CONFIDENTIAL -- LEVEL PURPLE CLEARANCE ONLY
DEPARTMENT OF WIZARD RESOURCES, POPULATIONS DIVISION

Overview of potential pre-emptive measures to mitigate ICW sanctions

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...the establishment in 1982 of the Department of Wizard Resources, Populations Division was just in time to collect sufficient data to see the negative trends appear, as summarised in the following table:

	82-97 *	98	99	00	01	02	03	04	05
Squibs	1	1.2	1.8	2.4	2.9	3.4	4.3	5	5.7
Defects	5	5.2	5.4	5.8	6.1	6.7	7.5	8.3	9.4
Low I.Q.	1.7	1.9	2	2.2	2.5	2.7	3.1	3.5	3.9

*Average expressed per one thousand of the entire population.

These numbers remain an unacknowledged fact among the population, and quite probably err on the side of conservatism, particularly where squib births are concerned, as there is a decided tendency to under-report for the following reasons:

• Some families with squib children are reported to give up their squib children to Muggle orphanages.
• Hearsay indicates that some families otherwise dispose of squib offspring, possibly illegally and inhumanely.

The under-reporting is clearly demonstrated by comparisons of the Census records, from which otherwise healthy children (per the family Healer's last examination) simply disappear once they pass the age for their magic to Show. Sadly, unofficial investigation and autopsies on several exhumed bodies (the few available given preference for cremation) prove that Cause of Death was not natural (see Appendix B). These families have not yet been officially charged, and the matter of legal action is pending with the Wizengamot...

How ironic, Hermione thought as she flipped through the proofsheets of the latest report, jotting down marginalia. To have finally defeated the man who used Wizarding Eugenics as an excuse, and then to find it was too late anyway....

Pureblood families had intermarried for so long in an attempt to keep the magical lines pure and strong that less desirable, more insidious traits had woven their way into the delicate helices that made Magical humans possible.

Hermione Granger was in a position to know. While her speciality was Theoretic Arithmancy, her thorough, overall grasp of other Magical fields -- and some Muggle ones which she made it her business to acquire a grasp of, such as Genetics -- made her a Generalist, able to easily see connections between the dry numbers spewn out of the Wizard Resources Division of the Ministry, the Registry of Marriages and Births, and the scientific information provided by the Research Department at St. Mungo's. It had earned her the unusual and unique position of International Confederation of Wizards' Populations Consultant for Wizarding Britain, Department of Wizard Resources, The Ministry. She processed the statistics, made the correlation between numbers and social trends, and put them in some form understandable to the Ministry officials (by far the hardest part of her work), and oversaw the annual presentation to the ICW, which was coordinating the worldwide effort to reverse the damage to the Wizarding genepool.

Frankly, there wasn't much the Ministry could do short of locking two genetically-ideal people in a room and force-feeding them a Lust Potion -- and Hermione feared that it might well come to that eventually, given the Minister for Magic's inability to accept the population's poor "performance."

However idiotic the Ministry's initial plan had been -- whatever bumbling, wizarding proto-geneticist had caught the Prime Minister's ear, convinced him of the necessity of such drastic measures -- it must be admitted that the Ministry had tried at first to implement the strategy with some delicacy. Heedless of the inability of governments everywhere (Muggle or Magical) to enact social change by persuasive rhetoric alone, the Ministry had tried.

But it had failed miserably.

The movement had started even before Hermione had Left Hogwarts, she'd realised, during that last, awful two-month period after the defeat of Voldemort: sickly patronising and ineffectual posters on the bulletin boards (Have You Hugged a Muggleborn Today? and Heal War Wounds -- Knit Us All Together With Your Choice of Magical Lifemate); Ministry-mandated curriculum that forced poor Binns to stammer his way through an entire week of revisionist history that downplayed the marginalisation of Muggleborns and Mixedbloods; other mandates that included tutorials by a genetic specialist from St. Mungo's, who carefully explained basics of Genetics and Breeding to the entire school, and who stressed that there was no magical difference, none, between Pureblood, Mixedblood, and Muggleborn, and that the old prejudices should be discarded.

It was, in its own way, an intriguing problem -- an academic one, Hermione had thought at first -- and at the time she'd quite naïvely decided that it was one she might help fix. To aid in the assimilation of her kind into the closed society of Pureblood Wizarding; to continue, in a way, the fight that she had unconsciously entered when she'dd become Harry Potter's friend. So she had slogged her way through her apprenticeship in Arithmancy while interning at the Ministry, despite Ron's occasional derision at her aspiration to become a "glorified Ministry bean-counter." (She'd got used to that, though, and managed to take it in good humour -- most of the time.)

