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English
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Part 4 of The Dominion of the Sword -- A Bellamione Tale
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Focus on Female Characters, Crossgenerational Slash, The Best Femslash
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Published:
2020-04-14
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2021-05-23
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104/104
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There Will Be Love (Not Half as Much Privilege)

Summary:

This story is basically War and Peace set in the Harry Potter universe, with lesbians. This story is not an endorsement of any real world political events. It is twice a fantasy, for even the “real” parts are but an image of a certain time, a dream of a world that not really was.

I'm not taking it down, don't worry.

Chapter 1: The Caspian Sea.

Notes:

Due to an ongoing AO3 databasing issue, Chapter 1 is duplicated as Chapter 2. Please skip directly to Chapter 3 when you have finished reading Chapter 1--the story is complete and you aren't missing anything. My apologies about this, but as the mere author, there's nothing I can do. :-)

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

The Caspian*

If some on the side of the enemy desert to come to your service, if they be loyal, they will always make you a great acquisition; for the forces of the adversary diminish more with the loss of those who flee, than with those who are killed, even though the name of the fugitives is suspect to the new friends, and odious to the old. – Machiavelli, The Art of War.

"Hermione, is this anything like a Muggle cruise? From before, I mean."

Hermione Granger slowly sat down the book, and ran a hand through her short hair. She understood what Ginny really meant by the offhanded comment, and looked up to her friend with her long hair braided sharply down her back and a bow near the top. "A little bit. There would be less smoke, though. The deck chairs would be nicer."

"Oh, well, they seem nice enough. The sea is very blue. There's this nice chicken and rice dish they sell down in the galley; I think it has mint in it," Ginny continued.

Hermione knew what was going to come next. She closed her eyes and started fumbling through the pockets of her field blouse for her pack of Belomors. "It probably is better than the field rations," she agreed mildly.

"Well, anyway… Don't you think there's enough smoke already?"

"It's the wrong kind," Hermione answered, reaching up to rub at one of her eyes and stare at the perfect blue reflection of the Caspian Sea, glinting in the white sun of the desert. "Ron sent another letter, didn't he?"

"He did," Ginny affirmed, and sighed, and made to sit down next to Hermione, which restored to the other witch a fading view of Turkmenbashi on the shore behind them. "You know that he's doing what has to be done against Voldemort. We all are. It's been so hard for him, since Harry died and we lost Hogwarts… We lost England…"

Hermione finished striking up the harsh Russian papirosa. She knew they would kill her someday, and she liked that thought very much. Until then, she'd have to fight. A part of her wanted to leave her friend be on the deck-chairs, as the heavy diesel exhaust wafted overhead from the straining, ancient, poorly maintained engines. They probably use cartridge start, Hermione thought to distract herself, musing that surely on Russians would ever come up with an idea so absurdly, well, Russian, as to start an engine with a gun cartridge. She could get up, and walk over to the fantail, where Alexandra and the other officers were already smoking. There was a key difference between her and Ginny, in the eyes of their comrades: Ginny was a Witch.

Hermione was also a witch—but she was an officer. Sergei Alexeivich, one of Major Alexandra Rostislavna Lukachenko's direct subordinates, tossed her a cheerful wave and a knowing grin to distract her, and it made Hermione crack a grin, too. She was tempted to go over and socialise with Alexandra and her officers—their battalion was dedicated to supporting Hermione's contingent of wizards—but it would make Ginny upset.

"You're not even going to read it, are you?" Ginny pleaded. Her braid fit with a lot of the Russian women in uniform, who tended to keep their hair long in a braid with a bow when they were not in combat—she had managed to fit in. A lot of the witches from Koldovstoretz did the same now.

"Maybe later. Enjoy the deck-chairs, Ginny."

"Hermione…"

"I'm going to get some chicken," her friend answered, and started toward the doors to belowdecks with the cigarette dangling from her lips. The excuse, at least, gave everyone an honourable way out, and Ginny sank into one of the chairs and tried to relax.

It was late 2002, almost five years after the Battle of Hogwarts, and nobody in the world cared about whether or not you smoked indoors anymore. No, there were plenty of other things that would kill you first. Like the cloud of smoke they were sailing towards, the massive billowing black clouds from the oil wells at Baku which were still burning, four years after six nuclear weapons hit the city.

From the multi-sided nuclear war that Voldemort had started to "cull the muggle herd" when he openly took power in Britain. From Hermione, Ron, Ginny and everyone she cared about failing.

From Harry dying.

Hermione stuffed the pocket copy of Machiavelli's Art of War into her fatigues, and couldn't quite remember ever seeing a sea as beautiful as this one. But it brought no comfort to her heart. Pausing at the doors which protected the stairs going belowdecks, she took a last look, to the first ferry that was carrying Turkmen troops and travelling right ahead of them, to the Russian frigate Tatarstan standing off her starboard quarter.

High up in the tops of the frigate's radar masts, the two lonely wizards on air guard looked like any other soldiers with their massive greatcoats pulled close against the cold wind; fully exposed to the sea breeze, they were much cooler than Hermione and Ginny on the fantail. Ahead off the starboard bow, the smoke from Baku, even though it was hundreds of klicks away, could indeed be seen fouling the sky under the white desert sun. It complicated the job of those wizards, who would have only bare seconds to save the ships from a magical attack originating from Makhachkala, the southernmost position of Voldemort's forces on the Caspian sea, but it also served like a smoke-screen for the route between Turkmenbashi and Alat, the Caspian port of Azerbaijan to which they were bound.

Hermione sighed, shouldered her AKM, and went below. As promised, there was chicken and rice, and the chicken had some kind of mint yoghurt sauce. And there was a pleasant surprise, too, one of the few new friends she had made in this terrible new world of smoke, soot, snow, and smert (or, Russian for death, to give her four s's). Larissa Sergeivna Naryshkina was dancing a Cossack's lezginka to a tune provided by a balalaika and an accordion.

