Fake It Till You Make It
The Complete Histories of Lord Hadrian James Potter-Peverell-Black of Gryffindor-Slytherin and Lord Ronald Bilius Weasley-Prewett-Dumbledore of Hufflepuff-Ravenclaw
Ancient Pureblood Training
Hermione sat down rather primly in the Headmistress's Office, taking her seat between Harry and Ron. It was a carefully maintained facade: being prim was better than being defeatist after all, and being defeatist was something she could hardly bear to think about. Yet every day Hogwarts felt less like a stronghold and more like a prison. Even Harry and Ron appeared restless; perhaps these 'councils' were starting to wear on them as well. The three of them hadn't talked about that. Minerva said nothing from behind her newly inherited desk, and Daphne Greengrass as she always did sat beside her, acting in her role as secretary for the group. Shacklebolt of course was his usual stoic self, standing quietly in the back corner of the room. He rarely spoke at these meetings but often attended, saying he liked to hear the news from the hippogriff's mouth. He always came across to Hermione as cool and calm, though he had clearly aged five years in the past five months, his face showing new wrinkles every time she saw him.
There was only one empty chair left, and so they waited in tense silence for The Minister himself.
It had all started off so promising. For a full year after Voldemort's return had been revealed in the bowles of the Ministry itself during the battle in the Department of Mysteries, the death eaters had seemingly been paralyzed. Hermione had kept expecting the hammer to fall and spells to start flying but day followed day without anything of note. Even after the Boxing Day Purge that had taken out such leading figures among the Death Eaters as Nott, Selwyn, and Burke, Voldemort had not retaliated publicly. With every passing day, it looked like there was a real chance that Minister Scrimgeour, backed by Harry, Ron, and Albus Dumbledore, would right the ship of state before Voldemort truly made a real effort to sink it.
Then Dumbledore had died, the curse affecting his hand finally overpowering his defenses and taking with it the great bulwark of Magical Britain. As Snape had explained it with oily derision, the Dark Lord had been well aware of the dwindling time left to the aged Headmaster, and had accepted the cost of losing the symbolic high ground if it meant that said high-ground was devoid of Albus Dumbledore.
Well... Snape was no longer around to gloat one way or the other, at least. Whether killed or having simply fled, Hermione didn't know. And after everything she wasn't particularly sorry for the loss one way or the other.
Dumbledore's corpse had hardly been put to rest before Voldemort's counterattack struck with a fierceness and fury that seemed to be seeking to making up for sixteen years of lost time. Less a hammer, more a thunderbolt had crashed down on the Britain.
But not all had been lost. Voldemort had been forced to make some meaningful sacrifices in his delay to remove Albus Dumbledore from the great game. The Death Eaters were a weaker force than they might have been, and the assassination attempt on Scrimgeour's life had only succeeded in robbing him of one of his ears. The attack on the Ministry itself had succeeded and Pius Thicknesse, either a sleeper agent of the dark lord or imperious victim, now held the office by right of conquest in Voldemort's very heavy-handed stead.
But. The Aurors, while decimated, had retreated with a cohesive force still in the field, and the year of breathing space had purged the corps of the weak-minded, weak-willed, and hidden opposition that might have handed over the rump force to the dark. Instead, the remaining hardened core was still a force-in-being and was firmly led by Shacklebolt, who followed Scrimgeour, who (though he would never directly say so) followed Harry.
Most importantly, the Floo network and Portkey office had been successfully sabotaged beyond the ability of any short-term repair, and the most important or significant magics in the Department of Mysteries had been secretly and hastily relocated and placed under a Fidelius, though where they had been relocated too, Hermione couldn't remember.
As such, Voldemort could and did rule London's magical environs (nominally a fifth of every wand in the country, not an insignificant accomplishment) without opposition. The Ministry, the real Ministry, held Hogwarts and a very swollen and volatile Hogsmeade. In between the two lay about five hundred miles of no-man's land, where wizards up and down the country hunkered down and pledged no allegiance if they could help it, a civil war of attrition grinding away at a snail's pace of raid and counter-raid, assassination, and arson.
Ireland had taken the opportunity provided by the chaos to openly declare itself independent of both factions and everyone else was doing their best to ignore that, hoping things would sort themselves out in the fullness of time without having to do anything as drastic as actually deal with the Irish.
