5

Chapter Five – Official Files

Ministry of Magic/St Mungo's

Monday 21st September 2048

Depite the extended lifespans of most Witches and Wizards, Hermione was having trouble finding people who were actually around and had made decisions relating to Harry in the years after his birth. Far too many of them were dead. Partly this was because of their age and the amount of time that had passed, but in a lot of cases it was because they had been killed during Voldemort's second rise.

She would have liked to have been able to ask Alastor Moody or Bartemius Crouch (Senior) about their roles in the incarceration of Sirius Black in Azkaban. It would have been helpful to have had a chat with Remus Lupin about why he took no part in Harry's life until he was appointed to teach Defence against the Dark Arts. Insight from Barnabas Cuffe, the Daily Prophet's senior editor in the late twentieth century, into where he got the information about Harry from to print in the newspaper would have helped fill in gaps.

None of those people were still alive, though, so Hermione was once again in research mode, this time amongst the masses of files in the Ministry.

Everybody in the Wizarding world seemed to have a file on them in the Ministry, and she had been shocked to see just how detailed some of the entries were. Having started with her own file, and seen references there such as 'acts as though she knows better than her superiors', 'uppity mudblood with delusions of changing the world', and 'rides the coat-tails of the Boy-Who-Lived' only served to fuel her indignation – these were comments from people she had previously respected, and some of the others were far worse!

The worst thing to find on her own file was a series of recorded Obliviations. She might have expected this if it had related to outbursts of accidental magic as a child, but it seemed that she had regularly had her memories tampered with from the moment she walked into the Entrance Hall of Hogwarts through to the end of her Sixth Year.

A trip to St Mungo's had thus been in the offing, to see if her memories could be restored, and whether they could ascertain who had cast the Obliviations, but she retrieved less information than she had hoped.

"I've got good news and bad news, Mrs Weasley," the medi-witch told her after the blocks had been removed. "The bad news is that we can't tell who cast the spells, as it was so long ago that you were Obliviated. However, the good news is that now you have the memories back, you may be able to work it out for yourself."

Hermione had been livid once she worked through her 'new' memories. The vast majority of the spells had almost certainly been cast by Dumbledore, but there were others, too, including by Cornelius Fudge and Molly Weasley.

Most of the memories were of little consequence to her now, but could have had a real impact on how her life and others around her had developed.

Many of them related to small, personal pieces of information about Harry. He had given her his telephone number at the end of First Year and asked her to call over the summer, which she had never done because she had been Obliviated of the knowledge before she could do.

He had told her some of the ways that the Dursleys had mistreated him, but Hermione's memory of the conversation and of her subsequent complaints to both Professor McGonagall and Headmster Dumbledore had been erased.

The oddest of them was a conversation that she, Harry and Neville had had during their Fifth Year – Neville had asked Harry what he knew about his family, and offered to teach him about some of the Pureblood family ways in return for the help that he had received in the DA.

So many of these memories seemed so innocuous, but when then were all added together, Hermione realised that they all pointed to two things: someone was trying to keep information about Harry's life with the Durselys away from anyone who might take an interest, and someone was trying to keep information from Harry.

Meanwhile, Molly had apparently Obliviated her of a number of arguments she and Ron had enaged in at The Burrow at various points, no doubt hoping that by removing the negative aspects of their relationship, it would progress more smoothly. Hermione wasn't sure how she felt about this. She and Ron had settled down and the arguments had become far less frequent as Ron had matured (and she no longer had to nag at him to do his homework), but she started to wonder whether or not they would ever have gotten far enough to be civil if Molly had not interfered.

The Obliviation from Cornelius Fudge was of a brief conversation she had overheard between him and Ministry Executor Walden MacNair back in her Third Year, with Fudge complaining that he had to order Buckbeak's demise to ensure additional funds from Lucius Malfoy. Hermione probably shouldn't have been surprised about this, since she had known that Fudge was corrupt and that the Malfoys had specifically got involved in the case at the time.

Harry's file was much thicker than her own. Whilst hers had been a few pages long, Harry's went on for more than a dozen pages, starting shortly after his birth with notations of accidental magic, and running heavy through his Hogwarts years.