Hermione dashed out her cigarette in one of the old bakelite trays on the table and took a guilty moment to admire a new friend for less than platonic reasons. The aristocratic Larissa was from one of the purest of pure-blood Russian wizarding families, and filled out her uniform very well, with her dark hair pinned up under the papakha of the uniform of a Registered Cossack of the Orenburg Host, and shining blue eyes as rich as the Caspian's waves.

Finishing her song, she went for the samovar. "Tea, Hermione?" By now, Hermione's Russian was perfectly good. She was still good at studying, she wouldn't give that up for anything, wouldn't stop until she was dead. It was the last thing that was normal.

"Certainly."

Larissa was at her side a heartbeat later with two cups. It was all the same intense Russian zavarka, boiled to a syrup from tea bricks and then diluted with hot water, but Larissa put cherry preserves into her's, and Hermione took some condensed milk from the galley. The men with the musical instruments had switched to singing Vashe Blagorodie, Gospoda Udacha ('Your Honour, Lady Luck'). The verse they were on went something like:

"Your Honour, Lady Luck,

To some you are kind, to some otherwise.

Wait, don't call for the 9 grams into the heart.

I'm unlucky in death, will be lucky in love."

The diesels made the table shake, but the low one-meter waves they were running head on into, the old Soviet steel hull handled well, even though it had been so streaked with rust when they boarded that Ginny had gotten a queasy look on her face.

"You're lost in a reverie again." Larissa was one of the kindest pure-bloods Hermione had ever known, not at all bigoted to her, and very perceptive, but she was very much ignoring the cossack officer who was now dancing to try and get her attention. Friends, yes, but she would likely never even think of a muggle-born that way, let alone a muggle in that way.

"My ex-boyfriend wrote me a letter again."

"Strelkov," Larissa muttered, using Ron's nom de guerre instead of his name, and turning her own attention to eye her gun against the wall. Wizards didn't need them, but they carried them so they couldn't immediately be identified as Wizards in a mass of soldiers.

"Yes." Hermione took a drink of her tea, still blazing hot as they drank it in Central Asia, though the condensed milk had taken the edge off. "He wants to get back together, but I … What he did to those collaborators in Chisinau, Larissa. I can't."

Larissa sipped her tea. "Most people consider his actions heroic. Even among the most courageous, there aren't many Wizards volunteering to fight behind Voldemort's lines. Isn't he in Poland now?"

"That's what they say, but nobody knows. Operational security, you know."

"Got to keep the constant tension up," Larissa murmured. It was true; the 'strategy of tension', muggles weren't terribly effective at fighting Voldemort by themselves, but even a few wizards with them could make an insurgency terribly effective, it forced a wizard to constantly be on his or her toes, they could never relax, never calm down, never let down their guards, or a single shot in the dark, or a cup of poison, or a dagger or a suicide bomb would be the end of them. The objective, quite simply, was to make the lives of Voldemort's Death Eaters in occupied Europe a living Hell, or, as it had been put at the time, 'since we can't put them back in Azkaban, we will bring Azkaban to them.'

"It's a licence for endless murder," Hermione answered.

"Wars happen, shit gets broken," Larissa shrugged. "But, I understand why you're uncomfortable. It changes a man. Five years of this, three billion dead…"

"Maybe I just don't want men anymore." Hermione wanted to get up, wanted to invite Larissa up-deck for a smoke, she wanted the gun to not be a weight on her shoulder. Instead, she forced herself to finish eating her chicken, because after the starving children that she had seen in Donetsk during their retreat from the Ukraine, she could never leave even a single grain of rice on her plate again without feeling a crushing blow of guilt.

Now Voldemort's armies were on the Volga, filled with slaves forced to fight for him. But he would not get past the Volga, and thousands were dying every day to keep it so. Muggle wars could last for decades. Now, Hermione felt, a wizard one would, too.

"Do you know what we're going to Azerbaijan for? They wouldn't even tell me and I'm a Senior Councillor of Magic," Larissa gestured to the three bronze stars on her epaulettes. Russians had ranks and uniforms for everything, and Larissa kept those rank tabs even semi-under-cover as a Registered Cossack.

"Five ranks down from the top," Hermione teased her, feeling better when she finished her food and reminding her friend that despite the grand title, it was actually a pretty common rank.

Larissa twisted a mock glare at her.

"So, yes, I do," Hermione allowed. "I can't tell you much, but…" Her voice dropped to a whisper.

"Voldemort has sent Bellatrix Lestrange to the Caucasus front with two divisions of the Janissary Corps. And we don't know why. But with that…"

Larissa's eager smile had frozen on her face. The Janissaries were Voldemort's best troops: They were volunteers. Bellatrix was the most powerful surviving Death Eater. "Bozhe moi," she whispered. "We're in for it now."

"Yeah," Hermione forced out. "Let's go have a smoke." Hermione Granger was only twenty-three years old, but she felt like she could be fifty.

Larissa smiled and got up with her. "Sure. I'm going to get a crude oil treatment when we get to Naftalan, I swear… You should too, the desert is hard on the skin. Six months in Gansu with our Chinese allies, I didn't think we'd ever get off that front…"

"Fuck my skin," Hermione mumbled, reaching again for her pack of Belomors. She remembered the kind soldiers who had given her a pack on the night that she had learned how many people had died in the nuclear war Voldemort started. She had wandered away from where the British wizard refugees were staying, crying, horrified at her failure. The cancer-sticks were a sort of self-flagellation that had brought her comfort on that night, and she'd never looked back.

As she reached for them, though, her sleeve pulled back a bit, and she saw part of the scar and tugged it down sharply again. "Fuck my skin." Cursing in Russian was about the only thing that made her feel good about that. "I don't want another boyfriend, so it doesn't matter. But I'm sure Ginny will go with you if you ask her." This is the future? This! She hung on the rail and smoked and looked out over the sea, and wished with all of her heart that Harry was still alive, that there was something to look forward to instead of endless war.


