"What do you need, besides a miracle?"
"Guns. Lots of guns."
-The Matrix
***
"Snape!" Hermione hissed. "What in bloody hell are you doing here, you bastard?"
She was almost surprised to hear such crude expressions escaping her mouth, but this was only a vague and passing concern. It had been almost three years since Snape killed Dumbledore at the top of that tower, and since he hadn't been seen or heard from to indicate otherwise, it only confirmed the worst about him. Now he had the nerve to owl her and ask for a private audience. Hermione spent a long time agonizing about whether or not it was a trap, and whether she ought to kill him on the spot when he got there, but in the end her curiosity got the better of her. She agreed to a meeting in a hidden alcove near the new headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix, making Snape jump through a lot of hoops to ensure he didn't bring any company with him.
"Settle down, Granger," he drawled disparagingly. "I see you haven't gotten one bit better at controlling your emotions. That will come to haunt you some day."
Hermione whipped out her wand and was about to hex him, but thought better of it. Snape might still be his old disagreeable self, but he did come here for a reason, and she wanted to find out what it was.
"Now then, to business. I am well aware that you and every last one of your associates are convinced that I am a traitor whose crimes are surpassed only by those of the Dark Lord himself. I can't exactly say I blame you, based on the information available to you, but I am not here to apologize or tell dramatic stories about it. Instead, I have some information you might find use…"
He never quite finished his sentence, because at this point Harry Apparated into the alcove and had Snape writhing on the floor, consumed in the agony of the Cruciatus Curse. Not content to merely watch him scream and groan from the curse, he began kicking him savagely, taking years of frustration and loss out on his second-most hated enemy.
"Harry! Stop it, stop it!" Hermione yelled. "He was about to give me some information and…"
He stopped kicking but didn't release the curse. Snape continued to convulse on the floor. Harry looked at Hermione with a deadened expression and spoke in an even but deathly serious voice.
"What are you doing here with this worm, Hermione? Have you completely taken leave of your senses? When Shacklebolt told me you'd arranged a private meeting with Snape, I thought you had somehow fallen under the Imperius Curse. What if this had been a trap? You're all I have left, how can you do something like this?"
"I took steps to ensure that this was not a trap, and if Snape can tell us anything useful, I am dead set on hearing it. You always praise me for my cleverness, yet you think I would overlook something as obvious as the possibility of an ambush?"
Harry frowned slightly. "I'm sorry. I know I shouldn't lecture you, but I can't afford to lose you too, and to this son of a bitch of all people! For Merlin's sake! He was involved in the attack on The Burrow!"
"Release him, Harry," she said softly.
"Fine," he sighed and lifted his wand.
Snape stopped writhing but appeared unconscious. Moments later, Shacklebolt and Tonks joined them in the secluded area, gaping at the wretched and bloodied form lying on the ground before them.
"Take that tub of shit to the infirmary and patch him up a bit before he can't talk," Harry ordered. "Be sure to place special restrains on him, I don't want him to be able to so much as lift his pinky without my permission."
Tonks, who was the Order's best medic since Madam Pomfrey's hospital wing was burned down by Death Eaters with her inside it, nodded and Apparated Snape's unconscious form back to the headquarters. After waiting a few minutes to ensure that no more Death Eaters would be arriving, the other three followed.
***
"Well, when is he going to wake up?" Harry asked as he paced impatiently back and forth across the infirmary.
"Not sure he will, Harry," Tonks answered, "You beat him up pretty badly."
Harry felt a twinge of regret, but squashed it. Why should he feel regret over hurting the man who was directly responsible for the death of his greatest mentor and, indirectly, for those of half the Weasley clan and countless others?
At that moment Snape opened his eyes and groaned softly.
"Ah, Snape! I'm sorry about that beating I gave you. I got a little, uh…carried away. You better have something good for me or I promise, I'll finish what I started."
Snape did his best to glower, considering he could hardly move a muscle from his injuries and restraints. Harry noticed his difficulty and loosened his wards enough to allow him to talk.
