[Fic] All's Well That Ends Well
Title: or Why Harry Potter Should Just STFU
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Canon-Compliant Including DH & The Epilogue *shock!horror*
Characters: Hermione Granger, Harry Potter, Ron Weasley
Warnings: Violence, Course Language, People Maiming and Zombie Gore
Category: Action, Humour, Crackish
Summary: Hermione really could just kick Harry in the teeth sometimes.
Disclaimer: Please Don’t Feed The Fictional Characters. Character not mine, no money made etc. etc. Zombies supplied by Bite The Hand That Feeds You Undead Farm.
Authors Note: Er … zombie crack. If you are splattered with brain matter while reading this, don’t say you weren’t warned. And the Anti-Cruelty Against Zombies Committee can suck it. Lots of zombies were harmed during the making of this fic. And one creepy old guy.
All’s Well That Ends Well
or
Why Harry Potter Should Just STFU
‘All was well.’
Hermione scoffed to herself. She could punch Harry in the face for making such a stupid comment. After everything they’d been through in their twenty five plus years of trio-ship, he should have known better.
Because really, if there was a better way to make Puck and the Gods of chaos and destiny start giggling and plotting than making a definitive statement on the goodness of life in general, Hermione wasn’t aware of it.
Indeed, all had been well. The kids were healthy and happy, she and Ron’s marriage was strong, everyone was satisfied in their jobs, and the rights to another of her handy little inventions had just last week been sold to Gringott’s for a disgustingly large amount of money. Apart from a little ache in her chest as she watched her oldest child board the Hogwarts Express, all had been very well. Grand, in fact.
And then, as they’d left King’s Cross, Harry had opened his big, fat, stupid mouth.
Moments after his thoughtless words the Ministry emergency medallions (patented to Granger Inc., thank you very much) around their necks had been vibrating and they’d shuffled Hugo off with Ginny and Lily and Apparated to a cramped closet on sub-level three of the Ministry of Magic through a tiny hole in the wards that only Auror’s knew about.
Ron’s elbow slamming into her boob in the enclosed space had been the first indication that the Fates were having a good old laugh at their expense. The zombies lurching through the corridor had been the next.
“Fucking hell in a hand basket.” Ron’s statement was so spot-on that Hermione couldn’t find it in her heart to thwap him around the head for cursing.
Painting the walls and floor in blood-splatter and chunks of decaying flesh, they fought their way up to the main levels and then quickly back-tracked out of the atrium when the massive mob of undead had started shuffling towards them, groaning an eerie chorus of hunger.
“You’re an idiot, Harry,” Hermione huffed as she plucked Ron’s conjured sword out of his hands and relieved Marjorie Quill from the Magical Trading Standard’s office of her head. She’d never really liked her anyway.
“What did I do?” he whined, throwing a reductor into the encroaching crowd and giving them a moment’s head start.
“You spoke,” she growled, pushing sweat lathered hair off her forehead. “Opened your big mouth and spoke. Don’t do it again.”
“Yes, mum,” he grunted, yanking open the door to her office.
The three hurried inside and slammed it behind them, Ron and Harry standing back so Hermione could cast every locking and reinforcing charm on it that she had in her vast armoury. Ron slumped into her visitor’s chair, while Harry leaned against the wall and Hermione slid down the door.
“What the fuck is going on?” her husband wheezed. “I recognized them, but I don’t remember them ever trying to eat me before.”
Harry, panting heavily, said, “Zombies. Fucking zombies.”
“Like that fil-ium thing that you and Hermione had me watch?”
“Film,” Hermione corrected automatically. “And yes, like that. Dead cells reanimated, but only with the basic need to feed - on living cells.”
“How?” Harry questioned, slumping to the floor. “It’s one thing in a movie, it’s another thing to actually be happening, here in the Ministry of Magic.”
“I bet those fucking Unspeakable’s had something to do with it,” Ron growled. “Always playing around with things better left alone and then waiting for us to clean up their mess. Like that bloody slime demon they summoned and then ‘lost’ that we had to go and hunt down. Bloody thing’s goop was coming out of my pores for months.”