Harry too had been the subject of multiple obliviations, the first at the same age as an obscure binding ritual that matched Petunia Dursley's recollection of Dumbledore visiting Privet Drive and casting a spell on Harry. He had also apparently been Obliviated a number of times during his school years, not to mention all the other activity that appeared on his file.

Curiously, when Hermione cross-referenced against her own file, she found that there was an Obliviation record for the same date as her own in the Fifth Year, though without Harry being able to visit St Mungos himslelf to check it, she couldn't prove that it was the same memory she had recently been reacquainted with... it seemed likely, however.

'I wonder who else I know has been Obliviated and might not even know about it," she wondered as she continued skimming through Harry's file.

There seemed to be a lull in activity that coincided with the years after Harry had defeated Voldemort, but even then he seemed to be active enough to fill his file, what with studying for and taking his NEWTs and then entering the Auror academy.

The years that followed had a long and extensive recording, as Harry's years as an active Auror progressed, but the one thing that Hermione noted in particular was that, as the Unspeakable Jeremy had indicated, Harry had not at any time perfomed any feats of magic that would have required significant power. Indeed, in more recent years his casting had relied more and more heavily on a series of simple and easy sets of spells that required relatively little effort to perform, only cast in neat combinations and precise manner that maximised their effect.

There just wasn't enough information for Hermione to gain any real insights into the questions she needed to ask though, so she moved on to the files of other people of interest.

A quick check of Neville Longbottom's file and cross-referencing with her own confirmed her suspicion that all three of those present for his offer of help to Harry had been Obliviated, which made her next port of call clear, but before that, she had some checking on other files to do.

Sirius Black's file was unsurprisingly thin. It covered a number of pecadilloes in his youth, and a decent amount of detail on his Auror training, but in relation to his arrest and sentencing there was little to go on.

A report from those first on the scene noted his seeming acceptance of blame for the deaths of the Potters, and inability to answer questions at the scene. There was no notification of any trial date, just a simple comment from a clerk that he had been sent to Azkaban. No indication of who had made the pronouncement. No note on sentence length or his ostensible crimes.

The next entry was a full twelve years later – 'escaped from Azkaban, July 1993' – and then only the final entry recording his death on 20th June 1996, but no mention of how or where he had died.

It was understandable that there were so few entries when Sirius had cast no magic nor had any cast upon him for all those years in Azkaban, but it didn't make Hermione's frustrations any less that she still wasn't picking up any leads.

DOHPDOHPDOHPDOHP

Longbottom Manor

Tuesday 22nd September 2048

"Good morning, Lord Longbottom," Hermione greeted her host as she arrived through the Floo.

"Good morning, Madam former Minister Weasley," Neville replied formally, then broke into a laugh as Hermione stepped forward to hug him. "It's a good job Grandmonther's no longer alive to wince at how we have mangled the formalities these days," he added.

"Yes, I can imagine that we might have been in for either some disapproving looks or a pointed reminder of propriety," she replied.

Augusta Longbottom had passed away around five years previously, having managed to cling on in perpetually disapproving fashion until after her 125th birthday, and in the years since then Neville had really come into his own. It appeared that Augusta had never approved of his decision to leave the Auror corps to take up a teaching role at Hogwarts, and even as he had matured, married and took on the mantle of Lord Longbottom, she had always been there looking over his shoulder.

Recently, as well as teaching Herbology, he had also been Head of Gryffindor, and was considered by most of the students across all four houses to be one of their favourite teachers, matching his knowledge of plant life with a caring attitude towards the students, and forever approachable.

In the years since Augusta's death, he had also begun reinvesting the Longbottom fortune that had lain largely untouched under his Grandmother's stewardship, and his eye for a good investment was becoming well known. Much of the profit went towards restoring and revitalising Longbottom Manor, which had also started to fall into decay. Hermione felt that the cheerful redecoration and practical redesign suited Neville nicely, and it made a change from so many of the staunch Pureblood families' residences that seemed gloomy and austere. She and Ron had been regular visitors for many years and really appreciated the changes Neville had wrought.

Now, he was taking a sabbatical from Hogwarts for a year and focusing on his business interests

He guided her to his office as they exchanged small talk, and they settled into the smart but comfortable leather armchairs he had installed.

