Chapter Text
Eight months earlier
“Why me, Hermione?” Harry whined, thumping his head on the mahogany desk, upsetting a precarious pile of papers and knick-knacks atop it. With a wave of her wand, her reflexes as fast as they’d been during the war, the brunette restored the fragile equilibrium before they could topple and fall.
“Listen, Harry, I’m not asking for the world here; I’m asking you to represent us and what we offer. Think of it as a vacation!” his traitorous friend offered with a sweet smile he knew too well. One that promised pain if he refused.
“Yes, I got the gist of that, thank you,” he snarked. “Still, why me? You know I’m not your best option. I’m not a politician, and I don’t want to go there as the fucking figurehead who offed a Dark lord when he was seventeen! Why not send Kingsley? Or Ron, even, if you want someone you can trust blindly. Surely, as Head Auror, he’d be a better fit for this.”
Hermione sighed and rubbed her temples—an action she was doing rather regularly lately when they spoke. The stress of her second campaign, he knew. That and the fact that he could still be a right bastard when he wanted, especially since, in his hermitage, he forgot more and more how to interact with other humans—mortals.
The wizard breathed in and out to cool his temper. Hermione didn’t deserve to suffer the brunt of his frustrations.
“Why me, Herm’? It’s been more than a decade since I’ve done anything in public; I’m not the symbol I was before. I’m more than glad to keep helping your campaign and projects however I can, you know this, but I’m nothing more than a recluse in a lab these days. Why send me?” he pleaded.
Hermione pushed her reading glasses up to stop them from slipping. A recent addition, sometimes in the last five years. It suited her. Ron thought so as well, if his drunken and amorous ramblings about his incredible wife were to be believed.
“Because I don’t want to send a Politician or an Enforcer or a Figurehead. I want to send a Scholar,” she stressed.
Harry sat up, suddenly interested.
“Of course, that got your attention. How did you turn out to be such a nerd with the life you had?” she said with a teasing lilt.
“Ah, but dear Hermione, it is because of the life I had that I turned out to be such a nerd. I’m just making up for lost time.”
“You’ve been making up for lost time the last thirty years, Harry,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Anyway, this coven, they’re patrons of the arts, have been for centuries. But they’re both dangerous and important to us, massively, and we—and I cannot stress this enough—desperately need a treaty with them. Ideally, an alliance, but I don’t want to be too optimistic.”
Harry regretted that he couldn’t take notes. He’d left his journal on Ron’s desk during his lunch break. A mistake he shouldn’t have made when Hermione asked him to come up ‘for a chat’. Lying bint, he thought lovingly.
“Why?”
In the absence of his pen to occupy his hands, he took out a cigarette from his jacket. Hermione vanished it before it could even touch his lips. He grumbled but didn’t try twice. The defiance would cost him more than her if her raised eyebrow and pointed look were anything to go by.
“Exposure, politics, bigger alchemical understanding, fostering relationships between species, fear of attacks, if you can name it, it’s there. The two main points, though, are the fact that as far as we know, they don’t know about us,” she inhaled, Harry tensed and leaned closer, “And that their venom can nullify our magical core. Entirely. If we’re exposed to it, then that’s it, it’s over. Our magic is gone.”
Harry stopped breathing. That was… Unheard of to say the least. No magical creature he’d ever studied could entirely bypass the innate safeguards embedded in a magical core. Creatures such as wixen, elves, goblins, mermaids and the like all possessed a magical core; it was what allowed them to interact in the same world, the same existence. It was how mermaid scales could be used for potions, or how goblin cultivated alihosty could also be grown by centaurs. The closest creatures he knew of that caused a core to shrivel or disappear were vampires, but even then, they tended to bite Muggles or Squibs and their venom was easily siphoned by spell if need be.
“So if a wix is exposed to their venom…”
“We estimate total Nexus destruction in roughly two hours, and for now, there is no known spell or substance able to cleanse the body.”
Harry fell back into his chair as a puppet with its strings cut. Hermione, bless her, looked exactly how he felt.
