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Chapter 25
The sudden stabbing pain in Harry's scar could only mean one thing. Voldemort was here, right now, and he was pissed off.
Harry glanced around, looking for a possessed person or a ghostly figure, but he couldn't see anything. He frantically searched for over a minute, trying to block out the pain in head, but spun around in horror as he heard Hermione scream. As soon as he turned, he saw the mist-like form of Voldemort rising out of the ground beneath Hermione's feet and flowing right into her.
Harry reacted immediately, sending rapid fire stunning spells at one of the women who was half of the very foundation upon which he was building his life. His thoughts were simple: if Hermione's body was unconscious then Voldemort couldn't make her do anything. However, Harry's response wasn't unpredictable and Voldemort had already planned for it. As soon as he had any control over Hermione's body, he had cast a shield charm and Harry's stunners bounced away useless.
Harry could see Hermione struggling to maintain control of her body. Her movements were jerky, like there were two different orders going to her limbs. Harry had no idea why Hermione was able to put up more of a fight than the other people who had been possessed by Voldemort, but she definitely was.
Hermione was terrified. For all the focus that was being put into controlling her movements and the spells she spoke, her eyes were left to express themselves and Harry could read it in her face. She wasn't afraid of what was going to happen to her. Hermione was far more afraid of what was going to happen to the people she loved. The story of the first possession from Diagon Alley haunted all of them at that moment. A loving husband and father forced to murder his wife and child.
Tonks and Fleur were only slightly behind Harry in reacting, but like Harry they dared not cast any spell that could hurt Hermione. Tonks was a little more aggressive, using bludgeoning and bone breakers, but Harry and Fleur couldn't bring themselves to risk hurting Hermione. So they stuck to mostly jinxes that would disable her: stunners, full body binders, and of course disarming spells.
With Voldemort having found the perfect hostage to guard against Harry or any of the others doing anything excessive, the wraith possessing Hermione was able to keep up with them and even start on the offensive. He tried focusing on Fleur first, possibly hoping that Harry having both the women he loved in danger would cause him to falter. While Fleur wasn't up to casting offensive spells at Hermione, she was more than capable of defensive spells. More earthwalls erupted from the ground, doing more damage to the graveyard and giving Fleur the cover to avoid Voldemort's spells. Being a seasoned Auror, Tonks took the opportunity to do the same, only she also added an anti-Disapparation ward that would keep Voldemort from running away. That left only Harry as a target for Voldemort.
Voldemort focusing on him suited Harry fine. As he was sticking to not only milder spells but by coincidence easier spells, he was able to continue to throw spell after spell even as he kept talking, not to Voldemort but to Hermione. "Love, I know this is scary, but I need you to keep fighting for me okay? You are fine, we won't give him the opportunity to vanish with your body, we won't let him hurt you, and we won't let him hurt us,'' Harry said, trying to make sure Hermione didn't lose hope.
Voldemort seemed to take Harry's words as a personal attack and redoubled his efforts. He shot spell after spell at Harry as he used Hermione's well trained body to dance around any spells that made it through his defences. Harry had to start calling on the shield bracer once or twice to keep himself from being hit. Unfortunately, as single-use items at least until he had the time to collect them, the shields just became more of the destroyed graveyard around them.
Then the worst thing happened. Harry tripped on a bit of a broken gravestone. It wasn't enough to take him off his feet, but it was enough for him to stumble, and that was all Voldemort needed. Before Harry could straighten himself out and continue casting, his wand went flying out of his hand, the victim of a well-aimed but silent Expelliarmus Jinx. Before Harry could even think about using his wand-summoning ring, Voldemort, knowing all about the rings Harry had hijacked the Triwizard Tournament radio coverage to advertise, used a quick spell to glue it to the base of a gravestone where it lay.
Harry tried not to panic as he dodged Voldemort's next spell. He tried his summoning ring anyway, hoping that the magic of the ring was stronger than the spell Voldemort used on his wand, but it didn't seem to work. Harry pumped more power into his ring, hoping to overpower the spell. Unfortunately, his ring started to smoke and burn as the Runes he used tried to channel more magic than they were ever designed to.