Unfortunately, as much as Hermione would rather die than admit it – and probably would, if it came down to it – despite everything, Voldemort held the high cards now. Eventually, the Floo would be fixed, knitting the country back together and allowing the Death Eaters to concentrate enough force to bring most of England and Wales to heel. The goblins would eventually be forced to surrender from the rubble of Gringotts, and when they did most wizards would stop hunkering down and 'surviving muggle' and return to Magical Britain's natural magical core of London, accepting the false Ministry and Voldemort's rule if it meant that they could move forward and pick up the shattered pieces of their lives. What that meant for their muggle-born neighbors...
And then, Hogwarts truly would be nothing but a prison until the outside world finally decided otherwise.
Thankfully, these gloomy thoughts were at long, long last interrupted by the arrival of The Minister. By his expression though, her thoughts wouldn't be retreating very far. Pity.
"Sorry I'm late, Tonk's team just got back from Liverpool, absolutely ghastly busi- Lord Potter, are we inconveniencing you," Scrimgeour looked and sounded ready to pop.
Harry had the grace to look a bit abashed. "Sorry Minister, but I'm expecting a very important call any second now."
Scrimgeour's face was going purple under his fiery red stubble. Thankfully before he could burst, Dobby popped unceremoniously onto McGonagall's desk, next to a currently uninhabited Phoenix perch. Unlike his usual eccentric attire, Dobby was dressed in a smart dark blue suit with shining gold buttons and a rich maroon boilerman cap. He was grinning madly, his oversized eyes bulging.
"Dobby is telling Lord Potter that Lord Potter is here," he squeaked breathlessly.
This apparently made sense to both Harry and Ron, who stood up and began to open their robes, Harry thanking Dobby as he did so. Dobby disappeared with a pop. Hermione gasped – around both boys' necks were identical golden hourglasses hung on silver chains with a golden bar running through the center.
"How did you get those, they were all destroyed," Hermione gasped.
Harry smiled. "We'll explain in just a second, I'm sure." Both boys span the hourglasses and disappeared.
The door to the Headmistresses office opened.
"Hello, Lady Granger, Lady McGonagall, Minister," Harry bellowed out cheerily.
"Ser Shacklebolt." Ron added with a nod, clearly fighting to keep his expression stoic and gruff as he greeted the auror.
Hermione gaped. She had not been "Lady Granger" or "Lady Witch" or "Lady Humble" since Dumbledore's funeral, and suddenly back to the fore were the gaudy robes, the golden baton, the gleaming monocle, and – jingle jingle jingle – those bloody shoes. Her heart leaped. Fourteen bells each.
It didn't take her a second to suss out what had happened, but what it meant was something else entirely.
"Right, where to begin," Harry asked with a jaunty grin, falling down with a whumph into the seat he had just vacated a moment ago, tossing his emerald green bunnet to a Dobby that had popped back onto the Headmistress's desk and who caught it, did a little dance, and hung it with a quick spin onto Fawke's perch.
"Well!" Harry clapped his hands against his knees, making a rather louder whoomp than it should have. "Voldemort's dead. Knocked the old bugger for seven and then some, if I may say so."
"Quite so, Lord Hadrian, quite so" Ron chuckled. "Tom the Tomato, the way he went splat."
The two boys shared a grin. The room was silent as a tomb.
"But, I believe I promised to explain this to you first," Harry flashed a glint of gold under his collar, sounding as if he'd just remembered some long forgotten promise. "Funny story, that. Ron and I went to the Department after the nasty business last Christmas to see if we couldn't just figure out what was going on, and while we were there," Harry paused, looking just a teensy bit like his pre-Lordly self. He shrugged. "Well seemed like a good idea to ask about Time Turners to be honest, worst they could do was say no."
"Only they didn't," Ron picked up the story with glee. "Turns out, they thought we had one the whole time, if you can believe that! So instead of telling us to toddle off back to Hogwarts empty-handed, they apologized for the cock up, handed two Time Turners over to us quick as you please, and even told us that to remind you," he nodded to Hermione, "to be less careless with our Time Turners in the future. No idea what that was about, but there you have it."
