Reaping Time

15.

Mister Shacklebolt is upset, but not nargle-upset or wraksput-upset. Luna is glad, because she had to deal with Hermione earlier and the other was hurtful. Unintentionally, she is sure. Hermione just has so many wracksputs round her sometimes, and even some nargles in a few times, like Ronald, and they often see from behind invisible eye coverings that make them look only in front and through certain colours. But it is still not nice, unlike Mister Shacklebolt, who only looks at her doubtfully when she says that she will lead them all to Harry but follows after her anyway.

The timing is nice, too. Something is making a great booming sound somewhere up there, and everything is shaking down here. Mister Shacklebolt even urges her to walk faster. But the portal cannot be hastened! It will extend a tendril only when it is ready. Not before, not after.

The door up the tiered seats crashes open when they are ascending the dais on which the portal is anchored. And, still, Luna holds on tight to Mister Shacklebolt’s arm so that he will not bring them either to an empty dimension or a very old one or somewhere where their Harry is not there.

“Everyone who will go with me is with me, Miss Lovegood. We aren’t waiting for anybody else, so we’d better go now,” Mister Shacklebolt insists, even more urgently than before, but Luna shakes her head with appropriately increasing firmness.

“I hoped to avoid us being tagged along by undesirables,” Mister Shacklebolt confesses, at last, with a quick, jerky look back towards where Luna can hear footsteps thundering down the tiers.

“We can deal with it when we need to and not before, Mister Shacklebolt,” she insists back. Calmly, so as not to incite him further, the poor man. Wraksputs have slowly been attracted to him!

He gives her an exasperated look, to that, while flicking his wand about to create a pretty twinkly bubble all round them that feels so safe. But, thankfully, he settles down afterwards. Just in time, too! The whispers are getting louder, informing, beckoning, and the semi-physical veil in front of her and Mister Shacklebolt begins to shift, readying for the tear.

One – or maybe a few as one? – of the whispers tells her to prepare to fly, so she fishes out her broom from inside one of her pockets and asks Mister Shacklebolt to do the same.

“We walk into the gap between universes,” she relays to the man, who doesn’t seem to hear what the whispers say. “But we must be ready to fly, at the same time. So perhaps we should mount our brooms while walking? Just until we are through, I would say.”

Mister Shacklebolt’s look on that speaks a lot. He doesn’t believe her, thinks her loony, feels awkward and uncomfortable about it.

It hurts. A little. But just a little, because she is used to it.

He does as she says, anyway, frowning and grimacing all the while.

He lets her come close and link their arms and hands together, too, and doesn’t look back when she tells him not to. Even when spellfire begins to splash everywhere. Even when Madame Umbridge hollers for them to surrender and calls them traitors. Even when something yanks at the back end of the two brooms. It’s awesome!

But, well, she speaks too soon, maybe. Because part of the veil’s arch has just crumbled, struck by a stray Bombarda that doesn’t manage to strike past the pretty, twinkly, safe-feeling bubble.

Luna sighs. This means the tear will be smaller, too; not enough for two broom riders. Damn it! Just as she is settling down for the travel, too. Why must government officers be so pesky? She can only hope that Harry’s people are more reasonable….

Before she can gripe aloud about it, though, the whispers tell her that the time is very soon. So she dismounts her broom and shrinks it, ignoring how Madame Umbridge squawks and thuds onto the dais and rants. Then she shimmies onto the front of Mister Shacklebolt’s, ignoring his own squawk of surprise and confusion and exasperation, and informs him of their impending travel.

“We should hold on tight to each other and the broom, I think, Mister Shacklebolt,” she muses as the dais buckles under their feet and Madame Umbridge shrieks. Thankfully Mister Shacklebolt’s pretty, twinkly, safe-feeling bubble manages to divert the debris from it away! Although, come to think of it again, it feels less twinkly now, and less thick, while she suddenly has a very strong feeling that they will sorely need the bubble soon.

`Uh-oh.`

“Could you please strengthen the pretty bubble, Mister Shacklebolt? You could borrow my magic for that,” she tells her broom buddy apologetically. “We will sorely need it, the whispers said.”

She can feel Mister Shacklebolt’s chest expand and deflate in a soundless sigh behind her. But she can also feel him jerk sidewise and back while Madame Umbridge growls and curses, so she can’t contemplate if this is his first sigh or his… third, maybe?

She is just all too busy holding onto him and the broom and her footing.

Unfortunately, though, yet another explosion rocks the dais just as Madame Umbridge snarls and shoves.

With a yelp that’s swallowed by the portal and yet another explosion, the broom zips tiltingly forward almost at the right moment, and it’s all she can do to direct them all to at least the right dimension.

Bothersome.

16.

