Section 2.14 - Out of time
Dunkelzahn
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2.14 Out of time
2.14.1 Out of options
End of term exams approached, and with them would come the end of the school year. Across the school, the staff busily readied themselves for the rush, preparing the tests that would be administered in the next few weeks.
In one office, nearly a week ahead of the time that such a thing would be expected, one class' worth of such examinations lay completed and ready to hand out. Each year matched with an answer key done up in red complete with annotations on how to assign partial credit. On top of the pile of parchments laid an envelope addressed to Albus Dumbledore. The rest of the desk was neatly sorted and done up, almost as if the owner had put things in order in anticipation of a long trip.
On the other side of the office, said owner stood before a bubbling cauldron and prepared to decant its contents into specially prepared glass canisters. Charmed imperturbable on the inside surface and extremely thin-walled, they looked rather like glass Christmas ornaments — with good reason, for that is what they once were. Within each one was an un-charmed glass vial containing the last of the ingredients required to complete the concoction.
If he were lucky, the inner vial would dissolve too quickly for him to seal the outer container, and his suffering would be over except for the dying — honestly a minor thing at this point, by his reckoning.
If he were unlucky, well… it would be just the weapon needed to break the goblin defense on the third floor — and he was sure his soul would be damned for eternity for using it.
And again, his earthly suffering would be over except for the dying. No change there.
Hands moving quickly, the incomplete potion was transferred, and the repurposed ornaments were melted shut with a tightly-controlled flame charm just in time to hear the slight crunch of breaking glass and the sudden sizzle as the potion in the spheres changed its nature dramatically.
Damn.
He could only hope the goblins were up to killing him tonight — he was out of options.
2.14.2 Night assault
The hallway was quiet and dark, and Corporal Mantrap struggled to stay awake for his guard shift in the third-floor hallway of Hogwarts. He commanded half of his section on the current shift, and his second would be taking over with the other half in just over two hours. Nothing had shown up in the hallway before their position since the beginning of the shift, not even that cat Filch kept around.
It had been a rather boring deployment all around, no action outside that one spot of excitement with the trolls back in the autumn, and the job was going to come to an end in just another month or so when the prize would be moved to another location. It was almost to the point where Mantrap was hoping for another bit of action — just to ward off the boredom if nothing else.
Almost… but not quite.
The corporal was a veteran soldier, and he had more than enough experience to appreciate boredom for what it really was: safety. If things got exciting for a soldier… well he wouldn't be bored, but there would be a whole lot more blood to deal with and a whole lot more dead friends to grieve. So that 'not quite' meant Corporal Mantrap was perfectly content to watch a mind-numbingly boring empty hallway for hours on end in the middle of the night…
"Hey, look alive there, soldier!" he barked at one of the gobs manning the gun emplacement who was starting to nod off.
…and he was quite happy to force the rest of his section to do so too. The soldier in question snapped back to wakefulness and sounded off an acknowledgement and an apology.
The acknowledgement came just before the quiet crash of breaking glass.
The corporal was already thumbing the safety off on his rifle and looking down the hallway for the telltale signs of a disillusioned intruder when the pair of gobs manning the emplacement screamed in agony. Mantrap snapped back to look at them and was horrified to see them missing an arm each and some sort of dark liquid eating its way through his soldiers' torsos. The gun itself was already a loss, melted through just forward of the ammunition feed.
It was the last thing Corporal Mantrap would ever see, as it was at that point that the fumes from whatever it was that was eating his men alive reached him and rendered his eyes pits of hellish agony, burning straight through his eyelids even as they reflexively closed.
"Gas!"
It wasn't a chemical agent he was familiar with, but the vector was obvious. Chemical weaponry was not something they had prepared for on this deployment — assuming that there was a way to contain the damned stuff even if they had. His gobs had fallen silent at the gun — probably dead from what he had seen before he lost his sight — and if he judged properly from the quiet swearing from the other side of the hallway, the other two had probably been rendered as blind as he was.
Regardless, his soldiers were well-trained, and they rapidly fell silent as they strained to listen for an approaching intruder. Blind fighting was a necessity in the tunnels at times, though no one was could really claim to be good at it. The best they could hope for at this point was to hear a footstep and then pray and spray in the right general direction.
While his men were doing that, Mantrap himself groped blindly for his radio to warn the rest of the guard company. The burning in his lungs told him he probably wouldn't survive much longer himself, but a warning would give the rest of the boys a chance. He had just managed to locate the radio when it fell apart in his hands with an electronic squeal as a silent cutting curse destroyed it, removing his left hand in the process.
The intruder must have silenced himself. Damn!
Another ominous tinkle of broken glass heralded the outbreak of yet more screaming, this time from his other two squad-mates, and Mantrap knew that the situation had gone from grim to completely black. The enemy had killed the last of them, then, the bastard!
As the last gob alive at the post, there was no reason not to go out swinging. His fallen mates would hardly begrudge him an accidental bullet or two to their corpses in exchange for the possibility of taking out their killer. Mantrap braced his L1A1 as best as he could before pointing it in the general direction of where he remembered the hallway to be and emptied the clip as fast as he could work the trigger, slewing the gun in an attempt to cover the whole hallway.
As the rifle clicked empty, the corporal ejected the magazine then reached for a reload with his remaining hand, pinning the rifle in place with his stump, only to be engulfed by a wave of fire which had him writhing on the floor in agony as he attempted to put out the flames. He managed to smother the last of them just as his thrashing brought his head into all-to firm contact with the wall he had been crouched next to, and Mantrap knew no more.
2.14.3 Unwanted success
As the corporal stilled, a pair of shoes appeared in the middle of the hallway, and then a distortion slowly traveled upward revealing a dark figure. The man was wearing standard dark-colored wizarding robes with the unusual addition of a purple turban as he allowed his disillusionment charm to lapse. He panted while clutching at his side to stanch the blood flow from a grazing bullet wound sustained in that last blind spray of bullets.
That had been a close one.
After the miserable failure of his Halloween gambit during the previous term, Quirrel had planned carefully for this moment. The trolls had revealed the futility of a frontal assault — despite his master's arrogance in believing otherwise — and Quirrel had scrambled for a means of neutralizing the goblin defensive position. He had finally hit upon the idea when he overheard some of his first-year students talking about a safety lecture from their potions class.