Bellatrix Lestrange sank deeper into the crude oil bath. She had been assured it would take years off her skin if she did it every day for ten minutes a day, the heavy Naftalan crude having been plundered from the tanks at the terminal in the city of Makhachkala when their troops took it. And if there was one thing that Bellatrix would try at this point in her life, it was anything to recover her youth.

Half the city had been wrecked in the fighting. Leading fanatical Dagestani irregulars who came out of the hills shouting 'Allahuackbar!' as they attacked, a small group of Koldovstoretsy, as the Russian wizards called themselves, had hit Yaxley's slave-soldiers in the flank when they had been advancing toward the Iron Gates of Derbent. Yaxley's Army and half the younger wizards under his command had been slain, and he had been recalled to London in disgrace, officially for his defeat. Of course, the twelve Koldovstoretsy involved in the operation and most of their Dagestani troops had been wiped out, but first they had stopped cold an advance by Voldemort's forces into the Caucasus for at least six months.

In fact, though, Bellatrix knew the real reason for the recall order for Yaxley was that Voldemort wanted to use his most reliable Death Eater (her) for a very special mission. It was a mission to the Caucasus, a mission of great personal importance to the Dark Lord and self-proclaimed Emperor of Earth. The kind of mission which had led to her being given two divisions of Janissaries, the only troops that they really had who could fight man for man on even terms with the motivated armies of the surviving Muggle nations, whose military equipment had been enchanted again and again by the wizards of Koldovstoretz, Wahemaya and Rìyuè until pretty much all of it that still survived had some kind of magical protection.

It was insane, really. Seven of the world's eleven schools were under Voldemort's control, but the Pure-Blood families of Afro-Eurasia, for complicated socio-political reasons interrelated with retarded Muggle political disputes, had sided with the Muggle-born and fought back. The nuclear war that Voldemort's Lieutenants had started between all of the world's nuclear powers with Britain's nuclear arsenal—while protecting Britain from the counter-strikes with a massive magical shield raised by all of the Death Eaters working under his control—had been supposed to thin the muggle herds on the planet and guarantee Voldemort's total conquest of the world, as forces aligned with him took over the Wizarding schools and communities in many other parts of the world. But it had also split open the protective veil defending the Wizarding world from detection by Muggles. Because of the failure to decapitate the Wizarding leadership in the whole world simultaneously, that had given Muggles in the countries whose Wizards resisted enough time to adapt to the existence of magic and begin to be motivated to fight back and resist their rule, hand in hand with those Wizards who still opposed them.

The last four years had been some kind of incomprehensible Hell. Sure, they had killed two billion Muggles, and that was all very nice, but it had also been quite impersonal, and as it turned out, the destruction from the widespread use of nuclear weapons had turned most of the magical creatures and magical beasts of the world against them, and the nuclear winter—admittedly not as bad as it would have been during the Muggle Cold War when there were many more bombs—had caused massive disruption to the food supply in Europe.

As it turned out, Muggles who were watching their children starve to death were remarkably hard to control, no matter what magic you used on them. So you had to kill more and more and more of them, and then Wizards showed up from Koldovstoretsy-controlled territory like that nasty brute Strelkov, and then Death Eaters in Europe started dying in a hundred new ways that none of them had imagined when they all started on Voldemort's course to ruling the world. Death Eaters… Like her husband, Rodolphus Lestrange, who had been lured into a trap in Budapest two years before.

Admittedly, she had never cared about him anyway, but it would have been nice to let him raise her little Delphini. Her blessed child with Voldemort. These days, as they grew further apart, as Bellatrix looked at a world so very, very different than the one she thought she would stand at Voldemort's side to rule, Delphini was the only thing that quieted her soul and the Screams that tore through her mind. Voldemort was further and further away as he hid himself—the loss of all the Horcruxes except for Nagini had guaranteed that he was never seen in public, and he spent more and more of his time studying the Dark Arts and less and less time with her, his orders to his Lieutenants for the war effort becoming increasingly erratic.

Enchanted body-doubles now made all of his appearances outside of his inner circle of Death Eaters, especially since there had been thirty assassination attempts, one of them with nuclear weapons!

Was this supposed to be their future? Assassination attempts, poisonings, nuclear bombs going off, endless wars, leading armies thousands of miles away using endless quantities of Muggle technology that they were supposed to wipe out in favour of Magic, but instead mass-produced to try and win the war?

What kind of joke was this? Was this what she had spent thirty years of her life right up through age fifty loyal to Voldemort for? Was this what she had spent twenty years in Azkaban for? To need her wand in hand even in a bath where the slaves had been strip-searched, scanned, probed, ensorcelled and still might try to kill her? To lose her beauty while thousands of miles from her Love, from Voldemort?

What the hell was the end-game now? The war just kept going on and on and on. Right now, there was some Chechnyan wizard named Shamil the Old who was leading his six home-schooled children in stiffening Chechen and Ingush fighters in attacking her flank around Kurchaloy, and probably thousands of stupid Muggles were dying but unless she sent some more young purebloods over there to fight them—who might easily die, further reducing their numbers—her forces would be driven back and she'd have to intervene.

What was the point? Bellatrix started cackling. The point is, there is no end-game, and there never will be. Bellatrix had finally figured it out, and between that and the punishment she had received for failing to stop the loss of the sword all those years before, she found her belief in Voldemort more hollow than it had ever been. In Azkaban, she at least had faith of his return. Now, there was faith in… What? Nothing. She had figured it out: Voldemort very much intended for there to never be an endgame. He intended to live forever, sure. He did not have a plan to end the war, though; the sum of all his plans now was to 'live forever', nothing more and nothing less. The problem was that so far, there was no known way in British wizarding to live forever. It was one of those tricky things which magic tended to recoil from as too far outside of the rules of the way of the Fae.