“We need a plan,” Harry stated, mostly ignoring his best mate’s ranting.
Hermione, busy pulling bits of brain matter out of her hair, looked up at the quiet that followed and found both men staring at her. She glared back. “What? Why is it always me that has to come up with the plan? You’re the dunce that got us into this mess, Harry, so why don’t you think of one? And don’t you smirk, Oh Great Strategic Genius. Shouldn’t you be the master planner?”
Harry and Ron exchanged a glance and then Ron slunk out of his chair and shuffled towards her, reaching out a hand to caress her cheek. Which admittedly would have been a very persuasive gesture, if only his hand wasn’t leaving a trail of coagulated blood on her face.
“You’re the smart one, love,” he told her with that stupid goofy half-grin of his - the same one that she’d always claimed was responsible for Rose’s conception. “You do the plan thing, me and Harry follow it, screw it up, and then you bail our arses out. Way it’s always been.”
She glared at him. “What the hell would you two dunderheads do if I weren’t around?”
They shared another look, then Harry shrugged and said, “Wing it and hope for the best,” at the same time Ron told her, “Die.”
She stood, effectively removing herself from Ron’s reach, and then checked the floo in her office. Not working, of course. Because honestly, that would just make things far too easy.
“We need to get to the Minister’s office and deactivate the emergency shut-down. Once the floo’s are open and the wards are dropped, we can set the self-destruct and get the hell out of here.”
“What if there are survivors in the building?” Harry asked, his bloody hero-complex coming to the forefront. Hermione briefly wondered when he would tear his shirt open to reveal his spandex costume.
The intercom came on for the fifth time since they’d arrived, the Minister’s voice loud and strong, “Emergency Code Four. Emergency Code Four. All Ministry employee’s are to follow Code Four procedures.”
Hermione nodded to the speaker. “General announcement. We tell them they have five minutes to get out of the building and hope they can.”
“But what if they can’t?” he pestered.
She had to resist rolling her eyes. He was always so hell bent on doing what he thought was right that he often didn’t see he was being a complete idiot.
“Harry, our main priority has to be containing the outbreak. With the lockdown in place, unless anyone who was infected got out through the Auror’s hole before it spread to their brain, then it’s focused in the Ministry. We blow up the Ministry, we contain the outbreak and the whole fucking planet doesn’t face a zombie apocalypse.”
She was sure it was her swearing that got through to him - it always seemed to startle her boys into doing whatever she told them to, so she considered it one of her secret weapons - but finally Harry nodded. “Alright then. Minister’s office.”
Ron groaned. “Tell me we don’t have to run and scream and fight all the way there.”
Harry agreed, “I don’t remember it being this hard when we were seventeen.”
“We’re old now, mate,” Ron said sadly and the two took a long moment to mourn their lost youth.
Hermione, resisting the urge to smack them both, gave her wand a flick. A black outline of the Ministry appeared before her, blueprints laying themselves bare. She studied it a long moment, nodded, and then flicked her wand again. Immediately, the schematic became heavily populated by red dots. Most notably, a large group just outside her door.
She didn’t even have to explain to the two men in her life that the red mass outside the only exit to her office were their former colleagues. Both saw the image and paled drastically.
“Bugger,” she muttered, frowning in thought. A long moment, in which the boys just stared at her and waited for her to come up with something brilliant to help them escape, and then Hermione told them, “Time for a bit of tandem, I think. Ron, on three, you’re going to open the door. Harry, you and I will hit that mass out there with reductor’s, the most powerful we can manage.”
They nodded, Ron asking, “And then?” because this was Hermione and surely she had something utterly genius up her sleeve.
She gave them a blank look. “Then what?”
“What’s the plan?”
“I just told you the plan.”
Harry and Ron exchanged a look, before Harry asked, “Open the door and shoot? That’s the plan?”
“Yes. And then run.”
“Run?”
“Like hell.”
“Oh.”
