Morning had not yet burned through the dark shrouding The Ministry. The once glistening building was fatigued and weary of violence. Like the people, it bore the scars of ravages conducted under the guise of righteousness, vengeance, and ambition. Burnt lightning trails wove across the white walls. Charred holes and torn paper airplanes dotted the floors. The once welcoming statue in the grand foyer laid shattered in a hundred pieces. Most unsettling was the stale scent of cooper tinged ozone that hung in the air.
Nearly the entire wizarding population was busy with preparations for the victory celebration in London. Hermione lurked in the darkness beside a door and crept down the hallway. The special floo connection to the Australian Magical Parliament building had been shut down during Pius Thicknesses' tenure. While it had not been officially recommissioned, Shacklebolt had whispered of sneaking refugees through it. She ghosted from shadow to shadow, skirting half a dozen black cloaked corpses, and only stopped long enough to light the fireplace and throw a handful of glittering dust in. A timed charm would shut the floo ten-seconds after she stepped in and then evaporate without a single trace.
The world swirled and churned. Lights flickered and colors blazed as she twisted and turned and landed with a clump. She waited under the shadow of the mantle, spying out of the green flames into the regal, wood clad hallway. Of course it's empty, dummy, it's Friday night.
Muggle Sydney's bright lights welcomed Hermione Granger. A cab whisked her off to the airport. Two hours later, she was sitting in an empty airplane staring across the darkness above the clouds. She itched and twisted against her tight bra. Hermione's smile crept up. She was finally filling out a bit. She hadn't bought a scrap of clothing in almost a year, maybe now she could treat herself. She would never be stacked like Ginny, but at least she could push a little something into Ron's face. Her frown crept back. Its not like he noticed. Ginny was probably right but shouldn't she enjoy her turn to bask in a boy's attention.
It was half one in the morning when she climbed into the shower. The fresh scent of clean water kissed her flesh and she scrubbed until the soap was gone.
She had forgotten just how nice it was to laze around in the air conditioning and stretch out under a pillow-soft comforter after laying on rocks and creaky floors and lumpy old couches contaminated by two hundred years of tobacco smoke and cabbage farts.
Her eyes wouldn't shut. Her stomach called. It was barely lunch time at home, but nothing around the hotel was open. Now she wished she had brought the whole gang. They could run a cab across town and sit in an all night diner and play cards, or just chat over milk shakes.
She wanted to curl into the crook of Ron's shoulder with a book while he napped. Luckily, she had the next best thing. Every single pillow on the bed was hers alone, so she made a comfey heap. She hadn't really read while on the run. Not for fun. Fifteen minutes later, half a dozen books laid open while she flipped back and forth. Untraceable magic had obsessed her over the last year, and these books held the keys. Individually, they were about how the types of magic actually worked. Expansion charms, for example, created tears in space time which wove into other dimensions. These could then be tracked by the energy fields required to maintain the dimensional disturbances. Simple transfiguration on the other hand simply rearranged the equilibrium of matter and energy within the bounds of what already existed. That was difficult to track. Then came her favorite. Magic and anti-magic creating a net zero. An expansion and an equal contraction which then recombined into nothing. If done carefully, it produced no trace.
Wizards simply were not careful. They took what they wanted and left the jumbled dimensional trash wherever it fell. Voldemort and his death eaters forced Hermione Granger to hone her craft and mind every single molecule of magical signature. He had the entire Ministry of Magic chasing her so she became invisible.
The thing is, she had to work it all out by trial and error with only the merest research. Now, though, she had a dozen works purloined from the restricted section of Hogwarts, Dumbledore and Snapes offices, the secret shelves in Grimmauld, and the library at The Ministry.
The hotel breakfast was adequate except it was dinner time at home and she really wanted grilled mackerel with salt and lemons, and a roast beet root salad with orange slices. Honestly, she was a bit nauseous from the floo, lack of sleep, and time lag. A slug of pepto brought her appetite back with a vengeance. She got a bit misty eyed when she thought of Ron teasing her. He loved to stab a link and pass it her way. "There's nothing I like more than my sausage in your mouth." She was chuckling when a burp almost made her vomit.
The cab ride out to the suburbs drove her crazy. The world moved slower and slower as she passed shopping centers and restaurants. Traffic lights and cars buzzed by as she rehearsed her first words. What would she say? Tears dripped down the side of her nose. Had she been a terrible child? What would they say when they found out she robbed their memories?
She checked the address twice, just to make sure. The lawn was just starting to need a mow. The blue Holden hunched down on a flat tire. Hermione scooped a heap of mail out of the box, but stopped short at the yellow tape criss-crossing the door.
