Chapter 5
His surroundings have changed entirely into that of an abandoned warehouse.
"Incarcerous!"
Thick ropes bind all his limbs to his body, his legs stuck together to make him fall. Harry grunts in pain, the impact brutal on his shoulder.
Rough hands grip his bicep and haul him upright to his knees, right into the face of a stern and furious Ronald Weasley, a wand at his throat.
That is, until Ronald seems to register just whose face he is looking back at.
"Hi," Harry says, a mere tremor of a sound, a smile as nervous as it is wondrous.
"What the fuck," Ronald whispers, wide-eyed, drained of colour. He lets go of him, backing off into an abrupt stand, staring down at him with a furrowed expression of terror as well as anger. "What the fuck?"
"Ron?"
Behind him rushes in Hermione Granger, wand firm in hand and looking as if she's only just woken, stumbling to a stop at Ron's shoulder when she sees him.
There is pure, utter silence, everything frozen.
And then Ron's got his hands twisted tightly into Harry's shirt, his wand pressed up painfully to his throat, "HOW DARE YOU SULLY HIS MEMORY BY WEARING HIS FACE ON YOUR FILTHY FUCKING SELF, YOU SICK BASTARD—" He is yelling so loud his voice is breaking. It rattles Harry up from the inside.
Hermione steps forward, gripping Ron's shoulder, which halts him even as his face is still burning with his emotions, his eyes are still blown wide. Grief, clothed in red, blazing rage.
"Who are you?" She is trying to be steady, but quiver in her features and voice and her red-rimmed eyes give her away. She swallows, and sets her face. "How did you get anything of his?"
"It's me!" Harry pleads, "It's me, I swear. Harry Potter."
Ron jolts as if he might attack him. Hermione's grip on his shoulder tightens.
"I have half a mind to kill you right now," he grits out, sounding hardly kept himself together. Hermione pulls him by the arm and takes him aside and touches his face with both hands, speaking to him very tenderly.
Harry's chest hurts. They come back and all such tenderness of theirs is gone.
"It's me," Harry says, turning to look Hermione in the eyes when she comes to kneel beside him. She looks back briefly, an impassive, on the edge of brittle face, and begins to cast many spells Harry doesn't understand.
He understands it's difficult to believe, and it doesn't help that he keeps saying the same thing as if maybe it might sink into them both as belief, but all he wants is for them to recognise him. What hypocrisy. All he recognises them by is a childhood picture and the stories Malfoy's told him, stories he doesn't entirely know the experiential details of.
If they ask Harry, right now, to tell them something only Harry would know, what would he tell them? All he knows is that they were supposed to be his family.
He blinks, hard and fast, swallowing. "Please. It's really me. They... they wanted everyone to believe I was dead, but it was all a trick. I was kept in — in Severus Snape's house first, and then Draco Malfoy's. He said you all are working together?" He glances between them. Maybe they will believe him a bit now, if they see what he knows.
There is a shift in their body language. Hermione frowns and the two of them share a glance.
Ron looks back at Harry. "Did he really?"
Harry blinks, bemused. Hermione is casting spell after spell in a confused frenzy, searching for something.
"No traces of polyjuice potion, disillusionment or appearance-modifying spells."
"That doesn't make any sense."
"It doesn't," Hermione agrees, eying him thoughtfully, guardedly. "But we don't have time to figure out why because there's a tracker spell on him."
Harry closes his eyes, taking one slow, calming breath. It can't be anyone but Malfoy. He hasn't come across anyone else. But Ron and Hermione believe it's someone else, and now they'll run off and have to find somewhere else to be.
"It's Malfoy's," Harry says flatly, but they both ignore him.
"How much time?" Ron asks. They both sound unbelievably calm about this.
"Half an hour if they're very good. The wards will slow down their reception of our location, and they'll have to find out where all our invisibility wards are first, the hinges of each one, and then break in." Hermione stands up. "But we still need to move as fast as we can, get a headstart. I'll get our things. You keep an eye on him."
Hermione walks past Ron. His eyes have not budged from Harry.
He crouches down to be at eye-level with him, scrutinising his expression, pressing in on Harry with his presence to intimidate him.
"Were you sent by Thorfinn Rowle?"
Who?
