Balance: by rabbit
Disclaimer: I've gotta make up a standard disclaimer that'll let y'all know whose stuff is whose… Ah, think it through!
Chapter 12: On Edge
Summary: Finding is easier than rescuing.
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Harry and Draco lay on the ground, breathing hard, staring in shock at the place where they'd almost gone the same way as the broom that didn't exist anymore.
"Minerva! MINERVA! ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?" Snape roared in the darkness.
It was Draco who recovered first, casting "lumos" on his wand and getting a dim glow in response. It wasn't much light, but it was enough for Harry to see that Draco was nursing his elbow.
McGonagall was staring at the two of them over her sleeve, her eyes gleaming cat-green in the dim light. "It's all right, Severus," she said, not at all calmly. "We've been found."
"That's the second time I've landed on that arm," Draco grumbled. "Couldn't you have managed to save our lives without breaking anything, Potter?"
"You're welcome," Harry said, disentangling himself from the other boy and crawling forward to the lantern. This time when it had fallen the glass had finally broken, but only on one side, and Harry set the lantern upright and cast a spark spell against the wick to relight it.
Nothing happened.
"Spells don't work well here, Mr. Potter," McGonagall said. Harry bit back a swear word and started digging into the pack for the muggle matches he'd seen earlier.
"Potter?" Snape asked querulously. "Is that Potter up there?"
"And me, sir," Draco said. "Malfoy." Draco hitched himself forward, carefully, toward the place where McGonagall was hanging onto the cloth, keeping his head low, and with every movement the light of his wand faded a bit.
"Hold on," Harry said. He'd found the matches and to his relief, they worked. The wick sputtered a little before it caught, and the flame writhed uncertainly until Harry thought of shielding the broken side of the lantern from the wind, but then the light steadied and illuminated the rainswept clearing.
Or rather, it illuminated half a clearing. The black barrier/swirl/whatever it was had cut off everything – trees, rocks, earth and all – for as far to either side as Harry could see. McGonagall was lying across a massive tangle of roots, some of them from a rowan tree that had been partly uprooted and was leaning against a neighboring ash, but mostly those of an oak that was still standing, despite being truncated by some massive axe. The cut had come out of the sky nearly vertically, taking off limbs and splitting the far side of the trunk downwards to some fifteen feet above the ground, and leaving the whole tree looking dangerously lopsided.
Draco kept going forward, a little more quickly now that he could see that the trees were cut off well above his head. He had to go under the trunk of the rowan tree to reach the edge without crawling over McGonagall, and all Harry could see was the back end of his cloak and his shoes for a moment before he backed out from under the trunk again, still favoring his arm, and twisted to look back at Harry. "I can't see. Bring the light, Potter."
"Right," Harry said slowly, trying not to stare as Malfoy's face shrank visibly down to the size it had been when they were both first years. It was hard to tell, given the cloak, whether the rest of Draco was shrinking too, but Harry suspected from the sudden looseness of his own shirt that Draco wasn't the only one changing. "Draco…do I look funny to you?" His voice cracked on the question.
Draco made an impatient noise, but he looked, and then his eyes widened. But he took a breath and managed an almost sneer. "No worse than usual, Potter. And we've got a rescue to do, remember?"
"Bring the light," McGonagall reminded Harry, and he stumbled forward and then took a breath and went more carefully. She was changing as well, although not in size. The silver in her hair faded to auburn as her face smoothed and then resurged as she began to look more and more like herself. "It's all right, Mr. Potter. We're in an area that has just been knocked loose from our proper place in time, and the effects are strongest near the perimeters. Once Professor Dumbledore and the others summon this part of the forest back to Hogwarts, we shall all be our proper ages again."
Harry shook his head, "Hogwarts is here with us," he said. "The whole castle. And Dumbledore's dying."
"Dying?" That was Snape, and his voice cracked too. "What do you mean, dying?"
"Madam Pomfrey needs you… both of you," Harry explained, picking his careful way across the roots with the lantern. There was a short branch above McGonagall's head on the oak tree – one that looked as if it had been broken long ago – where he thought he could hang the light. "I heard her telling Trelawney…"
"Professor Trelawney," chorused the adults, and Harry sighed a little, half grateful to know that they were still all right enough to care about something as stupid as forms of address.