Once she'd attained her position at the astonishingly young age of twenty-one, however, she'd realised how dreadfully naive she'd really been.

The numbers in the first annual report she'd read told the story: the Purebloods were ignoring the rhetoric.

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Union Composition	2001*	2002	2003	2004
Pure/Pure	376	364	372	368
Pure/Mixed	102	106	114	120
Pure/Muggleborn	36	44	48	52
Mixed/Muggleborn	168	176	184	192

*in individuals, per one thousand of general population

Millennia of prejudice could not be reversed overnight. Had Ministry officials been aware of Muggle social history, they might have realised from the first that to expect to do so in a single generation was foolishly optimistic at best.

But the Ministry did not have the time to waste even a single generations' resources. The numbers in the latest report weren't good. Britain was letting down the side: only India had a higher rate of non-compliance, and both were far behind the rest of the World.

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...Ministry institutution of financial incentives in 2005:

• tax benefits for Pure/Mixed or Pure/Muggleborn marriages;
• waiving of marriage license fees for Pure/Mixed/Muggleborn unions;
• property tax cuts for mixed-marriage homeowners.

The next logical step in terms of financial incentives would appear to be "rewards" or tax benefits for each birth from a mixed union.

More purely legal means have currently been proposed, but which I stress should be discarded: considered with great caution: banning of any Pureblood/Pureblood unions. This measure should be dismissed out of hand avoided at all costs for both humanitarian reasons and issues of civil unrest among the population. Likewise, compulsory Pure/Mixed or Pure/Muggleborn marriages are equally abhorrent inadvisable, and it will be impossible difficult in both instances to ensure compliance without resorting to an unacceptable level of intrusion into the populations' personal lives per DC: though quite possibly necessary...

Hermione knew that after any compulsory laws, she was sunk: it was only one step away from forcing all wizards to marry, and she had little hope that she would escape the measure, even with the considerable privilege that her position gave her. She was too valuable an asset to them to shove into marriage and childbearing as yet -- but not for long.

She didn't want to think about what might happen if even compulsory mixed unions didn't help. The possibility of restrictions on contraceptive potions, forced examinations to prove fertility, mandatory divorce if one partner proved infertile....

It was stupid, really. The American Council of Wizards had solved the problem by changing legitimacy laws, and managed to turn away censure with the scientific argument that multiple partners would increase genetic diversity and encourage compliance from those not interested in marriage or monogamy -- and it had: the United States had seen a dramatic upswing in the magical birthrate, second only to France.

That would never happen in Britain, though -- at least, not with Fudge still at the helm, head stuck firmly in the sand as usual. He was too deeply committed to what he called the "sanctity of the family," spouting yet more rhetoric about the dignity and traditions of British wizarding: ignoring that the needs of a society are dictated not only by proprieties and moral judgements, but by choice -- of partner, certainly, or even the choice of whether to mate at all. While there was, generally speaking, a primal, biological need for the human animal to preserve the species, there were factors that outweighed it (not everyone felt the urge, Hermione being one of them). She reckoned it would take considerable pressure from the ICW to shake his convictions, far more than would be placed on him when she had to present this new report at the ICW Conference in a weeks' time.

Should've married poor Ron when he asked, I suppose, she thought, rueing her decisiveness all those years ago. If I'd known what I know now, I probably should have done. It's not as though I was holding out for a Grand Passion. I might have been able to make him happy, if I'd... really tried. And then I shouldn't be right in the thick of this, at least personally.

She couldn't have done, though. If truth be told, she valued herself too highly to settle for Ron, absolutely no insult intended toward him. She might care for him dearly as her friend -- or rather, former friend -- but she'd have been miserable. It wouldn't have worked even had everything turned out all right, and certainly not with him the way he was now....

