Author's Note:
The Houses Competition (or THC) Round 8
House: Slytherin
Class: Ancient Runes
Category: Standard (up to 3,000 words)
Mandatory Prompt (cannot repeat): [AU] Overthrowing the government
Prompt: [Object] Howler
Word Count: 2,567
Disclaimers/triggers: War imagery, guerrilla warfare, mention of war crimes, bad dudes doing bad things, terrorism.
Beta Love: Thanks to İrem for looking over my story!
The Final Operation
"Severus, what is your position?" Hermione tapped on the charmed earpiece twice to transmit the message.
It took him a moment to reply, and each breath she took in the silence between brought another hysterical thought of all the potential ways her final plan could go wrong.
"Nearly there. Should be able to get out before the blast doors come down. Have faith, Hermione."
The line crackled a little. He must have been passing through the inner sanctum wards where the central Ministry officials were still holed up against the onslaught of her offensive teams. Hermione wasn't worried about being overheard. She knew that nobody could intercept her transmission. They were her own design, and she'd built a little Entrail Expelling Curse into them for anyone who tried to tamper with one without the proper knowledge.
She debated whether to tell him the secret that she'd been holding the past few weeks, but in the end she knew that if he didn't make it back, it wouldn't make her feel any better having told him, and if he lived, she'd have time enough to finally tell him everything.
She nearly jumped when the static resolved into his voice. "I'm going dark in a few moments. Be safe, love. I'll be home before dinner."
The line went silent as the connection broke. Her heart flip-flopped in her chest. They'd been tiptoeing around saying the words for some time, and there it was, discernable above the static just before the feed cut out altogether.
'He loves you, Hermione. He'll do everything to return. He won't…he won't do what he wanted to do back when we met.' She forced herself to scrub away the dire thoughts that sprung unbidden to her mind.
But she couldn't delude herself. Severus Snape had a habit of sacrificing his life for good causes, and her cause was better than most.
"Harry, patch me in to Ron," Hermione demanded, switching the channel on her Runic Radio. "I need to make sure he knows that it's nearly go-time."
"Sure thing, Hermione," Harry chirped back in her ear. "Just a sec. George and I are dealing with a bit of friendly fire."
Hermione could hear the buzzing of spells in the background, and after nearly going deaf in one ear at Harry's excited whoop as they got the last of the awful Life-Bringers who were, ironically, attempting to murder them, she heard him twiddle with a few dials before saying, "Roger! Over and out. Patching over to Ron!"
The Runic Radios only transmitted a short distance away, but they could be piggy-backed on top of each other as long as operators were placed at strategic places within range. Harry and George had volunteered to take on one of the more tricky-to-defend sites, hence the repeated skirmishes. Hermione only hoped that the line would be clear enough to get the message through before it was too late.
It had all begun only a few months after the Final Battle of Hogwarts. So many magical folk had died or fled the country altogether that there were precious few left to run the basic wizarding businesses and Ministry positions required to keep things going smoothly. Out of desperation, Kingsley had created programs to partner with magical businesses and nearby wizarding governments to provide goods and services to help keep things from completely collapsing.
This meant that many foreign witches and wizards were flooding in to take over vacant storefronts and fill in positions at the Ministry. Some spoke with accents or very little English, and there were others whose use of magic was unfamiliar to the British magic-user. These things and more led to the rise of a group of mostly British pure-bloods and half-bloods who had become convinced that this was a slow coup by "foreign wizards" to take over Britain. These fears led to the rise of one Monty Lockhart, Gilderoy Lockhar's older and even slimier brother, who knew a money-making opportunity when he saw one. He coined the term "Life-Bringers'' as a way to turn the "Death Eater" moniker on its head and provide an appearance of propriety.
The so-called Life-Bringers called themselves as such because they sought to force the Wizarding World into a system where all pure-blooded witches would be broodmares paired with random pure-blooded wizards in order to pump out an army of pure-blooded children, while all half-bloods were forced to choose between being forcibly sterilized or imprisoned in Azkaban. Muggleborns, of course, were the worst off. They were being taken to "cleansing" facilities, in which they were forced to sign away all of their valuables and properties, sterilized, and strapped to large devices that drained their magical cores until they were empty husks that disintegrated away without magic to hold their cells together.
