Soteriologically Diluted
The day of the raid on the Weasley house, Bellatrix Black Lestrange wished twice that she had never learned how to apparate, fly, or travel efficiently at all. She only wanted to travel slowly, as if to never arrive. Instead, she felt always already present and never quite past. Whenever there was something to be destroyed, she had to be there, and once she was there it never quite left her. Being stuck under generations of magic and her own corruption made her weary most of the time, though she worked very hard to hide it. There was always more pain to be doled out, but at this point neither did it excite or hurt her anymore.
Standing on the edge of the trees, she only felt sick. Distant notes of music signaled dancing and frivolity in the orange glow emitting from the rickety shack. She wrinkled her nose at the slum building out of habit. If she was honest (which she didn’t want to be right now), the mere fact that the Weasley house was still standing, all patchwork and leftover parts, was a testament to the oft-belittled Weasley family magic. She wanted it to grate on her – the sound of blood-traitors making merry – but instead it caused her to re-construct fleeting memories of drunken ragers she had thrown in the Slytherin common room with Rod’s and Andy’s help and the elegant balls for which her mother had been known. Of course, there was no way to pretend those were “the good ol’ days”, but they had a different quality than celebrations of late. Mirth, she knew, was not inherently a contrived thing, but it seemed that the Death Eaters and their sympathizers were laying it on too thickly these days. She would never say that, of course, and the Dark Lord had very little to find when he went snooping through her mind these days so he’d mostly stopped doing so. Not long after she received the dark mark all those years ago, she was present for a strange encounter in which she sensed that Snape held a secret advantage over the Dark Lord. She had crucio’d him until she learned his secret. They never spoke about the encounter after that, and Bellatrix probably never let her occlumency shields down around another witch or wizard again - Azkaban notwithstanding.
She sighed. It didn’t really matter anymore if he searched her mind, did it? There was little to find. So much of her 40-year-old brain had been re-written with the horrible nothingness of Azkaban. Then the Dark Lord had given her and the other escaped Death Eaters a great boon: he restored to them their years lost to Azkaban. The nightmares, the screams, the cold, the illnesses, the manias, the physical deterioration of that hellhole were all gone with a tap of his wand. He extracted or blurred the memories and rolled back the toll the years took on their bodies. They were now most loyal servants who looked to be in their late 20s and knew, but did not have to remember, the most terrible things they had experienced.
“The ministry tortured you,” he had announced with great pomp, “but I have undone all that they did to you. They can never execute justice and mercy for you as I do – and they never wanted to!”
She had believed him out of necessity. How could she not? 14 years of trauma wiped from her mind and body was the best thing that happened to her since Andromeda left all those years ago. It was never so easy, and so bland, to be dark.
Really, the attack in the Department of Mysteries last Spring had been too complicated, she thought, but the Dark Lord had believed it would work. They hadn’t counted on the sheer number of friends that arrived with the Potter boy, and their plan had faltered due to an unexpected unfamiliarity with children’s magic. Nonetheless, it had given them the fodder for this much simpler plan that she and her team were about to execute: cause havoc, lure Potter past the wards into the field, kill whoever followed, and take him to the Dark Lord. They were banking on Potter's blind hatred for Bellatrix due to Sirius’ death. She frowned at the thought yet again and shook her cousin from her mind. A raucous round of cheering at the Weasley house suggested a toast being given. If there was a right time to begin, this was it, but it didn’t make her feel any less sick.
“Let’s get this over with,” she muttered. They took to the skies in pillars of smoke.
It was all too easy. Potter leapt through the fire like a madman and charged after her into the swampy field. Keeping a wordless, wandless protego up while running, she was barely winded when she circled back on him and found Greyback creeping through the tall grass. Then the Weasley girl and one of her oldest brothers crashed into Potter. Greyback grimaced as Remus Lupin and another small-framed figure dashed in as well, all falling into a tight circle back-to-back. Bellatrix stepped out of the grass with her protego still up and stalked around the group, dallying for effect.
“Bellatrix! It’s time!” barked Yaxley nervously.
She placed one foot in front of the other slowly, tapping her wand in her hand. A single, nervous spell from the Weasley boy’s wand glanced harmlessly off her shield, prompting a smile to break out on her lips and a barking laugh to rip from them. “It would be a pleasure to educate you on dueling, Weasley, since your mother didn't. I wish we had time for more games, but I need to kill you.”
