Title: Code of the Griffin
Author: Knife Hand
Feedback: Constructive feedback appreciated, flames unappreciated
Spoilers: Nothing Specific, general for first few books.
Rating: R
Disclaimer: I do not own Hermione, or Luna, or Ginny, or Cho, or....... I would buy them all but I am broke.
Summary: From a war ravaged future, someone is sent back in time to change the course of the war.
"Hey Hermione. You want to tell us what this is about?" Ron asked.
"We're still waiting for one more." Hermione responded.
Ron looked across at Harry who just shrugged. Standing with Harry and Ron were the other Gryffindors. Fred and George were leaning against the wall while Neville stood nervously behind his year mates. Separated by a small but distinct gap were the two Hufflepuffs, Susan Bones and Cedric Diggory. Hermione was standing in front and between the two groups. Unlike the others, who were dressed in their school uniforms, she was dressed in her formal Order of the Griffin uniform, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. The uniform was a dark mahogany red set of pants, blouse and jacket all trimmed in gold. The tie had a red and gold pattern. On her shoulders was the gold and silver star cluster insignia of the Grand Marshall and a number of dress ribbons were lined up on the left breast of her jacket to represent the medals she had been awarded. On her left hip rested the sword of Godric Gryffindor, the limited portion of his own sentience that her ancestor had imbued the sword with radiating contentment, while a large pistol rested on her right hip.
After a few minutes of waiting they heard running footsteps. The group turned to see who was approaching and were greeted by a streak of blond hair entering the room, whose uniform had the colouring and crest of Ravenclaw house.
"Sorry I'm late." The voice was melodious and almost ethereal.
"That's fine Luna. We had not started yet." Hermione said. "Alright everyone take a seat."
The students who had received the letter sat around the classroom while Hermione went to the front of the class.
"Now, to begin. Some of you know, others may have heard rumours and others may be unaware, but I am not the same Hermione Granger who attended here last year. Voldermort will rise again and he will have to be fought. I come from a future where the War against Voldermort and his line was won, but it took far too long. We can not allow the older generation to run the war in their manner. It is our generation who will have to fight the coming war, and it needs to be us that runs it."
"Why can't we trust Dumbledore and the other teachers to run it?" Cedric asked.
"Because if we do, over half the people in this room will be dead before they are twenty and only two will make forty. In the future I came from over eighty percent of the students currently at Hogwarts were dead before they turned thirty. Most of those who survived turned to the service of the Dark Lord. In other areas it was worse. Baubuxton's in France was destroyed, all students and teachers killed. Our entire generation was almost wiped out because the older generation saw us as either cannon fodder, pawns or innocents who should not learn how to protect themselves."
"So how do we take control?" Harry asked.
Hermione smiled and outlined her plan and the nature of the Order of the Griffin.
Hermione marched through the halls on her way back towards the Gryffindor common room while Harry and Ron strolled half a step behind her.
"What do you think, Harry? You going to join?" Ron asked.
"Well I have to take on Voldermort anyway." Harry replied.
"Yeah. I guess I'll join too." Ron said with a shrug.
Both of the boys stopped on the spot as Hermione spun to face them, a hard look on her face.
"This is not a game!" she snapped. "Harry, either way The Order will protect you from specific harm just as I promised. That said, it is still a combat organisation and if either of you join you will be expected to perform combat missions in which any member of the Order could die."
Ron and Harry stepped back at the glare in their formerly bookish friend's eyes.
"Am I clear?"
"Yes." Both boys replied.
Hermione just nodded and then turned and strode away.
"Ready to go?" Harry asked, popping his head into her study.
"Just one second." Hermione replied, putting a few last papers into an attaché case. "Right, Let's go."
They both used the floo network in Hermione's office to get to Diagon Alley. After brushing off the ash from the public floo, they walked confidently down the street. Hermione was dressed in her Order dress uniform, while Harry was dressed in a pair of denim jeans and a simple red polo shirt. They made their way through the crowd towards Gringotts, a small gap opening around them as they walked.
"Lady Granger of House Gryffindor and Lord Potter of House Potter to see Account Manager Griphook." Hermione announced to the teller Goblin.
