Getting Dan and Emma checked out was not as easy as it should have been. In any reasonable world all it would have taken was a trip to St Mungo's. Unfortunately St Mungo's only dealt with magicals and would only deal with a Muggle if there was paperwork from the Ministry, usually the D.M.L.E signing off on it. There was some wiggle room where they would stabilise a patient if there was an obviously magical effect killing them, but full treatment required paperwork filed first. Anything else and the muggle was just dumped at the nearest mundane hospital to deal with.
For Dan and Emma this was a problem because at first glance they were fine, just under the effect of a stunner. Something that even if you didn't know the counter hex would wear off in a couple of hours.
This meant that after knocking Hermione's parents unconscious, instead of going directly to the hospital, the two teens levitated the two adults down the stairs and after a little fumbling with their portkeys they were whisked off to the Welsh countryside and the gates of Potter Manor.
As they walked up to the manor the two of them found they had time to think and for the adrenalin to crash out of their system leaving room for anxiety fueled questions. "Do you think my parents are going to be alright?" Hermione asked but from her tone Harry could hear that wasn't the question she really wanted to ask.
The problem was despite knowing it wasn't what she wanted to ask, he still didn't know what she really wanted so he could only reassure her until she felt like she could ask her real question. "Of course they will. Your parents were still fully functional this evening. That means whatever happened didn't go that deep or mess with that much. My guess is an imperius curse and memory charms to cover it up. As horrid as that is, the silver lining is that it's an easy enough fix." Harry tried to be as reassuring as he possibly could.
Hermione walked next to him in silence for a bit until she asked. "Do you think they will hate me after this? If it wasn't for me they would have normal lives. But instead they need to have their home protected and now when they go out they need to watch for people messing with their heads."
As she spoke it became obvious to Harry that was what Hermione was really worried about. The idea that her parents would see all the danger around them and reject her as the one introducing the danger into their lives. "Not a chance. Hermione, your parents love you. Nothing that anyone can do could change that."
"But I attacked my mother." From the way she said it, Hermione honestly believed that.
Harry stepped around her so she was on his left as his wand arm was occupied levitating Dan, and put his arm around her holding her close. "You're being silly. Tell me, if grandfather was cursed to try and kill me and I half killed him with my fists to knock him out to get help, do you think he would care about anything I did to him?" Harry hoped getting Hermione to look at it more objectively will help her.
"That's different-" Hermione started but Harry cut her off.
"Yeah it is different. Your parents love you way more than grandfather loves me." Harry saw a look of disbelief and a little anger flash over Hermione's face but he pressed on. "It's normal. Love develops and deepens over time. To grandfather I was only born three years ago. Your parents have almost seventeen years worth of developing their relationship with you, shared memories, shared lives. And if you think my grandfather would never abandon me over something like that then how can you disrespect the connection you and your parents share to think it can be broken so easily?"
By the time Harry was finished Hermione was looking at him a little slack jawed. "That was surprisingly well thought out and eloquent for you." She said as she leaned into his side craving the closeness.
"I've been an orphan as long as I can remember. I challenge you to find a single person who grew up without parental figures who hasn't spent a few thousand hours pondering the idea of parents. Now no changing the subject we were talking about you. How are you holding up?"
"I'm pissed off Harry. Someone, probably Narcissa bloody Malfoy, tried to use my own family to kill me. If I ever get my hands on the bitch she will be begging for death by the time I'm finished." as she let the anger she was feeling come to the front she stood up straighter and walked with more purpose.
The Manor was dark when Harry and Hermione walked through the main doors. That wasn't surprising as it was late and Sirius and Charlus were both probably fast asleep. As all four of them were keyed into the wards as family there wouldn't have been an alert to wake anyone.
They laid Dan and Emma on the sofas in the family room. Hary left Hermione to watch them as he went to wake his grand and god fathers. Both were surprised to see him and wanted to know why he was there but all he told them was that it was an emergency and they were needed in the family room as soon as they were dressed.
While they dressed Harry went to the kitchen. It was practically instinct for a Brit to make tea in a crisis, it gave everyone something to focus on. Harry however forsook the tea in favour of coffee. He was sure this was going to be a long night and everyone was going to welcome the caffeine.
It was only instant coffee so Harry was just loading up a tray with everything when he saw Sirius walking past the kitchen headed for the family room. Harry quickly followed, bringing the coffee tray with a flick of his wand.
"What's happened? Are they okay?" Sirius's voice cut through the silence of the house.
"They are just stunned for now. Let's wait for grandfather before we explain." Harry said, walking into the room.