The boy’s complexion reddened in an unflattering way and his wand reared back in a flourish that would surely be disastrous for him, but a woman’s voice, too deep and rich to belong to the Weasley girl, came from the other side of the circle. “Charlie, stop. Don’t egg her on. Hold steady.”
“Don’t egg me on?” Bellatrix skirted toward the voice, looking for the speaker. “It’s curious to me that you think I can be manipulated by – “ Her words caught in her throat and her wand stopped twirling in her palm, stunned by something very familiar. Noble and Most Ancient Black family eyes bored into her own, simmering on the haughty face of someone she had never seen but who was undoubtedly her middle sister’s daughter.
“I dare you to lift that wand, Aunt Bella. So help me Merlin.” The woman’s face flashed.
Bellatrix did not move her wand. She didn’t move at all, actually. Anger, dismay, and longing washed over her and pinned her feet into the mud.
“Lestrange.” Yaxley yelled. “Lestrange!”
Her throat constricted and sternum bowed, whether out of anxiety or a consequence of the imperius protesting her inaction she did not know, but she remained rooted to the spot, protego in place. Spells flew all around her. Yaxley sprouted three long lacerations across his chest from one of Harry’s spells, and in the distance more people rushed through the fire into the grass toward them. She tore herself from her spot, yelled for retreat, and apparated back to Malfoy manner with Yaxley in tow.
This meant she was back in the Dark Lord’s presence without any time to prepare an explanation. Snape and Narcissa received them in the Great Room. The sullen man mended Yaxley while Narcissa took Bellatrix’s elbows and tried to coax the story out of her. She couldn’t tell her about Andromeda’s daughter. She couldn’t explain, so she couldn’t tell her.
A bellow of rage echoed in the hallway. Then there was nothing until Pettigrew appeared in the doorway to say, “The Dark Lord requests your presence upstairs.”
Narcissa helped Bellatrix navigate the hallway and the stairs. Despite her sister’s physical instability, Narcissa could see no injuries, and that worried her perhaps more than if she could. When they entered the conference room, Narcissa backed away toward the wall while Bellatrix approached the Dark Lord.
“You’ve failed me.” He did not use her name. “You of all people. The strongest witch in Britain’s recorded history has been bested by schoolchildren twice in less than a year.”
That was not exactly true, she thought, but kept it to herself and lowered her eyes as he swiveled his chair to face her. “I apologize, my Lord. I’ve – “
“Been lacking some motivation? Yes, I see that. I fear I may have disadvantaged you by removing your memories of Azkaban. Your actions suggest you don’t remember the ghastliness of the ministry and its pitiful intentions. Your power wanes because you don’t feel it in your soul.”
Bellatrix, in fact, felt many dreadful things deep in her soul. She raised her head to look at her Lord, imploring him to have some other kind of mercy. Narcissa’s muscles tightened in the corner as he withdrew his wand and Nagini coiled herself around Bellatrix’s lower legs.
“Spare the rod, spoil the child, Bella. But Never mind, we can fix it.”
With a lazy flick of his wrist, the Dark Lord spat a wordless spell that collided with Bellatrix’s forehead. She swayed, held in place by Nagini, while her Lord’s face morphed into a hazy dementor’s hollow head in front of her and leaned closer. She heard a familiar screaming growing louder in the background, and then she collapsed.
After Bellatrix’s screams ceased, Nagini released her, and the Dark Lord nodded for Narcissa to collect her sister and leave. She had to charm Bellatrix’s feet to get her down the hallway and into another wing of the manor while supporting her lolling head and neck. Bellatrix’s eyes remained wide open for hours; Narcissa spent those hours wiping sweat and spit from her sister’s face. When Snape visited her, she dismissed him with a list of potions she desired but believed were useless. The fit eventually passed, but not before Narcissa began to wonder this was finally the time that she would lose her last sister.
