A/N: Special thanks are due to Anastasia, Luna, Ferporcel, Demon and Enigmatized, who all, in their various ways, contributed to this chapter. Also thanks to Potion Mistress for not minding too much that I bailed from the vQ for a day or so to get to a good writing place. Muchas gracias, amigo/as.


Libera Me

(Set Me Free)

… Severus drew his old wand for the last time.

He did not need to say the words aloud, and perhaps he should not have done, but with Hermione, bloodied, blinded, proud before him, his lips parted, and, his voice echoing in her soul, he breathed the words of the trapping spell, the words that would ensnare them both in a final, unforgiving dance with death:

"Foris Clausa."

A falling surrounding heaviness, a dome of irradiated darkness overhead, around them, the ragged edges of the Dementors forced upward, away from them by the nature of the spell, allowing only living souls within its deadly embrace.

Cast out of the feast below, a cloud of Dementors wheeled about, scenting, and peeled away from the park in pursuit of the burdened giant. Those who remained drifted lazily, lowering.

Seeking.

Moody glanced up sharply as the Dementors between himself and Severus were forced upwards, away from him, by the trapping spell. Branches crashed around him from missed spells and curses. Flashes of light illuminating trees, backlighting lampposts and benches, oily spots of dessicating puddles on pathways shining in a dark rainbow flare one second, descending, consumed by their own depths the next.

A demonic carnival of light and shadow filtered to his mind through his magical eye as it whirled, seeking one particular darkness, one distinctive shadow…

Click.

Severus' black cloak stretched taut across his shoulder blades.

A perfect target.

But Moody's eye was distracted by a graceful weaving in the air between them, as Voldemort's fingers entwined in the laden atmosphere.

Voldemort's lips parted to taste Severus' intent…

… how often had he willed the same violation, sent the same reverberating echo pulsing through the night…

James Potter had heard it.

So had Lily.

He had always wondered about the brat.

And then a thin, dry crackling sound shot through the park, undercutting hoarse shouts and yells and the splintering crashes as branches shattered, the grinding whine of twisting iron as bench frames absorbed deflected curses, reformed into twisted shapes, illuminated red, green, dying orange, as the battle consumed itself in its own rising fury.

A flash. Robes, spinning. Lights reflected in Minerva's spectacles, in the sparkling fang dangling from Bill's ear.

And above it all, below it all, cutting through the din, the thin crackling sound of a catching flame.

Voldemort was laughing.

Severus tensed at the sound and turned slowly, carefully angling his body so that he stood slightly between Voldemort and Hermione.

Moody's hand clenched on his wand as Voldemort appeared to float to his feet, his robes falling in a sibilant whisper as he straightened, the crackling laughter fading from his lips, his voice a seduction in the flashing darkness. "Severus, you have surprised me."

/x/

"Is Mum up yet?" Ginny breathed, backing slowly toward Harry and her mother as the remaining Dementors turned purposefully toward them.

"No," Harry said grimly, wiping the chocolate from his hands and stealing a glance at Ginny before mirroring her movements, sheltering Mrs. Weasley's limp form between them.

"What happened?" Ginny whispered, eyeing the Dementors.

"Trapping spell," Harry hissed between gritted teeth as he raised his wand to cast his Patronus.

"Wha-?"

"Hermione told me. Expecto Patronum!"

His voice and Ginny's echo bounced off the wavering amber-lit dome that separated them from the rest of the Order, their two Patronuses shining with promise as the heavy, rippling cloud lowered toward them.

/x/

At the far side of the dome, a single Dementor remained, drifting, a lone menace hovering over the mother and child inside as they picked themselves up, Narcissa moving Draco behind her with one arm as she realized the identity of the Death Eater sent tumbling upon them by Grawp's sweeping arm.

Bellatrix's eyes, hooded, cast into deepest shadow from the duels behind her, were fixed on Draco.

Narcissa did not know what he had done, but even in the deepening night she knew that look, some quality of her sister's intent stillness, too well. Narcissa's skin prickled, cold, in the heavy, lowering air. "Behind me," she said, quietly.

"But - "

"Now, Draco."

Bellatrix's eyes glittered hungrily as they flicked to and bored into her sister, pale skin glowing a sickly amber as the streetlights glowed to indifferent life outside the trapping spell and filtered, distorted through the dome, long hair freed of disheveled robes, ends raising to swirl slowly in the stiflingly charged air.

"Stand aside, Cissy." Bellatrix's wand was tracking on Narcissa's chest, her hair swirling slowly around her as the atmosphere under the dome crackled in time with Voldemort's laughter.

