Balance: by rabbit
Disclaimer: JK Rowling's toys. I just snuck into the toybox.
Chapter 11: Seek and Ye Shall Find
Summary: Draco and Harry finally find McGonagall and Snape.
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"That doesn't sound good." Draco grabbed the lantern and took off again while Harry jammed his direction finding stick into the mud so he wouldn't lose the direction. He was about to double check the angle, when he saw the lantern light suddenly drop to the ground and the lightning showed him a glimpse of Draco falling too, not more than twenty yards on.
"Draco!" Harry yelled, and ran forward, slipping once or twice on the wet leaves of the forest floor. He got there in time to see Draco getting to his feet again and pulling his cloak free of the tree branch it had snagged on with a vicious jerk. Harry caught up to him and paused to catch his breath. "Draco, are you all right?"
"I'm fine!" Draco growled, rubbing at his right arm with his left. "Just bruised is all. Do you see the lantern?"
"Lumos," Harry cast the light spell on his wand and tried not to think that it was getting dimmer. He didn't see the lantern. The forest had begun to be scorched here, and the mud was black with soot.
Draco was looking for the lantern too, a scowl on his face. "Dammit," he complained, "why did they have to go off into the Forbidden Forest anyway?"
"I don't know," Harry said, deciding to let the smaller boy grumble if it made him feel a little less hurt and scared. Draco looked very young, just now. "Maybe they thought there was another balrog."
"Balrog." Draco stopped moving and his scowl grew more thoughtful. "Hang about. The Professor flew back to the forest after we'd already gotten rid of the balrog, right?"
"Yes," Harry said, "and McGonagall went with him. They flew in just to one side of where the balrog came out."
"Well they wouldn't have flown into the fire, Potter," Draco said exasperatedly, much more his usual self. "But they might have flown alongside it."
Harry found the lantern at last and pulled it free of the mud. "What are you on about, Draco?"
"Look," Draco said. "Balrogs don't live in the same … same place as we do. They've got their own world. But sometimes the layer between the worlds can be broken through, right?"
"The merman said something about sending it back to its own time and place," Harry agreed, waiting to see where Draco was going.
"What if Dumbledore sent McGonagall and Professor Snape back to make sure that the nothing else was following the balrog? They'd go back along the line the balrog took, right?"
Harry saw it. "Back along the line of the forest fire! We can follow the burn!"
"It would be faster than trying to mess about with the lantern and foxfire," Draco said.
"I like the foxfire," Harry said as he set the lantern to rights and re-lit it. "It gives us a quicker way back out."
Draco nodded, recovering his broom from a bush. "And we should still check now and then, to listen. Just in case."
"Right." Harry set a patch of foxfire glowing between them. "You go left, I'll go right. We want to find the main path of the fire. If you find it, wave your wand up and down and I'll come to you."
"And I'll do the same."
It was Harry who found the path the balrog had taken, and while he waited for Draco to come to him, he set another patch of foxfire aglow and took a moment stare at the destruction revealed by the intermittent lightning. Whole trees had been knocked aside, and charred logs still steamed in spite of the rain. He was hovering near a huge hoofprint, half filled with rainwater and he shivered, realizing afresh how big the monster had been. He had to search a bit, to find a stick that didn't go to cinders in his hand, and he'd just started listening for the teachers when Draco arrived.
"…never was much of a conversationalist…" Harry heard McGonagall and checked his direction quickly. The burn was taking them mostly the right way.
"I think this will work," he told Draco.
"Good. Let's go."
They flew shoulder to shoulder, as if they were both chasing the snitch, but for once Harry felt glad that Draco was a good flyer. The balrog had completely cleared a path nearly ten feet wide, really – beyond that there were still trees standing, however scorched they might be – but in that narrow channel Harry and Draco could make more speed, risking overrunning the lantern light when the lightning came more quickly, and only slowing a little when it didn't. They stopped once, and once again, to leave a patch of foxfire in their wakes, and Harry was just considering stopping a third time when he heard words, as if on a gust of wind.
Draco pulled up, signaling a pause, and Harry stopped to hover and listen too…
"…still haven't finished reading that book Albus lent you." McGonagall. She sounded thoughtful, her voice just audible, but wobbly, like a radio with bad reception, to the boys.
"I planned on reading it over the Christmas break," Snape said. "When there weren't so many students to interrupt me."
"We must be getting close," Harry said, excitedly and Draco hushed him and led the way down the slope where the balrog's path crossed a streambed. When they came back up the other bank they flew along, both listening hard.
When Snape's voice came again it was very quiet. "I'm getting cold, Minerva."
Harry swallowed and bent closer over his broom to cut the wind resistance. Snape was never cold.
"Think warm thoughts," McGonagall told him.
"Do you know," Snape said drily, "I don't think I have any."
"After the day we've had?" McGonagall seemed to be teasing, ever so gently. "I should the think that demon was warm enough to last a while."
"True enough." Snape snorted derisively, but his voice when he spoke again was very tired sounding. "In a way it's too bad. This can't be the happily ever after you'd envisioned."
"Not the tall, dark mysterious stranger I'd envisioned at any rate," McGonagall
Snape chuckled. "I'm tall and dark!" he protested.
"But just not strange enough," McGonagall said fondly.
"Finicky female," Snape accused her in an amused tone that Harry had never thought he would hear from the man. "I suppose you prefer that black and white tom that's been hanging about Gryffindor tower."
"You mean that alley cat that attached itself to Jamison over the summer break?"
"Yes," Snape said. "Mister Mistofolees, she calls him. Man of mystery."
McGonagall made a rude sound. "Doesn't he wish!"
Both teachers laughed. But when McGonagall began to collect herself, Snape kept on laughing, helplessly, almost hysterically. Harry and Draco raced against the circle of the lantern's light, risking a little more speed in spite of snags and stumps and the suddenness of rocks in front of them. Another rise, and they could feel the brooms struggling now to gain altitude. Harry wished for more lightning, even a glimpse beyond the lantern light would ease the feeling that he was about to smash into something awful.
Snape's laughter was coming more ragged now, weakening into gasps for air. "Oh, please," he said, tears in the words, "please, Minerva, let go."
The ground dropped away below the lantern as the path led them into a deep bowl of a hollow, and the boys tipped their brooms downward to follow. Into the light came rocks, smashed trees, a glimpse of something bright…
"I won't," McGonagall said, nearly as wrought up as Snape was. "And I wish you'd …stop, stop, STOP!"
At the very last second, Harry realized that the brightness was McGonagall's armor where she sprawled on the ground, and that she was yelling at him and Draco. He reached out and got a handful of Draco's cloak, pulling the other boy with him as he slewed his broom sideways to a sharp halt.
Draco lost hold of broom and lantern, and his weight dragged both of them and Harry's broom to the ground, but in the moments as they fell they could see as if in some kind of slow motion movie.
The lantern arced to the ground, illuminating McGonagall's grim face and the deathlike grip she held onto the trail of black cloth she was keeping all her weight upon to keep it from slipping over the tree root she'd hooked one elbow around for security. The broom went on straight, over her head, into a darkness that suddenly swirled with colors too tinted with black to be identified. It smashed the wooden handle into splinters and then smashed the splinters into nothing, bristles following with sparks of brilliant ebony as they vanished as well. And then the lantern went out.