"F-fi-fidelius…broken…" Snape croaked.
"What are you driveling about, Snape?" Harry spat. "How can it be broken? I am the Secret Keeper and I haven't told anyone who shouldn't know. Last night, I gave you explicit permission to get Apparated in here."
"Broken," Snape repeated insistently. "Attack coming. Everything they got. You and your friends have inflicted heavy losses on the Death Eater ranks. This is an act of desperation, but the Dark Lord wants to take you with him if he is to go down himself. Thousands of them…" he shuddered. "Dementors, giants, disgruntled goblins and werewolves, and every Death Eater he has left."
Harry merely shrugged, and socked Snape in the face, leaving him unconscious once again.
***
Harry and Hermione were eating supper, with the former occasionally shooting disapproving looks at the latter, clearly still incensed about her apparent foolhardiness. The uneasy quiet was broken by a shout from the control room next door.
"Thermal sensors report 4872 contacts incoming at ground level on all vectors!" shouted Bill Weasley, who was on guard duty tonight and represented the very last of the once-thriving Weasley clan. "Radar shows a cloud of bogeys approaching from the northwest at 1000 meters, range 9.4 kilometers!"
Harry ran in immediately and couldn't help, but be mildly shocked when he looked at the screens.
"Well now that's quite something, isn't it? I guess I'll have to refrain from killing Snape, after all," he said with mock disappointment. "Very well. Arm all systems, starting with the minefield."
He unhooked a microphone off the wall and barked over the public address system to the three hundred or so wizards who, in this heretofore hidden base, represented the last organized resistance to Voldemort. "General quarters! This is no damn drill! We are under attack and we are outnumbered more than fifteen to one. Everyone is to be armed and ready with a lot of spare ammo, but nobody will set foot outside the compound until I give such an order."
Not five seconds after he finished speaking, dull thuds began to reverberate against the windows of the fortified bunker. The first wave of gargantuan but very stupid trolls, what Voldemort had evidently regarded as his shock force, stepped into the minefield and protested in the most forceful way they could: by flying into the air and scattering themselves over a large area.
"Automated defense turrets online," intoned a computerized voice, as a dozen cylindrical installations rose out of the ground around the compound, bristling with barrels, some relatively small .50 caliber chain guns and a couple of much larger weapons almost a foot in diameter.
"About five hundred and fifty contacts have disappeared, but the enemy has breached the outer minefield in several locations!" shouted Bill over the sounds of frantic defenders hustling back and forth to take up defensive positions near the windows. "Eight point five kilometers, they are almost in range of our big guns!"
"Excellent, excellent," Harry said nervously as he paced back and forth. "Switch 250s to incendiary." No sooner had he given this order, than the large-caliber guns on the automatic turrets began to introduce themselves to the approaching onslaught. The first volley was still ordinary high explosives, but the next consisted of special munitions that exploded about thirty feet in the air and scattered napalm over a large area. He watched with grim satisfaction as a firestorm consumed the horizon and bogeys started dropping off the scopes at a rapid rate. Hermione tempered his enthusiasm significantly by pointing out that partially this was due to the fact that the firestorm made it difficult for the thermal sensors to distinguish between hostiles and the environment. Harry was always thankful for her voice of reason, even if he didn't always properly express his appreciation.
Voldemort's mindless horde continued their relentless advance in face of horrific losses. Through his binoculars Harry could see that all the non-human creatures were arrayed at the front, with robed Death Eaters bringing up the rear in the cleared wake. No surprise there, Harry thought, Voldemort taking advantage of misguided malcontents and using them as so much cannon fodder.
Another quarter hour and the fifty-cals opened up, spraying a deadly hail of lead in all directions. At this point the heretofore-unidentified aerial bogeys dropped below the low overcast cloud cover. Much to the shock and awe of everyone in the compound, they found that dozens of enraged dragons had swooped down and were tearing at the turret towers. The carnage was appalling, but Harry could tell that the powerful creatures were doing some damage as several guns jammed and began to malfunction.
