![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lomonaaerenSecond part of a one-shot. Don't start reading here.
“There’s too many of them!”
The voices are shouting, loud and angry, from beyond the walls of the Three Broomsticks, where Draco and Harry have guided the latest lot of wizards forced from their homes. Muggles have followed them, though. Draco wonders for a moment if it was a wizard who betrayed them or Muggle technology that became powerful enough to see past the wards of Hogsmeade, and then decides that it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, except that he and Harry brought these families here, and they have to keep them safe.
He turns around and meets Harry’s eyes. Harry inclines his head, bleakly. They both know what has to happen now. Hogwarts is the only place strong enough to hold up against the determined Muggle attack, and the only place big enough to shelter the people they’ve brought to Hogsmeade as well as the people who live there and will flee from it.
Harry reaches out and clasps Draco’s hand. Draco holds so firm for a second that he cannot imagine letting Harry go. But Harry’s command and control of wandless magic is as strong as his own, now, and peculiarly adapted to Defense, the way it has always been. Draco has to believe that he will see Harry again. He will let no other belief exist or influence him.
“Go,” Draco says.
Harry nods, and reaches into himself to raise floating shields around the people they’ve herded into the pub. Then he steps out in front of the refugees and catches their eyes. They calm at once, Draco notices. That is something that Harry’s scar and fame are good for: making people trust him and follow him where they need to go to be safe.
They weren’t good enough to keep his friends with him or to stop this war, something Draco knows Harry blames himself for every day. But they might be good enough to keep part of the wizarding world alive.
“Come on!” Harry roars, magic aiding his voice, so that it travels to every corner of the room without echoing. “We need to get to Hogwarts.”
And he encircles them with more floating shields and leads them out the door. He doesn’t look back.
Not that Draco expected him to. He won’t want to see what Draco is about to do.
If Harry’s magic is made to shield, to defend, to protect and comfort, Draco’s magic is made for killing. Ironic, Draco sometimes thinks, for the boy who could not lift his wand to commit murder.
But this is not magic controlled by a wand. It is pure lightning, sparking through him, and what Draco looks at it, it strikes.
Draco steps out of the Three Broomsticks and turns in the direction of the army rumbling up towards Hogsmeade.
There are wizards there, on flying carpets—the ones who decided that it was against human rights to use Memory Charms on Muggles, and then eventually decided that it was against human rights to keep any secrets from them, either. Draco curls his lip. He’s read the pamphlets, the ones that talk about wizards having a duty to heal Muggle diseases, clean up after Muggle accidents, solve Muggles’ problems with pollution and waste and all sorts of other things that Draco hasn’t bothered to pay attention to. They’re very earnest, full of rhetorical questions, and utterly oblivious of the fact that magic can’t do everything and that not every wizard is good at the same things.
They never stood a chance of convincing Draco, but tellingly, they never convinced Harry either. Draco is prouder of that than he probably should be.
There are Muggles with the wizards, too, in cars and in tanks and with other weapons that Draco knows wards can’t stand up to. Neither can the wizards fleeing behind him, stampeding up the paths towards Hogwarts. They don’t have the temperament or the power for it.
That doesn’t matter. Draco has more than enough for all of them.
He half-closes his eyes and reaches out with his power, calling on fire first. Fires break out on the flying carpets, consuming the cloth, and the wizards veer madly around the sky, trying to find places to land, and means to put it out. They can’t do the last, though. Draco just has to pour more magic on the flames, and they respond as if to air, rising and wavering back and forth, fast enough to burn wands before the flyers can lift them.
Then Draco turns towards the Muggles and reaches out a hand, whistling softly. There is fire among the Muggles, though it is tame and coiled, patient, potential fire rather than open flame. All Draco has to do is touch it and convince it that it wants to burn instead of serving.
Muggle weapons burst into flames as gunpowder combusts, as the weapons Draco has learned to call grenades blow up, as everything that can catch fire does. Muggles are dying in the midst of it. Draco doesn’t care.
What he cares about is that Harry’s shields cluster on the path towards Hogwarts, keeping Draco’s flames from sweeping towards the castle or the people who are ducking and gibbering and cowering in flight.
Muggles pour out of the tanks and towards Draco, firing as they come—until Draco’s sweeping hand destroys their guns and the hands that hold them at the same time, and until Draco glances up at the sky and lightning hurtles down from it, forking again and again to hit the Muggles that still remain. They dodge, or they try, but they cannot. Nothing is faster than lightning.
Draco smiles.
An enormous explosion, strong enough to rock even Harry’s shields, erupts from the back of the line. Draco raises his eyebrows. So they brought along a bomb of some sort. Well, it is fitting that the bomb destroy its makers.
Draco’s parents are dead, overwhelmed in one of the first rushes that eager Muggles made on wizards because they wanted them to cure cancer. Granger said, over and over again, that it was understandable, because grieving parents and families would want their loved ones to be well again more than anything else. More than other people’s lives, Draco understands now. More than wizards remaining free. Even now, Granger and wizards on her side still make excuses for Muggles, talk about how fear is understandable, talk about how human rights have been ignored and abused long enough that wizards’ rights should be abused in turn.
Draco’s parents are gone. His friends are gone, seized and enslaved or dead or escaped from Britain. In the entire world, he has only Harry to love.
He lets his flames go, and watches them all burn.
*
“But what if it’s not true?”
Sarra looks up from the quill that she’s been making write on a piece of paper. She can’t make recognizable letters yet from across the room, only scratches and slashes, but she’s determined to master the art of writing with Air Magic. There are times everyone who flies a castle has to scribble down instructions with magic for other people to read, because the flyer can’t leave her post. If Sarra can’t do that, she’ll only be able to help a little with flying the castle that she and Kenyon and Peridot will someday be assigned.
“I wasn’t paying attention,” Sarra says, when she realizes that Peridot is looking at her. “What if what’s not true?”
Peridot sniffs, but doesn’t say anything about Sarra’s language, to Sarra’s relief. She knows that Peridot speaks better than she does, and that’s okay. She just doesn’t like being called on it when they don’t need precision of language to control their magic or accomplish some other task. “I said, what if the history that Angela taught us isn’t true?”