She'd tried to give him a great deal of leeway. Ron had seen what happened between Harry and Voldemort, not she; he was the one who'd been scarred in the battle, in all possible ways; and she knew she'd hurt him a great deal when, after his proposal, she'd gently told him she couldn't possibly marry him. (On reflection, she shouldn't have told him he was like a brother to her -- that was apparently a greater blow than if she'd simply said she didn't love him.) He couldn't seem to understand that she did love him, but not in the way that she felt she ought: Ron was too straightforward, too uncomplicated to understand -- as she did quite early on -- that love has many forms, and not all are suitable for marriage. She'd suspected, too, that he'd seen their potential marriage as a way to keep what was left of the Trio together and inseparable; and while she could understand the impulse, and while she thought that after his sacrifices he deserved anything good that might come his way, she resented being thought of as a reminder and legacy of their childhood first, and a person in her own right second.

And when it came right down to it, Hermione wasn't certain she could love anyone. Forget that -- Love, full stop. She never seemed happy with anyone for long; she constantly analysed their behaviour, their intellect, the habits that might begin to annoy her, and she always found them wanting in one area or another. ('Four-date Granger,' she'd heard through the grapevine that one bloke had called her: and an indignant counting-up of the time she'd spent with the few men she thought even vaguely worthwhile had proven the bastard entirely correct. By the fourth date she'd discovered something horrific with all of them -- she'd classed them dull, or patronising toward her, or she couldn't quite see herself going to bed with them.)

Ron was married, had done so disgracefully soon after she'd turned him down, and already had three children -- two boys and a girl -- and another on the way. Or so Hermione had heard from Arthur: she and Ron didn't really speak anymore, and that was as much her fault as his.

She caught herself staring at the only picture on her desk, of the Trio. (She often thought of it that way, now -- as something separate from herself, not really part of her at all, but of a group of friends that included a young girl who merely looked like her former self.) Two of the three Sixth Years waved back at her: Ron, cheeky (and still, then, irrepressible), stuck out a tongue stained a brilliant blue from a Honeydukes gobstopper; the girl, whose face was just beginning to lengthen and grow into something resembling actual attractiveness, wild hair whipping about her shoulders in the wind, irritably pushed the strands out of her face, smiled cheerfully, and waved at her adult self.

The third person -- Harry -- stared solemnly into the camera, all awkward angles and scraggly beginnings of a moustache on his upper lip, and tried but couldn't manage to muster a smile for posterity.

We'd only just really made up, Hermione remembered. Had a lovely, massive row just two weeks before to clear the air and set Harry straight.

Their friendship had still been strained the beginning of Sixth Year as it had been in Fifth, Harry impatient and demanding and occasionally cruel: and Ron, finally fed up with it all and ignoring Dumbledore's counsel that Harry was going through a great deal, read Harry the riot act. Ron pointed out that Harry was behaving like at utter pillock, and that he could ill afford to continue to alienate his only close friends; had insisted -- rightly, though not entirely compassionately -- that while Harry blaming Black's death on Bellatrix Lestrange was appropriate, blaming it on Snape was misplaced. (She'd been stunned by that -- Ron had always been first and foremost among the "Greasy Git" proponents.) Ron had stated outright that Harry badly needed to grow up and take responsibility for his thoughts and actions, including forgetting about that bloody mirror that might have kept Sirius out of the Ministry.

Harry had not taken it well. Hermione had to put them both in Body Binds, in fact -- but not before enough blows had landed to produce significant bruises. And, after a week of sulking, Harry had thought it through and apologised -- an event that was as startling to Hermione (given Harry's anger at everyone and everything) as Ron's perceptiveness about the whole bloody mess.

But they had never been quite the same again. Never as close, and certainly never as carefree and easy with each other. The Trio had, in a very real sense, died the day Ron said his piece.

The young man in the photograph had no answers for her. He was only partly-formed, a sculpture only just beginning to emerge from the lump of clay, and the solemn eyes behind the perpetually broken glasses gave absolutely nothing away about his soul.

She pushed the useless speculation to the back of her mind, and then dismissed it entirely. It did no good to mourn any longer, for either the past or for one unlucky young man, long dead, destiny accomplished. Her life was now centred in hard, factual numbers: concrete, tangible evidence that could not be contradicted or second-guessed, and she preferred it that way, even as she hated the bureaucracy that both consumed and produced it... and which, incidentally, utterly ignored her counsel and interpretations of those facts.

Emotion and regrets had caused great pain in her life, and they had wounded Harry to the point that he had acted rashly. She abhorred them. She refused to indulge in them now, and seldom did, save for brief moments of weakness like this.

Hermione's mental and emotional barriers were tall and deep, and the chinks few. She intended to keep it that way.

She pulled the report back over and began the rewrites on the sections she'd edited.

