Author's Note: This is your official welcome to the more cutthroat side of Fractal, where magic breaths and you breath softly as to attract not its attention.
Also, I apologize for the (lower) quality of the last chapter. It was not my best work. I was a little out of it.
Kaleidoscope
She decided that Beauxbatons would be boring if not for the three failed assassination attempts.
They hadn't been real assassination attempts, not in the risk-your-life-to-kill-the-target sense. They were assassins hired as an afterthought in the name of Lucius Malfoy for people who didn't really care for the man and only did so out of appearances.
Most of them engaged her in a rather half-hearted duel, then apparated away once Madame Maxime showed up to defend her student.
It was for this reason that Fleur Delacour was in her office.
"Fleur, you have to understand, I can't keep doing this."
Fleur nodded. "I'll be sure to kill them the next time it happens, then."
Maxime shook her head, looking uncharacteristically grim and a tad displeased by the casual way Fleur thought about the value of other lives. "That's not what I meant. In the interest of my other students' safety at this school, I cannot allow you to continue at Beauxbatons. We know between the two of us that your education is all but finished. There is not much I can teach you anymore that isn't too dangerous for you to-"
"Oh, I see," Fleur said, cutting her off. Maxime looked almost glad that the girl didn't let her continue rambling. "Well, what should I do, then?"
Maxime let out a deep breath. "I can allow you to graduate. Very soon, you will be outside of my ability to protect. When they begin to hire assassins who won't run from me, there will be collateral damage."
Fleur nodded. "I suppose that is a possible option."
"There are other alternatives. I can write you a recommendation and have it signed by Lady Greengrass to recommend you to the Clock Tower."
Fleur looked a little more ambivalent about this.
"Or I can send you to the protection of Albus Dumbledore."
Fleur shook her head. "I will not be going to Hogwarts Castle. Write me the recommendation, please. I would like to continue my studies in one way or another."
Maxime nodded heavily. "Be careful there. They are not schoolchildren and you will be in danger constantly simply for existing."
As Fleur stepped out of her office daintily, Maxime couldn't help but think that she had failed her best student in some way. Maxime began to pen an owl to Astrid Greengrass.
Fleur's face scrunched up into a mixture of various kinds of disgust and hopelessness until it became anticipation. She had palmed a pill hidden in her bag and had put it into her mouth. The strange flavor of cleaning fluid and violets had become almost comforting to her by this point. Maybe she'd skip her Potions class to go dancing or something.
Unwell
"Well, you can't say I didn't tell you. All of you."
There were three days before classes ended and everyone had progressed onto making their first Mystic Codes.
Harry grimaced. He wasn't making his own, but he was certainly interested in the process of creating them.
He had come fifteen minutes late.
Fifteen, so he could go to Madame Pomfrey's medical bay and take a large quantity of medicines she left out for the public. With a laundry bag full of burn salves, cut-closers, and all kinds of medicines and bandages, he had come back to utter chaos.
"First. I told everybody that nobody here is experienced enough to create a Mystic Code. Second, I told everybody to be careful when they started pumping magic into things."
Harry's voice rose just very slightly as he looked over the lines and lines of cuts all over Neville's hands and arms.
"And finally, I told everybody not to start without me today."
Draco moaned in pain, a patch of darkened skin on his right palm.
"You're going to have to go to the hospital wing for that one, mate," he said, shaking his head in Draco's direction. The boy moaned again and nodded, then dragged himself out of the room.
"Now, how about we shelve this project until next year, then?" Harry asked with false cheer as he began to uncap a jar of burn salve to deal with Ronald Weasley.
Burning Bridges
It happened really quickly.
Harry had asked for permission to gallivant around London during the holiday. The Hogwarts Express left at nine in the morning on the Sunday after all the classes had ended.
He and his three friends had shared a compartment in good cheer. Harry was, as usual, closed lipped about his ventures, but Daphne suspected his intention.
"Don't talk to strange men and definitely don't talk to scantily dressed women on street corners, Harry. Also, don't try to go into pubs. You're too young to drink your sorrows away," Daphne said, deadpan.
Harry had actually left his wand back at Hogwarts, believing that carrying it around for what he was doing would hinder his efforts. Besides, he could perform rudimentary alchemy and whatever magic that he had done in his first duel with Draco without it. Wouldn't it be surprising for whatever trouble following him to run into a brick wall quite literally?
"Don't break the Statute of Secrecy. You'll get in trouble even if you're defending yourself. And they'll ask the Headmaster stupid questions. We all know you can take care of yourself," Neville volunteered.
"Have fun, Potter," Draco said.
Daphne's mother was in the station to pick her up.
"Hello, Mrs. Greengrass!" Neville greeted.
Daphne's eyes widened and she stiffened suddenly as the woman who was probably not her mother drew her wand and, to the eyes of the other parents, had uttered a curse at her own daughter.
Harry pushed her out of the way and drew a pair of circles with his open palms in the air, immediately conjuring a thin sheet of metal.
The vibrant orange curse bounced off the reflective metal, hit a pillar and exploded.