That metal cleaning potion Snape had led off with for the first years could be easily converted to his purposes, with both a directly damaging component to take out the fortifications and the deadly gas for killing the guards. It was admittedly risky; any misstep would have led to his own gruesome demise. Ever since he had begun creating the potion and its delivery device, he had been one misstep, one piece of cracked glass, away from a closed-casket funeral.
It was in large part why he had latched on to the idea.
His master was a cruel and demanding one, and Quirrel served neither willingly nor eagerly, but the domination methods the monster had used left him little room to act. For the better part of a year since he had fallen victim, the man had been searching for a loophole, some way out, and he had hit upon the desperate idea of taking risks which were more likely to be fatal than successful.
The Master had commanded that he be willing to die in order to complete the monster's goals, and Quirrel had chosen to interpret that literally. He could not deliberately sabotage his own efforts, but he could choose the riskiest options that still held a faint chance of success and hope that statistics caught up with him before success. It was a poor option, but it was the best he could manage.
Death was mightily attractive in comparison to the Master's service.
"Shit," the turbaned man quietly cursed in the silent hallway. Why couldn't the goblins have managed to find something he had missed? He was tempted to kick the fallen goblin before him in frustrated anger. Barring some fortunate circumstance, his foolish gamble looked like it was going to pay off.
It seemed that Hell smiled up at fools just as much as Heaven smiled down on them. More's the pity.
As Quirrel cast a minor healing spell to seal his wound and a numbing charm to hide the pain, deliberately avoiding cleaning it first in hopes that it might come back to haunt his Master later, he continued on. The next room saw him face to face… to face… to face… with a three-headed dog larger than the staff table in the Great Hall.
The mutt was enormous and deadly looking, snarling viciously as saliva dripped from its three sets of massive jaws, but Quirrel quickly lulled it to sleep with a music charm cast at the prompting of his increasingly eager Master. The enslaved man had not held out much hope for the efficacy of the rest of the traps; the goblins were by far the deadliest of the lot. None of these would kill him before the Master had his chance.
Dumbledore was away on business, the goblins on guard had been silenced before they could raise an alert, the shift change wouldn't occur for another two hours, and Quirrel himself was the staff member on duty for this portion of the castle. Everything was set for Quirrel to succeed in his theft on behalf of his Master. No one was in position to stop him now…
…least of all himself.
It was truly a shame, Quirrel quietly despaired, even as he pushed further into the defenses.
2.14.4 Business?
"What do you mean the Minister is unavailable?" Albus demanded irritably. "His letter was most insistent on an immediate meeting."
First the Minister had called another one of his inane 'emergency consultations', and now he lacked even the basic decency to let his security know a guest would be arriving. Sometimes it was the most unlikely things that made him question his decision to refrain from fixing things through brute magical power.
It was sad how many of those unlikely things involved the current Minister and his cronies.
"I apologize, Supreme Mugwump," the thoroughly uncomfortable auror on guard duty apologized. "The Minister is in a meeting at the moment, sir, and he left strict orders that he is not to be disturbed."
"A meeting at eleven in the evening?"
"His wife, sir…" the guard explained in a mildly nauseated voice.
"His wife," Albus flatly echoed.
"Yes, sir."
"And why is he holding this meeting in his office?" Albus was almost afraid to ask.
"I wouldn't presume to speculate, sir."
The uncomfortable silence was broken by a loud slap and a high-pitched effeminate squeal.
Albus covered his face with his palm in disgust.
"That's him now, sir," the auror offered in a disgusted tone.
At the elderly man's questioning eyebrow, the auror elaborated helpfully, "His wife brought along a… toy, sir."
"She carried it in?" Albus asked incredulously. "Out in the open?"
"Not exactly, sir," the guard hedged, flinching at yet another squeal. "Her… skirt wasn't thick enough to hide it properly, sir."
Oh.
What had he been doing with his life that it had come to this? Albus shook his head in disgust and settled in to wait.
2.14.5 Sacrificing a pawn
Screaming in agony, Quirrel burst through a wall of black flames into a barren stone room.
"Damn it!" Why couldn't Severus have used something properly lethal? The potions master had gone and gotten Quirinus' hopes up when he had left poison in every bottle of his little logic puzzle, and then he hadn't had the stones to follow through and make the fire properly lethal!
Chintzy bastard!
Not bothering to pat out the residual flames — Quirinus was well aware he was about to die when his evil bastard of a Master body-jacked him, and he was doing his level best to leave that body in as poor a condition as he could manage within the confines of the Master's commands, a final act of spite — the unfortunate defense teacher walked toward the single piece of furniture in the otherwise empty room.
It was a mirror, oval in shape and full-length, mounted on a rather ornate stand, and the man could feel the magic imbued in it like sunlight on a summer's day. There was an odd inscription emblazoned across the top of the frame beginning with the word 'Erised'… ah.
That was a name he knew. The mirror that showed naught but the heart's desire. The thing was a legend in the cursebreaking and defense circles, held up as an example of how even the nicest of things could be turned into the vilest of weapons. Many a wizard had wasted away, unable to look away from the images it showed.
It would make sense, then, for Dumbledore to have hidden the stone in such a way that one had to look into the mirror in order to find it. A potential thief would catch sight of whatever seductive vision the mirror showed and be paralyzed, making for an easy capture.
Genius!
Quirrel knew his limits, and he knew that one look in that mirror would be his undoing. If his mental defenses were strong enough to resist that cursed mirror, he never would have been ensnared by the Master in the first place. Better still, his master's commands would not only allow him to take this opportunity, they would force him to!
Bless you, Albus Dumbledore!
Quirinus wondered what vision of desire would capture his fancy and keep him paralyzed until the compatriots of the goblins he had killed came by to slit his throat in well-deserved revenge. Perhaps it would be a vision of the monster who did this to him writhing in agony, enduring all the tortures of hell?
That'd be his guess. Just thinking about it warmed the cockles of his heart.
With a newly lightened step, Quirrel boldly rounded the mirror, stopped in front of it and locked his eyes on its surface only to see — his own reflection.