*****

The conference was a smokescreen, really. It was more a tribunal, where each wizarding nation gave evidence of its progress (or lack of such) before the ICW's Genetics committee, and, in the event of poor performance, would have to submit to the ICW's directives or face significant financial fines. But it was all cloaked in the pretense of an every-day academic conference -- smaller symposia on anything from Genetic Mediwizardry to fertility-enhancing Potions, to advanced Transfiguration methods to optimistically provide for ones' hypothetically burgeoning population.

All bloody boring, really, Hermione thought, annoyed with her compulsory attendance at Brazil's presentation to the ICW judges. (Attendance at all the other nations' presentations was intended to shame the low achievers, apparently, though it was pointless. Hermione couldn't single-handedly repopulate Wizarding Britain.)

Not without considerable help from the citizenry, she thought grimly, and winced as a less-than-enthusiastic fellow attendee trod on her foot in an attempt to leave the Hall.

That's not a bad idea, actually. Leaving.

She'd dutifully signed in, and could duck out on the pretense of needing the loo: they seldom checked to see that one stayed in the Hall after reporting in. And she badly wanted to escape from the stifling air of the building and her impending humiliation tomorrow -- for it would be all hers: her superior Dennis Corcoran, who was supposed to actually present the report, had managed to become violently ill the day before the conference began.

Blast Corcoran, she thought, flights of fancy suddenly evaporating. Of all the bloody times to gorge on prawns and get food-poisoning.... Probably did it purposely, the cowardly prat.

If she was going to be stuck in the Hall all day tomorrow, by God she was going to get out and about today. What was the use of attending a conference in the middle of summer if you couldn't get out and enjoy the place? She wanted to walk up the gorge toward the base of Mont Blanc, perhaps try to get a glimpse of the glacier, if her legs could make it that far. It was probably the last chance she'd have for anything enjoyable in a very long time. (If she tried it after her presentation tomorrow, she'd be tempted to throw herself into a crevasse.)

She picked up her handbag and briefcase, tiptoed her way to the aisle with whispered apologies, and fled the Hall.

*****

Hermione never made it out of the Spa; never even made it up to her room to discard her things and change to trousers and a sensible pair of shoes. The marquee leading to the East Wing -- where the research presentations were scheduled -- caught her eye and her interest.

Hermione tried to deny it, but she was intensely interested.

It was too intriguing to resist. She swerved toward the East Wing, trotted down the corridor, flashed her identification badge at the door attendant, took a packet of information from him, and slipped into the back of the conference room: it was too crowded to find a seat, so she put her things on the floor and quickly flipped through the packet to catch up to the right point.

"-- no, no, you do not understand," Bachelhoffer was saying tiredly. "There iss no possibility off harm to the patient --"

"But to deliberately infect a patient with a disease --" a worried-looking Healer interrupted him.
"There iss no disease involvt," Bachelhoffer roared (quite unpleasantly -- his voice was already magnified, but judging from the purple colour of his face his audience was particularly obtuse on this point). "The genetic material vissin the virus iss removt and iss replacet viss the repairt, healthy genetic material off the donor. The virus -- the virus' exterior -- this iss only the delivery system."

"But how can you know?" piped up another nitwit. "How can you be certain there's no infectious material left?"

Bachelhoffer threw up his hands and spewed forth a stream of very blue but totally appropriate German, and then drew his wand and clicked backward several slides to an illustration of extraction of the virus' nucleus.

Good luck, confrere, Hermione thought. (The Wizarding mind was incredibly resistant to Muggle scientific methodologies and techniques.)

"The nucleus iss extracted viss a very tiny pipette --"

"But how do you see it?" someone whined from the front row.

Bachelhoffer's shoulders slumped. Apparently no-one had read their information packets or bothered to calm down enough to listen to his earlier comments.

Another of the attendees, in a back-row aisle seat, snorted, and Hermione glanced over -- and then took a closer look at the back of the man's head in the half-light of the auditorium. Black, messy hair nearly to the shoulder -- shoulders with a very familiar, rounded, slightly tense look to them, clothed in a deep blue-black broadcloth....

She shouldn't have stared: the man seemed to sense that he was being observed, and slowly swiveled his head to stare back at her with hard, dark eyes.

It is Snape.

