lomonaaeren

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Chapter Twenty—Destruction

Harry’s ward sang to him as it expanded throughout the prison.

There were prisoners everywhere. There were shrieks, and screams, and tattered minds, and cold. The ward hummed all of that information to him, and it hummed that that had come about because of the Dementors.

And where it touched the Dementors, it forced them out of existence.

Harry could feel them bursting like overripe fruit in his mind, a pulse of rottenness there and then gone. He could feel his magic, so eager to obey his will, lunging against the leash that Harry had instinctively called up to hold it. It wanted to go further, to destroy all the Dementors in Azkaban and any that might be elsewhere.

But Harry could feel Theo’s hand on his arm, and he could Mrs. Tonks standing trembling behind him, and he could feel the dead weight of Black in Theo’s arms.

He couldn’t exhaust himself trying to kill all the Dementors, or they wouldn’t get out of here. And he couldn’t destroy them all, anyway.

Harry yanked sharply on his magic’s leash, and it whinged and came trotting back to circle around him. Harry could picture it as a huge silver dog, like the one Black had changed shape from in the cell, but opposite in color, with big dark eyes that fixed on him appealingly.

Destroy. Destroy.

Harry stamped out the will to do that in himself, and felt Theo’s hand tighten on his elbow. He reckoned that it had been there all along, but he had been—absent from his body, too busy to feel it.

He wondered for a moment how he could be so certain that it was Theo’s hand, and then shook off the thought. He had things to do.

“Lead us out of here,” he told his magic, and as he infused it with a new will, the silver hound sniffed about and then raced up the steps. Harry tried to follow, only to find himself wobbling on the edge of collapse.

“Here.”

There was a long, complicated moment of movement, and Harry managed to look up long enough to see that Theo had transferred the unconscious, magically Lightened Black to Mrs. Tonks’s hold. He cast the Lightening Charm on Harry himself and scooped him up.

Harry swallowed the protest he wanted to make, and held out his arm. He could do that, at least. “Follow. That way.”

Theo pounded up the stairs. Mrs. Tonks followed them. Once they emerged into the prison proper, they could hear the wailing of alarm spells and the distant shouts of Aurors who were—

Probably too terrified to actually approach whatever had destroyed a load of Dementors.

Harry felt his lips draw up in a snarl of a smile. Theo glanced at him once as they sped towards the door, and shook his head. “You’re incredibly smug at the most inopportune moments.”

“Do we need to worry about wards trying to get out of here?” Harry began to spin magic around his fingers, wondering if he would have to use it to bring down those wards. He hoped he had enough strength left to do that.

“No. They relied too much on the Dementors.”

“Anti-Apparition wards,” Mrs. Tonks cut in. “That’s why we had to come in the boat.”

Harry nodded, his attention already focused inwards. He reached out to the wards around the island and felt them thrum. The magic he had directed to destroy the Dementors had harmed them, he thought, but not unraveled them.

That meant…

It ought to mean…

He heard distant footsteps running towards them after all, and shook his head. It would have to mean what he thought it did, because otherwise, none of them were going to escape. And Harry was determined to survive and have the life he had dreamed of, and the answers from Black.

He reached out and spun his magic at the wards. They thrummed again. It felt as if they didn’t know how to react to him, Harry thought distantly. They were supposed to prevent Apparition, but Harry wasn’t trying to Apparate. No one was supposed to interact with those wards unless they were trying to Apparate off the island, but Harry was interacting with them.

He touched them again, and felt the thrum building towards a breaking point. They would try to prevent whatever he was doing in a few moments, if they figured out what he was doing.

Harry grinned, aware that his mouth was stretching in a way that made Mrs. Tonks look askance at him. It didn’t matter. His mind felt cool and smooth, like a crystal, the way he had felt the morning he set up the ward to get revenge on Snape.

“The two of you will have to handle the guards,” he murmured, his eyes closing, his attention drifting away from his Lightened and exhausted body. The exhaustion wouldn’t matter, soon. “Illusion would be the easiest. I’m going to be occupied with getting us out of here.”

“What are—”

“We’ll handle it, Harry,” Theo said, interrupting Mrs. Tonks’s question. Theo’s hands tightened on Harry’s arms and back at the same time, and he bent down to press his lips to Harry’s cheek.

Harry nodded. Then he returned his attention to the puzzle of the wards, and how they would leave.

*

“What in the world is he talking about?”

Mrs. Tonks sounded so bewildered that Theo nearly laughed. But he had the impression that wouldn’t go over well, and also that she might start interrupting delicate spellwork if she didn’t get an answer. So he simply said, “He’s a genius with wards. If anyone can get us past them, it’s Harry.”

Mrs. Tonks gave a little huff, but Theo didn’t have time to worry about it. He reached the top of the staircase they’d been running up and set Harry down on the floor. Then he lifted his wand.

