HP Widdershins, Part 6
Cell phones: THE most useful battlefield tool since the invention of chocolate, doncha know.
HP Widdershins.
An illustrated, alternate universe, OOC fanfic by Didodikali.
Part One, in which Harry Potter grows a brain.
Part Two, in which Dudley Dursley grows a personality.
Part Three, in which Hermione Granger seizes the reins.
Part Four, in which Harry Potter speaks softly.
Part Five, in which Dudley opens packages.
And now, Part Six, in which Hermione plays with fire.
Oct 24
After spending four hours destroying Inferi zombies, and then five hours watching Dementor reinforcements come sweeping in to blend their numbers with the zombies, and then half an hour eating dinner like he was actually hungry (I'd been too upset to do more than pick at my dinner), Harry had the nerve to say to me, "Sieges are boring, eh."
In a fit of pique I made him accompany me on a round of chocolate distribution. There's always someone who hasn't packed enough chocolate ration to cope with the unpleasant effects of being surrounded by Dementors, and I decided getting chocolate from the great and wonderful (bit of a git once you get to know him) Harry Potter would improve morale. Most everyone's morale was a little worse for wear after seeing all those Dementors roll in, and the sensible strategy of waiting until all the Dementors had arrived before sending them away with the Patronus mines was downright painful in practice. I just wanted them gone, gone so I could think properly and gone so I could risk sending the teams out to take on the Inferi again.
"I hate playing fucking mascot," said Harry when I shoved a bag into his hands. "Also the next batch of napalm is pretty much ready."
"Shut up and eat some of that chocolate yourself," I said.
We went up to the gate tower first to see Ron. Going by the ring of chocolate round his mouth, Ron was following standard procedure. In fact he'd eaten everything he had already, so we restocked his pockets. I attempted to pet Draco, who was crammed down the front of Ron's coat, but the little shit bit me. "Ow!" I said as Draco licked his bloody teeth at me. "Have you remembered to give him chocolate too, Ron? It might improve his temper."
Harry laughed balefully at that. "Won't help. He bites me all the time. He's been biting me for weeks."
I took a bite of my own chocolate bar to prevent myself from throttling the little beast.
"It's because you two are so grabby. You can't just walk up and poke people in the head with no introductions or hellos. It's not polite," said Ron, like he thought we were stupid. Ron, he's a ferret not a hippogriff.
Luna arrived then to take her shift with Ron. "I'd personally love to know what pleasantries Draco used to get into your robes," she said.
"No, see, he wasn't pleasant; I was pleasant, and I put him in there. I'm good with animals," said Ron to her, cluelessly.
"You're a bit too subtle sometimes," I told Luna as I dragged her away from the boys and filled her pockets and her hands with chocolate.
"Me? You think? Are you certain he has a pulse? Maybe he's a ferretsexual. Ewwww. Seriously, how do you attempt to seduce a boy whose got a rabid ferret down his jumper? How did you get him? I bet you used a love potion on him," she said, but then the chocolate I'd forced on her began to take effect and she smiled.
"I admit I never had to make my way past a rabid ferret, but keep trying," I said. "Those freckles go all the way down. It's quite worth it. And may I say, you're looking exceedingly fierce today."
She laughed and skipped back to Ron to start their rounds around the outer wall.
I collected Harry and we met up with Lupin on the stairs and together went on up to the south tower where Padma, Parvati, Ernie, and Neville were trading off sentinel duty, with Parvati currently taking her turn keeping her eyes on the crystal ball.
Padma was whining, which was not like her. Probably strung out by Dementors like Luna and everyone else and didn't even know it. "Why did we get shunted off to the night shift? It's not fair! There no way I'm going to be able to sleep during the day," she said, "And one more cold lunch eaten on top of this tower and I'll-"
"-Better a handful of dried dates and contentment with that than to own the Gate of Peacocks and be kicked in the head by an angry llama," said Parvati without looking up from the ball.
"Camel! You get kicked in the head by a camel! Not a llama!" said Padma.
"Says who? I bet a big llama could kick someone in the head quite as hard as a camel," said Parvati.
"Aaaaaagh! Camel, camel, camel, camel!" said Padma. I shoved chocolate into her hands and she absently ate it.
"Imagine getting kicked in the head by a hippogriff," said Neville, eyeing the feathery mounds curled up on top of the west tower. Neville doesn't usually tend to the morbid so I gave him chocolate, too, and Harry offered chocolate around to the rest of them.
Harry sat down next to Ernie and peered into the south tower's crystal ball with Parvati. It was linked to the spybats we'd spread around the treetops for miles around, and could scope out details all the way from the far end of the Forbidden Forest to as close as the shrubs and trees around the castle grounds. Parvati and Ernie started showing Harry how to move the view from bat to bat, and they passed round a chunk of Harry's chocolate.