"Yes, her… Madam Pomfrey said that Professor Flitwick and Professor Sprout could help keep him from slipping away, but Professor Trelawney said it didn't work like that, and they both said they needed you two." Harry waited for a moment for his legs to get longer before stepping over McGonagall's head. He hung onto the bark of the tree with his left hand, getting into position on the shoulder of a root to reach up with his right hand to the place he wanted to hang the lantern. He wasn't quite… was almost… was tall enough to hook the handle over the end of the branch now!
He almost lost his balance, and grabbed onto the tree with both hands, looking outwards, past the edge, into the exploding anti-colors of the space beyond the world. It wasn't just black nothingness – not exactly. It was more like the patterns that played behind pressed eyelids, only wrong and worse and warped into nothing that made sense for more than a moment at a time. For a second, for an eternity, it beckoned, promising sweet oblivion…
"Potter! Pay attention!" The harsh shout raked across his ears and Harry shook his head and looked down into the chalk drawing face of Professor Snape, twisted up to look into the light. "I'd appreciate getting out of here."
Harry nodded, swallowing hard. It was a little better looking down – even considering that it looked like someone had taken a giant shovel and cut off the side of the world with it. Dirt had crumbled away in some places, and Harry could see a trickle of water coming off a shortened root to fall and splash into black-glinting destruction far below, but on the whole it seemed as if he was standing at the edge of a giant scooped out piece of land that curved away underneath him gradually so that he couldn't even guess how far down it went.
Snape was trapped by his cloak and the tangled roots, and to Harry's eye it looked as if some of the earth had fallen away around him, leaving him tucked in a little from the edge of destruction. His position looked awkward and uncertain to begin with, and it only got more so when he started go younger. If McGonagall let go, he'd never be able to hang on for long, and as Harry watched he realized that Snape was still wearing the chain mail. Even if it were tangled in the roots, it would pull free soon enough.
Draco had managed to get a little closer to the rowan. "Can you reach my hand, sir?" he said, stretching out as far as he dared. A rock came dislodged from under him and bounced off a root and out. It was destroyed, the same as the broom had been, but Harry noticed that it wasn't destroyed directly near the edge. Draco had backed up, unwilling to drop the entire edge off onto Snape, and was swearing.
"Shut up, Malfoy," Harry said. "I've got an idea. Stay there and watch while I toss rocks over Professor Snape."
"That's not going to help," Draco said sourly while Harry clambered back over McGonagall.
"It is if we can figure out how far out is safe. There's rope in this pack, you know."
"Rope? How unusually practical," said Snape, surprised. "Five points to Gryffindor for thinking of it, Mr. Potter."
"You'll have to give it to Fred and George," Harry said absently, starting to lob dirt clods gently out over the trapped man. "It's their pack."
"Then let us hope that it's a rope that hasn't been rigged to do something surprising," said McGonagall drily.
"I don't think so," Harry said. "It's meant to be supplies to get out of trouble with, not the other way around." He tossed another clod. "What do you think, Draco? If you lower me on the rope, can I get down safely enough to get a rope tied around the professor?"
Draco pulled himself out from under the rowan and came over to stand over Harry. By the quirk of the moment, he was a good six inches taller, and Harry was kind of surprised to see that there was nothing gloating in his eyes at the sudden advantage. "You could," Draco said. "But you're not going to."
"What do you mean? Even if we lowered a rope, I don't think he's in any condition to hang onto it," Harry hissed, not wanting Snape to hear. "I'm lighter than you are."
"Now you are," Draco said intensely. "But that's not going to last, is it? We keep changing. But what isn't changing is the way my arm hurts. It might be all right for tying a rope around Professor Snape, but I'm not going to be able to pull much with it."
"So what are we going to do? Try to lasso him?"
"You're going to lower me over the edge," Draco said, looking suddenly much younger. For a moment the two boys were eye to eye. "And then you're going to bring me back up. Aren't you?"
Harry looked down into the pale eyes and saw real fear in them. Draco really needed the question answered, and as he resembled more and more the frightened first year that had done detention in the forest with Harry, Harry found that he wanted less and less to somehow prove himself superior. It wasn't bravery to do something you weren't afraid of; it was bravery to go ahead and do what terrified you. He wanted to ask Draco which frightened him more – going over the edge or trusting Harry on the rope – but it didn't matter. Not really.
"If you hadn't wanted Slytherin," Harry said. "I think you could have been in Gryffindor."
Draco blinked. Blinked again and almost smiled. "I suppose you think that's a compliment," he said.
"Desperate rescues customarily are enacted with expediency, Snape's voice prompted from the darkness.
The boys grinned at each other. "I'll pull you up, Draco," Harry said, and went to get the rope.