A/N:Okay friends, here's the dealio - as we delve into part four of this fic, I feel I must be frank with all of you. While I disclosed at the beginning of our story that this would certainly be a darker iteration of the events that occurred in canon, at this point I feel the need to call out some of the morally grey actions that have and will occur going forward.
I want you to know that this is not purely for entertainment or shock value, but because I think it's reflective of what someone might genuinely do under the given circumstances in order to protect the people they love. If you disagree, please feel free to keep that to yourself and exit the ride on my left.
Furthermore, there will likely be triggering content in several future chapters. I will be diligent in specifically calling out where and when this will occur so that, if you so choose, you can skip it.
I apologize for the delay in posting this one; someone I was very fond of died last week and, as such, other things took priority.
Nevertheless, life goes on and so does our tale. Thank you for continuing to come back and enjoy it with me.
1 August 1997
You come back to me.
"C'mon," Fred grunted, helping Oliver guide Charlie, whose nose was still bleeding like a faucet, through the narrow doorway and into the kitchen of The Burrow, every surface of which was cluttered with wedding paraphernalia.
"Just up here," his father said tightly from in front of them, guiding Yaxley and another man that Fred couldn't place toward the staircase and the profoundly transfigured ghoul in the attic, his supposedly ailing youngest brother.
The way they peered around at his childhood home, noses wrinkled and eyes sparkling with blatant disgust, made Fred's blood boil, but he focused his energy on getting through the next minute. For just that one minute, he would keep it together. And then, when that minute was done, he would do it again. And again. And again, for as long as he needed to in order to remain sane and not get himself, or anybody else, killed.
Their mother was still outside, seeing off those who'd stayed. Fred wouldn't have left her given that Death Eaters were still crawling all over the property, but Bill and Fleur were with her, as well as Remus and Tonks. If things went poorly there was very little he could do that they couldn't.
"Sit down," Oliver ordered, depositing Charlie into a chair beside the table. His fearful, tense voice didn't match the careful manner with which Oliver touched their brother, and Fred wasn't sure if anybody else noticed the way his hand brushed the nape of Charlie's neck, or how his brother kept hold of Oliver's arm a second longer than strictly necessary.
George stepped through the door next, maneuvering carefully and heading to the den to lay a still-unconscious Angelina on the sofa.
"Accio," Fred muttered, once Yaxley and his father were sufficiently out of sight, footfalls barely audible as they continued their ascent. Two blue, foil-wrapped candies came floating down the stairs a second later and landed directly in his palm.
"'S that?" Charlie asked, looking up and wincing as he held an increasingly red flannel to his nose.
"Antidote for Nosebleed Nougat," Fred explained, tossing one to him. "It's the old formula, so your feet might tingle a bit."
Charlie let out an anemic chuckle as he removed the wrapping and popped it into his mouth.
In the den Fred heard George revive Angie, immediately hushing her as he explained in a hurried whisper the baren details of what had transpired since she'd been stunned. Fred blocked it out, not needing to relive it. Not possessing the capacity to do so in their current circumstance. Later. He would think about it later.
You come back to me.
Oliver was still clearing the blood from Charlie's face when Ginny burst through the back door, disheveled as they all were with eyes frantic and scanning until they landed on him.
"Fred! Did they -?"
Before she could say another word, another syllable, she was silenced, her mouth moving rapidly without so much as a whisper coming out of it. Fred glanced around, not sure if he'd unconsciously done it or if somebody else had beaten him to it.
While Oliver set and healed Charlie's nose, Fred grabbed Ginny's wrist and dragged her toward him, glancing nervously at the ceiling above them as if Yaxley might be there, peering and listening through the floorboards. Ginny looked irritated, and still utterly terrified, but she followed without struggle.
"Yaxley is upstairs looking in on Ron," he explained in a clear voice before ducking his head to speak just beside her ear with hardly a whisper of a breath. "But they left. Our - our friends left."
Ginny pulled back enough to look up at him and he saw it for a second, like looking in a mirror. That raw pain that was simmering in his own gut as he pictured Hermione's frightened face, that piece of him that had been torn away when he'd let her go.
You come back to me.
His sister's lip quivered, and he saw the corners of her pale blue eyes fill with tears, but not a single one fell. No, she took a shaking breath and then, as if by sheer force of will, she blinked and they cleared. Then Ginny straightened, squaring her shoulders and lifting her chin in the same way Charlie had whilst staring down Yaxley beneath the tent.
