Summary: There will be 31 days of mayhem, but I'm not sure there will be 31 actual stories. That would require more brain than Corvus has.
Beta Love: Dragon and the Cold Water Bottle Torture, Dutchgirl01 the Busiest Bee that Ever Buzzed, Commander Shepard the Winter Soldier
A/N: Each story will be a separate chapter to feed my laziness and desire not to post that many new stories for the same event.
Ice and Mist
The thirst for vengeance was the beautiful nature which Homer imitated.
Johann Georg Hamann
Prompt: "And I told you, over my dead body."
They killed him on the eve of the announcement of his innocence in the war—his official public forgiveness for so many sins done in the war for two dangerous men.
He died, his body crumpled against the gnarled roots of the ancient pedunculate oak, his face a twisted snarl of scorn. He was silent—as he had always been since the war—his throat having been savaged by Nagini.
His black eyes stared right into their souls as they murdered him—after all he had survived, only to die at the hands of jealous idiots. Bigots that stubbornly believed what they wanted rather than facts.
And then the storms came.
Savage storms unlike any other.
An impenetrable fog like nothing that had ever been seen.
Sounds like the roaring of hellish beasts in the deep, dense mist.
Torrential rain like it was trying to refill the oceans.
Heavy snow like it was trying to paint the mountains white and repopulate the glaciers.
A deep, thick miasma flowed across the United Kingdom, all emanating from one particular spot.
The spot where Severus Snape had died.
The massive English oak that marked his grave grew into a towering monster that made the Major Oak look like a mere sapling. Its branches reached out over the Dark Forest in an ominous canopy.
A sobbing Hagrid found all of "his friends" dead and scattered outside of the forest, their bodies impaled on frozen thorns the size of broadswords. The forest seemed to expel and repel with vicious ire.
Only the centaur remained untouched, walking in and out of the forest and hunting as usual, seemingly unaffected by the fog and malice.
Or the wind.
The horrendous wind that slashed and froze, churned, and toppled.
And eventually—the whole of magical Britain began to notice that every time Ronald Weasley proclaimed it had been totally wrong of "his wife" to have spent so much time fighting for the Ministry to grant a pardon to the greasy bastard git, the weather would inevitably worsen.
Somehow, it always managed to get worse.
But when they demanded to vent their rage upon his wife, they found that his home was a messy bachelor pad with him enthusiastically shagging Lavender Brown upon the settee as the snow blew in crazily from the shattered doorway.
Hermione Granger, too, was missing.
And with every patently questionable excuse the Weasley boy-who-claimed-to-be-a-man made, the weather grew worse.
So much worse.
Colder.
Darker.
Meaner.
Even the Muggles' electricity grid went dark.
The food supply went stagnant.
Magical Britain was reduced to warming charms and lumos—and even those were failing.
Flying—impossible.
Floo—frozen as people would arrive at their destination encased in ice.
House elves were the only way to get things in and out of magical places—and most of the families had their elves take THEM out of Britain, and their elves left with them.
And then, one day, Ronald Weasley blurted, "She left me, yeah! For fucking Snape! She said she never wanted to marry me while he would always be the better option, and I lost it! I didn't mean for it to kill her! She was laying there, bleeding, and Snape took her into his arms and walked into the forest—"
Of course it was only to his mother.
And it was in the food court, smack in the middle of the Ministry.
So everyone knew.
It hit the papers within minutes.
And the frigid cold and ice turned to rain and a thick fog, as if the confession had caused the curse to lift—if but a little.
The Wizengamot came soon after, and during it, Ron blurted, "—and I told a bunch of Slytherins where the traitor that got their parents in trouble was and they did the rest!"
They extracted memories.
They found the ones that had murdered Snape in cold blood.
They filled Azkaban—again.
And the weather finally eased enough that the whole of Britain seemed to sigh with relief. It wasn't quite like it had always been, but it wasn't trying to become the next ice age or converting the island into a swamp.
Mostly.
The Weasleys were trying to convince everyone that their Ronald was simply misunderstood. That he was just guilty because he was so close to Hermione—not that he would ever do what he had claimed.
Not that he would actually—murder someone.
