Chapter 12
chapter 12
“HERMIONE!!!!” A voice cried on their left.
“George!” Hermione croaks trying to stand up.
She 's there. Godric’s dusty balls, she's alive!
Harry and Ron got there on time, exhausted and almost magically depleted but they were on time. George disarmed Umbridge and Hermione got hurt but they’ll fix her in no time.
Mrs Malfoy has her eyes on George’s approach and can see them not far behind him, she turns, points her wand and says “Depulso” sending Umbridge and Hermione flying backwards into The Veil. They don’t have enough time to react when she too walks into the Veil that took their friend away.
The last member of the Malfoy Family vanished from existence.
—-------------------------
She doesn’t feel the transition in her body. Her mind remembers that she was flying, that her nose was broken and she was bleeding from a wound on her brow, her mind remembered the noise of battle. Her body didn’t feel the change, she felt as if she was never hurt, as if she had never had tension in her shoulders and jaw, as if grinding her teeth when stressed , or the weight of her body being carried by her legs was an element of fiction. There was no noise, but the buzzing, ever present, in her ears in moments of complete silence wasn’t there either.
A woman with childish voice screeching “get that toy out of my face, you freak”
A mighty wet growl
A blood curdling scream
“Keep your eyes closed” a voice, feminine, young, a girl “I’ll tell you when it's over”
the pressure around her changed, a breeze picked up, like being pulled into a void.
“You can open them now” The girl was looking down on her, Hermione was laying on the floor, a very clean, very white floor, in a very clean, very white, room? World? Was everything white ?
Blue his house
With a blue little window
And a blue corvette
She blinked trying to concentrate and not judge her musical references in moments of shock. She focused on the girl, she looked fourteen. Where has she seen her before?
Godric’s Hollow. A runned down shack. An old lady. Shivers. Nagini. An old photo album.
A magical portrait. A sad Story. A passageway
Ariana
“Are you enjoying your stay on the floor? If that is the case tell me soon, so I stop crouching over you and continue on my way”.
“I’m sorry if my shock over being dead has inconvenienced your eternal rest”
“Hmmm, don’t let it happen again” deadpanned the girl. She was a very stoic, reserved child, she didn’t want to judge her afterlife … companion? Guide? Sidekick? Welcome party? Too early, but after that short conversation she could see that Ariana Dumbledore had the emotional range and empathy of dry oats.
Before she could answer, someone materialized in front of them. Narcissa Malfoy, the cunt, followed her here. Was killing her once not enough? In a plume of grey smoke she left as swiftly as she came, not even letting Hermione tell her what she thought of her.
“You’re horribly self-centered, did you know?” Ariana asked with her head turned towards Hermione watching her, unblinking.
“During my childhood and my formative years I was very self-less and worried more about my friends than myself, so with my therapist we’ve….”
“It was rhetorical”
“Who 's this?” A new voice, a girl who looked to be five years old asked from her left.
Hermione tried not to show any reaction until she assessed the situation.
The girl was short and very skinny, her robes that were frayed and dirty were hanging from her shoulders, her feet bare and dirty, her hair mated, and her eyes were an eerie amber almost yellow, the rest of her face…. It was distorted and undefined, as if you were looking at her face through foggy glasses. She was holding a doll, a baby doll dressed on pristine green robes.
“This is Hermione Granger”
“Her-my-own- nee?” she got a piece of parchment out of her robes and a quill, crouched on the floor and started “H - E - R-M……”
“She’s learning how to spell.” Ariana explained.
Contrary to the girl, Ariana was dressed to perfection, in a long dove grey dress with frills on the hem and at the end of her long sleeves, black mary janes and a ribbon holding her long hair away from her face.
Ariana leaned in and whispered “Do not ever touch the doll.” A breathe “We should start moving”.
The little girl jumped happily to her feet and held her hand out to Arianna who took it and started walking in an arbitrary direction. Hermione blinked and the white world disappeared and became a rich, green forest, placing the girls on a path.
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
“If you’re going to make of our travels a musical comedy I shall leave you to your devises”
“I like music!” interjected the child “that funny dog-man sang all the time”
Sirius
“You can read my mind…. and are you talking about Sirius Black?”
