Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Easy as Falling	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 31246 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
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Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Two—Oops

            Harry appeared outside the gates of Hogwarts, and stood for a moment looking at the school. This early on a Friday morning, it should have been quiet, as students sat in classes scribbling notes or performing spells or, if it was Binns, falling asleep. No, scratch that, some of them would have been falling asleep in any class, never mind who taught it.

            But there was a different kind of deep quiet around the school now, one that Harry had never seen, or heard, if you could even talk about hearing quiet in the first place. The banners were gone from the towers of the school, the ones that symbolized all the Houses, put there after the war. No owls soared back and forth. The grass beneath the immense gates, which Harry had appeared outside, already looked long and unclipped, although Harry knew that was silly. The Board of Governors had just declared Hogwarts closed yesterday. It hadn’t had time to look abandoned yet.

            The locked gates and the CLOSED sign on them could give the appearance of desolation if anything could, though.

            Harry took a step forwards. He could feel the grass on the other side of the gates rippling, not in normal wind but in the wind of power he projected ahead of him. The sparks were rising up around him, the sparks he normally kept concealed, because he never wanted to burn everything, and the constant smell of incinerated paper was what he would have surrounded him if he had let his magic have free play at his Ministry job.

            The school crouched there, and there was no sense, now, that there was a spirit worth fighting for. They had successfully destroyed every trace of that.

            Harry stretched out a hand. He had come here for a specific purpose, to remind himself of what was at stake and keep the fire burning, but now he wanted something more.

            The chain linking the gates shut blew apart in a silent cascade of metal. The last thing Harry wanted right now was noise that would bring someone from Hogsmeade running to see what was wrong.

            But bloody hell, it wasn’t right that a chain should keep Hogwarts shut off from the world like that.

            As he moved through the now-open gates and into the school grounds, he let his sparks have their way and burn down the CLOSED sign. They were so swift and so hot that the sign faded from view like a mirage. Harry smiled, viciously satisfied, and kept moving, reining the sparks back in when they would have started on the grass.

            The gamekeeper’s cottage showed no smoke. They had made Hagrid move out, then. Harry stared at it and resolved, quietly, that that was one of the first things he would change. Hagrid had no other real home anywhere in the world. He was probably staying with Madame Maxime right now, but his heart was here.

            And so was Harry’s.

            Harry turned back towards the school, and swallowed. His heart was beating fast enough to make the sight in front of his eyes waver. He had never come back to the school except on the anniversaries of the Battle of Hogwarts and Dumbledore’s funeral. For those, he couldn’t stay away, but he spent as little time as he could on the grounds and left as soon as his part was over. The Prophet had started spreading rumors that he hated the school, or resented the professors for not protecting him better when he was a student, or something else equally as stupid.

            But it was stupid. Harry still considered Hogwarts his home. He had stayed away because he was afraid that if he didn’t, he would never find another place where he felt as comfortable. And grown adults didn’t look back towards their schooldays with such longing unless they were wankers like Malfoy. To him, House identity was all-important.

            Harry didn’t think and dream about being a Gryffindor, though. He dreamed about being here: flying above the Quidditch Pitch, standing at the windows of the Owlery, eating in the Great Hall. This was home.

            And nothing else would ever take its place.

            Strange that it took the place almost being closed to make me realize that.

            Harry moved slowly across the grass, breathing in the air that wasn’t like it was anywhere else. Maybe that was stupid and maybe it was sentiment, but he could feel his shoulders relaxing, burdens he hadn’t even realized he still carried swirling and settling to the ground like snow. He tilted his head back and shut his eyes, and tapped his fingers on his thigh for a moment.

            “Hello?”

            Harry turned sharply. For some reason, he had assumed that he would find no one here; all the students were supposed to have left yesterday, and he had expected the professors to scatter to summer homes as they awaited the news of what would happen to Hogwarts.

            But a slender, tall figure was standing in the open doors, watching him. It took Harry a minute to recognize her; he might not have done it if a wind hadn’t caught her grey hair and lifted a strand of it free. As she turned her head to pat it back into place, the light flashed off her glasses.

            Harry smiled and moved forwards. “Headmistress,” he called. “It’s me, Harry.”

            She started and looked at him with new eyes, then shook her head as though to clear her face from some clinging gauze. “It really is you, child,” she whispered. “You came back. But why not?” she added, looking over Harry’s shoulder as though she expected Ron and Hermione behind him. “You want to say goodbye to the shade of Hogwarts as she was. Whatever she is when they finish with her, it won’t be that.”

            Harry took a quick breath and shook his head. The pain in McGonagall’s voice was the worst thing of all, worse than the initial newspaper article about Hogwarts’s closing. “No,” he said. “Not that. I’ve come here to save it.”