Another look. Harry lifted his eyebrows, Ron shook his head. Harry tilted his head to the left twice, Ron's brows rose and then furrowed. Harry scrunched up his nose, Ron's eyes crossed and then flicked to Hermione. Harry blinked three times, Ron shrugged and finally he commented, “Better than anything I can think of. Minister’s office, then?”
Hermione had taken no notice of the spastic facial expressions, instead taking the time to ready herself. With a flick of her wand she had transfigured her sensible work slacks and blouse into shorter, tighter articles of clothing. She pondered her knee high boots - dragon-hide and comfortable, but with a heel that was still decidedly feminine, they’d been thirty percent off and she hadn’t been able to resist them - and left them as they were.
Once she was done Ron was eyeing her visible thigh with a stupid grin, but Harry was giving her an odd look. “What?” she asked him and he frowned, his eyes flicking to her now more exposed cleavage.
“It’s what you do,” she told him, rolling her eyes.
Because it was. There were zombies to fight and she was the heroine, she couldn’t very well do that properly wearing Ministry acceptable robes. And with that thought, a letter opener became a machete and she was good to go.
“Right then,” she prompted and took her place in front of the door, Harry moving to stand beside her, wands at the ready.
After so long as a team - because even after the war they’d never stopped being the trio - they easily moved in synch. As if it had been choreographed, at the exact same moment that Hermione shouted, “Three!” Ron blew the door open and she and Harry blew a hole through the horde waiting on the other side.
The pink mist that used to be their co-workers had barely materialized over the Auror’s bullpen before the three of them were moving. Harry kept blasting holes through their path, Ron cleaved a wide berth around himself with both wand and sword , and Hermione’s machete flashed with years of pent-up neurotic frustration.
It easily chopped through the dead skin on the neck of a former Ministry accountant and his head slid neatly from his shoulders. To her right, Ron severed Terry Boot’s spinal cord, muttering, “Good riddance,” as he did so.
Boot had flirted with Hermione for years, feeling as if she should be with someone who was more intellectual and he and Ron had clashed often. Hermione had always been of the mind that it was Ravenclaw flirting, so it didn’t really count.
Still, she rolled her eyes at her husband and then kept pushing forward. Running, they made it to the next level up. She moved to jump over one of Harry’s victim’s, what was left of them anyway and growled when her heel sank into their open chest cavity. Dragon hide was notoriously resilient, but rotting flesh had to be difficult to remove. If she lost these shoes because of this, she was going to shove her wand up Harry’s nose and put bat-bogey’s in his brain.
A moan in her ear was the only warning she had before a decrepit hand had grabbed her by the arm and started dragging her backwards. When she saw the face of her attacker, she scowled. The hand was not decrepit because it was infected, the man had just been really, really old. And it was not the first time he’d grabbed her without her consent. Lecherous old bastard was a member of the Wizengamot she’d had run-ins with before.
A slicing hex from Harry relieved him of his hand and several swings of Hermione’s letter opener took care of the rest of him, blood spraying from every gash she inflicted. They all paused for a moment to look down at the body.
“Er,” Ron started, eyebrows raised. “Hermione, I don’t think he was infected.”
A moment, then, “Nonetheless,” was her response as she urged her boys forward.
Just outside the Minister’s office was another despondent figure, groaning and shuffling. Minister’s secretary Hannah Abbot lurched towards them. They weren’t friends, but Hermione didn’t hate her, so before she hacked her head off, she brought forth the memory of the time Hannah had got quite pissed at the ten year reunion and groped Ron unashamedly.
“Pity,” Ron murmured as they moved past her body and Hermione shot him a glare. “Not like that!” he exclaimed, his hands rising in surrender. “Well, I won’t say that some poor bloke won’t miss her because she’s a pretty deft hand with the --“ He quickly stopped speaking when he saw the look on his wife’s face. “Just a shame is all,” he mumbled, following Harry to the door. “Wasn’t all bad, was she?”