Ron smiles humourlessly at his confusion. Harry imagines he thinks this is all an act. "See, we don't work with Death-Eaters. So let me guess. This is the infamous Malfoy-Rowle conflict at play? You all like to keep it under wraps, but it slips out. You're not as united as you like to show, are you? It's all quite...unstable in there."
He sounds so believable that Harry's heart sinks for a brief moment at the thought that Malfoy lied to him.
But it takes a minute — it's hard to think, his brain fogged up by such pressure and anxiety — to realise that, if they think this is a scheme designed to use a weak spot, if they think he is spying for someone who's suspecting Malfoy and leading Death-Eaters to them all in one go and they can't believe a word he says, then it's possible Ron's only saying all this to protect Malfoy. Malfoy seems to know far too much to not be involved with them, down to who the top leader — whom they call the Custodian — is, Kingsley Shacklebolt.
But Malfoy also knows a lot about a lot of things, and Harry does not know enough.
So what if he...
"Yeah. We know about it. But doesn't matter which one of them sent you. We'll take you all down just the same. Rowle's men. Malfoy's men. Your Snakeface leader. But why, pray tell, are we being dragged into your little feuds? What did you think, you'd come here and find Malfoy having tea with us?"
Hermione appears behind him, holding her bag and tossing Ron his. He catches it easily. "Let's go."
"Should we kill him?" Ron asks.
"Not necessary," Hermione says. "What can he go and tell anyone?"
Hermione levitates him and drops him behind a pile of crates. He's a little glad it's her. He imagines Ron would want to drag him over all the way.
"Should buy us a little more time. I imagine they want him back," Hermione says. "Come on."
She takes Ron's hand.
And then right as they turn, take a step —
They all freeze, and Harry feels it in his core right alongside them; the brutal spasm of discomfort as the wards are disrupted, sweeping over them, and the loud slams at several invisible points, like bangs against heavy, metal doors, the sparks of magic in thin air, once, twice, three times —
"No," Hermione whispers. "No, how is this — "
And all the wards are blasted off their hinges, until all the room is smoke.
Somebody laughs, high and maniacal. "Hello hello!"
Between the gaps of the empty, broken out crates, the shadows appear at each broken hinge of the ward, dissipating into people in black cloaks and skull masks.
"Let me go," Harry whispers, panicked. He can't lay here like this and leave them to fight alone. "Free me, please. I want to help."
Ron and Hermione are not listening to him at all. Somewhere along all this, they'd gotten their wands out.
The smoke clears to reveal them all; aman, coming to a stop at the front and centre with a swing of his leg as more Death-Eaters spread out from behind him, grinning with all his rotted teeth, the only one without a mask.
"Rabastan Lestrange," Ron grits out. His hand is white around Hermione's. "Fucking insane."
Lestrange claps his hand once. "Let's get this party started, shall we?"
All hell breaks loose.
The room is all flashes and bolts of coloured light, green and red and blue, accompanied by yells of impact, utterances of spells, a generous attempt at Unforgivables. He does not hear Ron and Hermione's voices amongst them, all non-verbal. He does not, gratefully, hear any of their screams.
Harry keeps glancing up from his endeavour to wriggle his wand out of his sleeve, trying to get it into his hand. He loses sight of his friends, briefly, until a few from the swarm of Death-Eaters drop to the ground, clearing his view. They fight brilliantly, fearlessly, not just with their wands but with their whole selves, combining physical and magical combat with remarkable fluidity and flexibility, taking out several in one swoop. But they are blatantly outnumbered, being accosted from all directions. They are only just making it.
Harry gets his wand between his palms, trying to get as decent of a grip as he can with his tied up wrists. "Finite Incantatum," he whispers. It doesn't work. He tries again and it doesn't work again. His grip is too awkward. He can hardly move his wand. "Fuck! Finite! Finite Incantatum!"
It doesn't work, it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
And then he hears Ron cry out in pain. He hears Hermione scream, "Ron!"
There is a lurch of his heart, down to his hands, and then he is free. Harry quickly disillusions himself as he jumps to his feet and gets out onto the battle field.
There's a bleeding lash across Ron's back. It has not stopped Ron fighting. Harry stuns the Death-Eater who'd gotten him from behind. There's a split-second of shock on his face when his eyes meet Harry's, hardly having time to remain or be seen in the midst of the battle.