Sirius grunted but once he smelled the coffee he grabbed one of the mugs. "Bad enough to need coffee?" He asked. What he meant was 'bad enough that we aren't getting any sleep?' only he didn't want to just come right out and ask that.
Hermione answered. "How good are you at the refilling charm?"
"Fuck." Was all Sirius could say.
Charlus was only about a minute behind Harry in walking into the room and as soon as he saw Dan and Emma's unconscious bodies laying on the sofas he just said, "Explain."
As Harry and Hermione recapped what had happened Sirius cast a few diagnostic charms on Dan and Emma to check them over. Once Harry and Hermione got to the part where they came to the Manor Sirius told them. "Well they both appear to be fine. It will take someone qualified in mind magic to check for Imperius but there are definitely a few compulsion and memory charms on them. The memory charm probably just replaces the time they were being charmed with them doing paperwork. Something that nobody would think twice about."
"Fuck! somebody is going to have to check on Abigail." Hermione suddenly exclaimed.
"Who is Abigail?" Harry asked, confused.
"She is my parents' nurse slash receptionist. Nobody gets in to see my parents at work without getting past her first."
"Okay. Do you know her address or where it can be found?" Charlus asked as he cast a refilling charm on his coffee.
"It will be in her employment records at the surgery." Hermione answered.
Charlus finally knew what needed to be done and took charge. "Okay here is what we will do. Sirius, take Hermione to her parents' surgery and get the nurse's address. Hopefully she is at home and just sleeping off a mild confundus charm, we can't count on that though. So bring me that information and I will go to the ministry and send someone to check on her and file an incident report with the D.M.L.E. Then once I get that done I will come back and we can take Dan and Emma to St Mungo's to get checked over."
"Okay what do I do?" Asked Harry.
"Keep the coffee coming, watch Dan and Emma to make sure nothing happens, re-stun them if they wake up." Sirius told him. Harry knew it was just busy work but didn't say anything.
Soon Sirius and Hermione disappeared after Hermione raided her dad's pockets taking his keys. That left Harry and Charlus alone with two unconscious dentists. There was a little awkward silence as neither of them could think what to say until Harry asked. "How are we going to stop this from happening again?"
"Honestly I'm not sure yet. We can't ward the property too well because it's a business. The patients need to be able to come and go as needed. There wouldn't be any point adding anything like lockdown wards that they could turn on whenever they need because by the time they knew there was a problem it would already be inside."
"What about a monitoring ward that would alert us if there was any magic used in the area?" Harry asked.
"Tricky but possible. If we covered a wide enough area we could probably get an alert as soon as anyone apparated into the area. We would need to be careful how big it is though, it is after all London and plenty of magical people live and work in the city."
"What about just hiring a security guard? There has got to be a retired Auror or someone that would jump at the chance to spend most of their time sitting around reading the newspaper for a paycheck but be ready to intervene if someone magical walks in." Harry suggested.
"That is actually a really good idea. Sometimes we get so bogged down in looking for the perfect magical solution we forget the obvious. I will look into finding a security guard." Charlus agreed.
After that it was back to silent waiting until Hermione and Sirius got back. The trip to the dental surgery had apparently gone without a hiccup because they had the information and both of them were fine. Hermione handed Charlus a piece of office paper with the information written on it and Charlus took off for the Ministry. Luckily even with the new building, the D.M.L.E was open twenty-four hours a day.
Harry pulled Hermione into a loveseat he transfigured out of an armchair and just held her close. He knew that she would feel like she needed to be doing something but unfortunately there just wasn't anything she could do right now so he did what he could to support her.
They stayed like that for almost two hours before Charlus came back. "Well, good news about Abigail. She is completely fine. Looks like she was hit with a simple confundus so that whoever it was could slip past her without causing a scene. She will be as good as new in the morning. Hermione, you are probably going to need to phone her in the morning and tell her both your parents are down with the flu. I assume she can sort everything out from there?"
Nodding her head, Hermione answered. "Yeah she can reschedule appointments and get emergency cases moved to a different dentist. It's an annoying amount of work but nothing she hasn't done before."
It was easier than Harry suspected to get the two unconscious Grangers to St Mungo's. The Ministry had provided grandfather Charlus with a portkey that took them directly. Harry was glad about that, with the floo network compromised Harry was picturing having to carry two unconscious people through the middle of London. It may be the middle of the night but that would have attracted attention. Instead the hardest part was floating them down to the front gate.
-ϟϟϟ-
It was the morning after Dan and Emma had been admitted to the hospital and things were going pretty smoothly as far as the healers were concerned. Emma was found to be free of the Imperius curse and reversing the other effects hadn't taken the healer more than a few minutes once she was finished with her assessment. Dan however was definitely under the Imperius curse.
