Ten little Soldier Boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there were nine.
Nine little Soldier Boys sat up very late; One overslept himself and then there were eight.
Eight little Soldier Boys travelling in Devon; One said he'd stay there and then there were seven.
Seven little Soldier Boys chopping up sticks; One chopped himself in halves and then there were six.
Six little Soldier Boys playing with a hive; A bumblebee stung one and then there were five.
Five little Soldier Boys going in for law; One got in Chancery and then there were four.
Four little Soldier Boys going out to sea; A red herring swallowed one and then there were three.
Three little Soldier Boys walking in the zoo; A big bear hugged one and then there were two.
Two little Soldier Boys sitting in the sun; One got frizzled up and then there was one.
One little Soldier Boy left all alone; He went out and hanged himself and then there were none.
~Ten Little Soldier Boys Nursery Rhyme
One: Dashing, Daring, and Dangerous.
I
There's a whole lot to love about Hermione's best friend, Visenya Potter. She's dashing, daring and exhilaratingly dangerous. She's the best dualist the Wizarding World had seen in centuries, quick with her reflexes and creative with her spells, and a complete dead shot with her aim. Better yet, she isn't afraid to use her fists or feet, to get down and dirty with whatever weapon was at hand, which was sometimes a dagger, other times a broom handle. Hermione's seen her take out opponents three times her age and experience because no Wizard or Witch (typically Pureblood) expected a throat punch.
She's easy to like, harder yet to hate (though Hermione was sure the opposite would be said if Voldemort and his lot were asked), and she makes friends easy, especially those on the lower rung of the social ladder. She plays games and makes jokes, most of the time at her own expense, and she'd give you the coat off her back if you asked. She's loyal and loud, sticks up for those without a hope, and she's like the lightning scar on her pale forehead.
Quick as a flash and devastating once it touched ground.
But there's a lot of things to fear about Visenya too, Hermione would admit. She is mercurial and swift to take offense, impulsive and violent, as charming as she was unpredictable. You never know what you'll get with Visenya on a good day, friend or foe, brooding bastard or Hogwarts' delight, and it was her unpredictability that often caused more problems than solutions.
Visenya had sticky fingers, an eye for anything shiny, and like a magpie she won't think twice about plucking something valuable from someone else's back pocket if it caught her fleeting fancy. She takes and she takes, your friendship, your love, your devotion and your hatred, and she hoards it, amasses it, and she makes you think you're the one who gave it over freely.
That is to say, over the centuries Hogwarts has produced Witches and Wizards of every calibre, both men and monsters, and Visenya, Hermione believed, was both. She's admired, beloved, and utterly reviled. She's made of light and dark in equal parts, sometime hero, every so often the blackest of villains.
And Hermione wouldn't change a thing about her, not a single strand of silver-hair.
For, if Hermione had to describe Visenya in one word, just one, as impossible as that task seemed to be, it would be as a 'fighter'. Visenya fights for her friends, fights her enemies, fights for power and fights for love, and fights to prove herself in a world where her muddy origins before James and Lily took her in that fateful day at the Ministry, is seen as something 'dirty'.
Visenya Potter is a fighter down to her very bones-
And Hermione thinks that's why it is so confounding to see her as she is now, laying prone on a hospital cot lost in the starched linen, looking just like the seventeen-year-old girl she was.
With how big of a personality she was, so much bigger than her own bones, the type of person who walking in a room and didn't only take up space but somehow seemed to dwarf everyone else, is was easy to forget how very bloody young and frail she actually was. Because Visenya is small here, tiny and pale and sick, covered in sweat and shivering in her sweat slicked sheets, long since lost to sleep that might just make the pain bearable for a little while.
Visenya Potter is a fighter-
And here she slumbers… dying.
II
"Do we know what's wrong yet?"
Hermione can't take her eyes from the bed, from the petite form spent under stasis charms and stabilizing hexes the nurses of Saint Mungo's have drenched her in, if only to buy themselves time.
Time they clearly don't have any longer.
"The Doc's think it might be some sort of old blood curse, but they can't make heads or tails of it."
Hermione doesn't glance to her flank, doesn't need to see Ron shifting on his feet at the bottom of the bed beside her. She hears the nervous scuff of his boots loud enough.
"How long do they think we have left?"
There it is again, the uneasy shamble. Hermione's not going to like the answer then, and Ron knows that.
"Seven days. The thing is, 'Mione, whatever this curse is that Tom hit her with, it doesn't show symptoms until it's too late and irre-"
"Don't."
Hermione cut in warningly, a touch of frost to her voice. She can't bear to hear him finish the thought. This can't be how it ends. Visenya had won the war, given, it was in her immense Animagus form, but she had won it, and Tom Riddle had fallen, finally fallen, and they were supposed to be slowly picking themselves up now, grieving together, living together, putting the world back together-
But then Tom had thrown that unidentified spell at the last possible second, before he'd been ingulfed in the ensuing flames. It hadn't done anything then. Not so much as sparked off a black scaled side. It had hit Visenya, and superficially fizzled out. It had been nothing to worry over.
No one paid much mind to the spell-that-did-nothing.
