CHAPTER 4 – The Revolution takes the Nation
Cornelius Fudge thought he had had the worst day of his life after seeing the Tri-Wizard Tournament, a gigantic effort by his Ministry to improve public opinion about his government, end in a huge fiasco, a real farce with a tie between all the contestants, followed by the new escape from his currently biggest opponent, Harry Potter, and the disappearance of more children, daughters and sons of prestigious members of society, right under the eyes of the entire magical community.
He had to spend hours trying to minimize the facts with the local and international members of the press and to try to calm the angry parents with assurances that his government would not rest until finding and releasing the abducted children. When all his energy and patience had been long since exhausted, it was the turn of that old man in aberrant clothes to want to take his time with spurious allegations that Voldemort, duly dead for so long, could be returning! And he wanted to find Harry Potter to fight Voldemort! The same Harry Potter who had managed to dodge him, Umbridge, several teachers and twenty aurors for nine months, without anyone catching him! Let that old man do his own miracles! After all, was not he considered the greatest living wizard? The biggest of them all since Merlin? So, let him use his astonishing magic and leave him, Cornelius, alone!
But no, after the awful day he had, instead of some rest, what did he get? An even worse day!
And he did not even need to leave the house to find the world collapsing over his head! It was enough to open the Daily Prophet for this to happen. Three headlines, only three headlines on the front page, but enough to put his career in danger!
DEATH EATHER ESCAPED OF AZKABAN AND TEACHED IN HOGWARTS FOR A YEAR!
TRAITOR OF THE POTTERS RECEIVED ORDER OF MERLIN FOR PRETENDING HIS OWN DEATH!
WHO HAS THE GREATEST GUILTY ON RECENT DISASTERS: DUMBLEDORE OR FUDGE?
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Amelia Bones had kept her word to the letter. While Fudge wasted his time trying to placate angry parents and a revolted crowd, she had filled veritaserum into Pettigrew and Crouch Jr., took their statements, recorded everything before the Wizengamot, and wasn't happier only because she couldn't find Crouch Sr. to share his son's fate. Unfortunately, Junior had confessed to murdering his father and buried the transfigured body at Hogwarts, so Amelia took pleasure in getting him a dementor's kiss.
Pettigrew's case was a bit more complex, and she would unfortunately have to wait for a trial before the Wizengamot before she could deservedly punish him. But his confession was enough to cancel the search for Sirius Black, and that day, if everything went well, Sirius would be cleared of all charges and Pettigrew would be at least occupying a cell in Azkaban, but Amelia wanted more, she wanted that worm liquidated once and for all.
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While Sirius, now a free man, was recovering from his extended stay in Azkaban with the help of Remus, the children and the elves were quite busy. Using the Hogwarts log book and Ministry's records, they were contacting all the Muggleborns they get: not only the ones who would start next year but also the very young ones and the ones from previous years who had turned Hogwarts off or were not even contacted by the school, and even those who attended Hogwarts and returned to the non-magical world. The idea behind all this is that magic is a gift too rare and wonderful to be so easily wasted as it had been by the Ministry.
When the government discovers it, it was already too late: the children have already been incorporated into the group, their parents have moved and the magicals didn't know how to locate them. Amelia was doing a white strike on the task, and when she located someone, she ended up helping them to hide better from magical government instead of bringing them to court.
But not only the children were being probed. Sirius and Harry used the idle estates of Blacks and Potters to found two new magical villages, fully protected and out of reach of the magical government, each one of them keeper of the secret of the Fidelius charm used to hide them entirely from the undesirables. Delivered at a cost price and with comfortable financing, houses, shops and workshops began to be quickly occupied by those born in the normal world, whether they were wizards themselves or parents of magical children, and even some of mixed or purely magical origin also moved there, dissatisfied with the current government.
The British magical world undergoes a real evasion of Muggleborns and half-bloods, and didn't know how to deal with it. Workers are lacking for the simplest and least prestigious and paid functions. There is also scarcity of elves. Slowly, local democratic governments were instituted by the communities themselves to address the basic organization of each and the relationships between them, with a fair distribution of rights and duties. Seeing how even the domestic elves were entitled to join the government, Gringotts goblins were quick to open branches in the new communities and, after six centuries, some even come back to live on the surface, acquiring some of the houses offered in so favourable conditions!