Harry was desperate. Fleur and Tonks were still fighting, but Voldemort had been holding off all three of them only moments before and he had less opponents now. He couldn't help but remember the memory the Dementors had found in him of his mother desperately trying to wandlessly summon her wand so that she could put up even some resistance to the monster. Harry almost gave into despair at the similarity of the situation, except he was now the one who was wandless and without a way to protect someone he loved.
Harry couldn't help but try. He reached out his hand and tried to use his own magic, not the ring, to call his wand to him. It didn't work, and Harry's wand lay distinctly unmoved where it was. However, Harry felt a pulse of power from inside him. It pulsed a second time, and his left hand was suddenly radiating an emerald green magical aura. The aura seemed to condense into strings, or twisting vines given the colour, and the vines shot out towards Harry's parents' grave. They dug into the grave, horrifying Harry that his magic would do something like that to his parents' eternal resting place. However, barely a second after Harry's hand started glowing green, the vines pulled back to Harry drawing with them what was distinctively a wand.
Harry had no time to think, he snatched the wand out of the air. Any wand, even a badly matched one, would be better than the nothing he had now. As his fingers grabbed the wand, Harry felt a rush like when he had first held his phoenix wand. However, it didn't connect to Harry's magical core, instead it connected to the same power that had just pulled the wand from the ground.
In a flash, Harry had the answer as he understood what was going on. This was his mother's magic calling to his mother's wand. Once more, everything that was left of his mother was doing everything it could to help him survive an attack by Voldemort. Harry probably could have given you a full essay on why he chose to do what he did next. He could say that because it was his mother's magic, the magic that existed solely to protect him from Voldemort, he had an idea. He could say that it was an act of desperation because Voldemort was a wraith and he knew that this spell would get through any shielding without hurting Hermione. But the truth of the matter was this; in the moment, it just felt right.
Harry lifted up his mother's wand and pointed it at Voldemort, Harry summoned every drop of his mother's strength that he could feel coursing through him, and he shouted as loud and as clear as he possibly could, "EXPECTO PATRONUM!"
Emerald green mist poured from Harry's mother's wand and formed into a doe, an emerald green doe that then charged directly at Hermione and Voldemort. Voldemort tried to put up a shield, but the green patronus dove right through it. When it looked like it was about to run through Hermione, it instead dove into her, like it was trying to possess her.
Hermione screamed a blood curdling cry of anguish. It was clear there was pain like nothing she had ever felt before. It tore at the hearts of Harry and Fleur, but it also gave them hope because they could also see Voldemort being pushed out of Hermione's body, and while Hermione was sharing the pain it wasn't actually hers, it was Voldemort's.
It took maybe thirty seconds but Voldemort was forced out of Hermione's body. Hermione didn't pass out, but she slumped to the ground exhausted. Voldemort tried to threaten Harry, but the doe was having none of it and burst from Hermione's chest and charged right at him. Voldemort abandoned his attempt at grandstanding and fled. The doe returned to Hermione, appearing to nuzzle at her cheek with her nose for a second before turning back into green mist and flowing back into Harry.
Harry and Fleur immediately rushed to Hermione, needing to reassure themselves that their girlfriend was going to be okay. While the three of them cried and hugged it out, the Auror in Tonks took over. The first thing she did was send a message to the D.M.L.E. requesting a cleanup crew. With this much destruction, it was going to take some work to preserve the Statute of Secrecy.
The old priest that they had seen earlier came wandering out, nervously clutching at what looked to be a Bible and said to Tonks, "I… is it over?"
Tonks nodded. "For now, yeah."
"Are you demons?" he asked.
Tonks had been warned about situations like this in training, as sometimes religious folk were still in shock seeing magic and trying to fit it into a framework that they already believed in. "No, just people. People with more power than most, but just people." Tonks avoided the words wizard, witch or magic. She didn't want to risk triggering some 'suffer not a witch to live' rage. She could memory charm him, but she was tired and the people who could do a much better job of it were on their way. If he was gonna calmly wait then she wasn't going to change that.
The priest seemed to accept her answer. "I was watching your group from the rectory. It's Halloween. Sometimes people get funny ideas about graveyards on Halloween. I saw the boy talking to a grave."