Hermione was suddenly hit with the vague memory of a dingy pub, and Alicia... or Angelina, saying something about letting everyone at the ministry know that Harry and Ron – or at least Lord Potter-Peverell-Black and Lord Weasley-Prewett-Dumbledore – were supposed to have Time Turners.
"I know, right?" Ron responded to the looks that ranged from incredulity to sheer astonishment. "But it felt best to just get on with it and thank them for doing such a good job taking care of things rather than confusing the matter. So here we are."
"We'll discuss this later," Scrimgeour said as soon as he had a moment to butt in, chomping at the bit since the bit about Voldemort being dead. "And once this is cleared up, you can kindly return both Time Turners, those being the only two left in Britain at the moment. And Ministry property."
"Daph?" Harry called out, smirking at his wife.
Her returning smirk did not match her rather monotone response.
"Section thirty-four of Act to Restore The Ancient And Noble Rights of Lord Potter-Black and Lord Weasley-Prewett, paragraph two, A. All Lords and Heirs to each Lordship thereafter shall receive ownership in full from the Ministry of one time-turner, to be classified as a family heirloom of the Lordship..."
"Fucking Fudge." Scrimgeour growled. "Curse his cowardly, desparate arse."
"You did confirm the Act, Minister," Hermione mumbled.
Scrimgeour glare turned onto her. "I'd have had a revolt around my ears if I hadn't. First bloody day in office and The Prophet all but publishes the prophesy and Fudge had already had the Act read in the Wizengamot! His last desparate attempt to stay in power almost damn well worked – If I hadn't pledged to sign it exactly as written that slimy little son-of-a-krupp would probably still be Minister, and what a fine fettle we'd be in then!"
He let out a breath. "So don't tell me about what I signed, humble."
His head then swivled toward Daphne with a speed and angle as would have put Hedwig to shame.
"You're the one who drafted the bloody thing, aren't you? I knew it was nobody in Fudge's office – it was far too specific in what all these Ancient ruddy Restored Rights actually entailed, as conveniently nobody had a copy of them hanging around.
Daphne bowed her head, a smile tugging over her lips. "Guilty, Minister."
"What a lovely Lady Slytherin you are, my dear." Harry commented helpfully. He blew her a kiss.
"Voldemort is dead, you say," Scrimgeour decided to plow on the admittedly key question in lieu of continuing the current one.
"Well his corpse is flatter than frog crêpe – what wasn't completely pulverized, at any rate – and the tattered bits of his soul would have a better chance of haunting us again if he'd dived headfirst through the veil." A deep breath. "We're safe. It's over."
"Explain." Who in the room made the demand first was anyone's guess.
What followed was the most fantastical story Hermione had ever heard, and over the past four years, she had heard quite a few. Most from the same two boys telling the story now.
"Well, the story starts with the Malfoys. Narcissa of course; equally nasty as the rest of them, but with a functioning brain between her ears. After we publicly pushed for her husband to be kissed and we finally had a Minister with the balls to do it, Narcissa sought us out."
"Well... she sought Harry out, and that brought us to step two of the plan," Ron said with a snicker.
Harry continued over Ron's commentary. "Narcissa was a rat looking for a way of the sinking ship. Voldemort's return meant nothing to her if she and her son were killed by our side before he took power, so she tried playing for time. So we needed a way to bind her to us proper, keep her from stabbing us in the back at the first opportunity."
Suddenly, Malfoy's accusation of debauchery were looming before her eyes, despite her surety at the time that Harry's expression was as shocked as hers had been.
"Harry, no!"
Everyone stared at her.
Harry looked over at her and burst out laughing. "Of course not. Bloody hell. But Daphne did start that rumor – honestly we were doing so much to make the pompous little ferret's life miserable, it was only a question of when he'd pop. Doing it at Slughorn's Party was fortuitous, but he would have slipped any day then."
"Seeing Malfoy's face when he 'overheard' me talk about the situation I found Narcissa in with Harry is a memory I'll treasure forever," Daphne supplied.
Hermione felt rather lost at sea, though by the expressions on McGonagall's and Scrimgeour's face, she wasn't the only one.
