Chapter Title: Chapter 76 Part ONE
Author's Notes: Is this working for you? Do you like having them split in half? I admit, it's easier on me.

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Thank you so much to Arnel for beta'ing

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Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter

Chapter 77

Isabella Crabbe's plan was not going how she'd hoped or wished, or at least she was reasonably certain it wasn't. The plan had, inadvertently, given her information she didn't know she'd needed, though. When she'd planned, so many years ago, to take Lily Potter and destroy her in the cruelest way, she'd been only thinking about revenge against Harry Potter and taking his favorite child from him. Actually, in truth, it had begun when she'd poisoned and impregnated Ginny Weasley just after the last battle, but that had also backfired on her. Harry and Ginny had truly loved each other and that horrible woman, Audrey, had figured out that Ginny had been poisoned and she'd saved her life.

But she hadn't saved the baby and that had its own form of sweetness to it. They'd mourned the baby. Sources close to them, the few she'd been able to find who could be convinced to talk, had told her that Ginny had mourned deeply. Then they'd been made to forget that they'd spoken of it at all.

Isabella didn't always kill. Killing left a messy trail and she didn't always want that trail to be found, but when she did want it found, she was sure the finding would leave a mark.

When her first plot for revenge hadn't worked in the way she'd wanted, she'd stewed and plotted and thought and brainstormed and attempted and trialed… and finally she'd figured out what she wanted to do.

Isabella had been raped until she was pregnant and then when pregnant she'd been forced to marry the bastard, Crabbe Sr., who had raped her. The same thing had happened to her sister. It had all been in the service of making more pureblood, magical babies, and that was the problem. Magic was the problem. They didn't need more magical babies. Frankly, they didn't need to survive as a species. She'd set her sights on focusing on removing the ability to use magic once and for all.

It had taken years of research, years of trial and error and years of letting vile men rape and pillage so she could test her theory. She'd killed a lot of women and babies in her time until she'd come up with a potion that was odorless, colorless, and tasteless and could be slipped into anything else and still be stable enough to work. She'd spent gobs of money, mostly other people's, to finetune the process and to make sure that she had what she needed to erase magical babies from the planet.

There wasn't supposed to be a cure. There wasn't supposed to be a reversal. If the children survived, and a good number of them didn't, they wouldn't be able to use the magic they were born with.

But something had gone wrong. Somehow, someway, Potter had figured out a method for reversing the damage that was being done to women. As far as she could tell, his son's brat was healthy and strong. If the poison was still working in the welp, he should have been sickly and pale at the very least. He should have been dead, which was the plan she'd had when she'd kidnapped Potter and used him to impregnate that prostitute in Brazil, but no… the brat was fine, or at least as fine as she could tell. He did have an aunt who was a Healer and was, ostensibly, the one healing everyone from Crabbe's poison. It was what they'd told the public, of course, but Crabbe knew for a fact it couldn't be the healer because there was no way to counteract the potion. There was no cure. Nothing a Healer could do would change or save a woman or the fetus.

And yet, they were curing women.

She'd tried to sneak women in to learn what was going on, but none of that intelligence ever paid off. They always discovered the plants and the women were hidden away from Crabbe so she couldn't question them.

She had kidnapped several women who had been treated to interrogate them, but they were all put to sleep shortly after they saw Audrey Weasley and they knew nothing afterwards. Crabbe had killed several of them out of pure spite even though she doubted Weasley ever learned how.

No, it wasn't a Healer doing this, but that didn't negate the fact that the women and children were being saved. So, how were they doing it? Crabbe had been trying to figure that out for over a year and she felt like she was no closer to discovering how they were doing it. She knew Potter was involved, but she couldn't fathom how someone would be able to stop the poison.

But someone was stopping it and Lily's Potter life was proof of it. They had a way to stop all poisons that couldn't be a bezoar because she'd intentionally made her potion immune to it. Her potion wasn't a poison, perse, it was a block to magical receptors in the body. A side effect was the person given the potion would get sick and sometimes die, but that didn't mean it was a poison. She'd tested it multiple times and a bezoar never helped the woman.

But just to be sure, she gave Lily Potter the potion, many poisons, and a few things that couldn't be rid from the body without extreme measures and yet she'd learned from intercepting Lucius Malfoy's owls that Lily Potter was alive and well and most definitely not sick.

She should have been dead, and yet she lived.

How was Potter saving everyone?!

A knock sounded at the door of the room she was temporarily using as her office in the home she'd taken over from the couple she'd killed months back. "Enter," she called and she turned to find her righthand man standing in the door, a scroll in his hand. "News?" she asked.

He nodded once. Even his gestures were always brief, sometimes too brief. He never spared words when he could help it. "The plant contacted us."

Crabbe waited a moment then let out a painful sigh. If the man weren't so damn useful, she'd have killed him already, but as it was, he was the smartest man she'd ever met and he had a knack for keeping all the details straight. When one was attempting to eradicate an entire population of magical beings, there was a lot of organization that went into the process.

