Blood Money
The war is over.
There’s no question as to its end.
Hermione stares listlessly out the window of the executive boardroom in Gringotts. Below, Diagon Alley hums with a tentative kind of life—hesitant, but growing louder by the day. Social workers in crouched postures walk hand in hand with orphaned children, darting from Ollivander’s to Flourish and Blotts. Posters of Harry, posters of her, still flutter on the wind. More than a few still read UNDESIRABLE.
The war is over.
When the rain finally washes away the past—soaks and dissolves Voldemort-era copies of The Daily Prophet, pulling them through the grates like rotten leaves—then maybe it will look that way too.
There will be no more Death Eaters. No more Dark Marks suspended in the sky. No more grotesque statues in the Ministry's atrium.
But not today.
Not today, because old feuds and bureaucracy outlive even soul fragments in Horcruxes.
Yes, the war is over.
But the cost of the war remains an undying subject.
Hermione lets her head loll to the side, her gaze dull and fixed on her solicitor. She doesn’t want to be here. And if she weren’t so heavily medicated, she wouldn’t be. As soon as she gets home, she’s going to flush every single vial of Calming Draught and Dreamless Sleep.
“My client,” Mr. Volhard begins, his voice sharp with performative outrage, “under HB 1745, is entitled to restitution from surviving Death Eater families involved in her torture and unlawful imprisonment.”
He grabs Hermione’s wrist. Pushes back the sleeve of her robe without permission.
Her breath hitches.
Not enough to notice. Just enough to feel—like surfacing from cold water too fast.
And then her arm is burning.
She’s still here, in an uncomfortable tufted chair. Still in Gringotts. Not in that vault. Not on that marble floor. Not with that wraith Bellatrix Lestrange hovering over her.
Wild hair. Crazier eyes. Screamed slurs and spit.
Hermione doesn’t say anything aloud, but her lips still form the shape of the words. She clenches her eyes shut.
I didn’t take anything. I didn’t. Please.
She didn’t.
When she breathes again, the air is stale. The corridor outside this boardroom hums with goblin wards. Too close.
“It was your sister who carved this, was it not?” Volhard shouts, dragging the scar into view like it’s evidence—like it’s proof of value.
At this, Hermione finally stirs.
She jerks her arm away just as Draco Malfoy rises from his seat, knuckles white against the polished wood of the table. He steps forward, angling himself between Narcissa and the solicitor, his lip curling into a sneer—though she suspects it’s more protective instinct than outrage.
Even Draco Malfoy isn't immune to a guilty conscious.
Two veiled Aurors flank him, both reaching for their wands.
“Leave it,” Hermione commands, startling at the volume of her own voice, and she doesn’t know who she’s speaking to: Volhard, the Aurors, or Malfoy.
She stands, knocking over her coffee. Her legs tremble beneath her, the ill-fitting Ministry robes shifting over her thin frame. The fabric is too soft. It sparkles. She’s supposed to make a public appearance after this—give a statement to the press.
She’s already decided she won’t.
Volhard reaches out as if to steady her. She smacks his hand away.
“Mr. Malfoy,” she says, flinching at how much she sounds like Professor McGonagall. “Draco,” she amends—somehow worse.
“This isn’t a matter of—”
She trails off.
She can’t say it isn’t about money.
It very much is.
And he was there.
Not just at the trial. Not just today. There. In that drawing room, in that house. When she was screaming and Bellatrix had a knife and her friends were shouting and—
“I can pay you whatever you want, Miss Granger,” he hisses, the title before her surname spit like a curse. “Just tell your bloody Ministry to withdraw their hexes from around the Black vaults.”
“Mrs. Lestrange,” Volhard interjects, too pleased with himself, “was indeed born a Black. She did indeed marry into the Lestrange line. But as there are no more Blacks, and all the Lestranges are dead, the funds must come from the Malfoy family—”
“The fuck they do!” Malfoy snaps.
Hermione doesn’t blame him.
But she sighs like she does.
“So if Sirius Black were still alive, you’d be hounding him instead of my mother?” Malfoy scoffs. “As if.”