He wasn't involved in any research that she'd heard of: he had, in fact, become Hogwarts' Deputy Head when Minerva McGonagall had been appointed Headmistress. Hermione hadn't expected to see him here, even though it was the middle of summer. She hadn't thought of him at all in years, in fact, except for that brief, passing thought of him last week.

Snape continued to stare back at her for several seconds, and then, without even a flicker of recognition or an acknowledgement, returned his attention to Bachelhoffer's pained explanation of miscroscopic procedures.

Later -- much later -- Hermione would decide that that was when the seed had been planted in her mind: Snape's absolute disinterest to the point of a deliberate snub. It hadn't been that long, after all; she was still recognisably Hermione Granger, Chief Know-It-All. The hair was perhaps a bit sleeker and less wild -- she usually wrestled it into a chignon at the nape of her neck, now -- but her face hadn't changed that much from Seventh Year.

Without really thinking why, Hermione decided she wanted very badly to know what Snape was doing here: whether he was considering engaging in research... ...whether he was simply as curious as she...

Hermione knew trying to wrangle a place at his table at luncheon was pointless. She was supposed to dine with the other national delegates in a separate dining-room, in any case, so -- as Bachelhoffer wasn't likely to get to anything really interesting anyway, given the stupidly of the majority of his audience -- she reverted to her original plan, slipped upstairs and changed, and bribed a housekeeping elf to liberate a sandwich for her to take on her hike.

She also bribed it to divulge the room number for Professor Snape of Hogwarts School.

*****

"Where's your pet Ministry official, Granger?" Chuck Anderson asked. "Haven't seen him all day."

"Ill," Hermione said shortly as she took her seat at the dinner-table, and repressed the urge to dump her salad into Anderson's lap. "Not along this time."

"Awwww. Sudden? Too bad. You're stuck with the presentation, huh? That's rotten."

Hermione clenched her fingers around her napkin, under cover of the table.

Chuck -- Charles -- Anderson always had that effect on her. Relentlessly cheerful in that particularly shallow, fake American manner, and arrogant enough not to give a damn about how anyone felt about him. He could afford to be arrogant: the American numbers were spectacular this year.

"Zut alors," François DeLaine, the French consultant murmured. "Bon chance, 'Ermione."

"Merci, François," she muttered back, cast a sidelong glance at him from beneath her lashes, and tucked into dinner to avoid further conversation with either of them.

Apart from the humiliation of being seated with representatives of the two most successful nations, Hermione might have enjoyed François's company... except that she knew that he would try to wriggle confidential information out of her, probably after a thorough shagging, and disguised as pillow-talk. Were it not for that -- the verbal wriggling that is, not the shagging -- she might have seriously considered responding to his overtures of previous years. He was attractive, witty, and taken. No possibility of real, emotional attachment, but a good chance to finally... well, to get some things over with.

Then again, she'd always thought she'd have plenty of time to sow her wild oats, when and if she ever got the urge.

On the other hand, there was no need to start now. There was an annoying part of her nature that wasn't interested in anything but a real, emotional attachment, although if tomorrow went as badly as she anticipated, she -- and every unmarried British adult witch -- would have to compromise eventually.

She got through dinner with a minimum of chit-chat, avoided François's subtle overtures (in delicately-phrased French, which of course Anderson didn't speak), and then embarked on her main mission for the evening.

*****

Bearding the lion (or serpent, as it were) in his den proved problematic. Hermione had expected Snape to hole up in his room, not to participate in the ridiculous social activities the Spa had arranged for the conference attendees. But three minutes' persistent knocking at the door got no response, and a surreptitious charm cast at the room proved that it was empty.

She wandered back downstairs to the ballrooms and pushed her way among the crowd, searching in vain; and then the vague memory of Snape's usual behaviour popped into her head -- that solitary impulse to absent himself from the Great Hall, to wander among the rose bushes on the Grounds. (She'd always assumed, like everyone else, that he did so merely to catch snoggers; but perhaps it was more straightforward than that, though she had difficulty thinking of Snape as a Nature-Lover.)

As it happened, the Resort had a very fine garden of flowers and flowering herbs tucked into the walls of the gorge, and that's where she found him. She stood watching him stroll among the plant-beds from the safe cover of a rose-covered pergola. Now that she'd found him, though, she had no idea how to initiate a conversation. She was ready to give up and slink away as soon as his back was turned when he took matters into his own hands.

"I was not aware, Miss Granger," Snape said dryly as he straightened from examining a clump of costmary, "that I was such an object of intense fascination."

