Summary: Dark!Hermione. Hermione's parents died at the wands of Death Eaters, and it broke her. She leaves Britain. When she returns, she is not the naive girl in tears anymore.

Beta Love: Dragon and the Jingle Cat

Warning: Depravity, sociopathic dispassion, psychopathy, graphic descriptions

A/N: HP/DCU crossover


Intolerance

A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification. He can be destroyed, or locked up. But if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can't stop you, then you become something else entirely. —Henri Ducard


Hermione stood at the edge of the Malfoy estate. The damp mist in Wiltshire, England was nothing like the land she had taken as home.

Britain was but a memory.

An old illusion of contentment.

She had been reborn in the Himalayas, trained in the ice and snow as much as the wetlands.

Few would ever recognise her, now.

Her skin was darkly tanned, her slender body muscled and toned as well as scarred, not that anyone could see that when she was wearing her shinobi shozoku . Magic still sang in her blood, but she had no qualms with physical manoeuvres. No, magic was just one more tool. One more trick in an endless bag of distractions.

She had a small jerk of her head, and the squad nearest her disappeared into the darkness in one direction even as the next squad went in another. She didn't have to say a word. A twitch of a finger, a jerk of her head, and they would instantly obey.

They knew full well what would happen should they hesitate or disobey.

Her Lethifold warmed around her shoulders in anticipation. Every hunt led to food, and Walter would gladly assist in the hut or dispose of the hunted.

Whichever was more readily available.

Walter had been her graduation gift of sorts. He was in the Chest of Fears she had to face in her final test.

A test of mind.

A test of the body.

A test of resolve.

Of tenacity.

Of focus.

Energy follows thought.

Actions express priorities.

He is able who thinks he is able.

Her master's words were a ceaseless litany.

She had been broken when he'd found her. Emotional. Filled with despair. Her thoughts—chaos. Her actions—still.

She had given up. Nothing drove her but grief and—

The desire for vengeance against her parents' murderers.

Death Eaters.

Scions of decadence.

The unevolved.

The unchanging.

Rapists of the environment.

Of nature.

Of balance.

Muggles, of course, were their own problem, living in big cities ridden with pollutants with the corrupt in power doing even worse things to the greater world all around them.

But to conquer a thing, she had to face her own fears.

"To manipulate the fears of others, you must first master your own."

Fear of failure.

Fear of disappointing.

Stumbles were merely lessons to be learnt.

Disappointment was a lie the mind played as obstacles to success.

She did not fail.

She erased.

The Muggle world was for others to fix, not that the two were not entwined. No, this was her problem here—this Riddle.

These Purebloods revelling in their lives of decadence and obscene wealth, fighting to remain living in the lap of luxury, never evolving, never changing even as the world crumbled and fell around them—

No. This was her problem to fix, and if it earned her a bit of justice for her dead parents, then so be it.

But the Wizarding World had already fallen to this blight. Those that she once called friends were long dead now. Those who might have fought hard for all the wrong reasons, gone.

This "winning" side of the Second Wizarding War was a blight so bloated that it was seeping into the Muggle World.

That was just another pox upon a tortured world that cried out for balance.

They had no society without the mixture. Purebloods could not bring back those they had killed to help run Wizarding Britain, and what good were rules when the ones they were made for were gone?

Much like in Animal Farm, the purebloods were making all the rules, enforcing them with regard to others, but believed they themselves were above any such rules and societal norms. They believed they were living the greatest life, but none of them faced the grim spectre of their own mortality. In fact, they avoided thinking about it as much as possible while their leader thought of nothing but remaining alive forever.

"When a forest grows too wild, a purging fire becomes inevitable and natural."

Even this estate looked like something that was withering and going to die.

It smelled like it was dying.

She'd seen enough death—seen enough lights go out to know the feel of such things. Only, it had always been a person or an animal—not a place. Save one, that was.

The Earth was dying, and the League of Assassins was the cure. Like the fall of Baghdad, Moscow, or Rome once upon a time. There were many that fell over time. Some in secret, some in plain sight.

Some considered them criminals, villains.

But they were no more so than the lion to the gazelle. Or, if the lions were too plentiful, drought and hunger.

They were a force of change and balance, but like the hyena and vulture—no one celebrated their presence but those few who paid close attention to the balance to begin with.

" All humans die, but few have lived.

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."

Hermione had chosen to live. She had turned her back on being nothing. She dared to make her life anew.