The assumptions were right about the Imperius curse. Dan was to act normally until Hermione was asleep and stab her to death. Basically attack when Hermione had no opportunity to defend herself. Whoever had placed the curse, they didn't yet know if it was Narcissa herself or someone she paid, hadn't considered the possibility of a teenage girl sleeping with someone in her parents house.
The result was that the attempt was completed when Hermione had Harry there to protect her. That was the whole point of Harry and Hermione staying together over the summer but they hadn't anticipated an attack like that and it was a little disturbing that there was more than a little luck involved. What if Harry had been fast asleep rather than dozing? He really didn't want to think about it but he was practically haunted by images of just how badly it could have ended up.
At some point a D.M.L.E worker turned up to get Harry's and Hermione's statements on record as well as get a report from the healers about what had been done to Dan and Emma. It grated on both Harry and Hermione that statements from Hermione's parents weren't needed because apparently the magical legal system didn't have any use for what a couple of muggles said.
The process of backing Dan out of the Imperius curse was not a simple matter of a counter spell. The counter spell to an imperius curse was for the victim to reassert their own will. That was something that couldn't come from the end of a wand or from a cauldron. That was something that had to come from inside. Worse, it wasn't like you just talked someone into thinking for themselves. No, it required a specialised mind healer to go into Dan's mind and encourage him to break the spell himself.
Unfortunately this was entirely dependent upon the individual. Some people just needed it pointed out that they were under control and they could break free in only a few minutes. Others had to be pushed to the point that they absolutely refused to cross until their mind would absolutely refuse to go further and In some extreme cases that had been known to take a month. It was a delicate balance because if you pushed a mind too far it could break and the cursed becomes nothing more than a living puppet. In Dan's case the worst case scenario would be a mental construct holding him on the edge of stabbing Hermione. But if the healer slipped and let it go too far and Dan actually believed he had killed Hermione already there was every possibility that in his shock he would mentally retreat into the oblivious and calming nature of the curse to hide from what he would perceive as reality.
If that happened there wouldn't be any opportunity to heal his mental state until either the caster lifted the curse themselves, or the caster died and their magic failed. Only then would they have the opportunity to show him that Hermione was still alive and begin fixing the issues caused by believing you had been forced to murder your own daughter.
All this information had been explained to Hermione, the only person St Mungo's policy's recognised as Dan's next of kin, by one of the healers that had been part of the team who Harry worked with when they removed Tanaka's prosthetic leg while they waited to find out if Dan was going to be released form the curse that day or if they were in for a wait.
There was a knock on the door of the room they were waiting in and everyone looked up as the door opened expecting to see a healer with news. Instead it was Auror Shacklebolt dressed in his crimson robes, a signal that he was definitely there on duty. "Morning everyone. Can I come in and talk with you for a bit?"
"Sure Shack. What's up?" Sirius, who knew the man best from his work with the D.M.L.E invited the man in.
Shacklebolt came in, closing the door behind him and with a few quick taps from his wand secured the room against eavesdropping. That action alone had all the magicals sitting up straighter and paying attention. You don't secure a room like that for a casual or routine chat.
Shacklebolt settled himself into a chair across from everyone and only then did he start speaking. "First, Director Bones has heard what happened and while she doesn't have the time to come herself she wishes you and your husband a speedy recovery Mrs Granger." Emma thanked him and he continued with what he was there for.
"As regrettable as the current situation is, Director Bones believes it presents us with an opportunity. Narcissa Malfoy is not going to stop until either she or Miss Granger dies or Narcissa Malfoy ends up in prison. Given that, we want to get her into prison as soon as possible. Unfortunately hiding with magic is frustratingly easy if you have either talent or money. For all we know she could have rented out a hotel suite across the road and apparated in and until we had a reason to look there we wouldn't know . It's not like we have the right or manpower to check every hotel room or rentable space in even the city let alone the entire country."
"That leaves us with our normal method of capturing criminals. We need to be where they are. This is often done by watching people we know they are going to talk to, or monitoring something they need. Or as we are considering now, creating a circumstance where they reveal themselves. What we want to do is set up a sting operation using lookalikes of all of you as bait."
That had everyone thinking but Sirius was the one who asked the obvious question. "Why would they believe it's us? We have been pretty smart staying hidden behind wards. They wouldn't trust it if we suddenly started sitting around in Diagon alley eating ice cream outside Fortescue's."
"By creating a believable cover for why you would not be thinking straight. The idea is that we pretend that Mr Granger died and that Miss Granger and the rest of you will be attending his funeral."