Pomona Sprout, former Herbology professor at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, cannot help but stare bemusedly when Minister for Magic Kingsley Shacklebolt sends her a paper-aeroplane memo, summoning her out of the habitation trunk and asking her to put on a protective suit meanwhile.

 This is… new. She has rarely been picked first in anything, except in matters of herbology, in all her years. Surely warders and the like are needed first in a new world?

Still, she might be needed, and duty is a call that any Hufflepuff finds hard to resist.

She gathers up her armoured, expanded pack that contains all her tools, potions, wardstones, trunks of hardy and useful seeds as well as a handful of water skins and ready meals, dons the suit that all herbologists wear in unfriendly environments, tells Neville – her pseudo apprentice, perhaps soon-to-be apprentice now indeed – that she is summoned, that he should prepare to step up if she needs him or if she somehow dies, and marches towards the lift up the trunk amidst his alarmed squawking. That fussy boy….

Minister Shacklebolt meets her by the lip of the trunk, looking unhurt but… frazzled, and severely exhausted, and unnerved, and confused. He is hovering on a broom, somehow, with a somehow silently weeping Miss Lovegood seated in front of him and a lumpy someone or something slumped on the spread of white sand beneath them. And there is – there has been, it seems – a protective bubble encasing all of them.

Pomona frowns, even as she gives him a polite nod of acknowledgement. “Minister.”

“Madame Sprout,” he sighs, “apologies for the haste, but I’m finding myself quite tired. Could you please handle where we need to set up camp and the protections thereof? I need to escort Miss lovegood to somewhere she can rest, and I admit I’m in need of a respite myself. But please make sure the Sphaericus Protego holds up, because the air felt weird on my skin and in my lungs when it was down. I’ll rejoin you once I’ve got a Pepper-Up in me, and perhaps get myself and Miss Lovegood checked by a healer. Madame Umbridge needs checking and containing, as well.”

“Madame Umbridge!” Pomona growls, although she doesn’t dally in erecting her own protective bubble inside the Minister’s. She hasn’t forgotten and will never forget what that odious toad did to her students a few years ago, and what the said toad did during the war that raged last year. Who knows, that toad may have been the reason Miss Lovegood is crying now.

“A stowaway,” the Minister grumbles. “Miss Lovegood was rather insistent that we wait for the perfect time to go, despite all the explosions and the attempts to arrest us.”

Pomona huffs, thoroughly unimpressed. “The war truly hasn’t ended, then, after all.”

When the Minister’s answer is only a bleak snort that seems ludicrous for one of his station but apt for both the topic and his exhaustion, she tells him that she is going to clean everyone up before she’ll let them into the habitation trunk. Then she hits him, a still-weeping Miss Lovegood and the stowaway each with a set of cleansing spells meant to get rid of anything that is not of the subject’s body and clothes, which is usually utilised by herbologists after wading into a spore-thick site or somewhere too teeming with life, or before entering a sterile area after spending a day in their beloved greenhouses.

Neville, willful, reckless boy that he is, pops out of the habitation trunk – thankfully in a protective suit! – while Pomona is cleansing the Skurge of Hogwarts with perhaps more vigor than necessary. He spares her a startled, wide-eyed look, but – wisely – doesn’t malinger or ask questions. He takes up guiding the Minister and his former schoolmate into the trunk, too, so she needn’t do that herself.

She goes right to work after dropping a groaning Umbridge into the lift box and closing down and locking the lid of the trunk. A detailed survivability test is the very first thing she does afterwards, involving a whole cadre of spells, potions, test plants and rune arrays. A dictaquill records the grim, grim findings on a hovering scroll of parchment beside her as she ploddingly goes on despite the sinking, suffocating, squirming feeling in her throat, in her chest, in her guts.

How not? This desert of odd white sand is toxic for all life. Not as toxic as what happened after the bombings in Japan during her childhood, but still not good for any length of habitation. And, somehow, there are large traces of some kind of metal in the sand. As well as burnt bones, actually, but the latter can nourish life while the former kills it.

The briefest imagining of what may have happened here gives her goosebumps, it feels, so she resolutely moves to the next phase instead, namely testing the level of ambient magic in this place. Because, if the level is high enough, in theory they can clear up a patch of ground, ward it against all the contaminants, and try to eek a life here for the time being. Nobody will bother them here, she wagers, given the toxicity level and the haunted, lonely, hurt feel of this place, and they do need to be not bothered for at least the next while.

Her eyebrows rise up sharply when spell after spell give her the same conclusion:

This place is highly magical.

Better yet, a search for potable water afterwards nets her a deposit deep, deep underground but almost directly underneath her feet.

“Well, that decides it, then,” she muses to herself, then flicks her wand to summon a Patronus to sed a message to the Minister.

They have found their new home.