"So, what can I do for you this morning, Hermione?" Neville asked. "It's not that often you visit without Ron, so I was assuming this was something semi-official."

"You may have heard that I'm following up some of the instructions in Harry's will," she explained. "I'm coming up with more and more questions that I didn't know I had, and fairly few answers!"

"What sort of things are you talking about?"

"Well, for example, did you know that we seem to have been fairly regularly Obliviated whilst we were at school?"

Neville grimaced.

"Yes, sort of," he said. "Or at least I know I was. I had regular check ups at St Mungo's all the way through to my twenties because of Obliviations that I'd been subjected to back when I was very small – it seems that after my parents were attacked, someone on the scene decided that I shouldn't have memories of it, which I can understand, but it seemed that every year I went back they found new Obliviations that had been cast at Hogwarts, mostly by Professor Dumbledore."

"Ah, so you probably won't remember now whether a specific memory was affected from back in Fifth Year?"

"There were quite a few that year," Neville admitted sadly. "Dumbledore was trying to protect the identities of the people who came to rescue us in the Department of Mysteries, for example, so I lost several memories until later that summer. Remind me what memory you're thinking of."

Hermione explained that she'd only recently had a number of memories restored to her at St Mungo's and was trying to make sense of them, but the one that didn't make any sense was why she had been Obliviated of the offer that Neville had made to Harry to teach him about his family heritage.

"Why would anyone want to remove that?" she asked.

"No idea," he replied. "Actually, I was a bit miffed at the time, if I remember correctly, because I thought that Harry was ignoring my offer – he never mentioned it again."

"I'm amazed that Hogwarts was permitted to do something like that," she replied. "It certainly wouldn't have been allowed when I taught there."

"No, definitely not," Neville agreed. "But it seems as though Dumbledore was something of a law unto himself back in those days."

"Yes, I'm finding more and more that to be the case," Hermione said unhappily. "Everything in the first seventeen years of Harry's life seems to have been affected by it."

"Well, probably not all that surprising given the prophecy, though, don't you think?"

"That's the thing, Neville. I've spoken with people in the Department of Mysteries, and they aren't necessarily convinced that the prophecy had to have been about Harry."

"What?"

"You know that it could have been about you, don't you?"

"Yeah, Harry mentioned that, since we were only born a day apart, but apparently because of his scar it was Harry."

"That's what Dumbledore believed, but the Unspeakables aren't all that sure."

"But surely it came true? Harry was the one who finally offed Voldemort, after all."

"It's not as simple as that – I was advised that the prophecy had already been fulfilled before then."

"What? How? When?"

"Nobody knows. But the prophecy orbs aren't supposed to be able to be broken unless the prophecy in them has been completed."

"But I broke the one about Harry at the Ministry!"

"Exactly."

Neville puffed out his cheeks.

"Well that kinda puts a kneazle among the nifflers, doesn't it?"

"Doesn't it just!"

Neville walked across the room and opened up a sideboard. He pulled a decanter and two glasses from it and filled both.

"Don't tell Hannah I've broken this out," he said with a grin.

He passed one glass to Hermione, who wafted the aroma up to her nose.

"Mmm. Okay, our little secret," she said, and took a large sip.

Neville returned to his seat and took a rather larger gulp from his glass.

"But if the prophecy was already fulfilled, then anyone could have killed Voldemort at the end there," he suggested.

"Probably," Hermione replied. "But you know what Wizarding society is like – find someone to pin all their hopes upon and then make them feel guilty if they don't come up to scratch. I could have throttled Skeeter when she came up with that 'Chosen One' moniker for Harry back in our Sixth Year."

"Crikey, Hermione, I'm sure there's been plenty of times when you could have throttled that bitch," Neville noted. "Why limit it to the once?"

"True enough," she replied with a smile.

"So, what can I do to help you? I mean, you seem to have been busy tracing what Harry was up to and what happened to him, so where do I come in on this?"

"Initially I was hoping to get some confirmation on the menory that we originally talked about – where you offered Harry help in understanding Pureblood life – but I'm wondering if you know of any other times you might have been Obliviated where it was just because someone was trying to keep Harry in the dark."

