Chapter 3:
The Chase
Harry didn't dare breath as he huddled pitifully in a trench below the onslaught of laser bullets.
Wait, no. Not lasers. He could see the bolts. Plasma? Whatever. Might as well call them "death bolts" for all the good identifying their makeup would do him. Right now he needed to think of a way to get out of there!
Should he fight? Could he take them? He was invisible, and these erudite aliens might be unaware of magic as a phenomenon. Or Maybe he should just stop thinking and start doing. That's always worked out better for him.
And so when his obsidian armored foes finally relented he leaped up and fired a quick pair of blasting curses before running back the direction he came. He didn't peel his eyes off of them for a second, an action he soon regretted.
They literally shrugged the blasting curses off. Now all Harry could think about was how much he wanted that armor. Oh right. Running!
He pushed his leg muscles as hard as he could and ran like he was being chased by Dudley's gang. Their laser blasts chased him as he went, but missed by a country mile. For all he knew their aim was impeccable, but even a master marksman has trouble shooting what they can't see.
He ducked beneath a toppled roof and charged through a maze of ruined homes. The trashed buildings made ladder's out railings, slides out of walls and bridges out of staircases. He came to crouch in an open air basement and hid behind a pile of furniture and a large novelty ufo replica with kite shields for wings.
"Homeno revalio." Harry whispered and gave a sigh of relief when the spell came back negative.
He'd lost them. That or they just didn't care enough to chase his scrawny arse through the tight rubble. They were both rather broad and muscular, so like a small prey animal fleeing much larger predators he took the run-and-hide option and it payed off.
"Whew!" He sighed in relief before removing his cloak.
Running for his life had always brought Harry a kind of rush. He didn't care if it be dragons, acromantula or laser-wielding aliens. It made him feel alive, but always brought a nerve rending crash afterwards.
With that last spell he hoped anybody in the ministry tracking him would be able to find his position. He couldn't risk trying to sneak back to the cross streets he had sent Hedwig from, but hopefully whoever got his message had the brains to follow her back to him on a broom. She could always find him.
Speak of the devil!
"Hedwig!" He called out when he saw the white puff of feathers pass overhead.
She dive bombed towards him at his call and landed on his chest life a cannonball. He held her tight in a two-armed hug as she rubbed her head against his abdomen. Sheesh, she hadn't left his side but twenty minutes ago.
He was saved from his familiars affection by two broom riders swooping in.
Their faces were hard to make out behind the bubble head charms they wore - smart, considering the many dangerous vapors and pulverized materials floating in the atmosphere as dust - but the pegleg and shoulder-high staff of the male gave one of their identities away as they dismounted.
"Professor Moody!" He greeted with a leap.
If Hedwig wasn't in his arms he would have outright flung himself at the grizzled Auror and embraced him. The paranoid bastard probably wouldn't have appreciated that all too much.
"Professor?" Moody growled as he canceled the bubble head charm. "I ain't never been a teacher."
Harry's smile turned into a grimace as he remembered the fate this man had suffered for almost an entire year.
"Then what the hell have we been gettin' up to?!" His lithe companion snarled. "We been playin' patty cake or somethin'?"
Harry turned to insult her for disrespecting a man he, reluctantly, came to care for immensely during the week they spent together under Pomfrey's tender care. The words caught in his throat when he got a good look at her.
She was. Wow. Yes, wow succinctly described her. She was wow.
If Narcissa Malfoy was younger, dressed in a two-size too-small tank top and jeans with a heart-shaped birth mark peaking out of her exposed midriff, this is what she'd look like. Plus some bright, neon green hair.
Also, what was up with the cockney accent?
"Wotcher Harry, run intu sum barney rubble in this here, er, barmy rubble ere?" She asked as she examined the Roswell toy from behind him.
Harry turned to Moody in hopes of a translation, but his not-former-teacher shrugged with a grimace. Good, so she was the insane one, not him.
"This is my protege, Nymphadora Tonks." Moody introduced the crazy woman.
She outright hissed at the old man and looked ready to attack him.
"Don't. Call me..."
Whatever she was about to say Harry's next question defused the situation.
"Your name is Excalibur?"
She blinked at him.
Moody blinked at him.
"Huh?" Nymphadora asked.
"Nymphadora. Gift of the nymphs." He explained.
They weren't catching on.
"The only nymph I've ever heard of who gave away gifts was the lady of the lake, who gave King Arthur..."
"Excalibuh!" She gasped.
Before his very eyes her hair stood up on end as if she had just touched a power line. It absolutely sparkled as it turned gold and her eyes danced with every color of the rainbow made liquid. He was too dazzled by her smile to properly ponder how she was pulling the effect off.
"Well that settles it then, dunnit? From now on people get to refur to my bottle as Excalibuh!" Tonks explained as her hair settled on pink
Harry shared another worried look with Alastor. It was becoming patently obvious why she was assigned to the grizzled old bastard. The woman was too much for any other Auror to even attempt training.
