InsaneJournal

 

Chapter 7:

 

Harry paced. He was too wound up to draw, to agitated even to think. He had no options. Draco had been gone for hours with no word, Hermione hadn’t tried to contact him—nothing. 

 

The idea of going to Muggle authorities and reporting Draco missing made him choke back laughter.

 

Harry knew he was just this side of hysterical, knew that if he only had his magic he would be out there doing something—but he had no magic. He was helpless in the magical world. The Ministry had kidnapped his lover and his friend, possibly murdering them both—or worse—and he couldn’t even break into the bloody Ministry.

 

He shivered to realize that this was what the Dursleys must have felt when they found him on their doorstep. He had no control over anything—it was no wonder they’d been so harsh with him; they’d been terrified of him since he was an infant.

 

And now he was terrified, and alone, waiting for the Aurors or whatever they were called now to come for him, waiting for the morning paper, festooned with a picture of Draco receiving whatever had replaced the Kiss.

 

A single loud knock shook the flat door. 

 

Harry started to draw the wand he didn’t have, wished for a gun, and settled for moving behind the sofa and hoisting a decorative blob of wrought-iron.

 

A muffled mutter of spell-casting caused the door to swing open silently. Draco had told Harry about the restrictions of his probation—he couldn’t even set up decent defenses on his own flat—so the fact that Alomohora worked didn’t shock Harry.

 

What shocked him was the sight of Draco.

 

The Auror shoved Draco inside. Draco went to one knee before managing to recover his balance. He didn’t attempt to use his arms to brace himself or to stand: he did so slowly and gracelessly, his eyes focussed on something beyond the flat’s walls.

 

“Draco?” Harry whispered.

 

Those grey eyes didn’t even flick his way. 

 

The Auror snorted. “Keep your dog on a leash next time, Potter.”

 

“WHAT DID YOU DO?” Harry roared, brandishing his weapon.

 

The Auror smirked and Disapparated.

 

There was a fine trembling through Harry’s body—but he didn’t notice it until he tried to clutch Draco’s shoulders. “Draco? Draco, love, can you hear me?” He bit his lip. “ Hey, Malfoy! Ferret boy! Look at me!” He shook those familiar shoulders and got no more reaction than if he’s been a ghost.

 

“Draco, we’ve been through too much—you have to come back, I know you’re in there, you have to come back...”

 

Afterwards Harry wasn’t entirely certain how the next few hours passed. Draco refused to eat, refused to speak, refused to sit. He stood or he lay on his back, looking unnervingly corpse-like. His limbs were pliable, he blinked, there was nothing wrong with him physically. Harry remembered talking to this living, breathing mannequin, but he couldn’t remember about what. 

 

In the end, Harry sat and stared into the middle distance as the night moved to its coldest hour. He no longer noticed Draco’s presence and if someone had asked him what he was thinking he would have been unable to say. Everything was outside of him, even his mind. He watched its workings as if not merely a stranger but a foreigner who could not understand the language.

 

H returned to himself by careful but unplanned steps. This was how you worked your neck. This is your hand hurting because you’ve held it clenched too long. This is how you feel when you’re... Angry.

 

That realization blinked Harry back to himself.

 

He noticed a foul smell and a brown puddle at Draco’s feet. 

 

It was then that he realized he wasn’t angry. He had passed beyond anger to some sweet nirvana of hate.

 

“Scourgify.”

 

It was as automatic as if he’s never lost his magic. The feces and urine vanished.

 

And Harry Potter smiled.

 

*

 

“You can’t—” The reception witch paled after a single second of Harry’s glare. She shoved herself back from her desk, scattering papers as she stood. She was backing towards the exit before Harry had even passed her desk.

 

Draco trailed placidly after him, led by his hand as if he was a small child. He was an island of stillness in the growing chaos. 

 

It was like what Muggles called magic, but no spell Harry knew or, at least, had ever seen cast. It wasn’t merely fear: it was awareness which swept out from Harry’s presence. He could almost feel it flowing out of him, washing over the people, crashing through the walls and rushing up them, down them, filling the Ministry with awareness of his power. 

