Chapter Seventeen: Dogs, Cats, and Rats
Sirius, lost in the Madness, attacks the Gryffindors for Scabbers, and Ebony is reunited with his Kin for a rather unhappy reunion.
In order to keep a better eye on their charges, Fallen took off his Disillusionment Charm and Harry folded his Invisibility Cloak up under his arm.
It was a subdued group, knowing that they were leaving Hagrid, pretty much alone, to deal with Buckbeak's impending death, though Ron was struggling to keep a grip on Scabbers, who struggle more and more the further away from Hagrid's cabin they got.
The Valerians alternated between watching the area around them and watching the rat with derision, though the teens put it down to the sheer amount of noise the damn thing was making.
"Scabbers, shut up," Ron hissed angrily. "You're gonna get us caught!"
In reality, they were likely far enough away that no one at the cabin could possibly hear them.
The Valerians certainly weren't going to tell their charges that they'd heard the unmistakably wet thud of Buckbeak being decapitated barely ten minutes after they'd left and were more eager to get them out of sight, or at least closer to the castle, and had therefore led them not up the path, but closer to the Whomping Willow's side of the Forest and then up by the greenhouses, a longer route, but one less likely to put them on a collision with the Ministry officials.
Suddenly, Ron cried out and dove for the ground.
Scabbers had bitten him and squirmed free.
Ron missed, and the rat fled between his hands and knees, heading back the way they came, toward the Forbidden Forest.
"Stupid bloody fucking rat," Draco hissed as they all darted after Ron, who was after his rat.
Quite the scene they'd all have made if anyone were watching them.
Scabbers fleeing, squealing and shrieking the whole way; Ron and his friends scrambling after it; and the assorted Valerians loping after them, spread out to cover them as they chased down the rat.
With their wider vantage point – and the fact that it was exactly what they were looking for – the Valerians caught sight of the threat first.
A massive black dog burst out of the shadows of the Forest and the Valerians were too far away.
"Sirius, stop!" Tarana cried, pushing herself ahead of the others.
The dog paid her no heed, slamming paws first into Draco, the closest to him, and using him as a springboard to slam Harry and Neville to the ground, he snapped fangs sharply at Blaise and Hermione, who backed away from him and drew their wands.
Beyond them, Ron scrambled to his feet, Scabbers in hand, to the chaos behind him.
The dog turned mad grey eyes on the redhead and darted for him, skidding around Hermione as she bravely stepped between them, pointing her wand at it.
Elements clashed as Tarana's fire erupted around Hermione, pushing back what seemed to be solid, writhing shadows as they tried to ensnare the witch.
Hermione screamed and ducked her head.
Fallen and Arcana swept past her nearly as one, both going straight for the shaggy dog as he threw Ron to the ground and struggled to get at the rat in his grip despite the screaming redhead's attempts to prevent it.
They never even got close.
The shadows of the trees came alive, rising off the ground to march against the King and General.
Fallen swept his Element through them, cutting the image part, but they morphed and lunged for the two Valerians, twisting and wrapping around Fallen's attempts to cut them down.
Arcana slid to a halt and braced himself, drawing the water from the air to solidify in a shield around him and Fallen.
The Shadows picked up the shield, Valerians and all, and threw them over the teens they guarded.
Concentration broken, water and wind dissipated, and their commanders nearly flattened Tarana and Yoko, with the panther taking the full weight and momentum of her hicari and Yoko being missed only by virtue of being so much smaller than the rest of his Kin, flattening himself to the ground as Fallen rolled over him in midair, before moving forward with a vicious yowl.
"No!" Tarana roared, scrambling from the tangled limbs she and Arcana had become, as Draco and Harry advanced with Yoko, firing spells into the darkness, and trying to get closer to where Sirius and Ron struggled for Scabbers.
Sirius reared with a wild howl, sounding far more wolf than dog, before sliding off Ron and grabbing him by his shoulder.
Ron screamed, louder, as the dog's fangs pierced his light shirt and jacket, sinking into his flesh, and dragging him back, further into the Forest.
"Ron!" Arcana roared.
Tarana lunged forward, slipping between Harry and Draco and bodily shoving them back, while Blaise and Hermione threw themselves to the ground. Neville was a fraction too slow and took the thin tendril of shadow in the shoulder as three more of the tree-shadows came out of the Forest, slow and steady, limbs reaching for them.