"Account Manager Griphook will see you in his office." The teller Goblin replied.
Four hours latter they were back on the street of Diagon Alley after visiting both Gringotts and White, Hussey and Harris. From the vaults of Gringotts they had both retrieved their Family Signet rings and Harry had also retrieved his family sword, which now hung at his hip. Hermione's family signet ring is the same Lion emblem as the Hogwarts Gryffindor house crest, while Harry's consisted of the Potter Hawk, its wings outspread.
They walked through Diagon Alley before heading out of the Leaky Cauldron and into Muggle London, pausing only to transfigure Hermione's uniform into a pair of jeans and a white blouse and 'Don't notice me' wards on the two swords and Hermione's pistol. They wandered around London for a while before stoping for a drink. Stopping at a Café, Hermione treated Harry to a Chocolate Thickshake while she had a Coffee.
"I didn't know you drank Coffee." Harry said when the drinks were delivered. "Yum, that's nice."
Hermione smiled at Harry's reaction to his drink, knowing that he had never had one before.
"I've had the occasional cup since I was thirteen the first time." Hermione replied, taking a sip of her coffee. "You've just never seen me drink it because most Wizards simply can not brew a decent cup of Coffee. They try and do it instantly with Magic and it just does not taste right."
Hermione waited, slowly sipping her coffee and watching Harry thoroughly enjoy his thickshake. She knew him well enough to know he had a question and that this was not the time to press.
"Mione." He said finally. "What was it that the Boggart turned into in DADA?" he finally asked.
So that had been it.
"I have seen a lot of things Harry. I mislead Professor Lupin slightly when I told him it was a class seven. I came back much more than twenty years." She began, trying to figure out how to explain.
She looked into his eyes and decided he needed the truth. Not the whole ten thousand year truth, but the truth none the less.
"I have been a war a very long time, much longer than I have been at peace. In that time I have lost far too many friends. Luna, Ron, Ginny, The Twins. Everyone I have ever cared for or loved. Luna dying of shock form having her arm blown off by a spell; Fred, Alicia and two of their three kids with their throats cut; my husband dead in my arms while I was bleeding from the abdominal wound that killed our unborn child." She paused at the pain of the memories, her hand absently rubbing the where the scar had been. "I became obsessed with revenge and for a while lost my way. It was not about keeping people safe, it was all about killing Voldermort's line, anyone associated with them and anyone who got in my way. I was lost in rage and revenge, hunting alone to kill, no matter the cost. I did awful things and became something to be feared. That was what the Boggart turned into. It turned into me."
Harry sat in shocked silence for a while. He was not a naive as most people would think. He certainly, having grown up with the Dursleys, understood the desire for vengeance, the base impulse to hurt them because they hurt you.
"I can never defeat it, never escape it." Hermione whispered. "My greatest enemy is there every time I look in the mirror."
"So what changed?" Harry asked.
"Huh?" Hermione said shocked. She had half expected anger or disgust, not the sympathy and curiosity in Harry's eyes.
"You were a sole avenging angel, smiting the wicked at the cost of yourself and anyone who got in the way. I can get that, in my head I can see why, especially after living with my relatives. But then you formed the Order. You became the great leader of an army that liberated and protected the populous and, from what you've told me, often sacrificed tactical positions, or their own lives, to spare the innocent. So what changed?"
Hermione fired the last of the clip down the hallway and ducked back behind the corner. Pulling the spent clip from the assault rifle she stowed it in a small ammo pocket of her black armour and removed her last fresh clip from another pocket, slammed it home and cocked the assault rifle.
She quickly ran the last few seconds of footage through her heads up display, pinpointing the exact positions of the soldiers behind their barricade.
While the armour resembled plate and chain mail of the middle ages, it hid servomotors, electronics and enchantments that increased the speed, strength and reflexes of the wearer. While the increase was not dramatic it helped in combat. The armour also represented the first step in the long development of what would become the armour of the Grand Marshall. But that was not for a long time.
