"Hey you," Harry said, waving as he came out of the Ministry building.
"Hi," Hermione greeted him with a hug. It was long enough ago since leaving school that the Daily Prophet had stopped following them around constantly. They no longer had to worry about what kind of story would appear on the front pages following their working (or sometimes not) lunches.
"How's life?" Harry asked. "You seemed out of sorts at Alby's birthday party."
Hermione ordered her lunch and waited for the waitress to leave before she started talking. "That was a difficult night."
"Wednesday? Your normal Wednesday?"
Hermione nodded. They never mentioned her name in public so as not to draw attention to her. None of them wanted the Wizarding World to start hounding Minerva McGonagall again.
"What happened?" Harry asked, absently accepting his bacon sandwich.
"Just the same things as always. She thinks she's old, she's sad," she paused to take a bite of her salad while she worked on deciding whether she wanted to tell Harry everything that had happened that afternoon. Swallowing, she decided just to tell him. "She was talking about memories, bad ones. About the first war."
"The Order lost a lot of good people in that war," Harry said sadly.
"No," Hermione said, squeezing Harry's hand. "The war before that one. Grindelwald's war."
A look of recognition crossed Harry's face. Though fixed now, topics such as modern history had not really been covered in History of Magic as Professor Binns had been dead for most of it. Hermione had brought this up with Minerva not long after they all left, and the new Headmistress had been horrified that they had not been taught according to the syllabus. Professor Binns had been replaced the following year with a much younger, keener Professor.
"I, um," Harry took a sip of tea. "I actually have those files in my office," Harry said, looking like he'd been caught with his hand in the ginger newt jar. "I've not looked at them yet, but I found them the other day in the filing cupboard and thought I'd read up on them. They say it was the most collaborated war in Wizarding history. Even more so than the Civil War in America."
"Look at you reading books," Hermione grinned, accepting the balled up napkin he threw at her for her troubles. "I'm not sure what it is specifically she is struggling with, or whether it will even be in those files, but," Hermione sighed. "It's worth a shot. She was barely even of age when they went to war." Hermione chewed thoughtfully. "In fact, she wouldn't have been until the end of the war, or just a bit beforehand. I can't imagine what she did though. It's really thrown her. She looked sick trying not to tell me about it. Like she'd done something terrible."
"You don't think she hurt them, do you?" Harry said quietly.
"Who?" Hermione asked, looking up. "The Jews?"
Harry scoffed. "No, the bad guys."
It dawned on Hermione that it was probably exactly what Minerva had done - whether by her own volition or not. They both stopped eating and stared at each other.
"She wouldn't," Harry said shakily.
"The woman we know now maybe wouldn't have," Hermione whispered. "But we didn't know her back then. Dumbledore was different, we know that. It stands that she would have been too."
"We need to see those files," Harry said, throwing a handful of galleons onto the table. "Come on."
Instead of Hermione returning home, she crossed the road with Harry and walked into the Ministry. It had been a while since she'd been through the employee's entrance. After breaking up with Ron, Hermione had quit her job at the Ministry as well, choosing to do something for herself, rather than anyone else. She had decided on a career in research and development through various different charms and potions. The new Headmaster had offered her any teaching position she wanted, but after a discussion with Rose and Hugo had turned him down. She remembered all too well the things that she and the boys had got up to at school, and Minerva had often been the one to discover them and dole out their punishment. She could only imagine how terrible it would have been to have your own mother do the same.
Not that she didn't enjoy her work. She'd done some great things for magic in general, selling some patented spells for a tidy sum and even giving away the more important ones. Minerva had been so proud of her the day she'd figured out how to isolate and remove cancerous cells with a specific targeting charm. She'd published it in every magazine and wizarding publication that would have her.
People still stopped her in the street to thank her. And recently, she'd heard that one company had worked out how to harness the power and build it into a muggle device. It was due out next year and was set to turn the world on its head.
"Hermione!"
"Kingsley!" Hermione grinned, accepting a hug from the big man. He was in the middle of his third and final term as Minister of Magic. The law had been put into place by he himself that restricted all Ministers to serve a maximum of three terms so that nobody could get too comfortable. As in the muggle world, elections were held every five years and Kingsley was already looking forward to his next move.
"What are you up to today?" He grinned that toothy smile. "We have more than one position open for you, should you wish to return?"
Hermione didn't know why she felt the need to lie, but she laughed and mentioned something about cousins leaving their things at each other's houses and the need to retrieve them. It worked, as it should have, and Hermione and Harry went on to Harry's office. Harry didn't comment on the lie that she had told, but he did lock the door behind them when they finally made it. So many people had wanted to say hello to Hermione that it took twice as long to get there.
"So, our hopes of being undetected were dashed on your good looks."
Hermione chuckled and settled herself on the sofa. Harry rummaged behind his desk for a while and returned to her side carrying two boxes and levitating three more.
