►► If Hermione hadn't been crying in the lavatory when the Troll terrorized it.
a response to this meme:
They never became friends. Not really. There was too much nastiness between them, Hermione the annoying know-it-all and the boys who teased her about it. She never made any friends really, but she still knew all the answers to the questions her teachers asked and she told herself that was better than friends.
Harry and Ron still went into the third floor corridor, and Ron still played the best game of Wizard Chess than anyone had seen for a hundred years, but Harry couldn’t get himself past the potions and the fire and when Dumbledore got back to the school that night it was to find Ron lying bloodied on the chess board and Harry, skin scorched and hair half burnt off from his attempts to brave the fire anyway, sleeping now because he had screamed himself hoarse trying to get out. Quirrell was gone and the Mirror of Erised with him, but in the glass shards scattered across the floor Dumbledore could see glimmers of a blood red stone and he knew that Voldemort had not been able to steal it. The boys still won points, and so did Neville, and because there had always been a point to the amount they still beat Slytherin out for the House Cup by a measly ten points and Dumbledore sacrificed his chance of having any green-clad students on his side for the sake of cementing Harry’s loyalty instead.
(Quirrell wouldn’t last much longer, but he’d last long enough.)
The next year happened much the same way, because Hermione was still a Muggle-born and she still wanted to know who was terrorizing the school and telling her that she wasn’t good enough to go there, but she and the boys didn’t work together. No one drank any polyjuice so Draco Malfoy remained on Harry’s list of suspects right up until the end, which explains why Ron Weasley tried to break in to the Slytherin common room to attack him when Ginny was taken. Some Slytherins heard him raging in the dungeons and came out to see what the fuss was about; Harry heard the snake whisper again and ran after it, this time with Draco and his cronies on his heels, although they had very different reasons for wanting to discover the Heir of Slytherin of course. Lockhart simply fled and kept his memories but not his reputation. Five students went down into the Chamber this time, not on purpose and fighting each other the whole way, but there was no way back up that slide so they all went forward together in an uneasy not-really-a-truce. Meeting Tom Riddle face-to-face was the first time that Draco’s loyalty wavered, and Harry would always wonder if it was because Riddle had dismissed Malfoy as not being worth speaking to when Harry was there to question instead, or simply because he’d revealed that he was a half-blood.
They made it out because Harry was still Harry, and his loyalty called a phoenix who carried a hat that produced a sword, but Gregory Goyle was dead because no one had told him not to look the basilisk in its eyes – because without Hermione’s note, none of them knew what they were facing down there until it was too late – and the only reason Ron wasn’t dead too was because he’d seen the reflection in the water instead of looking at the snake straight-on. Malfoy and Crabbe and Harry and Ginny worked together just enough to drag everyone up from the Chamber on the strength of Fawkes’s wings and then resolved to be firmer enemies than ever before. Draco kept his first ever secret from his parents when he chose not to tell them what he’d learned about their Dark Lord the night his friend died. Gregory’s parents were not much comforted by their Order of Merlin. Ron thought it was unfair that he should get a medal and not them just because he’d died; he and Draco both eventually recovered from the hexes they exchanged over the issue and Madam Pomfrey fixed the damage Crabbe’s fist had done to his nose in a jiffy.
And Hermione? She had spent the last part of that year Petrified, and when she was cured at last she came out babbling about basilisks and pipes but that was one answer she’d discovered too late because the problem was already solved, and she earned neither points nor praise for the scrap of paper still clutched in her frozen hand. Dumbledore however noted her cleverness and filed that fact away beside Neville’s courage as something that might be useful to him later.
The next year she still obtained her Time Turner, because not being Harry and Ron’s friend certainly didn’t make her less interested in academics, and her cat still befriended Sirius Black and took against Ron’s rat. Their fights were worse because Harry wasn’t even trying to defend her but had sided solidly with his friend against “that awful know-it-all and her blood-thirsty monster of a cat, somebody ought to ban them both from Hogwarts is what I think!” and when Crookshanks finally managed to steal Scabbers to take to Sirius it was Hermione who chased her cat down the Whomping Willow, not Harry, and she did it because she wanted to be able to say I told you so, not because she cared about Ron or his stupid rat. Harry had still gotten, and then lost, the Marauder’s Map so Lupin followed them and Snape followed him, but there was no invisibility cloak for him to hide behind this time so it all ended a lot faster; a Hermione who had never been influenced by Harry and Ron wasn’t about to attack a teacher and Snape disarmed Lupin without any trouble.
He marched his prisoners up to the castle, Hermione moaning all the while about how much trouble she was going to get into because of Ron and his stupid rat while Crookshanks squirmed in her arms. When the moon rose everything went sideways just like it always did for Remus; this time Snape was conscious and a conscious Snape could handle a lone werewolf, although while he was busy Sirius and Crookshanks ran for it, the rat shrieking from the pocket of his grubby robes and Hermione running after them. When the dementors came out Hermione panicked and, unable even to think of conjuring a patronus, did the only thing she could: grabbed her cat in one hand and looped that little gold chain around Sirius’s arm with the other and spun her Time Turner to drag them all back to before the dementors had come to feed. Dumbledore was on his way back to the castle after Buckbeak’s execution (because while Draco Malfoy had indeed been changed by that night in the Chamber of Secrets with Tom Riddle, very little of that change had been for the better especially where Harry Potter was concerned) and despite the towering fury he was in, he let Hermione drag him down to the lake shore where the prone body of Sirius Black lay next to a very fluffy orange cat and the panicked rat that it held cornered by Sirius’s knee.
