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Chapter 20: The Hall of Miseries



The floating globe shattered, raining shards of glass over the three mages, and two very hungry dementors floated toward the only source of food in the room.



Rufus Scrimgeour had his wand out, "We need your patronus Harry!" he shouted.



"No need Minister" Hermione said in a serene voice as the two shadowy figures floated down to bow at her feet.



To say that the Minister of Magic was shocked would be the understatement of the decade.



"How are you doing that?" he rasped, still not believing his eyes.



"Please Minister," she whispered. "We're talking."



"Alright 'Mione?" Harry asked solicitously.



"Never better" she responded. "Why don't you test drive the time turner that Mr. Blanc gave you and see what this is all about?"



Harry nodded and placed the thin chain around his neck, "one turn enough do you suppose?"



She nodded, never taking her eyes off the essensentials at her feet.



"Okay," he said and gave the tiny hourglass a turn.



For the second time in his life he felt the odd backward moving sensation, but only for a moment. He found himself in a dark, cold room. He disillusioned himself and stood near the door. Turning the knob he peered out into the circular foyer and quickly ducked back as he heard footsteps approach.



"Who left this door ajar?" a gruff voice demanded, "don't you all know what's in here? Merlin's beard!"



The door swung inward and Harry just jumped back in time to avoid being plowed into by the Department of Mysteries employee. As the unctuous civil servant checked to see that the room was empty Harry quickly scuttled out, keeping close to the wall. He headed out of the DoM and toward the Hexagonal Office, where he assumed he and the Minister of Magic were having a heart to heart. As he rounded an empty corner he dropped the disillusionment spell and transfigured his plain black robe to the maroon of an auror. He had time; he looked at a desk calendar and realized he'd gone back /one whole day/. He looked closely at the time turner, agolden disk with a tiny hourglass set in place by tiny cantilevers. As he studied the device he saw the word 'interval' engraved on the edge. The movable outer ring had arrows that would line up for minutes, hours and days; ahead and back. The device was currently set on 'days' and 'back.'



'Great,' he thought, disgusted with himself; 'what am I supposed to do for a whole day?'



Then his eyes lit up as he remembered exactly what he had been doing the day before at about that time. He all but ran to the apparition point where he disapparated with a slight popping noise and appeared in the hall just outside his bedroom. Carefully opening the door he saw his past self from behind as he tit-shagged his beloved.



Harry regretfully left his past self after about two hours of intense and very satisfying sex. He smiled to himself as he re-dressed and apparated back to the ministry. Ducking into awashroom stall he began to flip the time turner in one hour increments until he arrived at his target time. He scribbled a note and headed out into the hallway where he saw his past self and Scrimgeour and Hermione turning the corner ahead. He put up the concealing hood and had no trouble bumping into himself as he'd already done it before; he mumbled an apology as he passed the note and walked briskly away.



Harry rounded the corner again and re-applied the near invisibility spell heading back to the Department of Mysteries. As he walked into the door that held the earlier Melvin Blanc he was just in time to hear "/imperio/!"



He watched as Auror Dawlish forced his will on Melvin Blanc. Dawlish, the Department of Magical Law Enforcement's second in command.



"I suppose you think you're clever usin' my voice to talk to Krofcheck, eh Whitey?"



Of course, Blanc is French for white, hence "Whitey!"



"Now when the Minister and Mr. an' Mrs. Potter come in, you're gonna' want to show em' your clever little dementor traps, clear?"



The man struggled but Dawlish had years of experience with this particular unforgivable curse.



"Clear?" Dawlish repeated.



Blanc seemed to resign himself as he nodded.



"An no more usin' my voice!"the senior auror ordered.



Harry understood that he couldn't act until he had caught up with his original time line so he waited and followed the senior auror. When it looked like the man was about to leave the DoM Harry sent a silent tripping hex that left the bewildered auror sprawled face-down on the floor. Harry took the two-way signaling mirror from his own robes and slipped it into the hood of Dawlish's cloak, silently activating it as he did so.



The big man stood up quickly, looking all around to make sure no one saw him tripping over his own feet, then left.



