The Whole World Overturned in War
The Prince
Princes were kept in the Tower, that was one prerogative they hadn’t changed. This one had been allowed to call himself a King, for somewhat less than a year. But Kings didn’t act like he did, and without a formal coronation, without the magic power bound up in Kingship, he was only a Prince.
The boots that clipped down the stones of the hall before the tower cell were those of a small and very dangerous woman. Now, Bellatrix Lestrange was the right hand of the most powerful man in existence. They all believed that their Lord and Master would soon rule the whole world. Bellatrix was less sanguine about the ease of the accomplishment, but she had no doubt that the first man to rule the whole world would be Her Lord, and perhaps he would also be the last, too.
In any case, she was going to the front, to Lyon, to take command of an Army which was to invade Italy since, for some reason, the Italian Wizards under the Conclave of the Black Lords (in this case, that meant the wizarding families that placed themselves under the authority of the Papacy) had managed to organise a resistance to Voldemort’s loyalists in the country.
Well, there were a few loose ends to tie up, first. She commanded the door to open. “Silencio.” The next step was to keep the cowardly monster from talking.
“Ahh, my dear Prince.” Bellatrix swaggered in, with her wand out, and soaked in for a little while the fear in his eyes, the first helpless attempt to speak, before the resignation before her power.
“You see, we have done it,” she continued, pacing in front of him. “We successfully used Britain’s nuclear stockpile to set the muggles against each other. Most of the world has already surrendered,” she skipped over the fact that by surviving population, that was not strictly true, because the purpose of this conversation was hardly to convey accurate information. “The whole world has overturned in war. And you bear at least a small part of the responsibility for it, considering your collaboration with us, in such a desperate effort to save your own skin.”
She looked at his eyes. As a credit to his intelligence, the fear he showed, manacled to a wall in the tower, being told about the destruction of the world, well, near to it, anyway, seemed appropriate to the fact that he was not going to save his own skin. She raised her wand to her lips with a bemused grin.
“You see, I could hurt you myself. But I don’t really have the time for muggles. I’m a busy woman. I need to command the Army on the Italian Front. However, it was my responsibility to take care of you. And you see, you’re an animal.” Her voice dropped. “You’re an animal. You behaved exactly like an animal to those you had power over.”
A sweet smile. “So, I was thinking. Just a special little thing. Since you’re such an animal, sweet Prince, I could introduce you to another animal. You know, you could be animals together and all that.” Bellatrix waved toward the open door of the cell.
Fenrir Greyback stepped in, unable to contain his laughter. Now, the Prince was truly frozen in terror, sweat beading on his brow, but still unable to make a sound.
“One problem though. Fenrir and I actually understand each other very well; I’ve always been the one to work with him for My Lord. We have divergent opinions on some matters, but, you see … Fenrir’s got his own standards too. And he thinks you fail them.” She tipped a salute with her wand, and ignoring the growing stain on the Prince’s prison uniform, showed herself out, a cackle on her lips.
Not everything about this world was awful, after all.
The Train Station
Diesels snorting and bellowing black smoke as they started, old engines which had been pulled out of the dead line, to replace those lost in cities hit by nukes, to augment the war mobilisation. People bustling around the train station—it was now the only way to travel, all civilian flights had been cancelled and all fuel was rationed for the military, so that private automobile use was prohibited in all but the most exigent of circumstances.
Here, in the late spring, when the winter cold was gone—even it seemed, from the dim light in the sky, from the infinite forest fires, that summer would never come—the transport situation had grown so serious that people rode on the top of the railway carriages, as they did in India. But, after Kovel’, at least, they had had a carriage to ride in, and not a goods wagon.
The wizards and witches from Britain began to stumble out, in a tidal wave of humanity. There were hundreds of them, intermixed with others from France, from the Low Countries, from Germany. Nizhniy Novgorod was the true cultural heart of the Russian wizarding world, from what Hermione had heard on the train, but she wandered out, a cigarette between her lips and a duffel bag over her shoulder, and felt like she didn’t really want to face the wizarding world or anything like it ever again. She imagined that I am a Failure was written on every part of her face, on her expression, that she couldn’t hide her misery from anyone. Even Ron had been avoiding her in the train carriage, though they had both chalked it up to simple exhaustion with being packed in such a small place for so long. Narcissa had already worked ‘wonders’ with her successful outcome to their interrogations and her own negotiations, but wonders in the case of the train trip east had been a hard-sleeper, nothing fancier than that. And, with the railways so heavily damaged and the priority being westbound military traffic, it had taken them ten days to go from Kovel’ to Nizhniy Novgorod.
And then there was a woman in a trim uniform, dark hair done up in a braid, blue eyes—aristocratic, pretty, with the kind of expression which did not falter even in the worst of circumstances. Hermione felt a little flash—of recognising that she was facing an attractive woman, walking toward her. But this also brought back a flash of her memory in the Malfoy Manor, and she closed her eyes.
The woman, apparently, didn’t stop walking closer. “Granger, Hermione?”
Hermione’s eyes linked open. She’d gotten a-hold of a grammar and a dictionary in Silesia, and rigorously drilled herself in Russian for the past three weeks. Immersion with the soldiers and workers and travellers around her had helped. She hadn’t lost her intelligence, never would, or if she did, she’d rather be dead. “Yes, ma’am?”
“You’re on our list---you volunteered for service with MinKol?”
“I did,” Hermione answered haltingly.
“English?” The woman asked, smoothly switching languages. She barely had a trace of an accent.
“I’m learning Russian,” Hermione continued to speak the tongue, diplomatically.
“Hmm. Well.” A hand was extended for her to shake. She kept speaking English. “Not badly, either, but we’ll have an intense immersion course before the rest of your training. A pleasure to meet you, Miss Granger. I am Larissa Sergeivna, to you; of the House of Naryshkin. And I was sent by MinKol to collect you and the others with you for your training.”
The woman led Hermione over to what the British witch realised was a soldier’s canteen in the train station, providing tea and snacks to the soldiers passing through from place to place for the mobilisation. She got tea for both of them, handing a cup over to Hermione, and her smile was impossibly warm—Hermione assumed it was just because the Russian woman, who was painfully aristocratic and clearly from their equivalent of one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, didn’t know she was a muggleborn yet.
Still in a miserable state, Hermione decided, in a fit of self-destructiveness, to fix that. “You know, they’d send me to a camp just for being muggle-born,” she remarked as she took a drink.
Larissa peered for a moment. “Your motivation doesn’t matter. That you’ll fight, does. If your back is to the wall, I probably want you at my side. I’ll always know to trust that flank.” She offered a grin.
Hermione stared at the pureblood young woman for a moment… And then couldn’t help but grin, too. It was infectious. Then, she laughed softly, and harder, until Larissa a cocked her head in a quizzical gesture at her.
“Some subtle English humour I’m missing?” She asked.
“Sort of. I’ve already fought Voldemort. I’m a refugee from the internal resistance Army against his takeover. And I’m most definitely a marked woman, if he wants. Do you really want someone who’s failed at your side?”
Larissa reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. “Fuck, yes. You won’t do anything stupid.”
She’s not going to give up on you. Hermione was smiling, despite herself, she couldn’t hold it in anymore. “Well. I guess you’re stuck with me, then.” As she looked around the station, she started to realise, that the thousands of people there were thousands of reasons to carry on—and fight until there was nothing left of her, nothing left of her but the will to resist.
And she rather liked the thought of that.