“That part about the Great Dark Lord?” Sarra ignores the way that Peridot looks around the room. They’re left alone more and more often now, to practice their magic. Angela teaches them history, and Azurite teaches them meditation, and they’re learning how to cook from Phoenix, who likes to use physical means, but everyone knows that adults can’t interfere too much with fifth-years and above, or they won’t develop the special bond that they need to have to fly a castle. “Well, Angela did say that it might not be true. That lots of people thought it wasn’t.”
Peridot shakes her head, her face brooding. “What I mean is, what if the rest of it isn’t true? We always learned that Light wizards invented starflight, working together. But if that could be a lie, what about the rest of it?”
Sarra pauses. She didn’t think about that. But it chimes with the thoughts she sometimes has at night, lying awake under the stars of the White Way and thinking about the planet where it all began, the wizards’ magic and their wariness of Muggle species that could hurt them. She wonders if the Great Dark Lord was lonely, what he was like, why teachers wear lightning bolts, why they chose to make Hogwarts fly and not some other place, and it doesn’t seem like there will ever be answers to her questions.
“Well,” she says at last, “you could ask Angela about that.”
“I don’t trust her enough, not when she admitted that what she said might not be right.” Peridot leans closer, frowning at Sarra. “I’m asking you.”
Sarra takes a long, deep breath. “I think it’s fun to think about,” she says. “But we’ll probably never know the truth. Things might be different than we were told. We should always make sure that we ask the teachers and check the truth and don’t believe things blindly. But we can’t know for sure. So we should get used to living with uncertainty.”
Peridot’s face changes slowly, like the piles of ash that Sarra had to sort out with Air Magic the other day. “Wow,” Peridot says at last. “So you think that everything we know might be a lie?”
“Not a lie,” Sarra says. “Uncertainty.” The more she thinks about this, the more convinced she is. “We can’t go back in time and ask the Great Dark Lord and the rest of them about the truth. So we have to do the best guesses and the best thinking we can, and just live with not knowing the rest of the time.”
“I wish someone had invented Time Magic,” Peridot says, and sighs at her own paper. She’s still trying to make the quill write something legible at a distance of half a classroom. Sarra can’t help feeling a little smug that, for once, there’s Air Magic that she’s better at than Peridot is. “I wonder, if it’s really Dark and dangerous, how do they know that? Is that another part of history that we aren’t supposed to question?”
“I don’t know,” Sarra says, and goes back to writing her message. She’s thinking of inventing a sort of code for her and Peridot and Kenyon to use when they fly their castle. It would be easier to write from a distance, and more distinct than all sorts of little letters, too, at least if they could convince their quills to write it larger across the paper.
She becomes so absorbed in ideas for the code that she doesn’t think about the Great Dark Lord and history again until she’s lying in her bed that night and watching shooting stars pass across the ceiling.
I bet that someone loved him, she thinks as sleep moves in like an eclipse’s shadow. Everyone loves someone.
*
“I don’t see any other choice.”
Harry closes his eyes. That’s all. He doesn’t turn away or reach out and strike Draco. He just keeps facing the paper in front of him where Draco has written projections and ideas about the war, and closes his eyes.
It hurts like a slap anyway. Draco swallows several times, and then says, “You know there were always more Muggles than wizards, Harry. Hogwarts’s wards can’t hold forever, and now the Muggles have destroyed so many places, like Hogsmeade, that we counted on hiding. I don’t think there are any free wizards left in Britain outside these walls.” He gestures around what used to be the Charms classroom, and now is the strategy room, although only Harry and Draco ever use it. The rest of the adults in the castle are useless in various ways, too concerned with their families to care about anyone else or occupied with crowd control and assigning rations and having endless, circular discussions about how to come to peace with the wizards helping the Muggles.
“I just—to leave them behind forever,” Harry whispers.
Draco cocks his head. He sincerely doubts that Harry is talking about the Muggles, or the captured wizards, who even Harry acknowledges they have little hope of rescuing from across Muggle-occupied territory. Not without abandoning Hogwarts, not without taking their power to resist Muggle weapons away from helpless children and injured men and women.
“You still entertain some hope of reconciling with the Weasleys and Granger, don’t you?” Draco asks. It’s the only thing that can drive Harry now, and make him reluctant to flee the war. “Even though they’ve helped Muggles since the beginning, and even betrayed the location of Hogsmeade to them.”
Harry licks his lips. “That might have been others, too.”
Draco says nothing. As far as he’s concerned, the owls that his storm intercepted bear all the evidence that’s needed that Weasleys were instrumental in flinging the doors open to the Muggles. Probably taking down some of the anti-Muggle spells and Notice-Me-Not Charms, too.
“Arthur was always fascinated by Muggles,” Harry is whispering, “and he never thought they would hurt his family.”
Draco stirs impatiently. “Well, they haven’t.” So far, the Muggles seem to have kept faith with their wizarding allies, though Draco suspects that will last only so long as there are free rebel wizards around and the Weasleys and their followers can keep promising that someone who can cure cancer and environmental degradation is over the next hill. Or in the next castle, now.
“But they trusted them.” Harry clenched his fists and bowed his head. “Maybe I can still reach out to Ron and Hermione…”
That’s what he wishes, of course. He still mourns the loss of his friends, no matter how much he loves Draco.
And Draco understands, but he can’t let Harry doom him—both of them—and a whole castle full of refugees on the off-chance that his friends will welcome him back.
He reaches out and puts his hand on Harry’s wrist, waiting until Harry looks at him. It takes a long time.
“Muggle parents love their children,” he says quietly. “That’s the excuse that Granger keeps using for all the horrible things that Muggles have done to us. They love their children, and they want them free of diseases and unhappiness and who knows what else. But do you think wizarding parents love their children any less? Can you ask them to give up the last chance we have for freedom and a place of our own because you want your friends back?”
Harry’s lips tremble for a second before he turns away and prevents Draco from seeing his face. But he doesn’t try to take his hand out from under Draco’s hand. “That was cruel,” he whispers.