“Your home was the headquarters for He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named,” Volhard presses, “with over a dozen Death Eaters in attendance, your father among the—”
“Don’t you say a damn thing about my—!”
She didn’t take anything.
She doesn't deserve this.
Hermione touches her scar without thinking, the M still puckered and white.
“The Ministry doesn’t want truth,” Malfoy turns on her now, his voice razor-sharp. “They want penance. And you—”
Hermione steps forward, vision warping at the edges, the colors too bright, too sharp. “Let’s end it here for today—”
“And you,” he seethes, “forced me to accept your mercy. Your pity.” His lip curls. “Testified for me. Like I needed saving? Like I should be grateful.”
“It wasn’t my intention—”
“Bullshit.” He says it so softly it burns. “Public opinion loves an angel. Just so long as they don’t see how avenging it can be, isn’t that it?”
Hermione’s mind reverberates with an echo and a crack.
As if her body becomes solid ice.
As if Malfoy is casting Bombarda.
She can’t shatter here. Not in front of him.
She already knows how he’d react, and it makes her sick.
In her nightmares, he watches. Emotionless, leaned against the banister of an ornate staircase. His cheeks flecked with rainbows glinting off crystal chandeliers. Bellatrix cries out Crucio.
Again and again and again.
“Avenging?”
Hermione doesn’t recognize her own voice. It’s too flat. Too soft. The boardroom falls eerily silent. “If I were avenging, Malfoy,” she enunciates, all pretense of politeness gone, “then I can assure you, the vaults of your distant relations would be the least of your concerns.”
She goes to pick up a legal pad. Her hand is shaky, and she jerks back when her fingertip nicks the paper. Hermione hyperfocuses on her red blood welling at the surface, on the microscopic cut.
She curls her fingers into a fist as her imagination gets the better of her.
It wouldn’t be the first time—if she said fuck it and punched Draco Malfoy—but it would be the first time with her own dirty blood on her hand. Hermione lowers her arm.
Instead, she circles the table purposefully, going out of her way to slam her shoulder into Malfoy’s on her way out the door.
“Take it up with Gringotts,” she says, sliding a pair of dark sunglasses over her eyes. “It would be such a shame for you to escape Azkaban only to go back for failure to comply with wartime reparations mandates."
She acts like shes leaving the room, but snaps her fingers, turning. "Oh, and one more thing," she drawls, sounding bored. "You have no claim to the Black family vaults, Malfoy. Sirius Black left them—and everything inside—to Harry James Potter." She quirks her brow. "Have you met him?"
Hermione slams the oak doors shut—on Volhard and everybody, shoulders quaking.
It isn’t any better downstairs.
Downstairs, the press descends like locusts.
There are no more little orphan schoolchildren on Diagon Alley. Only sensationalist journalists ruining the atmosphere for everyone. They’re dementors. Vampires. Monsters.
Except they have no issue with bright lights.
The flash of camera bulbs blinds her, even through her shades.
Aurors form a shifting blockade around her body as she nearly trips down the steps. They’re herding, shielding, pushing her, and Hermione lets herself be moved. Like an object. Like a thing.
She’s doing this for others. To show victims they can speak. That it’s not too late. That they deserve justice even if their attackers are rich and ancient and pure. That they shouldn’t fear reprisals.
A camera flashes, and under the foliage of an overhanging tree, the light is green. Pulsing.
An Avada Kedavra.
Flash. Flash. Flash.
“What do you dream of for the future, Miss Granger?” someone shouts. “What does the new Wizarding world look like to you?”
Hermione closes her eyes.
She hears her own screams ricocheting off marble walls. Ron’s voice, hoarse and begging to take her place. The quiet, confused hurt in her parents’ eyes when she found them in Australia.
She opens her eyes.
She smiles, fake and bright.
“I’m tired of dreams,” she says. “I’m ready for a new reality.”
Tomorrow, they will print it in the paper.
And for weeks after—much like the other pamphlets—she will wait.
Anxiously.
Praying for rain.