"And by 'someone' you mean Dumbledore."

"Yes. I'm starting to discover a whole swathe of things done to Harry over the years that nobody else could have had opportunity or reason to do. And I still not completely sure about the reasons.

It's like there's a pattern to his behaviour: keep the boy downtrodden and don't let him know anything about his heritage until you absolutely have to, bind his magic so he can't fight you even when he finds out about your manipulations, build up a legend around him for public consumption whilst keeping him completely ignorant of it, then point him at the enemy and send him to his death."

"Merlin, Hermione!" Neville burst out. "It sounds so evil when you put it like that! Why would Dumbledore do that?"

"Who knows."

"And what's this about binding his magic? Surely that's illegal. I'd be amazed if that was the case with Harry, as he always seemed so magically strong!"

"Oh, it's definitely illegal without parental consent, and even then it's supposed to be removed within five years. But Harry didn't even know it had been done until last year when he spoke to people in the Department of Mysteries."

"No way!"

"Indeed. And I'm starting to think that it was one of the things that killed him."

"One of the things?"

"Yes. He had apparently been losing what magic he had because the bind was leeching more and more of it away. The Unspeakable I asked about it said that they had not dared to break the binding – it would have released a magical backlash that would not only have killed Harry but probably wiped out several floors of the Ministry."

"We wouldn't want that after you spent so many years weeding out the incompetence and corruption, would we, Minister Weasley?"

Hermione smiled.

"No, we wouldn't."

"But losing his magic wouldn't have killed him," Neville pointed out. "He's not even been indoctrinated like some of those darker families who think that life isn't worth living without magic."

"No, and from what I've seen, he was making plans for a life where he didn't have magic, if it became necessary, but that's to be kept quiet for now. No, something else killed him, and it wasn't the simple heart attack that it's been made out to be."

Hermione drained her glass.

"That was good stuff, Neville," she said in appreciation. "I'll have to remember you've got a stash of that should I ever need it!"

"You're welcome."

"So, what I was going to ask you was if you come across any memories that you had Obliviated that fit into that pattern I mentioned about Harry being manipulated, can you let me know? I feel like I'm putting together a jigsaw puzzle, but other people have some of the pieces I need to complete it!"

"Of course I will," Neville assured her. "And if there's anything else I can do to help, do let me know."

DOHPDOHPDOHPDOHP

Weasley Residence

Friday 25th September 2048

Friday was a day that Hermione liked to work from home, and now that she was essentially self-employed she had the freedom to do so. Back when she had been Minister for Magic such a luxury would have been considered unthinkable, and even now most magical people actually had to travel to their place of work.

It was a day that she tended to set aside for reading and for reviewing research that her team had pulled together, which is what she was doing this particular morning when her mobile phone rang.

This list of people who ever called her on this phone was very short, and the number that showed up on the screen wasn't one that was familiar to her. It didn't even look like one of the occasional cold-calling ambulance-chasers that seemed to have obtained her details from somewhere.

"Hermione Weasley," she answered as she tapped the phone to speaker mode.

"Aunt Hermione?" the voice came through. "It's Oscar, Oscar Potter."

Technically, Hermione was Oscar's Great-aunt by marriage, rather than his Aunt, given that he was Harry and Ginny's Grandson, but things like that got confusing.

"Hello, Oscar. How are you doing?"

"Good thanks. Uncle Bill says I'm going to have another Auntie next year!"

"So I understand," she replied. "What can I do for you this morning?"

Whilst Ron and Hermione had remained close to Harry and Ginny and their children, the size of the ever expanding clan and their career paths had meant that they didn't see as much of the younger Potters as they might have done. Certainly it was a novelty for one of Harry's grandchildren to be calling them up.

"Dad said to give you a call. We went to have a look at the house in Stevenage like you suggested."

"Did you manage to find your way around it okay? The Vax system gave me a bit of a fright when I was there."

"Yeah. I've been looking at setting something similar up for when Janey and I move in together next year, but I'm wondering if Dad will let us rent out this set-up."

"Janey? Have I met her? "

"Yeah, she came to Arthur and Lisa's wedding last year with me."

