaving, a smirk stretched across Bellatrix's lips. And now you get entertained. The dam had a road across the top, sure, so aiming the spell where she actually wanted it was difficult. In a quick motion she jerked her wand down with the magnifying spell still on it, completing the beginning of the movement to call forth her next spell. "Aquamenti inferior Deprimo!"
A lesser Aquamenti, creating water from where the wand was aimed and not from its tip. Add an earth-shattering spell—the dam blew open and a mass of water appeared inside of it. As an earthen dam, it was liquefied immediately, not as dramatic as blasting it to pieces—less dangerous to the surrounding community than its immediate destruction, but the undermining caused a rapid flood, spilling down, water rushing through the creek, knocking down trees and shrubbery, increasing in force and speed, quickly threatening houses in Belmont. A quarter mile from the dam there was a bend in the creek, where it turned away from its nearest approach to the road. There, the force of the water moving around the bend quickly caused the height of the flood to rise and overtop the road, pounding around the foundations of the buildings lining the creek, and rising higher and higher still.
"Be ready to give them hell, Dawlish!" She snapped as the column began to slow. And then with a cheery wave, she apparated again, and appeared on the road before the column, with her left hand up in the universal gesture to stop, and her wand at the ready in the right, a smirk firmly set on her face. Don't be fucking idiots.
Two desperate wizards spun out of cover behind some of the howitzers to confront Bellatrix, as overcome as they had been by the entirety of Dawlish team on the ridge. Bellatrix laughed when she saw that one of them was Emma Vanity, the Slytherin Quidditch Team Captain in the mid-70s. Once you probably thought this was going to lead somewhere other than a fight with Bellatrix Black next to Great Hill in support of a dying regime.
"Hey sweetie, why did you lose to Gryffindor in '75!?" she called out, and brought the woman up short. "Satisfied with your life so far!?"
The Brigadier dismounted from his truck, cigarette clenched in his teeth.
"How about I offer you terms!"
"Go ahead, Lestrange!" Vanity answered, her face a white sheet, her wand gripped firmly, but one could, at a casual glance, read that she knew she had no chance.
"I want to get to Manchester as fast as I can. Fancy switching sides? You're artillery holed up in the mountains, not infantry and tankers butchering people in the streets, and the outcome is still in doubt. I think we can get you all off."
For a tense moment there was silence.
Then the Brigadier walked forward toward Bellatrix, and dropped to one knee. "I won't ask it as a promise for me, but can you give it as one for my men?"
Bellatrix smirked indulgently. "Done."
Emma dropped to her knees.
Who would fight for Voldemort, given the choice?
When she realised that they were meeting at Croke Park, in the middle of the sections that were in the process of being renovated (or had been, before the work had been halted thanks to the demands of the Morsmordre war effort—she tried to imagine someone trying to explain to a Death Eater the importance of rebuilding a Gaelic sports arena and wanted to laugh), Hermione felt very much like her fate for the rest of her life—shadowy meetings in large closed public buildings—was some kind of karmic punishment.
Perhaps, in fact, this was what she was going to suffer for the rest of her life for falling in love with Bellatrix: Meetings in the middle of unfinished stadia with shadowy political figures. Well, if that's it, you're pretty damned lucky then. She cracked a grin, she couldn't help it.
Portable lighting. Security guards. Nervous looking Irish wizards and witches in civilian robes. And at some plastic fold-out tables with plastic tablecloths in the middle—the Irish government. Hermione slowed, glanced back to Luna and Ginny. This had taken several days to arrange, but…
Yes, they're serious.
"Prime Minister Ahern," she said politely. "I assume you have your cabinet here?"
"Colonel Granger?" He stood. "I understand you are here with plenipotentiary power, from the Duchess Narcissa, who is generally recognised as the British Premier."
Aisling stepped up to the table from the right. "Aisling O'Croidheagain. You could say I've been selected to represent the interest of the Irish wizarding community."
"Hogwarts?" Hermione asked tentatively. She was young.
Aisling shook her head. "Only some Irish families bother sending their children there. I went to Caer Wyddno School."
"Lyonesse, then."
"Karrek Loos, we prefer."
"I wouldn't know, unfortunately, I haven't travelled there; I'm a muggleborn," Hermione observed as she moved to sit, looking levelly at the woman. She knew that Caer Wyddno only accepted purebloods and halfbloods and many in the families of parts of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland and the Lordship of the Islands retained the right to attend it instead of Hogwarts.
