Apparition evacuation
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or anything recognisable, however rest assured if I did I would currently be sunbathing on my Caribbean yacht. Not writing this story.
Summary: It is a common thing in the wizarding world for people to be able to apparate, so when the Death Eaters attack at the quidditch world cup it causes a slightly different response than the one we see.
Authors note: I haven't published anything in a while and as such I apologize for anything particularly poor, constructive criticism is welcomed, thank you.
Harry, Hermione and Ron were exploring the forest when they saw Death Eaters cruelly engaging in muggle baiting. Some were casting curses on the campsite owners casually torturing them, whilst others were sending off destructive curses to the surrounding area causing the land around them to look like a battle ground, with tents burning, massive holes in the ground everywhere and countless jets of spell light flying around. Harry immediately and very quickly drew out his wand and settled into a decent duelling position, having learnt how to do it from Lupin the previous year, due to the number of precarious situations he generally ended up in; Ron and Hermione copied him after a brief moment of amazement at how quickly he'd managed to draw his wand. After sparing a quick glance at his friends to check that they had their wands out, Harry purposefully strode off in the direction of the Death Eaters, his face clearly showing his anger at what was occurring. Hermione and Ron shared a quick glance of astonishment at Harry's selflessness/ lack of survival instincts, before Hermione spoke up saying "Harry wait, stop! They are fully trained adult dark wizards, they will kill you with ease, leave it to the Hit Wizards."
"The Hit Wizards?" said Harry pausing in his stride and turning to face Hermione, with something she couldn't identify in his tone of voice.
"Yes, they are highly trained Aurors, ones who specialize in taking down dangerous criminals; and this is the world cup, one of the most important international events in the wizarding world, there are a lot here" Hermione said relieved that Harry had stopped moving and was seeming to calm down; however then he spoke, his voice tinged with real anger as he said "I know what they are Hermione and they aren't here yet, I can't believe you expect to stand by whilst people are suffering and I can help."
"But you can't!" Hermione exclaimed " if there was anything you could do to help I would help you, but you'd just get killed, and adults who are trained and paid to help out will be here soon" she explained.
Harry nearly growled, looked at her before obviously deciding to just ignore her, and turned around to start walking towards the danger again. Sharing another glance with Hermione, Ron decided that it was his turn to try and stop Harry rushing into a life and death situation. Again. "Mate you don't understand they're dressed up like, and probably are, inner circle Death Eaters; they would love to kill you, slowly." Ron said in a near whisper, paling and looking terrified, hearing how scared Ron obviously was made Harry stop and turn back around, facing Ron in concern and questioned "what do you mean by inner circle Death Eaters?"
"Honestly Harry you are woefully uninformed about wizarding affairs, maybe if you spent more time…" Hermione began partially out of exasperation but mostly to give Ron some time to compose himself at being so close to those who he had been told since childhood were the most dangerous and evil beings out there, unfortunately Harry was not in the mood and cut her off saying "really not the time Hermione," before looking at Ron, so that he could answer Harry's question and tell him if there was anything important he needed to know, before he tried to take them on.
Ron took a deep breath, visibly composing himself, before saying "the inner circle Death Eaters were the most powerful and darkest of them all, supposedly taught by You-Know-Who himself, they were the ones considered responsible for most of the Auror deaths during the war. They were also the ones who lost the most when He-Who-Must-Not-Be named fell and as such are more than a bit peeved that you are responsible for vanquishing him, and if they knew you were here there's no doubt that they would hunt you down."
Harry took a deep breath to say something before he was cut off by a very loud scream that cut across them and made the trio flinch, and contrary to what Ron had hoped Harry just got angrier and shouted "Then they might kill some more Aurors, and every moment we waste arguing more people are getting hurt, and I am not going to let them take anybody else's parents, I'm going with or without you."
Saying that, he started running off into the direction that they'd heard the scream, with Hermione and Ron following, when only moments after they'd set off, a massive shockwave of magic spread through the area and could be felt by everyone, it lasted only a second but it fortuitously forestalled Harry from running off. Then, breaking the silence that had settled with the shockwave of magic, a series of very loud bangs could be heard, and a large number of wizards wearing burgundy robes appeared around the Death Eaters and started duelling them.
"Look" said Hermione the relief clearly present in her voice "it's the Hit Wizards, they can deal with the Death Eaters better than we could, let's go back to the camp and leave."
"I would like to be with my family" Ron added.
Harry looked at the two of them, and then at the Hit Wizards taking on the Death Eaters, and relented saying "fine" causing the trio to start running back through the forest to the tent.
Regretfully however the journey back to the tent was not as uneventful as they hoped, as after only a few minutes of running they ran into Draco Malfoy. Malfoy looked at the three of them running away from where the sounds of the battle could be clearly heard, sneered maliciously, and said "I thought you were supposed to be Gryffindor's home of the brave and the attention seeking, yet look at you running away from a battle, leaving poor pathetic muggles to be tortured." A sort of unholy glee lit up his face as he said "I can't wait till I tell everyone at school about this!"
Ron, never one to let Malfoy insult them, responded quickly saying "well what are you doing, waiting for daddy to come and help you, oh sorry I forgot, he's probably over there getting his ass kicked by the Aurors."
