Incarnation Caricatured
Hermione would always remember the day she learned about horcruxes because it was about 20 hours before the All Hallow’s Eve ball in her fifth year. Harry had been struggling with nightmares for weeks, and she had taken to spending even later nights in the library so that she could return to Gryffindor common room when he was alone and convince him to go to sleep. She’d long since finished her homework that particular night and was following an interesting trail of ensouled flora through a smattering of one-off herbology texts. The books ranged from musty at best to self-absorbed existential reflections to political banter and more. The author of the text that ended up commanding her attention was rather crass, so Hermione nearly skimmed straight over the first mention of horcruxes trying to avoid his rather lascivious tangents. She blinked once after the finishing the paragraph and scanned back through it. She rubbed her sleepy eyes and read it again.
“The joining of one’s soul to an anymyne is not too be confused with a horcrux wherein one ritually kills an innocent human – usually a muggle - to immortalize a fractured piece of one’s soul in another object. Rather, it is more akin to a patronus charm wherein one gives of one’s best goodness….”
The horror of such a thing. The horror… was her first thought. Her second was to recognize that it was the fracturing of a soul that horrified her the most, not the killing of an innocent person. Her third was to reject the second. Based on the author’s juxtaposition of the horcrux and the patronus, intentionally killing an innocent was the opposite of goodness. A fractured soul, as awful as it sounded, surely was not the opposite of “giving of one’s best goodness.”
She checked the book binding to see if it was meant to be filed in the restricted section. It was not. Another hour of searching the non-restricted shelves (as she no longer had after-hours access to the restricted section) led her to no more information at all related to the concept, and she decided to call it quits for the night. She toyed with the idea of leaving the book out with a note for Madame Pince to consider re-shelving, but instead she placed it right back where she found it.
On her way back to the common room, her stomach twisted with anxiety as she mulled the concept over in her head. Harry was asleep in front of the fire when she arrived, and she did not wake him since it was a small victory that he was sleeping. By the next morning, she had decided not to tell either of the boys about it; it didn’t seem worth it to worry Harry further. Many times after that, she pondered the implications of the possibility that Voldemort had used horcruxes, but the next time she spoke about the concept was almost year and a half later when Harry brought it up. She did always feel somewhat guilty about that.
**
The celebration was simple that evening. It was uncharacteristic for the school to host the ball without an event like the Tri-Wizard tournament to prompt it, but the professors felt that a celebration was needed to lift spirits this year. Professor Flitwick decorated the Great Hall to feel like a proper holiday without too much fanfare. Dumbledore was in even better spirits than usual and took McGonagall for a spin on the dance floor, to her great embarrassment and the pleasure of most of the students. Hermione danced more than she anticipated, slightly surprised at the number of awkward young men that approached her asking to dance. Harry looked more peaceful than he had in months, and his red face when that pretty Ravenclaw girl pulled him by his collar onto the floor to dance did nothing to mar it. Ron was ignorable and mostly grumbly until someone spiked the punch. Typically, Hermione would have alerted the nearest prefect about the alcohol, but it seemed that the prefects were maybe in on the prank anyway. She let herself feel relaxed and was only mildly concerned when two black plumes of smoke of shot across the enchanted sky on the ceiling. The feeling passed quickly; she didn’t notice Dumbledore leave the room.
She noticed acutely, however, Katie Bell’s hand placed on her arm with her thumb lightly stroking the inside of her elbow during the animated conversation of a large group of jolly Gryffindors. A nervous anticipation boiled in her rib cage when Katie’s hand drifted along her lower back to pull her in for a group photo. The girl shot her an amused grin and asked her if she wanted another drink. Hermione nodded wordlessly as Katie sauntered away in the direction of the punch bowl. Gears in her brain ground with great effort trying to discern the feeling. She concluded the alcohol was getting the best of her and decided she was just going to enjoy it.
When Dumbledore returned to the head table, he had a grim look and his wand at his voice box, his voice ringing out with authority through the hall. “Silence. Silence! There has been an attack on a muggle town six kilometers from here. Prefects, please escort your houses back to your common rooms and wait there for further instructions from faculty. There is no reason to expect danger at Hogwarts, but we believe it in your best interests to remain in your dorms until more information is released. You may go.”
Katie forgotten, Hermione whirled to search for Harry’s face in the crowd. Gathering Ron, they walked with him back to the common room.
“Are you ok, mate?” Ron slurred.
“It was Death Eaters,” Harry pressed two fingers between his eyebrows. “I can hear someone laughing. You can’t, can you? It sounds like Voldemort in the cemetery. Announcing something… Merlin, it’s awful.”
Ron looked worried, but only said, “How much did you drink, mate?”
“It’s not that. It’s not. It’s… I can hear him, see houses burning. He’s pleased. Bloody hell.”
“Let’s go to Pomfrey.” Hermione asserted, startling both the boys. “The common room can wait. This needs to be dealt with now.”
Pomfrey was grumpy with them for coming but kept them locked up in the medical ward with her the whole night. In the wee hours of the morning, Snape whisked Harry away to his office. He still had not returned when students were allowed back out of their common rooms and daily routine resumed as normal. That Monday the Daily Prophet arrived with “SUSPECTED DEATH EATER ACTIVITY” emblazoned on the front page, but the article said nothing more than what they already knew.