"Well, things will change," Aisling acknowledged bluntly. "I'm here to testify that the Taoiseach was under the Imperious Curse, despite the nominal alliance between the Morsmordre and the Irish government, until we freed him."
He did look pale and haggard, as if he were only now coming to terms with what he could remember doing. Or rather, now had the power to regret them.
Hermione tried to be sympathetic. "Mister Ahern, it's over and done, but I assume this means you have little time before you must act."
He nodded.
"Tomorrow at the latest," Aisling interjected.
"I admit," Ahern began, "that a commitment to an 'Ireland United and Free' would make these easier to swallow."
Was he really regretting what he had done, or was he putting on a show? Hermione wondered for a moment. Perhaps it was just an act. He was a politician. Does it matter? Sometimes, convenient lies are necessary.
"Ireland United. Ireland Free," Hermione replied, focusing on the matter at hand. "Wouldn't a union of Celtic peoples be worth joining?"
"Of course, I…"
"Is it any different than the EU?" Maybe, he was still somewhat influenced. But she'd take advantage of it if she could. "Look, I'll be very plain with you, right now a billion people in the world see Ireland as part of the enemy. You're negotiating with a government made up of people whose mother tongue was a Brythonic language. It's the equivalent of someone from the Gaeltacht. Duchess Narcissa has no interest in exterminating her own culture. In fact, she wants to restore it in her native land—what the Welsh call the Old North, whose culture was preserved and maintained in the wizarding world. Her demand of autonomy for the County Palatine of Lancashire was a calculated gesture for her to restore the old Brythonic north. In another year, Cumbric will be taught in the schools of Liverpool and Manchester alongside English. Yes, this is union with England. But it's union with England on even terms. This isn't a return to the 19th century. It's about the people of the British Isles seizing the one chance they have for the rest of the world to pick us apart as the pariahs who created Voldemort. They won't care about the distinctions, and they won't care about the question of who was right and who was wrong. To them, we are Nazi Germany. We are Imperial Japan. We can hang together or separately…"
"But the Crown?" Ahern mustered himself, and looked at her levelly. "I'd sign on to a Celtic League, even one including England, if Duchess Narcissa proposed to be the President, or the Premier with a President over her. But the Crown? The IRA will not stand for it. And we made our alliance with them already, in hopes that we would someday have our chance at liberty from Voldemort's regime, and we'd need armed allies to do it."
"Then," Hermione sighed, "are we to see bloody war? The reality is that the Loyal Orders would fight without the Crown. The North, the very Brythonic areas who Celtic culture Duchess Narcissa's family long preserved, is one of the great bedrocks of support for traditional British monarchy. Sir, we are in the middle of main battle against a terrible and resilient enemy. Let us defeat him. If you wish to address the constitution at that point, there will be methods for it to be done."
Ahern closed his eyes. "They'll speak my name in the same breath as Valera's."
Hermione couldn't but smile wryly. "Better than General Bellatrix Black, Sir. If we fail, they'll speak her name next to Judas, and if we succeed… They might do it anyway."
Manchester. Less rain. More carnage. Columns of tanks and IFVs rolling down the M61 at high speed, damn all for what it did to the pavement. Bellatrix laughed-only inside, but a laugh nonetheless—at the thought of some MP trying to get them to slow down. Today, there was no caring for rules, just getting into position to win, as fast as possible. She was propped up on the back of a chair and the steel rim of a hatch cover, hair whipping behind her, looking out down the M61 as the BTR rolled at speed.
Five and a half miles from Manchester City Centre as the Jackdaw would fly it. What are you playing it?
They were close enough to bring any Army in the world to action. They were sweeping out now to flank the enemy in the city centre, to get across the Mersey before the bridges could be blown. Not even the survival of people in the heart of Manchester, fighting for their lives, mattered in comparison to those bridges. The vehicles rattled and screamed, running flat-out.
Silence.
No attempt to slow them down. Are they able to organise? Where are the tanks? Are they retreating? Giving up the Mersey as a barrier? Giving up luring me into the heart of Manchester to fight, street-for-street?
She had to accept the risk. Bellatrix had to get her Army across the Mersey. There were a lot of bridges in Manchester and the city centre was actively contested. Ducking down into the command vehicle, she swung by gloved hands over to the little fold-down map table. "Reinforce the column on the A6 and get the lead elements to turn onto the M602. I think the M60 bridges are a trap."
