Chapter 33

The reports had stopped coming in, and Lee didn't know what to think of it. It had been a few hours since the Ministry had been taken over by a group of rebels, and at least an hour since the last death count had come in.

It seemed that anyone who had been providing him with information had long since fled the scene, either because it was no longer safe for them to be there, or well, they had become a casualty to the fight. Either way, it meant that neither he, nor the rest of the country, seemed to know what was happening, and that was not something Lee was going to live with.

He knew what the consequences of showing up to the scene would be, and that he very well might not walk out with his life. But he had to know what was happening. Maybe it was the Gryffindor in him, or the inner reporter, but either way, Lee was going.

Grabbing his wand from his pocket, he cast a transmission spell which would allow him to keep broadcasting while onsite, without requiring him to bring any equipment with him.

It had been a skill he picked up while on the run and still maintaining Potterwatch, as carrying around a bunch equipment became unrealistic as they often needed to find new locations due to raids. And if he didn't find a way to continue on, then the group quickly would have been ended.

When he apparated on site, he let out a deep breath, shocked at the site of the once glorious building. Even through the first two wars, the building had always come out relatively strongly. There hadn't a lot of damage either time, so most of the architecture had been the original.

But now entire sections lay crumbled to the ground. There was rocks and dust everywhere, as he could hear screams from people with fatal wounds or broken bones so badly, they couldn't even move. He was horrified, to say in the least. He didn't know what to actually expect. It was one thing to receive all the reports of what was happening, but another thing entirely to see it firsthand.

"For those of you tuning in just now, this is Lee Jordan, and I'm standing here at the Ministry of Magic to report first hand on what is happening here. I'm not going to lie to you, it's bad. There are bodies scattered everywhere, and others who are wounded are receiving minimal, if any, medical attention. If there are any healers listening, I can't ask you to risk your life by showing up here, but without you, they won't make it. We need to come together, now more than ever, to help save our society. If the Ministry falls today, the countless deaths of the innocent will be in vain. We need to take back our country and stop this battle once and for all," Lee spoke into his wand.

He looked around, trying to figure out who he should help first. He knew very little about healing and medicine, but it had to be better than doing nothing, right?

Harry was horrified by everything he had seen. He knew that in the future, the Vetusta seemed to grouw in such size that they were able to overtake the wizarding population, but he never would have guessed that they were able to reach such a state so quickly.

It seemed that for every member they detained, another five more would pop up and start fighting.

The members were all young, fresh out of Hogwarts, and unexperienced in battle. Most, if any, of them, probably did not even fight in the battle of Hogwarts because they would have been too young. The battle which was meant to save the world and stop the future from repeating the mistakes of the past. Yet here he was, a few years later, still trying to fight to turn the world into a safer place.

There was a loud crash from up ahead in the atrium, and he found himself running blindly toward it, wand out and ready for whatever was out there. He had long since been separated from Ron and Draco, so he was on his own in this.

He ran forward, and saw a large golden pile of rubble on the ground. It had been the war monument, erected a month after the war had ended to honour the many lives who had perished, and those whose bodies would never be recovered.

When it had gone up, there had been a large ceremony in which he and his friends had spoken, naming a few close people they had each lost, one way or another. It was a tall statue filled with the people who had been lost, or as many as they could fit on there, and for those who couldn't, their names were inscribed on the base to forever commemorate them.

Yet now here it lay on the ground, broken apart and destroyed.

And it made him so angry that he just wanted to shake all of them and question their sanity. Why were they choosing to fight in a battle where they didn't even know the truth to why they were there? Why accept empty promises and place their lives on the line when there was no reason for them to even be protesting in the first place? It made him so angry that so many people would die because someone decided to manipulate a bunch of young, impressionable minds and use them as his own personal soldiers because he wanted more and more power.

How could they be disrespect the people who had died in the past because they weren't happy with the way things were right now? It was utterly astounding to him that they seemed to not even care that it. He looked to the left, where he could see a spell coming at him from the corner of his eye, and quickly cast one to block it.

At the moment he had very little concern how misguided and young the perpetrators were. He had tried and tried to convince them just how wrong they were, but either they were just thick and couldn't get it into their skulls, or they didn't care.

