Bearings
Disclaimer/Author's Note: JK Rowling owns Harry Potter.
Am I that strong
To carry on?
I might change your life
I might save my world
Could you save me?
Fuel
Falls On Me
Interlude: Wrath
Monday, November 11th, 2002; 1:55 pm
The new sign outside of their shop had afforded George Weasley with countless hours of casual entertainment, and this afternoon was no exception. Even though it employed Legilimency as its main feature, the Ministry had cleared its existence as non-invasive because it could only skim the outermost edges of someone's consciousness. Therefore, what George saw when he used the sign were the fleeting images of an active mind; sometimes it was impossible to decipher any one from another, and other times he received a clear and vivid image of whatever was on the person's mind.
Other than taking the mickey out of passers-by, the sign was also good for keeping an eye upon the Alley at all times. George loved people watching-he always had-and Diagon Alley was perhaps unique the world over for the diversity of its patrons.
He had been manning the sign since lunch, because it was a rather slow day in the shop, and he had almost immediately recognized Harry among the shoppers. His out-of-control raven hair was hard to miss, as were the many people crowding around him at various times. He had almost gone out to say hello to Harry at one point, but his younger friend looked calm and undistracted in a way that George couldn't remember seeing, so he let Harry enjoy the Alley as it was.
As the minutes ticked by, George continued playing with people as they walked under WWW's flashy sign, and at the same time he kept a casual eye on Harry's progress through the Alley. He had just been elected Vice Minister, and it was interesting to George how the public reacted to Harry; as far as George could see, everyone that Harry had talked to seemed happy and congratulatory, though he did notice several people purposely avoid Harry.
He had just flashed Might want to tell your wife to get some new knickers at someone when he noticed Harry entering the jewelry shop on the other side of the Alley. It was overshadowed by the massive white building that housed Gringotts. He saw Harry look up at the marble facade for several seconds before passing into the shop.
George smiled to himself. This was an interesting, albeit not unexpected development, one that he would soon have to share with Fred. He and his twin had often wondered when Harry would pop the question to Hermione; George thought sooner rather than later, while Fred thought they might wait a year or two before they got married and had a gaggle of little Potter sprogs. Either way, it seemed inevitable, and had for a very long time. Even with Harry's sojourn across the pond, the twins had never believed Harry and Hermione would end up with anyone other than each other.
While Harry was in the shop, a few people had stopped to rest at the bench just outside. Two were chatting with each other and the third looked to be staring off into space, though at this distance George wasn't sure. Suddenly, the third person stood up and turned toward the door to the shop, pulling something from within his or her robes. Again, it was impossible to tell from this far away if it was a man or a woman. George thought the person's behavior was a little odd.
The door to the shop opened and Harry appeared in the strong sunlight. He had an absolutely radiant smile on his face, and George knew that Harry had bought a ring. He just knew it, and he would definitely have to tell Fred. Just as he was about to leave the sign station to find his twin brother, a sickly flash of green clouded his vision. His heart stopped.
"…avada kedavra…" reached his ears, well after the curse had faded.
George blinked. Lying on the ground outside the jeweler's shop was Harry Potter. The person George had seen standing by the doorway was gone, and some screams started to reach his ears as the occupants of the Alley discerned what had happened. He saw witches and wizards running towards Harry's prone body. George couldn't believe what he was seeing.
"Fuck-FRED!" he screamed, turning and falling out of the raised platform they used for the sign, and rolling in the direction of the counter. He refused to believe what his eyes had shown him. Harry Potter was not dead.
"What?!" a bewildered voice called back, and Fred appeared in the doorway to the back of the store, wand in hand.
Meanwhile, George had reached the counter, and he pulled their two unregistered wands from beneath, which they kept there for emergencies. Fred's eyes hardened when he saw George take the wands.
"What?!" Fred asked again, more insistently this time. George leapt over the counter and tossed Fred an extra wand in one fluid motion.