“That’s…That’s—” The prospect of being potentially sent into a coven of creatures able to burn the magic out of him shouldn’t be exciting, but damn him if he didn’t want to pack his bags right this instant. Studying them could yield so many discoveries, the least of which being some kind of vaccine to counter their venom. But the samples, the experiments, the knowledge.
Oh, Nicolas and Pernelle would be so jealous, he thought gleefully. He’d have to call them once he left the Ministry.
And for once, the merits of his research wouldn’t be stolen by those thrice-cursed fools down in the Department of Mysteries. He’d be working for Hermione, which meant total secrecy from someone he knew he could trust.
He shouldn’t ask any more questions. He should say, ‘Thank you for trusting me with this, Hermione, but I’m currently writing a research paper on the merits of Arnak truffles and freely given Unicorn blood on Dementor spores, and my editor is hounding my ass for this paper.’ That’s what he should say.
Instead, he asked, “Why are we only looking into this now? And what are they exactly?”
The bushy-haired’s eyes fell to her desk; she was wearing her ‘bad news’ face.
“Vampires. Some variation of the beings we’re already familiar with.” Huh, so he was on to something. She breathed in; he tensed. “Padma’s been bitten.” Shit. “She managed to take him out with an incendio and apparate to Saint Mungo’s afterwards, but she didn’t make it; her heart gave out from the stress before the venom could change her.”
Another one of his friends, dead.
So young. Still so much to experience. Parvati would be crushed.
His fist clenched, and he looked out of the enchanted window Hermione regularly spelled to display the rolling cliffs of Scotland. The breeze moved the long grass in gentle waves. Sometimes, a sheep came into the frame, eating the undulating grass, unbothered by the seriousness and tragedy occurring beyond the frame.
She wasn’t and wouldn’t be the first, he thought as he idly played with the restored ring on his finger, but he hadn't thought it would be this early. Wixen had such a long life expectancy. But of course, they also tended to die in rather spectacular ways.
“How do we know all of this?”
A tear glistened on Hermione’s cheek as it fell into her collar. “Parvati. She’s the one who treated her, did every possible checkup she could think of. Including Occlumency, Priory Incantatem and magical exhaustion. Took some blood too, of course, but not enough for them to implement a treatment plan.”
Fuck. Poor Parvati. Distraught wouldn’t even cover it. Maybe he’d try to send Luna her way; she was bored since she came back from Norway, and she’d be the best out of all of them to help her go through this. George as well, maybe, if he felt like it. He’d know best, after all.
And because there was nothing good to answer to that, he just said, “Fuck.”
Hermione snorted through her incoming tears, a wet, disgusting, gurgling noise. “Yes, I would say it sums up the situation at hand rather well, considering… Well— all things considered.” She was so sweet, with her perfect, enunciated, posh accent. She always retreated behind it when she felt vulnerable.
“When?” he asked, knowing Hermione wouldn’t need him to explicate.
“Yesterday morning.”
“Any leaks?” If the Ministry got hold of this, it would be a political and administrative nightmare. It would be much easier for them to introduce a new species of magical beings through a treaty with the ‘Boy-Who-Lived’ rather than the death of a recognised war hero.
“Not that we know of. Parvati hounded her team until they agreed to sign secrecy contracts, and she contacted me once the time of death was declared.”
He sighed. “Alright, what would you need me to do?”
She smiled like she’d already won. Which wasn’t far off course. “We need information most of all. I think it would be good if you came to them as an ambassador, inform them of our existence, and what we could bring each other. It would be best if you make it pretty clear out of the gate that you’d want some samples and participants for experiments.” Hermione turned and opened her filing cabinet. “I’ve pre-written a treaty, but it can be open to modifications, of course.”
The rest of their afternoon passed quickly as they shared information, theories and plans. Around four, Harry groaned and stretched on the uncomfortable chair.
“I have to go, I have a potion I need to check in the lab, and I want to call Nicolas and Pernelle to ask if they’ve ever met these vampires.” He frowned. “Do you know why we’ve never heard of them?”
“No idea. That’s for you to find out.” She grinned. “Aren’t you so happy I called you?”
He left the office with a two-finger salute and her relieved laugh trailing after him.