The trailing horde had gained ground as they’d dealt with the Hufflepuff, so they quickly locked themselves in the Minister’s office, breathing a sigh of relief when the door was shut firmly behind them.
Only to raise their weapons again at a hungry groan in the room. A sliding sound reached their ears and they all watched in disgusted fascination as the Minister of Magic dragged himself from behind his desk, reaching for them and biting at the air.
“Well,” Harry shrugged. “It’s not like we voted for him.”
Then he borrowed Ron’s sword and casually wandered over to the Minister, standing just out of his reach. Raising it like he was born to wield it, Harry said, “Sorry, Minister,” and then brought it down with force.
The head rolled on the floor from side to side for a moment as the body slumped, then Harry returned the sword to his best mate and told Hermione, “Do your thing.”
Carefully stepping over the headless cadaver, Hermione rounded the Minister’s desk and sat down in his chair, opening the bottom drawer and muttering a long string of Latin at it.
“Looks pretty good there, don’t you think, Harry?”
“Might be in with a shot at the job now, I reckon,” Harry responded. “The whole government is probably dead. And we’re about to blow up the Ministry.”
Ron grinned like Hugo on Christmas morning. “Been wanting to do that since fifth year.”
As if they were two little boys up to no good, Harry returned the grin. “Me too.”
The drawer's false bottom shimmered away. The three of them had had top level security clearance since the end of the war with Voldemort, back when Kingsley Shacklebolt was the Minister and had trusted the trio above any others in what had been a horribly corrupt government, so Hermione knew exactly what she was doing.
It would have been handy, back in what would have been their seventh year at Hogwarts, to have known about the self-destruct spells in place. When they’d broken in to steal Slytherin’s locket from the vile Umbridge, they could have just blown up the building on their way out and saved themselves a lot of trouble.
She inserted her wand into a small hole in the bottom of the drawer, and then called her best friend over to do the same. “One, two, three,” Hermione counted and at the same moment, they sent a burst of their magic. Runes on the bottom of the drawer flashed and then stayed brightly lit, the top most one beginning to fade to show the countdown.
“Five minutes,” Hermione said and then pulled an old fashioned microphone over on the desk, motioning for Harry.
A click, a burst of static, and then Harry said, “This building will self destruct in five minutes. Anyone still alive and uninfected, the wards will be dropped momentarily. Please rendezvous at the designated area. You’ve got five minutes to get out.”
Hermione set his message for repeat and then stood, stepping up to a stone basin that looked an awful lot like a pensieve but was actually what Hermione had named a Ward Pool - patented to Granger Inc.
She swirled her wand in it, banishing strands as she found them and once it was empty the fire in the Minister’s office burst to life. That done, they stood together in the centre of the office for a moment, silent.
“Well,” started Ron, “We’re about to blow up the Ministry of Magic.” Then he grinned. “Should’ve done this years ago.”
Hermione rolled her eyes. “Hundreds dead, countless magical artefacts lost, and you’re making jokes. Our government has just been toppled, you know. It’s going to be chaos for a while.”
Another beat of silence and then Harry, bless his daft soul, said, “Could have been worse.”
Hermione smacked him around the head. But before he could even get out his “Ow!” something was thumping against the door. Something far too heavy to be the average zombie.
“Look what you’ve done,” she hissed at her best friend. “I told you to keep your mouth shut.”
They started edging towards the floo, but Hermione could feel the strands of her magic that held the door closed tightly snapping back to her. They didn’t have the time for all three of them to get out and no matter what wards were taken down, there was no way to remove the anti-apparition field from the Minister’s office, as it had been spelled into the walls.
So instead of running, they formed a tight semi-circle, her boys on either side of her, and lifted their weapons, ready to fight whatever the hell was coming their way.
“All’s well,” Hermione muttered bitterly. “Could have been worse.”
The door smashed in in a shower of splinters and three sets of eyes widened at the abomination that more than filled the doorway and started eyeing them - with all four of its eyes - like Hagrid eyed treacle tart.
Somewhere, the Gods were laughing their arses off.