Narcissa shook her head, her hair streaming after the movement as if she were under water.

"Your son has failed us again, Cissy. Did you not see him? Or did you merely fail to stop him?" Her tone a low menacing whisper, her eyes hardened to steel. "Did you not want to stop him, Cissy? Stand. Aside." Bellatrix's words fell into the lowering air, sending a sharp note of menace rippling out toward to the perimeter of the dome.

/x/

Those dueling did not hear her, but the bonds of his vow to Narcissa tightened sharply as the ripple of Bellatrix's malice reached Severus where he stood facing the Dark Lord. In his peripheral vision, he saw Mad-Eye Moody's gleaming eye locked on him.

Although he betrayed no outward sign, his mouth went dry. Blast.

Tayet's talons clenched on his shoulder, and her wings went wide in warning.

Fly, little one, he thought. Go to Hermione. Fly, love.

Eyes unblinking, cast blindly in the flashing cacophony around her, Hermione struggled to draw a choking breath as the Foris Clausa spell intensified, its charge amplified by the murderous intent of nearly everyone contained within its circle.

"Tayet," she cried, flinging an arm outward, even as Severus commanded the phoenix to fly.

An inky black arrow silhouetted against a backdrop of an exploding nightmare, Tayet streaked from Severus' shoulder to Hermione's outstretched forearm.

"Squeep?" Tayet shrilled, leaning her sooty head toward Hermione's unblinking eyes.

Hermione turned toward the phoenix's voice, and gasped sharply as she saw one small, minute, gleaming speck of red some distance from her.

Oh… Hermione thought. Oh! Severus' voice in her memory, "… in the right darkness…"

In her blindness, through the film of blood that still covered her open eyes, the one thing she could see was the deep crimson glow of Tayet's tear in Severus' hair.

Tayet's tear… of course… but –

Then the tear moved. Behind it, another unwavering glow. Pale – no color.

The colorless glow seemed to be tracking the tear.

"No," Hermione breathed. "No." Who? Her mind worked frantically. Then - Moody.

Her skin grew icy as her world shuttered to the two small gleams of light, and she felt for her old wand with her free hand.

/x/

Kingsley dodged as a sudden crack overhead sent another tree splintering into falling shards. He dispatched the last of the Death Eaters near him and, finding Bill holding his own against a pair of Death Eaters to his left and Lupin's wand blazing in a duel to his right, Kingsley risked a glimpse behind him.

He met Minerva's eyes, her parchment-white face a punctuation of shock in the senseless chaos of flickering destruction around them.

"Harry?" he mouthed.

Wordlessly she gestured toward the dome.

"Outside?" he breathed, his eyes flaring wide, the reflections from Lupin's duel flashing in his eyes.

She nodded.

Damn!

It was all he had time to think before one of the Death Eaters turned away from Bill and sent a sudden flash of green light his way.

Minerva closed her eyes briefly – a reflex – but still saw the image of his surprise. Her fingers tightened around her wand as she turned toward the advancing Death Eater.

/x/

Tonks picked herself up nimbly, a jet of ropes spraying from her wand as branches crashed to the ground around her from a series of spells gone madly random during Grawp's charging flight.

The husky Death Eater she'd been fighting shuddered in vain against his sudden bonds, his small eyes narrowing as his fingers twitched against the ropes, trying to aim his wand.

Tonks grabbed his wand out of his swelling fingers, then, as she straightened, she saw Kingsley fall.

Her fingers snapped the Death Eater's wand in half.

It was against regulations, but she didn't care.

A flick of her ragged, falling hair as she dropped again into fighting stance, and, ignoring the involuntary tears freshening her cheeks, she backed up to the edge of the dome, reading the battle with young, hard eyes.

/x/

Beyond the limits of the dome, Harry and Ginny were holding the Dementors at bay, their Patronuses shielding Molly as she lay, unmoving, on the ground between them.

Ginny didn't take her eyes off her Patronus, channeling her will into holding it steady. "Harry."

"Yeah?" Harry said, forcing his voice out from between his teeth as he maintained his determined focus on the Dementors.

"I used a different memory this time," Ginny said calmly, as though she were relaxing against his knee in the Gryffindor Common Room.

Harry's Patronus glowed incandescent, pushing the Dementors back several feet.

Ginny chuckled.

A slow, satisfied smile spread on Harry's face as he answered, "Me too, Gin."

And Ginny's Patronus grew brighter in response.

Between them, Molly Weasley was stirring. She opened her eyes just time to see her daughter flash a quick, knowing smile over her shoulder.