"Understood, General!"
The engine was roaring, rattling, snarling. Metal and thin padding, transmission whining, diesel popping. They had run all of their equipment hard, and the Russian models which had been steadily replacing the British ones as they were destroyed in battle or wore out and broke were themselves worn third-line reserves. If it got her to London, it would do. She had never imagined, once, that she'd be so reliant—and so comfortably reliant—on muggle technology. She could already apparate to London in a heartbeat, but then she'd just be one witch…
...Alongside of an Army of Goblins, granted. Bellatrix tossed back her head and laughed. Cissy's boldness was still entertaining for her.
They poured on the speed, reinforcing the drive down into Salford. There was an overpass directly next to Salford Crescent station. Some combat engineers of the Morsmordre had set the charges, and detonated them as the lead column approached. The Black Guards were quickly pinned down in trying to divert and force their way across the tracks, where they saw a level access to drive across the tracks, and through a parking lot, gain access to the highway again. They deployed there, and also to the northwest, to push across the tracks. A single squad of Morsmordre troops held the Salford Crescent station, but their position was extremely well-prepared, and they held up the better part of a battalion for fifteen minutes.
Beyond them, a group of tanks were moving into position across the A6. Bellatrix and her command group were soon halted behind the lines, pushing units into action. But this wasn't fast enough for her. She tipped a smirking salute to Jorge. "Hold down the fort," she instructed before stepping down from the command track with her broom—a moment later she was zipping around the armoured vehicles a few feet off the top of the concrete step barriers down the central reserve which tried to intermittently divide the heavily upgraded carriageway. She was at Salford minutes later, swinging down from the broom and diffidently acknowledging the salutes of a Colonel and his aides. A spatter of bullets hit the side of an APC by them, perhaps aimed at her, but a flick of her wand took care of the next burst with a brief Protego.
The sun poked out from the clouds. Perhaps it was a good omen. She snapped her wand across the ruins of the bridge. Concrete erupted from the ground, the lone enemy wizard, some callow boy, went flying; tanks went flying with him. A second attack, a Deprimo as before, slammed deeper into the pavement. She shielded herself against the desperate shot of a tank shell, before returning to the attack. Seconds later, the main enemy force was reduced.
Gunfire from the southeast indicated that her forces were still on the attack there. But the sooner she demoralised the enemy, the sooner they'd break through. Wizards were challenged by the need to actually understand what they were repairing. Most of the time, this was inherent in the spell, and it made it easier to repair something because the nature of the magic itself was such that it held within it all of the information required for the structure, object or item to be returned to normal. In this case, however, it was a precast concrete bridge; it was not like Bellatrix was trying to repair a radio. She could see the tensors of the forces clearly and how the bridge had, before the charges had detonated, supported weight. Now in a dance with her wand, a thin yellow glow surrounded ruins on the tracks, and she guided the girders and then the deck back together and back into place, not as good as new, but as good as it had been a few hours before. It took about five minutes.
"Let's go!"
A second battalion was quickly sent down Trafford Road to try and gain the Mersey. It occurred to Bellatrix that if they had not been able to get engineers there to blow the bridge in time, they might have just set the charges at Salford Crescent and then used it as a defensive position to fire into the flank of an advance down Trafford Road toward the Mersey. Inside, she had simply bowled through them—personally—and now they were driving hard toward the centre of Manchester. She could see signs of fighting in the streets down. Damaged and destroyed buildings, others burned out, and the bodies of muggles simply laying in the street amid the rubble and twisted and burnt cars. Once she would have snickered derisively at the muggles being so incompetent and disrespectful to their own dead as to leave them out like that, but six years of this madness had taught her that the real cause was the chaos, the fighting, the simple fact that muggle battle was too intense to allow for time to collect the dead. The very way she thought about the world had changed.
Pounding their way across the Irwell, it was done. Only intensive defences in the heart of Manchester could stop them down. They'd follow the East Coast Main Line southeast if nothing else. But instead of resistance, anything that might have stopped them, they began to encounter people.
Bellatrix, riding on the top of a BTR, didn't know quite what to think when they cheered her. The throngs of liberated, celebrating their liberation; the British flags on the vehicles, the men grinning, as if now they got the recognition for their daring choice to follow her. The witch, who in that moment was a heroine. The witch who the battered and oppressed people of Manchester saw as the deliverance they had earned from three horrific days of bloodshed in the heart of the city, right up until the moment when only the barest of an hour before, the Morsmordre troops had abruptly withdrawn, and fallen back toward the south.
