The Houses Competition (or THC)
House: Gryfindor
Class: Potions
Category Drabble
Prompt(s) chosen: Corruption
Word Count: 715
The final step
Evil, Hermione knew now, was insidious. It was sly, a creeping danger that did not announce itself.
It was cunning too. It was so simple to slide into evil from the other side. People thought it was one big decision, but no…it was one small decision followed by another small decision, and so on until one day your feet were firmly planted on the Dark Path and you didn't know how they got there. One did not fall so much as slip slowly into evil, like a frog in a pot, incremental changes until you were doing things that never would have crossed your mind before. A journey of a thousand tiny steps, a million small decisions.
It was almost complete now.
As she stared down at the figures in the bright white room, the precious flask in her hand, she had the rare privilege of knowing that this was the moment. This was the turning point. She had the opportunity now to turn back, wash herself clean of sin, and live her life in such a way that her ledger carried more black than red at the end of the day. It would be hard, as the ledger dripped scarlet already, but she could do it if she acted now.
Or…not.
Her eyes, which had begun to lighten in her thirtieth year until now, at age ninety-eight, they gleamed with reflected whiteness, flicked left-to-right as she studied the mirrors on either side of the wide window.
Neither reflected her nor the room she stood in. That was not what they were for. Mirror magic was strange and mostly useless, according to those in power. What use was there in showing a future that would never be?
But for Hermione, in the dungeon of what had never been her home, had thought otherwise. That future had been an escape, the knowledge that there was another version of her that suffered less, that lived free…it was something. At times, it was everything. A vision of hope for a happier life, for a Hermione who adored her dark-eyed lover and was adored in return.
And so she had designed the other mirror, made from pure magic, created to show the future of the world as it was. Not divination, which was bunk and hokum, but true prediction, showing an approximate future that, in sixty years, had never once been wrong.
It was the dark mirror that had shown her what was wrong in her world. What was wrong with every living soul in her world, but not in the other.
How were they to know that Horcruxes were infectious? How were they to know that given time, those tiny flecks of soul-stuff that had contaminated the three of them would grow, and spread, until none of them were free? Until each soul on Earth was foul and cancerous with rot, and evil rose above each town and city like an invisible smog, smothering kindness, and hope, and mercy alike.
Hermione knew that even she was infected. Tirelessly as she might fight against the raging corruption, she knew that her present actions, to a younger version of herself, would be inconceivable.
The subjects—ah but no, let her be honest with herself, at least this once, here at the end of the line. Her victims cried out, but did not move. There was not that much give in the straps.
The modifications she had made to herself – to her eyes, to her mind – allowed her to see the infection raging inside them. It was contained, for now, but she had been unable to destroy it. She had calculated that it would need a potion infused with the purest of magic, the very brightest of lives.
She could do it, she knew she could. Even now, she could do it.
If she drank.
If she took that final step down the Dark Path, she could make the potion that would save - not her world…But a world. A version of her world where all was not darkness yet, and with her actions, might never be.
Hermione glanced again at the bright mirror, at the dark eyes watching her with love, at the bright and beautiful souls of the children she had never borne, but could have.
She lifted the bottle of unicorn blood to her lips.
She drank.
And took the final step.