A reflection that then proceeded to shrug apologetically and hold out a blood red crystalline stone in the palm of its hand before slipping it into its own pocket while holding Quirrel's horrified gaze with its own regretful one.
"No… no," Quirrel stuttered aloud, even as his hand, driven by the compulsion spells, reached down into that same pocket on his own person. "It's not possible! He couldn't have done something so… not when it was so close to… if he had just left well enough alone…"
His hand closed on a hard, angular stone in his pocket that most assuredly had not been there before.
"Damn you, Albus Dumbledore!" the broken man yelled. "Damn you to hell! If you had just left the mirror alone, it would have gotten me and that bastard for sure! Why… why did you have to get cute about it?"
And then the spells completed, a surge of magic coursed through both the stone and the man, and the turbaned figure erupted in a welter of blood as its flesh reconfigured itself with a wet squelch, quickly taking on a new shape starting with a face on what used to be the back of the man's head. All the while, blood flowed over the stone and took on a glowing silver hue before flowing back into the rapidly shifting figure.
A newly reconfigured arm reached up and pulled the bloody remains of a purple turban away from the new figure's face, and the newly revealed eyes glowed red as they looked down at the stone held in its other hand.
"Yes," it hissed in a sibilant tone which had little in common with a normal human voice. "Excellent work, Quirinus. Excellent work, indeed."
There was a hissing chuckle. "Ah, that potion was inspired, I must say — oh the screams! I shall have to remember it for the future. And that delicious ending, the desperate man presented with one last hope only for it to be snatched away — ah, if only Albus had actually intended to be so cruel, I might be envious. How marvelous!"
A quick bit of spell work repaired and adjusted the shredded and ill-fitting robes that were still draped over the man's new body, and the red-eyed man conjured a mirror — he knew better than to look into the one already in the room. Now that its alternate enchantment was in all likelihood spent, he had no desire to risk himself to its seductive imagery.
"Not bad for being dead for a decade, I suppose; though the red eyes are new," the man said examining his reflection closely. "I do believe I like them."
A flick of the erstwhile defense professor's wand dismissed the mirror.
"Now for some unfinished business…" the macabre blood-soaked figure spun on its heel and walked briskly out the way his unfortunate former host had entered, "it wouldn't do to leave the Potter job undone. Entirely unprofessional!"
2.14.6 Realization
"Albus? What are you doing here?"
Dumbledore had to acknowledge, his many, many other faults aside, Cornelius Fudge had some of the most impressive emotional control the elderly wizard had ever encountered. It was either that or the man simply had no sense of shame whatsoever… which sounded more plausible, come to think of it.
Whatever the reason, there was no hint in the Minister's voice or demeanor of what the man had been doing in his office for the last half hour, though the rather portly man did lose some points for sitting too stiffly. Understandable, certainly, but it detracted from the performance.
"Minister, you demanded that I meet with you immediately — half an hour ago," Albus handed the man the memo which had been delivered just before Albus had intended to go to bed.
The Minister of Magic looked curiously at the parchment in question before stating firmly, "Albus, I sent no such request. Who gave it to you? Should we contact Amelia about a forgery?"
"You didn't send it?" Albus frowned. "It arrived in the usual manner, and I thought nothing of it. Hmm, what was that in service of, I wonder?"
From the doorway, the Minister's long-suffering bodyguard spoke up tentatively, "Um, sir? It occurs to me that the only things that note accomplished were getting you here and making you annoyed at the Minister for wasting your time. Since I don't believe you are the sort to hold a grudge with someone over something that they didn't do, and I don't think anyone else believes that either, that leaves only one possible motivation for sending the note. I believe it was a means of removing you from your school, sir."
Albus' eyes widened, and he shot to his feet, an odd device appearing in his hand from within his robes. "Corporal? Are you there, Corporal?" There was no response.
"Cornelius, please pass that on to Amelia and ask her to investigate the forgery," Albus said indicating the parchment.
As the Minister nodded agreeably, the Headmaster excused himself, "It seems that I have some urgent business to attend to at Hogwarts, good evening, Minister." And the room was suddenly one person emptier.
"Did he just apparate right through the wards, sir?" the auror on duty asked the Minister.
Cornelius waved off the man's question. "He always does that," he said dismissively. The minister dropped the forged memo on his desk to deal with in the morning. "We're done here for the evening; I'll be leaving now."
"Aren't you curious about what's going on in the school, Minister?"
"Albus will deal with it, and if he doesn't then as long as I don't know about it, it's not my problem."
"What about the students, sir?"
"Like I said, not my problem," Cornelius shrugged on his coat and reached for his bowler. "If some of the little monsters die on Albus' watch, he'll get blamed for it, and the only way I can catch heat is if I was aware of the problem; therefore, I will go home and go to sleep without looking into things."
"I see, sir," the auror said uncertainly.
"You'll understand eventually, son," the Minister said magnanimously.
As the portly man left the room, his bodyguard muttered under his breath, "God, I hope not," before following dutifully along.
2.14.7 Blast from the past
At the Lair, Harry and his two damsels were engaged in their usual nightly ritual.
They had returned from the castle after dinner and had gone through their evening chores. Suze had worked on her spinning because her shirts were starting to wear out again; Hermione had curled up with — or more descriptively, around — a book, given her usual choice in reading material; and Harry had eaten his second, much more substantial, dinner.
Afterwards, the trio had come together to watch the sunset from the lip of the Lair, and then with the fall of night, they had returned to the sitting area intent on reading for a time before they sought their various beds.
While not strictly a part of the routine, it was not unusual — particularly since the incorporation of Hermione into the group — for this evening reading period to run rather longer than was prudent for growing children, which was why, when a certain blood-drenched figure burst into the Lair along about midnight, all three of the Lair's inhabitants were still wide awake.
"So, the Boy-Who-Lived," an unpleasantly sibilant voice sneered from the entrance. "Ha! The Boy-Who-Won't-Live-Much-Longer, rather!"
The red-eyed and nose-less man hissed a laugh as the centaur in the room went for her rifle and knocked her unconscious with a silently cast stunner. He would have to remember to punish it later for its temerity in not waiting patiently to be killed. There was a proper order to this sort of thing, after all.