For every dead person she'd seen, a hundred were cheering her. They thronged the vehicles, slowing them down, until, with some very great dignity, an older man, who had doubtless been a bobby decades ago, until he had retired, came out in his old, 1960s police uniform. He stood at the intersection of Oxford Street with Whitworth street, and with gloves, whistle, and his hands, separated the crowd from Oxford Street, so the column of armoured vehicles could pass by. As they did, the crowd spontaneously began to sing Rule Britannia.
Bellatrix pulled back her left sleeve and looked at her golden forearm. She thought of the fact that, for all that they were muggles, Hermione's parents just as well could have been in that mass (she knew they were not, but still, that was not the point).
Bellatrix snapped her sleeve back down. Perhaps it had been worth it, after all.
The radio crackled. The battalion heading down Trafford Road had crossed the Mersey without opposition. Keep up the pressure. Hammer home the attack!
"Forward!"
Dublin. The Oireachtas Éireann—Leinster House. The night before, the team of wizards led by Aisling, and Hermione and her group, had infiltrated the National Library of Ireland. Due to the state of emergency it was shut down, but of course, the government had secretly ordered the Garda—the Irish National Police, not really a Gendarmerie before the war, but something close to one now—to coordinate with them in it, while officially patrolling it against exactly the kind of attack they were now executing.
The buildings were all linked in an expansive national complex. The minds of the men in the Garda were swept by Legilimens regularly, but a number in the conspiracy had already allowed Aisling's crew to implant subtle blocks in their minds, which a Morsmordre wizard would not expect to be inside of a muggle's mind.
After all, they watched all the mudbloods in Ireland. After all, any politically suspect wizards were survailed. People like Aisling were purebloods, who were supposed to be reliable.
Narcissa Malfoy had offered them a deal they could accept, and so Hermione, Ginny, and Luna were wearing Garda Síochána uniforms as they stepped crisply out through the National Library. From there, it was as easy as one, two, three—they'd either be quick or dead. The witches cast disillusionment charms on themselves, blending in like human chameleons with the long Georgian hallways of fine old government buildings.
They slipped through the loyalist security toward a group of outer guards. "Stupefy," Hermione spoke, her wand moving, barely above a whisper, as they realised the floor was rippling before them, just a bit too late.
They walked on, feet clicking on the tile. Up the stairs, quickly now. Other groups were moving, too, throughout the capitol and several other cities. Airfields, barracks, naval docks, police stations, outlying government offices.
Avery the Younger was the High Commissioner of Ireland, a euphemism if ever there was one. In fact, he ruled the nominally independent government with an iron fist. It was not a position of repute among the Death Eaters—he had received it as he had displeased Voldemort too many times. Indulging in the flesh after years in Azkaban, Hermione had sickeningly heard from the Garda officers the horrifying kinds of games that Avery liked to play with muggleborn girls.
This seemed like it was going to be straightforward. In a properly executed coup d'état, one seized the government without a single shot being fired. That might even be true here…
But Hermione damn well knew there'd be no way to avoid a duel. The tension her friends and the Garda officers felt might be over whether or not they'd be found out too soon. But the tension Hermione felt, as the most skilled witch there, was over what would happen when they got to the room.
Stairs, offices, hallways. Adjusting the disillusionment charms for the setting, keep going. There was the cabinet briefing room. The Irish cabinet had, to the credit of those who composed it, volunteered to serve as bait, to get Avery away from the medieval tower house of Ashtown Castle which he had made his residence in the city.
A small body of picked Janissaries was there, Avery's security detail. Again – "Stupefy," from three voices instead of one. Then they raced forward. There was one junior wizard on guard detail—Luna turned toward him, as he realised that he was facing living objects and not madhouse floors. Casting a true-sight spell, he tried to get the drop on the blonde witch, but she was faster. His wand went flying from him with her sharp "Expelliarmus!"
But unlike in the days of Dumbledore's Army, there was a Garda man ready to rush the distance, and make sure he didn't get his hands back on his wand. In a brief struggle of man and wizard, the physically fit officer had the advantage.
Then the garrote he snapped around the wizard's neck make sure he kept it forever.
By that point, Hermione had already thrown herself into the chamber. "Protego rebounda!" It sent Avery flying away as he made a play for Ahern, with the other ministers pulling the Taoiseach away until some of the Garda men dragged him out of the room.
