-1When the last good man is dead.
By Wallace
Rating: PG, I guess.
Warnings: Lots of people are dead. Nobody is happy.
Written for the multi-fandom apocalyptic ficathon on Livejournal. Which should be warning enough...
The Daily Prophet relegated it to page six, underneath an account of the latest Wyrd Sisters breakup. The Quibbler at least gave it a full page, but nobody really read that. It was on the front pages of the Muggle newspapers right up until they stopped publishing, but very few of the wizards paid any attention to them.
By the time they realised the news was important, most of them were already dying.
The Ministry could do nothing - London saw one of the worst outbreaks of the entire pandemic. Afterwards, long afterwards, historians would try to estimate the dead, of London and of the world. At least six million in the city, they would say. Well over five billion worldwide. But all this was just guesswork. Nobody really knew. There was nobody left to count, after all.
Hermione Granger read the Muggle newspapers. She saw it coming, and tried to warn her friends. Most of them laughed it off, confident in the spells and potions of magical medicine. Some of them listened to her, and even took the precautions she - the daughter of two dentists - advised, but none of them, not even Harry, took it seriously.
Hermione became infected in the eighth month of the pandemic, by which time the shattered remnants of government were already distributing the vaccine. She was treated, went into remission, and one day woke up alive.
The day after the world ended, Hermione checked herself out of the crowded, stinking building that served as a hospital, emptied a cupboard's worth of vaccine into her backpack, and apparated to Hogsmeade.
The town was dead. Most of the buildings had been burned down, presumably in a last-ditch attempt at stopping the contagion. There was no sign of life. Hermione turned her face towards Hogwarts, and began walking.
Somebody had dug a mass grave on the old Quidditch pitch, but it had never been filled in; the stench was indescribable, but Hermione made herself walk closer.
There was no point. The corpses had been there long enough that none of them were recognisable even if they hadn't been covered in flies. She stared blankly at the charnel-heap for a long moment, and then stepped carefully backwards, trying to bring herself to look away.
She hadn't cried since her mother died. She wasn't going to start now.
The truly horrifying thing, she told herself, was the pointlessness of it all.
"The truly horrifying thing," said a quiet voice behind her, "is that they're all dead. Hello, Hermione. You've come back."
Snape was grey. His hands and face were the grey of ill-health and decay, his hair the grey of old age. Even his eyes seemed to have lost all colour. His robes were a patchwork of their old black and paler chemical stains. His body was emaciated, his gaze lifeless.
"Well?" He said, his voice hollow.
"I brought the cure," she said. "The vaccine. Muggle medicine. It saved me. It can..."
"Would you want to save me?" There was a trace of the old bitter humour in his voice.
"No. But I will."
"You're a hero, aren't you, Granger? Bringing your miraculous Muggle cures to save the wizarding world, but you're far too late. They're all dead."
"And you're not." She didn't need to put the accusation into her voice.
"Poppy and I," he began, then broke off and began again. "Madame Pomfrey invited me back to the school. Minerva agreed that finding a cure was all that mattered. We failed."
"But you're alive."
"No." His smile was far too wide. "That was a decision I made, when I found I had the disease. My heart doesn't beat, my lungs don't move, but I can still make potions. So I could care for the dying, and then let myself rot."
"Is anyone else left?"
"Some of the children made it through to last month," he said. "The ones whose parents were too far away or too ill to take them out of the school stayed, so they died here. The rest of them probably died at home. They're all in there."
"Why haven't you filled it in?"
"Because I'm not ready to lie down yet. Not for good, not for the moment, not at all." He made a sound like rusted chains dragging across a stone floor, and after a moment Hermione realised he was laughing. "How's Potter? I assume you gave him the medicine first."
"He was with the Weaseleys," she replied. "I haven't heard from them since April."
"Don't get your hopes up."
Snape followed her to the Burrow.
He waited outside while she went from room to room. While she used her wand to dig a pit, he went in and brought down the corpses, one by one. He laid them in the grave gently, side by side. They were already wrapped in sheets, so she did not know which body was Harry, which Ron, which Ginny; if Snape did, it didn't show in his treatment of them.
Once the last of them had been brought down - eleven corpses, side by side - Hermione raised her wand and filled the grave back in.
She felt something should be said, but couldn't think of anything appropriate. So she stood there in silence for long moments, until Snape spoke up.
"You deserved better," he said simply.
Later, Hermione asked him about Voldemort. Neither of them flinched from the name; no horror he could bring compared to what they had seen, this past half-year.
Snape had no idea. His Dark Mark was dead - but then, so was the rest of him.
There were other, smaller, magical communities, scattered around Britain. She found no survivors.
Finally, she returned to London. Snape did not come with her.
The Ministry was a shell, decaying spells making the once-proud building a dangerous derelict. Scrimgeour had been one of the first victims, and the contagion had spread through the crowded building, the crowded city, like wildfire.
Hermione made herself useful there, disarming spell after spell, doing her little bit to prevent the destruction of what little remained of the world.
It took three months to make the complex safe, most of that time spent in the Department of Mysteries. In all that time, no-one else found their way to the entrance. At first, Hermione left each night, sleeping in one of the refugee hospitals that had been set up above, eating the meagre rations that were brought into the city. But as days went by she spent less and less time aboveground. There was no point to it. There was no-one she knew left alive.
And then one day the job was done. The last portal was sealed, the last spell undone, the last spirit unbound, the last device made safe. The Ministry of Magic, the sprawling complex that had once orchestrated a vast subculture of the land, was an empty shell.
There had been scrying devices in the Ministry, more than a few. Hermione tried every single one of them, at first with hope, then desperation, and finally resignation. She named every witch and wizard she had ever known or heard of, every location mentioned in the Ministry's records. In mirrors and crystals she looked upon the emptiness of Diagon Alley, the fresh-filled plague-pit of Hogwarts, the countless isolated cottages that held nothing but corpses. Even Azkaban was almost empty, the Dementors starving.
Sitting upon a throne carved from granite ten thousand years past, she gazed into a dark citadel.
Voldemort had not died easily. The desiccated husks of Death Eaters lay strewn about his chamber. If she had to guess, he had drained their lives away in a desperate attempt to prolong his own. He had failed, and it must be the pain of this defeat, as much as the agony of the contagion, that had marked his face so harshly.
Hermione was the last wizard in England, alone in the Ministry of Magic.
She locked the door behind her as she left.