            McGonagall considered him, and then, to Harry’s astonishment, pulled her glasses off and swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. Harry cleared his throat and glanced off to the side. He hadn’t meant to embarrass McGonagall, but it seemed he had done that without meaning to.



            “Oh, you poor, dear, brave, good soul,” McGonagall whispered. “So much a hero…but it’s too late, Harry. I’ve tried as hard as I could to think of a way to save it, but the Board of Governors closed every legal loophole, and Minister Tillipop is backing them up. Maybe Albus could have seen a way around it, but I’m not Albus.”

            “And that’s the way it should be,” Harry said strongly. “Not everyone should be him,” he added, when McGonagall looked at him as though he’d gone mad. “He had his own way of handling the Ministry. But the Ministry was different in his time, Headmistress. You should be yourself.”

            She studied him a second, and then nodded. “I agree,” she said, with a dry tone in her voice that suggested to Harry what was coming next. “Since there is no one else I can be. But I don’t see what that has to do with any plan to save Hogwarts.”

            “I don’t mean to go through legal pathways,” Harry said.

            McGonagall was startled into staring at him again. Then she drew herself up, in a way that made her wince. Harry wondered if it was her heart bothering her, or just her conscience. “I’m sorry, Harry,” she said, drawing her wand. “I can’t be a party to any method that breaks the law. That takes away even the miniscule chance that we might get Hogwarts back someday, when the Board grows tired of the maintenance that their new classes will take.”

            Harry raised his eyebrows. “I’m not asking you to join me, Headmistress. When I came here today, I didn’t even think anyone was still here. And it’s not something you could stop if you wanted to. You don’t have to pick a side. Just sit back and deal with what’s going to happen afterwards.”

            McGonagall brandished her wand in front of her as though she assumed he would charge into the entrance hall and try to claim control of the school that way. “I’m not as formidable as I once was, but I can still stop you,” she said.

            “Stop what?” Harry couldn’t help countering, with a small smile. Dancing around the rules set by his Auror instructors had prepared him well for a verbal duel with McGonagall. “You don’t know what I intend to do yet.”

            “You must want access to the school, or you wouldn’t have come here.” McGonagall’s eyes were so narrow they almost vanished, and Harry thought she would arch her back and spit at him any second. “Well, you can’t have it. I’m not going to let you do something that could jeopardize the entire future of the school.”

            “That future is already gone, if they get their way,” Harry pointed out. “The children will learn what the Ministry wants them to learn. How pure-bloods are superior, or how there’s magic they don’t need to know. I honestly don’t know what would be worse, the way Voldemort would teach them or the way Umbridge did, but it’s not going to happen.” He shuddered at the thought of Umbridge coming back to teach. The Ministry would probably hire her, too, if they could find her in whatever hole she’d concealed herself from fear of Harry, because she was an “experienced teacher.”

            “There’s nothing you can do against the whole might of the Ministry,” McGonagall said. She’d lowered her wand. “Except try to raise an army with the power of your name, and I know you won’t do that.”

            Harry shook his head. “I don’t need an army.”

McGonagall came down through the doors at that, and walked up close to him, reaching out to feel his head. Harry patiently let her put her hand on his scar and forehead in all the ways she wanted, and then said, “I don’t have a fever, Headmistress. I’m not sick. This is something I could have done a while ago, but there was never a cause I cared enough about.” He looked up at the school, and pictured owls flying free around the towers, delivering messages to students who learned about all sorts of things, whether they were Ministry-approved or not. He nodded. “I have to save it.”

“You may be sick but not have a fever,” McGonagall said, and Harry blinked. Her words were careful. “I know this is a bad time to mention it, Mr. Potter, but have you been to St. Mungo’s lately? They have an interesting program in which Healers do nothing but talk to the patients, just talk, and sometimes they can figure out what’s wrong with them that way.”

Harry snorted. “Oh, all right, you don’t think I have a fever. You just think I belong on the Janus Thickey ward.”

            McGonagall dropped her wand. While she was picking it back up, she studied Harry warily from the corner of her eye, and then shook her head a little. “I think nothing of the sort.”

            “Yes, you do,” Harry said, and patted her arm. “Look, Headmistress, I have a lot of respect for you. Let’s not ruin it with your lies.”

            McGonagall snatched her arm away, and actually spat at him, the way a cat would. Harry grinned at her. “Where was that spirit when the Board of Governors was talking about closing the school?” he taunted her gently. “We need it.”

            “Mr. Potter, I cannot prevent—”

            “It’s Auror Potter, actually,” Harry said, and then paused and thought about things. “Although probably not after today,” he added, and reached his hands out towards the school, curving his fingers around and up.

            He had never tried to summon this much magic before. Usually, he just lay in bed and felt it play under his skin, bouncing and jumping up and down. His head would fill with visions of what he could do, and he had to dismiss the visions to go to sleep. They weren’t even dreams, just daydreams, the most distracting kind.