"Down!" Draco shouted, seeing his own mother in the crowd, who was running towards him, but the station was beyond the point of sanity already.
Harry dragged the shocked Daphne to the ground, following Draco's diving lead and the three of them all rolled to a stop with their heads safely under a stone bench.
Neville decided that this was remarkably good thinking and cast a shield charm to block the flying rubble as he crawled to a stop near them.
"Avada Kedavra!" a voice shouted in the crowd, aiming straight at them. A jet of green light flew towards them, but went wide and hit the same pillar that the exploding curse had taken a huge chunk off of.
Harry's eyes had activated quite suddenly after hearing these words and he watched in slow motion as a huge block of stone came down onto the bench and smashed itself to bits.
"Well, I'm glad these damn seats held," Neville said. "Told you dueling would be useful training, Harry," he said. "We have to get out of here before the ceiling collapses," he hissed urgently.
"But my mother-" Draco complained.
"Yeah, and my grandmother. I'm sure Daphne's mother is actually just running late because no one can impersonate her with her around." Neville didn't even want to contemplate the type of enemy who could actually dispatch Daphne's mother. At any rate, they probably wouldn't be flinging spells into a crowd.
They ducked some more falling rubble and a bunch of people on the ground whom had been hit by the quickly collapsing ceiling.
"Run for the other end of the tracks," Harry said, pulling them in the right direction. "We don't know what that could have done to King's Cross, but we can definitely find a way out into London."
The exit, where the train had come from, was lit in the afternoon glow. It was a bit difficult to see what was outside, due to it being much brighter outside.
They made a mad dash towards the exit when a huge gong was heard throughout the station.
After a responding flash of light, the vast majority of parents and students had fallen to the floor, most of them unconscious from the strength of the magic. A huge bubble flared from a source in the crowd, keeping the station from collapse.
"Damn it!" Daphne shouted as her vision swam and she pitched forward. Neville caught her, a single trickle of blood flowing out of his left nostril from his resistance to the wave of pressure. Harry and Draco had grabbed one another by the arm and combined their magic into a sort of rudimentary shield - Harry was feeding the other boy magic, Draco was releasing it and Harry was shaping it with his fingers. He was kneading the magic like dough, sending out responsive bursts to shield the four of them from the relentless pulses of power.
There were five people arrayed around the station - still standing and with their wands and various Mystic Codes pointed at them.
"Surrender if you want to live," one of them called over.
Harry shouted back. "Not a chance. If you wanted to let any of us live, you wouldn't have started with an Exploding Hex."
"And who are you, boy?" the same voice shouted back.
"He's Harry fucking Potter!" Neville shouted, whipping his wand back and forth to generate some sort of ball of lightning which loosed a thunderbolt at the man who was speaking to them.
"Protego!" the man shouted, completely misunderstanding the natural of lightning. The shield charm diluted the sheer strength of the spell, but a thin lance speared the man through the stomach and he screamed and fell to the ground, twitching.
Even as Neville fell to the ground from exhaustion and the other people raised their wands to fire on them, Daphne wondered why Neville didn't shoot it at the man maintaining the magical pulses.
Then it hit her, as she parried a bolt of reddish brown light with her wand and Harry smoothly ducked another. Neville was a better person than she - if he had hit the man, the blue light holding up the station would have shattered and the station would have killed every man, woman and child groaning or passed out on the ground.
Harry and Draco were still holding up their improvised shield - which was still somehow effective and neither of them showed signs of tiring.
Daphne felt like cursing. While she and Draco were quite better at Harry and Neville at traditional dueling, there was nothing like an alchemist when it came to unwelcome surprises for an enemy.
"Who are you with?" Daphne shouted, desperate to bring the fighting to a halt somehow. They were just first year students, no matter how gifted with their wands or how much they practiced. There were only so many ways that Harry and Draco could dodge incoming charms without dropping the shield and leaving the four of them quickly incapacitated.
Worse yet, Neville had not stopped bleeding - Daphne knew instinctively that it was a brain injury of some sort.
Without warning, a blur of color surged out of the crowd and impaled one of their assailants through the chest with a fuzzy pink umbrella.
"That's my grandmother," Neville said, looking relieved and horrified in equal measures.
Augusta Longbottom, the matriarch of the Longbottom family, was dressed in very traditional robes and held a wand in one hand. She had a strange hat with a stuffed vulture on it, but it clearly wasn't for show, as the vulture jumped off her hat and into the path of a spell that was slated to sever her neck from behind.
If anything, losing her stuffed vulture only made the woman more fierce, as she lifted the rubble with one smooth wave of her wand and banished nearly a metric ton of fallen rocks at chest level.
"Run and bring them home, Neville!" the old woman squeaked, as the rubble proved impossible to dodge for the man maintaining the stasis spell holding the station together and sending out those pulses of magic. As blood poured from the holes which the rubble had pushed through his body, most of the adults in the station came to rather violently, instantly jumping to their feet in a surge of adrenaline.
Harry and Draco dropped their spell even as the station gave a very ominous rumble.