With Pettigrew revealed and arrested, Sirius Black was exonerated and this time when he met Harry he was clean and groomed and a little more stable. The other events of the night were hushed-up, although Snape wasn’t pleased that Hermione had avoided getting in trouble for violating her agreement not to misuse the Time Turner and he took a number of unnecessary points off her exam results in retaliation. He had survived his fight with the werewolf and due to the location of his new scars – from claws thankfully and not a bite – he couldn’t show them without revealing the Dark Mark beneath them, so Remus’s secret stayed safe but he resigned anyway; that was Snape’s demand in return for his not revealing to the Ministry precisely how Hermione and Sirius had escaped the dementors. She handed back the Time Turner anyway, shaken by the experience and horrified by her own rule breaking, and dropped enough classes to have a normal schedule next year.
When the Hogwarts Express pulled in to the station at King’s Cross and all the students left to go home for the summer, Sirius and Remus were both waiting to talk to Harry; Sirius was officially free now and he wanted to invite Harry to visit him that summer, but before that they both shook Hermione’s hand and thanked her again. While Sirius explained to Harry that Dumbledore didn’t think it was safe for him to go home with Sirius right away, and so he would have to return to the Dursleys’ for a little while, Ron did his best to interrogate Hermione about the events of the night when he had lost his rat. She got to say “I told you so” and enjoyed doing it very much.
The Dursleys were horrified by all of them, even Hermione and her dentists.
When Harry’s name came out of the Goblet of Fire the next year and Ron stopped talking to him it was Ginny and Neville and Dean and Seamus who took up the slack in his friendship, not Hermione. She was busy, not freeing House Elves but researching the different Wizarding Schools, and when she showed up at the Yule Ball with Viktor Krum everyone was surprised – perhaps even more so because no one at Hogwarts liked know-it-all-Hermione – but no one was jealous either, although Ron would probably still have liked an autograph although of course he would never admit as much while Krum was competing against his best mate; he and Harry had reconciled after the dragon. It was not-so-quiet-anymore Ginny Weasley who had given Harry the idea of how to beat it, or at least how to outfly and avoid it, although his practice with the Summoning Charm hadn’t gone as well without Hermione there to help and he’d gotten a bit scorched in the process – but he’d lived.
Harry still hesitated in the water when he saw Hermione floating down there next to Ron and Cho and Gabrielle, not because Hermione was his friend but because he owed her: she was the reason why he’d gotten to go to the Quidditch World Cup with Sirius and the Weasleys, and the reason why he’d gotten to spend half the summer helping Sirius and Remus clean-up that old townhouse that Sirius had inherited instead of lazying about the Dursleys’, which Harry considered a much better use of his summer even if Sirius had spent the whole time apologizing for all the work. In the end the decision about Hermione was taken out of his hands because half-shark Viktor Krum showed up, and Harry saved the little Delacour girl too and got points for moral fortitude, and Rita Skeeter had to find something else to write about because there was no way anyone would believe that there was anything romantic between Harry Potter and The Most Annoying Girl At Hogwarts; she did get some mileage from “Durmstrang’s Champion Dates Muggle-Born: Slap in the Face to Blood-Supremacy!” but it wasn’t as good as stuff about the Chosen One, of course, and Harry was still her favorite topic for articles.
(Hermione’s teeth never got shrunk either. While Harry and Malfoy still argued of course, still fought – maybe even more fiercely than before, because Draco wasn’t as certain of things, and he and Crabbe blamed Harry for Goyle’s death – Hermione had not been standing next to Harry, so the rebounding jinx had hit Ron instead. She went to the Yule Ball with slicked-back hair and blue dress robes and buck-teeth, and still looked beautiful.)
Hermione never figured out that Rita was an animagus and the poison-quilled witch didn’t have to spend time in a jar although she did get into a rather threatening conversation with Sirius Black at the last task; it was just as well that Harry had come back with Cedric’s body and interrupted because it kept Sirius from ending up back in Azkaban for the (doubtless justified) murder of Rita Skeeter in front of a thousand witnesses. Because Harry did, of course, still come back with Cedric’s body because having Hermione for a friend or not did nothing to stop Voldemort wanting Harry’s blood, and while Peter Pettigrew wasn’t there to help the Dark Lord this time Quirrell was – or more accurately what little was left of Quirrell, and it wasn’t much by then – and while Hermione hadn’t gone to the Quidditch World Cup, Harry had, and he was still the reckless boy who kept his wand in his back pocket, and Barty Crouch Jr. had still been able to steal it and free himself from his father’s control, and Voldemort still returned. Some things are inevitable and Harry and Voldemort had been destined to face one another again from the moment when the Dark Lord marked the boy as his undoing all those years ago in Godric’s Hollow; had been destined for one another ever since Voldemort heard the half-spoken prophecy second-hand.
The Ministry was no quicker to want to see He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named returned than they had ever been, and they reacted with the same panicked denials and disinformation. Hermione of course had no reason not to believe Harry’s account of Voldemort’s return just because they weren’t friends; Dumbledore still sided with the Boy Who Lived against the Ministry and he was one of the most notable magical names of our time. Hermione wasn’t quite as quick to write-off the Daily Prophet’s words about Harry, since she knew him as a reckless show-off and a rule-breaker rather than as a friend, but she could see the smear-campaign that was being pitched against Dumbledore, so she decided that Harry must be (mostly) telling the truth, and certainly Dolores Umbridge did nothing to endear herself to Hermione, not once she admitted that she wasn’t actually there to teach them anything. (There was no greater sin an educator could commit, to Hermione’s eyes.) She and Harry weren’t friends though, so she didn’t think to turn to him for a teacher until much later in the year when she grew frustrated with her own attempts at practicing for her DADA O.W.L.s and Harry told her what she was doing wrong with her expelliarmus.
