Official Fine Print: Nope. Not mine. The brainchildren of the mighty pen of JK Rowling. Just playing with them. Honest.
Here With Me
Chapter 23
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"Never mind, Potter," came a voice they knew only too well from the next bed. "I've found a willing volunteer to help me. And we both think it is past time for you and your little friends to die."
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Even as his brain registered the danger of Voldemort dwelling in Malfoy's body on the next bed over in the Hogwarts infirmary, Harry simultaneously knew an enormous surge of relief. Finally the evil he was meant to fight was not holed up in his own brain, it was over there. Harry could deal with over there. His scar throbbed with the closeness but did not sear with the blinding knife-like pain of possession and even as he wrestled himself upright to block Hermione behind him he began to feel that for once this year he just might actually have a fighting chance.
"First time a Malfoy ever volunteered for anything," Ron said furiously. "Figures." He whipped his wand from his robes and ducked down behind Harry's bed, maneuvering toward the end.
Harry realized it might actually be Voldemort controlling things but Ron saw Malfoy and he wasn't afraid of the ferret, a plus he definitely hadn't counted on.
He slid off the far side of his bed, trying to stay in front of Hermione, his eyes darting around the room for anything that could be used to their advantage. He decided they stood a far better chance just about anywhere else; the infirmary was full of things he was quite sure he didn't want flying at him - he'd tasted too many of them before and they had some interesting effects. Best to make for the halls and see if they could lure him outside of the castle.
"You must be pretty desperate, to rely on Malfoy for transportation," he said boldly, stalling for time. "As a chronic liar - and you know I already know all about your Muggle Dad, Mr. Pureblood - how do you go about entrusting your soul to another liar?"
"Oh, I know what's inside this one's empty little head," Malfoy's own mouth hissed. "Before you start thinking you have any recourse Potter, know that I am here to finish you. You have far outlived any usefulness you may have had distracting the Ministry from my movements now. Malfoy minor was always meant to be my escape when I destroyed you; it was, shall we say, the very least he could do. You have changed nothing."
"Still can't quite risk that feeble excuse you call your own body, can you?" Harry forced out as a laugh, backing slowly. Ron was still crouched down by the end of the bed, waiting. If Harry could maneuver Malfoy just a little further…
"Enough!" Voldemort cried from Malfoy's lips, and put his wand into action.
Hermione had already seen the scatter-gun effect of his spell casting in the History of Magic classroom. What she couldn't quite grasp was Harry's response to it now. Shields and counters seemed to surge from his wand without a word; he appeared to quickly visualize the thrust of Voldemort's strategy in working the room around them and responded to it without hesitation. She could see him maneuvering to find a way to both shield Ron and yet cover for him at the same time even as he worked out an escape route, still keeping her behind him.
Clearly, whoever he'd been working with in that warded classroom had known their stuff, for she could see him making use of things with a faith in his instincts she'd never seen more than flashes of working with the DA. Ron's spells were mostly blocked but they were strong enough and persistent enough to keep Malfoy pinned near his own bed and responding. It bought them the little time they needed; she kept moving as smoothly and quickly as she could, hand clutching his robes to guide him so that his own eyes could remain on the two before him.
"Door," she told him tersely.
"Accio Ron." She heard him whisper, and Ron's body flew back to them with a surprised yell as they crashed back through the doors.
"Colloportus." Hermione cast quickly.
"Harry, you've got to tell a guy you're going to do that. I didn't know what the hell had hold of me." Ron gasped.
"Next time," Harry said distractedly. "Now run!" They tore off down the hallway, almost reaching the stairs before the sound of the infirmary doors blowing out reached them.
"Ron, keep going, hopefully Dumbledore already knows something's going on, explain about Malfoy." Harry said quickly. "I'm going to try to make him follow us outside the castle and away from everyone, maybe the Quidditch pitch, where it's more open. Meet me there, okay?"
"Okay, Harry. Watch yourself." Ron's worried eyes met Hermione's for a moment. She could actually see his belief that Harry would protect her with his own life if need be etched in his expression; Ron fully expected to see her again and wasted no more words on her. He set off down the stairs at a run.
I will not be a liability! She thought determinedly. I can fight as well as any witch. Better!
A vine snaked like lightening down the hall from Malfoy's wand and tried to twine around their ankles; Hermione chose a severing charm for the branch around her own but was surprised to see Harry transform his into a snake and send it back toward Voldemort with a series of hissed instructions. Voldemort met it quickly with another, larger one and the two snakes coiled and rose, weaving, fangs exposed. They struck at the same time but Voldemort's overpowered Harry's, sinking its fangs deeply.