“I know,” Draco says, and makes no apologies.
Yes, it was cruel. But he will do anything to prevent Harry from sacrificing himself in a useless bid for friendship. Granger chose her side from the moment that she decided to declare all wizarding families who still owned house-elves the enemy, and Weasley followed her like the besotted idiot he was. It’s not Harry’s fault that his friends were idiots, but it will be now, if he goes back to them and allows them access to the wards, or gets himself taken and tortured and weakens the wards that way. Draco can’t hold them by himself.
Neither can he raise the castle by himself.
Harry finally takes a deep breath and turns back to Draco. “Tell me again about this mad plan you have of escaping to the stars.”
*
“You have done very well.”
Sarra puts her head back and smiles at Angela. She’s a seventh-year now, twelve whole castle-cycles old, and for the first time, she’s managed to aid the people who fly their castle in making it circle around a sun. She was only in control for a few seconds, while the Crèche in charge transferred the castle from one wizard’s magic to another’s and needed people to help support the immense burden of tons of stone hanging in space. More than anything, they needed people to make sure that the castle didn’t fall into the sun or lose the position it has relative to one of the sun’s planets. There’s lots of sun and water there, lots of land too, and so far, magic probes have discovered no Muggle intelligent species who would attack wizards. It would be a good place to land and stretch their legs for a while, maybe even to settle.
Sarra already knows that she doesn’t want to stay there, though. Her heart belongs to the stars and the castles that circle around them.
“Maybe tomorrow Peter will let you create some of the gravity in the corridors.” Angela nods at her, then pauses before Sarra can stop basking in the pleasure of that compliment. Sarra looks up.
Angela is watching her narrowly. Sarra can’t stop wishing that Peridot and Kenyon were here. Sometimes she gets impatient with them, and of course it’s a great honor to be trusted to perform magic without the escort of her Crèche, but when she’s all alone, she can’t stop the feeling that she’s personally at fault.
“What?” she whispers.
Angela bends near. “You were looking at that panel while you held the castle in its orbit,” she says, and nods at a decorative panel that shows the Dark Lord Voldemort being defeated by the Light wizards Granger and Weasley. It’s near the window that reflects the blazing sun. “And I heard you saying something.”
Sarra blushes. They’re supposed to be silent when they perform magic in the Great Hall, lest they distract the Crèche that flies the castle. “Sorry.”
“That’s not the problem,” Angela says, so softly that Sarra finds it hard to hear her. She glances around once, then bends near. “You can hear me?” she whispers.
Sarra nods. “Yes, of course. You’re right there.”
“That’s not the question I should have asked,” Angela mutters, sounding disappointed in herself. “I meant, you can understand me?”
Sarra blinks at Angela. It looks as though she has her eyes focused past Sarra, on the same panel that Sarra was looking at when she flew the castle. The panel has lots of glittering glass, bright colors, showing the Dark Lord Voldemort and the snakes that swarm around him, Ashwinders and Runespoors and basilisks. “Yes. Why wouldn’t I?”
Angela’s hand rests on her shoulder, comforting and warm. “Because the language I just spoke in was Parseltongue,” she says, her voice without inflection.
It takes long, long moments for Sarra to understand her. Completely understand her, not just hear the words she’s saying.
Sarra tears herself away from Angela. Her tongue is stuck to the roof of her mouth, and she can’t cry out. All she can do is stand there, shaking her head, and then shaking.
If she’s a Parselmouth, then she’s Dark. And Dark wizards are eliminated.
She tries to say something, but she’s too close to crying. And Angela is reaching one hand out, her eyes wide.
That’s probably only the final comfort before they kill her. Sarra breaks and runs.
*
“It’s the best we can do.”
Harry nods a few times. When it seems as though he’ll go on nodding, long past the point where it’s productive, Draco reaches out and takes his chin, gently stilling him. Harry lets loose a long sigh and glances sideways at Draco.
“You really think they can fly the castle?”
Draco smiles back at him and looks up at Hogwarts, all its windows ablaze with light, and the stones ablaze with wards. “I do. They’re not nearly as powerful as we are, but desperation helps a lot with accessing wandless magic, and they still have a lot of children that can do accidental magic, too. They can only lift Hogwarts working all together, but like that? They can raise it.”
Harry grasps Draco’s hand, and squeezes hard enough to powder his bones. Draco squeezes back. He knows, from the sheen of tears that he can see in Harry’s eyes, what Harry feared. That one of them would have to go with the castle to raise it, and one of them would have to stay behind to defend against the Muggles, keeping their weapons from shooting it down during those first uncertain moments as Hogwarts lifts.
Now, they can stay together.
“What do you think is going to happen?” Harry asks quietly, glancing over his shoulder, back towards Hogwarts.
“I think they’re going to make it,” Draco says comfortably. “And they’ll go beyond the earth, and the people we trained so hastily will find ways to make it work because they have to, and the students we had who are with them will help them. And they’ll change, no matter what happens. They will change. History will be lost, or marked, or rubbed out, or told in different ways. Maybe they’ll forget us. Maybe they’ll tell tales of us, but under different names. Maybe all distinctions of pure-blood and Muggleborn will fade.” It’s Draco’s private opinion that they’ll have to. There are nearly a thousand wizards inside Hogwarts, but that’s not a large enough community for everyone to split off and have their own private enclaves, especially when they need to work together to fly the castle.
Harry pokes him in the shoulder. “I didn’t mean what would happen to them. I mean, what will happen to us.”
Draco seizes Harry’s shoulders and kisses him. Harry makes a surprised noise against his mouth, and then surrenders and kisses him strongly in return, nearly driving Draco off his feet as he leans in.
“We’ll go and defend Hogwarts from the Muggles, so it can fly,” Draco whispers into his mouth. He can feel Harry’s heart beneath his hand, beating so strongly that it seems impossible death or grief or power or Muggle weapons could ever still it. “And we’ll break through the Muggle lines when we’re done, and go somewhere else.” He pulls back so he can look into Harry’s eyes. “We’re not even thirty yet, and we’ve already fought in two wars. We deserve a holiday now, a home somewhere else where no one will ever look for us.”