Padma and Lupin and I were just getting down to a meaty theoretical discussion on the magical properties of the cacao bean when Harry shrieked and jumped away from the table and the crystal ball. He grabbed Parvati's shiny new broom and zipped away across the tiled roofs of the lower castle towers.
"What's he up to?" I said.
Parvati shrugged and twiddled the crystal ball towards me. "That's over by the rose gardens. Northwest wall," she said. I looked in to see a closeup of what I'd been watching in aggregate all afternoon: loads and loads of zombies and Dementors. Yick. These particular ones seemed fairly well-preserved, but otherwise they weren't especially- oh, how vile. It was Harry's mum and dad. And they were zombies. Shit.
"He's going down there!" I screeched, "Catch him!"
Ernie and Padma looked at each other, then grabbed their brooms from where they leaned against the wall, and they both dove after Harry. Gold and green flames, Harry's fire, erupted in the sky over the northwest wall. I looked back down into the crystal ball and watched Harry blow a ring of fire around himself and the Inferi. Not enough, Harry; you need more at your back than that. But he turned his attention to what was left of his parents and he burned the dark off of them until even their bones and all the air for meters around burned away.
It's a trap, Harry. The Dementors hidden amongst the zombies slid right through Harry's fire ring. Turn around, Harry. He didn't. They seized him and all his fires went out. They fought over him while he tried to get his wand arm free, and then the Dementor that won the right to eat him lowered its hood down over the top of his head. I watched the image in the crystal ball of Harry opening his mouth, teeth flashing over dieing flames, heard the sound of his scream as it echoed over the castle, and then Harry's image disappeared in silver light as Ernie and Padma's Patronuses combined, covered him and drove off the dark. Ernie and Padma arrived a second later and they grabbed Harry by the arms and hauled him back to the tower. Harry was a dead weight dangling from their brooms, not trying to hold himself on their brooms at all, and he slipped and fell from their hands as they got him back over the wall. Neville caught Harry before he hit the stone and held him up while we all gathered around to inspect him.
Harry was limp and silent, his eyes were open and his hair was sucked up into a bizarre point. It looked like the games you play in the tub while washing your hair when you're a kid, but his hair wasn't wet. Maybe it looked more like he'd been mauled by a miniature tornado. His hair was perfectly dry, held in place by static electricity or... something. I reached out and knocked my hand through it and his hair fell back down into its usual mess.
Parvati, who'd been studying mediwizardry in her spare time, stuck her wand in Harry's ear. "He's fine. They didn't have time to find his mouth. Get some chocolate into him. Fuck, if he's going to jump into the Dementors like that, we may as well just coat him with chocolate all over."
Not a bad idea. Harry blinked at me and seemed to wake up. I looked into his face, trying to get a bead into his eyes so I could take a quick Legilimency check to confirm Parvati's opinion that his soul was really still all in there, but I had no choice but to lean well back from him. "Whoof! It smells like you snogged Satan's rectum! Must you jump into every possible fight you see? And must you use the same technique to solve every problem? I'm trying to hold you in reserve!"
Harry laughed, hitting me with the remnants of his dragon breath again. "I," he said, "feel great. I feel- Whoooooo. Awesome." He sounded stoned out of his mind, but at least his mind was still in there.
I looked at him carefully. His clothes were not corroding. His lips were still attached. His tongue wasn't at all burned off. He really was fine. I grabbed his shoulders and shook him. "Reserve! Reserve! What part of reserve don't you understand?" His head bobbled back and forth satisfyingly.
Parvati peeled me off of him and peered into his eyes herself. "Don't scramble his brains any more, Hermione. So your head doesn't hurt, Harry?"
Neville reached out and delicately picked up Harry's fringe. "Where's your scar?" he asked Harry. My mouth dropped open as I stared at Harry. Neville was right. Harry's scar was gone.
Harry giggled. "They're free. I'm fine. I'm really, wonderfully, fabulously fine."
"Here," said Lupin, handing him a copper canteen. "It's hot cocoa."
Harry politely took a swig, which seemed to sober him up. He stared down at the canteen in his hand for one long frozen second. "You're all right?" asked Lupin. "Truly?"
Harry unsheathed his wand, silently sliced the whole top off the metal canteen, grabbed Parvati's broom again, and jumped off the parapet. Again.
Lupin regarded the crumpled neck of his canteen that had been dropped at his feet. "A thousand points from Gryffindor," he said.
"Harry!" I yelled and looked over the parapet after him.
Staying where we could easily see him, Harry flew down to the base of our tower, and out over the assembled hordes that surrounded us. They jumped and reached up their sticky fingers to him, but he kept out of their reach this time and flew sensibly, so Ernie and Padma stayed put. Harry singled out a Dementor, circled over it until it looked up, and dumped the contents of the sliced canteen into the Dementor's hood. It melted. It fell into itself, went transparent, and then spattered over the ground as smoking rain. Poof. Just like that. It did not reform.
