Standard Disclaimer: No, I don't own anything of the Harry Potter empire. Nope, nada. No money is being made here, which is solely due to sleepless nights and a disgruntled muse who has a penchant for excessive caffein. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is entirely unlikely and is unintentional if it does happen.
Timeframe: Hogwarts immediately after the Battle, with some slight time alterations of events during the battle. AU afterwards.
Warning: The aftermath of a battle is never pretty. Some nasty language, and character bashing.
Chapter 7: Burned Bridges
Andromeda Tonks answered the floo call to find it was her youngest sister. Frowning, she asked "Well, Narcissa, what do you want now?"
Narcissa was shocked. Her sisters had never called her by her full name for years, unless they were extremely mad at her. But then, she hadn't spoken to Andromeda for almost twenty years anyway. Actually, thinking about it, she had not spoken to her eldest sister since she married Lucious Malfoy. He had forbidden her from any contact.
Narcissa grimaced as she spoke. "Andy, I'm really lonely here. I only have a couple of elves to talk to, and they are not very good company. None of my old friends are coming to see me any more, and I can't seem to get them to answer any of my floo calls. If you have time, I would like to get together with you, for coffee or something."
Andromeda laughed a cruel sounding laugh. "You really have no idea why your so-called old friends aren't calling you back or visiting, do you. Narcissa, I thought you were smarter than this, but I guess I was wrong. I always knew you were naive and boy-crazy when Lucius proposed to you, but I honestly thought your marrying him was from a state of knowledge, and not that you were dumber than a bag of hammers!"
"Narcissa, there are a number of reasons your old friends aren't calling you. First, they only hung around you because Lucius was Voldemort's top henchman, and he was a murderer and thief. If they didn't show him what other organized criminals call 'respect', they would pay for it. He was rich, and so could afford the best food and drink, even if his wealth was stolen from the Ministry and from his victims. The most important reason most of them aren't responding is that they were lying dead in front of Hogwarts after the battle when Voldemort's Mark sucked them dry. And the rest of them were exterminated for the vermin that they were during the mop-up operations. But all that was after they had already murdered my daughter!"
"So I really don't give a rat's ass that you're lonely." And with that, she hung up.
An hour and a half later, Narcissa floo-called again.
She started the 'conversation' with "Andy, I really, really need to see you. I don't know what I will do if I can't see you, and maybe meet your grandson as well."
As Andromeda had spoken with Harry Potter about his meeting with her remaining sister, and that during the meeting he had told her that Teddy was his godchild and designated heir, Narcissa's insistence on meeting set off all sorts of alarm bells in Andromeda's head. She had just been through the second war where, due to her marriage to a muggle-borne wizard, she had been a primary target for murder. She responded "Narcissa, can you give me a couple of minutes to check my schedule? I'll see when we can get together as soon as possible. I'll call you back, okay."
When Narcissa agreed to this, Andromeda cut the connection and immediately called Harry as the head of the family. Ten minutes later, she called her sister and said "Cissy, here is a new floo address for you to come to, in two hours. I need to go down to the potions lab and check on some things that are on the boil and I can't leave them alone for the next hour and a half. The address I gave you is the floo in the clean room next to the lab. How's that?"
Getting agreement from the younger witch, Andromeda set the plan in motion.
Two hours later, Narcissa arrived in a bare room and was immediately stunned by three aurors and two security goblins. Harry had taken no chances in making sure Andromeda would be safe.
Some time later, Narcissa woke in a hospital bed, wearing a hospital gown. One hand was manacled to the bedframe with magic-suppressing handcuffs. With her other hand, she frantically checked her person and found neither her wand, her emergency portkey or the vial of potion she had brought with her.
Then she heard a voice she last heard when he told her that he really didn't care whether she lived or died, as long as it was not a 'family' problem.
"Narcissa, have you ever heard of the concept of a 'sleeper agent'?" At her shake of her head, he continued "I thought not. How about a scorched earth tactic?" Same response.
"The term 'sleeper agent' is a common term in muggle spy literature and history, and was a good description of a number of students at Hogwarts who were really Voldemort's supporters supplying him, or at least his Death Eaters, with information. This actually occurs in real life outside the magical world too."
The woman shook her head again, trying to decide whether she should appear angry that anyone should accuse her of reading muggle fiction, and deciding it was probably a bad idea.
"A sleeper agent is a person who was located in what could be considered enemy territory, but trained and instructed to live as if they always had belonged there. If nothing else, they were instructed to be very careful not to draw attention to themselves. At some point, they would receive orders from their superiors to take specific actions, which could be passing information, planting a bomb, or assassinating a particular person. Whether they survived after completing their mission was usually not a concern to the people who were in control of them, and in some cases, they were instructed to kill themselves after completing their tasks."