“Really, Harry, I could just kick you in the fucking head.”
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Canon-Compliant Including DH & The Epilogue *shock!horror*
Characters: Hermione Granger, Harry Potter, Ron Weasley
Warnings: Violence, Course Language, People Maiming and Zombie Gore
Category: Action, Humour, Crackish
Summary: Hermione really could just kick Harry in the teeth sometimes.
Disclaimer: Please Don’t Feed The Fictional Characters. Character not mine, no money made etc. etc. Zombies supplied by Bite The Hand That Feeds You Undead Farm.
Authors Note: Er … zombie crack. If you are splattered with brain matter while reading this, don’t say you weren’t warned. And the Anti-Cruelty Against Zombies Committee can suck it. Lots of zombies were harmed during the making of this fic. And one creepy old guy.
All’s Well That Ends Well
or
Why Harry Potter Should Just STFU
‘All was well.’
Hermione scoffed to herself. She could punch Harry in the face for making such a stupid comment. After everything they’d been through in their twenty five plus years of trio-ship, he should have known better.
Because really, if there was a better way to make Puck and the Gods of chaos and destiny start giggling and plotting than making a definitive statement on the goodness of life in general, Hermione wasn’t aware of it.
Indeed, all had been well. The kids were healthy and happy, she and Ron’s marriage was strong, everyone was satisfied in their jobs, and the rights to another of her handy little inventions had just last week been sold to Gringott’s for a disgustingly large amount of money. Apart from a little ache in her chest as she watched her oldest child board the Hogwarts Express, all had been very well. Grand, in fact.
And then, as they’d left King’s Cross, Harry had opened his big, fat, stupid mouth.
Moments after his thoughtless words the Ministry emergency medallions (patented to Granger Inc., thank you very much) around their necks had been vibrating and they’d shuffled Hugo off with Ginny and Lily and Apparated to a cramped closet on sub-level three of the Ministry of Magic through a tiny hole in the wards that only Auror’s knew about.
Ron’s elbow slamming into her boob in the enclosed space had been the first indication that the Fates were having a good old laugh at their expense. The zombies lurching through the corridor had been the next.
“Fucking hell in a hand basket.” Ron’s statement was so spot-on that Hermione couldn’t find it in her heart to thwap him around the head for cursing.
Painting the walls and floor in blood-splatter and chunks of decaying flesh, they fought their way up to the main levels and then quickly back-tracked out of the atrium when the massive mob of undead had started shuffling towards them, groaning an eerie chorus of hunger.
“You’re an idiot, Harry,” Hermione huffed as she plucked Ron’s conjured sword out of his hands and relieved Marjorie Quill from the Magical Trading Standard’s office of her head. She’d never really liked her anyway.
“What did I do?” he whined, throwing a reductor into the encroaching crowd and giving them a moment’s head start.
“You spoke,” she growled, pushing sweat lathered hair off her forehead. “Opened your big mouth and spoke. Don’t do it again.”
“Yes, mum,” he grunted, yanking open the door to her office.
The three hurried inside and slammed it behind them, Ron and Harry standing back so Hermione could cast every locking and reinforcing charm on it that she had in her vast armoury. Ron slumped into her visitor’s chair, while Harry leaned against the wall and Hermione slid down the door.
“What the fuck is going on?” her husband wheezed. “I recognized them, but I don’t remember them ever trying to eat me before.”
Harry, panting heavily, said, “Zombies. Fucking zombies.”
“Like that fil-ium thing that you and Hermione had me watch?”
“Film,” Hermione corrected automatically. “And yes, like that. Dead cells reanimated, but only with the basic need to feed - on living cells.”
“How?” Harry questioned, slumping to the floor. “It’s one thing in a movie, it’s another thing to actually be happening, here in the Ministry of Magic.”
“I bet those fucking Unspeakable’s had something to do with it,” Ron growled. “Always playing around with things better left alone and then waiting for us to clean up their mess. Like that bloody slime demon they summoned and then ‘lost’ that we had to go and hunt down. Bloody thing’s goop was coming out of my pores for months.”
