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Sean, At Hogwarts

Day 4 of the siege

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Two months of training with my Magic until it had reflexes that far outstripped mine. Two months learning and practicing every combat spell in the book. 4 additional days of intense training with the two greatest wizards in the world, soaking my brain in the directly transferred memories of the greatest secrets of wizardkind. I’d been so busy I hadn’t even had time to go back to the basement and get what I could from Slytherin’s monster. Suffice to say I was so far beyond an ordinary wizard in terms of speed and lethality that I could scarcely register them as threats anymore.

Mad-Eye Moody, though? Moody was different. He wasn’t just fast- though despite the mutilation of his traditional spellcaster training, he was still quite quick on the draw. He wasn’t just clever- even with the Concept riding shotgun in his mind. He was cruel. He fought with a perverse sense of humor and a callous disregard for propriety that was absolutely breathtaking. Nothing was beneath him. If he’d detected that I had some kind of nudity taboo, he’d have stripped his robes in a heartbeat. If he thought I was scared of blood, I had no doubt I’d be covered in his arterial spray at that very moment.

But he couldn’t crack my shell- I had only one weakness and I wasn’t betraying it to him. So we fought, and we were fairly evenly matched- though he’d trounced me four days ago, I’d gained some ground since then. He animated a statue and threw it at me, I blew it apart only to realize he’d manifested a grenade in the chest piece. I caught the shrapnel and drove it back at him, he converted it to stinging wasps and set them on me, and so on down the hall, back and forth. My only real triumph of the match was the fact that I was still standing after several minutes of it. That, and getting him away from the door long enough for my protege to sneak through.

He thought he saw his opening when Haley arrived. I supposed he hadn’t seen her in human form, and so didn’t register what her arrival meant for him. But he did see my eyes flicker towards her and a slight shadow of concern cross my face when she hove into view around a bend in the corridor, moving at speeds far beyond normal for a human. He misunderstood- my concern was for him. What happened next certainly took him by surprise. He grinned evilly at me and said “Gotcha” before throwing up a blast wave of fire in my direction. As I cut through it in a burst of fireproof butterflies, he levelled his wand at her and spoke the dread words. “Avada Kedavra!”

The green blast flashed out and took her full in the chest- she made no attempt to dodge. She also didn’t slow down, flinch, or in any way react. He had time to widen his eyes in shock before she took one good swing and slapped his ass into the nearest wall, hard enough to stun him. “Too many hit dice for that.” He tried to counter, possibly a binding spell- she just kept moving and the binding shattered, the backlash bursting from his wand in a shower of sparks that made him flinch and hiss. She knocked it from his hand and turned him around, slamming him face-first against the stone a second time, hard enough to knock him unconscious and break stone chips from the surface..

She was already calling for me before the dust had cleared. “Sean! Obliviate and heal!” I nodded and ran to him. If we could purge the Concept from him, he’d be an ally worth having. But I wouldn’t forget the look in his eye during that fight. He’d enjoyed that, every second of it.

He wasn’t coming around quickly after what she’d done to him. Wizards were tougher than humans but not, as a rule, tougher than foot-thick stone walls. It was astonishing that he wasn’t just dead, but I supposed if there was a chance it would kill him she’d never have used such force. I set his bones knitting and replaced the meme in his head with something from my own private supply, before Hermione caught up to us at last, running as if her life depended on it. “The paintings! Don’t look at the paintings!” Naturally that was the very first thing I was going to do, but the blue glow beginning to fill the room stopped me. Shit. They’d hung a painting of the meme somewhere and now it would spread throughout the castle, wards or not. That was damn clever. We’d have to watch every glance now, or risk needing an emergency Obliviate. The antimemetics weren’t perfect, and even if the meme couldn’t get us easily, it would turn every ghost, statue, and painting in the building. The entirety of Hogwarts was being turned against us in one stroke.

Still kneeling at his side, I turned from Moody to the near-frantic Hermione as Harry ran through the door, looking confused. “Calm down, kids. We’re going to figure this out. You saw the mirror of Erised?” Haley looked at me sharply even as Hermione nodded. “What were they looking for?”