"Who the dickens are you?" Harry demanded, rather justifiably put out at the sudden home invasion. "And what do you think you're doing; how'd you find here to get in; and what reprobate gave you a nose-ectomy?"
"Are you an imbecile, boy?" the nose-less man growled — rather poorly, to be honest; the hissing really killed the effect.
Harry looked rather less than impressed.
"I am Lord Voldemort!" the intruder proclaimed, sounding rather put out that he had not been recognized.
It had only been a decade, surely his reputation hadn't faded so quickly?
"And I am here to finish what I started ten years ago when I killed your parents! Of course I found you, I'm the Dark Lord, and you didn't even try to protect against scrying! Terribly sloppy of you — though I suppose it's to be expected; you are a child, after all. Perhaps I should wait for any future child enemies to grow up before murdering them?"
The creepy-looking man paused for a moment, rubbing thoughtfully at his chin. Adults did tend to be more professional adversaries, and the ultimately futile struggle was the best part of the whole business. "Something to consider I suppose…"
"What about the nose-ectomy?" Harry prompted curiously when the intruder drifted off before he finished answering his set of questions.
"Oh, yes, quite — terribly sorry, I got a tad distracted there," the self-styled Lord Voldemort apologized absently before shifting back to a hissing approximation of dramatically carrying voice. "And — what in Salazar's name is a nose-ectomy?"
"Huh. Nah, you can't be that Voldemort-guy; he splattered himself when he bounced a killing curse off my face," the young dragon countered.
Harry wasn't buying what this guy was selling; his face was way too awesome to leave survivors.
"And since you found my Lair, you can't be half as stupid as someone who managed to splatter himself while trying to kill a baby. And since getting your appendix taken out is an appendectomy, I guess getting your nose taken off is a nose-ectomy."
The red-eyed fellow who was most assuredly Lord Voldemort, no matter what his soon-to-be latest victim insisted, drew himself up for another round of argument before deflating.
"Why am I discussing noses with the Potter brat?"
He shook his entirely nose-free head in disgust before continuing, "Feh! Claim what you like, that mudblood bitch of a mother of yours did… something! A ritual! It caused my curse to rebound, not your face! And as I have progressed further along the path to immortality than any other, all it succeeded in doing was destroying my body, which — with the aid of my most excellent, if unwilling, assistant, Professor Quirrel, who unfortunately perished in the process — I have regained!"
"No, one of my friends has a photo of the mess. That Voldemort-guy was definitely splattered all over the walls, and the floor, and the ceiling, and the door, and my crib, and the windows, and the hallway outside the door, and…"
"That's enough, brat!"
"Anyway, I mean he went splat! And when I splat things — or I suppose, when my face splats things — they stay SPLATTED!"
"I have only one thing left to say to you, foolish brat, avada kedavra!"
And with that, a sickly green light shot out of the intruder's wand. Harry only had just enough time to say "Hey!" before the curse hit.
"And now," Voldemort declared, turning to Hermione, "for you, mudblood! You have the honor to be the second slain by me in this, my new…"
"You've got no idea how much that stings!" Harry loudly declared, sitting back up from where he'd slumped down on the couch.
This was sufficiently strange to throw Voldemort off-track in mid-monologue.
"…actually, I have," Voldemort countered. "By the way, avada kedavra."
He turned back to the quivering Hermione.
"Where was I? Ah, yes, you…"
"I'm done talking to you! Nobody just…" the Boy-Who-Just-Wouldn't-Freaking-Die declared, popping back up.
"Avada kedavra, goddamnit!"
"OW! Nobody just comes in here throwing…"
"AVADA KEDAVRA!"
"…killing curses and…"
"AVADA KEDAVRA! WILL YOU JUST PLEASE DIE ALREADY?"
"…threatening my damsels!"
"AVADA KEDAVRA! AVADA KEDAVRA! AVADA KEDAVRA!"
The Boy-Who-Just-Kept-Popping-Back-Up seemed to be staying down this time, so the highly irritated Dark Lord once again returned his attention to Hermione.
"Finally! As I was saying…"
That was when an enormous set of teeth descended on him from above. Harry, his piece said, had reverted to his native form and gone for the bite. Nothing accidental about it; that was intentional, through and through.
Harry briefly chewed, swallowed, and belched, then said, "Huh."
Hermione, who had managed to get her teeth unclenched, let out a distinctly shell shocked-sounding squeak.
"'S'funny. I didn't expect enemy to taste like pork." Harry continued, "Wonder who that was? Sure can't have been… oh boy, dragon gas!"
With that, he spun around quickly, sticking his tail and backside out over the lip of the cave, and released what had to be the most epic fart in known history.
After all, flatulence is usually composed of methane or some such rancid gas, not screaming, disembodied, horribly-traumatized-due-to-just-having-passed-through-a-dragon's-digestive-tract shades of Dark Lords.
Hermione, still plastered to the couch where she'd been wishing desperately there wasn't a Voldemort between her and the guns, blinked several times and managed to get out a stunned, "…uhhh…" between struggling not to giggle in hysterical relief and struggling not to freak out.
"Huh, that was weird," Harry remarked, bemusedly scratching at his head — which, coming from a dragon the size of a not-so-small aircraft, looked somewhat strange to say the least — and peering after the spectral Voldemort. "Stuff doesn't normally do that when I eat it; I guess I better see what Mr. Dumbledore and Madame Pomfrey think about that."
He cast a finishing spell — one of the few charms he could now safely manage after nearly a year of constant control exercises — at his centaur damsel in order to remove the stunning spell. It was not the prescribed counter, but it was close enough that the disparity in strength more than made up for the mismatch in spell choice.
As Suze struggled to her feet, he continued, "Oh well, he tasted like pork, so that's all… um, oh boy, aw man, I don't think enemy went down so good."
As the philosopher's stone that Voldemort had been carrying when he assaulted Harry's Lair went to work on the dragon's largely-iron physiology from its new home in the same dragon's absurdly magical gullet and caused him to pass out with a fever, the last thing he heard was Hermione and Suze frantically yelling his name.
As far as Hermione was concerned, this was definitely a valid justification to pitch a fit of the screaming meemies.