And honestly, at the moment he didn't care to set them straight. Clearly, they all needed to be locked up in a room until they completely understood their actions and felt some serious remorse.

But until such a time, he was going to have no reservations with taking down every last one of them. They had already lost so much in the war and he would be damned if these young idiots were the reason they lost even more.

Ron was coughing up smoke, as he fought to get to the source and extinguish it. As he quickly remembered a spell from his training, he cast it over himself, to prevent himself from suffocating.

There were bodies all over the floor who had died from either hexes or from the flames, and he was furious. All of these innocent souls who simply went to work this morning, not knowing it would be different from the rest.

All of the souls he had failed to protect by not stopping this soon enough. They should have done things differently. They should have been more honest with the world from the start, but they had all been scared. They were scared about what it would mean if they told the country that their children had come back in time to prevent all of this from happening, and it held them back. And because of it, there were so many poor innocent souls dead.

And the worst part was that he didn't even know if he was going to walk out of this alive. What if he died today? In the future, he apparently lost his life, and while things were different now, what was stopping the event from repeating itself? Maybe some things were destined to happen in every timeline; like fate pulling the strings of life and manipulating outcomes.

He didn't want to die today; he hadn't even told Luna that he was in love with her. He had been so scared that something could happen to him that it had held him back. And if he were to die, then she would never know how he felt.

He kept walking forward as he caught sight of a mop of red hair on the ground. Looking down at the ash covered body as he began to recognize who it was; Percy.

Ron fell to his knees and picked his older brother up in his arms. He had never been all that close with his brother, but after the war their relationship had begun to mend. It had been Percy who suggested to Ron that he consider a career as an Auror, like it had been so obvious to Percy.

And now he lay in his arms dead.

"No!" Ron yelled out, as he felt his cheeks grow wet with tears. He had already lost one brother in a war, he couldn't lose another. "Please wake up, Percy! Wake up, wake up, wake up!"

He let out a sob, as the truth began to set in. Oh Merlin, how would he tell his father? Or even his mother? She had been absolutely devastated by the loss of Fred; how would he take this? It wasn't fair. He couldn't lose his brother. Not after everything. It wasn't right.

Ron would be damned if whoever was in charge of all of this shite walked out in one piece. He was done with all the fighting and he was done with this group.

Screw what supposedly happens in the future. He was walking out of this alive, and he would be damned if anyone else died here today.

Hermione was still reeling from the encounter with Marcus, but as she fought alongside Blaise she felt herself slowly coming back to a calmer mental state, as weird as that could have been to explain.

Healing was her forte and her passion. She loved the research she did every day and she loved saving lives. There were hard moments when she lost patients or things weren't progressing the way she wanted it to. And that hurt. But there was very little she would change about her choices.

However she couldn't lie and say that dueling and in battle was another place she found herself comfortable in. On one hand, there wasn't the stress of fighting trained Death Eaters, But to say that that fighting unexperienced fighters, who despite not knowing as many dark curses, wasn't a challenge in its own right would be wrong. And because these people weren't Death Eaters who meant to kill her and knew why they were fighting, it was harder. She didn't want anyone else to be seriously injured today if she could help it, despite the fact that the people she was fighting clearly didn't seem to care if she died here.

And it wasn't just the healer in her that had a serious moral dilemma with hurting others.

There was a loud boom sound that seemed to come from up ahead and she very nearly was hit by a hex as she turned towards the sound.

"What was that?" Blaise asked, as he cast a tying up curse upon the remaining Vetusta.

"I don't know," she admitted, with worrying feeling filling her up. Whatever it was, couldn't be good.

Blaise's forehead creased slightly as he pointed his wand out in front of him. The two of them began walking towards the sound, and as they encountered opposition along the way, they quickly tied them up before they could even had a chance to send a curse their way.

Before entering the room where the sound came from, she took a deep breathe, ready to face. She just hoped that whatever it was, she would come up on top.

Pansy had fallen behind when they were making their way down the hallway. She had seen a young boy who was injured, with a bad abdominal cut, and was bleeding out onto the floor so there was no way she could simply leave the child there to die.