When Bellatrix was again aware of her surroundings, she rose from the bed and approached the room’s mirror and sink opposite the bed. She leaned harshly on the porcelain, grasping it hard enough to turn her knuckles white. In the mirror staring back at her was the 25-year-old face that should only have been associated with her young, foolish, rebellious self. Instead, it was surrounded by swarming figures terrorizing every inch of the mirror – dementors, whips made of human hair and dry basilisk fangs; enchanted chains that rattled when one desired silence and were imperceptible when one needed to hear something that proved one was real instead of floating in the nothing abyss; unending silence and darkness penetrated only by wailing and the snarl of deadened Azkaban employees; ugly charms to keep her alive only for the sake of her own suffering; and all the nightmares her own sick, pureblood mind had invented. The dissonance was miserable. The tide of 14 years lapped at her mind and frayed holes in its edges and its middle, but her body refused to corroborate what had happened. She had experienced and caused more horror in her 40 odd years than ten witches should in their lifetimes all put together, and the veneer of pureblood entitlement that she had been using to hide it in her soul was torn away, laying it all bare. She vomited into the sink.
Narcissa cleaned Bellatrix up and laid with her in bed trying not to cry. Laying on her side, she curled around the woman’s back and cradled her tenderly. She buried her face into her oldest sister’s hair, a shock of platinum blond garnishing the impossibly black, frazzled curls under which cowered the heir to the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black. When the blonde woman was sure she was asleep, she made for the door pausing only to light a small candle with a pinch of her fingertips. She froze when she heard Bellatrix cry out for their middle sister.
“Andy! Andy, please…”
Then she was silent, and Narcissa left bearing new burdens even as she shouldered up old ones she had been trying to ignore.
**
When Harry got Slughorn to tell him about horcruxes, everything changed. If he had been obsessed before, he became insufferable. His studies tanked. Conversation with him was next to impossible if it didn’t include Voldemort and the horcruxes. He spent hours with Dumbledore, always coming back to tell Ron and Hermione about memories they had watched. Ron was, of course, fascinated with each story. The whole thing made Hermione uncomfortable. She imagined others helping themselves to her memories and how self-conscious and even maybe unsafe she would feel if they could be accessed at will. Sharing them with another person voluntarily was hard enough; she wondered what it would take for her to agree to give them to an audience of tactical viewers. Maybe it was the viewers’ intent that made the difference. Maybe the content of the memories justified sharing or procuring them. Maybe viewing those memories was essential. She had plenty of excuses that never quite felt good enough.
Since the process of research tended to soother her, she spent some time in the library on the topic of memory acquisition. A couple of interdependent, musty tomes concluded that memories were private and should not be shared without the consent of the subject. Procuring memories without consent was akin to legilimency – heavily regulated within the ministry but used rather flippantly in places where old magic reigned supreme. She had a feeling that Dumbledore didn’t have much regard for ministry regulations, but she couldn’t tell if she thought that justified or not.
Harry and Ron brushed off her concerns with less attention even than they had given to her crusade for house elves’ rights. There were a few ethics questions, including this one, that the wizarding world seemed far behind the muggle world in addressing. They were generally new concepts to Ron, his family as pureblooded as they were sympathetic to muggles. Harry concerned Hermione more, since his zeal to defeat Voldemort seemed to be eclipsing his old concern for what was right. He was beginning to sound much like Dumbledore, though “all for the greater good” sounded much less righteous coming from his lips than from the headmaster’s.
She believed in Harry, though. The Order and many others had started to view him even more as a symbol of Good than as a young person deeply hurt by hatred and war and failed to distinguish between the two. Several years later, when she was hidden away in her small corner of the muggle world serving drinks to already drunk fishermen, she unhappily suspected that she had as well. She would hope that she had fought alongside him as much for their friendship and her love for him as for the salvation of the wizarding world. Presently, however, she believed in him as her stubborn, self-sacrificing friend, flatly good and deserving of peace, someone with enough heart - if not skill – to defeat Voldemort. The knowledge of the horcruxes gave the three friends hope that victory was possible so even as their lives darkened over the next year, they pressed on with purpose that they had not had before.