She relayed what she’d seen to us. “A way out- via… rain and an ancient stone arch with a black veil?” Haley and I glanced at each other. That first one sounded an awful lot like our plan of attack, to be executed as soon as her chosen hero got back from his trip. The second…

She got it first. “That doorway, in the Department of Mysteries. The one Sirius Black falls through in Order of the Phoenix.” I thought about it for a moment and then gasped in alarm. She just looked at me, puzzled. “What?”

I tried to explain as best I could. “When I spoke to Dumbledore about his history, he went off-script. Talked about things beyond the backstory that Rowling had written for him. The Concept was there. It had written itself into his life as a temptation. If it can do that, and the Veil is basically a doorway where the other side was never really fleshed out…”

She finished the thought. “It can lead wherever the narrator decides it leads. It could lead to a multiversal afterlife with a trillion souls. It could lead straight out into narrative space. They wouldn’t need portals or magic hacks to get around the multiverse.” Her eyes hardened. “It can’t get through that doorway, Sean.”

I was in complete agreement but- “It sure looks like they’re about to make their assault here. You know the painting trick is going to make us vulnerable. We need to coordinate these defenses, or start the final evacuation.” She had a portal to Second Ingenium that she was prepared to deploy in the event of a final invasion, but she hadn’t left it sitting open for fear of the Concept getting in. I didn’t like where this was going.

She nodded- “I can’t bring in simulacra. They’re too vulnerable to capture by the Concept. We’ll have to split up. I’ll go tear that doorway down, you stay here and-”

I stood up and cut her off. “ No. Absolutely not. Every single time it comes down to it, we end up fighting on opposite sides of some divide. Wonderland, or death, or a split by the narrative. We work best together. I can feel that in parts of me that I’m only just waking up to, but you know it’s true. We can’t let the story keep pressuring us apart.” She agreed, I could feel that too, but her conscience wouldn’t let her abandon a castle full of children any more than mine would.

A voice I really didn’t want to hear came from the doorway. “You’re going to leave us now? ” It was Draco, standing there with several of the other students and professors- no doubt drawn by the alarms and the general disaster-zone state of this wing of the castle. “They’re storming the front gates, Snape is down there with Dumbledore and Flitwick and you’re just going to- fly off? ” Hermione and Harry went to stand with him, the same question in their eyes as they stared at me. Haley glanced at them, then back at me. She stood back. This was my selfishness to defend, should I choose. I opened my mouth, to make some excuse, to say something like “I can’t be in two places at once,” before I slapped it closed again, gawping like a fish. That had been Haley’s hurdle this last month, hadn’t it? And she’d overcome it, hadn’t she? And now she invited me to stand with her. The arc of our story wasn’t forcing us apart- it was forcing me to keep up. I just needed to do the impossible. “Sorry, Draco. I’m afraid I was letting my mouth run away from me. Of course I’ll stay here and fight with you.”

My wife nodded and gave me a quick hug before turning to leave. I returned it and whispered in her ear. “South tower, 30 seconds.” She gave me a puzzled glance but didn’t question further- just whispered back “You’d better be in one piece when you get there,” wrapped me in a much fiercer hug, and then leapt out the window and shifted to her other form with a hurricane blast of displaced air. I turned back to the assembled crowd, all carefully not looking at any paintings. “Now then. I believe the school keeps a supply of time turners in stock in Professor McGonagal’s office?”

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1 Hour Later

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The evacuation had gone poorly. The pressure on the gates hadn’t let up, and we’d been forced to make a stand in the astronomy tower, with defenses at the lowest level and the top. The students were stashed inside the body of the tower, and I’d gone up top to open our portal out. But they must have been waiting for it- the second we opened it and began trying to shuffle the kids out, a hit team of mind-controlled aurors had dropped by broom and attempted to seize it. We’d lost Flitwick- stunned right off the balcony’s edge- and despite taking out a dozen of them, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to keep them from getting that damned meme through the portal if we left it open.

I’d driven them off temporarily with a lethal cloud of flesh-eating wasps and was preparing to shut the thing down when we received the last few reinforcements, stepping through from the sunlit fields of the other side. It was Roy, and the other three members of Haley’s squad- Nina, Charlie, and their driver Mac. They’d all been through Haley’s “Process” and it looked like they had come loaded for bear. Roy recognized me from that fateful night in the parking lot a month ago, and walked up to shake my hand.