"Harry's been attacked in the Alley," George told him, breathlessly; the green flash kept repeating over and over in his head. "I dunno-he might be dead-we have to help-"
"Dead?" Fred asked, sprinting alongside George to the front door. The few patrons in the shop had frozen completely and were listening with shocked ears. "But, but-impossible!" was all Fred managed to say.
George flicked his wand at the doors and they crashed open, flooding the front of the shop with bright sunlight. The world opened up before them as they crested the Alley, bright blue sky and strong sunlight above them and a panicked Alley all around them. It took a moment for George's brain to process all that was happening. He looked left and saw a crowd gathering around where Harry had fallen, and he couldn't see Harry anymore. There were too many people.
"Send your Patronus to the Ministry," George instructed Fred, now noticing the odd amount of people flocking in Harry's direction. And some of them were looking behind them, to the brothers' right, with shock and awe and fear plastered on their faces…
George looked right, and his mind boggled. Floating down the Alley toward them, in the same direction everyone was running, were Dementors. There had to be a dozen of them, or possibly even more.
"Oh fuck-Fred, do it now!" George said, pointing to the host moving relentlessly and mercilessly toward them. Thankfully it looked like people had known to stay well enough away from the cloaked creatures. "And go see about Harry-I'll hold off these things as long as I can!"
"Right-o," Fred said, absently, and then fired off his Patronus in the direction of the Ministry. It contained a quick message: Diagon Alley under attack, Potter down, send help. George turned and charged the Dementors just as another Patronus from Fred rocketed past him to meet the Dark creatures. He looked over his shoulder and saw his twin brother plunging through the crowd of people to get to Harry.
When he turned back, the reality of the situation settled upon him, as did the horrible coldness of the Dementors' aura. He could feel as his usual good cheer was ripped from him.
He had been trained well, though; Harry had personally taught both Fred and George during the last year of the Second War how to effectively cast a Patronus and how to resist the Dementors' effects as long as possible, so George called this knowledge to the fore. As Fred's Patronus ripped through the middle of the host, he set himself and cast three of the shining silver spells in a row.
Fred's spell was doing a decent job of confusing the beasts, and they were more than unsettled by George's three Patroni circling them, but their forward movement continued ceaselessly on. If Harry wasn't dead, perhaps they were going to finish the job; George could only hold them off for so long-he cast several more Patroni, but already the draining effect of the Dementors and the power required to cast each spell were wearing him down. He glanced behind but could only see the mass of people surrounding Harry and presumably Fred, if his brother had reached their comrade.
George backed up a few paces, casting two more shining spells in the direction of the advancing creatures, and knew that he only had a few more left in him. He set his jaw; if he had to give his life to save Harry's-and the hope for the future of this world-then so be it. He would charge into them if he had to and distract them long enough for help to arrive. They wouldn't be able to resist a fresh soul…
He cast one more Patronus, but it was weak and translucent. As soon as it reached the Dementors, it faded into nothingness. George drew in a deep breath, nodded at nothing in particular as if to assert with certainty what he had to do, and started running at the cloaked beasts. The wave of coldness and despair that crashed over him almost sent him tumbling to the cobbled road, but he managed to keep moving forward.
BOOM!
A noise like the loudest thunder George had ever heard in his life crashed through the Alley, reverberating up and down and off the buildings several times before fading into a low rumble in the distance. He pulled up as he watched the Dementors ease up as well, and his nose twitched as the smell of ozone invaded his senses.
It was then that he realized the Alley had gone eerily silent, so he turned to search for a cause. Three-quarters of the way around, his eyes widened in joy as hope was restored to his heart. There in the middle of the Alley, almost perfectly halfway between the crowd of people and the Dementors, was none other than Hermione Granger. George had never been happier to see her, nor had he ever been this frightened by her appearance.
Her arrival in the Alley must have caused that caucophonous noise, because the ground she stood upon was slightly depressed, almost crater-like. She was dressed in her Ministry robes-she must have been at work-and they were flapping about her madly, even though the air in the Alley was quite calm. Her hair was doing the same thing. Her wand was gripped in her left hand and pointed straight at the ground.