"One thing you have to know, if you don't already, is that Voldemort was desperate to get his hands on the Black family's fortune. As he believed that your eldest sister and your cousin Sirius had been disowned by your insane Auntie Wally, he recruited your cousin Regulus. Your marriage to Lucius was predicated on getting any of your offspring into the line of succession. When Regulus betrayed him and was murdered for this, and he found that Sirius had not really been disinherited, he figured that he would have to get rid of Sirius and, as Bellatrix was unlikely to spawn, make sure that your son would be the next head of the Black family."
"To make this all work, he had your husband make sure that Sirius was thrown into Azkaban without a trial, and thus, with no set release date. Dumbledore, for his own Machiavellian reasons, wanted total control of me and so was agreeable to throwing Sirius into prison to be forgotten. I doubt that Dumbles ever clued into the fact that he was essentially working to further Voldemort's scheme instead of his own demand for total control."
"However, in case of Sirius ever getting a fair trial and being released, he made sure that steps were taken to have him and me, and any other potential heirs, eliminated. And that's where you came into it, and why you are here now. You were implanted with a very deep compulsion charm, which was far beyond Lucius' ability, so we know it was planted by Voldemort himself. It has taken three weeks work by the best curse-breakers Gringotts and the ICW have available, to dig that out of your mind. He knew that Sirius had become my godfather, so I was his heir, and any of my heirs would inherit, cutting him off from the money he wanted so badly. You were intended to kill me and any heir I might have. Knowing that you would be evicted from the family for attacking the head or his heirs apparently did not concern Voldemort or your husband. Whether you survived such an attack did not appear to concern them either. This was the scorched earth part of the plan. If you were dead, the plan could not be tracked back to them."
"When you became so insistent that you had to meet my godson, it set off alarm bells to Andromeda. You have to remember that, having married a muggle-born, she had been a prime target of the Death Eaters for both phases of the war over more than twenty years. As they say, when they are out to get you, paranoia is just good sense. After all, this was just shortly after your former friends had murdered her daughter and son-in-law."
"We don't know if you were a willing recipient of the compulsion, or it was done to you unwillingly. The curse-breakers were unable to tell. Therefore, as head of the Black family, I have decreed that you are never to have unescorted access to young Teddy. Ever. He will only meet his Aunt Cissy under strict supervision."
She looked at Harry grim-faced. "You are cutting me off from my only family I have left."
Harry smiled. "No, you can visit your sister as you and she wish. I wouldn't hold my breath for an invitation to tea."
Narcissa started crying. "What am I going to do? I have nothing now, no friends, no family. Nothing."
Harry added, "I have founded a number of orphanages for the victims of your former friends' crimes. If you like, I can put in a good word for you to get work there."
Narcissa scowled. "Those places would be full of muggles and half-bloods! How can I hold up my head if anyone ever found out that I was working in such a place? Don't you care about me at all?"
Harry smiled in a nasty kind of way. "And that attitude is precisely why I don't give a damn about you. It got a lot of my friends killed."
Minerva McGonagall was sitting in her office at Hogwarts, when the portrait of Albus Dumbledore finally woke up. It was more than two years since he had died which, according to existing records, was fairly typical for the magical portraits of previous Headmasters.
As soon as he noticed he was awake, and seeing that Minerva was in the room, he started yelling "Minerva, we have to find Harry Potter. He is killing people and he is totally out of control!"
Minerva smiled at the distraught ex-Headmaster and shook her head at him. "No Albus, Harry is in very good control. He is just not under your control. He never should have been anywhere near your self-centred manipulations! For all that we have been able to tell, you have been trying to control Harry and the Potter Family since before he was born. You forget that, as the Headmistress of Hogwarts, I have the right and the ability to read all of your diaries and secret correspondence and I have done so. When you are breaking so many laws, both Magical and Muggle, you really shouldn't have documented all the lies you told."
"It appears that you really wanted to control the Potter fortune, as well as the Black family fortune too. For all your subterfuges, you never noticed that when you and Bagnold threw Sirius Black into Azkaban, you were actually working in concert with Lucius Malfoy and his master Voldemort. You were so desperate to get control of Harry away from his godfather that you didn't do your homework on who else was bribing the Minister. Rather stupid in retrospect, don't you think?"
Somewhat flummoxed by this revealing of his secrets, the portrait started to rant again. "We have to get Harry under our control. Voldemort can't be killed unless Harry dies! There are other things that must be done before he dies. Things that I can't explain to you. The secret is too important for others to know.""
He was quite shocked when the Headmistress folded over in her chair, laughing like she had never heard a joke in her life.