Hermione had been lucky. Grimmauld Place had been made Unplottable again after the end of the war by Kingsley's decree, and she'd been able to retreat there once she saw the writing on the wall. Before things had gotten truly awful, she had worked in a low-level clerical position in Magical Law Enforcement and felt sickened as Lockhart and his Life-Bringers began to slowly infest the Ministry. She'd nearly been tortured by a particularly wild-eyed witch one day in the breakroom for asking her to re-brew the coffee after drinking the last cup.
"Dirty louse! How dare you talk to me?!" the woman had hissed, pulling out her wand.
Luckily, Hermione's experiences in the war had put her Shield Charm on a hair trigger, and reflected the curse back to the woman, fleeing before the woman could cast anything worse.
It wasn't long until certain parts of the Ministry were off-limits unless one had the white star at the end of a wand-tip that signaled a person was a Life-Bringer. Hermione had nicked Harry's Invisibility Cloak to investigate, and that was where she'd found the experimentation rooms in the lowest levels of the Ministry. Many of the previous Death Eater alchemists and potioneers had been brought in to experiment on ghastly devices with the intention of wiping out all non-pure-bloods with a plague that could determine if one was half-blood or muggleborn. There hadn't been much success, but Hermone had nearly vomited after reading the head researcher's notes.
And that was before she found the tank.
It was in a sub-basement that she found was being curiously guarded, with Life-Bringers coming in and out at all hours of the day and night. One night, she slipped in behind a group of them and mapped out a sprawling hallway of doors and offices, many of which appeared to be empty. At the very end, was a door that looked much like one that would lead to a boiler room. Inside, a black metal tank with a grimy glass window sat, a pipe leading from the top of it up into the ceiling. Hermione had been curious, but she readied her wand just in case.
Using her sleeve to swipe at the grime, she nearly fell back in shock when she saw the skeletally thin figure within. There, inside, sprawled Severus Snape on the cold metal floor of the tank. Immediately, without thinking, Hermione sliced through the tank's wall and rescued him. He was so thin from starvation that she could easily lift him and wrap him under the cloak. He was so weak, he could barely lift his head, but his fingers gingerly closed around her shoulder in a gesture of relief. To cover her tracks, she re-sealed the hold and created a kink in the pipe above the tank, which slowly built up pressure. By the time the tank burst apart, she hoped nobody would ask too many questions.
It was lucky that Madam Pomfrey had been available in a pinch to help Hermione rehabilitate Severus in the hidden attic room at the top of Grimmauld Place. It had taken him forever to speak, but when she finally asked him how he'd survived all that time, all he could do was laugh in a dusty, awful way that made her skin crawl.
Still, he was looking healthier by the day, and as they grew closer, Hermione told him of what had transpired while he was indisposed. It wasn't long before he'd sworn himself to help her cause in any way he could.
She told Kingsley about the terrible things the Life-Bringers were doing, but his expression told her all she needed to know. He, and the other level-headed leaders, were losing control over the Ministry. Nobody would admit that the things the Life-Bringers were saying about genocide and forced reproduction were true. There was hand-wringing about "civility" and "reason" but no real action as the Life-Bringers continued their relentless march towards fascism. It would not be long until things became truly dire.
Hermione knew she needed to execute a decisive plan against this madness before all was lost. There was no Order, not anymore, but in a nod to the past, Hermione called her new group the Phoenix Army after the legendary bird that rises from the ashes.
"Oi, Hermione! I thought you said these were made of paper, not lead bricks!" Ron joked when his voice came through.
"Be careful, Ron. Remember, the ink is made with gunpowder," Hermione chided.
The idea had been Padma's. She'd been studying different ways to create magical inks, and while the initial experiment had been intended to create letters that would burst into three dimensional images like a fireworks show, it had been repurposed into something far deadlier. Hermione shuddered at how far they were having to sink in the name of stopping the carnage.
The streets of London were literally running red with blood. Corpses were left to rot as traps to catch any Phoenix Army members or Muggles trying to bury the dead. Fires had been running rampant for weeks, and many were calling it the apocalypse.