"Hahah!" shrieked Harry and he flew up away from all the nasty, grabby hands and back towards us. He tossed the ruined canteen at our feet and looped and rolled over our heads.
"Is he on Luck potion?" asked Neville, next to me. I shook my head.
"How did you-" I started to say when Harry had landed and eaten more chocolate.
"Just a good guess," he said, grinning from ear to ear.
"Oh my god, let's get rid of all those Dementors right now, so everyone can actually get some sleep for tomorrow," I said, "Would you call Dobby?"
Harry called Dobby, and when I asked him whether he thought the Hogwarts elves would help us defend the castle he said, "Yes! Ah. Well. But trickings and sweepings doesn't exactly defend. Dobby's friends may only do what is theirs, if Harry Potter's friends sees what Dobby means."
"Would you cook for us? Big massive offensive cooking?" I asked.
"Oh, yes," said Dobby, hopping up and down excitedly.
"How much cocoa powder do you have in stores," I asked, knowing the house elves had stocked up for the siege.
"As much as Miss would like. Many years of supplies!" said Dobby proudly.
"Enough to cover the entirety of the Hogwarts grounds in a drenching rain of hot cocoa?" I said.
Dobby's eyes got as big as bludgers. "No. Not that much."
I pulled out my folded, spindled, personal map of the Hogwarts grounds that Dudley had laminated for me and I handed Dobby my wax pencil. "Show me. Draw me a circle that describes what area we could drench with hot cocoa." Dobby drew a circle, maybe the size of a bottlecap on my map, which was maybe the size of a quidditch field. Big, but nowhere near big enough to do the job.
"Ah," I said, "So much for the idea of destroying them. There's too many Dementors for us to chase every one down individually, we just can't take that much exposure to them. I suppose we'll just have to pop the Patronus mines, and hope the Dementors get scattered very far away and don't come back very quickly."
"Sorry," said Dobby.
"No," said Neville, looking over my shoulder, "Corral them."
"What?" I said.
"I walked the perimeter and the ley line through the castle with Flitwick," said Neville, "He showed me exactly how the triggering charms work and how they link to the keystone spell, and we don't have to go back out to the perimeter to fiddle with things; we could do it from McGonagall's office. The Patronus mines are currently set to expand outward from the castle in an expanding star pattern, to drive the Dementors out and away. But we could change the pattern in which the Patronuses pop up."
Neville pulled out his wand and started drawing in the air. I must get him to show me that charm one day.
"Suppose we popped the outer perimeter first and sent the Patronuses round in a circle. Then we we could pop each radius line individually all the way around until we had them all compressed into a skinny sliver of pie," he said.
"Muahahaha! It'd be like shooting fish in a barrel. What do you need to do this right away?" I asked him.
"Well, said Neville, "We'd need to wake McGonagall so she'd be ready to release the keystone spell, we'd need Professor Flitwick to adjust the deployment pattern, and we'd need me and at least one other person to hold up the sticky ends of the charms with him-"
"Me! Me!" said Parvati, "I'll do it!" Padma stared at her sister and then silently took Parvati's place in front of the map and the crystal ball. Parvati ran over to Neville.
"Looks like you have a volunteer, Neville," I said.
Neville seemed nonplussed. "Uh. I- Yeah. So, two people to hold the ends of the charms with Professor Fliwick while he tweaks them and to provide him some extra power while he does it. And then we'd need twenty or thirty people in the air to drop the cocoa. And we'd need lots of cocoa."
"Elves will make you bathtubs full of lovely, boiling hot cocoa!" said Dobby.
"How far can you go?" I asked Dobby, "Do we need a few chocolate-coated Quidditch teams to pour the hot cocoa on the Dementors, or can the elves do that?"
"Elves be delighted to serve hot cocoa to our guests," said Dobby with a little wriggle of joy. Dobby and Parvati put their heads together and started discussing details, and Neville called Flitwick.
The crystal ball chimed. I joined Padma as she bent over it and focused the image. "What is that? Is that a dragon?" she said. Lupin pulled out his phone.
Ernie and Harry went over and huddled around the crystal ball. "Um. Looks very much like one," said Ernie.
"Charlie reports no authorized dragons on the loose," said Lupin. I looked over at his old map.
"Can I leave you in charge of handling this?" I asked Harry. It was closing fast, had showed up on the edge of the Hogwarts map, and, according to its little moving dragon-shaped dot, was named Puckles.
"Thurrre, I can take a drrragon," Harry said around suddenly enormous fangs, and he grabbed Parvati's broom and climbed up onto the parapet. His hair grew longer and wilder, he hunched over the broom...
I seized him by the hem of his robe. "That method will kill it, right? Charlie would be upset." And if you keep breathing flames and acid like a dragon yourself, you'll blow off all your tastebuds permanently, you damn fool. I doubt you can yet hold your tongue for more than half an hour. And you're going with backup if I have to duct tape them to your arse. "How'd you like to take your team with you and let them get some practice in?"
