Chapter Twenty of 'Burning Day'- Obliteration
Chapter Nineteen.
Title: Burning Day (20/21)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione
Warnings: Angst, violence
Rating: R
Summary: In the lead-up to Draco’s election as Minister, Dark Lord Harry Potter broods. Only he can’t do that all the time, even with most of Britain terrified of him now. So he has to find something else to occupy his time. And being a Benevolently Snarky Dark Lord is it.
Author’s Notes: The sequel to Easy as Falling and Black Phoenix, but still prequel to “Charming When He Needs to Be.” This will be a shorter story than the others, mostly tying up the loose ends of Draco as Minister and Harry as Dark Lord, and the last story in the series.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Obliteration
Harry came out of the wall with a ripple of fire. He knew that. He knew that he had traveled part of the distance in fire. He wasn’t stupid. A lot of his magic was bound to Hogwarts, but what wasn’t still had an affinity with fire. It was one reason he had chosen those particular illusions to create in Knockturn Alley, and to create phoenixes so often.
But he knew that a tunnel of fire, dancing with shimmering colors, connected him to the Department of Mysteries. He didn’t know how many wards he had burned. He didn’t know exactly what distance he had crossed, or whether he had passed through the non-space that Apparition used to work.
He knew that he homed in on the tug on his magic that Brightness possessed, and that was enough.
He ended up in the room where Brightness perched in a cage. Draco was sitting on a chair not far away. Harry nodded a little to see that he was unharmed. The Unspeakables were smarter than he had thought.
But not smart enough that they were going to make it out of this.
Harry turned around, and a blast of power hit his chest. It didn’t break any ribs or damage his heart, but to be fair, Harry wasn’t sure that was the intent. The caster was Ende, and his eyes widened when he saw Harry still standing and walking towards him.
“Hi,” said Harry, and heard his voice echo oddly. Well, he was feeling a little like he had when Persephone died and he had to bind her essence back into his bond with Hogwarts. Perhaps he looked like it, too, because Ende was backing away from him and the woman next to him was following suit. “I think that you have a few things of mine. I think that you made a promise to me, and now you’re breaking it. I think you’ve annoyed me often enough.”
Ende opened his mouth to say something. Harry assumed it was going to be a protest, or a promise. He actually, literally did not care. The woman beside Ende was casting something that looked like a Patronus, presumably to summon more Unspeakables to the scene, but Harry didn’t care about that, either.
He held his hands out in front of him and blew through them. Maybe he didn’t need to do that. But the point was that it felt right and natural, and right now, he was running almost entirely on instinct.
His breath caught fire as it came out on the far side of his hands. Harry lifted his palms, and the fire danced on them, shaped like silhouettes of fingers, spreading out in waves of red and purple and white and orange, so bright that Ende flinched back from them. The Unspeakable woman didn’t, which proved she was tougher.
But maybe dumber, Harry conceded, as the spreading fire touched her and she changed. Or perhaps she had decided that since his last weapon had been convincing illusion, the same thing would be true of the weapon that he had carried into the heart of the Unspeakables’ domain.
There was a sound like a butterfly turning inside out. Or so Harry assumed. He had never turned any butterflies inside out, though he was in the frame of mind where he thought it might be fun to try.
A brilliant bird, like a white peacock although the trailing tail was shorter, soared away from Harry and further into the Department of Mysteries. Harry hoped she found her way out. He had no intention of letting this part of the Ministry stand long enough to house her forever.
He turned back to Ende. Ende was sweating, but he had in his eyes something of the calculating look that had brought him to Harry’s court in the first place. He slid his wand into the holster on his arm and held out his hands, palms up.
Harry waited. He had enough power swirling around him, the flames caressing the chains and what looked like a trap hanging from the ceiling, that he knew no one could charge him in the next little while without turning into a bird. He could afford to listen if Ende couldn’t do anything to hurt him.
“I wanted you to use illusion, that’s true.” Ende spoke quickly, breathlessly. “I simply didn’t understand what I was asking you to do, and the way you would respond to it. I knew it was illusion, but it impressed me as if it was real.”
“And so you panicked and decided that you couldn’t trust me after all,” said Harry. His head was filled with a great blankness, a great peace. He stretched his hands out in front of him, and the crystal trap melted and dripped, the chains turning into snakes that perched on the walls for a second and then flowed to the floor. They were dancing around each other, necks entwining. For a moment Harry thought he saw their tails melding and blending together, creating an amphisbaena right in front of him.
Then he looked at Ende, who crossed his hands in front of his heart and closed his eyes as though he was expecting to die right there and then.
“Understand,” Harry said, listening to the chimes of his own voice in something like wonder, “I’m tired of this. And no amount of pleading is going to turn this around.”