It's all instinct and adrenaline-fueled survival leading his body, dodging collateral bolts of light and casting his own against them rapidly. Harry feels he is only hardly holding his own against them, just on the cusp of being knocked off his feet, catching a violent curse. Nobody guesses who he is. They can't see the scar on his temple.
When the three Death-Eaters he'd been fighting have all fallen to unconscious defeat, Harry does not expect this:
"Expelliarmus! Finite Incantatum!"
Harry whirls around, wandless, his hand twitching around the empty space.
Rabastan Lestrange stands behind him, wand pointed at Harry.
From Harry's quick observation of the entire situation before he entered the field, Rabastan has not been among the Death-Eaters surrounding them. He has been across the room, lounging against the wall, contented to watch the Death-Eaters under his command do all the work.
Now he grins at Harry, triumphantly, a wild glint in his eye. "I know a bad disillusionment charm when I—oh." He pauses and cocks his head.
Harry swallows hard.
Lestrange laughs. "Now what's this? A look-a-like of 'the great' Harry Potter?" He is sauntering forward with a flip of his wand, wrinkling his nose, like he thinks it's all very cute. "Just what are you all planning here?"
To the side, Ron and Hermione have lost their wands as well. A Death-Eater pushes them to their knees, bounding them bodily.
"No matter," Lestrange says. He smirks, sly, vicious. Harry stumbles backward a step. "It shouldn't be too hard to foil, whatever it is. If I gift your friends a necklace of your intestines, do you think they'll like it?"
What follows is a blaze of light. There is nothing at first, only a numbness spreading around his stomach, pooling warm and sticky. He does not even know what had happened, what Lestrange has shot at him.
Through him.
He sees it before he feels it.
The hole in his stomach.
What follows is horrible, scorching, unreachable agony. He cannot even make a sound — so out of air he was from the force of it — but for a choked noise jostled out of him when he drops to a knee.
"HARRY!"
Harry's cheek, falling against the dust of the ground, cold and clammy all over from anguish.
"—No, no, no, not again, I can't do this again, fuck, oh fuck—" It sounds afar, like through a tunnel. It takes a long, sluggish moment to register it as Ron's voice, nearing a sob, choked grief reopening afresh.
Elsewhere, all through the room in Harry's fading line of sight, black-cloaked bodies begin to collapse on both sides in streaks of green light, as if making way for someone.
"What the fuck? What the fuck!"
Awareness is slow-dawning throughout the scattered lines of Death-Eaters, the befuddlement and terror and shock thick in the room. The echoes of unhurried, heavy-footed steps. The fall of one Death-Eater and the next with little interval; frighteningly swift, each one revealed by another, and another.
Until the last body dropped reveals him.
Harry drifts in and out, blood thick and coppery in his mouth. Each time he opens his eyes, Malfoy has come closer, and closer, until the next time he returns to find he is standing not a few feet away from Harry. He is the only other person in a black cloak and skull mask standing upright, alive.
Him and Lestrange. Somewhere inbetween, Lestrange's wand has been knocked off into a corner. Malfoy's wand is holding him at a safe distance, drawing away his mask.
Lestrange is laughing again. "Oh if he could see you now, boy." He is clasping his hands up behind his head, lowering slowly to his knees. "He'd be so disappointed he'd wish he never kept you alive."
Malfoy is not listening to him. His eyes are on Harry's now. His face is drained of colour, creased, wide-eyed beneath a stressed line of his brows, fury hardening the edges. There's a well up in Harry's throat. He chokes on blood, coughing it up.
"You're dead," Malfoy whispers. "You were dead the moment you looked his way."
Lestrange follows the line of his gaze, to find Harry, his eyes dry. "Ah," he says in dawning realisation, softly to the quiet and unmoving room, "So it is. Your little old darling." It doesn't matter anymore that he knows. He doesn't ask how. It doesn't matter to him either.
There is another flash of green light, and Lestrange is dead.
When Harry opens his eyes next, it's to Malfoy, his gloved hand near Harry's face, quivering, and to Ron and Hermione's blurred forms appearing over his shoulder.
There is the smell of leather near his cheek, pressing to it. Pain begins to recede gradually from his body, as does full consciousness from his mind.
Harry lets go, now safe.