"How do you be knowing so much about name etymology and all that?"
... Oh! That was English. And she was speaking to him.
"Professor Trelawney let us pick our own topics for divination homework this summer." He explained. "I chose 'The predictive power of names!' and now I'm stuck trying to figure out how being a fuzzy creator of clay containers guarantees me an agonizing and imminent death."
Excalibur Tonks snickered at the joke, but Moody was a bit out of the loop, having never gotten to know his colleagues during his tenure at Hogwarts.
"What can you glean from this crotchety bastards name?" She asked, thumbing her superior officer.
She leaned against the pile of rubble housing the toy UFO as she asked.
"The persecutor with a foul mood?" Harry recited, having already deciphered the names of every person he knew. "A bit too on the nose there, no offense sir."
Moody took Harry's jab at the state of his nose in stride by flicking it with his thumb in a rather rude gesture. He seemed ready to retort, probably to defend his name as having the same meaning as Alexander, but before the banter could continue the room gave a violent jerk.
For a split second Harry worried that an entire two story building, okay, half of a two story building was about to come crashing down on their heads. That was until he saw the red, laser sharp eyes of the alien robot he'd mistaken for a toy replica. The one Excalibur was currently leaning against.
Well. That explained the hole in the ceiling. And the ceiling above that. And the ceiling above that one.
"Move Nymphadora!" Alastor yelled at the recruit.
While she was preoccupied flinching away from the rapidly rising kite shield of a robot Alastor made busy summoning their brooms. He tossed Tonks' to her before mounting his own. Harry jumped on behind him.
"You had the choice between me and the girl and you chose to ride bitch with me?!" He yelled back as they lifted off.
"She scares me! Now put some acceleration into it!" Harry yelled back.
And so the Auror obliged, his apprentice hot on his tail and the robot even hotter on hers.(Note: For those of you who haven't figure it out already, it's a Vulture Droid.)
The metalloid demon screeched like a banshee as it shot after them through the holes it no doubt made in the building when it crash landed. The sound was made all the louder by the cramped quarters.
They breached the roof just as it got the bright idea to shoot at them and the barrage of red plasma bolts blew scorching holes in what remained of the shingles.
The crimson bolts provided the only light with which to navigate, save for the equally demonic and equally red bolts of lightning criss-crossing the obsidian clouds above.
"To headquarters!" Moody yelled over the constant stream of plasma bolts littering the side of the building whose alley they flew into.
His words must have registered to the Cockney girl because she pulled up beside them and made an affirmative motion with her hand. Harry was a bit too busy worrying about this things astronomically high rate of fire and how poorly that boded for them.
Then it decided to fire a missile at them. No, make that two missiles. Bright, blue and glowing they may have been, but they were missiles all the same.
A bit of mental math comparing their speed to that of the projectiles in the cramped quarters of the alleyway and the prognosis wasn't promising. So Harry did what always worked.
"Bombarda!"
The wall directly ahead to his right opened up like a blooming, dusty flower. Lacking the time necessary to let Moody in on his plan, Harry reached around older man, grasped the shaft firmly with both hands and yanked it, guiding him into the hole.
If Harry survived to tell about it he would sure to describe these events in a significantly less homo-erotic manner.
Thankfully Tonks was bright enough to come to the same solution as he had, unless he was imagining her voice screaming a blasting curse over the sound of the missile following him and Moody through the hole.
Wait, what?
"It's tracking us!" Harry yelled to the pilot.
He then remembered why he was called Mad-Eye and realized he probably already gathered that for himself and would want him to do something useful about it instead of giving a play by play.
"I gathered that for myself, thanks! Now make yourself useful while I'm preoccupied instead of giving me a play by play!"
Yup. Good ol predictable Moody.
Harry swept his wand in a wide arc above them. He didn't bother uttering an incantation. This wasn't a spell. It had no finesse, just raw destructive magic pouring out of his wand. The old apartment building was fucked anyways, what was another collapsed ceiling?
Timber, drywall and wiring rained down behind them, but to Harry's horror the smoky missile phased right through it, creating a singed hole through all it touched.
Well that's not good.
Before Harry could try a more magical means of stopping the missile their hallway came to an end and they crashed through a window. Moody did an impressive barrel roll to transfer some of their momentum into a turn that just barely saved them from slamming into an adjacent apartment building.
The black, thunderous clouds above had mercifully parted enough to allow a few rays of sunlight to light their way.
Once again they were going full speed towards whatever destination Moody had in mind and once again the missile locked onto them and followed their trajectory perfectly.
It was then that the alien robot jet rejoined the fray and rained crimson death from above.