It wasn’t the same kind of group; wasn’t an army this time. Hermione was much less social, her edges never blunted by friendship, and she wasn’t the sort of person who thought that group-projects were a good idea nor was she the sort of one who could attract the interest of others with ease. But Harry was still a controversial enough figure to breed interest and curiosity, so others came when word leaked-out of what was being done. Ron of course went everywhere with Harry, and Neville came with them and Dean too, although it took a little longer for Seamus to change his mind and come around. Ginny and Fred and George came, and Cho Chang with the only friend who hadn’t abandoned her sorrowful company, and by ones and twos and threes others came too. So did Umbridge of course, because words doesn’t leak out in only one direction, and Dumbledore had to flee the school. Hermione hadn’t thought to create any loyalty jinxes, because it had never occurred to her that people would be loyal nor that she could be in trouble just for wanting to learn, but it didn’t matter because the much-maligned Marietta Edgecombe had had no need to choose between loyalty to a boy she didn’t like and a mother she idolized when Dolores Umbridge did her own digging, so this time the D.A. died without a traitor’s helping hand.
Harry knew even less of the ties and magicks that protected him than he had before, because without Quirrell withering away in front of his eyes there had been no need to share certain secrets with him, but he still went to the Department of Mysteries because he had never gone there to seek the Prophecy but rather to save a loved one, and what makes a good trap for a boy with a “saving people thing” holds true no matter who his friends are. It wasn’t Sirius he thought he was saving this time, because Sirius was free and Kreacher had no excuse to leave the house he had grown to hate, but rather Molly Weasley, the closest thing to a mother Harry had ever known. Fred and George were gone from Hogwarts already but there were two Weasleys there with him still, and without Hermione to council restraint and ask for confirmation that was no one to stop the three of them from racing straight for London. It was Lavender and Parvati who went with them this time, because they had been in the D.A. too, and they had been too close to not overhear that Ron and Ginny’s mother was in danger. Parvati brought her sister from Ravenclaw, and it was through Padma that they found a way to get to London because none of them could think of one, but Padma said she knew just the girl for impossible ideas and Luna Lovegood had always been able to see thestrals.
Hermione didn’t go, because she wasn’t their friend and they didn’t think to ask her for help. She did see them leave, along with a number of other Gryffindors who looked out their window in time to see a number of indistinct figures go flapping off into the clouds – looking to most, but not all, of the watchers as though they were mounted on invisible broomsticks – and she had a bad feeling about that, one that was made worse when she couldn’t find Harry or Ron, and fearing that they were going to get Gryffindor in trouble for breaking more rules she went to find a teacher for help. It was pure chance that the first one she ran into was Professor Snape; he was the last person she wanted to tell because she knew he would use any opportunity to take points from Gryffindor, but he read enough of the truth in her mind to know he needed to act, so Hermione was hustled into his office for a few drops of Veritaserum and left there weeping while he raced off to contact the Order of the Phoenix. They got to the Ministry in time to save Harry, although not the Prophecy, and not to save Parvati from Dolohov either. Padma was never the same after her twin’s death, and many of the others bore more visible scars that would never heal either: Ron’s arms, and Lavender’s knee, and Ginny’s left eye. Neville would wake nearly once a week for the next two years with screams born from the memories of his torture at the hands of Bellatrix Lestrange, who was the only Death Eater to escape once Dumbledore arrived to help the Order.
That was how Hermione learned of the secret anti-Voldemort society, because she had to be told something after she was finally let out of Snape’s office to discover the Ministry had changed its mind, and Umbridge was sacked and Fudge would be following her any day, and the Hospital Wing was full of faces she knew (but not exactly friends) and another Hogwarts student was dead.
Hermione’s first ever friend was Lavender Brown, sober and grim and determined to fight back against the people who had killed her best friend. She wanted to learn everything she could to be ready for the next fight, and who better to turn to than the girl who knew everything? There were no more giggly gossip sessions over the pages of Witch Weekly in the Gryffindor girls’ dorm, but rather serious discussions of magical theory and combat magic. Hermione pretended she didn’t miss the giggles, and she mostly didn’t. Mostly. She never completely stopped feeling guilty over the fact that it had taken Parvati’s death for her to learn how to make a friend, but she learned to ignore that thought and focus on the fight instead. She didn’t have to be Harry Potter’s friend to be invested in defeating the Dark Lord of course; she was a Muggle-born. She had all the motivation she needed right there in her blood.
The next year they all came back to school more serious and more committed to the burgeoning war, not just Lavender – all of them except for Draco Malfoy, who found himself conscripted into the Death Eater cause in his father’s place, but this time there was no misguided pride to soften the blow. He knew the Dark Lord was a half-blood, a liar, impure. He knew that Voldemort didn’t care about the people on his side, knew that the Dark Lord would kill any of them who got in his way just like he had poor Gregory Goyle. It didn’t take much to convince him to turn traitor, just the promise of safety for his parents and protection for himself, and while Occlumency can keep a Legilimens from reading one’s plans it does nothing to disguise fear and conflict writ large across a pale pointed face. Snape took a risk, and gave the boy a nudge, and Draco crumpled. He and his mother were spirited away and everyone, even Snape, thought the danger of an inside threat was quelled. But Voldemort wasn’t above using children as his tools and Draco was far from the only student at Hogwarts who had a Death Eater in their family: Theodore Nott was clever and clever enough to want to save his own skin, and Vincent Crabbe was bitter and angry and ready for revenge. Thinking that the Order of the Phoenix had kidnapped his only still-living best friend (because what story would keep the Malfoys safer, or be so readily believed as that one?) he was quick to jump at the Dark Lord’s offer and his knack for the kind of Dark Magic that is rooted in the heart and not the brain, combined with Theodore’s swottish tendencies, made for an even more dangerous combination than Draco Malfoy acting on his own.