2.14.1 Out of options
End of term exams approached, and with them would come the end of the school year. Across the school, the staff busily readied themselves for the rush, preparing the tests that would be administered in the next few weeks.
In one office, nearly a week ahead of the time that such a thing would be expected, one class' worth of such examinations lay completed and ready to hand out. Each year matched with an answer key done up in red complete with annotations on how to assign partial credit. On top of the pile of parchments laid an envelope addressed to Albus Dumbledore. The rest of the desk was neatly sorted and done up, almost as if the owner had put things in order in anticipation of a long trip.
On the other side of the office, said owner stood before a bubbling cauldron and prepared to decant its contents into specially prepared glass canisters. Charmed imperturbable on the inside surface and extremely thin-walled, they looked rather like glass Christmas ornaments — with good reason, for that is what they once were. Within each one was an un-charmed glass vial containing the last of the ingredients required to complete the concoction.
If he were lucky, the inner vial would dissolve too quickly for him to seal the outer container, and his suffering would be over except for the dying — honestly a minor thing at this point, by his reckoning.
If he were unlucky, well… it would be just the weapon needed to break the goblin defense on the third floor — and he was sure his soul would be damned for eternity for using it.
And again, his earthly suffering would be over except for the dying. No change there.
Hands moving quickly, the incomplete potion was transferred, and the repurposed ornaments were melted shut with a tightly-controlled flame charm just in time to hear the slight crunch of breaking glass and the sudden sizzle as the potion in the spheres changed its nature dramatically.
Damn.
He could only hope the goblins were up to killing him tonight — he was out of options.
2.14.2 Night assault
The hallway was quiet and dark, and Corporal Mantrap struggled to stay awake for his guard shift in the third-floor hallway of Hogwarts. He commanded half of his section on the current shift, and his second would be taking over with the other half in just over two hours. Nothing had shown up in the hallway before their position since the beginning of the shift, not even that cat Filch kept around.
It had been a rather boring deployment all around, no action outside that one spot of excitement with the trolls back in the autumn, and the job was going to come to an end in just another month or so when the prize would be moved to another location. It was almost to the point where Mantrap was hoping for another bit of action — just to ward off the boredom if nothing else.
Almost… but not quite.
The corporal was a veteran soldier, and he had more than enough experience to appreciate boredom for what it really was: safety. If things got exciting for a soldier… well he wouldn't be bored, but there would be a whole lot more blood to deal with and a whole lot more dead friends to grieve. So that 'not quite' meant Corporal Mantrap was perfectly content to watch a mind-numbingly boring empty hallway for hours on end in the middle of the night…
"Hey, look alive there, soldier!" he barked at one of the gobs manning the gun emplacement who was starting to nod off.
…and he was quite happy to force the rest of his section to do so too. The soldier in question snapped back to wakefulness and sounded off an acknowledgement and an apology.
The acknowledgement came just before the quiet crash of breaking glass.
The corporal was already thumbing the safety off on his rifle and looking down the hallway for the telltale signs of a disillusioned intruder when the pair of gobs manning the emplacement screamed in agony. Mantrap snapped back to look at them and was horrified to see them missing an arm each and some sort of dark liquid eating its way through his soldiers' torsos. The gun itself was already a loss, melted through just forward of the ammunition feed.
It was the last thing Corporal Mantrap would ever see, as it was at that point that the fumes from whatever it was that was eating his men alive reached him and rendered his eyes pits of hellish agony, burning straight through his eyelids even as they reflexively closed.
"Gas!"
It wasn't a chemical agent he was familiar with, but the vector was obvious. Chemical weaponry was not something they had prepared for on this deployment — assuming that there was a way to contain the damned stuff even if they had. His gobs had fallen silent at the gun — probably dead from what he had seen before he lost his sight — and if he judged properly from the quiet swearing from the other side of the hallway, the other two had probably been rendered as blind as he was.
Regardless, his soldiers were well-trained, and they rapidly fell silent as they strained to listen for an approaching intruder. Blind fighting was a necessity in the tunnels at times, though no one was could really claim to be good at it. The best they could hope for at this point was to hear a footstep and then pray and spray in the right general direction.
While his men were doing that, Mantrap himself groped blindly for his radio to warn the rest of the guard company. The burning in his lungs told him he probably wouldn't survive much longer himself, but a warning would give the rest of the boys a chance. He had just managed to locate the radio when it fell apart in his hands with an electronic squeal as a silent cutting curse destroyed it, removing his left hand in the process.
The intruder must have silenced himself. Damn!
Another ominous tinkle of broken glass heralded the outbreak of yet more screaming, this time from his other two squad-mates, and Mantrap knew that the situation had gone from grim to completely black. The enemy had killed the last of them, then, the bastard!
As the last gob alive at the post, there was no reason not to go out swinging. His fallen mates would hardly begrudge him an accidental bullet or two to their corpses in exchange for the possibility of taking out their killer. Mantrap braced his L1A1 as best as he could before pointing it in the general direction of where he remembered the hallway to be and emptied the clip as fast as he could work the trigger, slewing the gun in an attempt to cover the whole hallway.
As the rifle clicked empty, the corporal ejected the magazine then reached for a reload with his remaining hand, pinning the rifle in place with his stump, only to be engulfed by a wave of fire which had him writhing on the floor in agony as he attempted to put out the flames. He managed to smother the last of them just as his thrashing brought his head into all-to firm contact with the wall he had been crouched next to, and Mantrap knew no more.
2.14.3 Unwanted success
As the corporal stilled, a pair of shoes appeared in the middle of the hallway, and then a distortion slowly traveled upward revealing a dark figure. The man was wearing standard dark-colored wizarding robes with the unusual addition of a purple turban as he allowed his disillusionment charm to lapse. He panted while clutching at his side to stanch the blood flow from a grazing bullet wound sustained in that last blind spray of bullets.
That had been a close one.
After the miserable failure of his Halloween gambit during the previous term, Quirrel had planned carefully for this moment. The trolls had revealed the futility of a frontal assault — despite his master's arrogance in believing otherwise — and Quirrel had scrambled for a means of neutralizing the goblin defensive position. He had finally hit upon the idea when he overheard some of his first-year students talking about a safety lecture from their potions class.
