Disclaimer: They belong to JKR, I'm only playing.
A/N: I really do owe an apology this time, it's been so long. But the good news (I hope) is that the final two 'proper' chapters are at beta's mercy right now, and I'm scribbling away at the epilogue. So, the end really is nigh.
Many, many, many thanks to miconic as always; without her this story would've been quite different. In a bad way.
And many thanks for all of you for R&R.
***
--Chapter Fourteen--
There's no mistaking the direction from which the fire billows. Hermione's arms are clamped around his waist but that's not what's making his breathing so shallow, sharp. There's more smoke than fire, a hideous black sail snapping in the wind. Its guttering song stokes memories so close to the surface that it feels as though his own skin's stinging. But at the same time, it pulls at his eyes; it was dark the last time, he saw mostly the ashes, but now he's been given a second chance to look, to remember, to torture himself properly. And silent and rigid at his back, her heartbeat hurtles along with his.
Right above Diagon Alley, he swoops in a half-circle, looking for a place to land. The heat rushes into his eyes. One part of the street close to the Leaky Cauldron is fully engulfed in flames, with sporadic blazes further along, spreading towards Gringotts. No enchantments in place now, no sorting the Muggles from the wizards; the cries and wails from below are lifted up and guzzled by the flames. Coughing, Harry swerves higher, away from the smoke. From far above the city looks strangely disconnected, measured like a dollhouse, a doll's city, cooped in by blocks of buildings and the commanding lines of roads. For a minute he's distracted by the slow, oblivious midday that seems to be in progress in parts of town as close as Barnsbury.
Can't they see, smell the smoke?
Finally landing behind the Muggle block next to Diagon Alley, they wedge the bike behind a row of garbage cans with an invisibility charm over it. Then they run round the block, trying to hang on to each other against the throng rushing in the opposite direction; people, police, paramedics, stretchers. The front section of the Leaky Cauldron has collapsed and is exposed to the street. Harry turns aside, the stink of petrol strong in his nostrils. A hex flies out of nowhere and blasts a table still laden with someone's lunch and two pints of beer. Through the shower of glass and wood, two people in Muggle clothes run out, slamming Harry into the wall.
Hermione pulls him up. Turning into the cobbled street, Harry stops, heart and feet baulking. Uniformed men haul people away but fire engines can't get into the street closed off for centuries, a whole city grown around it, blocking it in. He watches the fire glide further and further along, finding footholds in collapsing shop fronts, merchandise, clothes, bodies.
I can't do this, I can't.
Someone pushes past him, slamming him against a wall again. Harry grabs the man by a shirtsleeve.
"Nick!"
"Harry--shit, Harry, sorry, I didn't--"
A whistle and a whoosh, then a small fire erupts right next to them. A barrel of eels eyes spill out over the cobbles. Ducking, Harry looks around for Hermione and spots her behind him, helping manoeuvre a stretcher through the rubble. He turns to Nick again.
"What the hell is going on? Do you know what's going on?"
Nick coughs wildly, bent double. His hair and clothes are singed badly, and there's a hysterical gleam in his eyes.
"Harry, I'm so sorry! I never meant any of this, I swear--I never--"
"What're you talking about? How long have you been here? Is Fred here as well? Ron? Nick--tell me what you know--"
"You should go--Hermione will skin me alive--is she here too? Harry, don't tell me--is she--"
Another blast cuts him off. Harry raises an arm against something that flies straight at him. Nick wrenches himself off Harry's grasp and stumbles over the rubble towards the entrance.
"Harry, just GO! Find Hermione and go! These people are fucking mad, ALL of them, your kind and mine!"
The Catherine wheel misses Harry by inches. It careens over the cobbles and bursts into flames prematurely. Eels eyes blast off in all directions. Harry stares, his blood hammering in his veins. It can't be…no! It's more potent somehow, more a weapon than a firework, yet there's no mistaking the smiling red dragon rising into air. Another jinx flies through the air. A Muggle falls to the ground, hit squarely in the back. Enraged, Harry turns to find a witch in a brown robe turn her wand on another Muggle trying to get past the fallen rafters of a shop.
"Take that, you filthy rotten scum!"
"Hey, hey, STOP THAT!" He reaches for his wand but he can barely wield it in the scuffle of bodies.
"Get out of my way--no!" Her aim goes awry and she falls back into a smashed glass door.
Trying to run to her, he's elbowed in the ribs. He bends, spluttering, and a splayed hand lands at his back. Straightening up, he realises that someone's just used his back as a lever to throw another firework.
Harry looks up the street rapidly blocking up with debris, a livid, bitter rage beating up his blood. His smarting eyes take in the rushing, shouting crowd; those trying to escape, those trying feebly to put out the fires, as well as those sparking more flames--with hexes, jinxes, doctored fireworks, spilled petrol. Not really aware of what he's doing, he makes to run up the street, his wand clutched in his hand. But someone pulls him back by his shirt.
"Harry! Where are you going? Don't--are you mad?"
He turns around.
"Hermione, they're KILLING each other!"
He breathes deeply, stupidly, inhaling lungfuls of burning air. Eyes runny and gritty with debris, lungs twisted with more than just smoke, he fights to stand straight.
"Did you SEE them? They've got Fred's fireworks! They're not stopping--they're--is this--Hermione, is this what we--I can't just stand here and watch, can I?"
Without waiting for a reply, ignoring the terror in her eyes, he jerks his shirt off her grasp, turns and strides into the midst of the smoke-throttled street.
*
She tries follow him, but people keep getting in the way. Two steps forward, three back, the falling end of a rafter almost in her eye.
"Just--get out--"
"Move, just move--"
"Daddy--over there--I want Daddy!"