But Russian wizarding, buried in its past, very much did have a way to live forever. And it was driving Bellatrix further into madness with envy, because it would work on only one of them, and Voldemort had sent her to retrieve it for him.

The military campaign was incidental. Bellatrix Lestrange was heading to the Caucasus to find and retrieve for Voldemort nothing less than the Wand of Koschei the Deathless.

But when Voldemort lived forever, and when Voldemort had conquered the world, and when Voldemort had the Wand of Koschei the Deathless, when Bellatrix was dead from old age with the twenty best years of her life left… When it was just Voldemort and Delphini, what would he do to her daughter? Would he start to see his own daughter as a rival?

In the part of Bellatrix's mind that was sane enough to love the child of her own body, she increasingly thought that was going to be the case. The mad part of her, conversely, grew increasingly envious the longer she thought about Koschei the Deathless. She was being asked to give immortality to her lover while she aged and died, even as he grew more reclusive, even more psychotic, as the resisting muggles and Wizards proved perfectly willing to do things like set off a nuclear weapon in Edinburgh and accept all the consequent collateral fatalities among their own precious muggles for a failed shot to kill him. That was the Endgame? And her sisters were On the Other Side? What psychotic trick of fate was that!?

"Madame Lestrange, may you live forever!" One of her Janissary commanders paused at the door, behind the screen which protected her modesty, like she gave a shit about it.

"Go ahead, Jorge." The salutation that Voldemort had the Janissaries use with Wizards made her soul clench down and grimace: She very much did want to live forever, and she very much wasn't going to get the chance to.

"The fourth division is in position. We're ready to begin the push on Vladikavkaz."

Bellatrix smirked. She at least had a moment of pleasure at that. The Confederation of Independent States forces—the wartime coordinating government under the Muggle Leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, but really controlled by the Koldovstoretsy (there was no way Muggles could have organised this war so effectively as to fight Voldemort's forces to a standstill)-were doubtless expecting her to hit the Iron Gates of Derbent as hard as she could with the Janissaries and slog through the radioactive hell around Baku rather than try to advance through the dubious terrain of the central Caucasus and the legendary Chechen insurgents.

She wasn't a fucking idiot. She was going to advance on Vladikavkaz, deal with Shamil and his sons, annihilate the Muggle population of Chechnya and Ingushetia and seize the Georgian Military Road over the Jvari Pass. Bellatrix had never expected this to be her reward for her twenty years in Azkaban, but she was Bellatrix Lestrange, the greatest Witch of her generation. Muggles would not better her at anything, not even this war which was increasingly fought on their terms.

"I'll be out in a few minutes, Jorge."

"May you live forever!" He saluted and spun on heel to step out.

May you live forever… She looked down at the scars on her wrists from Azkaban, and in a secret, hidden part of her mind, thought very bad thoughts, and wished for the killing to begin, and cursed that Grozny was a city already ruined by the Muggles, so she couldn't do the job herself. Still, there were people there, and that would be enough; it would quiet the Screams, for a while.

For only a while.

 


 

Port of Alat, Azerbaijani Coast of the Caspian Sea

 

When they arrived at Alat, the full squadron had come back together over the night after proceeding independently. Four big rail ferries, two lorry ferries, and four cargo ships had been escorted by the Tatarstan and two smaller Koni-class frigates, which now sailed on patrol lines off to the east from Gil Island. The smoke rising into the air in the north from Baku was eerie, and occasionally flicked with flames on the horizon to the north-northeast. Two rail ferries and a lorry ferry went in first, as well as the freighters, which were be unloaded at the same time; the ferries would unload faster, but there were fewer specialized docks for them, so they had to unload in two waves. That meant the total unloading process for the ferries and the freighters would take approximately the same length of time.

This focus on operational logistics was a new part of Hermione’s life. She had always been an intellectual. She had managed to complete six months of infantry officer training and another six months of special training at the Combined Arms Academy over the past four years in rotations back from the front. She carried pocket copies of Sun-Tzu, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Renatus, and the Strategikon of Maurice, and her Field Manual of Arms was dog-eared. To keep weight down, for comfort she only had Aurelius' Meditations. For magical books, she had Trimble, Basic Hexes for the Busy and Vexed, The Dark Arts Outsmarted, Practical Defensive Magic and its Use Against the Dark Arts , and Self-Defensive Spellwork. Keeping the books down to a bare minimum, they still filled half of her regulation duffel. Ginny had more wizarding books, of course, and Larissa had Russian ones, and they all shared to keep their knowledge up.

They can pry the books from me when I die. It was one source of great pride in the life that she still had. In front of her, the unloading continued. Each of the ferries was designed to carry forty railway wagons. They had been loaded directly with the tank transporters which had carried their T-64s all the way from Gansu for redeployment, with the bogies being swapped at Shankou for the break in gauge. And so in a journey of weeks across thousands of kilometres of the Central Asian desert, the 27 th Guards Motor-Rifle Division was heading to the Kavkaz, with several Turkmen armoured regiments reinforcing them. Frankly, war had gotten more interesting when she realised it involved lots of books and maths and railway timetables and sheer scientific complexity.

Ginny came up to her side with a grin. “Larissa said we could go ashore early, if you like. I brought some chicken from the galley.”

Ginny’s arrival barely stopped Hermione from habitually going for a cigarette. “Ginny, we’re not docked yet. We’re waiting our turn for a quay.”

“Wind’s blowing the right way, so…” Ginny cast Arresto Momentum as she pushed them off the rail. Hermione hated using that spell after it barely saved her, but in this case it worked perfectly, and gave the time for the wind to push them down onto the eastern quay. Some of the soldiers on the rail applauded, and Ginny gave a little bow in response. She was still very happy for male attention, though she hadn’t dated anyone at all since Harry.