“We need a plan,” Harry stated, mostly ignoring his best mate’s ranting.
Hermione, busy pulling bits of brain matter out of her hair, looked up at the quiet that followed and found both men staring at her. She glared back. “What? Why is it always me that has to come up with the plan? You’re the dunce that got us into this mess, Harry, so why don’t you think of one? And don’t you smirk, Oh Great Strategic Genius. Shouldn’t you be the master planner?”
Harry and Ron exchanged a glance and then Ron slunk out of his chair and shuffled towards her, reaching out a hand to caress her cheek. Which admittedly would have been a very persuasive gesture, if only his hand wasn’t leaving a trail of coagulated blood on her face.
“You’re the smart one, love,” he told her with that stupid goofy half-grin of his - the same one that she’d always claimed was responsible for Rose’s conception. “You do the plan thing, me and Harry follow it, screw it up, and then you bail our arses out. Way it’s always been.”
She glared at him. “What the hell would you two dunderheads do if I weren’t around?”
They shared another look, then Harry shrugged and said, “Wing it and hope for the best,” at the same time Ron told her, “Die.”
She stood, effectively removing herself from Ron’s reach, and then checked the floo in her office. Not working, of course. Because honestly, that would just make things far too easy.
“We need to get to the Minister’s office and deactivate the emergency shut-down. Once the floo’s are open and the wards are dropped, we can set the self-destruct and get the hell out of here.”
“What if there are survivors in the building?” Harry asked, his bloody hero-complex coming to the forefront. Hermione briefly wondered when he would tear his shirt open to reveal his spandex costume.
The intercom came on for the fifth time since they’d arrived, the Minister’s voice loud and strong, “Emergency Code Four. Emergency Code Four. All Ministry employee’s are to follow Code Four procedures.”
Hermione nodded to the speaker. “General announcement. We tell them they have five minutes to get out of the building and hope they can.”
“But what if they can’t?” he pestered.
She had to resist rolling her eyes. He was always so hell bent on doing what he thought was right that he often didn’t see he was being a complete idiot.
“Harry, our main priority has to be containing the outbreak. With the lockdown in place, unless anyone who was infected got out through the Auror’s hole before it spread to their brain, then it’s focused in the Ministry. We blow up the Ministry, we contain the outbreak and the whole fucking planet doesn’t face a zombie apocalypse.”
She was sure it was her swearing that got through to him - it always seemed to startle her boys into doing whatever she told them to, so she considered it one of her secret weapons - but finally Harry nodded. “Alright then. Minister’s office.”
Ron groaned. “Tell me we don’t have to run and scream and fight all the way there.”
Harry agreed, “I don’t remember it being this hard when we were seventeen.”
“We’re old now, mate,” Ron said sadly and the two took a long moment to mourn their lost youth.
Hermione, resisting the urge to smack them both, gave her wand a flick. A black outline of the Ministry appeared before her, blueprints laying themselves bare. She studied it a long moment, nodded, and then flicked her wand again. Immediately, the schematic became heavily populated by red dots. Most notably, a large group just outside her door.
She didn’t even have to explain to the two men in her life that the red mass outside the only exit to her office were their former colleagues. Both saw the image and paled drastically.
“Bugger,” she muttered, frowning in thought. A long moment, in which the boys just stared at her and waited for her to come up with something brilliant to help them escape, and then Hermione told them, “Time for a bit of tandem, I think. Ron, on three, you’re going to open the door. Harry, you and I will hit that mass out there with reductor’s, the most powerful we can manage.”
They nodded, Ron asking, “And then?” because this was Hermione and surely she had something utterly genius up her sleeve.
She gave them a blank look. “Then what?”
“What’s the plan?”
“I just told you the plan.”
Harry and Ron exchanged a look, before Harry asked, “Open the door and shoot? That’s the plan?”
“Yes. And then run.”
“Run?”
“Like hell.”
“Oh.”