That metal cleaning potion Snape had led off with for the first years could be easily converted to his purposes, with both a directly damaging component to take out the fortifications and the deadly gas for killing the guards. It was admittedly risky; any misstep would have led to his own gruesome demise. Ever since he had begun creating the potion and its delivery device, he had been one misstep, one piece of cracked glass, away from a closed-casket funeral.
It was in large part why he had latched on to the idea.
His master was a cruel and demanding one, and Quirrel served neither willingly nor eagerly, but the domination methods the monster had used left him little room to act. For the better part of a year since he had fallen victim, the man had been searching for a loophole, some way out, and he had hit upon the desperate idea of taking risks which were more likely to be fatal than successful.
The Master had commanded that he be willing to die in order to complete the monster's goals, and Quirrel had chosen to interpret that literally. He could not deliberately sabotage his own efforts, but he could choose the riskiest options that still held a faint chance of success and hope that statistics caught up with him before success. It was a poor option, but it was the best he could manage.
Death was mightily attractive in comparison to the Master's service.
"Shit," the turbaned man quietly cursed in the silent hallway. Why couldn't the goblins have managed to find something he had missed? He was tempted to kick the fallen goblin before him in frustrated anger. Barring some fortunate circumstance, his foolish gamble looked like it was going to pay off.
It seemed that Hell smiled up at fools just as much as Heaven smiled down on them. More's the pity.
As Quirrel cast a minor healing spell to seal his wound and a numbing charm to hide the pain, deliberately avoiding cleaning it first in hopes that it might come back to haunt his Master later, he continued on. The next room saw him face to face… to face… to face… with a three-headed dog larger than the staff table in the Great Hall.
The mutt was enormous and deadly looking, snarling viciously as saliva dripped from its three sets of massive jaws, but Quirrel quickly lulled it to sleep with a music charm cast at the prompting of his increasingly eager Master. The enslaved man had not held out much hope for the efficacy of the rest of the traps; the goblins were by far the deadliest of the lot. None of these would kill him before the Master had his chance.
Dumbledore was away on business, the goblins on guard had been silenced before they could raise an alert, the shift change wouldn't occur for another two hours, and Quirrel himself was the staff member on duty for this portion of the castle. Everything was set for Quirrel to succeed in his theft on behalf of his Master. No one was in position to stop him now…
…least of all himself.
It was truly a shame, Quirrel quietly despaired, even as he pushed further into the defenses.
2.14.4 Business?
"What do you mean the Minister is unavailable?" Albus demanded irritably. "His letter was most insistent on an immediate meeting."
First the Minister had called another one of his inane 'emergency consultations', and now he lacked even the basic decency to let his security know a guest would be arriving. Sometimes it was the most unlikely things that made him question his decision to refrain from fixing things through brute magical power.
It was sad how many of those unlikely things involved the current Minister and his cronies.
"I apologize, Supreme Mugwump," the thoroughly uncomfortable auror on guard duty apologized. "The Minister is in a meeting at the moment, sir, and he left strict orders that he is not to be disturbed."
"A meeting at eleven in the evening?"
"His wife, sir…" the guard explained in a mildly nauseated voice.
"His wife," Albus flatly echoed.
"Yes, sir."
"And why is he holding this meeting in his office?" Albus was almost afraid to ask.
"I wouldn't presume to speculate, sir."
The uncomfortable silence was broken by a loud slap and a high-pitched effeminate squeal.
Albus covered his face with his palm in disgust.
"That's him now, sir," the auror offered in a disgusted tone.
At the elderly man's questioning eyebrow, the auror elaborated helpfully, "His wife brought along a… toy, sir."
"She carried it in?" Albus asked incredulously. "Out in the open?"
"Not exactly, sir," the guard hedged, flinching at yet another squeal. "Her… skirt wasn't thick enough to hide it properly, sir."
Oh.
What had he been doing with his life that it had come to this? Albus shook his head in disgust and settled in to wait.
2.14.5 Sacrificing a pawn
Screaming in agony, Quirrel burst through a wall of black flames into a barren stone room.
"Damn it!" Why couldn't Severus have used something properly lethal? The potions master had gone and gotten Quirinus' hopes up when he had left poison in every bottle of his little logic puzzle, and then he hadn't had the stones to follow through and make the fire properly lethal!
Chintzy bastard!
Not bothering to pat out the residual flames — Quirinus was well aware he was about to die when his evil bastard of a Master body-jacked him, and he was doing his level best to leave that body in as poor a condition as he could manage within the confines of the Master's commands, a final act of spite — the unfortunate defense teacher walked toward the single piece of furniture in the otherwise empty room.
It was a mirror, oval in shape and full-length, mounted on a rather ornate stand, and the man could feel the magic imbued in it like sunlight on a summer's day. There was an odd inscription emblazoned across the top of the frame beginning with the word 'Erised'… ah.
That was a name he knew. The mirror that showed naught but the heart's desire. The thing was a legend in the cursebreaking and defense circles, held up as an example of how even the nicest of things could be turned into the vilest of weapons. Many a wizard had wasted away, unable to look away from the images it showed.
It would make sense, then, for Dumbledore to have hidden the stone in such a way that one had to look into the mirror in order to find it. A potential thief would catch sight of whatever seductive vision the mirror showed and be paralyzed, making for an easy capture.
Genius!
Quirrel knew his limits, and he knew that one look in that mirror would be his undoing. If his mental defenses were strong enough to resist that cursed mirror, he never would have been ensnared by the Master in the first place. Better still, his master's commands would not only allow him to take this opportunity, they would force him to!
Bless you, Albus Dumbledore!
Quirinus wondered what vision of desire would capture his fancy and keep him paralyzed until the compatriots of the goblins he had killed came by to slit his throat in well-deserved revenge. Perhaps it would be a vision of the monster who did this to him writhing in agony, enduring all the tortures of hell?
That'd be his guess. Just thinking about it warmed the cockles of his heart.
With a newly lightened step, Quirrel boldly rounded the mirror, stopped in front of it and locked his eyes on its surface only to see — his own reflection.
