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Intoxicate the Sun	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 18051 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Five--Flight of the Wands

            "Are you sure that you need to come into work with me, Auror Desang?" Hermione wondered if she should exaggerate the pout in her voice, and then decided it would do just fine. The Aurors were still a bit suspicious of her, though Hermione knew she was lulling them day by day. They would expect her to dislike having her movements restricted and a tail attached to her at all hours.

            Desang gave her a faint smile. "I thought we were friends now, Hermione," she said. "Please call me Andrea."

            Hermione didn't smile back, but turned around in the center of the corridor that led to her office and stared at her. The smile faded, and "Andrea" shifted. Hermione snorted. "You can't fool me that way. I never gave you permission to call me by my first name." She had considered doing so, and rejected the notion. Too much eagerness to help would increase the focus of the eyes on her.

            Desang shook her head. "Was I wrong that you like me, or at least tolerate me better than you did? I'm not the one who took you captive, Madam Granger-Weasley. That was the friend who's doing his best at the moment to undermine the stability of the Ministry."

            "Our own fears are doing that," Hermione said. "He hasn't harmed anyone so far."

            "Do you think that the Ministry can withstand a competing threat with Potter's popular acclaim?" Desang's eyes had turned wintry. "I don't think so."

            Hermione blinked. Once again, Desang had offered information without a price attached, and she wanted to look for it before she committed herself to any definite trade in exchange.

            Thinking and living like this is bloody exhausting.

            "He still hasn't done much of anything," she said. "And perhaps he can offer an icon for people to rally behind, but he can't arrest criminals, or collect money, or distribute help, or do anything else that makes the Ministry valued. No, he is mad, and this insanity is going to run its course soon." She turned her head away and closed her eyes. "Now, can you please leave me alone at work today? You can stay right outside the Department. I'll be out for lunch."

            "I've heard that you often don't eat, because you forget yourself in your dedication to your work," Desang said earnestly, the smile returning. "I'd rather go with you and make sure that you keep up your strength. Your life is hard at the moment, Madam Granger-Weasley. You need your health to fight off trauma and betrayal."

            I think you could be dangerous, under the right circumstances, Hermione thought, and opened her mouth to give as polite a refusal as possible.

            The world seemed to implode around her, a beam of orange light streaking past her hair and the air ringing with a loud noise like the fart of a cow. Hermione clapped her hands over her ears and tried not to shriek, which would add its own noise to the din. Instead, she flattened her back against the wall and watched, as closely as possible, what was happening.

            The beam of orange light landed on Desang and formed a circle at her feet, which expanded like a pool of blood. Desang swatted, but of course her hand passed right through it. Hermione didn't roll her eyes in contempt, either, although she wanted to.

            The orange glow grew brighter, and brighter, and then Desang's wand came soaring out of her pocket. She grabbed for it, but the light had already snared it like a rope and darted away down the corridor. Hermione chased it for a moment, to show willing, but both light and wand zipped out of sight.

            A second beam appeared a moment later, less violent in color, but the only thing it did was touch the wall and inscribe some shimmering letters.

            THIS THEFT COURTESY OF FRED AND GEORGE WEASLEY.

            Hermione put a hand to her throat, where she could feel her pulse beating. Oh, Harry, you did it. You really did give him a reason to live again.

            HAVE A NICE DAY, the light beam added before it winked out. Hermione was left trying to imagine the power and complexity of magic that could have passed through the Ministry's wards so effortlessly.

            She turned to Desang, who looked so blank that Hermione wasn't sure she realized what had happened yet. Hermione reached out and took her arm, guiding her towards the entrance of the Department.

            "Do you want me to contact the Minister?" she asked. "There must be--"

            Then shrieks started breaking out from all over, someone ran past her down the corridor, and Hermione realized that this was much bigger than George and Harry deciding to inconvenience the Auror who was tracking her. The more she listened, and the more she asked panicked questions where she avoided eyes in case anyone around her could use Legilimency, the bigger the scope seemed.

            Oh, Harry. Did you come up with this idea, or did George? Either way, I'm sure it was George who invented the equipment necessary to complete it.

            An Auror Hermione had never noticed before pushed into the corridor and shouted a blur of words at Desang. She started, then pulled herself out of Hermione's arms and hurried away without a second glance.

            She didn't notice the crumpled memo that fluttered from her sleeve, either, where her wand probably would have kept it still most of the time. Hermione picked it up at once, flattened it out, and stuck it into her pocket. If someone had seen her, she could have claimed she was keeping it to give back to Desang.

            But she had other motives, and her hands had gone clammy and her heart had gone fast.

            She had noticed the word necromancy on it.