The Life-Bringer footsoldiers were like murderous ghosts in their light-repelling robes that gave them a semi-transparant appearance. The only tell-tale sign of one was the oil-slick shimmer as they moved in for the kill. Hermione had learned the hard way that they were hard to stop, as they were a clever construct of an inferi base with living brain matter harvested from a murdered half-blood or muggleborn that had been inserted into the skull along with a runestone that kept it from decaying. From there, Lockhart and his inner circle could create an army of drones that were hard to kill and kept coming.
There was only one way to end it, and Hermione knew that her hands would be stained scarlet by the end of this day.
"Ron, hold for my marker—shite that stings—Ron, it's time! Open the sack!" Hermione said, hissing as the telltale pain in her wrist bloomed into the figure of a rose. The magical tattoo on her wrist connected with a matching one on Severus' wrist. It would be the only way to communicate once he was trapped behind enemy lines.
"Roger!" Ron let out a cry of glee, and she heard the shuffling of heavy cloth. She knew that he was opening the sack and holding it flush over the air intake shaft at the top of the Ministry building. It would have been nearly impossible to get there without help from Charlie and his Rhodesian Ridgeback steed. "Woo-hoo! Look at 'em go!"
"Ron! As soon as the wards fall, disapparate!" Hermione cried, afraid for her best friend.
"Don't worry—" A massive rumble echoed in her earpiece and could be more faintly heard at the building she had focused in the spyglass from the top of the attic at Grimmauld Place as the ten thousand Howlers clawed their way down the Ministry Building's air intake system into the safe room that the cowardly Light-Bringer elite had hidden themselves away to wait out the end of the world.
A Howler for every death.
A Howler for every injustice.
A Howler for every hurt foisted upon those whose voices were silenced.
Hermione fell to the floor, the spyglass tipping over and shattering as the shockwave hit. Shaking, she tapped on her earpiece, calling out to the watchtowers and sentries all around the operation zone ringing the Ministry. There were shaken affirmations and hysterical giggles of "all clear!"
"We did it! We overthrew the fascist bastards!" Harry cried out, and Hermione teared up at the sound of George hurtling verbal abuse in the background at those they'd finally taken out after so many bloody days.
"We won. We actually won." She breathed with relief, and nearly turned off her headpiece before she realized she heard back from everyone except for one person.
'Severus. Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no, no.'
She patched into three different channels calling out for him, but Severus' line stayed silent. Desperate and frustrated, she threw the headpiece against the wall with a cry, then grabbed the tattoo and pressed into it, sending a hot pricking pain into her wrist, something to show she needed his answering call.
Two minutes, nothing.
Five minutes, nothing.
Ten minutes, nothing.
Hermione was nearly beside herself with grief, certain he was gone, that he'd done it again, only more permanently than before.
"You dunderhead, you know I can't be killed," he'd said sardonically, before they'd parted that morning.
"Stupid, stupid, man!" She blubbered, squeezing an upended couch cushion until she thought she'd crush it flat.
"Are you talking about me? Because I can go if you need me to leave you in peace." The voice from the doorway was choked with grit and a little thick, but it was unmistakably his.
"Severus!" Hermione's cry felt far too loud in the small space, but she felt frozen to the spot.
"In the flesh," he said, and stumbled forward with exhaustion.
Hermione stared for a long moment, almost too shocked to move, and then she dove forward to help him hobble over to the threadbare, dusty couch near the side of the room. He was covered in plaster and there was blood dripping down his face and robes, but most of it, miraculously, didn't seem to be his.
"How?" Hermione finally managed, gaping like a fish.
"Did I survive?" He smiled weakly, and Hermione couldn't help the way her heart surged with happiness to see it. "Simple. I can't be killed. Not when I have someone to come back to. You, of all people, should know that."
He grasped her shoulder, then, and squeezed it, as he had when she'd rescued him, and before she could think to say anything further, he had lifted her chin and pressed his lips to hers.
"Welcome home, love," she said breathlessly, when they finally drew back with matching scarlet cheeks.
He smirked, tucking a stray curl of hair behind her ear. "Congratulations on overthrowing the corrupt magical government. Yet another stellar accomplishment for the brightest witch of her age."
"I couldn't have done it without you, you numpty," she replied, grabbing her mediwitch kit to attend to his wounds.
"I love you too," he deadpanned. She silenced him with a kiss, grinning when his face went completely scarlet and he let out a flustered squawk.
They knew that soon they would stand together to greet their friends to celebrate their victory, but for now, this was a moment to savor between themselves.