"Such a nice smile," Molly thought dazedly, pushing herself up onto her hands.

/x/

Out of the corner of his eye, Severus saw bright, twin flares through the dome's transluscence, bright enough to overwhelm the duels inside and the diseased, reddening orange glow that was beginning to pulse from the dome itself. Even as he kept his eyes firmly fixed on the Dark Lord and Moody, a taut immobility at the epicenter of confusion, his mind sifted through several probabilities and supplied the likeliest interpretation: Harry was somehow outside the Foris Clausa dome.

Even as Harry's position registered in his conscious mind, he had shifted his weight, calculating the relative positions of the Dark Lord, Harry, and the Order.

He and Hermione were between the Dark Lord and Harry.

That would have to change, and quickly.

His eyes a blank mirror masking the crystalline structure of his mind, his thoughts speeding through the analysis that would determine his next decision, likely his last – the formless decision he had been stalking for nearly two decades, through countless despairing moments of blood, rage, pain, terror, agony, guilt and shame, and, finally, unlooked for, love - the greatest despair of all...

Drawing balance from the tension between his thought and the ground under his feet, his muscles relaxed, poised, his mind focused only on the moment, the fate of the wizarding world literally rested on his next movement.

The world balanced on that one decision, its form finally clear:

Right? Or left?

/x/

Draco's wary eyes were unblinking as he edged his wand arm out from behind his mother's back.

"Cissy, Cissy… your son betrayed us. Stand aside," Bellatrix crooned, edging catlike on the balls of her feet, her voice simmering through the air as she met her sister's eyes coolly.

Narcissa stood coiled, tense, turning by calculated degrees as Bellatrix circled her.

She was no match for her sister in a duel – Bellatrix's cunning was that of madness, and of all of the Black sisters, Narcissa had only and ever been brittly sane. She could buy her son one moment, a chance. Only that.

She was a mother. It was all she had ever done, all she would ever do.

Sensing Draco's readiness behind her, she cast a grateful thought to the uncaring universe that in this her son was truly his father's. Meeting Bellatrix's gleam of madness, Narcissa called on the blood magic that was hers by right. Hers, not the childless Bellatrix's.

It bought her one blow.

Only Tonks heard Narcissa's curse, an old curse that she'd learned from her mother, only usable by a mother in defense of a child. As she watched both witches crumple, felled by a magic more ancient even than memory, even as she saw Draco's pale eyes widen, his mouth opening in a shout she could not hear, Tonks heard her mother's voice: "Passion, desperation, and sacrifice, Nymphadora – almost always fatal. You leave it right alone."

Tonks' shocked eyes met Draco's, and a shared understanding passed between them.

Without knowing why, Tonks nodded.

/x/

Even as his wand flashed in blindingly fast counterpoint to the Death Eater's curses and hexes flying toward him, deflecting off his shields and countercurses, Arthur Weasley saw his eldest son go down.

His chest tightened and he poured all of his power into a Shield Charm, holding it while his frantic eyes swept the circle for an ally.

A flash of light illuminated the pale, wide-eyed face of his youngest boy moving forward to take his brother's place.

"No," Arthur breathed, as Ron, still wide-eyed, dropped into dueling stance before the Death Eater's mocking grin.

A movement to Arthur's right – a steady glow revealed from behind a rippling cloak.

"Alastor!" Arthur yelled, frantically pouring his will into his wavering Shield. "Help Ron!"

And his Shield failed, and he lost sight of Ron as the Dark spells once again flew toward him.

At Arthur's shout, Mad-Eye's magical eye whirled away from Severus, sweeping toward young Weasley boy.

Whirr - click.

In some corner of his mind, Moody noted Ron's double-knotted shoelaces.

Vigilant.

A split-second of coiling tension, and Moody send a jet of writhing light arcing to the Death Eater's wand arm, encircling it at the wrist, jerking it around behind him, and, at a flick of his wand tip - Up.

A loud crunch as the Death Eater was jerked upward, off his feet, hanging from Moody's hex by his dislocated arm, his wand a useless wooden toy in a clattering roll along the hard path below him.

Ron's eyes widened in shock at the Death Eater's sudden roar of pain. Ron stared as the dark figure jerked, suspended in the air, then pitched forward, poised to fall straight onto him.

For a moment, Ron couldn't move. Then, at the last second, he threw himself sideways.

Straight into the arcing path of a spell that Minerva had just deflected.

A sparking hiss as the curse licked a line from shoulder to hip, his body jack-knifing from the force of the spell, a jet of blood a pulsing spray, spattering the lenses of Minerva's glasses and the dome behind her.