Furious, Malfoys face flushed red, as he said "as a matter of fact my father is with the minister right now securing us first class transportation out of here, where's yours hiding away?"
Realising that Harry was about to get involved, and seeing that it could go on for a while if she didn't intervene, Hermione pointed her wand, which she still had in her hand, at Malfoy and said very calmly " we don't have time to deal with this we need leave so go back to wherever you came from."
Malfoy smirked smugly and pulled out his wand in a smooth and very practiced motion, and aimed it at Hermione before any of them could fire off a spell, and said "how do you like that mudblood, my father paid for me to be trained by some of the best duellists in Europe, and I'm a Malfoy do you really think you could threaten me?"
A moment after he stopped talking however, he was hit with a repulso spell by Harry and flew backwards, letting out a fairly loud oomph as he hit a tree, causing Harry to retort smugly with "fortunately money can't buy you sense otherwise you would have known not to spend your time talking and instead concentrate on the three of us."
Malfoy, even more furious and more than a bit embarrassed, started to get up and cast a spell; he was however interrupted by the ground shaking, knocking three of them to the ground. Ron, Harry, and Draco looked around from where they were on the ground to see what caused it, and all ended up looking at Hermione's furious face as she rebuked them saying "grow up this is not the time for childish disputes, we don't want to draw them over here do we."
All of them reluctantly agreed, this lead to an awkward silence that continued for a couple of minutes, before Lucius Malfoy walked onto the scene looked at the trio, and with a sneer a lot like his son's, said to them "hiding away from the danger how very noble of you" took his sons arm and said "come Draco I have secured us a portkey home" before portkeying them away somewhere.
Hearing numerous massive bangs and cracks from what seemed to be every direction Harry, Hermione and Ron shared an uneasy glance, and set off back in the direction they believed the tent to be. After only a couple of minutes they reached the area where they knew the tent to be, fortunately without running into anyone. As soon as they got into view of the tent they saw Arthur Weasley, standing not far from it and going in the direction of the forest clearly looking for them, seeing this made Ron exclaim "Dad" and put on a burst of speed and ran into his arms hugging him tightly.
Arthur let out a relieved "thank goodness I've been waiting for you three for ages, I'm so glad that you're all safe and okay, you are aren't you?" After the three of them nodded, he said "good okay then, I have to apparate you over to a field near here before we can go back home, I'm afraid it's ministry procedure, I've already taken the others over there."
He grabbed the one closest to him, which happened to be Hermione, and said "okay boys I'll be back for you soon, don't move and don't do anything" turned to face Hermione and continued on saying "do you have everything?"
"I do in the tent, are you taking that with us?" she replied.
Arthurs jaw dropped open slightly as he remembered the tent, having clearly forgotten it in his rush to get everyone to safety, and said "yes I'd better do that, thanks for reminding me Hermione" hurriedly summoned it to his hands and then apparated away with her. He popped back moments later, quickly taking Ron away, and then Harry to what was basically a very large field packed with a lot of wizards; a lot like where they had just come from except it was further away from the Death Eaters.
"I need to go and find a ministry wizard who's on the job around here, so that they can say they saw us ensuring we're not Death Eaters and that we're safe. Like I said it's standard procedure, so don't worry, I'll be back soon and then we can go back to the burrow, the others have already gone so it should be rather quick" said Arthur.
They all agreed and watched as he wandered off in search of an authority figure, as soon as he was out of sight Harry asked Hermione "what was that magical shockwave do you know, also what's going to happen about us using underage magic?"
"Bloody hell, I had forgotten about that" said Ron.
Hermione reassured them however saying "it's okay to use underage magic under special circumstances, which a Death Eater attack counts as. Also it is highly unlikely they'd be able to tell that we used magic there as sensory spells behave weirdly in areas with large amounts of magic. And to answer your first question Harry, I would guess that it was the anti-apparition wards were taken down, quickly and not carefully; it would cause the shockwave we felt if they were powerful which they must've been as they covered several fields."
"That's good to know" Harry thanked Hermione "but really how on earth do you know all of that?"
"I looked up the reasons that you're allowed to use underage magic in our first year, the exceptions for Death Eaters attacks was put into place during the war and hasn't been taken out since. We actually did about wards coming down in highly magic environments in arithmancy, it's really rather fascinating, and I asked Mr Weasley why we couldn't just portkey straight to the tent area, and he told me about the anti-apparition and anit-portkey wards that covered most of the fields; they were there in order to ensure that people couldn't break the law and then apparate away" replied Hermione.
Any further conversation was stopped by the return of Arthur, with someone else who just took a quick look at them, and then turned to Arthur and said "alright then you can go" and handed him a glass bottle. Arthur told Harry, Hermione and Ron to grab a hold of the bottle, which they quickly did, for a few seconds whilst they were portkeyed away to a field, close enough the burrow that they could see it.