“We cannot, as you say, read your mind, but this is your journey and we are connected to it, we can have an idea of your feelings, needs and thoughts, it is you also who conjured the forest. We’ve been here a long time, we have already travelled our path”.
“So the world does revolve around me” Hermione’s cheeky answer was met with silence and a stony glare.
“We did the same for Mr Black when he was here, showed him his path and waited for his friend to arrive, then he moved on”
“Moved on?” asked Hermione, following Ariana into the forest, the girl running, playing and twirling with her doll ahead of them.
“It’s what we call being at peace about what you left behind and what awaits you after. You go beyond where your existence will be over and your soul can rest”... “Mister Black had many regrets and unfinished business, we escorted him and waited until he was ready to leave”....”Some souls don’t stay long, they are ready so they move on. Others, like the lady you saw, are ready to confront death but in her case she doesn't regret her actions so she’ll suffer and eventually guide other souls like yours. She’ll do that until she earns her peaceful rest.
The other one, the shrill one, was not ready, her destiny was similar to Lady Malfoy’s, but well, she touched the doll” she said the last part with dark hard eyes and a little macabre smirk.
Hermione didn’t want to know what that meant, she was however, going to see the bright side at the knowledge that at least Umbridge had a horrible ending and in a way Narcissa would pay.
She guessed her feelings went through their connection as Arianna’s smirk grew.
“So, I follow you both on this path that is going to ….lead me to… eventually move on?”
“Very eloquent Hermione…..” the girl was in the background trying to spell ‘eloquent’ “I must say that your case is particular, your arm has magic that keeps you connected to the world of the living, so it is hard to say if you are indeed dead”.
“Dead dead dead” sang and danced the girl with her doll.
“It also connects you to four others who haven’t left this plane, your path is made to take you towards them”
You don't need a compass Hermione.
_______________________
They walked for what felt like hours but the sun didn’t move. At the edge of the forest she could see it. Hogwarts. It was in perfect shape, as if the war never happened, the monolit next to the lake wasn’t there.
“Look!! Hogwarts !!!” cried excitedly the little girl “My Tommy went to Hogwarts, right little Tommy?” she asked her doll.
Hermione didn’t know what to make of this, so she waited for an answer from the doll, it never came. She turned to Ariana who was challenging her with a look and turned away, making her way to the quidditch pitch.
The school and grounds were deserted, not a soul to be seen but three. Is that my version of gallows humor? note to self : I’m not very good at it.
What a shame she didn’t see Ariana was chuckling under her breath.
Near the pitch she saw the first signs of “life”. Wow I’m on a row here.There was a man on a broom high in the sky gazing at the horizon, all of the sudden he dived on his broom at incredible speed chasing something invisible. He is a seeker.
He kept chasing the snitch and losing it, never getting close to getting it.
“Is he going to stop soon?” The man had long black hair tied in a bun in the middle of his head, full dark eyebrows and skin of porcelain white. He looked muscular and tall from her point of view but she wasn’t close enough to see more of him.
“This might be a complication, I didn’t expect this…..” Ariana side eyed Hermione “He never moved on, unfinished tasks as I told you before, so he spends his eternity trying to reach the snitch, some symbolic nonsense I gather, about never reaching his destiny and never seeing the fruit of his sacrifice”
Sisyphus task
“He can only stop when he is on someone’s path, when they need to talk or confront him to move on. His parents, friends, they all came to visit, when it was Sirius’s turn to visit his brother we stayed here for what felt like days”.
His brother? Regulus! She was looking at Regulus Arcturus Black.
“Of course we already established that you are not dead and you don’t need him in any of those ways, but I’m afraid that the magic bonding you to him won’t let us continue without him”.
“So we are stuck”.
“ I'm tired,” said the girl, pulling at Ariana’s dress. Can you feel tired in death?
“Why don’t you lie down on the stands and take a nap little one?” offered softly Ariana, So she had emotion after all
Ariana avadaed her with her eyes
After a minute, once the girl was laying a little ways away from them she sighed “First of all, I need you to understand that everyone faces death differently, If you want to sleep, eat, feel normal , you can do it, some of us cannot be so nonchalant about this plane of nonexistence that we’re in. This is going to help you on the long road.” a breath “I hope that I made myself clear. In the case of Regulus and you being stuck, again, some of us don’t move on because we can’t” looking at the girl sleeping on the stands “and some because they don’t want to” she added softly. “I don’t think Regulus wants to catch the snitch”
“If he catches it he will move on, and he isn’t ready to do it so he won't be able to finish the game” Hermione mussed “What happens if I do it for him?”