There were Death Eaters in the school by Easter, smuggled inside through a combination of Polyjuice Potion and the Imperius Charm – the former brewed by Nott, the latter cast by Goyle – because the Aurors never thought to check to make sure that all the students coming back from Hogsmeade were the same ones who had left that morning, not when they looked just as expected. While third year Gryffindors were hardly above suspicion, they were suspected of idle mischief and silly pranks, not Dark Magic. By the time the Polyjuice wore off it was too late to stop them and the castle was already infiltrated and besieged. Hermione – with Lavender and Padma at her side, because the three girls had become practically inseparable by then (Lavender had even gone with Hermione to Slughorn’s Christmas Party, because neither of them had any time for stupid boys but one little party was all right) and because it was their school and they weren’t about to sit on the sidelines when danger came to them – joined the defense of the castle and Hermione fought Death Eaters for the first time in the hallways that had been her home for the last six years.
There were deaths this time, not just scars, because no one had drunk any Felix Felicis – although Harry had still won the Half-Blood Prince’s book, and had still earned the prize, he hadn’t realized that danger was coming and the vial was safely in his dresser where it did no one any good – but the Death Eaters did have to flee without accomplishing their goal: Albus Dumbledore still lived and Severus Snape still waited to murder the headmaster on his orders when the time was right. Many students who hadn’t had anything to do with Harry or the D.A. had fought for their school too, and many had been hurt, and the Ministry was in a panic because if Voldemort could reach into Hogwarts itself then nowhere was safe.
Hermione survived, and so did Lavender and Padma, but others were not so lucky. Harry lived of course because the Death Eaters had been given strict instructions that his death belonged to the Dark Lord and they did not dare to disobey. Ron and Ginny lived too, but Ginny and Neville could henceforth joke that between them they were each “half of a Mad-Eye Moody,” because Neville’s leg couldn’t be healed any more than the Healers had been able to save her eye last year, so that made them “a matched set” and they started dating as a joke that didn’t stay funny for long. Dennis Creevey and Romilda Vane from Gryffindor were dead, and so was Tracey Davis from Slytherin and Terry Boot from Ravenclaw. Hufflepuff hadn’t lost any students but Pomona Sprout’s wand-arm would never be the same. Seamus Finnigan appointed himself as Dean Thomas’s “seeing eye Irish” until Dean could get used to the magical eyes he had to be fitted with to replace the ones he’d lost in the fight; there are few things Death Eaters hate as much as a Muggle-born and Dean was too tall and brave to go unnoticed in the battle. He had drawn Bellatrix’s attention specifically, and he wasn’t the only one.
The Hospital Wing was full to overflowing and had to be magically expanded to fit all the beds and St. Mungo’s sent several Healers to assist Madam Pomfrey. A few students were hurt so badly they had to go to St. Mungo’s itself for their care and Severus Snape did too. (The Curse on the Defense Against the Dark Arts position held even when the teacher was someone Lord Voldemort trusted because he hadn’t worded the Curse to allow for wiggle-room. Why would he bother when all his allies were disposable?) Part of the library had burned, the flare of fiendfyre strong enough to break all the magical protections against fire that had been layered over its contents for centuries, although it turned out to be only a very small part because Madam Pince had single-handedly killed all three of the Death Eaters who had dared trespass on her domain. The only reason Vincent Crabbe had survived was because she hadn’t realized that he had been the one to set the fire until he was long gone from the school.
Theodore Nott didn’t slip away so easily, and it was through his interrogation that they discovered how such chaos and destruction had found its way through the school’s protections. When Voldemort learned that the Order had captured his youngest Death Eater he ordered Snape to kill the boy. He and Dumbledore discussed it at length but in the end it was deemed too risky for Snape’s cover for him to disobey, so Theodore Nott died in custody – an “accident” during an escape attempt, Snape claimed, and the Ministry believed him although Harry Potter didn’t. Dumbledore backed his professor though so there was nothing Harry could do but seethe with suspicions, all of which his god-father shared. A schism grew within the Order but Dumbledore soon grew too weak to stop it; he survived the night in the cave retrieving the locket, but the ring’s Curse was still working on him, and he didn’t last much beyond the end of the school year. It was long enough for him to figure out who R.A.B. had to be (obvious to someone who knew the identities of so many of the Death Eaters who had died last time) and to trace the real locket to Kreacher, and to Mundungus Fletcher after him, and to show Harry the uses of a goblin-made sword imbued with Basilisk venom. He lasted long enough to give Harry one last mission and to share just enough secrets to make sure he would do what he had to: Finally Harry learned the full contents of the Prophecy that Sybil Trelawney had made so many years ago.
That was when he finally went to Hermione Granger, the Muggle-born know-it-all he didn’t much like but who he had fought back-to-back with against Death Eaters and dummies. He needed her know-how, not just for fighting but for figuring out secrets too. He had Horcruxes to hunt and only a few places to start, and he needed someone clever enough to out-think Tom Riddle and he couldn’t go to Dumbledore for help with the rest of the Horcruxes.
That was because Dumbledore was dead under mysterious circumstances and Harry suspected Snape. He couldn’t trust the Order any more because they still trusted him, so Harry needed new allies. He still had Sirius on his side of course, always had Sirius, and Ron and Ginny and the twins, but Molly and Arthur believed in the Order and Bill and Charlie sided with their parents and said that Harry and his friends were over-reacting and that they all had to stick together if they were going to have any hope of defeating Voldemort. Harry said their only hope was staying away from traitors, and made plans to strike out on his own as soon as the Trace was off. He collected others he thought would agree with him: Ron, Neville, Seamus, Dean, Lavender, Padma. Hermione. Lee and Angelina and Katie and Alicia. Oliver and Ernie and Justin and Hannah. Ginny and Colin and Luna would have gone too but they were too young, so they would serve as Harry’s eyes and ears inside Hogwarts and within the Order; they agreed to pretend to still believe in Snape in order to pass information to Harry and the others when they left.