"Rrrrrr," said Harry, but the fire in his eyes damped down to a smoulder and he reeled his hair and teeth back in. He jumped down off the parapet. "All right. All right. I'll call my team then. And I'll want Millicent and Lavender and Zach from yours. And Luna and a couple thestrals, and a lot of disillusionment charms. Professor Lupin, would you do the charms?" Lupin nodded and pulled out his wand. Harry pulled out his phone and called up Millicent, Parvati pulled out hers and called up the rest of Harry's team.
I leaned against the nice comforting stone and thought for a moment. If Voldemort had any grasp of strategy he'd send us another dragon right after we've engaged the first. Right? Middle of the night after we've spent the day fighting zombies, there couldn't be a more perfect time for Voldemort to bung everything he has at us. There's got to be more coming. And with the grounds covered in monsters, anyone who falls is toast. I should definitely clear the grounds now instead of waiting to see if all the Dementors have finished rolling in. And do the napalm on the Inferi right after. Maybe? Or would I be waking everyone for nothing and exhausting them for tomorrow? Aaaagh!
I called Ron for a sanity check. "Ron, we have an incoming dragon and Harry wants Luna for his team. Send her on up here. And tell me, if you were Voldemort, would this one dragon be it or would there be more coming?"
"Ahh... There'd be more. Lots more. I'll scramble my team, shall I? And maybe Pansy's?" he said. "Oh, and dibs on Bullseye Creevey for my team. Bye."
Harry's team started landing on the tower with their brooms and their air pistols and wands. Harry broke open the potions ammo stores and loaded them all up, and I watched him use Neville's trick to draw a moving picture of the strategy he wanted them to use. I hadn't practiced on a team with Harry in ages and his tactics all looked like Quidditch to me. It'd probably still work though. Lupin smacked them all with Disillusionments and they all jumped off the tower in a group.
I called McGonagall. "This is the head mistress's sue-yullar foon. Who the hell are you?" said some strange man. Was it... Mad Eye Moody?
"Give me that!" said Mcgonagall. "Yes?"
"Um..." I said. "Ah... Ma'am, we have a report of an incoming dragon. Harry and his team have gone to meet it, but we suspect more are on the way. We also have a plan coming together to rid the grounds of our assorted non-flying vermin and I think we'll be needing your assistance with the keystone spell. And I'd like to do it before any of our air forces take a tumble to the ground and get eaten."
"Oh, bother. All right. I'll get dressed and I'll be right up."
"Haha! You just told her you're naked," said Moody in the background.
"Er..." said McGonagall, "I'm certain I can count on your discretion, Miss Granger."
"I'm certain I have no idea what you're referring to," I said. "See you in a minute. We're on the South tower."
"Good girl," said McGonagall and she hung up.
The crystal ball chimed and chimed again. Padma, behind me, said, "Hermione? Come here!" I looked up and the dragon was now visible in the sky over the grounds. It writhed and sparkled but the disillusionment charms meant I couldn't see Harry and his team.
Padma screeched and waved me over to look at Lupin's old map. Harry's team, marked out in little green dots, surrounded the undulating large red dot that was the dragon. Harry's team seemed to be pushing it towards the lake. Fabulous, I don't think there are any Dementors in the lake. Just Inferi. And Squid.
"Not that," said Padma, "Here." She pointed to the far corner of the map, where a sprinkling of more red dots of all sizes was collecting into rows.
"Well, crap," I said and when at that Padma's face fell and Ernie began to look like he might panic, I said, "Oh, pull your socks up. I'd hoped for a bit more time and to run these plans one after another, but we can run them simultaneously. No problem. It'll still work." Did that sound convincing? And calm? Of course it did! They don't know Legilimency; I just have to LOOK like I know what I'm doing. How the fuck did my quickness at punching in phone calls land me this job? Where are my fucking assistants? "Okay, Ernie, Padma, I'll take over here. You two go scramble your houses. I want everyone on their assigned towers in two minutes. We're going to deploy the napalm in the next ten. Go."
Ernie and Padma grabbed their brooms and jumped off the parapets. Lupin was bouncing on his toes impatiently, so I gave him Parvati's forgotten broom and sent him off to scramble my house, and then I sent Moody down to Slytherin with Neville's. McGonagall was seized by Neville, Flitwick and Parvati, and after a quick conference they all ran back down to McGonagall's office. Dobby reappeared with news about the cocoa and I sent him after McGonagall's team.
I counted the gathering dots and rubbed my head. I need Snape. And some more Weaselys. And to tell Harry he can go ahead and take the brakes off. Too bad for Puckles. How many Aurors do we have sleeping down in the dining hall? I stabbed at the buttons on my phone again, as more teams assembled on the towers around me...
~
The next part, Part 7, is NC-17. You could skip it and go straight to the violence in Part 8, if you wish. Your choice.