Amidst them all, eyes a solid black, Ebony advanced.
The Shade paused at the tree line, though his puppets kept advancing, and tilted his head.
Tarana shook herself as she got to her paws, watching as her Kin took up his wordless challenge.
"Fuck," she growled.
XX
It said a great deal about everything they'd seen their Valerians go up against, that it was their lack of progress that terrified the Gryffindors the most.
Ebony stood surrounded by writhing shadows, and wielded them with such control, efficiency, and ease it was as though he wasn't facing off against three Valerians at the same time.
Tarana stood, low to the ground as she watched the battle between her Kin with such focus one would have thought her hunting.
"Help them!" Draco screamed at her, pointing at the colliding mass of Elements.
Yoko yelped as he was picked up and thrown across the grass, flipping and skidding until he rolled to a stop by the teens.
Blaise felt a moment of déjà vu as he watched Fallen swing wide, protecting Yoko's fallen form, as he and Arcana came at him from separate angles to keep Ebony's attention.
Tarana moved, but it wasn't to fill the gap Yoko had left.
Fire flared above her as a wave of writhing Shadows came down, edges pointing as though to skewer Yoko, and the two Elements fought in midair as Tarana pinned her Assassin to the ground.
"Enough," she rumbled, face close to his own.
The wild fury of battle was slow to leave the fox's eyes, but he kept Tarana's gaze, ears pressed back, and fangs bared.
"Enough," Tarana growled again, pressing more firmly on the canid. "I have a job for you, Assassin."
Yoko's eyes flicked past the panther to the battle behind her.
"No," she said firmly. "We're doing exactly what Ebony wants us to do. He's here to buy time and he's more than capable of it. The Whomping Willow. I need you to get inside it and get that rat."
Yoko's brows furrowed. "Inside…." He shook his head. "I don't-"
"The Willow was planted for ease of access between here and the Shrieking Shack in Hogsmeade," Tarana told him quickly. "It was protected more powerfully than any other passage leading out of the castle, to discourage anyone from trying to sneak down it when it was in use. At the base of the trunk is an opening just wide enough for Ivory or myself, if we didn't mind a bit of a squeeze. Sirius will use it to get Ron and Scabbers off Hogwarts grounds. I need you to get there before he kills Scabbers."
Yoko shook his head again. "I can't control the Willow," he told her. "It's too strong-willed to hold for long."
"I've given you an order, Assassin," Tarana told him sharply, releasing him to turn her attention in full to the battle behind her. "Make it happen. We'll be behind you shortly."
Yoko rolled to his paws and, without another word, sped across the lawn, Blaise, Hermione, and Neville unacknowledged shadows, heading for the silhouette of the Whomping Willow.
XX
Ebony's gaze shot to his sister before Arcana or Fallen even realized she was there, but she was no threat to him.
Fire slammed into Fallen's side, sending him skittering across the grounds and she sank her claws into Arcana's flank and hauled his back half down and to the side, throwing him off balance.
Before either had risen to their paws again, Tarana had turned to Ebony, Fire and Shadow walling the two siblings off from those outside.
Water rained down on them from above, only to be met with a veil of fire that turned the whole localized rainstorm to steam, and Wind met full resistance in a solid wall of unmoving Shadow.
"What the hell is she doing?!" Draco screamed.
"He's her brother," Harry said grimly. "You think she hasn't been worried about whose side she was going to choose from the moment they knew she was back?"
Draco growled in frustration
Arcana roared Tarana's name as he paced the net of Fire and Shadow that separated him from his hicari and her brother, but there was silence from within the circle.
Fallen and Arcana continued to hammer the dome with their Elements, searching for a weak spot, until the top of it cracked and the Shadows misted and slowly began to disappear.
Tarana stood tall and unmoving, blue eyes daring her Kin to step forward again.
"What," she growled, "is your fucking problem?"
"Ron-"
"Is not here," Tarana interrupted. "For all your talk about believing that Ebony would never abandon the Crown, you certainly wasted no time in attacking him as though it was Dark before you in his stead, Arcana! And you," she snapped, turning her head viciously where Fallen was trying to slink closer. "I will set you on fire from the inside if you take another fucking step, General, on grounds of treason. Ebony is mine. My ak-esh. My Bloodkin. What right do either of you have to lay claw or fang on him?!"
