Title: Diverging Reality
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters: Various
Chapter: 30
Word Count: 1824
Warnings: nothing really

Beta: TigerKat

AN: I just wanna sleep for a week. *twitches*

Flopping into his chair as he groaned, Harry rubbed at his face with both hands. "Tell me why I agreed to this bullshit?" he asked, as he looked over to Hermione as she went over parts of her wedding.

"Because it is a part of your familial duties as the Lord of Potter. And I really need Widow Longbottom to stop trying to remove the Potter parts of our wedding" she muttered as she tapped her order forms to fix them back to what she had them originally.

Hermione had taken to coming over to her brother's main house, having moved into a small loft that allowed her to walk to her apprenticeship as a researcher for the Ministry while she was engaged to Neville. Harry knew that she had been helping with the team doing the law rewrites. But when she was in the main home, she spent most of her time in her private study, where she would fill out the paperwork and have Neville come over whenever Harry was there to act as a chaperone.

"You should know better than to send paperwork to Neville without protections on it," Harry sang out, dodging the ball of paper that was thrown at him by his sister. "And why do you have to be so smart?" he asked, sighing.

Hermione huffed, putting the last of the pages into their proper envelopes. She then set a tealight under the holder to melt enough wax for the envelopes and lit it with a flick of her finger. "Because I needed to be smart enough to keep you and Ron from dying," she stated as she placed her wax spoon into the holder's circle. As the spoon heated, she opened her small containers of wax cubes and dropped them into the spoon to melt.

Harry snorted at her. "Have you gone over the new information we found out and sent you?" he asked, watching as his sister conjured a small bowl of water to help cool her wax seal.

"I have, yes. Most of the points in the bill that Dumbledore has put forth goagainst the contract that sits between Hogwarts and the Ministry, as you lot thought." She folded the dabbing cloth and set it by the water bowl. "Such as the point about the wards. Did you know that someone who is trained by the Goblins must come in every year to check them? From what we found out, the last time someone came in was after the Troll came in and they weren't Gringotts approved. After that, no one came around. And before then, Dumbledore never had someone come to check the wards afterhe took over as Headmaster."

"If you can send me that information, I'll bring that up at the Meeting of the Minds," Harry sighed. Hermione pulled out three envelopes and removed the shrinking charm on them, sending them to over Harry with a flick of her wand. Harry took them out of the air and opened them, finding them absolutely stuffed with information. He pulled out the pile of paper from the first envelope and found that it was each point of the bill being broken down and how it could or could not be put through according to the laws and the treaties between the Ministry and Hogwarts.

"That, and the fact that it has been found out that there are several wards that are very much down since there were two confirmed Death Eaters in the school at the same time raises many questions. Spy or not, Severus Snape had the mark, and it would have set off the warning signals. Then, of course, there was Quirell in first year and Crouch Junior in fourth year," she said, shaking her head. He watched as she carefully poured the black with silver swirls wax onto the first envelope, pressing her cold seal into the wax. She allowed it to sit as she added more wax to her spoon to do the next envelope. "Hell, the fact that nothing went off with Wraith Voldemort being around was a red flag from hell, and I'm surprised no one noticed."

Harry sighed as he looked over the other envelopes, finding that it was information from various fellow classmates with breakdowns of the concerns and contradictions of their years at the school, and the school rules and the original charter agreement. "I'm going to have to send copies to Lucius and Marvolo." Hermione absently sent three more thick envelopes over as she lifted the seal and placed it in the water to cool and put the envelope aside.

"Those are the smallest envelopes that I could use with an expansion charm before I compromised the structure," she admitted as Harry smiled and shook his head at her.

He pulled his mailing box towards him before he looked at the side of it, finding the rune that connected his box to Lucius' and tapping it. Opening the lid, he shoved the envelopes in with a bit of wiggling before closing the lid and waiting for the rune to stop glowing. He did the same with Marvolo's, shoving the box aside before setting it to be open. He had a feeling they would respond rather fast.