Next: Part 7. NC-17
Part 8.
HP Widdershins.
An illustrated, alternate universe, OOC fanfic by Didodikali.
Part One, in which Harry Potter grows a brain.
Part Two, in which Dudley Dursley grows a personality.
Part Three, in which Hermione Granger seizes the reins.
Part Four, in which Harry Potter speaks softly.
Part Five, in which Dudley opens packages.
And now, Part Six, in which Hermione plays with fire.
Oct 24
After spending four hours destroying Inferi zombies, and then five hours watching Dementor reinforcements come sweeping in to blend their numbers with the zombies, and then half an hour eating dinner like he was actually hungry (I'd been too upset to do more than pick at my dinner), Harry had the nerve to say to me, "Sieges are boring, eh."
In a fit of pique I made him accompany me on a round of chocolate distribution. There's always someone who hasn't packed enough chocolate ration to cope with the unpleasant effects of being surrounded by Dementors, and I decided getting chocolate from the great and wonderful (bit of a git once you get to know him) Harry Potter would improve morale. Most everyone's morale was a little worse for wear after seeing all those Dementors roll in, and the sensible strategy of waiting until all the Dementors had arrived before sending them away with the Patronus mines was downright painful in practice. I just wanted them gone, gone so I could think properly and gone so I could risk sending the teams out to take on the Inferi again.
"I hate playing fucking mascot," said Harry when I shoved a bag into his hands. "Also the next batch of napalm is pretty much ready."
"Shut up and eat some of that chocolate yourself," I said.
We went up to the gate tower first to see Ron. Going by the ring of chocolate round his mouth, Ron was following standard procedure. In fact he'd eaten everything he had already, so we restocked his pockets. I attempted to pet Draco, who was crammed down the front of Ron's coat, but the little shit bit me. "Ow!" I said as Draco licked his bloody teeth at me. "Have you remembered to give him chocolate too, Ron? It might improve his temper."
Harry laughed balefully at that. "Won't help. He bites me all the time. He's been biting me for weeks."
I took a bite of my own chocolate bar to prevent myself from throttling the little beast.
"It's because you two are so grabby. You can't just walk up and poke people in the head with no introductions or hellos. It's not polite," said Ron, like he thought we were stupid. Ron, he's a ferret not a hippogriff.
Luna arrived then to take her shift with Ron. "I'd personally love to know what pleasantries Draco used to get into your robes," she said.
"No, see, he wasn't pleasant; I was pleasant, and I put him in there. I'm good with animals," said Ron to her, cluelessly.
"You're a bit too subtle sometimes," I told Luna as I dragged her away from the boys and filled her pockets and her hands with chocolate.
"Me? You think? Are you certain he has a pulse? Maybe he's a ferretsexual. Ewwww. Seriously, how do you attempt to seduce a boy whose got a rabid ferret down his jumper? How did you get him? I bet you used a love potion on him," she said, but then the chocolate I'd forced on her began to take effect and she smiled.
"I admit I never had to make my way past a rabid ferret, but keep trying," I said. "Those freckles go all the way down. It's quite worth it. And may I say, you're looking exceedingly fierce today."
She laughed and skipped back to Ron to start their rounds around the outer wall.
I collected Harry and we met up with Lupin on the stairs and together went on up to the south tower where Padma, Parvati, Ernie, and Neville were trading off sentinel duty, with Parvati currently taking her turn keeping her eyes on the crystal ball.
Padma was whining, which was not like her. Probably strung out by Dementors like Luna and everyone else and didn't even know it. "Why did we get shunted off to the night shift? It's not fair! There no way I'm going to be able to sleep during the day," she said, "And one more cold lunch eaten on top of this tower and I'll-"
"-Better a handful of dried dates and contentment with that than to own the Gate of Peacocks and be kicked in the head by an angry llama," said Parvati without looking up from the ball.
"Camel! You get kicked in the head by a camel! Not a llama!" said Padma.
"Says who? I bet a big llama could kick someone in the head quite as hard as a camel," said Parvati.
"Aaaaaagh! Camel, camel, camel, camel!" said Padma. I shoved chocolate into her hands and she absently ate it.
"Imagine getting kicked in the head by a hippogriff," said Neville, eyeing the feathery mounds curled up on top of the west tower. Neville doesn't usually tend to the morbid so I gave him chocolate, too, and Harry offered chocolate around to the rest of them.
Harry sat down next to Ernie and peered into the south tower's crystal ball with Parvati. It was linked to the spybats we'd spread around the treetops for miles around, and could scope out details all the way from the far end of the Forbidden Forest to as close as the shrubs and trees around the castle grounds. Parvati and Ernie started showing Harry how to move the view from bat to bat, and they passed round a chunk of Harry's chocolate.
Padma and Lupin and I were just getting down to a meaty theoretical discussion on the magical properties of the cacao bean when Harry shrieked and jumped away from the table and the crystal ball. He grabbed Parvati's shiny new broom and zipped away across the tiled roofs of the lower castle towers.
