Love and Other Misfortunes

Chapter 5

Present

Hermione slipped into her flat that night feeling as though she had been trampled by a herd of hippogriffs.

Her day at the Ministry had been more wearing than she'd expected. It was probably due to how nervous she felt reaching the final stretch of passing the WRA.

This was it. The culmination of all her efforts.

It would pass. They had an excess of votes. After three years of work, it was practically a certainty.

The WRA was like a child to her. She had joined the Ministry specifically to pass the legislation. There had been a tempting research position, but she couldn't look the werewolf orphans in the face without grieving over the kind of future they would find upon reaching adulthood if werewolf rights remained unaddressed. She'd turned down the offer of her own lab, put her other projects on a back burner, and joined the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.

It had been hard.

Contrary to the beliefs of many of her friends, Hermione hated being what could only be described most days as a glorified paper-pusher. The tediousness of red tape and precedent were bad enough, but the politics were what ate at her most. She knew the Ministry was full of corruption and backroom deals but had hoped that it would have improved following all the postwar reform efforts. It had not. She was not a naturally compromising person, she hadn't come to the Ministry to for a werewolf rights compromise.

The pettiness had been almost more than she could bear. Politicians were obsessively tit-for-tat. Even when they were being asked to do something at no cost to themselves, they always wanted to know what she would do for them. Doing what was right was never a good enough reason to do anything.

Hermione had floundered.

She wasn't stupid. She knew she needed to play politics to get what she wanted, but actually doing so was like trying brew a potion with her feet; possible, but always worse than everyone else.

Her goals were inconvenient, so they drowned her in so much red tape and appeals that it would have taken seven years of court dates just to try to raise the motion to draft a Werewolf Rights Act.

After a year, sitting in her office, up to her ears in piles of paperwork that never seemed to get any smaller, she was ready to give up. She wasn't naive enough to pretend what she was doing was meaningful. She would slave away for seven years submitting the proper forms and gaining the appropriate clearance to raise the motion just so they could overrule it and start her back at square one. At least if she'd gone into research she's contributing something real, maybe it wouldn't be as meaningful as werewolf rights, but it would be something.

But slowly the tide began to turn. One day while taking the lift, she found herself alone with Blaise Zabini, who after after spending several moments looking terribly constipated turned and said, "You know. Hester Tutley has been trying for years to get the centaur tax credit on his family's ancestral home in Scotland."

Then, without another word, he stepped off the lift and disappeared, leaving the wheels in Hermione's head turning.

There were many Wizarding families who had been trying to get the Centaur Land Treaty renegotiated. The original treaty had overlooked some aspects of centaur migration habits which allowed centaurs to sometimes avoid formalizing their land claims. Without the formality the wizards whose properties were claimed were ineligible to have their property taxes written off or receive the additional tax credit. But the centaurs had no inclination to renegotiate the standing treaty and  the motions and attempts to carry it forward constantly stalled.