Ron fell in a shudder to the ground. His eyes were open, but the flashes of light around him grew dim as the sounds of battle faded in his ears.

/x/

A gust of stale wind blew a strand of Ginny's hair across her cheek, and as she raised her hand to push it behind her ear, she caught something out of the corner of her eye. Maintaining her concentration on her Patronus, moving her feet carefully, she adjusted the angle of her body for a better look.

An arching spray of droplets had appeared on the dome. As Ginny watched, the droplets swelled and began to trail slowly downward.

Against the red-amber of the dome, dimly lit from within by muted flares of battle, the trails were ominously dark, ominously slow.

"Harry," Ginny said quietly. "The dome is bleeding."

/x/

Minerva's shoulders sagged as her Petrificus Hex finally immobilized the young Death Eater. She reached heavily for her glasses to wipe the blood from them, and found Lupin at her elbow, drawing her behind a tree. "Rest here," he said urgently.

"RON!" Arthur yelled. In his panic, the strength of his Protego Charm was enough to send the Death Eater he'd been fighting flying into one of the shattered trees.

The Death Eater hung, twitching, impaled on the sharp jaws of a broken branch.

Arthur did not see the Death Eater die. He was already running.

But Hermione had heard Arthur's shout, and was on her feet, Tayet taking frantic wing overhead.

"RON?" Hermione screamed, turning blindly. "RON!"

And Voldemort turned his cold eyes toward her and returned her unblinking, unknowing stare as the last of the Death Eaters dropped behind her, as the sounds of the battle, so loud moments before, faded to the moans of the fallen, the dying.

"Your offering is wanting, Severus." Voldemort's voice was almost casual as he fixed his empty eyes on Hermione, raising his wand.

Hermione froze.

An airless silence as Voldemort saw her tension, tasted her fear on the air, and felt her heartbeat quicken, fluttering, deep in his blood. His voice carried through the pulsing air, driving ice into through the hearts of the Order members as they watched, waiting, a broken circle – Minerva and Lupin's hands resting unconsciously on each other's arms; Arthur, standing silently over his fallen sons. On the other side of the dome, Tonks and Draco stood unmoving, Tonks' eyes flat, Draco blinking more than usual.

In the few seconds of expectant silence that rang, laden, in the dome, no one breathed. Not even the leaves on the path were moving.

But the tip of Moody's wand twitched. Once more, he had a clear shot at Severus' back.

Severus inclined his head to the Dark Lord. "She is a disappointment." His decision made, he stepped to his left, taking up position at Voldemort's right hand.

As Severus moved, Mad-Eye Moody's eye swiveled with an audible whirr, and both gleams of light disappeared, lost to Hermione's sight.

Hermione's old wand was already raised. Faith, Granger. She remembered the touch of Severus' voice in her blood, sweep of his hair on her skin, and his laughter in her mind. She closed her eyes and remembered. "Expecto Patronum!" she cried, and a burst of starlit blue flew from her wand.

Her startled otter shot straight at Moody, up his body, and to his face, where it perched over his magical eye, blindingly bright, flaring Moody's vision into a scattered pattern of bright spots and flashes.

The otter waggled its paws angrily, and Voldemort's mouth opened in its not-smile. "Ingenious," he said, inclining his head to Severus. "Her loyalty to you is certain, but her instinct to use a Light spell under such tense circumstances – " Some air escaped through Voldemort's open mouth. Not quite a hiss. "The phoenix looks to her, at present?"

The Order held its collective breath. Severus nodded, once, his eyes alight from within, growing harder.

"Well, then." More crackling laughter as Voldemort's fingers waved decadently, in corrupt imitation of the otter's paws. "The witch is too chaotic to trust, Severus," he finished, his voice dropping with an air of finality.

Severus had heard the tone before, and knew what Voldemort was ordering him to do. His eyes hard, sharp; his tone a harsh, finely-honed blade. "Granger."

Hermione turned toward his voice, keeping her will steady on her Patronus.

"It's time, my love."

"I can't see you."

"Follow my voice."

Hermione switched wands behind the folds of her robes and took one step to the right. Again, the tell-tale red gleam. She exhaled slowly.

Severus' new wand was nearly invisible in the darkness as he pointed it straight at Hermione's heart, his hand pale, disembodied, floating as if controlled by a will other than his own.

His voice the softest caress in the darkness –

"Avada Kedavra."


Note: Like the preceding chapter titles, "Libera Me" is a phrase from the Requiem Mass.