"What's he up to?" I said.
Parvati shrugged and twiddled the crystal ball towards me. "That's over by the rose gardens. Northwest wall," she said. I looked in to see a closeup of what I'd been watching in aggregate all afternoon: loads and loads of zombies and Dementors. Yick. These particular ones seemed fairly well-preserved, but otherwise they weren't especially- oh, how vile. It was Harry's mum and dad. And they were zombies. Shit.
"He's going down there!" I screeched, "Catch him!"
Ernie and Padma looked at each other, then grabbed their brooms from where they leaned against the wall, and they both dove after Harry. Gold and green flames, Harry's fire, erupted in the sky over the northwest wall. I looked back down into the crystal ball and watched Harry blow a ring of fire around himself and the Inferi. Not enough, Harry; you need more at your back than that. But he turned his attention to what was left of his parents and he burned the dark off of them until even their bones and all the air for meters around burned away.
It's a trap, Harry. The Dementors hidden amongst the zombies slid right through Harry's fire ring. Turn around, Harry. He didn't. They seized him and all his fires went out. They fought over him while he tried to get his wand arm free, and then the Dementor that won the right to eat him lowered its hood down over the top of his head. I watched the image in the crystal ball of Harry opening his mouth, teeth flashing over dieing flames, heard the sound of his scream as it echoed over the castle, and then Harry's image disappeared in silver light as Ernie and Padma's Patronuses combined, covered him and drove off the dark. Ernie and Padma arrived a second later and they grabbed Harry by the arms and hauled him back to the tower. Harry was a dead weight dangling from their brooms, not trying to hold himself on their brooms at all, and he slipped and fell from their hands as they got him back over the wall. Neville caught Harry before he hit the stone and held him up while we all gathered around to inspect him.
Harry was limp and silent, his eyes were open and his hair was sucked up into a bizarre point. It looked like the games you play in the tub while washing your hair when you're a kid, but his hair wasn't wet. Maybe it looked more like he'd been mauled by a miniature tornado. His hair was perfectly dry, held in place by static electricity or... something. I reached out and knocked my hand through it and his hair fell back down into its usual mess.
Parvati, who'd been studying mediwizardry in her spare time, stuck her wand in Harry's ear. "He's fine. They didn't have time to find his mouth. Get some chocolate into him. Fuck, if he's going to jump into the Dementors like that, we may as well just coat him with chocolate all over."
Not a bad idea. Harry blinked at me and seemed to wake up. I looked into his face, trying to get a bead into his eyes so I could take a quick Legilimency check to confirm Parvati's opinion that his soul was really still all in there, but I had no choice but to lean well back from him. "Whoof! It smells like you snogged Satan's rectum! Must you jump into every possible fight you see? And must you use the same technique to solve every problem? I'm trying to hold you in reserve!"
Harry laughed, hitting me with the remnants of his dragon breath again. "I," he said, "feel great. I feel- Whoooooo. Awesome." He sounded stoned out of his mind, but at least his mind was still in there.
I looked at him carefully. His clothes were not corroding. His lips were still attached. His tongue wasn't at all burned off. He really was fine. I grabbed his shoulders and shook him. "Reserve! Reserve! What part of reserve don't you understand?" His head bobbled back and forth satisfyingly.
Parvati peeled me off of him and peered into his eyes herself. "Don't scramble his brains any more, Hermione. So your head doesn't hurt, Harry?"
Neville reached out and delicately picked up Harry's fringe. "Where's your scar?" he asked Harry. My mouth dropped open as I stared at Harry. Neville was right. Harry's scar was gone.
Harry giggled. "They're free. I'm fine. I'm really, wonderfully, fabulously fine."
"Here," said Lupin, handing him a copper canteen. "It's hot cocoa."
Harry politely took a swig, which seemed to sober him up. He stared down at the canteen in his hand for one long frozen second. "You're all right?" asked Lupin. "Truly?"
Harry unsheathed his wand, silently sliced the whole top off the metal canteen, grabbed Parvati's broom again, and jumped off the parapet. Again.
Lupin regarded the crumpled neck of his canteen that had been dropped at his feet. "A thousand points from Gryffindor," he said.
"Harry!" I yelled and looked over the parapet after him.
Staying where we could easily see him, Harry flew down to the base of our tower, and out over the assembled hordes that surrounded us. They jumped and reached up their sticky fingers to him, but he kept out of their reach this time and flew sensibly, so Ernie and Padma stayed put. Harry singled out a Dementor, circled over it until it looked up, and dumped the contents of the sliced canteen into the Dementor's hood. It melted. It fell into itself, went transparent, and then spattered over the ground as smoking rain. Poof. Just like that. It did not reform.
