Certain Dark Things || Book Five

xliii. the inquisitorial squad

November swept over the castle with a speed that took Hermione's breath away.

It felt as if the weeks had been crawling by with all the speed of a dazed flobberworm, and all of a sudden the month changed, and the days passed too quickly, the equinox and its looming election marked much too close on Hermione's busy calendar.

She read the papers every morning like a woman possessed, devouring every bit of information she could get on Amelia Bones, Gaunt, and how their platforms were being laid for the public. Gaunt naturally picked at the faults of others and those he said actively worked against his establishment, while Bones struck a surprisingly strong contrast. Though she claimed to have never had aspirations for the Minister's office, she wasn't a foolish witch; she knew how to campaign, and she knew what people wanted to hear.

Time in office had worked against Gaunt; those who might have otherwise supported his agenda were growing disillusioned by his leadership, pressuring members of the Wizengamot to vote with their community rather than solely on their family's own feelings. The unremitting strictness of his anti-Muggle policies had negatively impacted the economy; many wizard craftsmen procured their raw materials through the Muggle markets, and one of Gaunt's early moves had been to outlaw that practice, assuming wizards would fill the gap for production. It was a sound idea—if the British Wizarding world hadn't just suffered a debilitating war. There simply weren't enough people.

Coupled with that was the prevalent extinction of established families who left no one to claim their inheritance. It meant the goblins reclaimed many vaults in Gringotts and any wealth therein—taking thousands and thousands of Galleons out of the market by putting them back into the hands of a foreign nation. The goblins despised Gaunt, and they throttled the dispersion of currency among Wizarding kind. Attitudes were tense, and the public had been demanding Gaunt do something for years.

Bones, in contrast, had tackled the issue from a moderate stance. Magical Britain didn't react well to radicalism, change, or unfamiliar faces; Bones fed into their desire for tradition, being a recognizable, pure-blood witch while also promising to fix those issues the public thought Gaunt had failed to deliver on. Hermione had doubts how much change she could really affect—but, at the end of the day, a daft goose would be a better choice than Gaunt for Minister. So long as he was out of office, the Wizarding world could start uprooting his insidious influence.

It all seemed to be happening too quickly and not quickly at all. Hermione felt like an owl trapped in tar, frantically beating her wings while getting nowhere at all. All the while, her stress concerning the midterms continued to mount. Horrors and fears of failing every class filled her dreams, waking Hermione in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat.

"You're going to burn yourself out," Elara had told her as she handed over a cloudy vial. "And overdose on Calming Draught. This is the third I've gotten from Pomfrey, and she's not an idiot. She must know I'm giving them to you after you reached your limit."

"I just need the one," Hermione had lied, because she'd needed another the next morning, and the morning after, just to get through the day without breaking down into tears as she imagined horrid what-ifs and possible futures wherein she didn't have any accreditation or means of earning a living.

"That's dumb," Harriet had said with her typical blunt candor. "There's no future in which Hermione Granger can't find a way to make a living. There's not future in which me or Elara or Sirius or Remus would ever let you be—what? Destitute? Don't be a twit."

Gruff reassurances aside, Hermione still worried, and not just about her own fate, but the fate of all Muggle-borns and pure-bloods and anything in between. She worried about her parents and wondered if they were doing well in a reality where magic didn't steal their child away.