Chapter Text
Well…that was it. The life she’d built hung from a thread.
Hermione lifted her coffee cup to her lips as everything crumbled around her. The warmth biting at her fingertips burning her nerves into stability. Any hope of saving their relationship was ravaged by the picture before her. Laid on the kitchen countertop was this morning’s edition of The Daily Prophet, and there was no denying that it was Ronald Weasley whose arms were wrapped around the blonde witch on the cover.
Hermione smiled bitterly, 'Of all the witches it had to be Brown' she thought shaking her head as she took a deep breath, desperately clinging on to her control.
She must have seemed calm to the unsuspecting eye, frozen still in her kitchen, failing to avoid making eye contact with the panic in Ron’s eyes. He pulled away from the kiss, widening his eyes in the flash, like the final light a deer sees before it smashes its life through a windscreen. Ron's life shattered with the flash of that camera. Brown’s eyes were gazing up at her ‘Won-Won’ oblivious. Hermione let out a bitter scoff, clearly the woman hadn’t matured past her empty-headedness at school.
The only outward sign of her inner turmoil was the painful grip she held on the counter as she sipped her coffee with a shaking hand, trying to understand why she felt numb standing on the edge of the cliff in her life. She should be crying, punching a wall, throwing Ron's things from their apartment window onto the street. But instead, she felt robotic, berating herself for being such a fool. She had simply wanted to believe that he cared about his career when he started spending extra time on cases, working late, and being 'too tired' when he returned. But what she had forgotten in her hopefulness was that Ron was content to stagnate in life. Ron had never really worked to push himself beyond being mediocre. Even during the war, he quit when the pressure got tough and she suspected he only became an Auror because Harry was. He lacked the creativity to come up with something himself. In her relief that he had finally some drive for the future, she hadn’t questioned it, and now her foolishness was splattered across the front page.
The kitchen cupboards tinted green and she rolled her eyes, puckering her mouth in distaste. Her horrible thoughts had summoned 'the love of her life.' She rolled her eyes. She could practically hear the panic in his stumble as he rushed out of the fireplace.
‘Mione!’ he shrieked in surprise, and she didn't even have to look at him to see the stupid shocked look on his face. She felt his eyes on her back, but she couldn't even acknowledge him. She just crossed her arms across her chest, holding her coffee cup to her mouth, watching the steam mist around the cup from her breath. He had stopped dead in the living room when he had seen her, she couldn't hear his feet stomping across the room yet. She hoped he was choking on his heart, but found she didn't really care either way somehow.
She raised the coffee cup to her mouth and took a drink as she ignored him. He probably wasn't expecting her to be home, she normally would have left for work already. The sound of his feet moving towards her made her cringe inwardly. Each step was slow, approaching her like a wild animal that he had no idea how to interact with. The quiet footsteps stopped abruptly and she knew he had seen it, his own shame broadcast.
He set his hands on the kitchen island between them, dropping his head to his chest, 'Mione, I can explain,’ he whispered, defeated.
Hermione found she still couldn’t look at him. The best she could manage was the blurred hint of ginger in her far peripheral as she stared at a magpie outside the window. They were supposed to be a symbol of bad luck on their own, but it was tragically ironic that her luck could get any worse.
‘What exactly did you come back to the flat for Ronald?’ Hermione said, slightly shocked by the coldness in her voice. She knew why he came back and that sickened her almost as much as his affair.
‘Well I…I…Mione please,’ Ron bumbled, suddenly sounding very childish.
‘Don’t call me that,’ she spoke deceptively calm, frowning into her coffee which had gone as cold as her demeanour,‘You came all the way back from your business trip,' she spat the last two words out as if they were poison, revealing the storm beneath her calm exterior, ‘hoping you could get rid of the Prophet before I saw it didn’t you?’
Ron’s silence was all she needed to tell her what she already knew. Not only was her boyfriend a liar but an idiot to boot. He hadn’t even thought this through enough to realise it was inevitable she’d eventually see the newspaper or someone would tell her. Had he even the foresight to try and stop the newspaper from printing or did he think he could shield her from it forever? Suddenly she understood why their relationship never made sense to anyone. It only added salt to the wound that he thought he could fool her. It was the worst part of it, the cheating they could have maybe worked out, but lying to her and trying to trick her was unforgivable.