-ϟϟϟ-
The few days after Shacklebolt had proposed the idea of the fake funeral were weird. Harry had been 'arrested' for killing Dan and released because it was self defence. Dan's death had been reported as a murder in the daily prophet, the same day Dan got released from St Mungo's. They all moved into Potter Manor along with Auror Tonks who was tasked with keeping up their cover story.
The weirdest part of it was sitting across from Dan at breakfast while Hermione received owls from people they knew offering their condolences. Well, it was that or reading in the paper about the staged fight Harry's and Hermione's body doubles had on the steps of Gringotts where Hermione was demanding that as Harry had killed her father the least he could do was cough up the money to cover the funeral.
They spent their days with Hermione writing reply letters to people where she would accidentally 'on purpose' slip up and add a detail about the time and place of the funeral.
The biggest change was how Harry and Hermione slept now. Her parents had tried to continue to make them keep the door open when they shared a room but Hermione had put her foot down on the subject. Not only was she going to be sharing with Harry from now on whenever they weren't in school she was also going to be shutting and with magic locking and alarming the door.
Even though she hadn't seen her father standing over her with a knife, it was clear that it had affected her trust in her parents. While she still loved them and trusted that they loved and wanted the best for her, it had been proven just how easy magic could be used to override their decisions. She was still close with her parents, Harry didn't think that was going to change, but he could also see how much it hurt Dan and Emma that Hermione was now constantly watching to make sure they couldn't stab her in the back.
After seeing this Harry decided that he was going to have to talk to them. Not about fixing the issues between them, he wasn't an expert on family relationships, and even he knew some things were best left to them to figure out. No, he called the three of them into the kitchen one evening as he cooked dinner to tell them about a decision he had made the night of the attack.
As Harry drained the potatoes he had just boiled to cool for a potato salad, Emma asked. "Okay Harry what's up?"
"Well I have been doing a load of thinking and I have worked out the best way to protect you and Dan while you work."
"Oh?" Asked Dan, curiosity and caution in his voice.
"Well we can't put up strong wards because anything that would actually keep you safe would also keep away your patients so that would be useless. We can't simply move you to a new location because it wouldn't be too hard to find you if your patients can. All a magical would need to do is walk into the charity shop across the road and ask where you moved to and people would tell them. So as far as I can tell the only workable solution is a magical security guard."
"We can't afford another full time member of staff." Dan said, sounding pained.
"I will be paying for it." Harry insisted now slowly frying slices of bacon that would be diced up fine later.
"Harry we can't ask you to-" Emma started to say.
Harry however cut in saying. "You didn't ask, and I'm not offering. I'm telling you what I am going to do. And I'm doing it because I never want to see the look of horror on Hermione's face again as she learns someone she loves was forced to try and hurt her." Harry didn't know it but the combination of the things he had done, things like fighting dragons and Dark Lords had given him a rather commanding presence when he was giving orders. Even if the order was unintentional. Add that to the fact that one of the two people he was ordering had been knocked unconscious by Harry only a few days ago and it was no wonder Dan and Emma didn't object. Hermione was never going to object to Harry protecting her family and just gave Harry a warm smile and quick peck on the cheek that promised a more thorough thanking later when he wasn't busy.
"Now what I am asking of you when we get to the point of hiring someone is the two you need to help me choose who. You're the ones who will be working with him so you're the ones who will have to get along with him."
Unwilling to argue the matter Dan agreed then asked. "How are you going to find someone? I doubt you can just check the magical yellow pages or send an owl to 'magical henchmen services.'"
"I was going to talk to Director Bones. See if she knew any retired D.M.L.E officers or Aurors who would be interested in a steady paycheck for what will hopefully be mostly sitting around and helping out a little to keep from getting bored."
"Are you sure about this harry? A full time security guard will be a lot of money." Dan asked.
Harry shrugged. "About four and half thousand Galleons a year and that's paying well because I want an experienced officer and not just a rookie. I already sent a letter to my account manager to set aside ten years of pay in a separate vault."
It was at that point Tonks who had been originally following her nose for the smell of dinner proved that she had been listening outside the door for at least the last few minutes. "Damn kid, if the boss lady wouldn't kill me for quitting during a civil war I'd be tempted to ask for the position myself. But I can definitely ask around for you."
"Thanks Tonks. Just be sure that they are fine working in the Muggle world and don't have any issues answering to my parents." Hermione was obviously thinking about how problematic some wizards could be.
"I actually have a couple of Muggleborn former D.M.L.E officers I would approach first. So what's for dinner?" She asked, looking longingly at the food Harry was prepping and changing the subject.