“Sean, right? We weren’t quite done in there but she thought we’d serve better here. She’s sent us through for the defense, and then for whatever scheme you’ve got going on that will get us to her in time to help.” His grip was like iron and it made me regret that I hadn’t taken the time to get her Pathfinder level-juicing yet. He was wearing a ludicrous outfit of fur and leather, clearly magical, and on his back was slung some kind of enchanted flintlock that was probably a lot more dangerous than it looked, given that he’d chosen it over a modern assault rifle. A Ranger, then? His companions looked much the same- liked they’d stepped right out of the world’s most deadly serious renaissance festival. Nina had what I could only assume was the outfit of a Sorceress based on all that skin. Charlie was looking like some kind of divine caster, maybe an Oracle, and Mac was definitely a Paladin, based on the all-gilt armor and the damn pegasus he’d scrounged up somewhere.

“Sure hope you can use that thing non-lethally,” I said, glancing at Roy’s rifle. I indicated the stacked, unconscious bodies of Concept combatants behind me. I’d been in the process of transfiguring them into bricks to keep them stable and secure- standard practice now when we didn’t have time to free them. “Your friend Matt hasn’t made it back yet, and until he gets here we need all the help we can get. We have a few house elves and the people we freed from the first assault, along with three or four professors, but they’re hitting us all over. This tower is pretty much the last safe place in the castle.” We’d covered or taken down all the paintings as quickly as we could. “The kids are just below- we were going to evacuate them. Now- well, it’s feeling more like a last stand situation.”

Roy took it all in and conferred with his teammates. I tried to stay patient as another cataclysmic spell rocked the tower from below. Snape, no doubt, or Dumbledore, or perhaps Moody, holding off the bulk of their forces on the ground. “We’ll stay up here. All of us fight better with clear lines of sight and we can keep an eye out for Matt. You get where you need to go.” I nodded, and quickly distributed the extra time turners- I only had a few to hand out, but I explained what they’d need to do. Then I hurried below. There was simply no time for anything longer.

Moody had woken up and was grimly setting traps in the third floor entryway to the tower. Anyone coming in from the castle proper was going to get a- were those bandsaws? I stopped to scold him. “You were told non-lethal measures only. What, are you trying to outdo Jigsaw ?” The sheer scope of what he was setting up made my blood run cold. Pressurized spike traps, poison soaked monomolecular filament, invisible areas of perfect vaccuum sandwiched between floor panels of hundreds of gravities. I really didn’t know how Dumbledore had ever worked with this guy.

He sneered at me. “That some kind of horror movie monster? They have some cute ideas, from time to time. Too busy playing with their food, though. I’m not here for half-measures, boy. They got my mind once, and we’ll all be dead before they get me a second time.”

I’d already pumped him for information- he’d had surprisingly little, the same as Haley and the others we’d revived. The Concept wasn’t big on group thought, mostly just orders. But his rant did remind me. “How did you retain so much of your mind when it had control over you?”

He smiled evilly and tapped his skull. “Backup brain, kid. Never trust to one of anything.” I honestly couldn’t even tell if he was kidding. I hurried onward, but he stopped me before I could get far. “By the way. Why do I have vivid memories of being enslaved by a singer named Rick Astley?” I blinked and stammered as he glowered at me, but managed to make it past him and down the stairs without giving a firm answer. The sounds of fighting were picking up below and I raced downward to meet them. On the second floor landing I saw a cluster of kids who’d managed to get away from their house elf minders, firing stunners down into the melee below. I broke them up, sent them back up the stairs, but- what good would it do? If we lost at any of these choke points, they’d be dead or brainwashed soon enough. Better to let them fight in their own defense. I gave up eventually, throwing up my hands.

The ground floor of the tower was a mess. The Concept had come through the halls of the castle like a freight train- Grindelwald was leading the charge, and once again he and Dumbledore appeared to be crossing wands outside the tower doors in a titanic duel that threatened to overwhelm every other fight. Our last free witches and wizards were on the ground as I arrived, felled by a cackling trio of blue eyed witches- was that Bellatrix Black, Minerva McGonagall and Molly Weasley? I was almost stunned by the sight of those three fighting back to back- almost. A rocket-propelled snake hissed at me and I slipped on the stairs, falling to my back and bouncing down several steps as it embedded above and exploded into a rain of venomous, biting madness. Then I swung into action.