Harry was right that an illusion would be easiest. The problem was, Theo didn’t want easy. He wanted to use the curses his father had taught him when he was a child, curses he could feel tearing at his good intentions with eager claws.

But there was also the fact that Harry was exhausted, and might not be able to get them out of here. There was the fact that Theo might have to fight in his lover’s defense later on.

So easy it was right now, to conserve his strength.

Theo blended memories of pictures he’d seen in a book with magical strength, and spun illusion through his wand. A shape began to appear between him and the running Aurors, and filled in with silvery light. But Theo held it back from fully forming until he heard the scrape of a boot right around the corner.

Then he filled it in, and a huge, glowing, Nundu Patronus lunged towards the guards with its mouth open the moment they came around the corner.

More than one person screamed, and some people actually turned and ran the other way. Theo grinned. Everyone knew that only a hundred wizards working together could fight a Nundu, and that overruled, for some of them, the impossibility of finding something like this here.

But the other Aurors and guards were made of harder wood. A spell crackled down the corridor and hit the wall, and Theo had to duck into a little alcove, crouching to shield Harry.

“I cannot fight well while carrying my cousin.”

“Then put him down.”

Mrs. Tonks huffed again, but Theo didn’t have time to listen to what she thought about things. Another spell shot through the Nundu, and it sounded like more people were coming back. He had to stand and cast an illusion like a hood over his head. Father had taught him that one. As long as it seemed to connect with his cloak, most people took it for the real thing and didn’t try to dissipate the glamour to see his face.

Theo cast the same glamour for Harry, leaving it up to Mrs. Tonks if she wanted to act sensible or not, and then the first Auror rushed through the Patronus illusion.

Theo smiled. It seemed it would be curses after all.

*

Harry grinned as he plucked at the strands of the anti-Apparition wards around the prison and made them thrum in protest. Yes, he’d been right. They were only supposed to prevent Apparition from the prison and had no idea how to react to anything else.

And as long as someone else wasn’t actively trying to Apparate away from Azkaban—which no one would, because everyone here would know it was impossible—then they represented a reservoir of passive but potent, untapped power. One that Harry could use to get them out of here.

He gathered the force of the wards in his palms, as he saw them here, like dipping into shimmering, vertical, silvery walls of water. The wards again thrummed unhappily. Even if the guards could sense that, though, Harry thought, they would have no idea what was going on.

This wasn’t supposed to be possible.

But Harry had done enough that wasn’t supposed to be possible, he didn’t care.

*

The first Auror through the illusion hesitated at the sight of the four of them, maybe because he hadn’t expected this many intruders, or hadn’t expected so few. It didn’t matter. Theo hit him with the Bone-Melting Curse, raised a wordless shield while the other Aurors were distracted by his screams, and then cast a curse which the Unspeakables had invented and that Mother’s portrait had taught him

“Mentes filiorum!”

The corridor filled with blue and black lightning, and Mrs. Tonks gasped behind Theo, so maybe she recognized the spell. Theo didn’t care, as long as it did its job, and it appeared to. The Aurors in front of him dropped their wands and clutched their heads as the curse struck and forcibly cast their minds back to childhood.

“Where are we?” wailed several voices.

Theo raised another shield as someone further back cast a Stunner. It seemed he hadn’t caught everyone with the curse. He scooped Harry up in his arms and jerked his head at Mrs. Tonks. “Come on, bring Black,” he said, keeping his voice low.

“We shouldn’t—we shouldn’t use such magic—”

“Come the fuck on!”

From the way Mrs. Tonks set her jaw, she’d simply decided not to argue further rather than accepting that he’d won the argument, but Theo didn’t care, as long as she followed him. He ran with Harry cradled in his arms, mobile shield hovering in front of him, and prepared to return spellfire the moment he saw someone who would be a worthy target.

He didn’t let himself worry about the fact that they were essentially running in circles unless Harry found them a way off the island. He had the right amount of trust in his lover.

*

Harry grinned as he wrapped the silver magic more and more strongly around him and Theo, Mrs. Tonks and Black. Really, it was amazing that with so much magic like this just waiting in the wards, no one had tapped them before now.

Or maybe they can’t, Harry acknowledged to himself a second later.

It didn’t matter. Harry kept wrapping the magic, until probably their bodies in the physical world were shining with the same kind of silvery shimmer that a Patronus had.

And then he swung them, using his body as a conduit for the magic rather than the source of it, and propelled himself and Theo and Mrs. Tonks and Black higher into the air, over the wards, rather than through them. And as they fell down the outside of the wards, he slammed the gathered magic back into those ward walls, propelling all four of them back to the place that he was imagining as strongly as he could, the front of the Notts’ house.