Smiling at the portrait, she shook her head again. "You lying bastard!. I gather you mean the horcruxes." At the shock on his face, she almost fell out of her chair.
"Harry told me of how you and he met is what seemed to be the vestibule to the afterlife, and you both saw the remnant of Voldemort's soul there with you. Yes, we all know of the horcruxes that you expected Harry to destroy and not tell anyone else about them. Well, all of Harry's friends knew about them, and they have destroyed them all. All of them! Voldemort is gone. Totally gone, and all his marked followers gone with him. Their dark marks slaved their magic to him, and he sucked them dry as he died, trying to attain the immortality he so desperately wanted! All of his unmarked followers and sympathizers were removed afterwards."
Dumbledore stammered a bit. "How can they be redeemed if Harry has killed them all?"
Minerva grinned. "What makes you think that any of them wanted to be redeemed? They had pledged themselves to the Dark Lord, and they all thought you were an idiot for risking the safety of every other student at Hogwarts by giving all the Dark students not just a second chance, but hundreds! You put everyone at Hogwarts in mortal danger hoping that the few bad ones would come to you and ask your forgiveness."
"Was that the 'Greater Good' nonsense you kept spouting to us? No, you wanted them to come to you begging forgiveness from the great god Dumbledore, who was the only one who could dispense absolution. But they didn't want your forgiveness – they wanted riches and power, and they saw you as an impotent joke!"
"You put all of us in the Order of the Phoenix in mortal danger every time you sent us out on missions with your prohibition from using lethal spells. Arthur Weasley almost died when Voldemort's snake attacked him, because you refused to let any of us even protect ourselves when we were attacked by people and things with no such scruples."
Dumbledor mumbled "We couldn't fall to their level. That would have made us not better than they were."
Minerva's highland temper finally got the better of her. "That is pure bullshit on top of dragon dung and hippogriff excrement on top of that! They were attacking with a clear intent to kill us if they could, and any other innocent people who got in their way. They were murderers, and to get their dark marks, they had to commit murder. In just defending our own lives, that does not come even close to falling to their level."
"I know you were somewhat indisposed last week when the battle took place, but over a hundred of Hogwarts students and most of you precious Order of the Phoenix were lying dead in our Great Hall or on the field outside. On top of that, there were over three hundred of Voldemort's followers lying dead out there as well. With very few exceptions, every one of those dead people had been your students over the years you have been teaching or as Headmaster. Their deaths are all on you for forgiving what was declared to be unforgivable. Was Draco Malfoy ever punished in any way for casting the Imperious on Katie Bell – not bloody likely!"
Dumbledore started to say "The School Board wouldn't allow it..."
Minerva interrupted "And from long experience watching the way you ran things here, I know you didn't even try! Yet another excuse, saying you weren't to blame for anything. Just like you kept Fudge around as Minister."
Albus blustered "I never wanted to be the Minister of Magic!"
Minerva responded "Oh no. Of course not. You have the three most powerful posts in the Wizarding world, but by not being the Minster, you always had someone else to blame for any failings."
She pulled out her wand, and pointed at the portrait. "Incarceous!" Turning away from the portrait, she called out "Pappy."
An elderly house-elf appeared. "Yes, Headmistress?"
Minerva asked, "Do you know of how many other portraits there are of the late Headmaster?"
The elf nodded. "Elves know of at least four. One at the Ministry to be honoured publicly, and two others in secret places."
Minerva nodded. "Thank you. Do you know of the room where Argus Filch kept his torture equipment?" The elf nodded to this.
The Headmistress stated "Good." Turning again to the portrait, she cast "Accio Dumbledore's portraits." As eight large portraits appeared in her office, she cast "Incarcerous"on them all.
Turning to the elf, she said "I guess he was sneakier than even the elves of Hogwarts knew."
Dumbledore looked terrified. "What are you doing, Minerva. You can't do this to me."
She shook her head again. "Albus, you are now confined to your portraits, so you cannot run away through other portraits in Hogwarts or anywhere else. I am going to have the paintings locked away so you can do no more damage."
Dumbledore screamed. "Everything was for the Greater Good!"
To the elf she said, "Please take all of these to the room with the torture equipment. Leave the lights on so that Albus can look at what his world has come to. He let Angus keep these at Hogwarts, when they should have been removed many years ago. Let him think about that. Then seal the room for as long as I am Headmistress. I will discuss with my successor whether to change the arrangement. Please proceed."
A group of elves appeared and took the portraits away, all the while Dumbledore's image was screaming that he was only working for the Greater Good."
In the quite of her office, Minerva sat back and said to herself, "I think that the stupid idiot actually believed the drivel on his chocolate frog card."