A reflection that then proceeded to shrug apologetically and hold out a blood red crystalline stone in the palm of its hand before slipping it into its own pocket while holding Quirrel's horrified gaze with its own regretful one.
"No… no," Quirrel stuttered aloud, even as his hand, driven by the compulsion spells, reached down into that same pocket on his own person. "It's not possible! He couldn't have done something so… not when it was so close to… if he had just left well enough alone…"
His hand closed on a hard, angular stone in his pocket that most assuredly had not been there before.
"Damn you, Albus Dumbledore!" the broken man yelled. "Damn you to hell! If you had just left the mirror alone, it would have gotten me and that bastard for sure! Why… why did you have to get cute about it?"
And then the spells completed, a surge of magic coursed through both the stone and the man, and the turbaned figure erupted in a welter of blood as its flesh reconfigured itself with a wet squelch, quickly taking on a new shape starting with a face on what used to be the back of the man's head. All the while, blood flowed over the stone and took on a glowing silver hue before flowing back into the rapidly shifting figure.
A newly reconfigured arm reached up and pulled the bloody remains of a purple turban away from the new figure's face, and the newly revealed eyes glowed red as they looked down at the stone held in its other hand.
"Yes," it hissed in a sibilant tone which had little in common with a normal human voice. "Excellent work, Quirinus. Excellent work, indeed."
There was a hissing chuckle. "Ah, that potion was inspired, I must say — oh the screams! I shall have to remember it for the future. And that delicious ending, the desperate man presented with one last hope only for it to be snatched away — ah, if only Albus had actually intended to be so cruel, I might be envious. How marvelous!"
A quick bit of spell work repaired and adjusted the shredded and ill-fitting robes that were still draped over the man's new body, and the red-eyed man conjured a mirror — he knew better than to look into the one already in the room. Now that its alternate enchantment was in all likelihood spent, he had no desire to risk himself to its seductive imagery.
"Not bad for being dead for a decade, I suppose; though the red eyes are new," the man said examining his reflection closely. "I do believe I like them."
A flick of the erstwhile defense professor's wand dismissed the mirror.
"Now for some unfinished business…" the macabre blood-soaked figure spun on its heel and walked briskly out the way his unfortunate former host had entered, "it wouldn't do to leave the Potter job undone. Entirely unprofessional!"
2.14.6 Realization
"Albus? What are you doing here?"
Dumbledore had to acknowledge, his many, many other faults aside, Cornelius Fudge had some of the most impressive emotional control the elderly wizard had ever encountered. It was either that or the man simply had no sense of shame whatsoever… which sounded more plausible, come to think of it.
Whatever the reason, there was no hint in the Minister's voice or demeanor of what the man had been doing in his office for the last half hour, though the rather portly man did lose some points for sitting too stiffly. Understandable, certainly, but it detracted from the performance.
"Minister, you demanded that I meet with you immediately — half an hour ago," Albus handed the man the memo which had been delivered just before Albus had intended to go to bed.
The Minister of Magic looked curiously at the parchment in question before stating firmly, "Albus, I sent no such request. Who gave it to you? Should we contact Amelia about a forgery?"
"You didn't send it?" Albus frowned. "It arrived in the usual manner, and I thought nothing of it. Hmm, what was that in service of, I wonder?"
From the doorway, the Minister's long-suffering bodyguard spoke up tentatively, "Um, sir? It occurs to me that the only things that note accomplished were getting you here and making you annoyed at the Minister for wasting your time. Since I don't believe you are the sort to hold a grudge with someone over something that they didn't do, and I don't think anyone else believes that either, that leaves only one possible motivation for sending the note. I believe it was a means of removing you from your school, sir."
Albus' eyes widened, and he shot to his feet, an odd device appearing in his hand from within his robes. "Corporal? Are you there, Corporal?" There was no response.
"Cornelius, please pass that on to Amelia and ask her to investigate the forgery," Albus said indicating the parchment.
As the Minister nodded agreeably, the Headmaster excused himself, "It seems that I have some urgent business to attend to at Hogwarts, good evening, Minister." And the room was suddenly one person emptier.
"Did he just apparate right through the wards, sir?" the auror on duty asked the Minister.
Cornelius waved off the man's question. "He always does that," he said dismissively. The minister dropped the forged memo on his desk to deal with in the morning. "We're done here for the evening; I'll be leaving now."
"Aren't you curious about what's going on in the school, Minister?"
"Albus will deal with it, and if he doesn't then as long as I don't know about it, it's not my problem."
"What about the students, sir?"
"Like I said, not my problem," Cornelius shrugged on his coat and reached for his bowler. "If some of the little monsters die on Albus' watch, he'll get blamed for it, and the only way I can catch heat is if I was aware of the problem; therefore, I will go home and go to sleep without looking into things."
"I see, sir," the auror said uncertainly.
"You'll understand eventually, son," the Minister said magnanimously.
As the portly man left the room, his bodyguard muttered under his breath, "God, I hope not," before following dutifully along.
2.14.7 Blast from the past
At the Lair, Harry and his two damsels were engaged in their usual nightly ritual.
They had returned from the castle after dinner and had gone through their evening chores. Suze had worked on her spinning because her shirts were starting to wear out again; Hermione had curled up with — or more descriptively, around — a book, given her usual choice in reading material; and Harry had eaten his second, much more substantial, dinner.
Afterwards, the trio had come together to watch the sunset from the lip of the Lair, and then with the fall of night, they had returned to the sitting area intent on reading for a time before they sought their various beds.
While not strictly a part of the routine, it was not unusual — particularly since the incorporation of Hermione into the group — for this evening reading period to run rather longer than was prudent for growing children, which was why, when a certain blood-drenched figure burst into the Lair along about midnight, all three of the Lair's inhabitants were still wide awake.
"So, the Boy-Who-Lived," an unpleasantly sibilant voice sneered from the entrance. "Ha! The Boy-Who-Won't-Live-Much-Longer, rather!"
The red-eyed and nose-less man hissed a laugh as the centaur in the room went for her rifle and knocked her unconscious with a silently cast stunner. He would have to remember to punish it later for its temerity in not waiting patiently to be killed. There was a proper order to this sort of thing, after all.