"Hahah!" shrieked Harry and he flew up away from all the nasty, grabby hands and back towards us. He tossed the ruined canteen at our feet and looped and rolled over our heads.
"Is he on Luck potion?" asked Neville, next to me. I shook my head.
"How did you-" I started to say when Harry had landed and eaten more chocolate.
"Just a good guess," he said, grinning from ear to ear.
"Oh my god, let's get rid of all those Dementors right now, so everyone can actually get some sleep for tomorrow," I said, "Would you call Dobby?"
Harry called Dobby, and when I asked him whether he thought the Hogwarts elves would help us defend the castle he said, "Yes! Ah. Well. But trickings and sweepings doesn't exactly defend. Dobby's friends may only do what is theirs, if Harry Potter's friends sees what Dobby means."
"Would you cook for us? Big massive offensive cooking?" I asked.
"Oh, yes," said Dobby, hopping up and down excitedly.
"How much cocoa powder do you have in stores," I asked, knowing the house elves had stocked up for the siege.
"As much as Miss would like. Many years of supplies!" said Dobby proudly.
"Enough to cover the entirety of the Hogwarts grounds in a drenching rain of hot cocoa?" I said.
Dobby's eyes got as big as bludgers. "No. Not that much."
I pulled out my folded, spindled, personal map of the Hogwarts grounds that Dudley had laminated for me and I handed Dobby my wax pencil. "Show me. Draw me a circle that describes what area we could drench with hot cocoa." Dobby drew a circle, maybe the size of a bottlecap on my map, which was maybe the size of a quidditch field. Big, but nowhere near big enough to do the job.
"Ah," I said, "So much for the idea of destroying them. There's too many Dementors for us to chase every one down individually, we just can't take that much exposure to them. I suppose we'll just have to pop the Patronus mines, and hope the Dementors get scattered very far away and don't come back very quickly."
"Sorry," said Dobby.
"No," said Neville, looking over my shoulder, "Corral them."
"What?" I said.
"I walked the perimeter and the ley line through the castle with Flitwick," said Neville, "He showed me exactly how the triggering charms work and how they link to the keystone spell, and we don't have to go back out to the perimeter to fiddle with things; we could do it from McGonagall's office. The Patronus mines are currently set to expand outward from the castle in an expanding star pattern, to drive the Dementors out and away. But we could change the pattern in which the Patronuses pop up."
Neville pulled out his wand and started drawing in the air. I must get him to show me that charm one day.
"Suppose we popped the outer perimeter first and sent the Patronuses round in a circle. Then we we could pop each radius line individually all the way around until we had them all compressed into a skinny sliver of pie," he said.
"Muahahaha! It'd be like shooting fish in a barrel. What do you need to do this right away?" I asked him.
"Well, said Neville, "We'd need to wake McGonagall so she'd be ready to release the keystone spell, we'd need Professor Flitwick to adjust the deployment pattern, and we'd need me and at least one other person to hold up the sticky ends of the charms with him-"
"Me! Me!" said Parvati, "I'll do it!" Padma stared at her sister and then silently took Parvati's place in front of the map and the crystal ball. Parvati ran over to Neville.
"Looks like you have a volunteer, Neville," I said.
Neville seemed nonplussed. "Uh. I- Yeah. So, two people to hold the ends of the charms with Professor Fliwick while he tweaks them and to provide him some extra power while he does it. And then we'd need twenty or thirty people in the air to drop the cocoa. And we'd need lots of cocoa."
"Elves will make you bathtubs full of lovely, boiling hot cocoa!" said Dobby.
"How far can you go?" I asked Dobby, "Do we need a few chocolate-coated Quidditch teams to pour the hot cocoa on the Dementors, or can the elves do that?"
"Elves be delighted to serve hot cocoa to our guests," said Dobby with a little wriggle of joy. Dobby and Parvati put their heads together and started discussing details, and Neville called Flitwick.
The crystal ball chimed. I joined Padma as she bent over it and focused the image. "What is that? Is that a dragon?" she said. Lupin pulled out his phone.
Ernie and Harry went over and huddled around the crystal ball. "Um. Looks very much like one," said Ernie.
"Charlie reports no authorized dragons on the loose," said Lupin. I looked over at his old map.
"Can I leave you in charge of handling this?" I asked Harry. It was closing fast, had showed up on the edge of the Hogwarts map, and, according to its little moving dragon-shaped dot, was named Puckles.
"Thurrre, I can take a drrragon," Harry said around suddenly enormous fangs, and he grabbed Parvati's broom and climbed up onto the parapet. His hair grew longer and wilder, he hunched over the broom...
I seized him by the hem of his robe. "That method will kill it, right? Charlie would be upset." And if you keep breathing flames and acid like a dragon yourself, you'll blow off all your tastebuds permanently, you damn fool. I doubt you can yet hold your tongue for more than half an hour. And you're going with backup if I have to duct tape them to your arse. "How'd you like to take your team with you and let them get some practice in?"
