Author's Note: Hi Everyone. It's good to be back.
"He didn't have eyebrows? I swear he did!"
Hermione let out snort as she walked into the bakery next to her office. Her coworkers, Alice and Richard, had both graduated from Levine Magical Law institute with her in the same class and had worked together to form a law firm. It was uncommon for Wizarding law associates to work together under the same company, as most law associates in the past had been either privately hired family to family or worked close to the ministry.
In a way, that practice was understandable. The Wizarding world was still quite small. Most businesses were family owned, passed down from generations. Kind of like the artisan villages filled with century old winemakers, each family honed their craft and their own brand of magic.
Having seen more of the world and the ministry, Hermione understood more of the war that she fought in. The more you know, the more you see, in reality.
"Hermione, you saw him at the Great War at Hogwarts."
Alice was handing her a napkin. "Did he have eyebrows?"
Hermione frowned. Who was she talking about?
Richard came back holding a tray with their lunches. She had ordered an open face sandwich lunch special. It was topped with figs, pomegranate seeds with cream cheese and honey. Her favorite.
"Do try to keep up, Ms. Granger." Richard teased, sliding into the booth next to her. "The Who–Must–Not–Be–Named. Or as you denote, Voldy."
Hermione laughed. Did Voldemort have eyebrows? Memories of the war were haunting and draining and all the miserable adjectives that she could dredge up, but she had realized a long time ago that sometimes, light banter like this made things worth living. Chip by chip, the marble gashes of her past broke away with laughter and jokes like this.
"He didn't." she smirked, taking a large bite of her lunch. "Honestly, I don't know how he managed to be a charismatic leader. It's hard inducing terror when you look half-surprised all the time."
Alice let out one of her infamous cawing laughs.
"You know," Hermione mused. "I kind of get it now. The whole purebloods are better thing."
Richard looked at her, eyebrows raised, surprised.
"Not that I mean that they're better. Most of the Wizarding world is based on family craft. Handed down for generations. You know, the Olivanders with their wandmaking. The Botts with their confections. Sothebe's with their magical art preservation."
Alice slowly nodded. "Yes, but why…"
"It's not like that in the muggle world, like you guys know. There's a lot of people and a lot of variety. Regardless of what profession you choose to have or whether your family's craft is refined or not, muggles all know that in a way, they're composed of the same materials. The same DNA. I thought it was like that for the magical world as well. Prejudice in the muggle world is scientifically flawed. We all possess the same DNA and essentially are the same beings regardless of how we look… but being a pureblood was not that."
Richard looked confused but interested. Alice was nodding, chewing her own lunch with what Hermione called Alice's thinking face.
"Here, magic is power. And that's what's different. It doesn't really matter what color blood I have. It's just that my family did not spend generations inventing spells or integrating ourselves with magic. We didn't interact with it nor do we have our special color or characteristics that manifest themselves in my children. Like, the more magic spells you know that others don't, the more power you will have in the battlefield. At least that's what I understood."
She was much older now and had seen much more of the world that she had been thrust into. When she was young, she had ploughed her way into a battle against the evil, or as it had been painted as at the time, not knowing much of what was going on. But there were so many more layers than the black and white theology Dumbledore had led Harry and herself to believe. She had been foolish, thinking that she would be able to solve things and put a right to the blood prejudice after winning the war. She had thought that she had been able to change the fundamentals of the Wizarding world when she hadn't even understood the extent of how it was formed.
And that was what she was doing now. She was trying to understand how this society functioned and how it was formed through her work and her experiences with clients. It helped that her projects with socially marginalized magical populations allowed her to understand the logic of why they were marginalized and what beliefs and practices were hidden underneath.
Hermione wondered what werewolves were really like. Research on werewolves were rare and hard to come by. It was apparent that the wizarding world wasn't interested in improving their social and economic stance, choosing to remain safe under the umbrella that all werewolves were evil. It reminded her of Fudge during their fourth year when he refused to believe that Voldemort came back.
A thing about wizarding society that she noticed was how ingrained everybody seemed to be in their beliefs. Everybody seemed to be content in their little world with no drastic changes or large movements. Maybe it was like that for all societies?
It also didn't help that magizoology was not a highly regarded field compared to other branches of magic. That coupled with Voldemort's infamous campaign that considered wizards to be higher above, research into werewolves was rarely pursued. Even more so than muggle society, where there were people who wanted to demystify myths, the magical world seemed content to reside alongside them.
Hermione paid for lunch and came back into her office with Alice and Richard. Her thoughts drifted to Malfoy and the pictures that he had owled over to her that had come from Witch Weekly.
What would Malfoy be like in his wolf form? Wolves were naturally timid creatures around humans, and they usually never attack humans first when left in the wild. They also were very social, forming packs and having a set rank.
Maybe that was why werewolves, when turned, had an undeniable urge to bite people. It was their nature in wanting a pack, and maybe biting was a way to guarantee that that werewolf would have a pack? And maybe wolfsbane helped wolves forget that loneliness, allowing them to turn back into what a wolf would originally behave in nature. She would have to research more about the properties of wolfsbane later.
Hermione took out the large envelope containing the blackmail pictures Malfoy had sent her. They were standard wizarding photos, playing a three second interval over and over again. The pictures seemed to be taken from outside looking into a set of windows. A wolf was howling in one picture, its muzzle pointing to the sky and coming back down. Other photos showed the same wolf turning its head and looking directly at the camera, its head cocking to the side and ears twitching.
The photos all featured the same white wolf with grey spots all over its fur. What was interesting was that the wolf was standing on its hind quarters, similar to a person standing up. In the wizarding world, it was rare for a person to have looked at a werewolf and not turn into one. Hermione was one of the few who had looked at Lupin turn into a werewolf on her third year yet remain unbitten. Harry, too, she guessed.
She looked at the pictures again. How odd. All the pictures were supposedly of Malfoy in his wolf – form. How did Witch Weekly even know that this was Malfoy? It surely was a werewolf, but then none of the pictures had him as a person explicitly turning into one. The shot was also too dark and the wolf's fur too exposed to properly take in the surroundings of where supposedly Malfoy was.
The only way to logically argue that this was Malfoy was if Witch Weekly had somehow gotten Malfoy mid-transformation, or if they had more clear pictures to prove that this was the Malfoy Manor.
Well, Hermione had to start drawing up legal proceedings with the assumption that it was the worst case scenario. She would start with the defamation claims and then also try to approach the case with from a discrimination angle.
She quickly penned a note to her secretary, directing the junior assistants to dig up old cases of corporate defamation proceedings and trial results. She also had another analyze different court rulings based on claims used.
Hermione had one thing left to do until she left for the day. She needed to update Malfoy on her progress and the future timeline. Since they only had a month, this would be a humongous time crunch. She would probably spend the evening reading through corporate laws and past proceedings to familiarize herself with the approaches which were vastly different from civil rights.
She had just sent an owl to Malfoy and was tugging on her coat when there was a knock on her door.
"Floo call from Mr. Malfoy, Ms. Granger," her secretary announced. Hermione let out a sigh, heading over to her fireplace. What could it be this time?