When the new school year begins, Albus didn't know that the children were still there in the Castle. All he saw was a half-empty school, new registrations at the lowest level of all its history. He was desperate, unaware that Voldemort was a problem already solved and, in his desperation, he revealed in a Wizengamot meeting the existence of the prophecy and that Harry Potter is destined to face and defeat a future reborn Voldemort, demanding that all government efforts were used to find the boy.
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Meanwhile, the search for Voldemort's horcruxes gains unexpected impulses. The children find one in the Room of Requirement when they decide to use the resources of the room to research the subject. A second horcrux is found in the Gaunts' haven by the Unspeakables as they searched the origins of the Dark Lord. And a third is found by the elves that Sirius had borrowed from Harry to clean up the Blacks' ancient home.
Despite these successes, the group still didn't know how many were left, and progress to wrest this knowledge of the homunculus had been slow. Though physically weak, Voldemort was still mentally and magically powerful; and even the weeks of sensory deprivation under the effect of the Draught of Living Death didn't diminish that power enough.
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The situation of the government and the traditional British magical world begun to get unsustainable when Diagon Alley begun to lose its more traditional shopkeepers, including Ollivander, Malkins and Fortescue, and the village of Hogsmeade simply disappeared. There were many who wanted to rule, and no one wanted to obey, so that the government practically became a fiction that only existed on paper. Numerous decrees were proposed, voted and accepted trying to remedy the extreme situation, but no one was willing to comply with these edicts or enforce them. Which did not matter much, because no one was able to find the people who should obey them.
Albus was as worried as the Minister. He had attempted to reshape the Order of the Phoenix, but not only had he received more negatives than entrants; as also part of these entrants ended up disconnecting and disappearing in a few days. And Hogwarts was now working with less than a quarter of the expected students, barely managing to pay its bills and quickly consuming the few reserves.
Gradually, the lack of maintenance begun to be noticed: the Ministry building itself started to have problems, as well as the floo network and several other functionalities. Amelia tried one last time to save at least a little of the old society by suggesting that the government opened itself to everyone's participation, giving fair representation to each of the magical classes and species. She didn't expect much from this attempt, serving more as a pretext for her dismissal, soon accompanied by two-thirds of the corporation. The fatal blow occurred two days later, when Saint Mungos Hospital also disappeared for the non-revolutionary magical population.
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On a Tuesday in October two Unspeakables came to Azkaban. Shortly after the brothers Lestrange were declared dead. Wednesday, they are there again, Bellatrix signed documents taking possession of the goods left by both of them and, in the afternoon, is declared dead. The next day Sirius Black and the Unspeakables were in Gringotts claiming possession of the Lestranges' vaults, but carrying only a small cup from there.
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In the emptied Wizengamot, Dumbledore and his few allies were forced to withdraw, banished by the now-majority ultraconservative wing led by Lucius Malfoy. With the government now in his hands, Lucius became Minister, placed Norbert Nott as head of the Wizengamot, instituted the 'State of Emergency' and quickly passed laws enacting the immediate acquittal and release of all purist allies retained in Azkaban. All Muggleborns and half-bloods were declared traitors to the magic society, subject to immediate execution and total confiscation of property and assets. If the prejudice against the less pure blooded magical beings reached its maximum, nothing compared to what they wished to do against those devoid of magic: to declare them as nonhumans, and to regard them as an invading species to be hunted and exterminated freely because their high reproduction rate was causing damage to the environment and the natural balance of species.
This (previously) controversial subject was on the agenda when the session was interrupted by, which seemed to them, to be the strongest earthquake ever recorded in the London region. However, the phenomenon was not natural as they had thought at first, but caused by the Unspeakables a level below them. The Unspeakables didn't even care about the farce that had become the magical Legislature, and were occupied with something much more useful.
In possession of all of Voldemort's horcruxes and the homunculus he now inhabited, the Unspeakables had coincidentally marked for the same day the final removal of those aberrations from our world.
In the room dedicated to the study of perhaps the most mysterious of the magical artefacts, the Veil of Death, almost all members of the Department of Mysteries performed a powerful ritual to weaken the connection between the soul fragment inhabiting Harry Potter's scar and the body of the boy, who was imprisoned lying on a large rock placed in the middle of the room.
