Chapter 4
Harry's animagus form is a sparrow.
It's fucking brilliant.
He looks at himself in the reflection of a puddle of water; brown-winged, tiny. It's far simpler and more bearable these days to see himself as a bird rather than as himself.
Harry transforms himself back into human form and meets Malfoy's eyes.
"Oh my God," he whispers, breathless and excited.
Malfoy does that half-smirk, half-smile thing he does. It makes him bright-eyed with pleasure. "Spectacular, isn't it? See, where would you be without me?"
Harry hasn't felt so elated since he dreamed his first memory two months ago, but that was short-lived when he found out the fates of everyone he's ever loved.
Right now, it's all pure, floating joy, the kind that makes him want to do something wild and free.
"Race with me," he says, grinning. He does not wait for Malfoy to say yes, already turning around into a bird and flying away.
"Careful!" Malfoy commands loudly, sharply, understandably since Harry has only just learned. He can still lose grip on his form any time if he doesn't maintain focus, but Occlumency has helped him improve decently at that. "Oh for goodness — "
Maybe he will follow. Maybe he won't. But Harry finds himself hoping he will.
The rush and exhilaration fills him up as he swoops fluidly through the vast openness of the space all around him. He can move in every direction and there is nothing to stop him anywhere. He has flown on an old broom of Malfoy's here in this backyard, because Malfoy told him he loves it and he does, but this is a different kind of flight altogether. The world is so large like this, and so alive, and he feels everything far more vividly against his small form. The sun sets high and far in the distance, casting a buttery-yellow glow all over, stunning and enormous.
Right as he is wondering if Malfoy has left behind him, there's a slice across the air next to him, a blur of white zooming past. A feeling wells up in him, like laughter, delight, coming out as birdsong, and he follows after the white dove. They stay there for a long time, flying together, chasing after each other in play.
And only when they grow satisfyingly, aching tired that they come to a permanent landing.
They sit on the balustrade with their legs hanging off the edge and watch the sun lower into the horizon the rest of the way. Harry is so contented, serene, his eyes closed to feel the cool air, his shoulders a little high as his hands press into the parapet.
"Bit of a natural, aren't you?" Malfoy says.
"I suppose it's the innate skill I have when it comes to flying," Harry says, which is what Malfoy once told him regarding his love for flying on a broom. Now though, he just rolls his eyes. Harry grins. "Your words, not mine."
When he chances a glance at Malfoy next, he is held still by the sight.
He looks so different in that moment.
He looks as young as he is, in the light of the evening that coloured him in its haze; the rise and fall of his chest steadying soft and slow, his wind-swept hair playing up even more, the splotch of pink high in his cheeks and the slight hollow beneath its bone. All sharp, refined structure. He has a maddening kind of mouth.
He is beautiful.
And Harry realises that he will miss him.
There are still all these gaps in his understanding of Malfoy, but he has grown on Harry these last months. He has been patient with him, kind even, trying all he can to win his trust. He's seemed honest about most things Harry's asked about that had to do with him. He's helping his friends. He's taught him all these wonderful things. Harry's better in Occlumency than he may have ever been (or so he assumes), knows animagi now.
Malfoy is clever, intelligent and skilled. There is so much more he can teach Harry if he stays.
But these last few months, ever since he's learned of what's been happening with his friends, have been a kind of hell. Harry can't stay cooped up and protected here as they fight for their lives every day. He wants to be there to fight with them, help them out with whatever they are planning, be proactive. Even if he doesn't know them right now, he feels certain he would die for them.
The only thing Harry fears is putting Malfoy at risk.
He does not want him hurt, or worse.
But Harry thinks all he really has to do is make it safely to Ronald and Hermione, find the Blood Traitors. There are surely things they can do to keep Harry from being found out. He can take on a new identity, change enough of his appearance that it makes a difference; dye his hair, modify a feature. No one will suspect it's him, because it's been three years since he died to the rest of the world, and so word might never reach Voldemort. As far as he knows, Voldemort never checks in on Malfoy by visitation. It's likely he uses other means to, but Harry assumes Malfoy usually reports by going to Voldemort himself.