Arthur then ushered them to the burrow, and they made it there very quickly, having gone at a pace that was not quite running to get there. They had just about made it through the door when Molly seemingly pounced on Arthur, then Ron and then Harry and Hermione, hugging them all tightly and checking that they were okay, whilst saying "oh thank goodness you're all okay, I was so worried when I heard about the attack on the wireless. I've sent all the others to bed, you three should go to, what took you so long to get back compared to the others!"
Harry and Hermione shared a light hearted amused glance, as Ron shuffled away from his mom clearly embarrassed by her for some reason, whilst Arthur said to Molly "we weren't expecting any trouble so they wondered off exploring, and we should've gotten here not that long after everyone else, when did they get back? We were actually rather fortunate that I ran into Geoffrey, you remember him we had dinner with his wife and him last month, and he knew us so knew we weren't dark wizards which meant that we didn't have to go through the usual checks, and gave us a portkey to not far from here, instead of one of the usual drop off sites."
"That's good, very good, remind me to bake him some cookies or something to thank him, in the morning would you please" Molly said with a smile and then continued saying "and well they got back about 10 minutes ago, I only just got them into bed and hit them with some discreet sleeping spells before you got back; but I had no idea what you were doing, there is something wrong with the family clock, it didn't say you were in mortal peril at any point!"
"Really, that's unusual I wonder what's up with it" said Arthur, Molly however had moved on looking at Ron, Harry and Hermione, completely ignoring or not noticing Hermione's frown, and said to them "all of you go off to bed now, if you're not asleep when I go up in 10 minutes I will charm you asleep, I'm sure you poor dears need it."
Taking her at her word, the three of them hurried upstairs to the rooms they were sleeping in, and quickly got ready for bed, however inevitably after the night they just had none of them were ready to sleep, and just as inevitably Molly charmed them to sleep when she checked up on them and saw that they were still awake.
The next morning Harry, Hermione and Ron met on the stairs, all having been awoken by overly loud and possibly hysterical laughing from what seemed like the twins. Bleary eyed Ron looked at Hermione and asked her "Do you have any idea what the hell is going on? I was enjoying my sleep then."
"Why should I know, I just woke up myself you know" Hermione replied curtly. "Oh wow I'd forgotten what Hermione is like when she's woken up early" whispered Ron,
"Just leave it Ron I'm more curious as to what woke us all up" Harry replied.
On their way down the stairs they ran into Ginny, who had gone ahead of Hermione to see what was going on, whilst Hermione waited for the boys, when they asked her however she said "I don't know all I saw was the twins practically crying from laughing so much, I decided to wait outside and try to calm myself down, so that if it's because of some joke of theirs I won't hex them and upset mom; because I was really enjoying my sleep before their crackling woke me up."
"Shall we all go in together then? We can stop you from cursing them if we need to" said Harry, "if this is because of some sort of a joke I'm not going to be the one stopping her," muttered Ron but they all walked into the kitchen, where everyone was gathered together, to see not just the twins laughing but everyone, excluding Percy, smiling slightly although it seemed mostly with relief instead of humour, with the paper on the table clearly being the cause.
"What's so funny?" Ginny practically growled. Grabbing the paper on the table one of the twins pushed it towards them, saying "read it and see for yourself" "you won't be disappointed" the other twin insisted.
Thieves fake Death Eater attack!
By Rodnam Posern
Last night what seemed to be a group of Death Eaters attacked the world cup, in a move that is currently being wildly regarded as one of the greatest international incidents of our time. After the game, when the celebrations and parties were at their peak, a group of wizards started cursing everyone in sight wearing the uniform of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's inner circle Death Eaters, whilst apparently torturing some muggles, the campsite owners, this ended up causing mass amounts of panic as people everywhere feared that the Death Eaters were re-forming under the leadership of a new dark wizard; we've had reports of people who when they heard the news on the wireless started putting up siege wards and at the world cup when the supposed Death Eaters were there, there was a mass evacuation of thousands of wizards all leaving within a 10 minute period. The truth however it turns out is a lot less frightening, and not really panic worthy at all. What actually happened is that a group of wizarding thieves, the Aurors have identified them as just being called The Thieves, decided to play on the fear they knew dressing up as Death Eaters would provoke, and take the opportunity to steal from everyone they could when people left without their tents and possessions. The curses they had sent off whilst causing a lot of environmental damage and destroyed a few tents, actually caused no damages to people, and the 'muggles' they were torturing were in fact merely very skilled illusions. It is not all light-hearted news however, as despite their being no damage to any people, and the news being not nearly as bad as the Death Eaters coming back together, several thousand galleons worth of goods were stolen and it has caused a lot of international problems; as governments abroad wonder how trustworthy we are, when we can't even properly secure an event with several dozen of the most important members of our society, such as Cornelius Fudge and Lucius Malfoy. This news is made even worse, as The Thieves managed to avoid capture by our highly trained Hit Wizards with some more illusions…
"It's lucky that you reminded Dad about the tent then isn't Hermione, what made you think of it?" said Ron once he'd read the article and processed that they were never in any real danger the night before.
At the question Hermione flushed and managed to stammer out "er well you see, it had my favourite copy of Hogwarts a History in and I didn't want to leave it behind."
This of course made the twins, who had just started to calm down, start laughing loudly again.
The End - thank you for reading my story and please review.