Years ago that would have upset Hermione enormously. Now, she had figured out Ginny was going to do it, and had just rolled with it. Ginny’s fierce independence had become even more paramount to her state of being since the hardship of the past years. Since members of her family had started to die in this.

Hermione flipped her duffel over her shoulder and adjusted her helmet. “So, now we find somewhere to have lunch?”

“Exactly!” Ginny started off with Hermione, stepping off the quay onto the brown sand and rock of the shore. But they hadn’t gotten far across the barren hills, salt ponds and toward the ramshackle village before they both realised that what was beyond it was not some storage depot or ammunition dump, but a refugee camp. The smell had been the first warning.

“Oh…” Ginny sighed as she looked out, and saw a group of children run up toward them.

“əsgəri!” they cried, which Hermione figured meant ‘soldier’ well enough. She could see the rags they were dressed in, and how thin they were, and how it made Ginny want to cry.

But while Food cannot be Created—that was one of the fundamental laws—it could be duplicated, though it would not be as nutritious and would rot immediately. But that didn’t matter; it would be consumed even faster. The two women looked at each other and without further thought pulled out their lunches of chicken and rice and their wands. It wouldn’t help beyond today, it wouldn’t help beyond this one meal, but for one meal, the children would eat.

The screams of delight and awe as more and more people from the refugee camp clustered to witness Hermione and Ginny recreate the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes with a little bit of wizarding power were enough to make even Hermione smile. More and more people kept coming until they had almost exhausted Hermione and Ginny, and the two, in exhausted contentment, accepted tea from a lean man with blisters on his face, dressed in the rags of fine clothes.

“Wonder-workers,” he said, speaking in Russian, which might as well be the lingua franca of the region in the circumstances. “Thank you for helping the children. Allah protect you.”

“Witches,” Ginny replied with a smile. “Glad to help.”

The man laughed. “We would not think that word good, but if you say you are witch, then witches are good.”

“Thank you,” Hermione said softly. “Were you all from Baku?”

“We are Baku,” he said with some grim pride. “I just came back from a tour.”

“I thought that Baku was uninhabitable?” Ginny asked in consternation.

He laughed bitterly. “It is. That’s why we live in the Sychlijar Camp. But we men do three month rotations at the oil fields and the refineries, to keep the petrol flowing for your ships and trains and tanks and fight the fires.” His lean face sank. “We lose a thousand a month to radiation and industrial accidents.”

“I shouldn’t have asked…” Ginny trailed off, and turned her attention to the children.

But Hermione looked to the man. “We’re all soldiers, now,” she offered quietly. “All doing our bit to stop Voldemort.”

The man spat at the sound of the name. “Shaitan himself.”

“You’re right about that. Want a smoke?” She offered, trying to be friendly.

“I cough whenever I smoke now,” he grinned blackly. “Not much longer now for me. But every barrel of fuel our towers crack is another step to victory.”

Hermione turned away and looked down. She imagined the man, choking on the radioactive soot and smoke in Baku, working to keep one of the damaged Cracking Towers at a refinery running. It was the scientific alchemy of Hell. She tried to remember what could be said as a benediction for a Muslim. “Go with God,” she offered.

Tawakkaltu Ala-Allah,” the Azerbaijani man offered in return in liturgical Arabic, and then he turned quietly away, to watch the children who for one meal had full bellies, and smile.

As he did, a rumbling cut through the ground. Hermione and Ginny tensed with the reflexes of veterans. Then, coming around a curve, they saw a locomotive swinging down the embankment on the broad-gauge line from Baku. A massive Red Star surmounted the armoured snout as a wisp of soot from the exhaust stack indicated this engine was in better condition than most, despite the massive welded slabs of steel down the side.

Despite everything, Hermione’s heart caught in her chest and she leapt up in excitement. It was an armoured train, and a real one too, purpose-built, not improvised. With the airbrakes hissing and popping, it slowed to a stop on the main-line, Russian flags flying overhead, and Red Stars painted on it for recognition markings.

“Ginny, that’s an armoured train. A Russian one, so it retreated from the North. You don’t think…?”

“Well, they should at least know!” Both of them made haste, hoping against hope.

And for once, in the middle of uncertainty, death, starvation, combat, a little, tiny dream came true.

An absurd figure wearing a green skirt and a Cossack’s blouse, a cherkeska, with blonde hair in a braid and a massive pair of smoke-tinted tanker’s goggles, with a sword buckled to her side and her rifle on her shoulder with roses stuffed in the barrel, descended from the train with an eager shout of her own. A massive burly Tajik man with a full black beard followed her with a Papasha submachinegun in hand, with a trace of concern evident through his beard.

“HERMIONE! GINNY!”

Hermione shouted right back. “LUNA! I was so worried when I heard that they took Makhachkala!”

Luna Lovegood reached out and spun into an embrace with Hermione Granger, still wearing those giant tankers' goggles. “We were attacked with armour-piercers,” she said in exaggerated excitement. “By Janissaries. But I used Impedimenta on their auto-loaders, and six of their tanks blew up and we got away ! And then I was given tea and we stopped and we found these flowers, but they’re getting sort of dry, so I fixed them.” Closer in, Hermione could see that instead of fake musket cartridges or gazyr, the blouse held potion bottles. Leave it to Luna to come up with something so clever. Hermione immediately wanted one.

“By Merlin, Luna, did you have to retreat through Baku?” Ginny asked delicately, still feeling a little sick over the conversations with the man.

“Oh no, there’s a railway to the west of Baku, and that’s the way we came,” Luna answered, and peeled off from Hermione to give Ginny a big hug, too. “I LOVE Armoured Trains. They’re so neat, and so rare, but everyone likes them! They’re like the Crumple-Horned Snorkack of the Military World,” she said, like she was confiding a very important secret.

Hermione shook her head, and looked at the man who was obviously Luna Lovegood’s muggle bodyguard. He looked back.

“You’re friends of her’s?” He asked.