*

            "Go as fast as you can," Ron murmured in Harry's ear, and also the ears of the two other people who had come with them, Catchers and a woman named Kelly Wheelwright. "Speed is of the essence here. No time to stop or slow down. No time to do anything but get what we came for and then leave again. And scatter the confusion that'll leave it uncertain what we actually came for, of course. Do you understand me?"

            Harry joined the meek chorus of assent. His gaze was focused ahead, on Hogwarts's rising stone walls.

            This place had been a home to him, the school where he learned, the battle site where he had defeated Voldemort, and the heart of the wizarding world as far as he was concerned. On the day that Hogwarts had finally reopened, after the damage from that last battle had been repaired, Harry had felt a tight stone of worry in his stomach melt.

            He hated to think that they were raiding it, and especially he hated what McGonagall would think of him when she found out.

            But he braced himself to do it anyway. No amount of whining would change their duty, or their need for the treasure that Hogwarts contained.

            Ron gave a faint whistle. Another whistle answered from the other side of the building. The second group of four--Ron had taken to calling them quatrains, after a term he'd taken from Hermione--was waiting to act as a diversion and hit Hogwarts from the front. With luck, all the focus and excitement on them would put the second group completely out of everyone's minds.

            Ron nodded impressively all around, and then they started trotting. Harry kept licking his lips as he moved. His head and his gut were both churning with what felt like a mixture of acid and Firewhisky.

            From the front of the school came a bright pink flare that covered the entire nighttime sky, followed by a chorus of barks and howls, as though the quatrain there had unleashed a mixed pack of hounds and werewolves. Harry knew that it only sounded as though they had; all the members of that group had worked very hard on auditory glamours to hide their real purpose.

            Ron grunted out the command, and the group surrounding Harry broke into a clumsy run. Harry tried to keep his thoughts away from how clumsy it was, with branches slapping them in the face and grass squelching underfoot, and his attention on the challenge that was coming up in front of them.

            He saw from the corner of his eye, because he was watching for it, Ron's imperious nod. Harry lifted his wand and channeled as much power as he could down the center of it, praying to no one in particular that he wouldn't manage to split the phoenix feather core.

            The power drew from his eyes and made them feel scratchy, from his bones and made them shiver, from his legs and made them feel weak. Ron caught him as he sagged, pulling him upright and murmuring encouraging words in his ear that Harry needed right then. He continued piling as much magic as he could into his wand, but not casting a spell, which was the difficult part.

            The diversion in front of the school now involved immense numbers of shadowy brooms diving around the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw Towers, and students shouting, and the howling and barking joined by the deep-throated roars of lions and tigers. As Harry lifted blurring eyes, someone else set off a blue light that made the night glow like a sapphire. Professors were awake by now, and McGonagall's enhanced voice demanded to know what was going on. Harry smiled dazedly. The other quatrain was doing a good job of causing confusion, and Harry knew that the confusion would only increase when they launched their next trick.

            "Harry!" Ron shook him sharply. "Focus!"

            Right, he had to. Otherwise, the called magic would simply dissipate in harmless sparks and leaping images, earthing itself any way it could, and all the benefit that Harry might have got from it would be lost. He thrust one hand stiffly up and outwards, and his fingers spread.

            As George had told him would happen when he suggested this tactic, all the magic promptly raced to the ends of his fingers and buzzed there.

            "Go, Harry!" Ron was supporting him by now, leaning back as though the weight of Harry's magic made the world around them literally heavy. "Reach out and smash them!"

            There were boulders just ahead, Harry thought dreamily. Great rocks that weren't part of Hogwarts's walls, but in another way were, surrounding them on the outside, supporting and sustaining them although no one knew they were there, or at least didn't usually pay attention to them. The wards. He reached out and touched the nearest one, and it sang a low, threatening song to him.

            From the front of the school came the trumpeting of elephants. Harry lifted his eyes and saw a giant, shadowy one charging Hogwarts, coming straight through the wards like they weren't even there. He smiled. Knowledgeable observers would realize that that meant it must be an illusion, but knowledgeable observers weren't thick on the ground right now. He would bet the watch that Molly had given him that, by noon tomorrow, reports of mammoths or worse would be all over the front page of the Daily Prophet.

            "Mate, now!" Ron shook him so that his teeth rattled in his head.

            "Not--yet," Harry said, gritting his teeth as the power surged in him. Like holding lightning, fuck. Like holding a storm, all the weight of howling winds and leaping rain and racing thunder in his head. "Have to time it for when the--elephant hits."

            The illusion, growing stronger as the attacking quatrain directed the force of their willed belief at it, hit Gryffindor Tower with an enormous purple shoulder, half-there. The school shook.