“I wouldn’t know”
—------------------------------
Crammed in a council room, layered with multiple expansion charms sat the new Order of the Phoenix,the D.A, the members of the Wizengamot, minus the ones in prison and the heads of department who worked against Mrs Malfoy. There were roughly eighty people waiting for Hestia Jones to start her speech at the head of the table. Presiding along Hestia were Andromeda, Headmistress Mcgonagall and Kingsley.
“Welcome and thank you for your help today. Former Minister Malfoy is dead, the witches who supported her claim and voted for her policies in The Wizengamot are detained, their guard too. We successfully took the Ministry without any casualties in our organization”
They had asked her not to talk about Hermione’s hypothetical death, Harry was hopeful, Ron wasn’t ready to recognize it.
“These are going to continue to be difficult times for our society but I trust that after this two month long ‘jump scare’ that Mrs Malfoy imposed on us, everyone in and beyond this room will be eager to improve our Ministry and Laws. I want every head of department to meet with Arthur Weasley and give him a list of competent and trustworthy replacements for the ones in custody, he will then present it to me.
Honorable members of the Wizengamot, it’s been too many times that the power held by the old families has controlled and hurt our society, more than half of the chamber of Lords and Ladies is now also in custody, I ask you to hear my claim and accept an elected group of muggle-born citizens esteemed and elected by our community, to treat them as your equals and share the responsibility and power that has been abused by those before them”
“hear hear”.
“I would like to propose, in honour of our missing friend and symbol Hermione Granger, that we not only include Muggle-borns in our law making process but that we leave the door open to magical beings to represent their own stand in our community”.
“That certainly is a lovely sentiment, Lord Longbottom and Minister Jones but you wish to impose this on the whole population when our way of life and our traditions can be erased if we continue this way”.
“Lord Fawley, We will no longer tolerate the excuse of tradition to ostracize a sector of our population” Minister Jones declared. “Muggle-borns have come to our world since the beginning of Wizarding History and there are still people who doubt their right to exist. It won’t matter if you exclude them, banish them or worst, there are muggle-borns being born in these very moment and that won't stop, however we have more than half of the pure blood representatives dead or in Azkaban, five years ago we said goodbye to the last scion of The House of Black, three years ago, it was the Crabbes, today was the last day of a Malfoy in the world. We need to adapt to save our world, embrace muggle-borns, and yes Lord Longbottom, magical beings, with open arms”
“I want in. I umm… Hermione was, is , my best friend and she sacrificed everything for this world. She kept Harry and I alive all these years and if it weren’t for her, Harry wouldn’t have lived long enough to defeat Voldemort. After all of that, they kept coming after her for things that weren’t in her control.
I never thought that being a Blood traitor in our world was a place of privilege but Hermione taught me otherwize, yes, we, the Weasleys, have been mocked, and we’re not invited to the fancy events, but our right to live or to use a wand has never been questioned…
…I made a scrapbook…”
“Oh dear”
“Shut up Harry” he chuckled. “ I made a scrapbook with ideas that Hermione sometimes pitched, about how to improve the Muggle studies curriculum, an immersion program for Ministry employees and members of the Wizengamot, and also an integration program for muggle parents and families. I don't like homework or school but I want to do this…”
“I like homework Ronald, Mme Minister, I would help my brother create a commission for this and ready a proposal for you”
“Thank you Percy I’ll wait for it, Ronald I think it is a great Idea”
“Of course it’s a great idea, It’s just not mine”
Laughter
“Very well Mister Weasley, anyone else interested in joining this commission? Yes?,Thank you Miss Parkinson, Mister Zabini. I think your recent years living in muggle London will be helpful. Mister Lovegood I would like a piece in The Quibbler with these proposals, on the Wizengamot Structure and the commission the Weasley brothers are leading, we also need to recruit for Aurors.
Kingsley I want you as head of the DMLE, if anyone has a better candidate you can address me, Harry, I know you’re young but I need someone as Head Auror, I would like you to give it a try.
I would like all of this on my desk by tomorrow afternoon, you’re dismissed”