"I can help you for a while, but I have a three o'clock meeting I can't miss. You can stay if you'd like though."
"Great. But I will have to leave about then as well. I have decided to get Minerva a mobile phone so I thought I'd pick one up and take her dinner too."
"On a Monday?!" Harry laughed as she elbowed him. "You'll have to give her my number," Harry said seriously. "Any time the kids are misbehaving, I'll just Facetime her. It'll sort everything out immediately."
Hermione giggled as she started pulling files from their boxes. Harry let her as he answered a few internal memos. Organising things was what Hermione did best, and after half an hour, there were three stacks of folders.
"People we know," Hermione pointed at one stack. "People we don't, and significant battles, skirmishes and engagements with the enemy."
"You're amazing you know," Harry grinned, picking up a handful of files and sitting back on the sofa, his legs crossed and started reading from the pile of people they knew.
"We need to weed out the ones from after she joined," Hermione mused, tying up her hair. "It would have to be about two years or so before the end. She wasn't that old. 1943 at the very earliest."
Harry nodded and flicked through a few of the files. They fell into an easy silence as they read and sorted. There were eyewitness reports and photographs - some of which were horrific, some even censored from view without the right clearance. They didn't have a high enough level, so they put these files aside for a while as they continued sorting. After about an hour, Harry dropped a file on the pile to go through thoroughly and sat back with a sigh.
Hermione didn't have to ask why. The reports were harrowing from what she had glanced over. What little they could read was stark and brutally honest. Harry's eyes were wide and the haunted look that she'd not seen in many years was back.
"It was horrific," he whispered. "Worse than ours, much worse," he said shakily as if he couldn't believe it. Hermione sadly could believe it, remembering the stories her grandfather told about his time in a POW camp. Hermione knew that Harry's ideas of war had been based on his own experience, but in all honesty, he'd missed the parts of day to day life during their personal battle with Voldemort that had made it a truly terrible experience for the rest of wizarding kind.
Harry, Ron and Hermione had been fighting guerrilla style for a long time, and sometimes had been stuck in the same place for weeks, completely cut off from the rest of the world. They hadn't experienced the fear on the streets, the terror that ran through you during the most mundane of times when you heard a weird noise, or someone startled you. They had experienced terror, to be sure; she rubbed her arm in memory. But she knew this was different somehow.
"They were tortured," Harry said, flipping open the front page. Gaunt looking faces stared back at them and Hermione realised what he was talking about. The striped pyjamas hung off the bones of the man staring back, his skin seemed to be the only thing holding his body together. It was a muggle photo, thankfully. Hermione wasn't sure she could have handled any moving portraits of ethnic cleansings.
"How much do you know about it?" Hermione asked. "About the Muggle war, World War II?"
"Not a lot," Harry admitted. "I think had I done school in the muggle world, it would have been different." He looked at the files before him. "I knew they'd done this," he muttered. "But it's different seeing it, you know?"
Hermione did know. She'd read enough that she'd have trouble talking to Minerva tonight without Minerva realising something was up, so she decided that with half an hour til Harry's meeting to call it a day.
"Let's come back to it. It'll take a while and you need to go to your meeting and I need to go and get this phone."
"I really hope she isn't mixed up in this," Harry said out loud the very thing Hermione was struggling with.
"I don't think so," she shook her head. "I'm sure she wasn't working with the Nazis," Hermione said, looking back at the photo and closing the file. "But I am terrified that once they found out what the Nazis had done that they took retribution somehow," she sighed. "And whether it was justified."
"You know, don't you?" Harry said, perking up.
"No," Hermione admitted. "But I think I'm beginning to work out what it is she's hiding. I think she, or a group of them, punished some of the Nazis. I think they found the Concentration Camps and they tortured the guards. I just don't know whether it was the right thing to do," she sighed again, tugging at the roots of her hair. "Or whether we can judge at all."
"They're monsters!" Harry protested.
"Would you have tortured Malfoy?" she whispered. "Would you have tortured Sirius before you knew what had happened?"
"I thought about it," Harry admitted bitterly. "I really did. And I hadn't seen," he waved at the folders, "what they saw. I was only angry for myself."
"Then I don't know," Hermione shrugged, frustrated at her lack of understanding. "Maybe I would have as well."
"You're too noble," Harry grinned.
And just like that, the atmosphere was broken. He pulled her up and into his arms and they hugged for a moment.
"Ginny is incredibly lucky," Hermione said, pulling away. "I was worried about you for a while there, but you turned out alright Harry Potter."
"I have you to thank mostly," he smiled. "Let me know how you get on. And I meant it, about giving Minerva my number. Just in case."
Hermione nodded and took her leave, waving from the door as she left. It had been an illuminating afternoon, and she was more sure than ever that what she thought Minerva may have done... she had done.