POLICE CRIME SCENE.
The notice below listed a detective Aubry at the Perth police department.
Her key slid into the lock and clicked. She ducked the crime scene tape and stopped at the carpeting beside the couch. Books and papers were strewn across the living room. A thousand boot prints and blue rubber gloves dotted the carpeting. All the trails lead into the kitchen. Her breath left her at the brown crust streaking the floor. All of a sudden, the reek of disinfectant, feces, and blood smashed her in the gut. Nausea welled up, sending her dashing back outside where she threw up into the bushes.
She was shaking, flip flopping between rage, shame, and dejection as the taxi carried her away past more shopping centers on the way to the police office. She replayed the inside of the house over and over. Death eaters must have found them. It had to be. That was the only explanation...
Except for the one nagging itch. Logical brain wrestled the reigns away from Ms. Emotional. There wasn't even the slightest whisper of magic. She had purged it before she left the last time, vanishing even the merest trace that would link her parents to herself. Death Eaters were proud as a rule. Muggles were vermin polluting their pure creation. Their ilk wanted everyone to cower at their feet and beg. They would have paraded her parents torture to bait her like they had with so many others.
The small police office stank of disinfectant, burnt coffee, and sweat. A rust-spotted folding chair creaked and groaned as she melted into tears in front of the detective. She couldn't breathe. The word was so final. Dead. Both of her parents had been killed barely two weeks prior. Their bodies were still in the morgue waiting for family to claim them.
She was rubbing her stomach when nausea threatened. The detective drawled, "The wife did the same with both of our kids. Let me guess, breakfast didn't sit well?"
"No, I'm... I'm really jet lagged. I couldn't sleep last night."
She jotted down the address of the morgue in the basement of the hospital while the man rattled off details about some local gangs and their initiations. One in particular made a big deal about cricket bats. She touched his hand and stared deep into his eyes. His memories flickered as she dug past card games and drinking beers with his best friends, and then...
He was questioning a big red faced brawler. The man sucked through his gold teeth and drawled out, "Nah, stric-ly above board offic-uh. You see, we're a yout outreach. we were out at the beach all day."
"Doing what?"
"Barbie an beer and pick up cricket. It's what we do. Ask me boys. They was twenty of us."
The man ran a cloth over the wooden bat's script B and prancing tiger.
"Fine piece 'o wood you got there."
"Bradbury! Best there is." The man beamed as he flaunted the custom monogram of a crown above three letters.
The interviews had been a waste of time. Twenty-three witnesses provided alibi for the three main suspects, and the case dead ended.
She searched for the gaps of obliviation. Missing time and fuzzy details, but there was none. Either the obliviators had been extremely skillful, or... It didn't make any sense.
He escorted her to the Vice unit. They handled gang activity, drug dealing, and prostitution. There, they looked through books of pictures. There, she found addresses of the ham-fisted red skinned blonde who obsessed about cricket. Perhaps he was under the Imperius, and was being controlled by death eaters. She had to know.
She took down the address of the morgue but the lump in her throat only grew. When was her last monthly? Her cycle ticked along like clockwork until... Her breath hitched. Two and a half months ago?
She had only slept with Ron three times over the last two weeks, and she used McGonagall's charm each time... Religiously. Two and a half months? Ron had just returned a few weeks ago. Her mind shifted to Harry with Ginny. He was so happy. They were so deeply in love. Then it drifted to her own sneering ridicule of two round Ravenclaws waddling past. Knocked up their sixth year. "Is birth control really that hard? They just ought to have kept their legs closed."
Ron nodded his assent, and snorted. "Never catch me raisin' some other git's spawn. That's a line you'll never see Ron Weasley cross."
Pomfrey gave it out to anybody who asked. Dumbledore kept the big bowl of lemon birth control drops which he passed out like candy. Snape drilled them on a dozen contraceptive potions, and made every single boy, including Neville, brew it correctly before moving on. And McGonagall schooled every single girl in semen rejection charms which were effective hours after the fact.
The detective offered his deepest sympathies for her loss and presented the card of the department's grief counselor.
Focus, dammit! Act normal! Tears filled her eyes, and she sniffed out, "Thank you. So what do I do now?"
He mumbled an apology under his breath about procedure and her being underage and passed her another card. This time for a social worker.