Fred nodded at her once, then he looked around the room at the faces already watching them, at George and Angie in the doorway, Charlie and Oliver still sat at the table. He heard their family and friends distantly through the still-open back door, all of those who, given the choice and the opportunity, had not run. Who had stood at their side and borne witness to the foundations of their society, of their world, crumbling.
And even though they were surrounded by enemies, even though his brother's blood was still sticky on the floorboards beneath their feet and there was a gaping, tattered hole in his chest where lavender shampoo and lazy mornings lived, understanding passed and the embers of a rebellion smoldered, dogged and unwavering despite all that had transpired that night.
They would not break.
This wouldnot break them.
You come back to me.
"Finite"
It had to have been nearing dawn when Hermione heard Harry get up from his makeshift bed in the living room of Grimmauld Place. Ron, still snoring beside him, didn't even stir.
She watched in the bleak grey light peering through moth-eaten curtains to see her friend's silhouette don a jumper and then pad in the direction of the back garden. Having also been awake for most of the night, it didn't take long for her to gather herself and head after him.
Hermione found Harry on a worn stone bench beside a jungle of untamed weeds and wildflowers, the varieties of which were both mundane and not.
"Couldn't sleep?" she asked, wrapping her arms around herself and whispering a warming charm to chase away the morning chill.
"Could you?" Harry challenged, shooting her a sidelong glance as she took a seat next to him.
Hermione just shook her head, touching her fingertips to the small golden bird nestled against her breast.
They were quiet for a long while, watching the few visible stars above them wink out one by one as the sun began to crest over the neighboring homes.
"Hermione," Harry started, keeping his eyes fixed somewhere distant as he toyed with a long blade of grass that he'd plucked from the earth beside them. "I need to ask you something. Earlier tonight, at the cafe, if Ron and I hadn't been there, hadn't been with you, that is… would you have killed those men?"
Hermione stilled, unsure what startled her more, the sudden break in silence or the utterly unprecedented topic of discussion. In any event, it took her a long moment to respond.
"Maybe," she finally admitted, paltry an answer as it was for a subject as austere as life and death. "Would it have bothered you if I did?"
She didn't want to have this discussion – didn't want to think about her various sins and moral turpitudes at all, but Harry was risking his life right alongside her, and she was unlikely to deny him much of anything that was within her means to provide.
"Of course it would bother me," Harry said quietly, his brows drawing together.
Hermione bristled at that and wondered if he knew. If he understood just how much blood had already been spilled, both on his behalf and by simple circumstance. If he knew how much already stained her own hands.
"Wars aren't won with only light and love, Harry," she said tightly. "It's important, and it gives us something to fight for, but the battle can't always end with a disarming charm. How would you feel if one of the men we left in that cafe tonight goes on to murder Ginny? Or torture Fred? Or do Merlin-knows-what to someone else's Merlin-knows-who? Because they could, and there would be nothing to stop them."
As pallid as Harry had already looked in the waxing light, he seemed to pale further as he turned in place to face her.
"That's not what would bother me," he explained, almost defensively. "I don't – I understand that you've all done and will do what you need to in order to survive. I get that, and I don't fault you it. I just… can't. I mean, I can't. I'm not capable of it."
She searched his eyes, stringing together his disjointed stream of thought like the pieces of a puzzle. Not that he resented or condemned them but that he himself couldn't go to that extreme. "Why not?"
Harry turned his gaze back to the blade of grass, the bright green darkening where he worried it, creasing and uncreasing.
"This bond that I have with him, whatever it is, it feels like if I cross that line, I won't be able to come back over it. That day in the ministry after Sirius, when I tried to torture Bellatrix… I could feel it, Hermione. Like it was dragging me away from myself and toward something else, something darker. I think that if I let it take me too far, I won't be able to find my way back."
Intemperate fear bubbled in her throat, so many theories about that unholy connection dancing unbidden through her mind.
"Then don't," she said, quickly but with a certainty that she felt in her bones. "Protect yourself, and protect us when you need to, but let that be it. Let me - let us handle the rest."
Even as she said it, Hermione wondered how many lives was too many; at what point her soul would be beyond salvaging, which death precisely would tip that scale. Because, for better or for worse, she now had incontrovertible evidence that such a thing, that souls in some form, existed. And she'd be lying through her teeth if she said that she believed hers wasn't already tarnished.
Harry let out a humorless snort. "I can't ask you to do that –"
"That's the point, though. You don't need to ask me. You've never needed to ask me, Harry. I'm in this with you to the end, wherever that might be and whatever it might mean."