For a second, Draco thinks it’s not going to work. Harry’s hands tighten painfully on his wrists, and he looks for another second as though he might throw Draco aside and go in search of his friends.
But Draco can’t confine him or hold him back. He can only trust to Harry’s sense of the fitness of things, and the honor that burns in him like a flame, and the love that Harry bears him, to hold him still.
Then Harry gasps, “Yes,” and by the lights in Hogwarts’s windows, Draco sees the tears on his cheeks.
Draco cradles him close, and Harry whispers against his shoulder, murmurs, the words spilling from him like a river of oil.
“All my life, I wanted to have a home, I wanted to have someone to love me, I wanted to be normal. The first time I came to Hogwarts was the first time that I ever felt at home, but then people started trying to kill me, and now you tell me Hogwarts has to go away forever. And you love me, but we didn’t get the chance to enjoy it for long before my friends were thinking that you corrupted me. And...I’ve done enough, for everybody. If I can go somewhere else and enjoy myself for once, in a little house, with you, and make other friends, and maybe have children, then I’ll have everything I want. I think—I can finally think I deserve it.”
Draco’s hands slide down Harry’s back, and he pulls Harry against him, kissing him so aggressively that Harry laughs in protest. But he doesn’t pull away, and that means that Draco can keep kissing him, at once expressing and hiding the relief that pounds through him.
He has wanted Harry to come with him long before this. If Harry hadn’t wanted to stay and defend people from Muggles, then Draco would already have left Britain. But he knew Harry wouldn’t come, that he felt he owed other people something, and that his hero complex and his guilt wouldn’t let him rest.
Now, it sounds as though the guilt has cracked and fallen from Harry’s shoulders, and Draco knows they will have a life together, at last, at least, for always.
Harry finally breaks free of the kiss and looks up at the stars, and the castle. “I wonder what they’ll think of us, later, when it’s generations past and they’re free among the stars?” he whispers.
Draco shakes his head. “Probably not the truth. Who cares? I’m happy to finish this last battle with the Muggles and then walk out of history. Forever.”
Harry smiles as he takes his hand, and they walk into the darkness for the last time, towards the lines of Muggles who cannot, Draco thinks, kill them, beings of joy and power as they are.
The darkness closes around them, hiding them from all knowledge.
*
Sarra tenses when the door opens. For the first time in her life, she threw Peridot and Kenyon out of the room when she arrived, even though they wanted to hear all about her flying the castle. They’re probably coming back in to ask again, and she’ll have to sit up and smile and talk about it as though that still matters to her.
It can’t matter to her. Nothing can, except what Angela told her recently, because pretty soon she won’t have a life for it to matter in.
But it’s Angela who comes into the room, and not with a Sword or some other weapon of elimination. She sits down at the end of Sarra’s bed and watches her steadily.
“I thought you were smarter than this,” she says.
Sarra bristles. “What do you mean? I should have been smart enough not to reveal that I’m Dark?” She closes her eyes and touches her hair for a second. It’s brown and wild and curly and hangs down to below her waist. It makes her envy Peridot, whose hair is smooth and blond. Well, now she won’t have to worry about cutting it. “But they tell us to report any Dark thing about ourselves as soon as we notice it.”
Angela reaches out and takes her hands. Sarra stares at them, wondering when her skin will start burning and blackening.
“Listen,” Angela whispers. “If every Parselmouth dies as soon as they’re noticed, why do you think I’m still alive?”
Sarra opens her mouth. Closes it. Finally says, “Oh,” and feels just as stupid as Angela said she was.
Angela shakes her hands a little. “You can survive,” she whispers. “You’ll have to keep it a secret from your Crèche, which I know is hard. Someone who’s been picked as having the magic to fly a castle should always be able to trust the other wizards around her.”
Sarra swallows and nods. If she had a simpler life, simpler magic, like the kind that Angela has, she could be a teacher or a caretaker or an artist and live without a Crèche. But she doesn’t think it’s impossible to keep secrets from Kenyon or Peridot. They don’t know about all the things she thinks of during the nights, for example.
“It’s hard,” Angela says again, and touches her cheek. “But there are Dark wizards around still, Sarra. History that flourishes where it’s not supposed to be seen. Gifts like Parseltongue that survive and are passed on because people who have them, like me, see the young ones who do and protect and mentor them, like you. Sometimes, even alternate books to the History Books.” She smiles, probably because Sarra’s eyes have widened. “Yes, I thought that would interest you.”
“But how?” Sarra whispers. “How, when everyone hates the Dark?”
Angela grins at her. “Let’s just say, not everyone who made Hogwarts rise agreed on everything. Now, most of us do, because it’s been generations, but we have the freedom of the stars. We can go to a different castle if we need to, to spread the truth or be with people like us or keep from being discovered. If the Muggles couldn’t cage us, how can other wizards hope to do so?”
Sarra just stares at her, and sees a new future opening out.
“It can be a hard life,” Angela says. “A secretive one. We can’t talk about what we know with everyone. But there’s excitement and rewards in it, too, looking for the truth, trying to decipher what is real from what’s known.” She sits back and spreads her hands a little, and for a moment a silver shimmer appears between them, no magic that Sarra knows. “Maybe inventing Time Magic.”
Sarra’s heart is beating hard. She has never known how much she’s wanted something like this, for all her noble words to Peridot about living with uncertainty. To figure things out, to do magic that isn’t in the List of Nine Disciplines, to know…
“Do you think the Great Dark Lord invented starflight?” she whispers. “And the kind of magic we use?”
Angela smiles at her. “I do. And I think he was also two people, not one.” The silver shimmer appears again. “Someday, I intend to go back and ask them.”
Sarra shivers. It’s dangerous, it’s strange, it might change the life she leads, it’s wonderful, it’s the life she wants.
“Teach me,” she whispers, stretching her hands out to Angela. “Please?”
Angela nods and takes her hands again. “We have our freedom,” she repeats. Her eyes are shining, bright, wild. “We should use it.”
And Sarra says, “Yes,” and all the future is before her, flushed with starlight.