"Who the dickens are you?" Harry demanded, rather justifiably put out at the sudden home invasion. "And what do you think you're doing; how'd you find here to get in; and what reprobate gave you a nose-ectomy?"
"Are you an imbecile, boy?" the nose-less man growled — rather poorly, to be honest; the hissing really killed the effect.
Harry looked rather less than impressed.
"I am Lord Voldemort!" the intruder proclaimed, sounding rather put out that he had not been recognized.
It had only been a decade, surely his reputation hadn't faded so quickly?
"And I am here to finish what I started ten years ago when I killed your parents! Of course I found you, I'm the Dark Lord, and you didn't even try to protect against scrying! Terribly sloppy of you — though I suppose it's to be expected; you are a child, after all. Perhaps I should wait for any future child enemies to grow up before murdering them?"
The creepy-looking man paused for a moment, rubbing thoughtfully at his chin. Adults did tend to be more professional adversaries, and the ultimately futile struggle was the best part of the whole business. "Something to consider I suppose…"
"What about the nose-ectomy?" Harry prompted curiously when the intruder drifted off before he finished answering his set of questions.
"Oh, yes, quite — terribly sorry, I got a tad distracted there," the self-styled Lord Voldemort apologized absently before shifting back to a hissing approximation of dramatically carrying voice. "And — what in Salazar's name is a nose-ectomy?"
"Huh. Nah, you can't be that Voldemort-guy; he splattered himself when he bounced a killing curse off my face," the young dragon countered.
Harry wasn't buying what this guy was selling; his face was way too awesome to leave survivors.
"And since you found my Lair, you can't be half as stupid as someone who managed to splatter himself while trying to kill a baby. And since getting your appendix taken out is an appendectomy, I guess getting your nose taken off is a nose-ectomy."
The red-eyed fellow who was most assuredly Lord Voldemort, no matter what his soon-to-be latest victim insisted, drew himself up for another round of argument before deflating.
"Why am I discussing noses with the Potter brat?"
He shook his entirely nose-free head in disgust before continuing, "Feh! Claim what you like, that mudblood bitch of a mother of yours did… something! A ritual! It caused my curse to rebound, not your face! And as I have progressed further along the path to immortality than any other, all it succeeded in doing was destroying my body, which — with the aid of my most excellent, if unwilling, assistant, Professor Quirrel, who unfortunately perished in the process — I have regained!"
"No, one of my friends has a photo of the mess. That Voldemort-guy was definitely splattered all over the walls, and the floor, and the ceiling, and the door, and my crib, and the windows, and the hallway outside the door, and…"
"That's enough, brat!"
"Anyway, I mean he went splat! And when I splat things — or I suppose, when my face splats things — they stay SPLATTED!"
"I have only one thing left to say to you, foolish brat, avada kedavra!"
And with that, a sickly green light shot out of the intruder's wand. Harry only had just enough time to say "Hey!" before the curse hit.
"And now," Voldemort declared, turning to Hermione, "for you, mudblood! You have the honor to be the second slain by me in this, my new…"
"You've got no idea how much that stings!" Harry loudly declared, sitting back up from where he'd slumped down on the couch.
This was sufficiently strange to throw Voldemort off-track in mid-monologue.
"…actually, I have," Voldemort countered. "By the way, avada kedavra."
He turned back to the quivering Hermione.
"Where was I? Ah, yes, you…"
"I'm done talking to you! Nobody just…" the Boy-Who-Just-Wouldn't-Freaking-Die declared, popping back up.
"Avada kedavra, goddamnit!"
"OW! Nobody just comes in here throwing…"
"AVADA KEDAVRA!"
"…killing curses and…"
"AVADA KEDAVRA! WILL YOU JUST PLEASE DIE ALREADY?"
"…threatening my damsels!"
"AVADA KEDAVRA! AVADA KEDAVRA! AVADA KEDAVRA!"
The Boy-Who-Just-Kept-Popping-Back-Up seemed to be staying down this time, so the highly irritated Dark Lord once again returned his attention to Hermione.
"Finally! As I was saying…"
That was when an enormous set of teeth descended on him from above. Harry, his piece said, had reverted to his native form and gone for the bite. Nothing accidental about it; that was intentional, through and through.
Harry briefly chewed, swallowed, and belched, then said, "Huh."
Hermione, who had managed to get her teeth unclenched, let out a distinctly shell shocked-sounding squeak.
"'S'funny. I didn't expect enemy to taste like pork." Harry continued, "Wonder who that was? Sure can't have been… oh boy, dragon gas!"
With that, he spun around quickly, sticking his tail and backside out over the lip of the cave, and released what had to be the most epic fart in known history.
After all, flatulence is usually composed of methane or some such rancid gas, not screaming, disembodied, horribly-traumatized-due-to-just-having-passed-through-a-dragon's-digestive-tract shades of Dark Lords.
Hermione, still plastered to the couch where she'd been wishing desperately there wasn't a Voldemort between her and the guns, blinked several times and managed to get out a stunned, "…uhhh…" between struggling not to giggle in hysterical relief and struggling not to freak out.
"Huh, that was weird," Harry remarked, bemusedly scratching at his head — which, coming from a dragon the size of a not-so-small aircraft, looked somewhat strange to say the least — and peering after the spectral Voldemort. "Stuff doesn't normally do that when I eat it; I guess I better see what Mr. Dumbledore and Madame Pomfrey think about that."
He cast a finishing spell — one of the few charms he could now safely manage after nearly a year of constant control exercises — at his centaur damsel in order to remove the stunning spell. It was not the prescribed counter, but it was close enough that the disparity in strength more than made up for the mismatch in spell choice.
As Suze struggled to her feet, he continued, "Oh well, he tasted like pork, so that's all… um, oh boy, aw man, I don't think enemy went down so good."
As the philosopher's stone that Voldemort had been carrying when he assaulted Harry's Lair went to work on the dragon's largely-iron physiology from its new home in the same dragon's absurdly magical gullet and caused him to pass out with a fever, the last thing he heard was Hermione and Suze frantically yelling his name.
As far as Hermione was concerned, this was definitely a valid justification to pitch a fit of the screaming meemies.
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