Another look. Harry lifted his eyebrows, Ron shook his head. Harry tilted his head to the left twice, Ron's brows rose and then furrowed. Harry scrunched up his nose, Ron's eyes crossed and then flicked to Hermione. Harry blinked three times, Ron shrugged and finally he commented, “Better than anything I can think of. Minister’s office, then?”
Hermione had taken no notice of the spastic facial expressions, instead taking the time to ready herself. With a flick of her wand she had transfigured her sensible work slacks and blouse into shorter, tighter articles of clothing. She pondered her knee high boots - dragon-hide and comfortable, but with a heel that was still decidedly feminine, they’d been thirty percent off and she hadn’t been able to resist them - and left them as they were.
Once she was done Ron was eyeing her visible thigh with a stupid grin, but Harry was giving her an odd look. “What?” she asked him and he frowned, his eyes flicking to her now more exposed cleavage.
“It’s what you do,” she told him, rolling her eyes.
Because it was. There were zombies to fight and she was the heroine, she couldn’t very well do that properly wearing Ministry acceptable robes. And with that thought, a letter opener became a machete and she was good to go.
“Right then,” she prompted and took her place in front of the door, Harry moving to stand beside her, wands at the ready.
After so long as a team - because even after the war they’d never stopped being the trio - they easily moved in synch. As if it had been choreographed, at the exact same moment that Hermione shouted, “Three!” Ron blew the door open and she and Harry blew a hole through the horde waiting on the other side.
The pink mist that used to be their co-workers had barely materialized over the Auror’s bullpen before the three of them were moving. Harry kept blasting holes through their path, Ron cleaved a wide berth around himself with both wand and sword , and Hermione’s machete flashed with years of pent-up neurotic frustration.
It easily chopped through the dead skin on the neck of a former Ministry accountant and his head slid neatly from his shoulders. To her right, Ron severed Terry Boot’s spinal cord, muttering, “Good riddance,” as he did so.
Boot had flirted with Hermione for years, feeling as if she should be with someone who was more intellectual and he and Ron had clashed often. Hermione had always been of the mind that it was Ravenclaw flirting, so it didn’t really count.
Still, she rolled her eyes at her husband and then kept pushing forward. Running, they made it to the next level up. She moved to jump over one of Harry’s victim’s, what was left of them anyway and growled when her heel sank into their open chest cavity. Dragon hide was notoriously resilient, but rotting flesh had to be difficult to remove. If she lost these shoes because of this, she was going to shove her wand up Harry’s nose and put bat-bogey’s in his brain.
A moan in her ear was the only warning she had before a decrepit hand had grabbed her by the arm and started dragging her backwards. When she saw the face of her attacker, she scowled. The hand was not decrepit because it was infected, the man had just been really, really old. And it was not the first time he’d grabbed her without her consent. Lecherous old bastard was a member of the Wizengamot she’d had run-ins with before.
A slicing hex from Harry relieved him of his hand and several swings of Hermione’s letter opener took care of the rest of him, blood spraying from every gash she inflicted. They all paused for a moment to look down at the body.
“Er,” Ron started, eyebrows raised. “Hermione, I don’t think he was infected.”
A moment, then, “Nonetheless,” was her response as she urged her boys forward.
Just outside the Minister’s office was another despondent figure, groaning and shuffling. Minister’s secretary Hannah Abbot lurched towards them. They weren’t friends, but Hermione didn’t hate her, so before she hacked her head off, she brought forth the memory of the time Hannah had got quite pissed at the ten year reunion and groped Ron unashamedly.
“Pity,” Ron murmured as they moved past her body and Hermione shot him a glare. “Not like that!” he exclaimed, his hands rising in surrender. “Well, I won’t say that some poor bloke won’t miss her because she’s a pretty deft hand with the --“ He quickly stopped speaking when he saw the look on his wife’s face. “Just a shame is all,” he mumbled, following Harry to the door. “Wasn’t all bad, was she?”
The trailing horde had gained ground as they’d dealt with the Hufflepuff, so they quickly locked themselves in the Minister’s office, breathing a sigh of relief when the door was shut firmly behind them.