Hermione heard Harry cry out and saw the fang marks appear, red and dripping, on his own neck.
She slapped away his shaking hand and quickly cast purging and healing spells, hoping it wasn't too venomous and she'd got them right. Harry's green gaze never wavered from Malfoy's borrowed body at the far end of the hall and when Hermione had finished she looked up in surprise to find that he had charmed several of the suits of armor that lined the hall to their aid. As Malfoy lurched after them he was accosted by various age-blunted spears and swords hacking and slashing at him vigorously.
"Take that you vile and scurvy Sir!" Aethelred the Antagonistic's haunted armor taunted, poking at him with a drawn sword. "Halt and do battle! How dare you move so maliciously against a Lady! For shame!"
"Here, Here!" cheered the portrait of Horatio Angus Mac Aleful. Hermione knew that voice. A Scots wizard, he had be renowned for wiping out his enemies by inviting them to dinner and feeding them exploding haggis; he was a great personal favorite of Fred and George Weasley who had often spent hours conversing with him while still at Hogwarts. "At least leave the Lass out of it. There's never been a Malfoy here worth a pig's bladder, but none of 'em have sunk as low as that, ye ken."
"Pig's bladder indeed, there's never been a Malfoy worth the very product of a pig's bladder in all my years. Useless, sniveling creatures always looking for a cheat, can't trust them, even at cards," added the next portrait, a portly, elegant wizard in green velvet dress robes.
"I am NOT A MALFOY! This body is NOTHING …" Voldemort shrieked, distracted.
He twitched Malfoy's wand hand and Aethelred's armor dissolved into a pile of fine red rust. Malfoy's body claimed the fallen sword and raised it with a sick, pleased grin. Harry twitched his wand as well and Aethelred's dust flew into Malfoy's eyes and face, briefly choking and blinding him.
"Down the stairs, carefully," Harry whispered. "Don't turn your back on him unless you're positive I've got him covered."
Hermione backed down a step and found the railing with her outstretched hand. It struck her then that he'd made a choice, conscious or not, to send Ron for help and allow her to remain with him. He trusted her.
Down the hall the last of Harry's valiant knights collapsed themselves across Voldemort's path and his temper, not helped by the clinging red cloud of Aethelred, blew. A violent wind burst through the hall, scattering the armor like litter and rushing over Harry and Hermione, pelting them with helmets, visors and gauntlets. She ducked and lifted her wand, choosing the largest, heaviest helmet and sending it back to crash down over Malfoy's still blinking, rust-reddened eyes.
"Nice one," Harry whispered appreciatively, and sent a storm of stunners down the hall while the helmet blinded him. Voldemort swiftly erected a shield around Malfoy as he struggled to remove the helmet; deflecting them, but Harry was poised and ready when he lowered it to send another curse their way. It was countered, almost effortlessly. It seemed impossible to hit him with anything.
"Duck, now!" he warned, crouching down before her as a blasting curse ripped over them and burst against the castle wall. A crater bloomed, raining a shower of pulverized rock over them. Her hair was whipped fiercely around her face and she was momentarily blinded, she leant forward, pressing her face into his back, hearing his choking cough through the stone dust. It hadn't stopped him from sending his own spell Malfoy's way; when Hermione raised her head she saw a cloud of vengeful Cornish Pixies, taunting and tearing at Malfoy's clothing. Voldemort caused him to spin round, swatting spells at them in a raging fury. It struck her how much more effective seemingly simple, annoying spells worked against him than conventionally damaging battle tactics.
They moved stealthily backwards through the crunching grit. They were more than halfway down the stairs now.
Harry muttered and twitched his wand again; the steps above them abruptly disappeared and she had the dizzy sensation of hanging suspended in the air even though she knew the bottom steps must still be attached to the landing behind them. At least she hoped so.
"It is time to stop this school boy nonsense." Voldemort snarled through Malfoy, stopping disappointingly short of the top step. "You dare play at Cornish Pixies with ME?"