Harry knows he will have to be careful. If Malfoy's life depends on it, he has no choice but to be.
"I had fun," Harry finds himself saying, when he does not know how to say goodbye. "Today."
Malfoy hums, quirks a half-smile and glance at him. "Good."
The glance lingers on him, a second, two, for the small smile Harry reciprocates. Yes. He will miss him.
Under any other circumstances, he may not have been so pleased about his animagus being a little bird. Now he can only think of how easy it will be to travel unnoticed in this form.
Malfoy has spilled where they are hiding out right now, supposedly because he is certain Harry can't go after them. He knows a bit about where to go.
All he needs to do is get through the barrier.
Malfoy does not keep a floo system, presumably for higher security and invisibility, so he always leaves the house by the iron doors, and when he goes through the barrier, it flickers for a split-second all throughout.
Harry will just have to time it and fly through it right as Malfoy moves through it. He risks injury and getting splinched, but it's his best bet, and a terrible idea.
*
His sparrow self waits perched on the iron doors. He knows as Malfoy is stalking towards it, fitting his skull mask onto his face one-handed, he will smooth through it without a hitch, as if he does not have to think about it at all.
Harry can never get used to it. Seeing him in that mask.
Right as Malfoy is a few steps away from passing through, Harry takes off and propels his body forward at a great speed for the barrier.
His pulse is quickening as he nears it, and hardly processes the last few seconds of the distance. He hurtles into the barrier, expecting to be slammed back, to violently drop to the ground, to be ripped in two by the splinching, to get stuck half in and out.
And then he is out.
He is out.
He is free.
He swoops towards the left and keeps on flying. There is a terrible part of him that wants to turn back. There is a terrible part of him that is terrified that something will happen to Malfoy if he does not stay, and it will be all his fault, that Harry will not make it there safely, that it will all go wrong.
He presses down on the fears.
And he does not stop.
*
It is a bleak and terrible world.
Pinpoints of people are moving lazily through the streets. Rubbles of destruction have burnt up certain areas, felled its architecture in others. Black-cloaked Death-Eaters in skull masks are patrolling the streets with their wands. Somewhere else is a decaying corpse hung up for the world to see.
It's a different level of sickening to see it all with his own eyes.
He wants it all to end, with a nauseating, fierce desperation. He wants it to end.
It is what begins to ruin his focus enough that he has to find a hiding spot to stop at, where he curls up against the brick wall of a backalley and tries not to heave, the heels of his hands pressed to his eyes as he tries to stay quiet.
But he has to go on. He can't stop too many times or for too long.
By the time he reaches somewhere around his destination, his body is aching and strung horribly tight and he is drained of all energy.
And his destination turns out to be an obscure place. A kind of deadend. He does not know anymore where to go or what to do.
There is a line of posters along the walls.
There are posters everywhere, in fact.
Harry moves closer to look, following along them, the bounty prices varying based on severity of threat.
He stops when he gets to:
UNDESIRABLE NO. 1: Hermione Granger. Bounty: 10000 Galleons
UNDESIRABLE NO. 2: Neville Longbottom. Bounty: 10000 Galleons
UNDESIRABLE NO. 3: Ronald Weasley. Bounty: 10000 Galleons
If you have any information, please immediately contact the Ministry.
In these sepia pictures, Harry could have recognised their faces even without their names, from the childhood picture he had seen. They look different and the same all at once. Older. He's seeing Neville for the first time; long face, hollow-cheeked.
Harry is stood there for a very long time, just taking their faces in, something sad and something warm in his chest altogether.
A foot scuffs somewhere very near by. Harry stills, his heart jolting before it begins to race.
Seemingly out of nowhere, a pair of arms wound around him and abruptly haul him into what seems like nothing.
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, 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 tendery.
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 the hinge of our invisibility wards first, where each one is, 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 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 people 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, leaning 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. "Well, well. Say it ain't so."
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.