“Yes. Schoolmates.”

He nodded. “She’s happy to see you,” he added laconically. “I’m Farrukh, so she calls me ‘happy’.”

Hermione shook her head. “Want a smoke, Farrukh?”

“Sure.”

Hermione gave him a Belomor and a light. “She is something else, isn’t she?” She gestured to Luna, while the woman talked to Ginny.

Farrukh took a drag on his cigarette and looked very, very serious toward Hermione. “She is a Mad Fakhira, and it is well-known that Allah protects the Mad. I would rather be at her side than anywhere else in this war.”

I’ve found someone who takes Luna seriously. Hermione blinked, and took a drag on the cigarette she’d lit up, herself. Shaking her head, she looked down to where the unloading of the freighters was continuing. The cranes on the quay were lifting artillery pieces and pallets of ammunition off, and setting them down on railway wagons. Large numbers of men, who she now realised were from the refugee camp, were securing them to the wagons with chains.

Hermione saw some movement, and jerked her head around to see a column of four UAZ-469’s approaching. In one of the middle ones was a woman in a uniform like her own service uniform in the MKPФ (министерство колдовства Российской Федерации), the Ministry of Witchcraft of the Russian Federation. But with the massive number of stars on her epaulettes, Hermione realised in surprise that she must be the Actual State Councillor of the Azerbaijani Ministry. Her hair was grey, her expression severe, as she dismounted when the UAZ screeched to a halt.

“Junior Councillor of Witchcraft Granger?” She asked. It was the equivalent of being an Army Major, so that was normally what her comrades called her in the field for convenience. But the Actual State Councillor for Azerbaijan was not exactly a comrade.

“Ma’am!” Hermione dropped the cigarette, came to attention and saluted.

“Good to meet you in person. I am Nuray Hajinsky, the Actual State Councillor for Witchcraft of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. Go ahead and smoke, Junior Councillor.”

Hermione sheepishly retrieved it. Even cigarettes were too precious to waste these days. “You wanted to talk with me?”

“Well, first I want this armoured train off the mainline!”

Luna looked sheepishly at the woman as her voice picked up. “Oh right.” She gave Ginny a last hug. “Sorry, Hermione!” And ran back for the train.

Hermione shielded her eyes. “Sorry, ma’am.”

“No worries. Walk with me, Junior Councillor. You were told about the reason we’re being reinforced here in the Kavkaz?”

“Yes, General Pronichev told me in some detail, Ma’am.”

“Well, good, but we’ve got a problem,” State Councillor Hajinsky murmured. “We thought that they would attack the Iron Gates again, so we were planning on reinforcing Derbent. Good enough to stop Gog and Magog, good enough stop Hitler, good enough to stop Yaxley—good enough to stop Bellatrix Lestrange.”

“She jinked back west again, didn’t she?”

“Exactly. Her Janissary divisions started moving out for Grozny this morning. That means she’s going to try and force the Jvari Pass. With winter coming on. It sounds insane, but remember that Bellatrix was the Death Eater who led her troops over the Simplon Pass in winter to conquer Italy.”

Hermione grimaced. “Still, that puts them far away from the oil.” She shook her head. “I suppose the Georgian Military Road,” she tried to keep her geography straight, “goes right into Tbilisi, doesn’t it?”

“It does, but Tbilisi was hit by three nuclear weapons. It’s not really so important. There’s another one of you English who is working on a lead. The 27th will pass through Tbilisi—the railway has been repaired--and start to deploy at Dzegvi. You’ll meet your contact there.”

“Do you know who it is?” Hermione answered.

“I’m afraid not,” the older woman replied. “Well, I was also asked to give you something else,” she added, and fishing in her pocket, produced a scroll that she handed to Hermione. “Moskva MinKol asked me to present this to you,” she finished with a flourish, using the common abbreviation for the Ministry of Witchcraft in Russian.

Hermione unfolded it, and the enchanted scroll played a short ditty of the opening chords to the famous military song V ‘Put, “Let’s Go”. As it did, the State Seal of the Ministry of Witchcraft glowed in red, white and blue above the paper. By Order of Georgii Borisovich Sorokin, Actual State Councillor for Witchcraft, Hermione Alanovna Granger is hereby promoted to the rank of Councillor of Witchcraft for the Russian Federation.

Alan was not her father’s real name, of course. But she needed a patronymic, and the further it threw off the Death-Eaters, the better. She had no idea if her parents were still alive, but…

Between actually being able to help the children, however briefly, and thinking about her parents, Hermione felt wet hot tears splash on her cheeks without ever really feeling any of the other sensations of crying. “Thank you, ma’am.”

The elder Azerbaijani witch put a hand on her shoulder. “We’re going to finish the job,” she offered, with an iron reservoir of confidence. “There will be a future for humanity and wizarding kind. And starting a counteroffensive with Bellatrix Lestrange’s head on a pike would be a nice gesture to Voldemort back in London. I have ever confidence in you, my child. Present your wand to the enemy, and show no mercy.”

 

Outskirts of Grozny, Chechen Republic, Occupied Russian Federation

 

Bellatrix had Apparated to Gudermes on the eastern approach to Grozny as her Janissary divisions fronted a mass of ensorcelled troops and monsters driving toward the already-ruined city. The Chally II’s which equipped the elite Janissary units were on the advance, still being mass-produced in the largely intact United Kingdom with their superb Chobham Armour, were like so much chaff to Bellatrix’s interests, but her lower-ranking wizards, the Pureblood Wannabes who aspired to becoming Death Eaters themselves, could be relied upon to enchant the precious vehicles for additional protection, or else.

She knew that they really needed to seize the railway intact, or else they’d have problems. It was the only real way the muggles had for moving large quantities of goods across land, and muggle armies needed large quantities of goods. Her Army needed large quantities of goods. Her Army was a damned muggle Army.