Thank God he couldn't see the blush that rose to her cheeks. It was only just dusk, still light enough to see, but she was in the shadow of the pergola.

"I was surprised to see you at the conference, Professor," she managed to say quite calmly. "Or should I say Deputy Head?"

"Professor will do," he shot back. "I still teach, despite McGonagall's best efforts and those of the bureaucratic idiots at the Ministry. Of which, if I'm not mistaken, you are one."

He turned to face her head-on, and she took stock of him.

He hadn't changed much. She could still clearly see the facial scar he'd earned in the last battle, running from his left temple to jawline -- I wonder why Pomfrey hadn't been able to heal it?; and the grooves that ran from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth were perhaps a bit more firmly etched, but his hair was still midnight-black and stringy. She allowed that he might have put on a bit of weight, but that was natural for a man his age, and she suspected his life was a bit more sedentary than it had been. (It wasn't a bad change by any means -- he'd always been skinny as an alley-cat on the few occasions she'd seen him out of those billowing teaching-robes.)

He was certainly the same nasty, verbally-abusive git.

"I don't think it's quite fair to blame me for the mess, is it?" she countered, embarrassment banished by quickly-controlled rage. "I simply interpret the data. I don't make the laws."

"You enable them. Tell me, Miss Granger, why should one of Hogwarts' more capable and ambitious students choose to become a Ministry drone?"

"Because it needed to be done," she said steadily, refusing to respond to the fresh insult. "Because I felt it was better if someone with more general knowledge of the technical and medical problems was involved. Because I have actual knowledge of the prejudice that has to be surmounted, in terms of the social issue."

He snorted at that.

"Congratulations are not in order, Miss Granger. For your information, the proportion of hexing incidents due to racial insults has not declined in the least at the school. It has, in fact, increased."

"I didn't expect that they would end, not this soon. They're symptoms of a problem that will take a long time to change, and that won't happen until the bloodlines are thoroughly mixed. You obviously know why I'm here," she said, determined to change the subject and get to a more comfortable footing. "But why are you?"

"Because I have to deal with the ramifications of government meddling," he shot back. "The directives regarding the curriculum, the turmoil it's causing in my students' lives. What were they thinking, Miss Granger?" he added bitterly. "That Purebloods would become one happy family with the rest overnight? Tolerating their presence is one thing, but forcing Purebloods to accept them is something else altogether."

"I think that was their hope, to take the easy way -- I would have told them it wouldn't work, had they bothered to consult me. I don't think they anticipated such resistance."

"Idiots."

"I quite agree. But aren't you dealing with the consequences of doing nothing? Have been, for many years?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"The Crabbes and Goyles, for example. One can hardly claim those boys and the others like them were sterling examples of the Pureblood philosophy."

"Touché, Miss Granger," Snape admitted with a thin-lipped smile. "I think you'll agree that those weaknesses helped the Order in the long run, however, so I beg you not to belabour the point. It reeks of gloating."

He turned on his heel and continued down the path, and Hermione darted from under the pergola, trotting to catch up to him.

"I'm not gloating, I'm only saying that there is good, solid science behind the reasoning," she protested. "They're a good example of the genetic problem, that's all."

"But gloating is how it's seen in the Pureblood families," he said, bending to examine a brilliantly-coloured rose. "As an insult. And you and your kind must accept that scientific arguments hold no weight with us, not when we see ourselves consistently labeled 'weak' and 'congenitally unfit.'"

"That report was issued before I began at the.... I don't think of --" Hermione started to argue, and then clamped her lips shut before she could blurt out something unfortunate. This was precisely what he wanted: for her to lose her temper and leave him in peace. "Are you researching Gene Therapy?" she blurted out instead, ignoring for the moment that he had placed himself squarely in the Pureblood camp.

"No," he said shortly. "Why ever would you think I have time? I simply refuse to allow my knowledge of the Potions field to stagnate. I have had to increase production of therapeutic potions to help Pomfrey treat some of the more unfortunate congential illnesses, however," he grudgingly admitted, "which is alarming. I'd like to keep up on suitable treatments. And it's rather amusing to see the idiots at St. Mungos and elsewhere attempting to stumble their way through forty years' worth of Muggle genetic research."

"Quite," Hermione said. "If I had a Galleon for every time I've had to explain the simplest Genetic principles...."

"You understand them? I thought your field was Arithmancy."