Unless George's eyes were deceiving him, and he doubted they were, her eyes were completely black. He shivered as those eyes looked directly into his. The last time he had seen Hermione even close to something like this was during the final battle at Hogwarts…and even then was nothing like the raw power she now exuded, both with her physical presence and the magic he felt upon the air.
"Harry?" she asked, very quietly, though George was sure everyone in the Alley felt her words. He motioned with his eyes over her shoulder, where Fred had finally reappeared from the crowd of people. Harry's prone form floated in front of him.
The ground rumbled from somewhere deep underneath as Hermione saw this and took a step in their direction, but Fred held up his hand and yelled, "He's alive, thank Merlin! I'll take him to St. Mungo's-you take care of that." His twin pointed behind George, where the group of Dementors had started moving forward once again. The sight of Harry must have prompted their motion.
"Step aside, George," Hermione commanded, and he did as he was told. Her voice, normally soft and mellifluous, was hard-edged. He retreated back to the front of his shop and watched with arrested eyes as Hermione faced off against twelve Dementors. All other eyes in the Alley were glued to the scene as well.
George had time to fleetingly wonder where the rest of the Ministry was-the Hit Wizards, the Aurors, and the simply curious-before Hermione braced herself against the cratered cobbled stone and raised her wand toward the Dementors.
"EXPECTO PATRONUM!" Hermione screamed, like a banshee straight out of the darkest depths of hell. George had to shield his eyes from the intense white light that flared from her wand, washing out everything else for just a moment.
When the glare settled, George saw a truly tremendous otter swirling around and around Hermione. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up as her magic permeated the air around him.
"Get them," he heard Hermione growl, and the otter shot forward toward the Dementors. It left a trail of glowing magic as it sped toward the dark beasts. Instead of plowing into the center of them, though, it turned at the last second and began to circle them. The Dementors had stalled completely by now, and were moving back and forth in a curiously rhythmic pattern, trying to get away from the circling Patronus.
Hermione started walking slowly toward the trapped Dark creatures. George was a powerful wizard, but his Patronus was neither that large nor that bright; his couldn't corral twelve Dementors, either. Hermione seemed to be doing a fine job by herself, so he was content to stand by the front of his shop and watch.
"Incendio," Hermione said, very casually, and flicked her wand to the side. George took several more steps back, now almost pressed against the front of his shop, as the overwhelming heat from the flames created by her spell rippled through the air. Directly underneath the circling otter, flames grew into a ring around the Dementors. They rose six or seven feet in the air and then continued to burn, feeding merrily off the plentiful oxygen and Hermione's seemingly limitless stores of magic.
Every breath for George was like inhaling brimstone. He shied away even more as Hermione flicked her wand again, reinforcing the spell. She was now within twenty yards of the roaring inferno, though oddly enough the flames did not touch the Dementors. It was almost as if Hermione wanted them to be trapped in that ring of fire.
"Hot enough for you?" Hermione called, jeering the Dementors.
George was tempted to roll his eyes. Only Hermione (or Harry) would taunt twelve Dementors. He looked around quickly, and noticed that the reinforcements had finally showed up. They were all staring at Hermione, however, rather than contributing to the fight.
"How about now?" she yelled, reinforcing the flame spell once again. They rose another three or four feet in the air. George could barely see the cloaked forms of the Dementors within the ring of fire. The flames were too tall and too intense.
"Or now?" The flames rose again.
"Or-" she started again, but George decided it was time to intervene.
"Hermione!" he called, and she paused. She turned her head to look at him and he fought back the urge to run away as fast as he could as her black eyes locked with his. "Enough already! Just finish it, if you can!"
She smiled grimly. It was not a smile of satisfaction. It was not a smile of anger or irony. It was simply a smile of murder.
"Get everyone back," she said, and George knew that was all the warning they were going to get for whatever she had planned for the Dementors.