Until, two days later, their friend had started to gripe on how hot it was in Grimmauld Place… in the middle of November. The fever came not twenty hours later, along with the crippling pain, muscle spasms, delirium and a quickly ticking down clock.
Whatever this curse was, it was ostensibly eating Visenya from the inside out like maggots devoured a bloating corpse. Bit by bit by bit.
"Have they really found no cure?"
Hermione pushed, desperate as she had been since bringing Visenya here three days ago when she found the lilac-eyed Witch passed out and weeping blood from her odd eyes on the kitchen floor.
Three days, and still no answer.
"Something to stem the curse's progression? Halt the effects? Anything?"
Hermione does not look to Ron, not once and not for an answer, too busy staring at her other best friend. She thinks any moment now Visenya is going to leap up out the bed like the shameless Jack-in-the-box she was. She would laugh and snort and say 'Sike! You really think some spell could take me out the fuckin' game? And from who knows where pull out a bottle of Firewhisky, which she'll down in one, or maybe smash the glass over the head of some Wizengamot representative in the hallway, and demand they all go down to Diagon Alley for a good piss up.
But Visenya only wheezes, throat bubbling on the blood slowly suffocating her, waxing and waning like a moon slowly going black.
It doesn't seem right to see her so sick, so deathly still, so… everything she wasn't typically. Like suddenly looking at the Mona Lisa and seeing not an enigmatic smile but a nasty snarl, the image before Hermione doesn't match with the memories she has.
It's almost dizzying.
"They think there might be a chance if we could-"
This time Ron cut himself off, not in warning or threat but in a sad little affair of hopelessness. It doesn't matter, Hermione's already latched on. That's what fear does.
Make you gobble up the littlest of crumbs.
"Could? What could we do?"
Now Hermione turns to Ron, now she sees the disarray of his ginger curls, the purple bruises lining underneath his eyes.
She must look as dreadful as he does.
"The Docs think the curse's source of attack is in the blood. It's sort of… latched on there. It's the only thing they've figured out so far but…"
"But?"
Hermione pushed on, pushed harder, patience wearing thin. Ron bends his bright blue eyes towards her, and there's more than sadness there. There's a miserable sort of irony too. Irony Hermione doesn't see yet-
But she will.
"They think if we had a close relatives' blood to examine, maybe a brother or sister or… mother or father, then they could cure Vis. The only problem is…"
And like all irony, it hits Hermione fast, hard, and far too late.
Hindsight is a bitch.
"The problem is Visenya doesn't have any blood relatives. Close or otherwise. She was adopted by the Potters, and while that works for Blood Wards and Gringotts Vaults, it won't work for hereditary magics."
Hermione finishes for him, slipping into her text-book tone as easy as one would slide into silk slippers. It's a nice rest bite, to fall into the logics of this problem and not the emotional ramifications losing your best friend-
No. They hadn't lost Visenya yet, and if Hermione had anything to say about it, they wouldn't any time soon.
"Just like Riddle, right?"
Ron snorts, sounding like he said something filthy. Hermione supposes he had. Voldemort was a pretty foul thing.
Pretty foul and pretty ashes now.
"Had to get one last shot in, hit her where it really hurts. Bastard knew she was adopted; knew we wouldn't be able to do a damn thing about this curse. I bet he's burning in the afterlife somewhere having one last chuckle to his mad-self."
But then Ron is spinning, and there, again, something new in his blue eye, something flinty and cool, steal like determination as he reaches into his satchel and pulls out-
A piece of parchment.
"But not on my watch."
He declares as he hands the slip to Hermione. She takes it gently, glancing down, scanning the ink on the face.
III
It looks like a Muggle birth certificate, if those included astrological signs, moon phases of childbirth, and the local flora of the approximate birth location.
Visenya Targaryen, it reads in black and red, two names perched above in the gold and silver of paternal and maternal lines. Names that don't make much sense to Hermione.
"It's a paternity test I had a nurse whip up for me before you got here. They're pretty popular in Pureblood circles to… you know, ensure 'purity' of lineages."
Ron rolls his eyes, but he's on a turn and he won't be easily stopped.
"We just find the people with those names, take their blood, willing or unwilling, and Hagrid's your uncle, we have our friend back."
Yet, Hermione, ever the pragmatist, doesn't see it so clear cut. Instead she taps at the paper, at the names, wincing.
"They've written these names wrong, Ron. You don't spell Damon with an e and… and how the hell do you pronounce that?"
Ron, of course, shrugs under Hermione's logic, finding it, perhaps, as chaffing as dress robes that smell like great-aunt-Tessie.
"No, they're spelled right. Apparently the magic doesn't lie, hence why the tests exist at all, and I think you pronounce it Rah-knee-rah."
"No, no, no."
Hermione shakes her head.
"You've got it wrong. You always get the intonation arse over head. It would have to be something like Rain-ney-rah, surely?"
Ron snatches the parchment back, earning Hermione a paper cut that stings the pad of her thumb, glowering.
"Are we really standing here arguing over diction just like that Flitwick lesson while Visenya is laying there dying?"
Properly chastised, having forgotten where she was and why she was there, Hermione shrank a little in on herself.