The plasma bolts threw up charred cobblestone and dirt as they tore up the ground all about them. Harry did his best to focus on the missile closing in on them but his blasting curses refused to meet their target. At this rate his only option would be to wait until it was close enough to hit them and cast a protego, a strategy Harry did not want to put all of his hopes into.
Small blessings being what they were, the hailstorm of fire let up and Harry finally managed to hit true, only for his blasting curse to pass right through the projectile.
"Shit! Stupefy! Reductor. Flipendo!"
Miss, miss, pass right through. A few more cycles of trying the three spells and the accursed thing proved just as invulnerable to his stunners and reductors as it was to the knockback jinx.
And then Harry heard the reason for the robots lost interest in them.
It was loud. It was high pitched. And it was coming right for them. Moreover, whatever it might be was taking the full brunt of the robots attention.
His time was out. The missile was a mere meter away from them. All he could do now was pray that this last measure worked and hope it didn't blow them out of the sky.
"Protego!"
The earth shattering kaboom would make Marvin the Martian proud. And for all Harry knew the Looney toons character may very well exist. Recent revelations made it a distinct possibility.
For a moment Harry felt weightless, consumed by the dust cloud that obscured what little light still pierced the hellish storm clouds above the city. The next moment had Harry dangling from the back of Moody's broom with one hand, hanging on for dear life.
Moody wasn't given the opportunity to slow down and pull him up, however, as the flying kite shields came crashing down in a fiery mass of twisted metal just ahead of them and forcing Alastor to swerve and avoid it. Crescending over a half-collapsed office building was a sight that would seer into Harry's memory for the rest of his life due to the unadulterated fuck-awesome of it.
One of the armored aliens from earlier had shot down the robot from the back of a motorcycle. A flying motorcycles. A sleek, weapon bedecked killing machine of a flying motorcycle. It's blue and silver finishing made the boxy exterior class horribly with the red and black of the rider's armour. (Balutar-class swoop)
Could these guys get any cooler?!
With their mutual foe destroyed, Kast - or at least Harry thought it was the woman alien - opened fire on them. The front of her hoverbike had a similar rate of fire to that of the UFO from earlier, and just like before Moody swerved and dodged with a skill that betrayed his years of being the Hufflepuff beater.
Still, Harry imagined this would all be going much more smoothly if he was driving and the experienced soldier was Manning the figurative guns. In the meantime, Harry did his best to twist his body to reduce air drag and prevent his dangling feet from meeting the ground as he returned fire.
In an unusual display of skill his stunner, knockback jinx and reductor all hit the woman on her chest. Like with his earlier blasting curse, they did jack with a side of shit against that god-like armor.
Her aim was improving too, and as her latest bolt singed Moody's cloak Harry came to a decision. A stupid, reckless liable-to-get-him-killed decision. But it was do or die.
"Fuck it. That bike is mine." He declared.
And with that declaration he let go and flew, feet first, into Kast's FACE! That bit of blunt force trauma finally did the trick and knocked her off the bike.
Harry barely managed to grab hold of the hoverbike before joining her in the short trip to the ground. The vehicle bucked at the sudden changes in weight and it's backside dug a deep trench into the ground as he fumbled with the handle.
Good news! The denizens of other worlds saw fit to equip their bikes with a throttle on the right handle just as earthlings did. Bad news! Harry couldn't drive.
Worse news? Kast decided to answer his question on her potential coolness in the affirmative as Harry saw her rise up from behind him like an avenging angel and flew at him by way of an honest to God JET PACK!
She was awfully fast with it too. She gained on him rather quickly. Impressive grip on that woman, it completely cut off his airway when she grabbed him by the throat and threw him aside like a rag doll while she remounted the bike.
Now, one maneuver every quidditch player learns early on is called "skipping." When you fall off of a broom at high speeds you don't immediately crash on the ground(unless you're really high up, in which case you do just go splat). If you're close to the ground when you fall then the momentum keeps carrying you forward and for a few split seconds you can skip across the ground like a rock on water. On a Quidditch pitch, with soft, sleek grass you can then slide relatively comfortably to a stop. In a desolate postapocalyptic city with nothing but metal and glass-covered asphalt and large piles of debris to crash into, sliding to safety wasn't an option.
He had two choices. He could use what little time he had left skipping to cast a cushioning charm and be mowed down by Kast, OR, he could light that bitch on fire and learn to cope with his shattered body.
"Incendio maxima!" He yelled.
"Bombarda maxima!" Another voice yelled.
A flash of pink, a sudden jerk and Harry was being dragged by his arm along the ground. He internally thanked Tonks while their enemy caught fire and her vehicle caught a nasty case of the explosions just as she finished turning it around to come after him.
He maneuvered his feet to skid along the asphalt while Tonks struggled to lift him one-armed. With a mighty heave, he pushed off of the ground and caught onto the broom behind her. A few seconds of fumbling later and he was pressed comfortably against her back.