Her eyes fluttered. The noonday sun was bright and clear but it was the middle of the night back at home. Hermione's see-sawing emotions were making her stupid, so she boxed them up and locked them with the rest of the horrors behind the walls of occusion. It was the only way she could function most days during the war. The coldness brought relief, and clarity. Then the ancients reminded her, "Whoever sheds the blood of a man, by man shall his blood be shed." These police had neither the tools nor the resources to do anything about her parents. They were swimming in an ocean of muggle crime and she didn't have a lawyer. The ball was in her court. She thanked the man and made her way across town to the big hospital.
She yawned as the trees whizzed by. Warm sun kissed her shoulders. Her eyelids drooped. Memories replayed over and over between Harry mumbling I love you's into Ginny's ear and Ron smiling and twining his fingers into hers as the taxi drove to a chemist.
She snorted awake with a start. The yellow, black, and white grit pattern on the stall dividers was swirling in and out of focus inside the cramped toilet stall. Hermione was waiting, watching the third test slowly form the little blue plus. Terror washed through her. This would wreck everything. She could just hear Molly's scorn dripping, Ron's ridicule, feel all the girls at Hogwarts staring at her swollen belly and pointing, and Harry's acquiescence. He didn't deserve to be chained in a loveless marriage any more than she did. Betraying Harry and Ginny like she had hurt worse than anything else. They were so good together. She had matched them herself. She was the one who convinced Harry to pursue Ron's sister, and Ginny to take him back. She couldn't bear the thought of her stupidity tearing all that apart.
Stop! Focus! She beat it all into the box behind her occlusion walls, and her mind cleared. It was simply one more fact, and it had to go on her list of facts that needed to be dealt with.
-/-/-
Her breath formed a cloud that drifted past her hair in the icy hospital morgue. One look at her mother's smashed teeth and crushed eye sockets and her father's broken fingers and shattered legs left her empty and cold inside. She craved Harry's warm arm around her. Tremors quaked through her as she sobbed. Seething with fury and paralyzed by fear all at the same time. Everything in her entire life was wrecked. Parents dead, pregnant by a man who could never love her like that, and dating a friend who only wanted the sex.
Scandalous! What would Rita Skeeter write about the little mudblood swot who got knocked up? Nothing kind, especially after trapping the reporter in a jar. They would pillory her as a whore, wreck Harry's life, and ruin the Weasleys even worse. Never mind that death eaters were still out there. Death eaters like the ones who killed her parents.
She smashed the swirling emotional tornado back into its box.
Fact: Death Eaters did not bother bashing people's skulls with cricket bats.
Fact: Death eaters did not spray paint gang tags on the refrigerator and living room wall.
Each detail was critical, so she waved simple charms and plumped the skin to coax out its secrets. She inspected the wounds more carefully, manipulating waxy flesh to reveal the patterns.
Fact: Above her mother's crushed eye socket was the shadow of a monogrammed crown and three letters. The back of her father's neck revealed an identical mark.
Her brain was a swirling tornado of emotion, rage, and depression. She should get an abortion and end it. Pretend nothing happened. Break up with Ron and finish Hogwarts. She was too young, but the thought tore a hole in her heart and left her sucking for air. The baby in her belly was now the sum total of family left in the world.
Her problems! Hermione Granger's lack of preparation and self control was about to smash everything they won in the Wizarding War. She had to release them from this torment. Escape! Disappear!
Focus! Ice displaced her emotions, pushing her worries away.
Medics banged and groused, shoving a gurney containing a bagged corpse into the hallway. They plopped a clipboard and sack of belongings onto its legs and left. A purse? She froze. The bag slowly unzipped revealing brown, curly hair. Brown eyes. Petite build. Mangled to unrecognizable in a car wreck. The tag tied to the corpse's toe said seventeen years old...
The idea struck like a lightning bolt. Hermione scooped up the girl's purse and went to work. Some quick charms expanded the leather bag. Most of her gold, Bellatrix's wand, and the stolen books went with her. The rest stayed. The necklace Ron gave her draped the girl's neck. Her brain begged her not to, but her handwritten spellbook had to stay. They would look. Harry would know if it wasn't there. Blood smeared her own glittering bag before it stuffed into the possessions sack.
One last thing.
Vinewood. Ten and three quarters inches long with a dragon heartstring core. It had been hers since she was eleven years old. It would serve her one last time. The twinge burning inside her soul as the wand snapped disappeared behind her walls. The smashed stick pushed deep into the gash in the cadaver's broken leg under the mangled holster.
Some quick charm work and the corpse even had a matching Mudblood scar that persisted after the final traces of magic disappeared.
Clarity soothed her mind. Her emotions washed away like they had at Hogwarts. Commerce must be conducted to satisfy the ancients. Magic required blood. She worked quickly, vanishing every single trace of her manipulation and stuffing a pocket full of blue gloves.