“If I apologize?” Ende came a step forwards, although it must have cost him a lot in fear to do so. “If I say that you can have me, and I’ll be the sacrifice for all the foolishness that the others have done? You can kill me or transform me, as long as you leave the Department of Mysteries alone.”
“But you were the one who came to me and actually tried to broker a peace treaty,” Harry murmured, turning to Draco and checking on him again. Draco still had a faint smile on his lips. “There’s no guarantee that the others would leave me alone if I killed you. What did you do to him?”
He could almost hear the sound of Ende blinking, but he answered readily enough. “The Imperius Curse. I haven’t given him any commands except the ones to come here and stop fighting. He was supposed to be the bait, not someone we were going to hurt.”
“You don’t think that interfering with his mind hurt him.” It wasn’t that much of an effort for Harry to keep his voice down, almost gentle, almost a croon. Ende would be a fool if he trusted that, and Harry didn’t think he was. On the other hand, he might be desperate enough to trick himself into thinking that Harry was losing his anger.
The way he spoke next said he was. “What-what else could I have done? I needed to get you here, and I needed to not hurt him. He’s still basically going to be the Minister, even if you helped him to steal the election.”
Harry glanced at him over his shoulder, and he really couldn’t help it, the way his lips twitched and he laughed. “Yes. Because illegality is such a concern for an Unspeakable.”
Ende flinched, but did meet his eyes. “Believe it or not, I disapprove of the vast majority of what my colleagues have done as a result of this war.”
Harry abruptly lost interest in the conversation. It was perfectly obvious where it would go, how Ende would defend the same positions again and again, and they would never come to any new conclusion because Ende was too interested in maintaining the Unspeakables’ right to do everything. Harry wanted him gone.
Harry knelt down in front of Draco and laid his hands on his shoulders, and breathed fire like the gentlest of dragons through Draco’s ears and eyes, and into the center of his mind. He burned away the bonds of the Imperius Curse, and Draco jerked and suddenly stared at him, reaching out one clumsy hand as if he thought that he would find Harry’s school tie at the base of his throat.
“Harry?”
“It’s all right now,” Harry said, and held Draco’s hand while he looked him over. “They didn’t hurt you anywhere?”
Draco shook his head, but he thought he was catching his breath. “Brightness? Brightness was-I thought he would fly and fetch you, but-”
“Becoming solid and real has disadvantages, too.” Harry snapped his fingers, and the flame-snakes danced joyously around the bars of Brightness’s cage. They burned and fell apart, and the phoenix soared and out and over to Draco. If he was singing, Harry couldn’t hear him over the crackle of the flames. “He could still alert me through the connection he had to my magic, but he couldn’t fly through walls to get to me.”
Draco abruptly looked past him, at Ende. “He heard us.”
Harry felt the tension in Draco’s muscles, and patted him softly on the shoulder. “It doesn’t matter. He’s going away now.” He turned to face Ende with a pinwheel of fire gathering in his palms.
“I don’t want to die,” said Ende. It was probably the most honest thing he had said since he started talking to Harry in his Court.
Harry held his eyes. “I’m still not killing anyone. You can’t make me into that kind of Dark Lord unless I agree to be, and I haven’t agreed.”
The furrow that creased the skin between Ende’s eyes was almost painful to look at. He didn’t understand, and he probably never would.
Neither would the Unspeakables who rushed into the room then, Harry was sure. He turned to face them cradling fire in the middle of his palms, juggling and holding it. They looked into his face and drew out artifacts from their robes.
Harry whispered instructions to the fire, and let it go. He wanted to spare the Unspeakables’ lives, but he wouldn’t spare their artifacts. There were simply too many dangerous things here, things they could use to sneak past wards or hurt his chosen lover. Harry would take them away now.
Along with everything else.
The flames rose, and began to spread. Ende, springing forwards with his arms spread as if he imagined that Harry would still accept him as the sacrifice that he’d been talking about, was the first to catch fire. His arms flailed up, and came down as wings, and a phoenix launched itself down the tunnel that Harry knew led back towards the Ministry lifts, singing.
The other Unspeakables did turn tail and run, but not before they’d aimed their artifacts or squeezed the triggers on them or whatever it was that they did to activate them. There was nothing inside those weapons and crystal balls and mind-traps that Harry’s fire couldn’t defeat, though. It ate them and turned them into light, and the Unspeakables turned into miniatures of Persephone and bright crows and magpies with jeweled tails.
Harry turned and held out his hand to Draco. “Shall we?” he asked.
“The fire won’t burn us?” Draco’s eyes were steady despite the question, and Harry had to smile. Here was someone who would never turn his back and betray Harry, no matter what he might do. It was comforting to know that Harry stood in the Department of Mysteries with at least one person like that.
“No.” Harry gathered Draco close to him and Brightness fluttered around him as he prepared for the non-Apparition back to Hogwarts.