He picked up the PA again, livid. "Where are my bloody triple-a gunners? Get to work, you slack-jawed daffodils!" he screamed into the microphone.
Four flak guns on the roof of the bunker itself finally came to life, but their effectiveness was tempered by the need to not further damage the turrets while trying to keep the dragons off them. It was a losing battle. One by one, the turrets went offline, surrounded by hundreds of carcasses but too damaged to be of any use. Harry was beginning to feel worried. Although the rogue dragons had been almost entirely wiped out, and the flak guns were making such short work of the survivors that they no longer had to worry about friendly fire, over a thousand ground targets, who now consisted mostly of surviving Death Eaters, were nearly at the perimeter fence. Long range rifles, fired from the compound windows, were beginning to take their own toll when the first Death Eaters, shouting with glee, mobbed against the fence. A few dozen of them reached out and touched it, only to be thrown to the ground in convulsions from the high-voltage shock they received from the electrified barrier. Screaming with rage, they began to cast Reductor Curses at the fence, which quickly failed as the circuit was broken.
By the time they made it to the doors under withering fire, only a few hundred Death Eaters remained with Voldemort himself leading them. A pitched battle ensued in the halls of the compound, with casualties mounting on both sides, but the Order quickly gained the upper hand as it fought with the advantages of knowing the environment and prepared defensive positions. As soon as they broke in, Harry was about to go to lend his wand and gun to the battle, when Voldemort burst in with Lucius Malfoy and his son at his flanks. Bill was hit by a curse from behind and slumped over in his chair in front of the screens. In apocalyptic rage, Harry and Hermione destroyed the minions, the former with a clean shot through the throat and the latter with a particularly nasty Blood-Boiling Curse.
They turned on Voldemort, but before they could react, a flaming curse hit Hermione squarely in the chest and she crumpled to the ground. Harry was painfully reminded of a similar scene several years ago in the Department of Mysteries. Only a blistering array of curses sent at him by Voldemort shocked him into action, realizing that he couldn't help Hermione or Bill by getting himself killed. Slowly, as the pitched battle raged around them, they dueled their way through the compound into the recreation area, leaving a trail of devastation around them. Voldemort was clearly getting very irritated at his lack of success, when he finally landed a Disarming Charm and cackled with glee as Harry's wand went flying away.
"So, any last words, Potter?" he asked snidely.
"Funny, Tom, I was about to ask you the same thing!"
"Wha…" Voldemort started to say, with a look of surprise on his pale snake-like face. The surprise was just enough for Harry to introduce his foot to Voldemort's face with a roundhouse kick, sending him plunging into the swimming pool behind him. Looking around at the destroyed electronic equipment, treadmills, pitching machines, and the like, Harry smiled down on Voldemort.
"Goodbye, Tom," he said, and pushed a decimated tennis machine, which was still plugged in and sending angry sparks everywhere, into the pool.
There were a few seconds of screams, but these quickly fell silent and all Harry heard as he exited the recreation area was a static crackling noise.
***
Hermione was, fortunately, not worse off than before, and Bill, though he spent nearly a week unconscious, promised to make a full recovery. In the end, only twenty-nine of the defenders lost their lives, compared to the complete destruction of a force that totaled over five thousand, not to mention their Dark Lord.
Harry shook his head and suppressed a sob. "How callous can I be," he thought, "If I think 'only' twenty-nine is an acceptable loss? Twenty-nine fathers, sons, mothers, daughters, brothers, and sisters, who will never be with their families again. Twenty-nine heroes."
***
"One thing troubles me, Harry," Hermione began, sitting up in her infirmary bed as Harry was chatting with her and Bill. "What is this 'power the Dark Lord knows not' that was supposed to help you defeat Voldemort?"
Harry looked from Hermione to Bill and made a face. "Eckeltricity."
Bill roared with laughter.