The End.
“There’s too many of them!”
The voices are shouting, loud and angry, from beyond the walls of the Three Broomsticks, where Draco and Harry have guided the latest lot of wizards forced from their homes. Muggles have followed them, though. Draco wonders for a moment if it was a wizard who betrayed them or Muggle technology that became powerful enough to see past the wards of Hogsmeade, and then decides that it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, except that he and Harry brought these families here, and they have to keep them safe.
He turns around and meets Harry’s eyes. Harry inclines his head, bleakly. They both know what has to happen now. Hogwarts is the only place strong enough to hold up against the determined Muggle attack, and the only place big enough to shelter the people they’ve brought to Hogsmeade as well as the people who live there and will flee from it.
Harry reaches out and clasps Draco’s hand. Draco holds so firm for a second that he cannot imagine letting Harry go. But Harry’s command and control of wandless magic is as strong as his own, now, and peculiarly adapted to Defense, the way it has always been. Draco has to believe that he will see Harry again. He will let no other belief exist or influence him.
“Go,” Draco says.
Harry nods, and reaches into himself to raise floating shields around the people they’ve herded into the pub. Then he steps out in front of the refugees and catches their eyes. They calm at once, Draco notices. That is something that Harry’s scar and fame are good for: making people trust him and follow him where they need to go to be safe.
They weren’t good enough to keep his friends with him or to stop this war, something Draco knows Harry blames himself for every day. But they might be good enough to keep part of the wizarding world alive.
“Come on!” Harry roars, magic aiding his voice, so that it travels to every corner of the room without echoing. “We need to get to Hogwarts.”
And he encircles them with more floating shields and leads them out the door. He doesn’t look back.
Not that Draco expected him to. He won’t want to see what Draco is about to do.
If Harry’s magic is made to shield, to defend, to protect and comfort, Draco’s magic is made for killing. Ironic, Draco sometimes thinks, for the boy who could not lift his wand to commit murder.
But this is not magic controlled by a wand. It is pure lightning, sparking through him, and what Draco looks at it, it strikes.
Draco steps out of the Three Broomsticks and turns in the direction of the army rumbling up towards Hogsmeade.
There are wizards there, on flying carpets—the ones who decided that it was against human rights to use Memory Charms on Muggles, and then eventually decided that it was against human rights to keep any secrets from them, either. Draco curls his lip. He’s read the pamphlets, the ones that talk about wizards having a duty to heal Muggle diseases, clean up after Muggle accidents, solve Muggles’ problems with pollution and waste and all sorts of other things that Draco hasn’t bothered to pay attention to. They’re very earnest, full of rhetorical questions, and utterly oblivious of the fact that magic can’t do everything and that not every wizard is good at the same things.
They never stood a chance of convincing Draco, but tellingly, they never convinced Harry either. Draco is prouder of that than he probably should be.
There are Muggles with the wizards, too, in cars and in tanks and with other weapons that Draco knows wards can’t stand up to. Neither can the wizards fleeing behind him, stampeding up the paths towards Hogwarts. They don’t have the temperament or the power for it.
That doesn’t matter. Draco has more than enough for all of them.
He half-closes his eyes and reaches out with his power, calling on fire first. Fires break out on the flying carpets, consuming the cloth, and the wizards veer madly around the sky, trying to find places to land, and means to put it out. They can’t do the last, though. Draco just has to pour more magic on the flames, and they respond as if to air, rising and wavering back and forth, fast enough to burn wands before the flyers can lift them.
Then Draco turns towards the Muggles and reaches out a hand, whistling softly. There is fire among the Muggles, though it is tame and coiled, patient, potential fire rather than open flame. All Draco has to do is touch it and convince it that it wants to burn instead of serving.
Muggle weapons burst into flames as gunpowder combusts, as the weapons Draco has learned to call grenades blow up, as everything that can catch fire does. Muggles are dying in the midst of it. Draco doesn’t care.
What he cares about is that Harry’s shields cluster on the path towards Hogwarts, keeping Draco’s flames from sweeping towards the castle or the people who are ducking and gibbering and cowering in flight.
Muggles pour out of the tanks and towards Draco, firing as they come—until Draco’s sweeping hand destroys their guns and the hands that hold them at the same time, and until Draco glances up at the sky and lightning hurtles down from it, forking again and again to hit the Muggles that still remain. They dodge, or they try, but they cannot. Nothing is faster than lightning.
Draco smiles.
An enormous explosion, strong enough to rock even Harry’s shields, erupts from the back of the line. Draco raises his eyebrows. So they brought along a bomb of some sort. Well, it is fitting that the bomb destroy its makers.
Draco’s parents are dead, overwhelmed in one of the first rushes that eager Muggles made on wizards because they wanted them to cure cancer. Granger said, over and over again, that it was understandable, because grieving parents and families would want their loved ones to be well again more than anything else. More than other people’s lives, Draco understands now. More than wizards remaining free. Even now, Granger and wizards on her side still make excuses for Muggles, talk about how fear is understandable, talk about how human rights have been ignored and abused long enough that wizards’ rights should be abused in turn.
Draco’s parents are gone. His friends are gone, seized and enslaved or dead or escaped from Britain. In the entire world, he has only Harry to love.
He lets his flames go, and watches them all burn.
*
“But what if it’s not true?”
Sarra looks up from the quill that she’s been making write on a piece of paper. She can’t make recognizable letters yet from across the room, only scratches and slashes, but she’s determined to master the art of writing with Air Magic. There are times everyone who flies a castle has to scribble down instructions with magic for other people to read, because the flyer can’t leave her post. If Sarra can’t do that, she’ll only be able to help a little with flying the castle that she and Kenyon and Peridot will someday be assigned.
“I wasn’t paying attention,” Sarra says, when she realizes that Peridot is looking at her. “What if what’s not true?”
Peridot sniffs, but doesn’t say anything about Sarra’s language, to Sarra’s relief. She knows that Peridot speaks better than she does, and that’s okay. She just doesn’t like being called on it when they don’t need precision of language to control their magic or accomplish some other task. “I said, what if the history that Angela taught us isn’t true?”