Tonks looked over at the gravestone of James and Lily with a wince. The top half was completely shattered. Sirius was laying behind it, stable and protected by a few spells she had cast on him before she had joined the fighting. "It's the grave of his parents. It's the anniversary of their death."
"Ah. So why the fighting?" He asked. "A boy visiting his parents grave on the anniversary of their death is sad, but it hardly seems like a good reason to desecrate a hallowed resting place." He was looking at the bodies of the Death Eaters as he mentioned desecration.
"It's a long and complicated story but the simple answer is politics, discrimination, and that boy having a tendency to kill people trying to murder him. He's a good kid, stretches the idea of reasonable responses occasionally, but it's always in self-defence so I can't be mad at him and I'm a bloody police officer. Some people really do not like that the boy refuses to die," Tonks explained without any detail. The man would forget it all soon anyway, she was only telling him this much because she was sure it would be more effort to ignore him.
"Given that the kid seems more concerned about the young lady than fighting, it seems to me like the simple answer is to stop trying to kill the boy."
Tonks couldn't help it, she let out a snort of laughter. "The problem is the people trying to kill him don't have enough sense to realise that." She would have said more but there were suddenly loud cracks all around them. Understandably, Harry, Fleur, and even Hermione all jumped to their feet brandishing wands. Tonks had to calm them down quickly as it was the cleaning crew she had called.
A cleaning crew was an informal name for a team of witches and wizards who came in to hide evidence of magic from the muggle authorities. There were people who could fix things, people who could alter the memories of witnesses, people who could throw up some quick and dirty muggle-repelling wards, and (very importantly) a medi witch or wizard who could stabilise anyone injured and transport them to St Mungos.
They all quickly got to work. The priest was taken and his memory modified. As far as he was now concerned, there had been a gas leak that popped off, causing the damage. Nobody was hurt, and he was helping the insurance people with information like who was buried where so that the headstones could be fixed correctly. Shattered headstones were being repaired, dirt walls used for defence were broken down and turned back into pristine lawns, and bodies were being catalogued and cleared up.
It was all extremely efficient, the clean up crews having had way too much practice after recent Death Eater attacks on muggles. The rumour around the office was that the Death Eaters view hunting muggles as a sport. Tonks didn't know if that was true, but honestly wouldn't be surprised if it was.
The medi witch who had come with the group had apparated Sirius to St. Mungos before coming back for Hermione. Harry and Fleur would have to follow on their own. Harry, however, was waiting for Tonks to acknowledge him.
"Hey kid, what can I do for you?" she finally asked.
"You're the senior Auror on site. According to everyone else around here, Fleur and I can't leave without your permission. We want to follow Hermione to the hospital."
That gave Tonks a mental shake. She was currently in charge of this mess of bodies and destruction. Though considering who the dead bodies belonged to, Tonks didn't exactly feel bad about it. The fact that Bellatrix had a strong resemblance to Tonks's mother did hammer home just how close she had come to not surviving this. "Yeah, you can leave. There will be paperwork and a list of questions a mile long, but I will find you when it's needed."
Harry nodded. He was just about to walk away to collect Fleur when he turned back. He hesitated for a moment before he said, "As morbid and disgusting as it is, I'm claiming Lestrange's head as a spoil of war. I will explain why to you later, but for now Fleur and I need to get to Hermione." And he turned and walked away, leaving a confused and nauseated Tonks behind him. He took Fleur by the arm and the two disappeared.
-ϟϟϟ-
Harry, Fleur, and Sirius were all seated around Hermione's bed in St. Mungos. Sirius's head wound, while potentially dangerous if left untreated, was fixed up in seconds by a healer with a few flicks of his wand and a potion for the concussion. Sirius was burping purple bubbles occasionally, but that was a known side effect of the potion and he had been told it would end within six hours and was nothing to worry about.
Hermione was grumbling about not being allowed to leave. She was physically uninjured. Mentally stressed after what happened, but that was expected, and she didn't feel off. However, possession, even a brief one like Hermione experienced, had the healers being cautious. They wanted to monitor Hermione for twenty-four hours and make sure she was herself and that there weren't going to be any complications.
"This is absolutely ridiculous. I am fine. I wanna go back to school and lose myself in my books for a few days. That will do me far more good than being stuck here."