"Yes love, we'll get Daddy--Excuse me, miss--"
She dodges the corner of a stretcher, looks up, and can't see him anymore.
"Miss, miss, please, can you give me a hand?"
She turns blindly nodding, clamps a hand over her mouth and turns to the wailing child, and the officer trying to help the boy into the stretcher, whose leg's at an odd angle. She smells burning fabric, and something much more pungent--skin perhaps, and turns to see a man slumped under an upturned table. She grabs the arm of a woman running past.
"Get that man out, and follow us--"
"I--no--my brother's out there somewhere--"
"We'll find him, now get him--"
"I can't--"
"JUST DO IT!"
The child wails incessantly, but they finally strap him down. Then out through the Leaky Cauldron, now unrecognisable, her wand, hands, feet working of their own accord, her mind smothered against everything else, the one other thing. The child safely inside an ambulance, she turns her wand on the burns on the man behind her, then hustles him into the arms of a medical officer. Ash in her eyes, throat closing up, she runs back inside, then out again, once, twice, a dozen times, doesn't keep count of the people she coaxes, cradles, yells at, to herd them out of the burning street. After what seems like years, she glimpses green robes outside among the other uniforms and is grateful, so grateful, but doesn't stop, runs back up Diagon Alley, fire and smoke and burning flesh, witches and wizards and Muggles, but no Harry.
No Harry.
*
The noise alone is enough to drive him mad; the deranged sirens, the loudspeakers, the falling, crashing timber and brick and roof tiles, the hiss and snarl of the flames. A human hand started it, yet human cries are now too frail to be heard above it all. The smoke is another animal altogether, ramming its bloated, bloating body against the boundaries of the street, giving Diagon Alley dimensions it didn't have before. Was the street ever this long, this deep? A foul-smelling plume rises right through an Apothecary. Tendrils of flame leap across the roof of the neighbouring second-hand robe shop. The roof caves, the robes go up in flames. Harry shouts; Aguamenti!
Soon, he looses count. Aguamenti Aguamenti Aguamenti. Sometimes it works, sometimes the fire works better. So many ways to start the fire, yet only one charm for extinguishing. Hermione might know more, but he left her behind. Words become painful, the air a splinter in his throat. His wand gets in the way of bodies. He pockets it and begins to use his hands and mind. Vaguely, he's aware of someone helping him, one person, two, a few, but he can't really see much anymore. They lift doors and parts of walls aside so he can get in to put out the flames. Water flows from his palms, fingertips. Soaked cinder smells worse than dry ash. Soot stamps tattoos on his arms and face. Soon, his clothes are drenched.
Then inexplicably his hands fail.
He's trying to levitate the body of a child through a collapsed window, all his mind clenched around the incantation, yet nothing happens. He tries again and again, but nothing.
No no no , not now, NOT NOW--
Sliding his useless hands under her arms he drags her out--gash downs her neck, hair burnt, one shoe missing--and someone carries her off. He returns to the burned building and tries to mend the glass, just to see, to know--
Reparo, reparo, REPARO!
Nothing.
The sudden hollowing out of his heart he feels right down to his toes. He keeps trying, out of defiance, fury, disbelief--
REPARO, please, reparo!
Suddenly, like a lost memory fished up, the magic comes back. His mind balances as if on a tightrope, his hands shake; the glass whips back together. On his knees, he retches dryly. Then he wipes his mouth and returns to the street.
*
The smoke soon becomes a thick fog, the fire still ravenous up the street where most of the larger, older buildings are. She catches glimpses of the now ashen exterior of Gringotts and tries to keep that in sight. How many shops were there in the street, how many has she visited? She passes Eeylops, helps the owner set free the remaining birds, then past an erstwhile confectionary shop she'd never been to, squeezes through the scramble of furniture of an open-air restaurant, and before she knows it, through the merciless smoke she sees him.
The world sways a little. She shouts but no words come out. He's only a couple of hundred paces away, but on the other side of a bank of smoking rubble blocking the street. Standing precariously on top of an upturned barrel, without a wand, he's directing a stream of clear water at a burning building. With his other hand he's trying to shield his eyes--why didn't she think to cast an Impervious for him?
Crumbling plaster adds to the smog. As she rushes up, he swims in and out of sight like a conjurer's best trick, something so magnificent that it cannot possibly be real. He's attracted a small bevy of helpers who are wrestling fallen awnings and walls to clear a small opening in the pile of debris across the road. Through the gap, a steady stream of people stumble through. A man hobbles over and falls to his feet, a silent scream twisting his face. In the next second, he's blocked from view by more panicked bodies hurrying through. Her eyes are rapidly becoming useless, swollen and teary. People rush past her in the opposite direction and somewhere far away, her body's aching just from being jostled, elbowed, pushed. She pauses, bends from the waist, trying to breathe out the smoke.
Then she straightens, something explodes, and Harry goes up in flames.
"HARRY!"
Her feet move, her mind shuts down. A wave of screaming rises around him, bodies scatter, timber falls. Some begin to run back towards Harry. Dancing obscenely, the flames leap up to his shoulders and arms. For a second, among the people running towards him, she thinks she glimpses someone familiar, but there's no room in her mind for anything now. Harry's too far away, blocked by smoke for her to see his expression, but he raises his head, eyes on something above. She follows his gaze. A green and gold garland of fire hangs above his head. Around him the black sail of smoke rises higher, dragging their world further into a future no one dares to see. He looks down at his feet. As the barrel beneath him gives way, his hands are thrown up in air; a pair of fire-hewn wings, their arc bright against the black sky. Then, silently in all the noise around him, unbearably slow in the span of a few seconds, he sinks out of her sight into a well of flames.
--end chapter fourteen--