Remus would probably have gone with Sirius, because a friendship like that isn’t something to throw away lightly and he’d already lived through its loss once, but Sirius wasn’t sure that Remus would side with him over his new love for Nymphadora Tonks, so they didn’t ask Remus. Moody probably would have come too because he had never liked or trusted Snape, but Harry knew that if they talked to him and he disagreed they’d never be able to outsmart the crafty old ex-Auror well enough to get away. The other adults they didn’t even think of asking, because they were the Order of the Phoenix and that meant they were now the enemy, or at least unknowingly in league with the enemy which was in some ways even worse.
Harry’s dreams of a second Order, of a real Dumbledore’s Army, fell apart when Voldemort took the Ministry of Magic three weeks after Harry turned seventeen. He and his friends had already split from the Order – and Harry pretended not to hear when Ron or even the twins cried sometimes over turning their backs on their parents – and they were making strides to find the last Horcruxes (because a Harry who had Sirius at his side was a Harry who didn’t fall prey to the allure of secrets the way a Harry who had lost him would) when their headquarters came under attack – not Number 12 Grimmauld Place, because that was where the other Order was based; while it was Sirius’s house and he could have reclaimed it, they didn’t want anywhere that Severus Snape could access with ease because they didn’t trust him. They had set-up shop in Hermione Granger’s home, because she had sent her parents away for their own protection and now it stood empty and available. They had thought that it would be safer to hide in plain sight in the Muggle world, because who would look for wizards at the home of two dentists? Unfortunately they hadn’t anticipated the Ministry turning directly against them – obstructionist was one thing, but falling to the Dark Lord? that was something else entirely – or they might have thought better of choosing a location that was on file in the list of Muggle-born’s homes; the Ministry used those lists to keep track of accidental magic and breeches of the Statute of Secrecy. Voldemort’s minions used it as a list of homes to attack and children to hunt.
Dumbledore’s Army scattered, went on the run.
The Order of the Phoenix dissolved. The only reason any of them survived was because Severus Snape accidentally let slip something suspicious in front of Alastor Moody, whose paranoia had kept him alive for a long time: he had planned ahead just in case, and so when the Death Eaters and Aurors burst in on their meeting with Snape in the lead Moody was ready for the fight, and had escape routes already prepared for the others. He held the attack back long enough for most of the Order members to flee and might have saved all of them if Bellatrix Lestrange hadn’t shoved Snape out of the way and gotten Moody with an Avada Kedavra that even his magical eye hadn’t seen coming.
Remus was one of those who made it out; he left a comatose Tonks at her parents’ house and for the first time in his life actually embraced his werewolf side, rallying almost two-thirds of his fellow lycanthropes against the Dark Lord who would gladly use their savagery but would never treat them as equals. That took time though, and the war was nearly over by the time he returned to show that not only was he still alive, but he’d found allies during his absence. (Tonks, who had recovered by then and slipped off to join the fight before the Death Eaters could think to track her down, actually did him more injury when she launched herself into his arms and knocked the both of them down the stairs than he’d taken during the battle itself, but he didn’t seem to mind.)
Arthur died saving Molly although it was only because her eldest son and daughter-in-law dragged her away from her husband’s body that his sacrifice wasn’t in vain. Ron and the twins wouldn’t learn of their father’s death for months, not until Ginny finally successfully smuggled a tear-splotched letter out to them from the veritable prison that Hogwarts had become under the Carrows and Voldemort’s new headmaster.
Kingsley Shacklebolt was taken alive, although he soon wished he hadn’t been. So was Hestia Jones, which might have been a mistake because her wife Gwenog – who had stayed out of politics until then, preferring to focus solely on Quidditch – caused the Death Eaters no end of trouble through her many raids against the Ministry with her Harpies. They would go on to wage a very flashy and inspiring, if strategically limited, guerrilla campaign against Voldemort’s Ministry. The biggest problem this caused him was in P.R. because it was hard to hush-up a Harpies attack, and the outspoken witches had enough celebrity due to their athletic fame that the Wizarding World would listen to them when they said that Voldemort was the one running the Ministry now, and a lot of efforts that the Dark Lord would have rather devoted elsewhere had to be spent cleaning-up the damage they did: modifying memories, torturing people, murdering witnesses, and so forth.
As for Harry – he and Hermione and Padma continued to hunt for Horcruxes. They had been separated from the others, but that didn’t stop Sirius, Ron, and Lavender from mixing their own efforts to sniff out Voldemort’s secrets with (rash, bold, reckless) direct efforts against any Death Eater who crossed their path. Nor did it stop Seamus, Dean, and Neville from rallying support for Harry and the cause, especially once they joined-up with Augusta Longbottom. Lee Jordan and Fred Weasley become the information brokers of the underground with their wireless broadcast while Angelina, Alica, Katie, and George were their agents on the ground who ferreted out the secrets that they then shared on the airwaves. (Fred had survived his duel with Yaxley, but he would never walk again.) Eventually Ron figured out how to tap-in to Potterwatch and he managed to re-unite their two branches of Dumbledore’s Army, although he and Sirius and Lavender still preferred to take a more active approach to fighting the Death Eaters while the former Gryffindor Quidditch team and their loyal commentator understood the benefits of a more subtle campaign against an overwhelming enemy; they had all learned that under Umbridge, but Ron and Lavender were too angry to pay heed to that lesson and Sirius – well, he had never learned to pay heed to anything that counseled patience.
Harry’s was waning too; in some ways it was better that he wasn’t with friends because there was no fear of hurting the feelings of two girls he didn’t much like the way there had been when he’d been with friends, and in some ways of course it was worse because there was none of the implicit trust and support he had had from Ron and Hermione initially. At least there was never any fear of them abandoning one another: for one thing they had no Locket around their necks working on their fears, and for another neither Hermione nor Padma were there because of friendship but rather for vengeance and justice and those are emotions that burn hot no matter what the cause. They might hate each other more often than not, but they hadn’t been friends first so that didn’t matter; they were allies was all, and emotions and fighting didn’t change that.