Malfoy's immaculate clothing was in disarray, his fine hair snarled. He was focused on Harry and she saw his wand arm extend; she turned quickly back to see how many steps were left and immediately knew her mistake when she felt herself thrown swiftly sideways and hurled over the railing. Before she could even scream she saw Harry unhesitatingly launch himself after her; she felt herself slowed by magical force while he continued dropping at full speed and caught her up. He wrenched them both around in mid air so that he was falling beneath her. She heard him mutter desperately; felt him arching back behind her. She saw he had managed to charm the stairs two floors down to twist their way and was reaching desperately for the railing. She twisted quickly as well and they grabbed it together, arresting their fall and momentarily blocking them from Voldemort's view as they dangled, gasping for breath.
"I know it's not really remedial DADA," she whispered fiercely. "But just what the hell is going on in that class, Harry?"
He grinned unsteadily, still visibly shaken by her fall and the adrenalin of going after her.
"We need to get him out of the castle," he whispered back. "I'll try to pull the next stairs to us. We need to drop down on them and make sure he follows us out the front door."
They heard Malfoy's feet thundering down the flights above them; Harry cried, "Now!" and Hermione jumped trustingly, landing awkwardly mid-step on the stairs as they swung past. Harry landed beside her and snatched her hand. They flew down the last steps, turned and,
A blast of red light hit the final staircase. It glowed for a brief moment and pulverized, collapsing into heaps of stone dust. They were poised now between Voldemort and a sheer drop to the main floor below. Hermione fully expected Harry to jump and tensed herself to follow, already sorting through which charm would soften their landing best. It took her several precious moments to notice that he had turned back and was holding his scar with one hand while using wingardium leviosa on one of the hall torches to threaten Voldemort with setting fire to Malfoy's robes. Voldemort abruptly turned the flame into a galloping fire-dog and sent it back at him with a swish of Malfoy's wand.
"This is what Black looks like in Hell, Potter," he sneered. "Still running scared."
Harry made an unearthly sound, almost more than Hermione could bear. The fire-dog exploded, and the shower of sparks sparkled down to the entrance hall, shimmering like fireworks.
"I can still have you, Potter." Voldemort insisted through Malfoy's lips. Harry clutched desperately at his forehead; she could see his fingers scrabbling at his scar. "If I desire it. I must admit we do make a better pair than… this one, willing or not. He has not my power, as you do."
"No. NO!" Harry ground out. He began to move back up toward Malfoy on the landing. "Never again." Hermione grabbed hold of the sleeve of his robes, tugging hard. He shrugged them off in a single twitch, leaving them in her hands like a forgotten skin.
He reached the landing and sparks began to fly from the two wands, jets and bursts of magical energy crashed into quickly cast shields or careened off the walls, leaving scorched stone in their path. Twice the paths of the wands almost crossed; the spells they were issuing swerved off course toward each other like magnet to magnet, countering each other explosively. She remembered what he had told them about their wands joining in the graveyard. Harry hadn't had a wand the first time; he'd been an infant, unarmed, and by all accounts Lily had never raised hers. Now that his own magic had chose the brother wand to Voldemort's was it even possible for them to use either against the other with deadly force?
They were both eerily silent, neither seemed to need words to focus their magic when it came to the other and Hermione knew she was seeing things from both that she had never even read of. It was not formal magic between them, but a release of elemental feelings more powerful than any written spell. Voldemort conjured what looked for all the world like a cloud of true dementors and sent them at Harry; they swooped down on him in delight as if hungry for their deadly kiss. Harry called on Prongs, and the silvery stag bounded into their midst, flailing madly with his antlers until they were dispersed and then bearing down on Voldemort, charging right through Malfoy before he disappeared. It appeared to have a draining effect; Malfoy's body staggered and Harry drove home his slim advantage, knocking the sword from his hand with a spell that clearly burned and sending a roiling black mist to surround him, momentarily obscuring his view.
"You will never take me again," Harry stated; his tone low and furious. Hermione heard six years of pain and revulsion in his voice, but she also heard a new resolve that had not been there before; a steely determination to forever block Voldemort's access through the scar joined the loathing he had held so long for the one who had cost him his parents. If only he could…
Voldemort laughed and cleared the mist with a wave of Malfoy's wand. His power and darkness had begun to contort Malfoy's face closer to his own image, though the silvery eyes shone red instead of black as they had in Harry. Hermione wondered at that, was it some indication of how fully he had submerged his victim? Was his power somehow increasing as he affected his host? If so, then the longer they fought, the more danger Harry was in.