The man had come to her, which was not the way she normally worked. He'd been a one-time associate of Donald Baker, but unlike Baker he wasn't a degenerate perv and it made working with him considerably easier. Baker had been a narcissistic, egotistical, self-aggrandizing prick who had only been useful for his money. However, he'd been connected and one of those connections had resulted in her current right-hand man.

He didn't come with money, but he also didn't come with an ego the size of America. Normally she liked weak men who would happily give into their baser natures. It made them easier to control.

But this man had come with something better, something she fully understood and appreciated.

Her right-hand man wanted revenge in the worst possible way and he was willing to do anything to secure his revenge. She didn't have to work to control him when his aim was exactly in line with hers and she let him poison whomever, however, whenever he wanted.

He'd already destroyed several lives, including ending the life of the woman he'd been supposed to marry. She'd left him for his younger brother, who arguably had more magical talent. She was dead, his brother was a widower, looking to remarry.

The new wife would die the same way.

That was fine with Crabbe. She needed this man on her team and if he needed to focus some of his anger, that was something she could respect. "What did the plant say?" Crabbe asked, forcing the issue.

Honestly, she wondered if it was the magic the woman left him for or his lack of conversational skills.

"They haven't made any progress on getting closer," he answered succinctly. "Every time they push, the target backs off noticeably. They are concerned with losing ground."

Crabbe did not want to hear any of this, but she couldn't say she was surprised, either. She'd always known this was a long shot, but the plant was distantly related to her on a branch that was always likely to be more sympathetic to what she'd been through when she lost her son. Added to that, the plant didn't want to be targeted by Crabbe and was willing to cooperate to ensure that didn't happen to their family.

If bribery didn't work, and often it didn't, threats usually did. "They need to keep trying. I want to see some progress on that end before the end of the year."

The man nodded and then held out the scroll. "More owls were intercepted between the Malfoys and the Greengrass family. Both sets of grandparents have been cut off by Scorpius Malfoy. We won't be able to use them to get to Lily."

Crabbe had been afraid of that, but of course it was not a stretch to think he'd have cut them off. Crabbe would have cut them off, as well, simply for how annoying they could be during dinner. "Are we having any luck on Draco or Astoria?"

"None," the man answered shortly. "They are refusing any comment from any of the sources we've tasked with answering questions. They simply say they are happy for their son and his new wife. We've made no inroads there."

It was the most the man had spoken in a very long time and she took a moment to consider it. "Very well. We'll keep on the plant with the other source, try to see if we can get more information on the other project. I do not like how badly this has gone."

The man hesitated for a moment and then said, "They have to have someone healing the women. If it's a person, we have stop them."

"The question is who and we can't get that without the right person telling us all their secrets," Crabbe fumed as she strode over to the window and looked out onto the lower slopes of the Andes mountains. "Thus far I can't get to anyone due to their security and those I can secure to question do not know who or what is happening. We are left in the dark with no way to find other answers."

It was absolutely infuriating to her that she had come so far, so quickly, and was stalled here. Their only silver lining was however they were healing the women, they couldn't keep up with the demand and volume that Crabbe was producing. She was working to poison the entire magical population and they were on track to achieve that in the next two or three years. It all depended on their supply chain remaining intact here in South America and the governments continuing to not play nicely with the British or American Aurors.

But she had something the Aurors lacked and that was money and pure spite.

As she'd already realized, bribery went a very long way, and if it didn't, threats would usually do the trick. No one here wanted their wife, sister, or daughter to be poisoned. If she kept them from being poisoned, then they were happy. If they were given money along with their females remaining free from the poison, so much the better.

When someone didn't play along with her scheme, he found his wife in a world of hurt and a new child he might not have actually fathered planted in her belly.

Yes, she held all the cards in this situation.

Of course, in the end, all of them would have to be given the poison. They weren't going to leave anyone to reproduce and keep the magical lines alive, but that could wait until they had a sufficient stockpile secured in a location that no government or Auror would ever be able to find. It had to be enough, also, to combat the person healing the women.

Soon. Soon it would be enough.

~*~

Somehow Al had made it through his first year of Auror training. It was September, school was back in for Hogwarts and he was not there. Again. Last year had been weird, he had to admit that. He'd been going back to school for so long that not going back was definitely something else, like missing out on a chore he had done every day of his life. Maybe it was like not brushing his teeth. Yeah, that could be it.

Al shook his head and commanded himself to focus. He was back in school, only it was Auror school and Auror school didn't get summer hols. No, indeed, he didn't even get weekends half the time. If things were going badly, and often they were, Al and Lena were brought into the Ministry to observe and take notes on what was going on. They were there, according to his father, to learn how things were done.

Realistically, though, he and Lena were there to fetch tea and make sure they had a record of everything that happened. He felt like a secretary whenever this happened, but since he knew most of the other Aurors had all gone through the same thing, it wasn't like he could complain.

His dad hadn't done any of this, of course. He'd come out of the war as a hero and he'd gone straight in to be an Auror. He'd barely been trained. Instead, he and Uncle Ron were thrust straight into the mix of things and had to learn as they went along. "We could have easily been killed," his dad would say with disgust. It was why he insisted on the training for the new Aurors. They had three years, that had been standard, but under his dad's control and in conjunction with the Americans who were equally as mental, they'd upped the hours of training in those three years to make them even more intense.