At any rate, it was Padma who figured out what source they needed next: the one that Dumbledore had tucked-away before he’d died that everyone else had forgotten. They tracked down Narcissa and Draco Malfoy, in hopes that one or both of them would have information that would lead them to the next Horcrux. It turned out they did and, after being bullied a little and lied to a lot (because they hadn’t heard that Dumbledore was dead and Voldemort was winning and so they didn’t know that it might have been in their best interests to “escape” their kidnapped and return to their “allies” with loyalty seemingly untarnished), they revealed where the three needed to go: Gringott’s Bank to the Lestranges’ vault. In return for promises of safety Narcissa even agreed to get them inside – because who could impersonate Bellatrix better than her sister? And Narcissa had prudently squirreled-away a few strands of hair back when Draco had first been Marked, in case she someday needed to spirit her son away, because who would gainsay the Dark Lord’s most faithful servant if she said she needed to take her nephew somewhere?
Certainly no one protested her walking into Gringotts with a crew of surly-looking Death Eaters in tow and when the goblins balked at letting her into her vault without her key it only took three quick Cruciatus Curses executed without a second of hesitation by the disguised Narcissa before they decided that perhaps they could make an exception and anyway she was obviously who she claimed to be. The torture proved that much, as did the horror and fear on the faces of her companions – hardened Death Eaters all, who were doubtless used to sights of torture and carnage and yet who paled and shuddered and half-protested when she raised her wand! So they were ushered with all haste into the cars and taken down to the depths of Gringotts where the Lestranges kept their treasures and it wasn’t until they were riding back up with a heavy old Cup and a silver sword with rubies in the hilt that Narcissa betrayed them. She had learned enough, in those moments in Diagon Alley and Gringott’s Bank, to know that Harry and his companions had lied to her and the Dark Lord was the one who held all the power now and the reason they had not seen anything of Dumbledore was that he was dead. She was sure that turning Harry over to the Dark Lord would be all the evidence she would need to prove that she and Draco had in truth been kidnapped as they had pretended, and they could save their skins at the cost of these three children.
She might have pulled it off, too, if she had explained things to her son first – but Draco had no loyalty left for the half-blooded Dark Lord who thought Harry Potter was more important than he was, and he thought his mother had been Cursed by something in the Lestranges’ vault rather than acting on her own, so when she started to fight he hit her from behind with a Stupefy and they fled down the street and right into the quickly-dispatched back-up guard of Sirius, Ron, and the rest of the remnants of Dumbledore’s Army that had been sent out to help as soon as Fred and Lee had learned that there was a disturbance at Gringotts. They would never have gotten away unscathed if it weren’t for the fact that Tonks had found her way to the group; she walked down the street wearing Voldemort’s eerie features and the others slunk along behind her in black robes and everyone scattered before them except for Harry and his allies – and Draco Malfoy knew what a Death Eater was supposed to wear, and none of those following Voldemort had the right kind of mask. When the Dark Lord winked and said, “Wotcher,” Harry figured it out and he lowered and wand and let himself – and the others – be taken “captive” and no one in all of Diagon Alley was going to protest anything Voldemort chose to do, so the guards of Gringotts and the other skulking Death Eaters and Snatchers slunk away and Tonks managed to hold-in her laughter until after everyone had Apparated with their “prisoners.”
No one had been keen on accepting Draco Malfoy and his mother into their ranks, least of all Sirius, but Harry remembered that night in the Chamber of Secrets and the look of betrayed hurt on Malfoy’s face and there was no one who knew better than Harry how good Draco was at keeping a grudge, so he overruled the others and inducted Draco into their number. Narcissa of course went where her son did, and while she was terrified that this was going to get them all killed she knew that Voldemort did not forgive treason so there was nothing to do now but make the best of it and hope the blood-trash won. Sirius reluctantly vouched for his cousin on the basis of her unwavering family loyalty – not to him of course, but to her son certainly – and so Dumbledore’s Army acquired its first turncoats.
They also destroyed another Horcrux, not with the fake sword that they had taken from the Lestrange Vault out of curiosity and confusion but with the real one, which Harry had been carrying around ever since Dumbledore pressed it into his hands at the end of school last year, his fingers blackened and trembling and weak and Harry’s strong and resolute. The Cup didn’t go quietly but it hadn’t had a chance to put its teeth in anyone’s heart yet, and the grim-faced soldiers were unaffected by its death-throes. The next ones, they knew, would be harder because the most likely place for a treasure of Ravenclaw or Gryffindor was in Hogwarts itself, and then there was the snake.
“I’ve been reading up on Dumbledore,” Hermione announced suddenly, looking up from Rita Skeeter’s slanderous biography, “and I think we should try and find his brother. He might know something valuable.”
“Aberforth Dumbledore?” Narcissa laughed shrilly. “Not likely, unless you have a particular predilection for goats – not that I’d be shocked by that,” she sneered, because changing sides hadn’t changed her thoughts about Mudbloods, and she and Hermione avoided each other as much as possible and Lavender Brown – who while not Muggle-born herself came from two parents who were – had appointed herself as the Malfoys’ personal watchdog to make sure they never stepped out of line.
“Do you know where we can find Aberforth?” Hermione asked, resolutely ignoring the rest of Narcissa’s statement, like usual.