 

He wondered if Voldemort had ever felt like this.

 

There was the panicked flare of continuous green fire as people darted back through the Floos. 

 

But not everyone fled.

 

In fact, as the power hit the Floos, Harry felt as if he was reaching through them, somehow, calling people to him. He didn’t know if it was a hallucination and didn’t much care, even when Kingsley Shacklebolt and Tonks—defrocked Aurors thanks to this new administration—stepped out of the fire. 

 

A small crowd was gathering behind him—Harry knew that. He knew if he bothered he might even recognize some of them. At the moment, though, the only thing of interest to him was the path to the Department of Answers.

 

The mark of Umbridge became more apparent with every step. Gone were the black stones and the echoing floors. The walls were institutional pink, rather like Harry’s primary school, and the floors were covered in wall-to-wall beige carpet. 

 

Kittens capered in paintings all the way to the Room of Information. 

 

“What are you—”

 

Harry ignored Umbridge, letting his eyes roam over the room. He knew what Hermione would do in this situation: she would study the set-up and try to understand the spells working under the surface.

 

Draco had laughed at him for seeing only what was apparent to the eye and not the truth. He had said that was why Harry might be powerful but would never be a great wizard. Harry had said something about arrogant purebloods at the time, but this time...

 

This time, Harry laughed.

 

In a room full of people—furious Questioners, ferocious Aurors, and prisoners, both the terrified and those who stood mute and absent like Draco—Harry laughed.

 

Hermione stood beside Snape who stood beside Lupin in a strange absence of rancor. They all three stared straight ahead, almost as if they had been Kissed. 

 

And yet there, yelling at him silently, were Hermione and Draco and Snape and Lupin and Luna and Neville and so many others, clustered in one corner of a mirror. No, Harry realized, clustered in one corner of two separate mirrors, and then stretching back into infinity in silvery webs of reflection and refraction. Complicated magic, immense magic. The sort of magic Snape, with his astral wandering, understood better than most as he herded old allies away from the panicking people who nearly filled the mirrors.

 

Snape to infinity. It was an amusing thought.

 

Umbridge kept talking, pacing him as he walked further into the room. His companions had broken off to duel with hers, prisoners shuffled in their chains as he and Umbridge passed among them.

 

“Why are you here, you filthy lying little Squib?” Umbridge demanded. She was careful not to stand between the two mirrors. Harry didn’t mind.

 

He just wondered for the first time if his ability to throw equaled his ability to catch.

 

Draco’s object d’art crashed through one mirror.

 

Draco gasped. Harry didn’t recognize the spell Draco used, but Umbridge finally, finally stopped talking, and Harry was filled with the same perfect peace the completion of a sketch always afforded him.

 

Spells and images they might be... but, when you got down to it, they were only two mirrors.

 

*

 

“Well.”

 

Harry propped his head on Draco’s shoulder. “Well.”

 

The Ministry—much to the alarm of the Muggle authorities—was a smoldering crater before them. 

 

“Pumpkin juice?” Tonks asked. Harry took both glasses just in time to save Draco from being sloshed. 

 

Their vantage on top of a nearby Muggle office building gave the curious wizarding folk an excellent place to study the Muggle equivalent of Aurors.

 

“The Statute of Secrecy is blown to hell and back,” Kingsley said. He didn’t sound particularly upset by it.

 

Hermione accepted her own glass from Tonks’ ever-filling jug. “They’ll just blame it on terrorists,” she explained. 

 

“Innocent folks bein’ blamed for us,” a young Auror said.

 

“Don’t worry—there’ll probably be plenty of people eager to claim credit,” Hermione assured him. That devolved into a discussion of Muggle terrorism, which became Muggle politics, and which Harry happily ignored.

 

“So, what now?” Draco whispered.

 

Harry chuckled and pressed his face into the crook of Draco’s neck. “Guess.”

 

“We live happily ever after?”

 

“Yeah. We do.”

 

And they did.