“That part about the Great Dark Lord?” Sarra ignores the way that Peridot looks around the room. They’re left alone more and more often now, to practice their magic. Angela teaches them history, and Azurite teaches them meditation, and they’re learning how to cook from Phoenix, who likes to use physical means, but everyone knows that adults can’t interfere too much with fifth-years and above, or they won’t develop the special bond that they need to have to fly a castle. “Well, Angela did say that it might not be true. That lots of people thought it wasn’t.”
Peridot shakes her head, her face brooding. “What I mean is, what if the rest of it isn’t true? We always learned that Light wizards invented starflight, working together. But if that could be a lie, what about the rest of it?”
Sarra pauses. She didn’t think about that. But it chimes with the thoughts she sometimes has at night, lying awake under the stars of the White Way and thinking about the planet where it all began, the wizards’ magic and their wariness of Muggle species that could hurt them. She wonders if the Great Dark Lord was lonely, what he was like, why teachers wear lightning bolts, why they chose to make Hogwarts fly and not some other place, and it doesn’t seem like there will ever be answers to her questions.
“Well,” she says at last, “you could ask Angela about that.”
“I don’t trust her enough, not when she admitted that what she said might not be right.” Peridot leans closer, frowning at Sarra. “I’m asking you.”
Sarra takes a long, deep breath. “I think it’s fun to think about,” she says. “But we’ll probably never know the truth. Things might be different than we were told. We should always make sure that we ask the teachers and check the truth and don’t believe things blindly. But we can’t know for sure. So we should get used to living with uncertainty.”
Peridot’s face changes slowly, like the piles of ash that Sarra had to sort out with Air Magic the other day. “Wow,” Peridot says at last. “So you think that everything we know might be a lie?”
“Not a lie,” Sarra says. “Uncertainty.” The more she thinks about this, the more convinced she is. “We can’t go back in time and ask the Great Dark Lord and the rest of them about the truth. So we have to do the best guesses and the best thinking we can, and just live with not knowing the rest of the time.”
“I wish someone had invented Time Magic,” Peridot says, and sighs at her own paper. She’s still trying to make the quill write something legible at a distance of half a classroom. Sarra can’t help feeling a little smug that, for once, there’s Air Magic that she’s better at than Peridot is. “I wonder, if it’s really Dark and dangerous, how do they know that? Is that another part of history that we aren’t supposed to question?”
“I don’t know,” Sarra says, and goes back to writing her message. She’s thinking of inventing a sort of code for her and Peridot and Kenyon to use when they fly their castle. It would be easier to write from a distance, and more distinct than all sorts of little letters, too, at least if they could convince their quills to write it larger across the paper.
She becomes so absorbed in ideas for the code that she doesn’t think about the Great Dark Lord and history again until she’s lying in her bed that night and watching shooting stars pass across the ceiling.
I bet that someone loved him, she thinks as sleep moves in like an eclipse’s shadow. Everyone loves someone.
*
“I don’t see any other choice.”
Harry closes his eyes. That’s all. He doesn’t turn away or reach out and strike Draco. He just keeps facing the paper in front of him where Draco has written projections and ideas about the war, and closes his eyes.
It hurts like a slap anyway. Draco swallows several times, and then says, “You know there were always more Muggles than wizards, Harry. Hogwarts’s wards can’t hold forever, and now the Muggles have destroyed so many places, like Hogsmeade, that we counted on hiding. I don’t think there are any free wizards left in Britain outside these walls.” He gestures around what used to be the Charms classroom, and now is the strategy room, although only Harry and Draco ever use it. The rest of the adults in the castle are useless in various ways, too concerned with their families to care about anyone else or occupied with crowd control and assigning rations and having endless, circular discussions about how to come to peace with the wizards helping the Muggles.
“I just—to leave them behind forever,” Harry whispers.
Draco cocks his head. He sincerely doubts that Harry is talking about the Muggles, or the captured wizards, who even Harry acknowledges they have little hope of rescuing from across Muggle-occupied territory. Not without abandoning Hogwarts, not without taking their power to resist Muggle weapons away from helpless children and injured men and women.
“You still entertain some hope of reconciling with the Weasleys and Granger, don’t you?” Draco asks. It’s the only thing that can drive Harry now, and make him reluctant to flee the war. “Even though they’ve helped Muggles since the beginning, and even betrayed the location of Hogsmeade to them.”
Harry licks his lips. “That might have been others, too.”
Draco says nothing. As far as he’s concerned, the owls that his storm intercepted bear all the evidence that’s needed that Weasleys were instrumental in flinging the doors open to the Muggles. Probably taking down some of the anti-Muggle spells and Notice-Me-Not Charms, too.
“Arthur was always fascinated by Muggles,” Harry is whispering, “and he never thought they would hurt his family.”
Draco stirs impatiently. “Well, they haven’t.” So far, the Muggles seem to have kept faith with their wizarding allies, though Draco suspects that will last only so long as there are free rebel wizards around and the Weasleys and their followers can keep promising that someone who can cure cancer and environmental degradation is over the next hill. Or in the next castle, now.
“But they trusted them.” Harry clenched his fists and bowed his head. “Maybe I can still reach out to Ron and Hermione…”
That’s what he wishes, of course. He still mourns the loss of his friends, no matter how much he loves Draco.
And Draco understands, but he can’t let Harry doom him—both of them—and a whole castle full of refugees on the off-chance that his friends will welcome him back.
He reaches out and puts his hand on Harry’s wrist, waiting until Harry looks at him. It takes a long time.
“Muggle parents love their children,” he says quietly. “That’s the excuse that Granger keeps using for all the horrible things that Muggles have done to us. They love their children, and they want them free of diseases and unhappiness and who knows what else. But do you think wizarding parents love their children any less? Can you ask them to give up the last chance we have for freedom and a place of our own because you want your friends back?”
Harry’s lips tremble for a second before he turns away and prevents Draco from seeing his face. But he doesn’t try to take his hand out from under Draco’s hand. “That was cruel,” he whispers.