"Rrrrrr," said Harry, but the fire in his eyes damped down to a smoulder and he reeled his hair and teeth back in. He jumped down off the parapet. "All right. All right. I'll call my team then. And I'll want Millicent and Lavender and Zach from yours. And Luna and a couple thestrals, and a lot of disillusionment charms. Professor Lupin, would you do the charms?" Lupin nodded and pulled out his wand. Harry pulled out his phone and called up Millicent, Parvati pulled out hers and called up the rest of Harry's team.
I leaned against the nice comforting stone and thought for a moment. If Voldemort had any grasp of strategy he'd send us another dragon right after we've engaged the first. Right? Middle of the night after we've spent the day fighting zombies, there couldn't be a more perfect time for Voldemort to bung everything he has at us. There's got to be more coming. And with the grounds covered in monsters, anyone who falls is toast. I should definitely clear the grounds now instead of waiting to see if all the Dementors have finished rolling in. And do the napalm on the Inferi right after. Maybe? Or would I be waking everyone for nothing and exhausting them for tomorrow? Aaaagh!
I called Ron for a sanity check. "Ron, we have an incoming dragon and Harry wants Luna for his team. Send her on up here. And tell me, if you were Voldemort, would this one dragon be it or would there be more coming?"
"Ahh... There'd be more. Lots more. I'll scramble my team, shall I? And maybe Pansy's?" he said. "Oh, and dibs on Bullseye Creevey for my team. Bye."
Harry's team started landing on the tower with their brooms and their air pistols and wands. Harry broke open the potions ammo stores and loaded them all up, and I watched him use Neville's trick to draw a moving picture of the strategy he wanted them to use. I hadn't practiced on a team with Harry in ages and his tactics all looked like Quidditch to me. It'd probably still work though. Lupin smacked them all with Disillusionments and they all jumped off the tower in a group.
I called McGonagall. "This is the head mistress's sue-yullar foon. Who the hell are you?" said some strange man. Was it... Mad Eye Moody?
"Give me that!" said Mcgonagall. "Yes?"
"Um..." I said. "Ah... Ma'am, we have a report of an incoming dragon. Harry and his team have gone to meet it, but we suspect more are on the way. We also have a plan coming together to rid the grounds of our assorted non-flying vermin and I think we'll be needing your assistance with the keystone spell. And I'd like to do it before any of our air forces take a tumble to the ground and get eaten."
"Oh, bother. All right. I'll get dressed and I'll be right up."
"Haha! You just told her you're naked," said Moody in the background.
"Er..." said McGonagall, "I'm certain I can count on your discretion, Miss Granger."
"I'm certain I have no idea what you're referring to," I said. "See you in a minute. We're on the South tower."
"Good girl," said McGonagall and she hung up.
The crystal ball chimed and chimed again. Padma, behind me, said, "Hermione? Come here!" I looked up and the dragon was now visible in the sky over the grounds. It writhed and sparkled but the disillusionment charms meant I couldn't see Harry and his team.
Padma screeched and waved me over to look at Lupin's old map. Harry's team, marked out in little green dots, surrounded the undulating large red dot that was the dragon. Harry's team seemed to be pushing it towards the lake. Fabulous, I don't think there are any Dementors in the lake. Just Inferi. And Squid.
"Not that," said Padma, "Here." She pointed to the far corner of the map, where a sprinkling of more red dots of all sizes was collecting into rows.
"Well, crap," I said and when at that Padma's face fell and Ernie began to look like he might panic, I said, "Oh, pull your socks up. I'd hoped for a bit more time and to run these plans one after another, but we can run them simultaneously. No problem. It'll still work." Did that sound convincing? And calm? Of course it did! They don't know Legilimency; I just have to LOOK like I know what I'm doing. How the fuck did my quickness at punching in phone calls land me this job? Where are my fucking assistants? "Okay, Ernie, Padma, I'll take over here. You two go scramble your houses. I want everyone on their assigned towers in two minutes. We're going to deploy the napalm in the next ten. Go."
Ernie and Padma grabbed their brooms and jumped off the parapets. Lupin was bouncing on his toes impatiently, so I gave him Parvati's forgotten broom and sent him off to scramble my house, and then I sent Moody down to Slytherin with Neville's. McGonagall was seized by Neville, Flitwick and Parvati, and after a quick conference they all ran back down to McGonagall's office. Dobby reappeared with news about the cocoa and I sent him after McGonagall's team.
I counted the gathering dots and rubbed my head. I need Snape. And some more Weaselys. And to tell Harry he can go ahead and take the brakes off. Too bad for Puckles. How many Aurors do we have sleeping down in the dining hall? I stabbed at the buttons on my phone again, as more teams assembled on the towers around me...
~
The next part, Part 7, is NC-17. You could skip it and go straight to the violence in Part 8, if you wish. Your choice.
Next: Part 7. NC-17
Part 8.