She thought of her younger self, then. Of giant chess pieces and flooded bathrooms and racing through time with him beneath a full moon. No, he'd never once asked her to be there, and yet there she'd been all the same. The stakes may be higher, the problems before them more complex, but to her this was no different.
"I'll get you back to him," Harry said suddenly, interrupting her train of thought as he read something on her face that she hadn't realised she'd let slip. It was so earnest, the way that he looked at her in that back garden. Like he knew what it meant for her to be there with him rather than with the other half of her heart, the little pieces of her that it chipped away.
Hermione swallowed hard and sank her teeth ruthlessly into the inside of her bottom lip to keep it from trembling. Unable to speak, she simply turned and let her head fall sideways to rest on his shoulder. She didn't nod, nor did she accept a promise that she knew neither of them could keep. She just shut her eyes.
Time passed again and eventually songbirds began to sing.
"I'm going to go and put the kettle on," Harry said after a while, gently rubbing her shoulder as she sat up straight again and freed him.
"I'll be in in a moment," Hermione nodded with a halfhearted smile, watching as he left. As soon as she was alone, she let the smile melt away and she fixed her eyes on the slowly rising sun again, all the while lost in a tangled web of her own thoughts and transgressions. Of those increasingly twisted lines that she trod, in between right and wrong. Good and evil. Justifiable and… perhaps not.
"Erase their memories," Harry had told her in the café that night, crouched on dingy tile amidst broken glass in front of two men that would sooner cut their throats than offer them a kind word. Two men that were a threat to not only them, but to the people they loved and had left behind. To innocents that had no part in this wretched production and yet found themselves in the crossfire regardless. Mothers and sons, lovers and friends. Strangers. People that would inevitably be hurt if she simply let them walk away unscathed.
She hadn't lied to Harry; had he not been there, she truly might have killed them. Even with him watching over shoulder she'd thought about it, let the tip of her wand linger for just a second over that thick, pulsing artery in Rowle's throat. But she didn't, she moved it up and to his temple.
"Erase their memories," Harry had bid her, intent on concealing their tracks and moving along. So, like any good soldier, Hermione did as ordered.
Severus Snape knelt low in his place at the Dark Lord's side, his eyes cast unmoving on the dark floorboards of the Malfoy drawing room.
"They were not there, my lord," Yaxley said. He used the same tone of voice they all used when addressing their master; reverent and submissive. Always so fucking submissive, Severus thought desolately. Always submitting to somebody, bending and stooping and bowing until his back ached, and oh, after so many years, it did ache. "The Weasley boy was sequestered in the attic, ill with Dragonpox, but Granger and Potter were not with him, nor were they recovered among the guests."
The Dark Lord hummed quietly to himself, contemplative. Severus rationalised that the only reason Corban wasn't sprawled on the floor and writhing at present was because, despite their inability to locate Potter, the overtaking of The Ministry had otherwise been an irrefutable victory. The head of every major department and committee was either one of their own, or thoroughly under their influence.
"And where are Rowle and Whitney?"
Severus dared a glance up through the dark curtain of his hair, fighting the urge to roll his eyes at the dumbfound expression on Yaxley's chalk-white, corpulent face.
"Th-they were not with our cohort, my lord."
Before their master could respond, another figure stepped forward and knelt deferentially on the makeshift dais. McNair, if Severus wasn't mistaken.
"If I may, my lord, Rowle and Whitney responded to a break in the taboo at the same time that Yaxley was raiding the Weasley property. We thought it prudent that they attend to it rather than send the snatchers."
"And?" the Dark Lord demanded sharply.
"And we just received word from St. Mungo's that they were recovered in a sacked muggle café on Tottenham Court Road in London."
A quiet hiss slipped through the Dark Lord's teeth and, despite having heard it dozens of times, it sent a shiver up his spine.
"What exactly are they doing at St. Mungo's?"
McNair wavered then, glancing anxiously around as if he regretted having been born, let alone having spoken, and was looking for someone that might be willing to take his place. When nobody miraculously stepped forward, because it would be unbelievably stupid to do so, he reluctantly answered their Lord's question.
"You see, m-my lord, it seems as though both of them suffered rather extensive memory loss."
Severus' master grew still, and his head tilted ever so slightly, the air in the room tightening to a thrum. He didn't need to ask, simply stared at McNair with those slitted, crimson eyes until the man continued, sounding for all the world like he'd rather be at the bottom of the sea.
"The healers say that they… they do not know who they are, and they do not know magic."