“I know,” Draco says, and makes no apologies.
Yes, it was cruel. But he will do anything to prevent Harry from sacrificing himself in a useless bid for friendship. Granger chose her side from the moment that she decided to declare all wizarding families who still owned house-elves the enemy, and Weasley followed her like the besotted idiot he was. It’s not Harry’s fault that his friends were idiots, but it will be now, if he goes back to them and allows them access to the wards, or gets himself taken and tortured and weakens the wards that way. Draco can’t hold them by himself.
Neither can he raise the castle by himself.
Harry finally takes a deep breath and turns back to Draco. “Tell me again about this mad plan you have of escaping to the stars.”
*
“You have done very well.”
Sarra puts her head back and smiles at Angela. She’s a seventh-year now, twelve whole castle-cycles old, and for the first time, she’s managed to aid the people who fly their castle in making it circle around a sun. She was only in control for a few seconds, while the Crèche in charge transferred the castle from one wizard’s magic to another’s and needed people to help support the immense burden of tons of stone hanging in space. More than anything, they needed people to make sure that the castle didn’t fall into the sun or lose the position it has relative to one of the sun’s planets. There’s lots of sun and water there, lots of land too, and so far, magic probes have discovered no Muggle intelligent species who would attack wizards. It would be a good place to land and stretch their legs for a while, maybe even to settle.
Sarra already knows that she doesn’t want to stay there, though. Her heart belongs to the stars and the castles that circle around them.
“Maybe tomorrow Peter will let you create some of the gravity in the corridors.” Angela nods at her, then pauses before Sarra can stop basking in the pleasure of that compliment. Sarra looks up.
Angela is watching her narrowly. Sarra can’t stop wishing that Peridot and Kenyon were here. Sometimes she gets impatient with them, and of course it’s a great honor to be trusted to perform magic without the escort of her Crèche, but when she’s all alone, she can’t stop the feeling that she’s personally at fault.
“What?” she whispers.
Angela bends near. “You were looking at that panel while you held the castle in its orbit,” she says, and nods at a decorative panel that shows the Dark Lord Voldemort being defeated by the Light wizards Granger and Weasley. It’s near the window that reflects the blazing sun. “And I heard you saying something.”
Sarra blushes. They’re supposed to be silent when they perform magic in the Great Hall, lest they distract the Crèche that flies the castle. “Sorry.”
“That’s not the problem,” Angela says, so softly that Sarra finds it hard to hear her. She glances around once, then bends near. “You can hear me?” she whispers.
Sarra nods. “Yes, of course. You’re right there.”
“That’s not the question I should have asked,” Angela mutters, sounding disappointed in herself. “I meant, you can understand me?”
Sarra blinks at Angela. It looks as though she has her eyes focused past Sarra, on the same panel that Sarra was looking at when she flew the castle. The panel has lots of glittering glass, bright colors, showing the Dark Lord Voldemort and the snakes that swarm around him, Ashwinders and Runespoors and basilisks. “Yes. Why wouldn’t I?”
Angela’s hand rests on her shoulder, comforting and warm. “Because the language I just spoke in was Parseltongue,” she says, her voice without inflection.
It takes long, long moments for Sarra to understand her. Completely understand her, not just hear the words she’s saying.
Sarra tears herself away from Angela. Her tongue is stuck to the roof of her mouth, and she can’t cry out. All she can do is stand there, shaking her head, and then shaking.
If she’s a Parselmouth, then she’s Dark. And Dark wizards are eliminated.
She tries to say something, but she’s too close to crying. And Angela is reaching one hand out, her eyes wide.
That’s probably only the final comfort before they kill her. Sarra breaks and runs.
*
“It’s the best we can do.”
Harry nods a few times. When it seems as though he’ll go on nodding, long past the point where it’s productive, Draco reaches out and takes his chin, gently stilling him. Harry lets loose a long sigh and glances sideways at Draco.
“You really think they can fly the castle?”
Draco smiles back at him and looks up at Hogwarts, all its windows ablaze with light, and the stones ablaze with wards. “I do. They’re not nearly as powerful as we are, but desperation helps a lot with accessing wandless magic, and they still have a lot of children that can do accidental magic, too. They can only lift Hogwarts working all together, but like that? They can raise it.”
Harry grasps Draco’s hand, and squeezes hard enough to powder his bones. Draco squeezes back. He knows, from the sheen of tears that he can see in Harry’s eyes, what Harry feared. That one of them would have to go with the castle to raise it, and one of them would have to stay behind to defend against the Muggles, keeping their weapons from shooting it down during those first uncertain moments as Hogwarts lifts.
Now, they can stay together.
“What do you think is going to happen?” Harry asks quietly, glancing over his shoulder, back towards Hogwarts.
“I think they’re going to make it,” Draco says comfortably. “And they’ll go beyond the earth, and the people we trained so hastily will find ways to make it work because they have to, and the students we had who are with them will help them. And they’ll change, no matter what happens. They will change. History will be lost, or marked, or rubbed out, or told in different ways. Maybe they’ll forget us. Maybe they’ll tell tales of us, but under different names. Maybe all distinctions of pure-blood and Muggleborn will fade.” It’s Draco’s private opinion that they’ll have to. There are nearly a thousand wizards inside Hogwarts, but that’s not a large enough community for everyone to split off and have their own private enclaves, especially when they need to work together to fly the castle.
Harry pokes him in the shoulder. “I didn’t mean what would happen to them. I mean, what will happen to us.”
Draco seizes Harry’s shoulders and kisses him. Harry makes a surprised noise against his mouth, and then surrenders and kisses him strongly in return, nearly driving Draco off his feet as he leans in.
“We’ll go and defend Hogwarts from the Muggles, so it can fly,” Draco whispers into his mouth. He can feel Harry’s heart beneath his hand, beating so strongly that it seems impossible death or grief or power or Muggle weapons could ever still it. “And we’ll break through the Muggle lines when we’re done, and go somewhere else.” He pulls back so he can look into Harry’s eyes. “We’re not even thirty yet, and we’ve already fought in two wars. We deserve a holiday now, a home somewhere else where no one will ever look for us.”
