Tyger! Tyger!: Tyger! Tyger! by Bloodcult Of

Tyger! Tyger!: Tyger! Tyger! by Bloodcult of Freud Disclaimer: I didn't not invent this universe. I did not invent the principal characters. I did not write any of the first five Harry Potter books. I will not write the next two. I didn't even come up with the basic premise of this story. I'm a two-bit fic hack. It would not be worth the effort to sue me. Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize thy fire? And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And why thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors grasp? When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? - William Blake It all ended. Presaged by a rain of blood. Seconded by an impenetrable fog. Two weeks after their 7th year at school started, it all ended. Ron killed three Death Eaters before one he had left cursed his wand hand into oblivion. After that, the rain turned from blood to fire. A horrid inhuman shrieking had been going on for hours and hours by the time she was able to find Harry. All Hermione wanted to do was get to her friend, despite that fact that when she found Harry she was almost guaranteed to find Voldemort. Voldemort. Why did Harry always have to face him alone? She finally found the room, but Dumbledore held her back. "This is Harry's battle to win or lose." It was a tribute to the insanity of the moment that she considered trying to fight her way past him for an instant. Then they heard a voice, like Harry's only deeper, only a monument to wrath and rage, like Harry's if Harry had an inhuman monster hiding in the depths his soul. "Avada Kedavra," the Harry Thing spat. A scream. Shouts of "No," "NO." But the animal shrieking continued. Dumbledore threw the door open with his own hands. The cluster of wizards who had assembled there, held back like Hermione herself, pushed through the door. One of Harry's glittery green eyes hung uselessly from its socket, but he was still standing. Tom Riddle lay dead on the floor greyish fluid leaking from the corner of his mouth. The painful noise was still ringing out. There was a knot of Death Eaters, their wands trained on a single target, muttering what seemed a continuous string of "Crucio, Crucio, Crucio." Hermione recognised Lucius Malfoy, Bellatrix Lestrange, and Mcnair in the crowd. It took her a moment to realise who the victim was. He hung upside down and his face was crusted with vomit. Snape. Somewhere in the room she heard rather than saw Draco Malfoy, his cry was inarticulate, the only word she recognised was "Father." The tall blonde boy raised his wand. "Let him go." Lucius Malfoy looked at his son and sneered, "Your teacher is a traitor, the greatest traitor of them all." "Let him go," Draco insisted quietly. Lucius shook his head. "Avada..." Draco began, his wand pointed squarely at his father. "Avada Kedavra," Lucius Malfoy pointed his wand and killed his only son with lightning speed. Whirling around, he turned and executed the Death Eaters who stood nearest him, including one Hermione recognised as his own wife, Narcissa. Real time seemed to start again after Lucius dropped his wand. Of all people, Harry, stumbling and one eyed, insisted on carrying Snape's shaking body from the blood spattered burning room. Not even Dumbledore dared stop him. That was how it all ended. It was also how it all began. Three weeks later they were back in school. Neither Ron nor Harry would ever play Quidditch again, but they didn't seem to mind much. Harry combed his hair to cover the puckered blank socket. She had to admit it gave a certain rakish affect. He kept Ginny Weasley within arm's reach like his life depended on it. For reasons that could never be explained properly, Ron needed an entirely new wand now that he was forced to change wand hands. But he was doing fine using the stump of his arm for inane practical joke after inane practical joke; in fact, they were all fine and having the time of their lives. If it all seemed a bit forced and hysterical at times, she imagined that would wear off eventually. If Snape was not suddenly transformed into the picture of good cheer it was understandable, if anything, the man seemed tired. As though he needed nothing so much as a six-month long nap before he could get back to insulting his students with conviction again. He no longer tormented Harry in the classroom; instead, he seemed intent on pretending Harry Potter had ceased to exist. Hermione, for one, was surprised that he hadn't gone mad. More so when she learned the Potions master had survived more rounds of the Cruciatus Curse than any other wizard in the medical records at St. Mungo's. More than the Longbottoms. Yet he was as apparently sane as ever. He did finally have his Order of Merlin, though. Lucius Malfoy, ironically, emerged unscathed. He pled Imperio; after all, what else would drive a man to take part in the torture of his closest boyhood friend, then turn around and slaughter his wife and only child? The Ministry of Magic wouldn't have liked Hermione's answer. She overheard McGonagall and Snape agreeing that Fudge was more convinced by his finances than the facts. It made her miserable if she let herself think about it and, for once, even she wanted not to think. Nearly one quarter of the wizards in the country were dead. The students held impromptu parties in the common rooms at least once a week. The government seemed over-strident, but that was to be expected. Hermione paid it no mind, until the decree was issued. The Muggle-born Marriage Act. Decreeing that all Muggle-born witches were required to marry within six months of their 18th birthday, to Pureblood wizards no less. Witches who failed to choose a wizard would have one chosen for them. Special dispensations were given for mental infirmity; somehow, she doubted she would be eligible for that one. Research was the obvious solution, but research only told her the law was much longer coming than she imagined. If she had been paying attention, she could have predicted it herself. After the battle at the Department of Mysteries, when she and almost everyone else she knew could think of nothing but Voldemort, the Ministry of Magic had passed restrictions on marriage between first cousins. Reasonable, right? Another instance of the wizarding world slowly catching up with the 19th, if not the 21st, century? No. It seemed many old pureblood families took the legislation as a cultural vendetta against those suspected of questionable sympathies. As the war progressed, the law moved to ban unions between second and third cousins as well. She hadn't even noticed when, three months before the ultimate defeat of Voldemort, all marriages between purebloods were outlawed. As if by group consensus, the birth rate among purebloods, never exactly prolific, had dropped to zero. Zero. Nothing. In the last year, not a single pureblood witch or wizard had produced offspring. Given the choice between outbreeding and dying out they had chosen extinction. So the Ministry of magic had moved its misbegotten legislative attention to the Muggle- born. She understood what the ministry was trying to do; instil some hybrid vigour into those old incestuous families, force them out of their myopic world of pedigrees and blood ties, wrest their alliance from them by coercion if necessary, but this was certainly the wrong way to go about it. She couldn't think of a right way, but this certainly wasn't it. She did the only thing she could think of, she sent a succession of howlers to Arthur Weasley. Within a week, an owl delivered a marriage proposal from Lucius Malfoy during breakfast. It was no great surprise when Professor McGonagall fetched her before the end of the day's classes. An argument was already in full swing inside the Headmaster's office; she heard them as she and the Transfiguration teacher sat waiting in the ante chamber. "Could you turn the divan on the opposite side of the room into a unicorn, Miss Granger?" Hermione blinked and obliged. She supposed the Transfiguration teacher was aiming to distract her. But she kept an ear to the other room, performing her task with less than her full concentration. "This is idiocy!" bellowed a deep voice. "It is, nonetheless, the law," came the calmer one, clearly the Headmaster. "So you are simply going to sit there, Albus, and let this happen?" She placed the voice as Professor Snape's as several portraits began to take him to task for using that tone with the Headmaster. "It seems to me, you came up with quite a viable solution, even if it currently strikes you as less than ideal," Dumbledore said gently and was for some time answered only by the sound of restless footsteps.

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