The affair was common knowledge now and that stung Hermione’s pride than the horrid article sarcastically exclaiming a new Golden Trio. Hermione Granger- Brightest Witch of her Age-had been publically humiliated by the wizard behind her. By a wizard who thought he could fix this without her having to know about it. By a fool. She deserved more than that, she deserved more than him- he was dating out of his league.
She slammed her coffee cup on the counter, letting it shatter in front of her, coffee dripping down her kitchen counters onto the floor. Ron jolted forward as if to help, but she held her hand up as he took his first step, ‘I am going to work now Ronald, and I don’t expect to hear from you for the rest of the day. When I come home tonight I expect your things to be gone.’
Ron was speechless as Hermione lifted her handbag from the counter and walked past his gaping mouth to the fireplace without even looking at him. As she threw the floo powder she heard him call after her desperately, she closed her eyes and with them her heart. She couldn’t feel sympathy for this man. Not after what he had done.
The caverns of the ministry atrium felt dark and oppressive when she stepped out of one of the chimneys. She stopped still, feeling the anxiety pull in her stomach knowing she would have to face the masses who knew about her crumbled relationship. She inwardly shook herself, steeling herself against their judgement.
People stood around in groups, each one mirroring the other. Usually one of them would lean in and quietly gesture her way with a nod or a look, their companions turning not so discretely to gawk at her. She slammed her high heels into the dark floor, stretching her legs in long strides doing her best Malfoy impression. No matter what happened to them they just strutted arrogantly through it. They deserved every look of scorn chucked their way, but she had to admit they never seemed much affected by the disdain.
Some people looked down as soon as they saw her, giving her a wide girth when she passed them. The whispers and stares made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, but she kept her eyes pointed at a distant brick in the wall and refused to remove them. She channelled Draco Malfoy's best stone face, focusing on the sounds of her heels hitting the floor. She could lick her wounds later; a lion doesn’t show weakness. In her determination to avoid eye contact with anyone she didn’t see the pair of silver eyes locked on her from across the room, staring curiously at her nerve.
She tried not to show her relief when a lift was open when she arrived. It was nearing capacity but she walked in and stood next to the witches and wizards as she felt the lift go eerily silent. The tension in the lift catching in her lungs. Apparently, it was in someone else's too when a single cough rippled through the tense silence. This would be a long journey to the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.
She couldn’t bear to know what they thought of her- she was almost guaranteed that most people saw Ron's cheating as somehow her fault. She could almost hear the childish scoff of Pansy Parkinson telling her that goody-two-shoes Granger was too much of a prude for him. She felt like she could hear it in each uncomfortable throat clearing. What was worse than even that, were the pitying looks she felt on her back. It made the humiliation all the worse, but she held firm and stared at the point the doors joined together begging the gap would widen and she could leave.
She strode out almost as soon as the doors opened to the fourth floor, relieved to be free of the suffocating space. She didn't look at a single person in her department, she stared at her office door at the bottom of the corridor like a dancer picks a spot to stare when they spin. She hurled towards it and spun the handle, whooshing the door open in a flurry. She swept in and closed it behind her, pressing her back hard against it for stability. She closed her eyes and sighed, allowing herself to drop the weight of pretending to be stone.
The overwhelming urge to sob built in her chest as she was left alone. She realised that her tears weren’t necessarily about the end of her relationship, but mostly the humiliation and mourning of the years she had spent trying to be taken seriously in the Ministry. Many of the most important people in the Ministry had never been able to see her as anything but Harry Potter’s Muggle-born friend. To them, she might as well still be eighteen. Her extreme views, especially those involving house elves and werewolves, had contributed the most to this view- but she would not drop her campaigns for them. She had spent five years determinedly going after her goals, and this had eventually earned her at least a little bit of respect. She had only recently managed to get some welfare laws introduced to protect house elves from some of the cruelty at the hands of their masters, and she had planned to follow her trajectory towards legislation demanding basic rights like fair pay and holidays. She felt like half of the ministry would see her as the eighteen-year-old girl raving at the Wizengamot again.