And if she wanted to win, and live, she was damned well going to fight like one. Because she was not going to give up yet. She still had a life to live. She still had Delphini. And fucking muggles wouldn’t be the reason that Voldemort killed her. If he was going to do that, she was going to give him a better reason.

So she was going to break through the ruins of Grozny in record time. The shells were laid out in front of her, with Green Crosses on them, a peculiar design. Men in the janissaries were muttering softly, and making sure it was slaves and captives who positioned them. Muggle items could be enchanted—cars could be made to fly, tanks could be made resistant to magic, too—but weapons rarely were. Either it was a magical weapon, or it was a muggle weapon. There was no particular spell that would make a shell more lethal.

Except when the shell was empty, and custom designed merely as a dispenser for a very muggle kind of potion. They really are remarkable at finding new ways to kill each other, Bellatrix thought as she walked along the lines of gas shells, and the slaves worked at the delicate process of loading her potion from a great iron vat into them.

It was then that she paused, hearing screams from some of the houses nearby. The high-pitched shouts froze her in place. For all they were coming from muggle animals, at the hands of muggle animals, they sounded altogether very much like her own.

Ignoring the work, Bellatrix was frozen in place. She didn’t know where to begin, as the memories hammered her. The memories that she would never let anyone see, anyone. Not with Legilimency, not with anything. The memories that were the reason for the promise Voldemort had given her. The promise that he had betrayed over the Sword. A betrayal which had come with beautiful Delphini, a betrayal which meant she was nothing more than another Death Eater.

A betrayal that meant she could trust no-one at all.

She was frozen in place, but it didn’t really matter at all, because the men were still working. Her Janissaries and her slaves were still working, and they would keep working until she told them to stop. They certainly knew better, even the officers, than to disturb her, or question her, or care if she was in a reverie, or even using some kind of magic to prepare to face the enemy. One did not question a Death Eater when one was a muggle, and expect to live. One obeyed, or one perished, no matter how ‘important’ of a muggle that one was.

It was for that reason that she did not think twice when the moment seized her. “Jorge!” she called out to her Chief of Staff. “I want you to have the soldiers let those women go.”

“May You Live Forever, Madame,” he answered with a salute and stepped forward, rubbing a gloved hand over his short-cropped sandy-brown hair. “Madame, the men…”

“Obey,” Bellatrix answered flatly. She very nearly killed him then and there, except that then she would have to go find someone else with the authority to order the soldiers to stop. And he was a Janissary Officer, valued, at least. So the eldest Black daughter deigned to provide an explanation. “They are distracting me, but there is no value in shooting them, we need slaves in this region and the men always fight to the death. So I want you to make the men stop, and I want you to let them go.”

Jorge stiffened. “It will lower morale before the action. Do you have a recommendation, Madame?”

“We are still on our supply lines, and I suspect there will be sustained action so there will be little opportunity for Firewhisky, so distribute a double-ration to the men before the attack in order to encourage them,” Bellatrix snapped. “Now execute your instructions.”

“May You Live Forever, Madame!”

He turned back to the Command Track that they had brought up for her. Muggles and subordinates handled most of the coordination, but Bellatrix was aware that she had to make sure that the general intent of her orders was followed, otherwise some fucking idiot would lead an entire division of ensorcelled supporting troops into a swamp and humiliate her before the Dark Lord. The assault on Jvari Pass was a precision, high-speed operation in which hours counted. She had to lead it in person.

But what she was actually interested in was enchanting the potions in person. That was Wizarding work, unlike leading the Army. The brief confrontation with Jorge had disrupted her concentration. That made the Screams fade away, and that was not a bad thing. The screams in the buildings were fading away as well, as the order spread. There was a part of her that was still very uncomfortable when confronted with reminders of her upbringing in the lives and fates of muggles.

It made it seem like they were almost people. That wasn’t upsetting, but it was unsettling, like the first time you pulled up a Mandrake and it seemed almost sapient. That’s it.

She smiled, baring her rotted, wrecked teeth to a world which, in this time and place, did not care in the slightest. The nearest enemy position was about fifteen kilometres ahead in Argun, and Grozny, less than thirty-two kilometres away, could be hit by her artillery with ease. She just had to finish the work on preparing the potion for the shells…

The radio clipped to her belt crackled. “Madame, incoming 2 o’clock high!”

Bellatrix lurched up and without thinking flipped her wand up and cast Protego, in the variation she had specialised for these occasions.

It saved her, her command track, Jorge, the shells they were working on, and her potions from the tracks of cluster bombs, as a group of shapes tore through the sky above her. The terrifying roar of attack jets going supersonic at low altitude came seconds later as flares, chaff and decoys tore out from the aircraft.

Bombs ricocheted off her Protego in random wild directions, hitting some of the artillery pieces—but they had plenty—and knocking out a few tanks. They skipped randomly into houses in the city, too, and the explosions would be followed by screams soon enough. But not her screams.

Bellatrix knew how this game was played by the muggles. Instead of following up on the temptation to cast a spell against the fleeing jets, she raised Protego again. That saved her from the second wave, intended to take advantage of any wizards who had committed the amateur hour mistake of destroying the jets that were no longer threats and dropping their shields to do so. A second wave of bombs ricocheted crazily through the town in consequence to their interaction with the magical shield.

A smirked touched her lips as her Chief of Staff stepped back over to her side. “What were they, Jorge?”

“Fencers, at maybe fifty meters,” he answered with a shrug. “Harassment attack.” It was a pretty common game now. If the Wizards tried to kill the bombers, one of them might just fuck up and die. It happened more than Bellatrix would like to admit. “The Rapier SAMs with the 3rd Janissary Division are engaging now, Madame. We might get a few.”

Bellatrix ignored the comment, that was more relevant to Jorge than to her. There were screams in the city from wounded muggles, but they were not her Screams. She fixed on the fact that the muggles had killed and wounded their own kind in a failed attempt to kill Wizards, and let it soak into her tortured soul. It kept the madness comfortably at bay.