"Of course I understand them," she said indignantly. "I made it my job to learn, since it affects my work. It's really not that difficult, the Wizarding mind just can't wrap itself about the techniques. The mechanisms are really quite logical."

"Or would be, if someone could manage to publish a decent article or abstract."

"I fail to see why they haven't," Hermione said bluntly. "If the Muggle schools can manage to teach the basics to teenagers, even a Wizard should be able to understand. Haven't you checked Muggle sources? After all, you have a remarkably logical mind if you were able to --"

"-- or at least I certainly had that impression," she finished lamely, belatedly avoiding mention of the Potions Puzzle.

"And when do you propose I find time to do that?" Snape said. "Take the time to traipse about Muggle London and find a decent bookseller with a text both clear and advanced enough?"

"Ah. You're too busy to take even a day, then?" Hermione said casually -- greatly relieved that he'd ignored her slip. "I realise that the Deputy Head's duties are absorbing, but.... You have a family now, perhaps?"

"Don't be stupid, Miss Granger, and don't pry. At least not in such a cack-handed manner."

Ah. No, then, she thought with a curious sense of triumph.

"I didn't mean to, I was simply making conversation. I have several suitable books, in fact," she retorted mildly. "Shall I send them on to you?"

Snape eyed her warily.

"Acceptable," he finally said. (His curiosity was apparently greater than his unwillingness to deal with her).

"Very well, then," she said brightly. "I'll send them on soon. I'd best turn in, I've got the devil of a day tomorrow. Good evening, Professor."

He grunted a goodbye, and she left him with his back to her, staring moodily up into the gorge that wound its way up to Mont Blanc.

Once back in her room, Hermione pulled out her presentation materials and grimly concentrated on surviving anything thrown at her next day.

She refused, as yet, to allow herself to mull over what she'd learned of Snape today, why she was so intrigued with his status, or what she might intend to do with the information.

*****

July 26th, 2007

The presentation went every bit as badly as Hermione had expected.

The format was dictated by the ICW: first the factual data -- the raw figures that listed population increase and decline in actual numbers, and the percentage of the population those represented -- and then more complex sets of figures that attributed population increase to existing marriages sorted by bloodlines and the incidence of squibbishness and birth defects, among many other variables. There were even, in some cases -- such as Britain and India -- requirements to demonstrate the mix of race and class (or in India's case, caste) of all marriages in the past year. (This was highly unfair, Hermione thought -- the United States had an exemption on providing those figures, claiming to be the original "classless society," when everyone knew damn well that it was no such thing: the only difference was that in the U.S. the class lines there were drawn by economic factors rather than bloodline.)

Hermione did her best with the figures -- a modest three and three-quarters percent rise in the birthrate, accompanied by a one percent decrease in squib births. Yet mixed marriages had only increased by four percent. Which, when one took into account the actual statistics of who was born to whom, meant that the few people who ventured into the murky social depths of a mixed marriage were providing most of the new so-called "viable" citizens -- magical children with no discernable birth defects or squibbishness.

"Are you telling me, Miss Granger," huffed Adolpus Dusselbum, "that the majority of the advances made this year were accomplished by a relative few?"

"That is what the statistics appear to indicate, sir," she said, trying to keep a 'Didn't I just say that?' tone out of her voice.

"And there has been an increase of marriages out of the country among the Purebloods, this is true?"

Shit. That was the figure she'd really hoped she could slip past them.

"A very slight increase, yes, sir. There is, of course, absolutely nothing illegal about that," she said. "The trend started well before now, actually -- in the 1970s, when more people started traveling and studying internationally. I don't think the figures are significant in terms of the present problem."

"Hmmmmph. Optimistic of you, I think. Very well, proceed to the Annual Summary," Dusselbum said irritably, and Hermione launched into an overview of the Ministry's financial incentives and public relations efforts.

It was over far too soon, and Dusselbum rose from the table.

"We shall recess for thirty minutes," he said, fussing with his robe, "and reconvene in the Flamel Conference Room for the recommendations, Miss Granger."

She nodded, and Dusselbum and his juniors on the judicial board left the auditorium, leaving Hermione at the podium with cheeks blazing: the auditorium had been packed with national representatives who had no earthly business being there as their numbers were much better, and who had only come to watch avidly as Britain was humiliated.

"Jesus, Granger," Anderson's voice floated up from the auditorium floor. "I knew you Brits were supposed to have uninspiring sex lives, but that's just pathetic."