"As I really was meeting with Narcissa, it wasn't nearly as difficult as it might sound to spoon feed Draco into popping his top. And then, once we had Malfoy in custody, Narcissa immediately quit her backhanded bullshit and did as she was told," Harry continued. "We had her son and we were the only ones standing between him and the Dementor's kiss. She was ours."
"Ah, Draco Malfoy, by far a better citizen of Britain as a pawn to leverage than he ever was as a wizard," Ron opined with the air of a dispassionate philosopher emitting some great and forgotten wisdom.
"So... what did Narcissa do?" Hermione asked a split second before Scrimgeour asked the same question.
"She bought the Vanishing Cabinet at Burgin and Burkes and had it installed in the dining room of Malfoy Manor."
Hermione blinked. "That's it?"
"Mostly." Harry waved his hand dismissively. "Of course, we had its partner – not that Narcissa knew that, though she must have suspected."
"And how did you manage to come by such a happy circumstance?" Scrimgeour asked.
Harry and Ron shared a look. "Can't really discuss that," Harry said at last. "But what matters is in a country with suddenly no easy way for a large number of wizards to cross it thanks to the number we did on the Floo, and where most places of any real import were either already blown to bits or under enough Protections to leave a wizard cross eyed, we had under our control a direct link between ourselves and Malfoy Manor, to the very room where in the last war, Voldemort directed his major movements. And Draco Malfoy's life hung in the balance of this advantage not being surrendered to Voldemort under any condition."
There was a pause as the rest of the room digested this.
"You must have had some intelligence then," Hermione said at last. "You..." she tested her words. "You discovered something was going to happen that guaranteed Voldemort would be where you needed him to be. Then you went back in time so that with the information you will have had gained, you could act upon it at the same time. That's why you didn't leave until Dobby told you that you were waiting for you, so that you could be sure you left in time for you to arrive, here." She paused. "My head hurts."
"Didn't follow a lick of that, but probably" Ron agreed amicably. "We left a few hours ago to time things with Tonks's raid in Liverpool, we needed all the extra time because there is one other way to move a large group of wizards from London to Hogwarts: The Hogwarts Express. Which, we made sure, was on our side of the rail line when things went tits up. So we used the Time Turners and that's where we went, vanishing cabinet in tow. Onto the Hogwarts Express, cheerfully puffing off to London at eighty miles an hour in full sight and without a care in the world. Plenty of time for Voldemort's agents in Hogsmeade to get wind of what was happening, get word down the country, and for Voldemort to call his inner circle and decide what to do once we arrived at King's Cross."
Hermione frowned. "Surely, they could just attack the train long before then?"
Scrimgeour of all people actually snorted at that. "Granger, we've been putting a not insignificant portion of an entire generation of wizards and witches onto the Hogwarts Express for one-hundred and fifty years. There's no way to forcefully stop or hinder or even destroy the Hogwarts Express once it's moving; you'd have more luck trying to knock off a wizard in mid-apparition. If you're going to attack it, it's either going to be a King's Cross or Hogsmeade."
"But third year, the Dementors-"
"We're acting under direct orders of the Ministry to search the train, as was the Conductor to allow them entrance."
A pause. "Well, go on then. Let's hear what happened next."
"Right, well, obviously we weren't going to just steam into King's Cross. But like Harry said, we didn't need to. We had the vanishing cabinet." Ron's voice rose in excitement. "A really, really massive vanishing cabinet."
The room sat in stunned stupor as Ron explained exactly what they had done.
"You're lucky to be alive," Minerva said at last, voice oddly hushed. "A vanishing cabinet is an extremely complex bit of enchantwork, to just fling around enlargement charms – and only on the inside space at that – and not have the whole thing blow you to kingdom-come... I'm more relieved the two of you are alright than wanting to throttle you myself... but only by the thinnest of margins.
Harry shook his head, his expression serious. "We knew what we were doing, no – we really did." He held up his hand interrupting Hermione's protestations. "Ron and I spent a not inconsiderable portion of fifth year inventing manor-in-a-trunk. And I know you think we were bullshitting about that, but we weren't." He and Ron shared a look. Then he looked around the room. "Ron's going into business on this after this year, so not a word of this to anyone, is that clear?"
Slow, somewhat apprehensive nods.