            Now, he didn’t have to dismiss them, but he was afraid he might have ignored his magic for too long, and it wouldn’t come when he wanted it.

            No need to fear, as he ought to have known, he thought, remembering the buttercup he had conjured for his friends in the pub yesterday. The magic burst through him like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. Harry gasped aloud, sinking to his knees but still extending his hands, holding them up so the power would have an exit.

            Having it leave the palms of his hands was weird. The flesh on his fingers seemed to swish aside like doors, and between one second and the next enormous beams of light were streaming towards Hogwarts, gentle but implacable.

            McGonagall gasping behind him was the only sound, though. Well, Harry reckoned he had to count his heartbeat and breathing, but he was so caught up in the high of his power that he didn’t hear them. As such. He reckoned they were continuing just because he was still alive.

            The light surrounded Hogwarts and danced into the bricks. It dived down to the foundations, explored the towers, and wandered into classrooms. Harry knew he wasn’t done yet, though. He had to keep Hogwarts absolutely safe. That meant controlling access to it, but not preventing people from coming in, because of course the whole point was that students should still be able to attend.

            So, when the light wanted to snap up gates, he told it no. The light pouted at him and danced around his head in a crown, and clothed his shoulders with what Harry supposed probably looked like golden robes from the outside, and in other ways didn’t want to obey him, and whined in in his ears with a noise like bees humming.

            No, Harry told it flatly as he stood up. He wouldn’t cow the magic on his knees. He still had his hands out, dedicated to the purpose of protecting the castle, but he was the source of the magic, not the other way around, and he wouldn’t let it do whatever he wanted. I want you to keep people with hostile intent towards Hogwarts out. Anyone who feels neutral to it or likes it can get inside.

            The magic circled, and then images formed in front of him, golden as though touched with summer sunlight. Harry recognized some of the wizards from the picture of the Board of Governors standing in front of Hogwarts, as they walked through the corridors and looked up admiringly at the portraits, or peered into the House bedrooms with fond smiles on their faces.

            Harry growled. He took the point. People who liked Hogwarts might still have hostile intent towards it, the way Harry defined it. The problem was that he wanted to keep Hogwarts the same, and someone who wanted to change it could want that without also, physically, wanting the school destroyed.

            Then what’s the solution?

            The magic danced in response to that thought, and Harry felt it rushing over him, much the same way it had over the school. He stood as passive as he could under the onslaught, swallowing when he felt the way the magic pushed on his throat and head. He was still master here. If he didn’t like whatever change the magic was working on him, he had the ability to reverse it.

            The shower of golden light faded away with an abruptness that startled Harry. He looked down at his hands, thinking he must have changed with the way the magic had concentrated on him, but it didn’t look like it. For one thing, he still had ragged fingernails, and if the magic had made him into an idealized image of himself or something, Harry was sure it would have taken care of ragged fingernails.

            Frowning, he turned to McGonagall and opened his mouth to ask her if she knew what had happened.

            With his first words, the stones of Hogwarts thrummed.

            Harry whipped around and stared at the school. He could see all through it, he realized abruptly. He knew how many stones there were in the walls without asking, and the walls themselves thinned until he could see the rooms inside them, and he knew that mice lived in one of the dungeons, and he could feel the heartbreak of the house-elves who had worked in the kitchens until yesterday.

            Harry cleared his throat. A bell rang. He walked a little nearer to Hogwarts. A tower trembled. He stretched out his hands, and a breeze rose in the Forbidden Forest and swept over him, tugging his fringe back from his forehead.

            “So, uh,” Harry said to McGonagall, and tried to ignore the way that Hogwarts seemed to orient on him. “So do you, uh, know what happened?”

            McGonagall shut her eyes. Harry had no way to read the expression on her face, no experience with something like it.

            “You have apparently become an avatar of Hogwarts, Mr. Potter,” McGonagall said, emphasizing the Mr. “The focal point through which it channels its energy. The representative of it to other people.”

            “But—hang on, you get avatars with gods and things like that,” Harry said. “The people they choose to embody them. Or something. Or sometimes a single magical creature will be the avatar of a whole group of them, like phoenixes choosing A Phoenix. The biggest one. The focal point. I don’t think you can have an avatar of a place. I mean, if you had that, the place would have to be self-aware and have a will, and…”

            He trailed off. McGonagall had opened her eyes, and Harry could read her face now, although it wasn’t comforting to be able to.

            “Holy shit,” Harry said, and Hogwarts sang.

*

            SP777: Thanks! I was a bit hesitant because I didn’t want to spoil the impact of the one-shot, but I think this new story is flowing pretty well so far.
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Easy as Falling