"Oh, the tall Asian girl? Yes, I remember her. I didn't realise you were that serious."

Hermione could almost hear the shrug down the phone line.

"We're not looking to get married any time soon, if that's what you mean? Anyway, I had to help Dad with the system, 'cos he didn't have a clue. I don't think he's been in a normal house since he was a kid himself, and it's all changed since then."

"Tell me about it – I was amazed at how much has changed, and I grew up that way."

"Oh, okay, I always forget that you were Muggleborn," Oscar said. "Do you know how to use a techscreen?"

"I doubt it," Hermione replied. "I used to be able to use a computer back when I was your age, but the thing that Harry had set up in his office was way beyond me. I didn't even know how to switch it on, let alone try and use the thing. It didn't look very much like the tower that I got from Dell or even the laptop that my Dad used at the dental clinic."

"Naw. Most of it is touch screen and voice operated these days. You'd've needed a recognised voice print to gain access and probably biometric scans for anything beyond basic commands."

"I only vaguely know what you're referring to, Oscar," Hermione admitted. "I didn't know that you'd gotten interested in Muggle tech."

"Yeah, have been for ages. One of Mum's older friends was a programmer at Apple a while back, back when they still used people to write code – these days its all AI-driven based on verbal algorythyms - and she taught me all sorts of things about where tech was going. I've kept up with it ever since, and spent all sorts of time tinkering with the guts of modern techscreens and delving into how voice activation and AI works. When I was in America that year after I left Hogwarts I spent about half my time at MIT and AppleLabs on the modern apprenticeship scheme they run.

"Obviously, trying to explain that to anyone in the magical world takes some time. That's why I like Janey – she's had a solid grounding in modern tech from her Uncle, who still lives in India but is a CEO at one of their major technomagic labs – not that they've actually got tech and magic to work together properly yet – but she knows how to work tech just as well as magic."

"Neither Harry nor James have ever mentioned anything about this," Hermione said.

"I know Granddad took an interest in it, but it wasn't something that was ever mentioned around the house at home. To be honest, it was just as well Dad knew to take me with him from your comments about what you'd found there, really. I reckon he'd've had the shock of his life if he'd gone there on his own.

"Anyway, what I was calling you for was that I think you mentioned to Dad something about the Norway Cloud, where Harry had stored some information for you?"

"Yes, that's right. It didn't make much sense to me. I'd heard of the 'Cloud' for saving things to, many years ago, but didn't know there were separate ones for each country."

"There's not, really," Oscar explained. "Only some countries have one. Back in the 2020s, some governments were getting wary of the amount of influence that China and the USA had over the places that people could store data, and deliberately set up their own infrastructure so that they weren't reliant on countries they had worries about.

"Some were free to access for most people, like the Indian and Canadian versions, but some are very heavily policed and security conscious, like Switzerland's but also Norway's, so it's a great, if expensive, way to store data securely where you know it won't get picked up by disreputable businesses or used to try and steal your money."

"That makes sense, I suppose," Hermione acknowledged, "but I hadn't realised that Harry was so security-focused."

"Oh man, you should see some of the security protocols he's got built into some of his tech, Aunt Hermione. Even I had trouble hacking my way into it. I really had to quiz Dad about the stories he'd told us of you, Uncle Ron and Granddad at Hogwarts to figure out some of the clues that he'd left to make it difficult to access stuff. I mean, who knew that a hippogriff slashed Draco Malfoy!

"But one of the things that it keeps coming up with is a reference to something that it tells me is stored on Granddad's cell phone. There's a kind of enygma encryption on some of the files that seems to need a key or set of keys that are detailed on that phone, and I wondered if you had come across it at all?"

"Actually, yes, I have. I've got it here in my handbag," Hermione replied. "Do you want to come and collect it at some point?"

"That would be great, Aunt Hermione. But it might be better if you meet me at the house in Stevenage with it, since the data that Granddad wanted to leave was for you anyway. That way, if there are any more codes I don't know about you might be able to help me. And I can let you have the data then and there, with any luck."

"That sounds like a plan. Did you have a particular time in mind?"

"This evening would be good – how about I meet you there at about Six thirty?"