            At the same moment, Harry channeled the power through his wand and destroyed Hogwarts's anti-Apparition wards.

            An explosion of light, dark green in color, mingled with silver and scarlet, yellow and blue and bronze, raced back towards him. Harry fell to his knees, crying out, his voice lost in the trumpeting and roaring that had already destroyed the silence. The ground rose beneath him, then sank and split. Ron dragged him hastily away from the forming crack.

            "This way!" he shouted to Catchers and Wheelwright. "You need to follow me! Keep up!"

            That was the only warning any of them got, as Ron started forcing Harry's feet to move faster than he had known they could. He swallowed, remembered the times that he had run from Harry-Hunting, and forced his feet to churn up the earth. The crack behind them stopped spreading with a ragged groaning sound, and then they leaped over something new and landed safely behind it.

            "You remember?" Harry whispered to Ron, feeling his friend pull him close and hold him there, in the perfect position to Side-Along him.

            "'Course," Ron said with a snort. "You don't forget something like that." And they blinked in and out of being, Apparating straight to the seventh floor of Hogwarts. Catchers and Wheelwright appeared behind them a breathless moment later, just when Harry was starting to worry that they hadn't remembered the coordinates, after all.

            In front of them was the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy and his trolls. Harry turned around to face the opposite wall. He tried to stand up so that he could walk back and forth in front of it, but he nearly toppled over, and Ron rolled his eyes as he leaned Harry against the wall near the tapestry.

            "As if you were ever going to be able to do this, mate, with all the effort you put into the destruction of those wards," he said. "Wheelwright, Catchers, watch him and club him over the head with your wands if he moves." And he began to pace up and down, his face worked into such a scowl of concentration that Harry didn't dare ask him if he was sure and wouldn't cast a Strengthening Charm on Harry. He watched the turn of the corridor that led to the stairs instead; danger was most likely to come from that direction if it arrived.

            But the entrance appeared after a moment, a huge, ornate wooden door like the one that Ron and Hermione had put in front of their library at home. Ron froze, and Harry was sure that he was thinking of that and coping with even more memories than Harry. But he shook his head and yanked the door open by its brass handle a second later.

            Harry gestured fiercely to Wheelwright, who nodded after she jumped in surprise and helped him up. Harry leaned to the side so that he could see into the room that had appeared.

            It was an immense, cavernous place, even though the walls looked as if they were made of wood and not stone. Ron walked up to a pedestal that stood in the middle of the room. The pedestal was marble, and had carved snakes climbing it. Harry licked his lips and shook his head.

            Ron picked up the book that lay on the pedestal and turned to Harry, face shining. Then he flicked open the cover of the book.

            "Shite!" His voice was loud enough that Harry heard Catchers, still on guard and watching for intruders, draw in a startled breath.

            "What is it?" Harry demanded, trying to walk closer. Wheelwright's grip had slackened, though, and he just slumped to the floor. She dived after him, whispering a horrified apology, and Harry jerked his head in a way that he hoped she would take as acceptance. He didn't have time for listening to her, not when his whole being was focused on Ron and the word he had spoken.

            "It's written in some language that I don't even recognize," Ron spat. "It's not Ancient Runes, and it's not--it's not any of the European languages in a different alphabet, either!"

            "Well, if they were in a different alphabet, you wouldn't know, would you?" Harry pointed out, his hope sinking for only a moment. George would invent a device that could read the book for them if he had to. "Bring it along anyway. We asked the Room for it, and it gave it to us. There's no law saying that such a big secret has to be easy to read."

            Ron nodded as though reassured and lugged the book towards Harry; it was almost as wide as the span of his arms. Harry caught a glimpse of one flapping, open page, and the letters seemed to twist in front of his eyes. He blinked.

            "I can read it, mate," he said a moment later. "What are you talking about?"

            Ron stared at the book, then at him, and shook his head. "But it's not even letters, Harry," he said earnestly. "It's all twisted and climbing things bending back on each other, like thorns or vines or snakes."

            Harry glanced back at the pedestal covered with snakes, and shivered. "It might be a written version of Parseltongue," he said.

            Ron stared at him with his mouth open.

            "Anyway," Harry snapped, leaning back and gesturing for Ron to go out the door ahead of him, "the important thing is that we have it, and that's all we need."

            When they stepped out into the corridor again, the door shut behind them with a hollow boom. Harry winced, wondering if the Room was angry with them, and then wondered why he was having such thoughts. He didn't think the Room cared what anyone used it for, or it would have done something about them and the things they'd used it for before this.

            Catchers yelped abruptly. Harry tried to spin around and almost fell to the floor, caught just in time by Wheelwright's arms.