“Of course, he’s hardly a recluse. He’s got that grubby little pub down at the end of Hogsmeade. Filthy place, idiot man. I can’t imagine what you’d want to talk to him about, though – other than goats…”
But despite her sneers they went to the Hog’s Head and it was from there that they staged the Assault on Hogwarts. There was no tunnel, this year, between the pub and the Room of Requirement because the fragments of Dumbledore’s Army still at Hogwarts had no secret, protected enclave to practice in since there had never been a friendly House Elf to tell Harry that secret of the school and the Marauders had never found it either. But the Marauders were good at communicating secretly, and Sirius got word to Remus about the assault and he would manage to get back just in the nick of time with his werewolves – but before that there would be fighting, beginning with sabotage inside the school carried-out by Ginny and Luna (the Quibbler, of course, remained just a bonkers old tabloid with no particular ties to Harry Potter, because there had never been any blackmail over Rita, and thus no article ever telling Harry’s side of the story under Umbridge’s nose, so Luna was no more in danger than the rest of the students – which was to say, a lot of danger, but not the sort that resulted in her being captured to hold against her father). They led an uprising against the Carrows and Snape and woke the castle by exploding the Muggle Studies classroom and all its propaganda.
Before the dust cleared an army descended from the skies on broomstick and thestral-back, wands flashing; the school’s defenses were not raised against them because Amycus and Alecto didn’t have any grasp of the intricacies of Hogwarts, not to compare to that of McGonagall and Sprout and Flitwick anyway, and Snape was not really on their side although he seemed to be. It was quick work to free the school, and rather than smuggling out the younger students through a tunnel that didn’t exist, they were enlisted to search for Voldemort’s hidden Horcrux while the older ones made ready for battle.
Battle came with overwhelming force but the Death Eaters hadn’t expected to face an attack on two fronts, and Dumbledore’s Army had kept their brooms and other mounts and, joined by most of the Quidditch players of Hogwarts, they had lurked in the clouds above the school until battle was joined below and then Oliver Wood led the largest airborne assault that Wizarding Britain had seen in three hundred years against the hapless black-robed figures. It was a rout and the Death Eaters had to retreat leaving casualties behind. It was a stalemate without the Horcruxes though, and this time all the defenders knew the secret they were fighting for – not that all the students of Hogwarts stood in the school’s defense of course, because Dumbledore had still weighed Harry’s loyalty as more valuable than that of anyone else’s, and there was still a schism between the houses. Especially around Slytherin, which stood firmly apart as one whole united front while the other houses were split in loyalty and logic.
It wasn’t until Lucius Malfoy, who’d been quickly told a few secrets by Severus Snape as they retreated, slipped through the lines of battle to rejoin his family that the four houses stood united because Malfoy was still a name that commanded respect in certain circles. (After all, he might have made mistakes at the Ministry, but there was no point in humiliating him for them when his wife and son were held captive by the Order; that made him an enthusiastic and devoted follower second only to Bellatrix herself in the passion he put to work for the Dark Lord’s cause, even if he was more interested in finding his family than winning the war; his was a name that now commanded both respect and fear.) When he climbed up on a table in the Great Hall and explained how Voldemort only meant to use his forces as servants rather than allies, those children listened to him as they wouldn’t have to Harry or McGonagall. Lucius had always been a compelling and charismatic orator after all, and with Draco there to confirm that the Dark Lord was actually a half-blood who had lied to and discarded and even abandoned and killed his own allies out of greed and selfishness – well, the hard-liners didn’t change their minds, but there were plenty of Slytherins who had never liked Voldemort to begin with, and plenty more who had hated the Carrows, and by the time the fighting started again there were students of every house standing side-by-side against the Death Eaters. Maybe there were more Gryffindors, and Hufflepuffs, and Ravenclaws than there were Slytherins – but there had been death in the dungeon too, and loyalty was not an exclusively Hufflepuff trait for all that Helga had always praised it highest.
Hogwarts stood together, and Hogwarts fought, and the Death Eaters wavered.
As for the Horcrux – nobody really wanted to listen to Luna Lovegood when she talked about the Lost Diadem and the Gray Lady, but Ginny had faith in her friend and Padma hadn’t changed her opinion of Luna’s insights just because her sister had died, and both Lavender and Hermione had learned the merits of listening to Ravenclaw ideas. So the girls went hunting the Gray Lady and Ginny dragged Harry down to meet her when they’d found the ghost, and he still had enough Tom Riddle in him to earn her trust – that had never been something he’d learned from Hermione, but rather something he’d had inside him all along, after all, and the balm of a god-father who had stayed at his side had not erased the years of misery and anger mastered under the Dursleys. So she told Harry the same thing she had told Tom, and Padma claimed the right and responsibility of clearing Ravenclaw’s legacy of Voldemort’s taint and cleaved the diadem in two with the sword belted at Harry’s waist, and she whispered “for Parvati” as she swung.
While Harry had been distracted with the Horcrux, though, the tide of battle had turned. Even a united school made for a group of students standing against trained killers, and the army that had followed Harry’s banner to Hogwarts was ferocious but also small, and the Death Eaters were supplemented by much of the Ministry’s forces – willing or otherwise – and they were all ruthless while the students, even after a year of tutelage by the Carrows, sometimes wavered. They were going to lose – but that was when Remus Lupin arrived with his mongrel allies who wanted to prove that Fenrir Greyback did not represent all werewolves. Some of them didn’t even have wands, but there were plenty of corpses by now to scavenge those from, and the shock of their presence – and the momentary confusion of which side were they here for – tipped the scales once more in favor of the defenders.
That only left the snake – and Harry.
Because Severus had not told Lucius where he could find his family, and why, solely out of the goodness of his heart; he had whispered something else in his ear too, trusting in Lucius – or at least trusting in his self-interest and familial affection – enough to take the risk of telling him more of the truth than he and Dumbledore had shared with anyone else yet. Lucius didn’t disappoint: he consulted the person he knew who knew Potter best and asked his son what they should do, how much they should tell Potter – or if they should tell him nothing and just kill him themselves? Draco hated Harry as much as ever – maybe even more than he had originally, when they’d been simply enemies – but he also understood him well enough to know that he could be easily goaded into sacrificing himself for the sake of his friends. Especially if the “brains” of the operation could be convinced of the logic behind the truth. They pulled Hermione and Padma aside to discuss Horcruxes; no one had studied them more than the two of them, and Harry, during the last eight months on the run and the hunt. And what Lucius passed along from Severus made too much sense to not be the truth. It cleared up all the little things that Hermione had noticed and wondered about Harry, things that as his friend she had overlooked but that now, as an ally who didn’t much like him, she couldn’t ignore – like the speaking to snakes and the seeing into Voldemort’s brain and all the strange connections between the two of them and how magic doesn’t normally work like that…and she and Padma went with the Malfoys to talk to Harry, and to tell him the truth that had been hidden from him for all these years.