"It started out as a cobbled together experiment and looking back, we didn't realize how dangerous it could have been until we knew what we were doing." Harry gave Minerva an acknowledging nod. "But we started tinkering with putting space inside more space, not just enlarging existing space. We got the idea from the Quidditch World Cup to be honest, and the tents that Mr. Weasley had gotten. We thought, what if we could set up a tent inside a trunk, couldn't we basically get a trunk even bigger than the one that Moody was locked in?"
"It wasn't easy," Ron went on. "We had to enlarge the space in order to get the tent set up on the outside. Eventually we managed that. But then we had to shrink it back but just enough that we have the trunk and the tent line up every time, and we had to arrange things so that 'down' in the trunk wasn't 'down' in the tent, which took even more time. And then we needed to make sure that when you shrank or enlarged the trunk it didn't shrink or enlarge the tent, but also kept them snug. None of the charms for any of that were keen on sticking together, let me tell you."
"But we did it," Harry said with a small grin. "And viola, suddenly we could fit a three room flat and eventually a complete manor inside a school trunk. Then we started building our own insides to see if we could make expanded-space-within-expanded-space for real and not just two different things cobbled together." He paused. "I think Ron and I might honestly know more about Enlargement and Contraction magic than anyone in Britain – Dumbledore seemed to think so."
Hermione had no words for that. Neither did anyone else. On one level, she had seen with her own eyes that for all their bullshitting, the two boys had grown in leaps and bounds in magics that weren't strictly speaking part of the Hogwarts Curriculum. But to hear in detail what they had done...
"So, anyway, we now had a vanishing cabinet of absolutely massive proportions. I'm not kidding, you can fit almost anything in it. Literally anything at all." Ron paused. "Like things you'd never, ever guess. Aaaaaaanything."
"What did you put in it," Hermione asked with both a sign and a growing sense of unease.
Dobby, who had been wringing his hands this whole time and looking more and more frantically towards Harry, finally lost it. "Dobby is being summoned by his Lord Potter-Peverell-Black and his Lord Weezy from the coaling bin. Harry is telling Dobby to grab the cabinet and he is pointing out the window and telling Dobby to place the cabinet longways across the tracks.
"Oh, you didn't," Hermione said, but even she could not keep from sounding extremely impressed.
"Yes," said Ron. "We drove the whole bloody Hogwarts Express straight into Malfoy Manor's dining room. Wish the blighters had given us a look on their ugly mugs before we hit them, but there's not a lot of time between a ruddy great steam engine popping out a cabinet ten from you and noticing it in time to do anything about it."
"But how do you know he's truly gone?"
"Well, that's where the story gets a bit odd."
There was a bit more to the story, but Hermione had a hard time paying attention to it. Hearing that the worst Dark Lord in a century had his reign cut short by a flying scarlet steam train ramming him and what remained of his inner circle while they plotted around the Malfoy dinner table had a large part to do with it. The other part was well – the rest of the story was even more fantastical than everything that had been said so far, and clearly Harry and Ron were back to their old tricks of mixing fact with more than a small dose of the fantastical. There was no way, absolutely no way, that Harry was... will be... will have had been the Master of Death, and that as Master of Death, and sacrificing the three ancient, mythical – and nonexistent – Deathly Hallows in the process, he had been able to vanquish the otherwise lifeless Voldemort once and for all.
Hermione sighed. Maybe one day they'd tell her what really happened. What mattered was that however it had happened, Voldemort really was dead and there would be time enough for her to unravel the mysteries of her two best friends. She shuddered as Daphne let out a very Lavender squeal and jumped into Harry's arms. Plenty of time after the honeymoon period was over between Harry, Ron, and their in aggregate twelve wives.
She tuned back in to the world around her just as Ron was answering a final question from, at last, Shacklebolt.
"Not likely," Ron replied with a snort. "We've agreed to give Narcissa her son back, on the condition of an unbreakable vow from both of them that he's never to leave the grounds of Malfoy Manor. Not our problem his new prison is a little more rubbly than the last time he was there."
Hermione could smile without any further questions at that. Not their problem, indeed.
Thank you all for reading. Hope you have enjoyed this, and wow would you look at that sixteen years later Vlad gets to put 'complete' next to a multi-chapter story. Truly some things are stranger than fiction.