Fallen skittered backward, but he looked far from happy to be doing it, and Arcana paced a wide circle, as though weighing his odds against the siblings.
Ebony, for his part, sat calm as could be behind his sister's bulk, and watched them with half-lidded blue eyes, eyes nearly identical to Ivory's, with his tail swaying almost mockingly behind him. He didn't look like he'd just spent the last five minutes or more spinning Shadows against the Collective.
"Report, Shade." Tarana barked, not taking her eyes off Arcana.
"For the sake of everyone being on the same page," Ebony sneered, "Sirius and I arrived at Godric's Hollow perhaps an hour or two after Voldemort and Dark attacked the house. The half-breed was there to collect Harry, apparently under Dumbledore's orders, to place him somewhere safe.
"Sirius allowed this, as he and I had other missions to undertake, to put an end to the threat currently posed to the little Lord. I was going in search of the Crown, which should have been present at Godric's Hollow, and Sirius was going after the traitor." The leopard glanced at Arcana, who had stopped his pacing, with a sneer, before turning his attention back to the middle-distance and continuing his debrief, decades in the making. "I found no sign that either Queen or King had been in the area for several hours and deemed both to have been killed, as Tarana would have never allowed Dumbledore to interfere in the manner he had otherwise. I would later learn that Arcana had, in fact, been Thralled by the Traitor of our Kind and continued to believe that Tarana had been killed, though at that point I had deemed it at the Puppet King's claw and fang."
"What happened with Sirius?" Tarana pushed, bringing him back on topic. "Why were the two of you not together when the Aurors came to arrest him?"
"Sirius' confrontation with his brother's betrayer did not go as he'd planned. He was too emotional and openly confronted the weasel and allowed him to manipulate the mortal idiots that the Ministry would call on as witnesses, though I wouldn't know this until later. By the time I returned to London to rendezvous with him, he was already in Azkaban."
Arcana shook his head. "When was he tried?"
"He wasn't."
The reply didn't come from Ebony and all eyes turned on the wolf.
"And I don't suppose that surprised you, General?" Ebony sneered.
"No," Fallen retorted coldly. "There had been dozens or more Death Eaters at the time that never saw a courtroom, because of ties and connections they had to Ministry officials that didn't want that news made public. And every trial was public. It was the only way to keep any affiliations those within the Ministry had to ensure that no one knew about those affiliations. Like Aurors."
"Enough," Tarana growled, warningly. "Report, Shade."
Ebony smirked but settled in to continue. "Following the loss of Sirius, I had no reason not to believe that his own mission was incomplete and began looking for other prey. I found it by working outside the Order of the Phoenix, finding the targets the Ministry couldn't keep, those not unlike Lucius Malfoy."
Draco grit his teeth and clenched his fists but Fallen grinned, feral and vicious.
"A challenge I would have welcomed, Shade, I assure you."
Tarana growled, clearly losing her patience with them both, and Fallen subsided with a snarl of irritation.
"The Order, of course, quickly became obsolete and I needed to find a new well of targets."
"You went back to Sirius," Arcana stated.
Ebony hummed. "It was at that point," he said, tilting his head as Severus, Remus, and Ivory sprinted up the small hill that hid the Whomping Willow and this side of the Forest from the view of the school. "That I was made aware that Sirius had failed in the single job given to him. To hunt down the only one who could have revealed the location of the Potters to Dark and his mortal 'lord'."
"Peter," Remus panted, raising the map clenched in one fist. "Sirius never killed him."
"No," Ebony sneered. "He let his emotions cloud his judgment and allowed the little rodent to trick him and turned a dozen of simple-minded idiots into false witnesses before faking his death. The explosion wasn't, as I'd first assumed, caused by Sirius casting a spell too powerful due to his emotions, which I had warned him to keep under control for that very reason, but by Peter detonating a city block to hide his transformation."
"Transformation?" Harry asked, frowning.
"The Marauders are all animagi," Remus revealed grimly, a rather moot point when they'd just heard Tarana calling the massive, Grim-like dog by Sirius' name and Ebony fighting to protect and buy him time. "Peter was a rat. Wormtail."
Draco and Harry exchanged slack-jawed expressions. "Scabbers!"