The final stage of the ritual consisted of the Unspeakables letting some of the boy's friends talk quickly with him, seeking to strengthen the bonds between the boy and this world so that Voldemort's soul fragment would abandon him without taking him along. Some promises were swiftly exchanged, and the Unspeakables did their best to ensure the privacy of the young man and the girls, but the general blush that struck the group and the goofy smile that the boy showed after the brief conversation left little doubt as to the content of it.
As soon as the girls moved away from the little hero, the Unspeakables floated the homunculus and its inanimate horcruxes, directing them toward the veil. As the objects approached the veil, the pain and suffering through which the boy passed became increasingly visible.
The ray-shaped scar, which was already quite red and clear, began to bleed profusely. Floating the homunculus and the horcruxes toward the veil, initially an easy task, began to demand more and more power from the Unspeakables, showing on the part of the objects an increasing resistance to the imminent danger.
It was then, when the wizards and witches were reaching the limit of their strength, that Harry turned his head to the direction in which his friends hugged each other, desperate in the extreme of the situation through which the boy passed. After that last look at them, Harry let out a piercing scream and used all his affection, love even, for those girls to expel the fragment of Voldemort contained in his body.
His scar opened completely, and that fragment, along with the homunculus and all the other horcruxes, suddenly ceased all resistance and rushed into the Veil at great speed. Voldemort was finally finished! But the energy accumulated during the process and suddenly released in that final act caused a great magical repercussion that put the exhausted boy and many others who accompanied him unconscious, shuddering the very bases of the building.
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Even with all the chaos caused by the complete elimination of Voldemort, Madame Bones still received from one of the Unspeakables the signal she had been waiting for. In a few minutes her forces had taken care of all the entrances and exits of the Ministry building, subduing everyone they met along the way who did not belong to the group that had assembled in the Department of Mysteries. The fastest and most radical magic revolution of all time was completed, and it was now time to put the house in order.
Two days later Harry Potter was recovered from all the trauma he had been through, and with Madame Bones' company, elected the new Minister of Magic, and her Aurors, took full control of Hogwarts from a discouraged and weakened Dumbledore who, after discovering the full extension of events and how everything had happened without (or despite) his efforts, decided that it was time to retire and to live his remaining time in relative isolation.
Harry and his group began immediate reforms at school with such naturalness and efficiency that, to the astonishment of the boy, he found himself unexpectedly in the position of effective leader of the millennial educational institution when even teachers and members of the Education Evaluation Committee began to ask his opinion on everything. And his performance was so positive that he was formally instituted as the new headmaster soon after.
By consulting students and their parents, teachers, the Board of Directors (the new one, reorganized after the exclusion of convicted members) and the Evaluation Committee, the group reformulated the entire school: curriculum, rules and directives, punishment and award system, tuition fees, support for Muggleborns, all went through a thorough review to make the school fit to receive all magical beings, even non-humans, and to give them the most comprehensive and complete education possible. Needless to say, Binns, Trelawney and Snape were immediately considered useless to the new institution that the changes created.
Similar changes were made in magical government, with great results. A meritocracy was instituted for career positions in the Ministry, instead of the nepotism and elitism that prevailed until then, while the leadership of the Executive and the Legislative positions (Wizengamot) became elective, without any restriction as to the origin or wealth of the candidates.
More than a mere victory against the forces of evil, this time the magical society as a whole felt the energy of a complete revitalization and renewal, with rights and freedoms guaranteed for all.
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Harry James Potter had become Hogwarts' newest headmaster of all time, at the age of 15, and finally the longest running, remaining in office until his 165th birthday when he retired to enjoy the nearly four hundreds of penta and hexa-grandchildren of his, and began to write books for children and young people from the stories he created, told and recounted to the little ones, who helped him a lot in the process.
He was never married, unable to decide for a single one of so many sensational girls he had met, but he had open relationships with many of them, and many children from these relationships, and he never failed to tell everyone that he considered himself one of the happiest human beings of all times.
A/N: Thank you all for reading this little story. Hope it was entertaining. If you could, please let me know what you think of it. I'm trying to improve my writing skills, and I appreciated any and every criticism or incentive. Sorry if the lack of marriage frustrated you, I simply couldn't choose one of the girls above the others.