For a second, Draco thinks it’s not going to work. Harry’s hands tighten painfully on his wrists, and he looks for another second as though he might throw Draco aside and go in search of his friends.
But Draco can’t confine him or hold him back. He can only trust to Harry’s sense of the fitness of things, and the honor that burns in him like a flame, and the love that Harry bears him, to hold him still.
Then Harry gasps, “Yes,” and by the lights in Hogwarts’s windows, Draco sees the tears on his cheeks.
Draco cradles him close, and Harry whispers against his shoulder, murmurs, the words spilling from him like a river of oil.
“All my life, I wanted to have a home, I wanted to have someone to love me, I wanted to be normal. The first time I came to Hogwarts was the first time that I ever felt at home, but then people started trying to kill me, and now you tell me Hogwarts has to go away forever. And you love me, but we didn’t get the chance to enjoy it for long before my friends were thinking that you corrupted me. And...I’ve done enough, for everybody. If I can go somewhere else and enjoy myself for once, in a little house, with you, and make other friends, and maybe have children, then I’ll have everything I want. I think—I can finally think I deserve it.”
Draco’s hands slide down Harry’s back, and he pulls Harry against him, kissing him so aggressively that Harry laughs in protest. But he doesn’t pull away, and that means that Draco can keep kissing him, at once expressing and hiding the relief that pounds through him.
He has wanted Harry to come with him long before this. If Harry hadn’t wanted to stay and defend people from Muggles, then Draco would already have left Britain. But he knew Harry wouldn’t come, that he felt he owed other people something, and that his hero complex and his guilt wouldn’t let him rest.
Now, it sounds as though the guilt has cracked and fallen from Harry’s shoulders, and Draco knows they will have a life together, at last, at least, for always.
Harry finally breaks free of the kiss and looks up at the stars, and the castle. “I wonder what they’ll think of us, later, when it’s generations past and they’re free among the stars?” he whispers.
Draco shakes his head. “Probably not the truth. Who cares? I’m happy to finish this last battle with the Muggles and then walk out of history. Forever.”
Harry smiles as he takes his hand, and they walk into the darkness for the last time, towards the lines of Muggles who cannot, Draco thinks, kill them, beings of joy and power as they are.
The darkness closes around them, hiding them from all knowledge.
*
Sarra tenses when the door opens. For the first time in her life, she threw Peridot and Kenyon out of the room when she arrived, even though they wanted to hear all about her flying the castle. They’re probably coming back in to ask again, and she’ll have to sit up and smile and talk about it as though that still matters to her.
It can’t matter to her. Nothing can, except what Angela told her recently, because pretty soon she won’t have a life for it to matter in.
But it’s Angela who comes into the room, and not with a Sword or some other weapon of elimination. She sits down at the end of Sarra’s bed and watches her steadily.
“I thought you were smarter than this,” she says.
Sarra bristles. “What do you mean? I should have been smart enough not to reveal that I’m Dark?” She closes her eyes and touches her hair for a second. It’s brown and wild and curly and hangs down to below her waist. It makes her envy Peridot, whose hair is smooth and blond. Well, now she won’t have to worry about cutting it. “But they tell us to report any Dark thing about ourselves as soon as we notice it.”
Angela reaches out and takes her hands. Sarra stares at them, wondering when her skin will start burning and blackening.
“Listen,” Angela whispers. “If every Parselmouth dies as soon as they’re noticed, why do you think I’m still alive?”
Sarra opens her mouth. Closes it. Finally says, “Oh,” and feels just as stupid as Angela said she was.
Angela shakes her hands a little. “You can survive,” she whispers. “You’ll have to keep it a secret from your Crèche, which I know is hard. Someone who’s been picked as having the magic to fly a castle should always be able to trust the other wizards around her.”
Sarra swallows and nods. If she had a simpler life, simpler magic, like the kind that Angela has, she could be a teacher or a caretaker or an artist and live without a Crèche. But she doesn’t think it’s impossible to keep secrets from Kenyon or Peridot. They don’t know about all the things she thinks of during the nights, for example.
“It’s hard,” Angela says again, and touches her cheek. “But there are Dark wizards around still, Sarra. History that flourishes where it’s not supposed to be seen. Gifts like Parseltongue that survive and are passed on because people who have them, like me, see the young ones who do and protect and mentor them, like you. Sometimes, even alternate books to the History Books.” She smiles, probably because Sarra’s eyes have widened. “Yes, I thought that would interest you.”
“But how?” Sarra whispers. “How, when everyone hates the Dark?”
Angela grins at her. “Let’s just say, not everyone who made Hogwarts rise agreed on everything. Now, most of us do, because it’s been generations, but we have the freedom of the stars. We can go to a different castle if we need to, to spread the truth or be with people like us or keep from being discovered. If the Muggles couldn’t cage us, how can other wizards hope to do so?”
Sarra just stares at her, and sees a new future opening out.
“It can be a hard life,” Angela says. “A secretive one. We can’t talk about what we know with everyone. But there’s excitement and rewards in it, too, looking for the truth, trying to decipher what is real from what’s known.” She sits back and spreads her hands a little, and for a moment a silver shimmer appears between them, no magic that Sarra knows. “Maybe inventing Time Magic.”
Sarra’s heart is beating hard. She has never known how much she’s wanted something like this, for all her noble words to Peridot about living with uncertainty. To figure things out, to do magic that isn’t in the List of Nine Disciplines, to know…
“Do you think the Great Dark Lord invented starflight?” she whispers. “And the kind of magic we use?”
Angela smiles at her. “I do. And I think he was also two people, not one.” The silver shimmer appears again. “Someday, I intend to go back and ask them.”
Sarra shivers. It’s dangerous, it’s strange, it might change the life she leads, it’s wonderful, it’s the life she wants.
“Teach me,” she whispers, stretching her hands out to Angela. “Please?”
Angela nods and takes her hands again. “We have our freedom,” she repeats. Her eyes are shining, bright, wild. “We should use it.”
And Sarra says, “Yes,” and all the future is before her, flushed with starlight.
The End.