Only to raise their weapons again at a hungry groan in the room. A sliding sound reached their ears and they all watched in disgusted fascination as the Minister of Magic dragged himself from behind his desk, reaching for them and biting at the air.
“Well,” Harry shrugged. “It’s not like we voted for him.”
Then he borrowed Ron’s sword and casually wandered over to the Minister, standing just out of his reach. Raising it like he was born to wield it, Harry said, “Sorry, Minister,” and then brought it down with force.
The head rolled on the floor from side to side for a moment as the body slumped, then Harry returned the sword to his best mate and told Hermione, “Do your thing.”
Carefully stepping over the headless cadaver, Hermione rounded the Minister’s desk and sat down in his chair, opening the bottom drawer and muttering a long string of Latin at it.
“Looks pretty good there, don’t you think, Harry?”
“Might be in with a shot at the job now, I reckon,” Harry responded. “The whole government is probably dead. And we’re about to blow up the Ministry.”
Ron grinned like Hugo on Christmas morning. “Been wanting to do that since fifth year.”
As if they were two little boys up to no good, Harry returned the grin. “Me too.”
The drawer's false bottom shimmered away. The three of them had had top level security clearance since the end of the war with Voldemort, back when Kingsley Shacklebolt was the Minister and had trusted the trio above any others in what had been a horribly corrupt government, so Hermione knew exactly what she was doing.
It would have been handy, back in what would have been their seventh year at Hogwarts, to have known about the self-destruct spells in place. When they’d broken in to steal Slytherin’s locket from the vile Umbridge, they could have just blown up the building on their way out and saved themselves a lot of trouble.
She inserted her wand into a small hole in the bottom of the drawer, and then called her best friend over to do the same. “One, two, three,” Hermione counted and at the same moment, they sent a burst of their magic. Runes on the bottom of the drawer flashed and then stayed brightly lit, the top most one beginning to fade to show the countdown.
“Five minutes,” Hermione said and then pulled an old fashioned microphone over on the desk, motioning for Harry.
A click, a burst of static, and then Harry said, “This building will self destruct in five minutes. Anyone still alive and uninfected, the wards will be dropped momentarily. Please rendezvous at the designated area. You’ve got five minutes to get out.”
Hermione set his message for repeat and then stood, stepping up to a stone basin that looked an awful lot like a pensieve but was actually what Hermione had named a Ward Pool - patented to Granger Inc.
She swirled her wand in it, banishing strands as she found them and once it was empty the fire in the Minister’s office burst to life. That done, they stood together in the centre of the office for a moment, silent.
“Well,” started Ron, “We’re about to blow up the Ministry of Magic.” Then he grinned. “Should’ve done this years ago.”
Hermione rolled her eyes. “Hundreds dead, countless magical artefacts lost, and you’re making jokes. Our government has just been toppled, you know. It’s going to be chaos for a while.”
Another beat of silence and then Harry, bless his daft soul, said, “Could have been worse.”
Hermione smacked him around the head. But before he could even get out his “Ow!” something was thumping against the door. Something far too heavy to be the average zombie.
“Look what you’ve done,” she hissed at her best friend. “I told you to keep your mouth shut.”
They started edging towards the floo, but Hermione could feel the strands of her magic that held the door closed tightly snapping back to her. They didn’t have the time for all three of them to get out and no matter what wards were taken down, there was no way to remove the anti-apparition field from the Minister’s office, as it had been spelled into the walls.
So instead of running, they formed a tight semi-circle, her boys on either side of her, and lifted their weapons, ready to fight whatever the hell was coming their way.
“All’s well,” Hermione muttered bitterly. “Could have been worse.”
The door smashed in in a shower of splinters and three sets of eyes widened at the abomination that more than filled the doorway and started eyeing them - with all four of its eyes - like Hagrid eyed treacle tart.
Somewhere, the Gods were laughing their arses off.
“Really, Harry, I could just kick you in the fucking head.”