Dame Longbottom continued to duel, shouting for anyone with a wand to levitate the station itself, as what could only be assassins continued to duck and weave around her spells. It was clear that she was quickly tiring, but she pressed on admirably.
Harry and his friends quickly vacated the station, turning back to glance at the hundreds of adults who had raised their wands skyward to protect their families.
Aftermath
The trek to the Leaky Cauldron did not prove difficult for Harry, who carried a small sum of muggle currency and could navigate the tube system. Draco and Neville looked distinctly uncomfortable to be wearing robes, while Daphne had never been so glad to have changed into a pastel green dress and a jacket.
In a show of solidarity, they chose to sit between the two robed boys and talk softly to them. Draco wouldn't stop shaking - possibly a side effect of being Harry's magic conductor and his hair was frizzled. Neville had wiped the bloodstain off of his upper lip, but he looked distinctly unwell. Daphne was breathing heavily from overexertion in casting the shield charms that she was suddenly glad she learned.
Harry seemed to be fine, but it appeared as though his paranoia was bordering on mania at the moment. His hands, in his pockets, were twitching as though he was still molding huge amounts of magic.
They managed to floo through the fireplace of the Leaky Cauldron to Neville's manor without much trouble at all - the bartender there had actually given them cold butterbeers after seeing the state they were in, on the house.
As Harry tumbled out of the fireplace unceremoniously, managing to spill only a small amount of butterbeer, and crashed into all three of them, he muttered unintelligibly to himself.
"My eyes are itching," he said quietly.
All of them took a drink, almost at once.
"Activate them," Draco said. "I thought I saw something weird hap-"
"There's two. Two stains or commas, in your right eye. The left one's the same," Neville remarked, being the closest person to Harry.
Harry shuddered. "I don't like it. I really don't like it. It feels weird, like I'm swimming through something when I'm walking, it's too clear-" his words came out in a jumble.
There was clearly something else and Daphne was going to drag it out of him if she had to. "That's not it, Harry, is it? It's emotion based, there must be-"
Harry looked positively haunted and Daphne regretted pushing immediately for her vain interest. As if it couldn't have gotten any creepier, Harry had begun to cry out of his right eye and his right eye only.
"Everything's a different shade. More red. More black," he said. "But the problems are more clear too. The problems," he paused, thinking of a way to explain. "The problems are these little flashes of stuff that's happened. When I see Draco, sometimes I could… see his reaction to the news about his father. It's a lot more clear now."
He had taken a risk. This was something he had never wanted to reveal to anyone but Dumbledore.
Daphne and Neville looked stricken, Draco surprised and saddened.
Harry deactivated them. "I don't need your pity," he almost shouted. The words had come out in a hiss.
Instantly, Daphne's face harshened. "And you'll get none of it. I don't pity you, Harry. You're my friend."
"A very wise statement for someone so young," came a voice from behind an opening door.
"Grandmother!" Neville shouted, running over to hug her.
"I brought Lady Malfoy along with me," Augusta said. Draco's mother was behind her.
"And-" Daphne started.
Augusta untangled herself from Neville and looked rather grave. "I've contacted Albus, through some older routes." She threw a sideways glance at Lady Malfoy which the other woman missed.
"She's missing, presumed dead," Daphne said, mechanically.
Augusta shook her head, looking bemused. "You are far too pessimistic, child. Astrid is a formidable woman, Dumbledore's most powerful living student. I am sure some things would have been triggered had she…" she trailed off, realizing suddenly that she was in the company of minors who had not seen war.
"Forgive me for my lack of tact in this matter," she said, mostly to Daphne. "All of you have performed admirably. What exactly was admirably performed is, I am afraid, quite beyond me. I have not seen battle magic of that sort since the Darkness in the seventies."
Harry shook his head, recovered from his earlier stint. "It wasn't battle magic. It was alchemy."
Lady Malfoy looked at him sharply, reevaluating the boy.
"Alchemy?" Augusta asked, several shades more alarmed than she was earlier.
"Mhm," Harry grunted affirmatively, trying to place himself somewhere more easy to understand and somewhere more polite simultaneous and failing miserably. "I've been learning under the Headmaster for some time now. He told me stories about Conduit Theory being used to ward things and I thought I'd be good enough to do it."
It was clear that Conduit Theory went over everyone's head, but he was sure they had some guesses, especially considering his need of Draco in his spellcasting.
"Is he hurt, Mr. Potter?" Narcissa asked, desperately hoping her son was not.
"I don't think so. In theory he shouldn't have even felt the magic, but some of it probably bled over his control. It's really amazing he managed it so easily." Harry had, after all, given the extremely vague command of 'take my magic with your left hand and push it out your right'.
Luckily, Draco had clearly been doing reading on how to manipulate magic within his own body. The fact that he wasn't looking slightly more crispy was a testament to the case.
"They aren't playing around anymore. Those weren't just wizards, Ms. Greengrass," Augusta spoke, after a lull in the conversation.
In that moment, none of the children looked ready to grow up, but it seemed as though that was their fate.