Harry went back to the Hall of Misery's door and waited. Just as Blanc was leaving the room Harry slipped in and waited until he saw himself turn the tiny hourglass before revealing himself.



The two starving essensentials looked like they were pleading with, or perhaps praying to his bushy haired best friend.



"Hermione" he asked softly,"can we do anything for them?"



"I don't know, maybe," she said. "They're so young, so /hungry/. They've been feeding on happiness for so long that they crave it like a drug."



"Can we change that?" Harry asked. "I mean, you did."



"But I don't know what I did, or how I did it!" she wailed. At the sound of her anguish the two essensentials rose up to their full, intimidating height.



"It's okay" she said in her oddly harmonic dementor's voice, soothing them. "No one here is upsetting me, we're just upset for you, we want to help and we don't know how!"



The harmonic came back"communion."



Hermione smiled and turned to Harry, "I need to try something, okay?"



"What are you doing?" he asked suspiciously.



"Communing" she replied and placed a hand on each of the essensentials' bowed heads.



"This is my essence" she sang in a beautifully unearthly alto soprano, "given freely, take it, eat, and we shall become as one."



The semi-corporeal wraiths responded - discordantly at first - before finding the proper harmonies. As they communed the air in the room began to warm, and the feeling normally associated with dementors faded to neutral.



The most astonishing change was that of the essensentials themselves. Their skeletal forms fleshed out, becoming androgynous human-like forms. Harry was reminded of aliens he'd seen on the telly, Roswell, he remembered.



Rufus Scrimgeour, Minister of Magic was at a total loss.



Hermione, looking very much the worse for wear turned on the Minister. "This is closer to what a dementor looks like, when it's not perverted by the unspeakables here! Did you know that Minister?"



He shook his head, unable to speak.



"These gentle beings have been starved and twisted until they have become a wizard's worst nightmare, and it's all because of what goes on in here. Where's the accountability? Government agencies have to be transparent or they form shadow governments! Ask yourself Minister; who's really in charge here?"



"That would be us," two wizards and a witch turned to the familiar voice of Cornelius Fudge, Ex-minister of Magic, Dawlish and half a dozen aurors in his wake. Everyone was pointing awand except Harry, Hermione and Rufus Scrimgeour.



As the three were relieved of their wands Fudge chuckled, "very clever my dear, you could write for the Quibbler, conspiracy theories and all that rubbish!"



"But it's not rubbish, is it /Mister/Fudge?" she replied, and then cocked her head as if listening to another voice that only she could hear. "Oh, that explains it!"



Hermione looked at Fudge and shook her head "it was your wife." It wasn't a question, just a simple statement of fact.



He couldn't help but answer. "Persephone felt that I was spending too much time at my job, I was a junior assistant to an undersecretary at the time and when other wizards went home for the day Istayed to complete my assigned tasks. Do you know what happens to a government employee who gets the job done? They keep giving him jobs until he can't get them done anymore. Well I kept getting the jobs done. I gravitated to the Department of Mysteries where time was on my side. It got to the point where Persephone only saw me on weekends, then only on Sundays. She begged me to quit, or at least slow down, which would have amounted to the same thing. Icame home one Sunday night to find her soulless shell lying on the kitchen floor. The healers said she had been demented so I called the thing that she had summoned a dementor. The name stuck."



"And you've been running the government from behind the scenes, from the Department of Mysteries for how long? Surely you must have realized that someone would out you sooner or later."



"Who would believe them? Lovegood perhaps?"



"I'm curious Fudge, just how many of Lawrence Lovegood's 'crazy conspiracy theories' were spot on?"Scrimgeour asked.



"Well, there are conspiracies and there are conspiracies. You see, when our young Mr. Potter was warning the world about the return of Voldemort we in the Department of Mysteries knew, how could we not? But we had an excellent opportunity here for the death eaters and the Order of the Phoenix to wipe each other out. One or the other would prevail of course, but the 'winner' would be decimated, easy to control or destroy.



"Did you know I was the most popular peace time Minister in history? It's true, and people will want those'good old days' back. I'll be Magical Britain's Richard Nixon, the comeback kid!"



"Its all about power, isn't it Fudge?" Harry observed.