He felt a breathless gasp of power, and he heard people stumbling and swearing, and a rough whimper that he thought might be from Black. It was strange, when Harry forced open his eyes to judge the others’ reactions, to find that he was making the sound himself. Worse, he couldn’t seem to stop. He frowned.

“Harry!”

And then the pain hit him, so incredibly powerful that Harry didn’t even have time to scream before he passed out.

*

“Fix him!”

Helios swept his gaze across the people collapsed on his doorstep: Theo, pale and sweating and distressed; Andromeda Tonks, looking so shocked that it had settled into her bones; a convulsing Sirius Black; and Harry, with thick blood trickling out of his eyes and ears and nostrils and mouth.

“Father! Fix him!”

Helios cast two Stasis Bubbles without pausing, one on Black and one on Harry. Those would stretch an endless moment around them and hold them the way they were, with no time passing, until he could fetch a Healer. Grimacing at the drain on his magic, Helios swung around and glared at Theo.

“Theodore.”

The name brought Theo’s eyes and attention up, and he snapped out of his attempts to reach through the Stasis Bubble and get to Harry. He straightened up with his hands behind his back. “Yes, Father?”

“Healer Thalestis. You know her Floo name.” He wasn’t about to reveal it in front of Andromeda Tonks.

“Yes, Father.” Theo slipped past him and ran into the house. Helios, meanwhile, shook his head as he stared at the damage in front of him.

“What happened?” He didn’t know if he would get an answer from Mrs. Tonks, but he did have to ask.

“We—we discovered that Sirius Black claims he’s innocent,” Mrs. Tonks whispered. “Your son broke him out of the prison, and Harry destroyed some Dementors that were attempting to attack us. Then we were in flight through the prison, and your son fought some Aurors, and—and Harry got us out of there. I don’t know how. It’s impossible to Apparate from Azkaban.”

“That was not Apparition,” Helios said absently. He would have heard the crack, and his wards would have felt the characteristic press of such magic. “Perhaps it does not have a name. But Harry is brilliant with wards, so he could have found a way to do it regardless of the protections at the prison.”

“It doesn’t matter how brilliant he is if he dies for it!”

Helios considered Mrs. Tonks for a moment, and then nodded and summoned one of their house-elves. “Please ensure that Mrs. Tonks has a private place where she can recover,” he told the elf, and ignored the way that she spluttered protests, instead using his wand to direct both Stasis Bubbles into the house. There was a set of comfortable but secure rooms he had already planned for Black to take, and he installed that bubble in there, shaking his head as he did so.

I suppose fostering a young dragon is bound to expose one to all sorts of new experiences, he thought, as he watched Harry’s bubble settle on his bed.

“Healer Thalestis is on her way, Father.”

Theo stood in the doorway of Harry’s suite. Helios nodded and backed off. He knew from the look on Theo’s face that his son wanted to be alone with his betrothed.

“I will be downstairs if you need me, Theo.”

Theo nodded without taking his eyes from Harry. Helios sighed and floated down the stairs so that he didn’t strain his old injuries, shaking his head again when he was settled in a chair in front of the fire.

I suppose I will only get a more coherent account of what happened when Harry wakes up. Although perhaps only marginally more coherent. When one is pushing the boundaries of magical theory as much as this, one is breaking into unexplored territory.

*

Andromeda knew she was alarming the house-elf by how hard she laughed after swallowing most of a glass of wine, but no one could blame her who had been there. She buried her head in her hands and kept laughing, not able to identify the point where laughter turned to tears.

What had that been? How could someone destroy Dementors instead of drive them back?

How could someone Apparate off Azkaban when it’s impossible to do so? And without breaking the wards? I would have felt the backlash if the wards had broken. It’s not likely we would have survived it, anyway.

There had been a sensation like flying without a broom, and a sensation like falling from a great height, and then her knees had hit the stone outside the door of the Notts’ manor.

Andromeda looked up and saw that the elf had brought Firewhisky, maybe because it thought that would calm her down. She reached for it with hands that were steadier than she’d expected, and gulped most of the liquid once she held it in the glass. Then she reeled back against the wall and choked down another wave of inappropriate laughter.

Harry Potter was powerful, and Dark, and not afraid of destructive spells Andromeda hadn’t even known were possible, and capable of getting one of the more loyal Death Eater families to follow him instead.

By all rights, she should have reported him to someone, some department like the Unspeakables that could help him control his magic—

But even the thought made a sharp string pull taut in her chest. Andromeda took a deep breath and rubbed the throb gingerly.

No. She owed him her life, and her parents had taught her to take life-debts seriously. This one wouldn’t let her act against Harry’s best interest.

So all she could do was see how this played out, and give Harry guidance if he asked for it, perhaps help getting away from the Notts if he wanted it.

“An appropriate godson for you, Sirius,” Andromeda whispered, and then she remembered the fact that Sirius was apparently innocent, or claimed to be, and began to cry again.