And finally, his dad had managed to get the Aurors their very own Room of Requirement. Oh, they didn't call it that. It was called the training room, very dismissively, if anyone asked about it, but it was a near perfect replica of the room at Hogwarts. Only theirs was specialized for Aurors, which meant the room tried to kill them. Often.

He and Lena had advanced to using the room now that they were done with their first year. Most of the summer had involved going into the training room, feeling woefully unprepared, and learning that no, it's actually worse than that.

Al had really thought that after a year of study and physical training that he would have been at least mildly competent in real world scenarios, but no. No, he would get in there and within minutes, but he and Lena would have red paint splattered all over them indicating that they'd taken a fatal hit and died. It was absolutely brilliant. Completely. Just what he wanted to do nearly every day.

In fact, he'd already died twice that day and was looking forward to a third time any moment now.

"Duck!" Lena shouted just before the both of them were hit with the light that meant they'd both been killed.

Al glanced down at himself in disgust and shook his head. "Let's go break for lunch and regroup," he told Lena as she waved her wand at first herself and then him, removing the paint.

"Yeah, let's do that," she said wearily. "I swear the room gets faster every single time we come in here."

"It's definitely faster," Al complained as he walked with her to the door. "If they're trying to demoralize us, they're doing a banging good job." Al pushed the door open to absolute chaos. It was so out of place that for a moment he froze, unsure of what to do, then he sprinted for their trainer and asked how they could help.

"Just stay out of the way for now," he barked and Al nodded to Lena, moving off to the side to watch as people yelled and scrambled.

"What could have possibly gone wrong in the thirty minutes we were in the training room?" Lena wondered as she sidestepped to where they put their things. It was supposed to be a desk for them, but it was more like an end table. They didn't even rate chairs. She grabbed her bagged lunch and opened it, pulling out a sandwich.

Since they weren't going to be allowed to help anyway, Al did the same. "Dunno," he said after he took a bite of his own lunch. "Nothing we're going to do but wait for someone to announce what's going on, though."

They didn't have new recruits that year. There were no new trainees for the Aurors, so there was no one below Al and Lena in the Aurors. Al had almost hoped they would get someone new in, but no one had qualified.

To be fair, they'd only had one application, but he wasn't fit to handle the job.

"Alright!"

Al looked up at the sound of his father's voice and quickly shoved the last bite of his sandwich in his mouth. He needn't have worried, though, as his dad didn't even bother looking their way.

"I have a bit more information and we'll be mobilizing in a matter of minutes," Dad told the assembled Aurors. "The Americans have let us know they were hit hard in New York and would like ten Aurors to come and assist. I have chosen who is going based on several factors, most of which includes flexibility to be gone for at least a week."

"What happened?" Lena asked, but so quietly only Al could hear her.

It was exactly what Al wanted to know, only he was smart enough not to ask any questions.

"Do we have any more details yet?" Teddy asked.

"We are still working on the report of a massive explosion at their Ministry with people still in the building," Harry told them. "They have enough people to search but they're looking for more security while they do so. That's where we are coming in. I believe the French, German, and Australian Aurors are also sending people. It's going to be a huge undertaking and they need to be able to focus on search and rescue while not worrying that more attacks might be coming. After I call your name, if you need to be excluded, come and see me immediately so I can arrange a swap."

Then he read off the names and not one of them wanted to miss out on the assignment to America.

"You two can take off for the rest of the day," their trainer said to them. "We won't get more done. Be ready to go in the morning. I'll leave instructions for you."

"Alright," Lena said as she grabbed her bag. "Let's go get some ice cream from Diagon Alley," she said to Al as they headed towards the door. "Summer is over and it's going to be too cold soon."

Truthfully, all Al wanted to do was head home and fall flat on his face, but he hadn't had a chance to hang out with Lena in weeks so he agreed and they headed for the exit.

The whole Ministry was buzzing with the news of the attack of America. It wasn't as though there were many details to be had, but it didn't stop anyone from speculating on what might be going on.

Primarily, everyone was concerned that if the Aurors went to America, and someone attacked them in London, they would be in serious trouble.

But when their ministry had been attacked, the Americans had sent Aurors immediately. So, Al thought this was only right.

"You've been lost in thought," Lena said and Al realized he'd missed the entire trip to the ice cream shop. They were standing just inside and the man was waiting to take their order.

"Chocolate," Al told him as he pulled out his coins and paid for both of their ice creams. He went over to a table and slumped down with his bowl of ice cream and poked at it. "I just hate feeling like I'm rubbish at our job."

"We're both rubbish," Lena pointed out. "Also, it seems like everyone else expects us to be this level of rubbish. I take comfort in that."

Al felt a smile tug at the corner of his lips. "It's just… with my dad…"

"You aren't your dad and your dad doesn't want you to try to be him," Lena reminded him pointedly. "You're your own man and you need to do your own thing. But aside from that, he wasn't trained properly. He's told us that before. He wants us trained and he warned us it would be really hard. But we'll get there."

Al nodded again and took a bite of his ice cream. "I guess I get to wait and someday it'll be us flying off to America to help."