Harry's fists clenched, his anger, banked and twisted to sympathy months earlier, burned anew.
"We saw all three of you on that accursed map," Severus revealed, "but came down when we lost Weasley, Black, and Pettigrew off the edges. Anyone looking out the windows would have seen that show you idiots just put on, and I can't guarantee that Ministry has left Hogwarts. If you have a plan to get Ebony and Black off the grounds and out of their hands, you don't have much longer to implement it."
Tarana glanced over her shoulder at Ebony, who only had eyes for Ivory.
The white leopard hadn't paused, nor was he hindered by Tarana's presence between them, and had come within inches of Ebony, the two appeared to be having a conversation of their own.
"We need to move quickly," Tarana interrupted them with little regret. "Yoko was sent to prevent Sirius from killing Peter before he can be questioned and handed over."
Ebony got to his paws and fell in on Tarana's right as the Valerians circled the humans, urging them across the lawn.
"How are we going to get past the Willow without Yoko?" Draco asked.
"There's a knot in one of the branches," Remus told them. "And though it doesn't look like it, there is a pattern to the Willow's strikes."
"Do you remember how to make it stop?" Severus asked, already guessing the answer.
Remus shook his head. "It's been almost two decades."
"Not to be the bearer of more bad news, but Sirius is nearly lost to us," Ebony revealed as they loped across the lawn, giving just enough speed that the smaller, slower humans could keep up with them as they ran. "I would never have allowed such a rushed assault if this wasn't his last chance at avenging James."
"Yoko will protect Ron above all else," Tarana added. "And until we can prove to him that Scabbers is more than Scabbers, he will fight to try and protect him."
"And if you have any hope of proving that Sirius Black is innocent of the Ministry's charges, you need Peter, alive and able to testify," Fallen added.
"So, no pressure," Ivory grinned viciously.
"Business as usual," Ebony smirked.
XX
While Tarana was putting a vicious and violent end to the, hopefully, short-lived civil war by the Forest, Yoko took the three teens through the trees, the shortest route to the Willow, though it had the greatest level of danger if Ebony had left any tricks behind when he and Sirius had come through.
Though it had been minutes since Ron had been dragged away, he had clearly put up a good fight, because he was still screaming and flailing, trying to avoid being pulled through the gap Yoko, who had spent the last three years in this area of the school – close as it was to the greenhouses and Hagrid's cabin – was a bit irritated to find he'd never known existed.
Either by accident or design, however, Ron had caught his ankle on one of the gnarled and twisted roots at the base of the Willow's trunk and Sirius could be heard, in the breaths between one scream of denial and the next, snarling as he struggled to get the teen free of the obstacle.
'There's no intelligence there. Only raw, animal instinct.'
The cold and analytical voice of the fox nearly brought Yoko to a startled stop. 'Shu-'
'He's dangerous, Assassin,' Shu interrupted, no desire to explain his sudden desire to speak with the Valerian half of his soul. 'Do not take this threat lightly.'
Yoko bit his metaphorical and mental tongue and flared his Element as he and the teens came within inches of the flailing branches.
As the tree came to a stop around them, there was a gut-wrenching crack and a scream of literal bone-deep agony.
Ron's leg had given way beneath the insistent tugging and tearing of the mad dog at his shoulder and his ankle had slipped free of the root.
Both disappeared into the hole.
"Go," Yoko barked at the three students, feeling the Willow struggling against his control, the first plant he'd ever come across on this world with such presence and dominating will equal to the fox's own.
Hermione and Neville were through in seconds, and Blaise was just there, when the Willow tore itself free of Yoko's control, pinning the fox at the halfway point and forcing Blaise to throw himself away from the gap for half a second before he could throw himself bodily through it, narrowly avoiding being struck by another branch.
Though he's the smallest of the Valerians, Yoko is still nearly four times larger than a natural fox and was too tall to remain pressed to the ground and avoid the longer branches of the Willow, forcing him to duck and weave around them, narrowly avoiding serious injury.
Slowly, Yoko gained ground, but it was a painfully slow process, and his luck wouldn't hold out forever.
Once he'd closed half the remaining gap, Yoko flung his Element at the Willow again, Shu's voice echoing in his head.
'Another angle. Slow it down, Assassin.'