He turned and ran in the opposite direction, waving everyone back with his hands, and then amplifying his voice so they could all hear his warning. Reaching what he thought was a safe distance, he then turned and saw Hermione setting herself once again. The ring of fire was a hazy conflagration beyond her, and the Dementors must have sensed their impending doom, because he saw them quite frenzied within.
Hermione reached to the heavens, pointing her wand straight to the sky.
And then nothing happened for several moments. Hermione had frozen completely, though her Ministry robes and brown hair continued whipping around her body as if she stood in the middle of a gale.
She suddenly faded in and out of existence several times, as if she was trying to Apparate and was running up against wards. This continued for several seconds, but eventually she was wholly solid once again. George felt that prickle on that back of his neck for the second time in as many minutes, though now it was much more powerful and even more unsettling. If he could feel Hermione's magic from this far away…
"Do it for Harry," George muttered, thinking of his brother in all but blood. The poor bloke had so much on his shoulders, and now this had to happen. The world never gave him a break-it looked like Hermione was about to provide him with one, though.
"BURN!!" he heard her scream, or shriek rather, and the air seemed to be sucked toward the Dementors. It was as if the atmosphere was collapsing toward some singularity, some focal point caused by Hermione's magic-
"EXURIS IGNIS EXUSSUM!" she shouted, once again at the top of her lungs. She brought her wand down toward the ground, toward the Dementors, with both hands and as hard as she could.
For a moment absolutely nothing happened, and then an odd keening sound reached George's ears. It sounded almost like a Muggle jet engine at full throttle, and it was growing louder and louder with every passing second.
"Look up!" someone shouted, and the eyes of the Alley turned toward the sky as one.
George unconsciously took a step back as he saw some presence-some disturbance of the air-plummeting toward the ground, heading directly for the ringed-in Dementors. He saw Hermione tilt her head toward the sky, though he couldn't see her face because her back was to them.
The jet-engine noise grew louder and louder and the disturbance appeared to pick up speed. The only thing it could be was whatever spell Hermione had cast, and George was amazed that it had such a physical presence. Even Hermione took a few a steps back as it neared the ground, and George waited with wide-open eyes as it fell the last fifty feet.
With a terrifyingly loud and deafening sound, the spell ignited twenty feet from the ground; the roiling fireball that propagated from its hot-as-the-sun center was truly magnificent, and it struck the ground with a noise George couldn't describe. It was a cross between an engine revving to redline and several hundred industrial tires popping at the same time.
Hermione's spell had flash-ignited the oxygen in the air within that small ring of fire, and in doing so had incinerated everything down to the very last molecule. The fireball burned off as quickly as it had come, because there just wasn't enough fuel to sustain something that hot for very long, but the wave of superheated air that passed over their heads was enough for George to simply marvel at the spell's power.
Then silence settled over Diagon once again, and within the ring of the fire, George saw that the cobblestones were glowing molten red. There was no trace of the twelve Dementors. Hermione was down on one knee, though her head was held high. Without thinking, he sprinted away from the crowd toward her.
It was a good thing, too, because just as he reached her she leaned to the side and would have toppled to the street if he hadn't caught her. She was lucid, however. He saw that the ends of her hair and eyebrows were singed. Her robes were very hot.
"Hermione?" he asked, looking into her eyes and seeing once more the familiar chocolate irises.
"George…" she whispered. Her voice was extremely hoarse.
"That was incredible," he told her. "Where did you learn that spell?"
She smiled tiredly, though it fell away quickly. "I still have a few tricks up my sleeve every now and then."
"I'll say," he agreed, then chuckled slightly. He shifted slightly to support her weight more evenly across both of his legs, and that seemed to wake her up a little.
"Harry?" she wondered, looking anxious and afraid-quite the contrast from the Hermione that had just roasted a dozen Dementors.
"Fred took him to St. Mungo's."
"Take me to him, George," she whispered, and he nodded. He helped her to her feet, and without a glance over his shoulder at the amazed crowd behind them, cracked out of existence with Hermione's hand held tightly in his.
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