Harry smiled. "You know if I was the one the healers wanted to monitor for twenty-four hours, you would be telling me my health is important and I need to do what the healers say," he said.
"But stuck here for a whole day, nothing to read and nothing to do, it's gonna drive me insane. I need something to keep my mind occupied." Hermione didn't need to say that without a distraction she would be left thinking about what happened earlier.
"So Harry, why do you have your mother's wand?" asked Sirius, changing the subject.
"You know it's my mother's?" asked Harry
"Sure, I was the one who told her it wouldn't affect her wand if she carved some designs in it. Helped her finalise and practise her design. I would know that wand anywhere. Your dad got really annoyed with me because at that point Lily wasn't talking to him. They were fighting over something stupid and we spent a few evenings working together," Sirius explained. "Now how do you have it? I thought it was buried with her."
"It was." Harry explained to his godfather what had happened as he ran his fingers over the ornately carved lily flowers on the handle of his mother's wand. "So now I have two wands, each one responding to a different magical core in me. I'm not sure what to do."
"You should keep both wands," said Fleur. "Especially as your mother's Patronus could somehow save someone from possession."
"I don't think it was his mother's Patronus so much as Harry's mother's magic hates Voldemort. She died wishing with everything she had to protect Harry from Voldemort. I think it would only work if Voldemort was possessing someone, because it was insubstantial and could get inside me to where Voldemort was hiding," said Hermione. She looked at Harry and had a look of indecision on her face.
"What?" asked Harry
"I think your mother talked to me while the patronus was fighting Voldemort. I could hear a woman's voice in head encouraging me and saying it would be okay." Hermione said, nervous that Harry could possibly get upset over something that was so special to him as his mother's words being given to her.
Harry though just pulled her into a hug. He wished he could share his parents with his girlfriends like they shared their parents with him. It was impossible but that Hermione had been able to experience even a pale imitation of a conversation with his mom was something that made Harry happy.
They sat together for the next hour talking, but once he was sure that Hermione was fine he had errands to run. He first sent a message to Headmistress McGonagall telling her what had happened and that he would be staying with Hermione until she was let out. After that was the Ministry, where he needed to claim Lestrange's body if he was going to do what he had planned. As expected, he first was pulled into the D.M.L.E. where he was questioned over the incident. Despite the fact that killing Lestrange and Death Eaters was perfectly legal because of the declared blood feud and self-defence, the powers that be still wanted to know what happened and to have reports filed in triplicate for their records.
Then there was the breach of the Statute of Secrecy. No declared blood feud gave a magical person the right to risk the exposure of the magical world. After a few hours of questions and Auror Tonks's report, it was deemed that Harry's actions and those of the people with him fell under the self-defence exception, as did his use of magic outside of school. Even the Auror questioning Harry practically admitted that, as he had passed his O.W.L.s, as long as he didn't do anything ridiculous with his magic, nobody was going to worry about his magic use now.
Harry's next stop was to collect Lestrange's body. He had expected to have to go to some specialist department for that, but he was already in the right place. Lestrange's body was considered evidence, so it was in an evidence locker. There was a grizzled old witch who was in charge of the magical equivalent of an autopsy room and had already determined what Lestrange had died of. Though to be fair, a piercing curse to the forehead wasn't exactly subtle. She also had done scans and filed more reports.
She was reluctant at first to hand over the body to Harry. Even if Harry's kill had been legal, the older witch found it crass for Harry to be the one to claim the body. To be fair, Harry agreed with her, what he was going to do was crass, but he thought it was necessary. He explained why he was going to do what he was going to do and the woman reluctantly agreed.
Harry left with Lestrange's body in a roughly transfigured wooden box that he shrunk to fit in his pocket; there would be no dignity for the bitch. Harry considered how he was going to do what he needed next. This time last year he could have just walked into their offices, but now, by their design, he had no idea where their offices were. He didn't want to wait for an owl, so that only left a Patronus message.
He concentrated on the person he needed, called up his Patronus, and said, "Rita, it's Harry Potter. I think I have a story for you. I'll be in the Ministry foyer for the next hour. Hope to see you soon." Once Harry was finished, his silvery gryphon ran off and disappeared through a wall.