It wasn't right; the amount of innocent civilians who got caught up in all of this. It wasn't right the amount of deaths that would occur here today, simply because of this group claiming the world was corrupt and trying to 'fix' it.

She knew how the wizarding world worked. As a pureblood society girl, she had seen all the flaws in the system. It was all about how connected you were, and not how well you could do for yourself. Which was completely unjust.

Despite how smart girls like Hermione Granger might have been, the fact that she was a muggleborn definitely would have made it harder for her to achieve success. And as terrible as it might sound, the fact that she was a war heroine was probably a contributing factor to her career.

As she healed the child, she stood up to continue one, when she heard a voice from up ahead. As she held her wand out in front of her, ready for who was out there.

She could feel a panic setting in, as she realized that it was Zacharias Smith, and that it was Theo who was right in the line of fire.

And she was scared; as a tutored girl who loved historical objects, it didn't take her long to figure out that somehow Smith had gotten his hands on the Staff of Merlin, and if anyone knew just how potent it was, it was Pansy.

She knew that it would be able to rip his limbs off, one by one, until there was nothing left of him, and she knew it would be able to cause immense pain.

For a staff created to do so much good during the reign of Arthur, she felt herself growing furious at just how much evil it had been used for recently. It also didn't take her long to figure out the exact cause of all the strange things that had been happening lately.

But Merlin help her if Theo was killed here today.

It had taken years of her life as she spent them longing after him without knowing he was doing the same thing. And in the time since they had gotten together, she found herself as the happiest she's ever been. Growing up had been hard for her; she was never as perfect as the other pureblood girls. She wasn't like Daphne and Astoria Greengrass who were all poise and polite. She was rough around the edges and she often felt herself pretending to be something she was not.

But it was different with Theo. He cared about her and didn't care that she wasn't perfect. He didn't care that she could be brash and often speak out of turn. He didn't care that she would never be a housewife who hosted gala upon gala. He just cared that she loved him.

To see him on the other end of the Staff made her furious. A part of her wanted to turn Gryffindor and run in head on to challenge him. But she knew more than well enough that it would not accomplish anything. She knew the power of that staff and knew that she was nowhere near as skilled as she needed to have been to take it on.

So she stood in the shadows and she plotted. She took note of where his weaknesses were, and how she would take him down. She took note of how she would crush him, and when Pansy Parkinson wanted to take someone down, they would be absolutely destroyed. And of that, she could promise.

Theo swallowed, as he watched Smith raise the Staff and strike it hard to the ground. He could feel the shock waves being sent out through the Ministry.

"What did you just do?" he could help but ask, with a slight amount of horror. There was no way that this could result in anything good.

Smith let out a manic laugh as he spoke, "I decided it was best to bring everyone to me. This is going to end today, and I will be the one to walk out victorious. And instead of spending months on end afterwards dealing with any opposition to my reign, I will crush everyone who stands in my way, right here and right now. How do you think the wizarding world would react to me when they find out I'm the reason Harry Potter and his trusted minions are all dead? They would both fear and respect me, and any chance of more insolence will be crushed."

"You're absolutely crazy!" Theo couldn't help but spit out. "Don't you think people are going to realize just how full of shite you are?"

Smith just leered at him, "You can say what you will, but I already have an army, don't I? I've already brought down the bloody Ministry of Magic. Clearly there is very little left that I haven't yet accomplished. Make no mistake, Nott. I will reign over England, and then I will slowly take over every other country in my way."

"Until what, world domination?" Theo asked sarcastically, not completely sure if he was actually hearing what was coming out of the Hufflepuff's mouth.

Smith just shrugged. "The thought has crossed my mind, yes."

He was about to say something; anything, but as he looked up, he could see others slowly piling their way into the room. He saw Potter and Weasley, looking like they took a turn for the worse, as they came out of the door across from him, Granger and Blaise entering from the door to his right, Draco on the one from his left. And to his horror, Pansy came up from behind him as she slipped her hand inside of his.

This would end today, and Theo would be damned if it was that wanker who came out on top.