She wondered, idly, if the muggles had evacuated their civilians from Grozny.

 


 

 

Note: Please skip directly to Chapter 3. Chapter 2 is a mirror due to a databasing issue with AO3 I cannot fix on my own.

 


 

Notes (continued in the notes section):

Turkmenbashi - The largest port on the Caspian coast of Turkmenistan, it was renamed from Krasnovodsk by the regime of The Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan's post-Soviet dictator.
Cartridge start - Some diesel engines, and actually not just in Russia, are actually compression started by setting off the powder charge from a bullet, without the bullet of course. This is called a cartridge.
papirosa - this is an extremely strong, unfiltered, primitive cigarette with the end you smoke surrounded by a cardboard tube that you pinch in your fingers to hold and smoke from. The Belomorkanals that Hermione is smoking are a real brand, named after Stalin's massive construction effort of the White Sea Canal (which after all is what Belomorkanal means) in the 1930s. They are cheap and strong and represent exactly what a soldier would smoke.
Makhachkala - City on the northeast of the Caucasus on the Caspian shore.
Alat - A small port with rail access south of Baku.
AKM - Used for the AK-47M and AK-74M (referring to the second in this case), basically simplified and improved variants of those assault rifles.
papakha - a kind of hat cossacks wear, furry with sheep's wool
bakelite - Plastic-like material you'd see cigarette trays made out of in the 60s.
lezginka - A kind of dance.
"Registered Cossack of the Orenburg Host" - this is a legal term and a cultural term. Legally, "Registered Cossack" means someone who is in one of the Cossack hosts recognised for paramilitary duties by the government of Russia. It also means a certain mannerism, style of address, and lifestyle, and group affiliation. But each host also has uniforms which means for purposes of concealment, someone might be wearing one even when they don't belong to this group - if it's convenient and they're important. In the old days of the Empire, aristocrats might have several regiments they were affiliated with and have a uniform for each one
Vashe Blagorodie, Gospoda Udacha - Your Honour, Lady Luck - a famous song from the iconic Soviet movie "White Sun of the Desert".
Naftalan crude - a kind of crude oil from the Caucasus region that people bathe in because of its reputed healing powers.
Janissaries - Ottoman slave-soldiers who were raised from a young age for military service and were the Ottoman Empire's elite soldiers. The term here is used to refer to muggle troops who volunteered to serve Voldemort, mostly because the Death Eaters don't care what they're called and because they adopted it out of pride when their enemies (i.e., the CIS and allies) started calling them that. Russia has a long cultural history of fighting Janissaries.
Koldovstoretsy - This just means "People of Koldovstoretz", i.e., Witches and Wizards in the CIS.
Jvari Pass / Georgian Military Road - this refers to a famous route constructed by the Russian Army to access Tbilisi from the city of Vladikavkaz across the Caucasus mountains. It's quite rugged going, but at the end of the day, it is just a road. "Military Road" is just part of the name because it was built by the old Imperial Army.
Tatarstan -- The name of a Russian Navy surface action ship of slightly less than 2,000 tons full load displacement, around 102 metres in length. Armed with anti-ship and anti-air missiles, in 2002 it is the flagship of the Caspian Flotilla.
T-64 -- The front-line Main Battle Tank of the Soviet Ground Forces during the 1960s - 1970s and in service to the present; it saw heavy action in the Donbass, and is unique due to the automatic loading cannon, three-man crew, and very high ground speed.
Kavkaz -- Transliteration from Russian of Caucasus.
27th Guards Motor-Rifle Division -- the formation Hermione is attached to  -- this is the equivalent of a mechanized division in the west.

Notes:

Tawakkaltu Ala-Allah -- "In Allah we place our trust", essentially; a common Islamic benediction.
Armoured Train -- The Russian military still has two in service, these are special railway rakes, heavily armoured, with tanks and armoured vehicles on them which can dismount and engage the enemy, and gun turrets and anti-air weapons. They were used heavily in Chechnya. Like a lot of old Soviet equipment in the 90s, the one Luna is on still has its red stars. They have something of a cultural cult status due to movies like "Turbins' Days" among many others ((A clip -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_jNLK5Ub-I)).
Junior Councillor of Witchcraft -- Hermione's rank before being promoted to Councillor of Witchcraft. Junior Councillor, which is also Larissa's rank, is the equivalent of Major in the table of ranks of the Russian Federation, but MinKol, the Ministry of Witchcraft, maintains its own ranks and unified service. These ranks are modelled on the ranks of the Russian State Prosecution Service, which is actually a uniformed but non-military service -- so the Russian Ministry.
Councillor of Witchcraft -- the rank Hermione was promoted to, the equivalent of Lt. Col.
Witch, 1st Class -- What Ginny's rank is, the equivalent of an Army Captain.
Actual State Councillor of Witchcraft -- This rank is a uniformed equivalent in Russia and the CIS countries to the Minister of Magic. In a military order of precedence it's afforded the same status as General of the Army.
Chally II -- Short-form for the British Challenger II Main Battle Tank, being used as the primary tank by Voldemort's Janissary forces.
Chobham Armour-- the composite (layered ceramics, steel, depleted uranium, etc) armour used by the Challenger II.
Chief of Staff -- in military terms, the person with the job of coordinating operations for the commander. Probably the most important single position in a military unit, more important than the Commander.
Command Track - a specialized tracked vehicle for transporting command staff close to the front line.
MinKol -- This is the short-form for министерство колдовства Российской Федерации -- Ministerstvo koldovstva Rossiyskoy Federatsii -- Ministry of Witchcraft of the Russian Federation. It uses the first syllables of "Ministry" and "Witchcraft" and is therefore a pretty typical form of an abbreviation of a Russian Ministry.
Rapier SAM -- A British mobile army surface to air missile launcher intended for short range engagements.