"Hold on tight!" She ordered over the howling wind.
Yeah. That uh, that's not going to be a problem.
He turned around from the soft woman he was wrapped around to look at the hard woman who was hopefully wrapped around a tree only to see her scrambling in the distance and trying to put out the fire he'd enveloped her in. Goddamn these guys are tough. And loyal, if her partner coming to a stop to assist her was any indication.
One turn later and their flight from hell was over.
Harry relaxed into the lady Auror as the danger faded from his mind and adrenaline faded from his veins. Everything hurt, down to the last microbe in his gut. But not her. She was soft and warm and smelled of peaches and lavender. There was no pain where he was touching her.
Their flight, sadly, ended a few short minutes later as they pulled onto a street called Grimm Old Place.
During the interim it had started to rain. It was a stinking, ashy rain that stung every bit of skin it touched. It wasn't long before it soaked through Dudley's hand-me-downs and everything hurt twice over.
They dismounted and approached a tiny alley between number eleven and number thirteen. Tonks had to help keep him steady, but he wasn't going to complain about his arm being around he neck while hers were wrapped around his chest.
"Wait. What?"
Harry felt the oddest sensation glancing between the two buildings. Every time he read the addresses he felt like he was forgetting something, like a piece of information repeatedly slipped from his mind.
Wasn't there supposed to be a number between eleven and thirteen?
"Here." Moody grunted before shoving a crumpled piece of parchment into his free hand.
Harry struggled to unfurl it but soon read the tidy scrawl within.
The headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix may be found at number twelve, Grimmauld Place, London.
That's right! Twelve. Twelve comes after eleven. Why couldn't he remember that a moment ago?
Before he could ponder this strange mind magic Moody vanished the piece of paper and walked past him to a shabby door that hadn't been there before.
Before his very eyes brick, mortar, barred windows and everything else comprising a house inflated from the gap between numbers eleven and thirteen Grimmauld place. Now there was some interesting magic.
"In. Now!"
Harry obeyed the peeved-off Auror and ducked into the hideous home just as Headwig landed on the fencing beside it. What he entered could only be described as thinly controlled chaos.
"I need more type oh for the next batch of blood replenishers!" Ginny screamed over the sea of bubbling cauldrons.
And indeed it was a sea. Dozens of black iron tubs filled the hallway and living room to his right where Ginny had called from.
"Here! Pass the boomslang skin!" Sirius hollered back from the opposite end of the living room as he tossed a vial of blood to the youngest Weasley.
"Burn salves and blood clotters are ready for bottling! Ronald, get to it!" The Weasley matriarch ordered her son from a large drawing room to the left of the hallway
Peering inside Harry had to increase his estimate to hundreds. Hundreds of cauldrons littered every inch of available space save for small deer trails carved out for walking and transporting.
This Grimmauld place was a potions sweat shop!
"Coming mum!" Ron's voice came from a flight of stairs and down he came, carrying a large box filled with empty vials. "Heya Harry."
Everyone within earshot glanced up at the nonchalant greeting and looked like they honestly wanted to run over and fuss over him. Thankfully the tasks at hand were more important than their histrionics and they kept at it.
"Potter! Nymphadora!"
Harry groaned. Out of the door leading to what looked like the kitchen strode Severus Snape.
"Are either of you injured enough to need immediate medical attention?" He asked smoothly.
Harry blinked at the question. He'd never heard the potions master show any kind of concern for another person, least of all him. He could only shake his head dumbly at the change of disposition.
Perhaps great tragedies like this can warm even the coldest hearts?
"Good. I trust even dunderheads like you can pull off a satisfactory wiggenweld potion. You will find all of the ingredients and enough cauldrons to work with in the library upstairs." Snape demanded before unceremoniously shoving two cauldrons into their chests.
"Now get to it!"
Author's Notes:
So. I recently read a Pottermore article titled The chapter that made us fall in love with... Nymphadora Tonks
According to the writer, Tonks is supposed to have a cockney accent. I never would have known. Aside from saying wotcher, it never really came out. Naturally, I decided to do some research on the dialect and exaggerated her speaking.
The result was oddly sexy. I like cockney Tonks. She's here to stay.
And if you want to complain that it's not canon compliant my excuse is that my story takes place three or so weeks before the start of Order of the Phoenix. So my reasoning is that training under Moody beat it out of her but since she just started under him it's still there and strong. End of discussion.
Become a Patron:
NonsensicalRants
- Patrons who pledge 3 Dollars get all future chapters a month early and a link to the discord server.
- Patrons who pledge 10 Dollars get the right to vote on story choices, what story I update next, and access to the source code for my Fangame projects, Such as Frogger He's Back and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for PS1.
- Patrons who pledge 25 dollars get access to X-rated scenes and commissioned works.
- I take commissions for $25 per 500 words.