With a cracking of her knuckles, she unsheathed her sword, took a step, and vanished.


The ceaseless chatter that had taken up Malfoy Manor had strangely become less prominent, and the Dark Lord Voldemort frowned. It was becoming almost eerily quiet, and he did not like quiet.

Quiet made him think, and he was done with thinking after having finally given Albus Dumbledore exactly what he deserved.

Then again, he did like the quiet of the corpse garden where he had strung up the bodies of his vanquished annoyances. Harry Potter and Dumbledore were both there, and corpses on display were always much more satisfying than in the ground where no one was reminded who had killed them.

And by quiet he meant the muffled gasps of horror and his people trying to be "okay" with it. He enjoyed hearing their reactions and seeing them squirm.

Thinking his people might be outside "enjoying" the fresh air of the corpse garden, he decided to go there. Even if they weren't quite comfortable there, he certainly was.

The unexpected tang of fresh blood caused him to pause. That was not normal for the corpse garden, and he had not sent out his knights to acquire a new prized hog.

There honestly weren't that many people left to make a lesson out of and even less to view them to enjoy their fear.

As he went deeper in the garden where his most prized corpses were—that of Potter and Dumbledore—and then froze.

What he saw was not just the corpses of his finest aquisitions.

Wide eyed, mouth-gaping, piss-soaked new corpses were scattered about the garden as though a drunken revelry had gone on, and they had just collapsed—but not the new recruits as much as—

His knights were all there, their bodies posed along with Nagini's corpse, which had been neatly slit from head to tail. They were all sprawled across her corpse as if she had been a table, their arms posed in a twisted mockery of a scene of market hawkers raising their arms to get the attention of clients. Their throats, however, were slit. Their skin—pale and lifeless as their blood stained the ground in dark pools of gore.

And his inner circle knights—Bella, Rabastan, Rodolphus, Antonin, the Carrows—each had the charred remains or a piece of one of his Horcruxes shoved into their mouths. His goblet was halfway down Bella's throat. The diadem had been stabbed through the throat of one Lestrange brother and out the other's—the blue central gem cracked and smouldering.

No, this was some kind of a trick. He would have sensed this—

This was a mere illusion!

He would string up whoever had done this and—

He noticed a shift in the shadows out of the corner of his eye, but before he could even lift a wand, before he could even discern what it was, a sharp pain hit his throat.

His hand flew to his neck, and it came back smeared liberally with crimson. He gurgled, staggering as he dropped to his knees where his eyes caught sight of a dark leather sandal and a black dragonhide boot.

He looked up to see Severus, his pale fingers caressing the cheek of an unfamiliar dark-skinned woman as his mouth dipped onto hers in a deep kiss.

The woman handed him a long, distinctively Asian-style sword.

Severus turned to him, his face utterly dispassionate as he swung the blade in one swift movement.

Tom Riddle's head went tumbling off his shoulders and into the garden, slowly coming to a rest at Dumbledore's shrivelled and desiccated feet.

"Ready to come home, Severus?"

"Yes, my lady," he replied.

The squad materialised around them, all dark and silent, sheathing their swords as Hermione stroked Walter fondly.

"We'll be waiting for you at home, Walter, when you are done playing with your food," she told him.

The Lethifold warmed to her and then zipped around the garden making loud, enthusiastic crunching noises.

Hermione, seeing that every one of her squad was accounted for, knew they would not show up if anyone in the estate had survived.

She nodded to them silently, and they simultaneously disappeared in a massive cloud of blackened smoke.

"Will you guard your heart, or will you act when you fall in love?"

Hermione reached into her shinobi shozuku and pulled out a sprig of mistletoe from one of the many hidden pockets and dangled it over Severus' head. "Happy Christmas, love."

Severus sighed, feigning weariness. "I was always such a sap for sentimental frivolity when it came to you." His mouth descended upon hers as they Disapparated with a crack.


As a heavy winter snow fell in London, within the remains of the main entry hall of the Ministry of Magic, one preserved head frozen forever in a moment of total disbelief was left impaled upon a simple wooden pike.

And so ended the Second Wizarding War, once and for all.

What little remained of the British magical people were left to rebuild their shattered world, but should it become a blight upon the Earth once again, the League of Assassins would return to bring humility to their hubris.


(jingle bells)


A/N: I had to write this to get it out of my brain. You're welcome.