A quick swish of his wand severed the heavy link chain that hung one of Hogwarts many lanterns over the open stairways and sent the iron lamp hurtling at them. Harry answered with a flick of his own, sending it veering of course. Voldemort had clearly planned for this; another wand slash and the end of the chain snaked itself around Harry's neck as the lantern crashed over the side of the stairs. Hermione heard Harry's choked gasp, saw his knees buckle as he was pulled, grappling with the chain, against the railing. She winguardium leviosa-ed the lamp, just managing to hold its massive weight aloft until he broke free of the chain. As it crashed heavily to the floor below she suddenly remembered his dream, how he'd begged for a time-out to Bellatrix's mocking laughter, needing that one minute more he never got.
That much, at least, she could give him. She took aim and cast a charm just before Malfoy as he leapt forward on what he believed to be his triumphal journey over the missing stairs toward Harry. It was one she had learned third year using the time turner. This one held time suspended in a small area for a brief period, it had been most helpful in assuring more graceful transitions from one moment in time to another. Without it she'd had a tendency to wipe out her landings like Harry on floo powder.
There's your minute Harry. Use it, please! Don't let him…
Even his voice slowed down as Malfoy's body slowly sailed over the gap. "Yoooouuurrrrr miiiiiiinnnnne Potttttttttter."
She saw Harry visibly struggle to rise from his knees, extend his wand and let loose a spell. Whatever he chose intersected with Hermione's timespell but ricocheted off as if it were a protective shield, racing through the empty air above the entrance hall with a crackling sound like lightening…
Straight for the rose window.
Hermione felt herself tense, waiting for the explosion of raining glass. The spell slammed into the window with a sound like a great, reverberating gong, but it held and then began to glow with an unearthly light. It was late afternoon now, the sun long passed over the peak of the roof, but all at once the stained glass gleamed brightly and the myriad pieces began to shift and click, whirring through their lead frames into new places. It was for all the world like the turning of a giant kaleidoscope, the colored bits reforming in a new order.
She watched in unbelieving silence as each petal-form slowly came into focus as a distinct picture or symbol. She felt she could watch it forever, the colors mesmerizing before her eyes. A story began to unfold there, far greater than she could ever grasp in the brief time allotted her. She realized only one truly important fact.
Neither Harry nor Voldemort had anything to do with the central hub. They were there; both a recognizable 'chapter' of their own in a timelessly unfurling story of good and evil, and there were blank 'chapter' segments still at the very edge, where the petal forms bore only clear glass, or shadows of what was to come.
The difference was that Voldemort's chapter was at the end of a concentric ring; Harry's overlapped it in position but began the next ring outward, the one containing the dimly emerging future and clearly moving ahead in the spiraling of time.
"No!" hissed Voldemort, "This is just more of Dumbledore's trickery and lies. NO!"
Hermione saw Harry mesmerized by the window as well. He was searching not ahead of himself but behind, for those he had loved and lost before. Trapped in the past, he was clearly unaware of the portent for his future. Or the one who would make it a lie if he but could.
"Harry!" she cried out, and raised her wand. She knew what spell Voldemort would choose this time around. The time to taunt his prey was done. There was no shield that would withstand the killing curse, but Hermione could not bear to do nothing, not to try.
Only belatedly registering the fear in her voice, Harry shifted his gaze and hurriedly cast a strange silvery spell she did not recognize just as Voldemort let loose the unmistakable green light of the Avada Kedavra his way. Hermione's protection spell intersected the other two; both reached their targets slightly altered and diffused.
Malfoy's body trembled, dropped to its knees and vomited a wraith of red mist. It rose in the air, writhing and twisting on itself like a blood-colored snake.
Dumbledore's voice arose suddenly from the ground floor like thunder. "Malefactoris Abi."
The red mist dissipated with a high-pitched, enraged scream that seemed to go on and on.
Or maybe that was her.
Harry lay sprawled below, limbs unnaturally splayed and unmoving where the green light had finally caught him.
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A/n: Ok, I'm hard on Harry and all, but you MUST know by now that I could never do anything fatal to him… Hermione's got all those bazillion snog points still to call in! Relax already.
If you are not familiar with rose windows, do yourself a glorious favor and go to Google (or the image search engine of your choice), choose images and search on Rose window. A feast of color for your eyes and soul. An excellent example of what I am trying to evoke can be found here: .artlex.com/ArtLex/r/images/rosewndw_notrdm.par.int.lg.jpg Add an http:// and www before it. This is the famed rose window at Notre Dame You'll get a sense of how they are shaped, the center and rings radiating outward. The design and images and the way the magical window in this story actually moves will be discussed more thoroughly next chapter, but if you can't visualize what is going on it's just my crappy writing and a picture might help. ~ Lynney