Harry didn’t trust the source, but even though he wasn’t exactly friends with Hermione and Padma he trusted their intellect – and it felt right, too, much as he didn’t want to admit it. This time, though, he wasn’t the master of the Elder Wand – Snape was, as he’d always been intended to be. So this time when Harry died, he stayed that way, a green-eyed corpse with messy hair and too few lines on his face. Voldemort didn’t get to do it in the privacy of the Forest surrounded only be his Death Eaters though, but rather had to face Harry in front of everyone. It wasn’t a sacrifice either, this time, but rather a fight: phoenix feather against phoenix feather, Voldemort cringing and cowering and trying to squirm away from his fears of the dual core. His wand proved the weaker in the end, perhaps because it was older; perhaps because it had laid unused for ten years; perhaps simply because there was at the core of Voldemort himself a certain weakness that Harry did not share – whatever the reason, Tom’s wand died in his hand in a gout of flame and for a moment it seemed that Harry might simply win. Severus Snape chose that moment to reveal his loyalty and he slashed the snake to the bone before anyone could stop him, his Sectumsempra cutting right through the cage that was supposed to keep Nagini safe. He went down at Bellatrix’s hand while Voldemort screamed and everyone else scattered and it was Neville Longbottom who avenged his least favorite teacher, although he didn’t strike for Snape but rather for his parents and for the future and Bellatrix died laughing and Neville shouting victory. It was Ginny who kept him alive, and the two of them made it through the rest of the battle back-to-back and hand-in-hand with their remaining limbs intact. Hermione and Padma protected each other nearly as well, although at some point they got separated from Lavender and Luna, but they both lived through the fight as well – Luna quite mysteriously without a single scratch, but then she had always been odd, and of course it wasn’t every witch who had Blibbering Humdingers watching their back for them.
Others were not so lucky. Oliver Wood kept the kids who’d been flying for him alive but at the cost of his own life.Katie Bell died in Alica’s arms. Lee and George both took heavy wounds but the Death Eaters who’d been dueling them hadn’t thought that the cripple being carried by one of McGonagall’s mobile statues was a threat until he’d killed them both, so they didn’t get to finish what they started and eventually both recovered. Remus lived too, but he’d never walk without a cane again, and not even a metamorphmamgus can shapeshift away the scars left by a werewolf’s claw-sharpened fingernails, although savaging the woman who had dared to marry a werewolf without taking the bite herself was Fenrir’s last act before Remus finally got revenge for the childhood he’d stolen. Ron’s dreams of a Quidditch career fell apart under Dolohov’s spell when he got between that purple light and Lavender Brown, but he said later that it seemed a fair trade to exchange health and mobility for a wife. Only Hagrid’s thick half-giant hide protected him from a similar fate, but his grief at the battle’s end was almost as debilitating. Michael Corner died screaming at the hands of Rodolphus Lestrange; Lucius killed his brother-in-law and didn’t seem to regret it at all. Sirius at last committed the murder he’d spent twelve years suffering for and didn’t seem to realize that he walked through the rest of the fight with Peter’s blood up to his elbows. No one saw what happened to the Carrows but McGongall and Flitwick were wearing identical grim, blood-spattered smile when their bodies were found lying next to each other at the door of the Great Hall. The smiles didn’t last because they found the broken body of Sibyll Trelawney on the steps outside where she had fallen, or more likely been thrown, amidst a glittering pile of shattered crystal balls. Vincent Crabbe died at Narcissa’s hand – or maybe it was Lucius’s; with their spells overlapping it was hard to tell – when he tried to kill Draco for his treason; he left scars, but Draco was never going to make it out of this war without scars, although the ones from Crabbe were rather more prominent than the ones he’d gotten from Harry in another life.
And then there was Harry himself, of course. He hadn’t learned any lessons about Hallows in this world, because Hermione had never read Beedle the Bard and they had never gone to the home of Xenophilius Lovegood, and their quest had contained far fewer secrets – at least as far as they had been aware. He didn’t bother telling Voldemort to try and find remorse; he just charged the wandless man, tackling him around the waist before Voldemort could flee and fly away. Harry brought him back to earth but even disarmed the Dark Lord was still a threat and it was Harry who died, although no one had expected that the prophecy would be quite so literal about the hands that did the killing, although he screamed with the pain of his burned flesh sloughing off the bone as he squeezed. Voldemort did not get to celebrate his victory for more than one single, hollow bark of laughter though, before Ginny Weasley avenged herself on Tom Riddle for all the horrors of a diary and a half-stolen soul.
The Death Eaters broke at that – although they weren’t the only ones, and Sirius’s howls of grief shook the very trees, and those who knew his secrets had to wonder if there wasn’t some truth hidden in the myths of England’s many Black Dog Stories – and the battle was little more than mopping-up. There was a lot to mop, blood and tears and rubble, but the Dark Lord was dead the school – most of it anyway – still stood, and so did Wizarding Britain.
And Hermione? Well, she went back to school of course, and so did Padma. Without ever really deciding on it, they ended up doing most everything together, after; Lavender went on to get married and have children, and they happily played aunt, but this time Hermione became an Unspeakable rather than a mother -- she and Padma both. They argued a lot, both at work and at home, but they were largely happy in the flat they shared with their cats and their books and their strange magical experiments. Maybe it wasn’t happily ever after exactly -- but it was pretty damn close.