The Willow didn't stop moving this time, but it slowed significantly. Significantly enough that the fox could dart around the sluggish branches and dive through the hole, knocking the teens that had waited and watched with bated breath, to the dirt floor inside the Willow's massive trunk.
Blaise ran nervous hands over the heaving fox's sides in search of injury, but Yoko shook off his hands.
"We need to go," he said, as the three teens lit their wands around him, giving them their only source of light. "Black isn't lucid enough to know friend from foe. He'll hurt Ron to get at his target."
"Why does he want Scabbers so badly?" Neville asked, raising his wand higher to try and elongate the light it gave off so he wouldn't rip on any of the roots on the ground as they rushed down the passage. "I mean, he is the reason he broke out of Azkaban, right? It wasn't Harry?"
"We speculated months ago that there was an Animagus masquerading in the Tower, so I can only assume that Black knew, somehow, either through experience or Ebony, that this person was hiding as Ron's pet for the last thirteen years."
The floor beneath their feet abruptly changed from dirt and root to rotten wood and from one second to the next, they were in some sort of dilapidated house.
The Shrieking Shack.
"No!"
All eyes shot to the ceiling and Yoko bolted for the stairs down the hall from them.
He didn't have time to worry about whether they would hold his weight or not, the heavy thud of footsteps behind him made a part of him flinch and thank the fact that Sirius wasn't thinking clearly because there was no way to miss the fact that they were coming.
There were only two rooms at the top of the stairs, and a lantern was lit in the only one with an open door.
Yoko bolted for it.
Black had changed skins and put himself in a corner, leaving Ron sprawled across the only bed in the room – surprisingly intact after all these years - and if the dog had looked ragged, the man didn't look much better.
His hair was a tangled mess and there were days, if not weeks, of muck and grime on his skin. He was wearing the gray rags of Azkaban – hopefully again, otherwise Yoko would have to reevaluate Ebony's intelligence – and his filthy fingers were wrapped, one over the other, around Scabbers' neck as he worked to wring the life from the thing's tiny body with a mad smile on his face.
"Expelliarmus!" Blaise cried over Yoko, flicking his wand in a downward flick and spiral.
Scabbers was torn from Black's startled grip by the Disarming Spell and Neville side-stepped into the room to catch him, dropping his wand in the process.
Yoko darted forward as Black, with an animalistic snarl, crawled after his lost prey, as though he couldn't quite remember what skin he was wearing at the moment.
Yoko crouched low and, with a flare of power, picked the human up at the waist and slammed him back to the ground with several vines wrapped around him.
The vines crawled across Black's body at Yoko's prompting like wriggling ropes or snakes, dragging the man toward the bed, where Ron scrambled back and away, his leg a bloody and mangled mess.
The vines hauled the Animagus' struggling limbs, with great effort, to one corner of the bed and tied all of them to it in what must have been a seriously uncomfortable position.
With Black detained for the moment, Yoko turned his demon-black eyes on the rat struggling to be free of Neville's grip.
Thankfully, Neville was used to the struggling form of his own pet, a toad named Trevor, and was an old hand at keeping him contained, though it wouldn't last long.
Trevor didn't have teeth.
With the last of the seeds that created the vines around Sirius' wrists and ankles, the fox shaped a 'cage' though there was no base to it.
Neville all too eagerly dropped the writhing rat into it and Yoko tied the many small vines into a twist at the tip, preventing the rat from escaping, though it was certainly giving it a shot, gnawing on them when he couldn't squirm between the 'bars'.
Neville shook his hands, sending small flecks of blood to the floor where Scabbers had sunk his teeth into his fingers.
"Nicely done," Yoko praised him.
Ron settled back against the dusty pillows with a whimper, closing his eyes.
"Hang on," the fox told him, mentally sifting through his repertoire of medicinal plants and coming up with very few that wouldn't knock the teen out, and there was no time to create any kind of poultice that would assist in the healing of his leg.
Near his tail, a black stem sprouted quickly growing silver leaves. "Do not eat this whole thing," he instructed them. "Take two. Tear one in half and give it to Ron, split the other half in half again before you eat it, Neville. It will numb the pain a bit."
"What about the other o-"
'Assassin!' Shu cried at the same time Blaise screamed his name.
Yoko spun on his tail; fangs bared as the massive black canine lunged for him.