"Of course, with power you can have wealth, security, popularity. You can have it all."



"By any means necessary?" Harry asked.



Fudge shrugged, "why not?"



"You know Fudge, someone once told me that there is no good or evil, only power, and those too weak to use it."



"Sounds like someone after my own heart!" Fudge replied.



"Oh I don't doubt that, it was Voldemort."



Fudge just chuckled. "Not to worry mi' lad, no one's going to hurt any of you. We're just going to obliviate your memories of this little encounter and place the dementors back into their cages so that they'll be useful again and no one will be the wiser!"



"You forgot about something Mr. Fudge." Harry said with a smile. "All the would-be dictators of the 20thcentury have used it, and so have you."



"What's that Harry?"



"The Fourth Estate," then he looked directly at Dawlish and said in a loud clear voice "did you get that Sweetheart?"



A tiny voice seemed to come from behind Dawlish "yes love, and so did the Wizarding Wireless Service! They tell me it'll be the most famous magical broadcast in history!"



Fudge went pale, "what did you do?"



Harry smirked, "Just placed asignaling mirror in ex-auror Dawlish's cloak. He's been broadcasting to my home and out to the airwaves for the past half hour or so."



Scrimgeour stood tall and ordered, "Aurors, stand down!"



They all dropped their wands except for Fudge, who had gone purple with rage. The Ex-minister leveled his wand at Hermione and shouted "Arvada . . ."



He never got to finish. Both essensentials blocked the unfinished curse with their own bodies as Harry tackled the man.



"Do you want him Kissed?"Hermione asked hopefully.



"We need to question him first, but after that, he's all yours m'dear."



"Hermione," Harry asked, "are you okay?"



"I will be Harry, there's enough conflicting emotion in this room that I have a veritable smorgasbord in here. I just need a few minutes."



He hugged her tightly and said,"Take all the time you need."



"Oh that's delicious," she moaned, returning his embrace, "pure unadulterated love, 1998, a very good vintage!"



The other essensentials glowed in approval as well.



"Merlin's Balls!" Rufus Scrimgeour bellowed, "how could this happen?"



Harry, who was still embracing a recovering Hermione, answered. "Only too easily. People tend to the path of least resistance, and if someone is willing to lead the 'sheeple' will follow."



"Sheeple?"



"Yep, when the mob mentality takes over and people can stop thinking for themselves they become like so many sheep. Sheeple.



"Which begs the question, Minister, what are you going to do about it?"



The leonid man activated his own signaling mirror, "Weasley!"



"S-sir?"



"You heard?"



"The broadcast? Yes sir! It's playing on every wireless in the ministry right now!"



"Lock down the building, shut down the floo network and ward all outgoing apparition points!"



"Already done sir."



Scrimgeour raised both eyebrows in surprise, "on who's authority?"



"That'd by mine!" Alastor Moody's voice called from somewhere behind Percy, "I also confiscated the record from the offices of Fudge and Dawlish and everyone they did business with on a daily basis."



"Good thinking Alastor, very thorough!"



"I jus' locked down the place; young Weasley here had the idea to confiscate the records."



"Let's make everyone comfortable Weasley, we're in for a long night."



"Minister?" Harry asked. "Could we go home, please? This has been very draining for Hermione."



"Can you make a portkey?"



Harry smirked and picked up ashard of glass from the floor. He touched the shard with the tip of his wand and said "Grimmauld Place, foyer, portus!"



"I'll take that as a yes then, go on lad, you and your lady have earned a rest. We'll talk next week, all right?"



Harry nodded and pantomimed to the essensentials to touch the portkey. The four of them vanished in a rush of wind.



The Purge, as it came to be known, came swiftly. Heads of nearly every department were sacked. Most of them, it turned out, had been Fudge appointees. Junior undersecretaries became department managers. Department heads became division heads. A merit system was put into place, with mandatory annual reviews. Cronyism in the Ministry of Magic died a painful death that night.





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Author's note: The Hexagonal Office is my take on the layout of the Minister of Magic's working space. At first I thought Oval office, but then I thought of shapes normally associated with magic - and the HEXagonal office just sounded right to me.