“Then I want to stay and see what happens.” Draco shook his head when Harry looked at him. “Not to be a witness for other people. How could I explain why I didn’t fight? But I want to be able to-hint at what happens when people displease you, if not actually tell them.”
After a few moments of thought, Harry nodded. He knew his fire would destroy the Department of Mysteries, but he supposed it couldn’t hurt to stay here and see the destruction.
“Come on, then,” he said, and the door on the far side of the room melted off its hinges.
*
Draco had been dazed and helplessly following along when he was under the Imperius Curse. He didn’t feel much different now.
Well, of course, he was glad that the bonds in his mind had snapped and his actions were his own again. But he was still in a situation where he was the most powerless person there, even with Brightness sitting on his shoulder and crooning soothing nonsense into his ear.
The sheer scale of the fire was beyond his comprehension. He knew, because Harry had briefly mentioned it when they entered a room even brighter than the others with piles of silver and a white metal Draco didn’t recognize on the floor, that the fire was drawing some of its magic from the artifacts it consumed, and that was one reason why it was being allowed to rage the way it did. But still.
This was the illusions that had danced over Knockturn Alley come to life. Draco wondered if Ende and the other Unspeakables who had wanted to follow him, but then turned tail when they realized how powerful Harry was, had ever thought they would end up in the real version of it.
Harry abruptly drew Draco close and shielded him. “We’re coming to a room with an artifact too powerful to burn,” he murmured. “And if it’s the one I think it is…”
There are specific artifacts here that he knows about? But then Draco remembered Harry’s Auror career, and wanted to shake his head. Of course he would have come down here for reports, and it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that he might have been given some of the artifacts to use on cases.
The wall curved in front of them, and a flock of birds that looked like huge hummingbirds soared away in front of them. Beyond the corner, Draco saw a veil.
It fluttered and whispered, and he thought he could hear voices coming out of it if he listened hard enough. But the sound of the fire triumphed over it, and he wasn’t tempted to rush forwards and throw himself into it, the way Harry’s clutch on his shoulder said he feared might happen.
“What is it?” he whispered, leaning against Harry once he saw the way that Harry was looking at it.
“Bellatrix used a spell to knock my godfather through it, and he lost his life,” Harry whispered back. He was gathering up some of the fire. It splashed and foamed around him like water, and when he lifted his free hand-the one not touching Draco-it was white and transparent all the way through.
“What are you going to do to it?” Draco had tensed up because he could feel the tension thrumming through Harry.
“Destroy it,” Harry said simply, and a second later the room was filled with white.
Draco clung to Harry’s arm, ducking his head into his shoulder. He wondered for a second how Harry was going to manage that, when he had just said that the Veil was too powerful to burn.
Then he felt the shiver of the power beside him, and swallowed. Yes, the artifact might be too powerful to burn, but not too powerful to change.
Because he might never get to see anything like this again, and he wanted to, Draco lifted his head. Harry was shaping and pushing the air with his free hand, and there was a faint frown on his face. Draco thought he had seen that frown before in Potions, when Harry was contemplating some set of instructions that unaccountably wouldn’t do what he wanted it to.
“Harry?” Draco whispered.
“Shh. I’m working,” Harry said, and his fingers snapped, and the fire sprang out and washed away from him, a silhouette only, a brilliant ring with space in the middle that something Veil-shaped could fill.
The silhouette settled around the Veil. Draco watched it for a second, and heard the whispering accelerate, as though whatever or whoever was behind the thing thought speaking faster would spare them from what was going to happen next.
It didn’t, of course. The fire convulsed inwards, and spun like a dragon’s neck, and then the light was closing in and the Veil bent with it, and snapped and bobbed and bubbled and was gone. What was left…
Draco craned his head. It was a flat pool of water on the floor, as silver as a crystal ball and swirling with some of the same mysterious lights. He looked away before they could draw him in, and frowned a little at Harry. “Do you think this is really going to be less attractive to anyone who comes down here, though?”
“No one’s going to come down here,” Harry said, and breathed in the fire and breathed it out again.
Draco’s memories were a little confused from that point. He knew they made their way unharmed through bare and melted rooms, and they took the lift up and away from the fire, before they reached a point where Harry felt confident enough to carry Draco through weaves and waves of flame back to Hogwarts.
But he was never sure if Harry had made the roof fall in-the lifts from the Ministry, later, simply wouldn’t go anywhere near the Department of Mysteries, and skipped the ninth level regularly on their way to the tenth-or had really done what Draco had seen him do, which was to fill the whole of the Department with skein after skein of flame. And the flames braided together, and something like a serpent rose sleeping from the middle of them and wriggled towards the pool.
And it drank the pool up, and the magic was too thick to stand, and Harry drew Draco away, and they vanished towards the lift, with magnificent birds flying and crying around them.
Chapter Twenty-One.
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