**
By the winter holiday, Harry finally admitted to Ron and Hermione that he had been seeing and hearing things in his head for the better part of the semester, things that he believed were related to Voldemort. He attended nightly meetings with Snape to practice occlumency. Hermione sometimes thought those lessons were counterproductive. Harry was constantly exhausted, obsessed with Voldemort even more than usual, and incredibly difficult for even Ron and Hermione to be around. Sirius’ head appeared in the fireplace one evening to invite Harry to spend the holiday at Grimmauld Place with him. With his long curly hair against the green flames, Hermione thought he looked remarkably like Andromeda and, therefore, Lestrange but thought better of saying so. Harry enthusiastically said yes, but the next morning McGonagall informed him rather brusquely that he would be returning to Privet Drive instead – which of course made him even more sullen. Hermione hated to admit it, but she was glad the break gave her an excuse to get away from him and the whole situation.
The holiday was predictable. She spent her days in coffee shops or at the kitchen table catching up on most of what her muggle counterparts had learned in the fall semester. In the evenings she went out with a few people she was friendly with, making up fantastic stories about boarding school that held no candle to the truth. Her father always roared with delight when she filled her parents in so they could corroborate her stories later. She didn’t tell them about Azkaban, didn’t tell them about Death Eaters, didn’t tell them about the pureblood hate for muggleborns that seemed to be ramping up behind the scenes. They knew an unsavory man was gaining some power in the community but had assumed that he was a dirty politician who wasn’t really a danger unless one got in his way. Hermione chose not to correct them because it seemed easier than explaining that an old, endemic oppression was raising its head violently in the wizarding world.
At Christmas, her mother unwrapped a red and gold scarf that Hermione had knitted with Molly Weasley’s guidance and wore it every time she left the house until Hermione went back to school. Her father was elated to find two tickets to a quidditch game and a small book explaining the games’ rules and history so that Hermione wouldn’t have to. The match would ring in the New Year. Hermione assured her mother she had gotten permission from the ministry to bring her muggle father to a game and promised repeatedly that she would keep him safe. “Don’t make me request an unbreakable vow, Hermione,” Mrs. Granger had said with a wink.
The day of the game, her dad came downstairs wearing his rugby-styled Gryffindor shirt, carrying the quidditch handbook and a handful of cash to change to galleons. Her father easily embarrassed her sometimes, but she was grateful for his enthusiastic support. In Diagon Alley, they made their way to the quidditch portkey which spit them out in the circus of tents and concessions in front of the pitch. She thought he fit in with the throng quite well, exposing himself as a muggle only when fawning loudly over various charmed trinkets. As the game went on, he was more and more delighted; his enthusiasm was infectious. She considered herself quite clever for this Christmas gift to him.
The game ended with a shower of fireworks in the shapes of dragons and harpies. Hermione clapped and laughed along with her father until the smoke and ash drifting down from the lights seemed to collect into cylindrical shapes and swoop along the top of the stadium. Something felt wrong about that to her. Magical energy began to emanate from the metal on the stadium and she couldn’t tell if it was dread or something else that washed over her from the top of her head. Then the fireworks went out and the columns of smoke circled lower and lower, until one scraped the pitch and morphed into a human running. Tendrils of smoke billowed out from the figure’s head – or was that hair? Both? – and flames erupted from its feet. It drew a large circle of fire on the pitch, stopped in the middle, and began twirling slowly, an amplified cackle trilling upwards from it followed by a lilting woman’s voice.
“The Dark Lord has returned. Very soon, you will get to choose whom you follow. I suggest you don’t make a mistake.” Four more columns of smoke alighted on the pitch, four men who tossed what looked like severed heads onto the ground. “It would be a such a shame for you Witches and Wizards to make a mistake.”
Then the figures disappeared in billowing smoke; the crowd erupted in panic. Hermione pulled her father to his feet with an uncommon strength and dragged him, creating a path with a moving repelling charm in a beeline to the portkey. Back in Diagon Alley, she ignored his questions as they all but sprinted to muggle London, not stopping until they were back inside the Granger house with all the doors locked.
“What the bloody hell was that?” Mr. Granger’s breath was ragged, and his eyes were on the floor.
“I’m not really sure…” Hermione was actually quite sure.
“What’s going on?” Mrs. Granger demanded from the doorway.
Mr. Granger grimaced with his eyes closed. “Some sort of terrorist attack. At the match.”
Hermione ran with the explanation. “There have been rumors of a terrorist group forming, but I don’t know a lot about it.” She knew actually quite a lot about the Death Eaters at this point.
“What’s their deal? Their cause?”
“It’s hard to say.” It was actually quite easy to say - but not to her parents. “Absolute power. Tradition. They want to go back to the way things were.”
“How did things used to be?” Her mother crossed her arms leaning against the doorframe, eyes boring into her.
Hermione swallowed. “No muggleborns in the wizarding community. I think that’s part of it. The rest is a bit hazy.” That part was true.
The Granger parents asked a few more questions. Hermione tried to answer them truthfully without giving away the severity of the situation. She had a feeling that they might not let her return if they knew the truth, and not returning was unthinkable for her now. She also suspected the less they knew, the less likely they were to become targets if things got worse. At the end of the conversation, the Granger parents were still shocked and fearful for their daughter but sufficiently convinced that it was a freak event, that Mr. Granger had experienced the literal worst of the wizarding world. Hermione, however, had a feeling that much worse was yet to come and perhaps was coming fast. She made a mental note to owl Professor McGonagall about being delicate when responding to a potentially forceful letter from her mother requesting more information.
That night Mrs. Granger brooded while listening to soft chirping coming from Hermione’s room where tiny sparrows circled above Hermione’s head until she nodded off to sleep.