Harry made his way back to the more populated part of the D.M.L.E. Apparently, just like regular people, wizards didn't like having a morgue right under their nose and had put the office away from everyone else. He actually found Rita in the D.M.L.E. waiting for him with an Auror. Apparently she had gotten word that something had happened and had come to ask around. She had been with the Auror when the Patronus message appeared, which, despite the fact he had felt safe casting magic in the Ministry just because there was no one around, it meant nothing when you sent that magic into the middle of an office belonging to a senior Auror. Luckily the Aurors didn't have much to do with underage magic, that was handled by the regular law enforcement wizards and not the combat specialist dark wizard and violent offenders specialists.
Even so, Harry got a ten minute lecture, though more than half of it was on the danger of sending a Patronus message, because if nothing else you had no way to know if the recipient was for example having lunch in a muggle establishment surrounded by muggles. That would have been a major breach of the Statute of Secrecy. Harry ended up getting a semi-official warning, which amounted to as long as he didn't do something so stupid again, nothing would go on record. However, if he risked the Statute of Secrecy like that again, then he would be in trouble. Harry was sure that he was getting off so lightly because it was him, the Boy-Who-Lived person fighting Voldemort and all that. They didn't want to risk the public backlash if they actually got to the point where they snapped Harry's wand.
Harry and Rita walked together as they left the D.M.L.E. "So Harry, despite how it turned out, your message said you had a story for me?" Rita asked with a slightly predatory smile on her face like a cat watching a goldfish.
"What do you know about what happened a few hours ago?
"Not a lot. You were involved in a fight at your parents' gravesite and that there were some dead bodies."
"Okay off the record for now?" Harry asked.
"I can't write a story off the record, Harry." She rolled her eyes.
Harry gave her a predatory smile of his own. "Trust me, give me a few hours and you will have a great story. I just want to discuss what's gonna happen in the next few hours and what context I want it presented in."
She agreed so Harry started filling her in on what had happened that day. He told her everything that had happened at the graveside. Then he told her what he had in his pocket and what his plan for it was.
-ϟϟϟ-
Harry and Rita were currently sitting in the Longbottom ancestral home with Neville and his grandmother. Harry had taken Rita back to his house and Floo-called the Longbottom matriarch from there. Technically, he could have done so from the Ministry, but Harry really didn't like the idea of pointing his ass at a room full of strangers while his head was in the fire.
He had asked for a meeting with the formidable woman and Neville, not as Harry Potter but as the Warlock Potter and the Heir Black. Madam Longbottom had agreed and asked for an hour to prepare and to get Neville home from school. When Harry and Rita arrived, it was extremely formal as it needed to be. They were served a few refreshments and chatted a little about nothing of importance, but the rules of being polite required it. Soon, though, it came down to business.
"I must admit Warlock Potter, I'm curious as to what your business is and why you need to bring a… journalist," Madam Longbottom asked. There was a slight pause before she referred to Rita as a journalist but given how Rita sometimes wrote her stories Harry couldn't blame her.
"There are certain aspects of this meeting I would like chronicled in the Prophet for the sake of the war effort. As to what that is…" Harry pulled out an ornate wooden box he had made for this. "The Houses of Potter and Black would like to present this gift to the House of Longbottom. It's honestly been too long in coming, but it has only now become available." He placed the chest on the table between them. "I would, uh, brace yourself before you open that."
Madam Longbottom didn't hesitate, she opened the chest revealing the head of Bellatrix Lestrange nestled on a red fabric pillow staring up blankly at the ceiling. There was stunned silence from the woman and Neville moved to see what it was.
"Earlier today, Lestrange and some Death Eaters attacked me, Fleur, Hermione, Sirius, and a cousin of his and mine that happens to be an Auror. During that fight, with a little aid from Hermione, I was able to kill Lestrange. I know you would have preferred captured, but this was the best I could do in the circumstance."
Harry soon found his arms full of a crying old woman who could barely say thank you, she was so overwhelmed. As the woman in his arms sobbed out her gratitude at one of the people who tortured her son finally getting some of the justice she deserved, he knew he had made the right choice in not delaying delivering this news.
A/N
the author would like to allay any fears that they are suffering from an addiction to energy drinks. I enjoy every minute of it. now don't forget to pay your comment/review tax