"You need to go in and get a bigger box soon," Hermione mused, as she continued to seal and stamp each letter that she had to send out. She dropped the first three letters into her own mailing box.

"I know this," Harry said, rolling his eyes as he turned to the notes again. "So, to go over what I should bring up at this Meeting of the Minds, outside of the whole thing with Dumbldedore's issues with the ability to follow the law, we need to talk about the issues with the school."

"You can use the discussion of his bill to lead up to Dumbledore's issues," Hermione suggested. Harry gave her a look but still pulled out a moleskine notebook that he had been using to take notes during and after their meetings.

He flipped to a new page in the book, stuck a sticky note tab on it, and wrote at the top of the page 'Bring Up' before grabbing a pen. "Let's see. The wards, when they had been last checked by an approved warding master and approved curse breaker, both from Gringotts. The school curriculum and what should and should not be taught, and how they need to be taught. The headmaster's job and the qualifications needed to be a headmaster."

"That will be a good one to lead into Dumbledore's issues, and maybe get him fully out of the political arena, by forcing him to set a Regent who will follow the Dumbledore charter properly," Hermione said. Harry made a sub-note on that point.

"We need to bring up the school's ranking compared to the rest of the world. The attitudes towards Light, Dark and Grey magic, most notably the Dark equals evil or Light equals good thing. Wizarding politics need to be added to the school curriculum and the non-magical classes all need to be updated in all ways. The last known update for the 'Muggle' class was from the late forties at the very latest. Possibly the mid-twenties, since they were still talking about how televisions are black and white and only get a few channels," he mused.

He shook his head. His pen continued to scratch away at the paper as he worked out what he wanted to bring up during the meeting.

Hermione continued to seal her letters, dropping the last of them into her box and closing the lid for the last time as Harry sighed as he sat back. The Gringotts rune flashed once before dimming fully. "Are you all done for now?" she asked, looking at him with a smile on her lips.

"Yeah, for now," he sighed as he brushed his hair out of his face. "I don't know. I just...I don't know what to think about all of this. Even after what happened with Ginny and the whole marriage thing, I find I'm lost sometimes," Harry admitted. "At one time I would have never thought that Dumbledore would be so stupid as to arrange a marriage for me just to keep power, but here we are, nearly four years after he did just that. My marriage has been dissolved, with both parties coming out of it unscathed. We're friends for the most part, but we're really not close like we could have been had she not been raised to worship the ground that I walk on."

"Yes, but her issues are on Prewitt's and Dumbledore's shoulders though," Hermione said as she started to clean up and got rid of the conjured water bowl. "Prewitt wanted her daughter so desperately toget the Boy-Who-Lived as her husband so that she could live a better life that she filled a young girl's head with fairytales and false promises on the word of a manipulative old man," she continued. She shook her own head as she put her supplies into her box. "She's now learned that whatever she wanted was never going to happen, no matter what people thought. Or what she was told."

"True. Prewitt won't be gaining fame and fortune for being the 'mother' to the Boy-Who-Lived. Most of her children now want nothing to do with her. She is finding that most of the British Wizarding world really wants to never hear from her again. She's also going to be sent to the Prewitts' grape farms in Romania by Charlie, since she's been a stay-at-home mother for so long that she has lost the ability to hold a proper job. Now if we can just convince her to stop trying to fuck around with me," Harry grumbled.

Hermione laughed softly at her brother, handed her things to Winky to take to her study, and went over to Harry, pulling him from behind his desk. "Come on, grumpy pants. You can continue to work on things later. After we have a nice walk and then a long lunch," she said. Harry rolled his eyes, flicked his wand to put things away and activate the charms to protect everything on and in it, and allowed her to drag him from his study.

As the door closed behind him, they missed when Winky let out a terrifying roar of anger and jumped an elf that had dared to enter her territory that was under the Potter and Black Family elves' protection. The poor elf, who would end up being treated for his wounds by an amused Hermione and presented to an angry Harry, was reminded in that moment that one did not invade a house who had a fully bonded and well-cared-for female house elf with the intent of stealing something.

It wasn't the male house elves that you had to watch out for, it was the females.