Avery pitted a quick Sectumsempra against the shield, but it rebounded and he had to shield from it himself. The shield held together long enough to cover the retreat of her 'bait', and then Hermione stood alone.
"The fucking Hogwarts Mudblood Queen herself." He chuckled darkly. "I'll fuck you up like all the other bitches." He threw himself over on the attack immediately. "Won't you like that, dearie?"
Down right, drop your knees, cant the wand up left… Duelling spell after spell, trading shield and curse and jinx, flew from Hermione's wand and matched the Death Eater blow for blow. For a moment, the magic caught their wands together, and Avery looked discomforted at the grin that Hermione had as they leaned in and forced the power in the cores of their wands against each other in a momentary stalemate, like two duellists with their swords locked. "I've already got one Death Eater in my life, I'm not interested in a second. Aren't I little old for someone who rapes eleven year olds, anyway? Y'inbred shit."
Avery stared at her, her casual comment, in confusion and shock. In truth, Hermione hadn't planned on weaponising her relationship with Bellatrix like that, but in the impulsive heat of the moment, it was one more way to stay alive.
Then Ginny dropped in through the fire exit. Avery staggered back, barely able to shield against her quick attack as Hermione used the opening to hammer him into a wall with a combination of five spells in short succession.
Then Ginny kicked a chair into his legs. He staggered and fell. "Gotcha, sick fuck!"
Hermione sent his wand flying with an "Expelliarmus!"
And then it was over. The two witches looked at each other. "Didn't Death Eaters used to be harder than this?" Ginny asked, watching as Hermione stepped up to the man, grabbing him and hauling him to his feet, wand at his neck.
"Maybe we've gotten better at this. Comes with practice." Hermione grinned tightly.
But Avery the Younger was grinning blackly at her, despite the blood and bruises on him. "Yer Death Eater, huh? Signed up to the Black-Malfoy Treason Train, did yah? Well let me tell you something about that."
Hermione's brown eyes bored into him with a tightening expression, skin paling. She grabbed at his collar. "What. Are. You. On. About?"
"Azkaban," he laughed until he began to choke from her grip. "Just so you know, we all celebrated. Impressive bit of ritual magic. Shows the Black Bitch's talent very well. Those fucking triple sisters from Hell. Raised a dead, sunken land back up from the sea? Makes a lot of people like all these traitors you're working with assume they can actually win, I guess. But did they tell you the price that you paid for it, mudblood? Oh I'll tell yah."
"Don't listen to him, 'Mione!" Ginny shouted.
"What?" Hermione whispered.
"We used Azkaban as our own prison, little missy," he grinned. "Dumbledore's Army and the Order of the Phoenix? Light Aurors? All of them left were there. You killed them when you nuked it for Narcissa Malfoy and your Black Bitch. I bet the bitches like it that way. Removes any resistance to whatever regime they're planning when this is over. Delusional, of course. The Dark Lord will win. You can't stop him. You can't kill him. It's impossible. But, I have to admit as a Slytherin, it's pretty clever. Make yourself a hero while removing the rivals who might ask questions about why the new government is filled with Death Eaters just like the old one."
Hermione's face was pale, and if it was rage, and if it was horror, it almost didn't matter.
"I can testify about the disposition of the prisoners… I know names of who was still alive… I'll testify about all of it. You can use it to move on them with the Russians. They don't really care about Narcissa and the Black Bitch, they'll support any other government. Heard you were ambitious, Muddy. Launch your own coup d'état. I bet the Chief Muggle down in Australia will be happy enough to say you're Premier, next…"
Hermione roughly kicked him into the wall. "Accio pistol!" She caught it in midair with her off-hand as it flew toward her wand; she didn't hesitate, her hand was already in motion on the trigger, she didn't really aim.
A spray of bullets tore through Avery as he slipped down the wall in a growing pool of blood. Hermione emptied the full magazine of the PMM—twelve rounds of 9mm Makarov—and only stopped, with a frozen, empty expression on her face, when her finger clicked over an empty trigger.
Ginny watched her friend silently.
Aisling leaned in, and looked at the scene. Hermione turned toward her with a blank expression.
The Irish witch hesitated for a moment, and then smiled with a jaunty bloodthirstiness, her Gaelic lilt echoing around the wrecked furniture and slumped body in the Cabinet Room. "Right. Shot will attempting escape."