She slammed her fist into the door in frustration. How could she face them demanding rights for the less fortunate creatures when half of them would be snickering at her and the other pitying her. Her emotions crept up behind her eyes as she felt a physical squeezing on her heart. She closed her eyes tight, took a deep slow breath and shook herself, that kind of grief would need to wait before she launches herself into a panic attack. She would bury herself in her work and try again. She was Hermione Granger; she doesn’t give up for anything she had to remind herself. It might even help her to pretend like everything was normal.
She walked over to her desk and slumped into her chair. She smiled when she realised her assistant, Lydia, had made her tea and it sat ready on her desk. She started to feel strangely emotional again as she realised it was the first nice thing someone had done for her since her life fell apart. She took a sip of the warm comfort and smiled, leaning into her chair as she started to feel a little better.
She sat forward and resolved herself to getting some work done. She looked down to her desk to see what memos had been left for her today. The smile was wiped from her face when she noticed the newspaper. That was a paper bomb on her desk. She slowly turned the paper over with two fingers as though it would explode in her face. All that looked back at her was the Minister of Magic, Shacklebolt, giving some sort of a speech. Lydia had removed the front page and left the rest of the newspaper. Tears prickled at the edge of her eyes, how silly of her to be getting so emotional about a simple act of kindness. She was suddenly glad of Harry and Ginny nagging about her accepting the Ministry’s offer of an assistant. The girl really was thoughtful, and on days like this she was glad of her.
Hermione opened the paper fully and read the opening line.
Ministry of Magic Proposes Marriage Law to Save Wizarding Britain.
She always knew the Prophet was still in the Ministry’s pocket but this was outrageous. The article had barely any real facts- just over-exaggerated statements about the supposed ‘crisis’. Hermione scoffed at the idea that they were all supposed to swallow this hogwash as real facts, all because a ‘source’ claimed them to be true.
One source from the Minister’s inner circle confirms, ‘Each year more and more pureblood families have been almost incapable of producing magical children. This could be the end of magic in Britain as we know it unless we take drastic action now.’
Hermione scoffed, rolling her eyes. A few squib children had been born to the sacred twenty-eight and now the whole of Wizarding Britain was at stake. Sometimes it felt like little had changed after the bloody war.
‘The public needn’t worry about their existing marriages, the law would only apply to unmarried witches and wizards. The ministry has no interest in breaking up families,’ the Minister emphasised at his speech at the Wizengamot yesterday, ‘The proposal in question, if put forward to vote, would require Muggle-borns to join with Pureblood families to produce the best chance of magical heirs. Half-bloods would be free to marry other half bloods, providing the couple are deemed likely to produce magical heirs. But strictly no marriage licences would be given to marriages containing more than one pureblood family or Muggle-born witches or wizards.’
‘Well there’s no need for you to worry Hermione. It’s not like you are going to be getting married soon,’ she laughed darkly as she sipped her tea, remembering her newly single status.
‘The Ministry really have no choice but to enforce marriages on the population,’ said another source who is supposedly in favour of the law, ‘there is even discussion of an amendment to the proposed law which would make it a requirement of all currently unattached Muggle-borns and pureblooded wizards and witches to undergo fertility testing to assign the best matches.’
Hermione spat out her tea and sat forward in her chair. What the source was hinting at was that this law wasn’t just encouraging people to marry outside of their blood status but…enforcing marriages. Hermione suddenly found the air hard to breathe, she sucked it in more rapidly but somehow it still seemed devoid of oxygen.
‘Hermione, think this through before you overreact,’ her first-year self scolded her in her head.
This was most likely just a scare tactic, encouraging people to marry now before they were forced to marry someone they didn’t choose later. Even if it wasn’t, the purebloods still had a strong enough hold on the Ministry that the law wouldn’t be passed. Right?
She set her tea on her desk and gathered her notes from yesterday’s meeting about the success of the new house-elf legislation. She straightened her papers and breathed a heavy sigh. That was all this law proposal was, a ploy to incite a baby boom. Her reinforcement still didn’t stop her feeling on edge about it but she needed to focus on rebuilding her reputation now. She had to come out looking strong or the Ministry would eat her alive.