Stepping back out, she gunned down the defenders with quick and accurate bursts from the assault rifle and the targeting data. After confirming all the soldiers were dead she ran down the hallways, following the map in her heads-up display. She burst out into a cross corridor and noticed another group of soldiers.
Unlike the previous group, these soldiers seemed surprised to see her and hesitated for a second before opening fire, allowing her to duck behind a pillar. She fired the last burst from her assault riffle down the hall, forcing the soldiers to find cover, then she released the assault rifle, trusting the strap to secure the weapon. Without a word she charged towards the soldiers just now peaking out from cover, a pistol in one hand and a dark blade in the other. She snapped off a few shots as the formed a firing line. The first volley rang out and a few bullets bounced off her armour, one finding a chink and lodging itself in the side of her abdomen. The second volley was about to ring out when the officer called a cease fire. A second later something crashed into Hermione's legs, causing her to stumble to a stop.
"Don't kill him." The small girl who had tackled her legs called out. "Don't kill my daddy, you dirty Slytherin!"
"Jenny, go back inside." The officer called out.
Hermione now noticed the Gryffindor Lion, now turned into a unit patch, on his uniform. This was something that she had seen but not really noticed on the previous soldiers who had been shocked at her appearance, but in retrospect had been conspicuously absent from the groups that had been prepared for her appearance, like the last group.
"I'm just here to kill two men." She stated. "Your Governor and his guest."
"Tell that to all the solders you killed." Spat one of the soldiers.
"They all fired first." She replied.
"We are duty bound to protect the Governor." The officer replied.
"Even if he is working with a Dark Wizard?" she asked.
"Talk fast." The officer said.
She did.
"So with his squads help, me and the officer cleaned out the squads that had known about the dark wizard's presence, killed the Governor and the dark wizard.' Hermione concluded. "The next morning I left that planet and never went back. Eighty years later when I founded the Order, they send the first group of recruits. Including that little girl, Jenny Weasley. She became on of my best soldiers and my Second in Command, till she bought a piece and I shipped her home."
"Weasley?" Harry said.
"The descendant of Fred and Alicia's last surviving child."
"Descendants, other Planets. Exactly how old are you?" Harry asked.
"Harry, you never ask a woman that question." Hermione mock scolded, causing Harry to blush red. "How old do you think Dumbledore is?"
"I don't know. One twenty maybe." Harry said with a shrug.
"McGonagall is about one sixty. Average Wizarding life expectancy is about two forty, Dumbledore is pushing two eighty. I make him look young. But here's something to consider. Within ten years of the Magical world being revealed to Muggles, there were spaceships capable of travelling thousands of light-years in a matter of days and seven colony worlds being founded."
"How?" Harry said in wonder.
"Teseracts and Quantum Tunnelling."
"Huh?"
"Never mind. Those are just the Muggle names for Apperation and Portkeys. The real reason is that they are imaginers and Wizards are Expediters." Hermione tried to explain. "Muggles dream, they can make anything they imagine, Wizards speed up the creation or implementation of ideas, but most can not really generate new ideas themselves. Muggleborn are the bridge, the creativity of the Muggles, the magic of the Wizards. When the two worlds come together, there is nothing that can not be done."
Harry said a thought for a while, still sipping on his drink.
"So a little girl, a Weasley at that, brought you back?" he finally said.
"Yes. She did. But I know I haunted her dreams, weather as the daemon who came to slaughter their defenders, or the angel who freed them from the dark, or both. Just as the others haunt mine. All the little boys and girls, the men and women who could not find the right words. All the widows, the orphaned children and childless parents who never got to see their loved ones again. The wedding dresses never worn, the children never conceived. All the lives destroyed because of my dark rage."
"But what about the most tragic loss?" Harry asked. "The life YOU never got to lead, all the things YOU never got to do. YOUR lost children, the time YOU never got to spend with YOUR husband."
Hermione lowered her head, so lost in pain of her memories. Still she felt lighter, as it they would not trouble her quite as much ever again. Harry now knew some of the worst in her, but he was still her friend. She was so caught up in the pain and relief that she never heard his next words.
"I think that is the loss that will haunt my dreams." He whispered.
TBC…