She couldn't help it: she fumbled and dropped her notes, and glared down at him.

"It's called respect for Civil Liberties, Anderson," she shot back. "And we've an irritating tendency to be patient, and not to get ahead at all costs. Not when we're dealing with peoples' lives."

"Hey, I'm joking, Granger. No offence intended."

"Eh, Chuck," DeLaine threw at him from halfway down the aisle, "Nous avons faire du ski, c'est ça? Vite!"

"Huh?"

"You have plans to go skiing," Hermione translated. "He's ready. Shift your arse."

"I love it when you talk dirty Brit, Granger," Anderson threw back at her. "Okay, François, I'm comin'."

He turned and strode up the aisle, head down -- and DeLaine looked up at Hermione, unseen by Anderson, and gave her a sympathetic wink before they both left the auditorium.

As Hermione gathered her notes together a flutter of movement caught her eye, and she glanced over to find Snape pushing past and glaring at the careless idiots who brushed against him as they filed out: when he was certain he had her attention he strode to the platform's edge and beckoned her over with an arrogant flick of the wrist.

"Good morning, Professor Snape. How long have you been --"

"Since five minutes in."

"I didn't know you were interested in the populations data."

"I'm not particularly, Miss Granger, I assure you," he hissed. "I am trying to give you some advice. You're giving quite a bit away. When you are unsure of yourself, or think that your information is vulnerable to attack," he said in an undertone, forcing her to crouch down to hear him, "you... fiddle with your hair."

"I most certainly do not!"

"Yes, you do, you push the... curly bits in front of your ears, behind them. Just as you used to do in my class. Dusselbum was an interrogator for the Swiss Auror Service for many years, and he's noticed. That's why he pinned you down on precisely the things you'd hoped to gloss over."

"Blast," Hermione muttered. "Thought I'd broken that habit. I'm not used to doing the bloody presentation, it's Corcoran's job."

"Dennis Corcoran?"

"Yes, he's my superior. Head of Wizard Resources."

"Yet another idiot -- a few years behind me at school. A craven coward. You have my condolences."

"Damn it. I've bolloxed it up for certain, then...."

She caught herself in the middle of "fiddling," snatched her hand away from her hair, and glared at Snape when he smirked at her.

"That's how you always knew what to quiz me on, isn't it?" she hissed at him. "You'd never call on me when I was absolutely certain of the answer."

He smirked again. "Of course. It took several years to determine, however -- most of your female classmates fiddled with their hair also, though it didn't signify anything but vanity with them. At any rate, good luck."

He turned and strode away from her: she didn't even know if he'd heard her muttered, "Thank you."

She dismissed the thought, shoved her notes into her briefcase, and debouched to the ladies' loo to give herself a pep talk before facing the tribunal.

*****

The meeting with the tribunal was awful, simply awful. She managed to wangle from them a three-month delay on implementation of the recommendations on the grounds that she'd made the presentation, not Corcoran: she wasn't above playing the Subordinate-Who-Might-Have-Missed-Something card, not with the stakes this high, and argued that Corcoran might be able to get enlighten them on points she might have misinterpreted. (He wouldn't, though, and she knew it. The delay was simply the best she could do to wrest some victory out of her defeat.)

Afterward she grumpily submitted to the ministrations of the spa staff, in the hopes that the masseuse would work out the kinks that the tribunal had put in her back. (The other advantage was that Anderson was unlikely to find her and gloat further if she was in the sauna with a layer of mud over her face, and she wouldn't have to resist the urge to pull her wand on him. She wished she'd had the forethought to jinx his skis.)

By the time her voluntary exile in the spa was over, dinner was as well; and when she made her way back to Snape's room to thank him for his advice, she found he'd already checked out and returned to Hogwarts.

Good. That gave her time to really think about the amorphous, rather sneaky plan she'd begun to devise while in a half-trance in the sauna.

Plenty of time, really, three months, she thought lazily. I should be able to think through any objections he has and find good rebuttals. It's really for his protection, as well as mine....

She stopped dead, glass at her lips, and frowned.

All the more reason for him to agree, she finally concluded triumphantly.

She finished off the last of her wine, took another long look at the peak of Mont Blanc hovering above the resort, and left the balcony for her bed.

*****

LINK TO CHAPTER 1 FOOTNOTES.

LINK TO CHAPTER 2