Despite the memories of Snape walking into the forest with Hermione's curse-slashed body.
Despite the fact they saw the memory of Ron having cursed Hermione Granger with clearly mortal wounds.
Despite the memories of the Slytherins that Ron had leaked Snape's location to, coming to tell him the "traitor was dead" and handing him proof—two wedding bands still covered in blood.
But when they found the rings in the Weasley vault by none other than the pale-faced junior Auror Harry Potter, Auror Potter closed his eyes and ears to the pleading and did his job.
Ronald Weasley was sent to Azkaban for murder.
And Ginevra Weasley divorced Harry the very same day.
But as Harry came out of the Ministry to the flash of cameras and reporters, he looked up at a blue sky peppered with clouds and sun—something unseen in Britain for far too long— he had a grim smile on his face.
Harry Potter had grown up and become his own person.
He and his new partner at the Aurory, Borm, went on to save many lives and catch many a Dark witch and wizard. And if Rita Skeeter ever dug up anything horrible and tried to publish it, they would find her screaming as giant pieces of Muggle flypaper stuck to her body as she went flailing down the public places—flypaper that took off her body hair as she tried to pull it off, and she became known as Sticky Rita or the Bald Beetle, since she was exposed as a beetle Animagus with hundreds of pieces of evidence stuck to her and the fly paper.
With the conviction of Sticky Bald Rita, the weather in Scotland became downright perfect in almost every way. It would rain before it got too dry. It would be cool or warm enough for things to grow but not overly hot—
People were starting to visit Scotland again because OF the weather—tourists coming from all around to visit.
But, for some of those that knew, reform had not come from the war being won. Change had come with the concealment of guilt and the subsequent reveal—
Justice had fallen over magical Britain and even the whole of the UK itself.
-SSHG SSHG SSHG-
Harry gazed upon the huge oak—the likes of which he had never seen before in his life. Its massive branches spread across the Dark Forest, its canopy sheltering all that lay below and around it.
The centaur flourished, and the Acromantula were no longer infesting it.
In fact, all species that hadn't been there for hundreds to countless years previous had passed into memory after the elemental cascade that seemed like a nuclear winter or perhaps a scene from a Hollywood movie like The Day After Tomorrow.
Harry sighed and squared his shoulders. He placed his hand on the trunk of the great tree.
"Hello, Hermione," he said quietly. "It's me. Harry."
There was only silence for a time, but then the bark seemed to ripple and form a door.
"Step on through, Harry."
Harry walked into the shadowed door—
Hermione stood by the magical hearth in the heart of the tree, her body but mist and shadow, but the form of her hair was unmistakable.
A dark figure of pitch-coloured ice stared at him as Harry entered. He nodded, saying nothing.
"Harry," Hermione said with a relaxed smile.
"Unca Harry!" a small child of ice and mist cried, glomping onto his legs with glee.
"Hello, Skye," Harry said with a smile as he picked her up and ruffled her misty hair.
"You staying for the summer solstice," Skye asked. "Daddy is teaching me how to make ice cream!"
"Wouldn't miss it for the world, love," Harry reassured her.
He smiled at Hermione, and Severus wiggled his little finger at him as if to say, "she's got you wrapped around her little pinky."
Harry rolled his eyes, but he didn't exactly disagree.
"Come one, Unca Harry! I want you to see my new waterslide! Even the centaurs love it!" The little imp wrapped her hand around his and dragged him off.
Severus engulfed Hermione in his arms, pressing his face into her misty curls.
"I love you," Hermione said.
And I, you, Severus whispered into her mind.
And Silvanus, God of the Forests, smiled down upon them, having honoured their sacrifice with a peaceful, natural life as close to nature as the elements they were.
The guardians of the Dark Forest and vexer of Rubeus Hagrid, who kept trying to reintroduce Acromantulas to be his friends, encased them all in hard, black ice, leaving the pile of spidersicles to greet him upon his doorstep.
Minerva would often stop by for tea to tell them all about the latest sobbing Hagrid drama as she happily spoiled their little elemental.
Severus would only smile, his icy lips turned up into a smug, dangerous smile.
And they lived elementally ever after.