"Is this why you called me here? You want to try and track these people down?"
Ron flipped the parchment around, flashing the face at Hermione, pointing out a long line of text near the bottom.
"We already have a location to search. It says here that Vis was born in a place called 'Dragonstone' in a country called 'Westeros'."
The grimace on Ron's face was lemon sour as he dropped the parchment slip back to his side, swinging his fist at his hip.
"But I've looked on every Wizarding map I can get my grubby hands on, even went searching through the Muggle ones too… 'Mione, there is no such place as Dragonstone or Westeros."
Hermione takes the parchment back, has to fight Ron's fist for it, curiously running her thumb over the cursive gilt-script.
"No-"
She argues softly, mind already gearing up, trundling on, putting the pieces to places they belong. Hermione might not be much of a fighter like Visenya, and she might not be as tactical as Ron, but she was a great thinker.
This mystery was right up her alley.
"Just because something isn't marked down, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. When do we leave?"
Ron was already reaching beside the cot, where he stashed another satchel, throwing it over to Hermione glibly.
"Now. We've got seven days, best not to waste a minute of it. I already have the potion the doctors made to cure Vis. All we need to do is add the blood to it."
Hermione, for once, as she swings the strap of the bag over her body, is in full agreement. She is not, however, in union as, instead of heading for the hospital wards door Ron takes himself over to Visenya's side, heaving up a limp, lifeless arm to begin dragging over his shoulders.
"What in Merlin do you think you're doing?! She needs to rest, Ron!"
Hermione demands in alarm, watching as Ron began to drag a prone Visenya out from the tangle of too-thin bedsheets.
"What's it look like I'm doing? We're bringing Vis with us. Think about it, 'Mione. We don't know how far this Dragonstone is, and we don't even know if her biological parents will be there. We only have seven days to finish this potion, and more importantly, get it down Visenya's gullet. Do you really want to waste possible life-saving time by having to get the blood and then cart the potion all the way back to-"
"Alright, alright."
Hermione hisses, moving to help Ron get their friend out of the bed.
"You made your point."
Tactics. It's what made Ron good at chess, and what made their schemes often work despite the odds they faced. Hermione laid the groundwork, scheduled it all out in neat little bullet points, Ron tightened the screws and the bolts, and then Visenya went in like a fuckin' firework to the face.
It had saved all their arses more than once-
But Visenya wasn't here to do the impossible, wasn't there to save the day, was, in truth, the one in need of saving. It feels a bit like trying to drive a Muggle car with no engine. They have the breaks and they have the wheels, but none of the drive and the magical trigger of gasoline.
Hopefully Ron and Hermione would make do.
They will make do.
It couldn't be that hard, surely? To find a place that seemingly doesn't exist?
"Now help me sneak Vis out of here before the nurses get back and put us all in lockdown."
"They don't know what were doing?! Circe, Ron, do they even know we have the potion or did you steal that-… Merlin, you stole that parchment too, didn't you! You stole it all-"
"Oh, lay off, 'Mione. Do you want to sit around like we have for the last three days twiddling our thumbs and slowly watching our friend choke to death on her own liquefying insides or do you want to actually do something about it? I know what I'm choosing."
Somewhere in the ward unseen, a clock ticked on and on and on, and for Visenya, laying limp between her two friends like a puppet with her strings cut, it ticked down and down and down.
"Let's just get out of here before sense comes back to me."
From over the flopped silver head of their friend, Ron grins with all the depths of his dimples.
"You'll make Visenya proud yet."
Next Chapter: Hermione and Ron step through the Veil only to discover the universe is infinitely bigger than either expected, time doesn't work the same in two worlds, and after having five boys, Rhaenyra was desperate for a daughter, which she hoped would revive the loving relationship she had with her own mother as a child, but sadly the child doesn't live long enough to take it's first breath… or does it?
A.N: listen, LISTEN, House of the Dragon hasn't given me far enough Dad!Daemon content as I need so far, and what's the point of scribbling out fanfiction if I can't be so incredibly self-indulgent to the point of disgusting you all? So here I am folks. That's it. That's the reasoning behind this fic. I would say I'm sorry, but clearly I'm not lmao.
Yes this is also another Aemond/Fem!Harry fic, and like the other, it's going to be pretty fast paced, and a tiny bit, just a smidgeon, dank as all hell. There's assassinations, dragon fights, incest, and those nasty little Targaryens being nasty little Targaryens.
This fic isn't going to be about who the good guy is, this is about who your favourite war criminal is lol.
Plus, I want to hit Daemon and Rhaenyra with all the cosmic Karma I possibly can when they realize their daughter is off playing Dance of the Debauched with her uncle. That's the tea. I'm also having Viserys stay alive just a little bit longer than canon because *drama*.
In all seriousness, I'm actually going away on holiday for the next couple of weeks. I have had this fic on my computer for the last month and a half, and I'm sitting on ten chapters of it so far with new ones piling up each week. So I'm going to be posting this and my Fernweh fic while I'm gone. I hope you all liked this prologue, are looking forward to more.
Cheers for reading! ~AlwaysEatTheRude21