**
The impetus for the legendary quest to find and destroy Voldemort’s horcruxes came not with Dumbledore’s death, as one would have expected, but with the Dursleys. Harry, ever true to his word, had not returned to Privet Drive, settling in to Grimmauld Place against Mrs. Weasley’s wishes. Not two days after the end of the semester, when Hermione, Ron, and Ginny had forced Harry into Diagon Alley for some much-needed distraction, Death Eaters attacked the Dursley Home. Mrs. Figg, at the end of their neighborhood, saw a mass of black curls saunter down the middle of the street and portkey’d to Grimmauld Place. Fortuitously, the Order was assembled for a meeting and apparated directly to the Dursleys’ to fend off the attack. The family was traumatized but physically none the worse for wear after Tonks’ quick field healing. Dudley even committed his first truly selfless act by shielding his mother’s body with his own to protect her from a stinging jinx. They decided to move immediately to northern France, and McGonagall returned a few weeks later to grace the battle-torn house with a “Condemned; Not for Resale” posting. There was no communication between the Dursleys and the wizarding world again.
An anxiety that had been lurking in the back of Hermione’s mind could no longer be ignored as she lay in bed that night. Her parents were in danger. Death Eaters were using every means to find Harry. The false attack on Sirius in the Department of Mysteries; the destruction of the Burrow during Bill and Fleur’s wedding; the visit to Harry’s old home with the Dursleys. It was only a matter of time before they tracked down her parents to seek information as to his whereabouts. She doubted that her parents would fare well against Death Eaters, and they would have no way to alert the Order of an attack. Even with protective measures, the Dursleys had been saved by the skin of their teeth due to pure luck that the Order had been assembled at Grimmauld Place. She hated the ideas that she came up with to protect them, but she hated the thoughts of what the Death Eaters might do to them more. In the very few hours she slept that night, she had nightmares that might have rivalled Harry’s.
She finally learned how to control the little birds that came when she was sad and did a fairly good job of maintaining a happy front with her parents when she went home. Her father asked once about the terrorists. She shrugged it off by turning away to make some tea, mumbling that they didn’t hear much about it at Hogwarts. She tried to go out a few times with some girls that she met out and about – which she had found rather habit forming the previous summer – but long before she could satisfy the butterflies and creeping heat in her abdomen, the feeling was replaced by a cold sweat and dread that her parents were being tortured at home. They weren’t, of course, but she soon found she couldn’t enjoy herself when she left them. In the house, her wand remained at the ready in her sleeve, deployed at the slightest unexpected sound.
When Harry asked to meet her and Ron at a little muggle coffee shop one night, she was not surprised to hear him say he would not be going back to Hogwarts and would be seeking out horcruxes to destroy instead. She was also not surprised when she and Ron so quickly asserted that they would come with him. He gave in, and they began to make their plans. At home, she shrunk any item she thought necessary – and many she didn’t – to fit in her bottomless bag. She trembled all night because of her plan, already despising herself for what she was about to do. That was the first day she hated the wizarding world.
She could not stop the birds that followed her into the kitchen that morning. Her mother gave her a worried look and a long hug. Her dad, who by now had caught on to the birds, smiled affectionately and handed her a mug of steaming coffee. They left the kitchen to sit on the couch for Saturday morning television, calling her to join them. Instead, she sat her untouched coffee on the counter, raised her wand, and steadied her breath. In slow motion, her birds morphed into foaming crests of magic that crashed into the walls as she pronounced the spell. Frames rattled as her face dissolved in each picture. She was glad she did not have to see her parents’ faces blank and unblinking and that they would not see the strength of her magic glowing in her eyes. Then she was gone, apparating into the field outside the Burrow where she knelt crying for a long time before she composed herself and let herself into the Weasleys’ home.
Since the housing market was booming and they felt they needed a change of pace in their middle age, Mr. and Mrs. Granger sold their house and moved to Sydney where they joined an already thriving dental practice. Mr. Granger became an avid New South Wales rugby fan, spending most nights with a crew at the local bar cheering the team on and fantasizing about starting fights with Queensland fans. Mrs. Granger got more into gardening and began hosting workshops on growing flowers out of season. When Mr. Granger was asked one night about his red and gold shirt with the weird emblem on it (How dare he wear it on a Saturday? “Saturday is rugby day, mate.”), he frowned for a moment before saying, “I think I picked it up in a thrift store some years back.” The first time Mrs. Granger was truly homesick, she bought a bird feeder and thought it curious how much the little sparrows that came to it meant to her.
And so, 18-year-old Hermione Granger performed her life’s greatest feat of magic with no one there to acknowledge it. The depth of her magic in that moment dove way beneath the line between good and evil, and that fact haunted her almost as much the loss of her parents. She hoped that the need for such greatness would pass and let her sink back into quiet mediocrity for good.