            McGonagall stood behind them, wand out.

            "Mr. Potter," she whispered, and her eyes moved on, picking them all out, filling Harry's body with icicles. "Mr. Weasley. Miss Wheelwright. Mr. Catchers." Her eyes returned to Harry. "I assume that we have you to thank for the destruction of our wards?"

            Harry nodded. He knew he should have been prepared better for an encounter like this, but he was honestly at a loss for what to say. He had thought that McGonagall would be out in front reassuring the students and combating the quatrain who actually seemed to be attacking, rather than in the school looking for whoever had brought down the wards.

            "You have made all our students less safe." McGonagall moved a step forwards. "Those wards had endured since the days of the Founders, and Apparition in this school was forbidden for a very good reason." Her voice sharpened to the point where Harry could feel it like a blade against his throat. "Now our students will hurt themselves Apparating to classes and Splinching themselves unless we manage to put up new wards, which I don't anticipate happening in less than a month. Why did you do it, Harry? I never thought that you would want to hurt Hogwarts, when it gave you refuge, or the people who lived here."

            A Stunner flashed past Harry's head before he could reply. McGonagall stiffened and dropped to the ground. Harry listened anxiously, but heard her breathing.

            He turned around. Ron was still lowering his wand back to his side and shifting the huge book in his arms. He nodded to Catchers, who moved forwards and took the arm on Harry's other side.

            "Why?" Harry whispered, lost in wonder. "You know that Stunners almost stopped her heart once, Ron."

            "She was slowing us down," Ron said. He had his eyes on the ground and a choke in the back of his voice, but as they passed McGonagall, he looked up defiantly at Harry. "And it was four Stunners that hit her then. Mate, she was coming closer and using her voice to distract you. You keep forgetting. She was a member of the Order of the Phoenix. She knew how to fight. And she would have taken us captive if she could have."

            Harry lowered his eyes in turn and nodded. He had to remember that they were fomenting a revolution here, he thought as Catchers and Wheelwright hustled him past McGonagall, with Ron following. Of course people would try to stop him, and of course he couldn't let his feelings interfere.

            And if he didn't necessarily like what their revolution was doing to Ron, still, it was he who was responsible for the change.

            They reached the point where Ron felt safe to give the book to Catchers and Wheelwright and let them transfer Harry over to him. Harry was proud that he could at least stand for this Side-Along, unlike the other one. Ron still looked long and hard into his friend's face, one hand rising as if he planned to lay it on the side of Harry's neck.

            "You sure you're all right, mate?" he whispered.

            "Now who's slowing us down?" Harry snapped, but he smiled at the same time, and Ron exhaled hard with relief as they whirled out, the secret to establishing their own Room of Requirement safe in the arms of the two former Aurors following them.

*

            It turned out not to be that hard to find Potter's "revolution." Once Draco heard that a fairly large number of Aurors and Hit Wizards had deserted to find him, he knew the secret must be relatively simple.

            And so it had been. Draco had simply located Luna Lovegood's residence--this week--by means of a few directional spells that the Ministry could have used if they didn't happen to require Dark Arts and a Malfoy's intimate knowledge, and asked her about where he could find Potter. Doubtless the others who had done so had access to clues about where she was that Draco didn't, but one kind of simplicity could substitute for another.

            Lovegood had given him a cool, distant glance and said, "But why would you want to find Harry?"

            Draco met her eyes and told the truth in place of a lie, a trick he had perfected a long time ago, when hope had lived in his heart. It was the appropriate one to use now, when hope had come back. "They imprisoned my parents."

            After a few seconds, Lovegood had nodded, and given him the Apparition coordinates.

            Draco appeared in the middle of a thick copse of small trees, and had to fight his way out. He didn't bother to disguise his footsteps. A pair of women he would have recognized as former Aurors even if they weren't wearing the distinctive robes was waiting for him, and they aimed their wands with a synchronization that spoke of further training. Draco made his first note in the back of his head. He intended to carry no parchment. Hope would sharpen his memory to a crystal pen.

            The one on the left recognized him; Draco thought she was a distant cousin to Millicent Bulstrode. She gestured for the one on the right to raise her wand higher and leaned towards him, squinting. "Malfoy? What are you doing here?"

            Draco spread his hands out. His mind sparked and danced. So did his blood. He was here; he could feel the distinctive push of Unplottable magic against his back.

            Which meant that hope was here.

            "I'm tired of my parents being imprisoned," he said. "I want to find someone who will help me change that."

            Truth, all of it. Shining, unvarnished truth. Draco wondered if Potter would appreciate the irony when he learned about it.

            I've become a Gryffindor at last.

*

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Intoxicate the Sun