I reversed gravity locally and leapt to the ceiling- two of the three fell, but Bellatrix simply rotated in the air, laughing like this was the grandest carnival ride before trying to stop my heart directly. I fended that off invisibly, but by the time I was done McGonagall was halfway through transfiguring the air around me into something unbreathable, and Molly was picking herself off the ceiling, readying what looked like a drill of pure force. It was time to not be here. So I apparated, rendering my hands and feet sticky and appearing on a nearby wall- but also in three other locations simultaneously. Without a clear target to pick from they each chose at random, and I suddenly had far less incoming fire to deal with. I took advantage of it, bracketing Molly with an array of stunners and drillers that pierced her shields and battered her defenses down before I took her out of the fight with a simple application of force to her carotid artery. Deprived of blood flow to the brain she was out like a light, leaving me the other two to deal with.

“Clever little sausage!” shouted Bellatrix, as the fight between Grindelwald and Dumbledore seemed to hit some new stage in the hallway. We couldn’t see much of it but what looked like the head of a dragon made of plasma fire briefly made an appearance in the doorway before being sucked out of the room with a look of alarm. “But what will you do if there’s no gentle way out, hmm?” She aimed her next spell not at me but McGonagall, sending the other professor into a red rage as she came tearing through the room at me. I threw myself out of the way but she was getting faster - in fact, the transfiguration professor’s body was warping and splitting. It wasn’t werewolfism- this was no curse, it was deliberate, some kind of berserker hex. It might have made a normal witch formidable, but McGonagall was a master of transfiguration. She made whiplike extensions to her arms and flung diamond-tipped claws at me. She opened her mouth and fired poisoned exploding darts at me, that I surmised had once been her teeth. Individual hairs came loose and began trying to loop themselves around my neck before becoming monomolecular garrottes and tightening to choke me. All of that I could deal with, but she was casting spells the whole time as well. McGonagall unleashed was terrifying, a monster. She didn’t appear to have any physical limitations. There were openings in her assault, but only for lethal force- stunners had no effect. And I wasn’t willing to go there. I needed something to remove her from the fight and I wasn’t getting it. I began taking hits- a claw tore my right calf, a garrote found my arm and sunk deep before I cut the line. Bellatrix was taking a breather, laughing at my misfortune.

I healed as best I could but I was beginning to contemplate something extreme when Moody joined the fight, exploding into the room through the stairway. He’d already assessed the situation with that magic eye of his, no doubt- he made a beeline for the bulk of McGonagall and grabbed onto it. “Dammit Minerva, don’t make a liar out of me about half measures! You take care of them Peakes, it’s on you now!” He roared even as her tentacles and hair-strands whipped around him in a tight ball. Before they could descend, I saw him pull something from his pocket and snap it- a portkey? Tuned to work inside the castle? Damn you Moody, you got that from the time with the Concept didn’t you. But it worked- they vanished, and it was just me and Bellatrix. The room shook again and dust fell from the stone ceiling as the struggle outside continued.

She wagged her finger at me. “Naughty naughty, interference on the play! Won’t do at all!” I rolled my eyes at her but internally my mind was racing. Where the fuck is Severus? He was supposed to be down here. I’m going to have to do this without him. I rolled my shoulders and took a deep breath. Even without the other two, Bellatrix Lestrange was an astonishingly lethal woman. But I had a trick or two for her. As we squared off, my magic flitted out.

“ ...Bellatrix,” called a voice off to her right, a perfect imitation of her lord and lover, who not coincidentally had spent part of the last week training me. Her attention flickered and my bolt took her from the other direction, rocking her back. She snarled and snapped her attention back to me, beginning another fusillade of spells. But the voice called again, a more private name, stolen from his memories. “ ...my Bella, my black lotus…” once again she succumbed to the distraction, once again a numbing hex slipped through her shifting wards and made her wand arm droop. “ QUIT IT!” she shrieked, sending a blastwave of force that slammed me against the wall and blew several stones right out of the frame of the window, plummeting into the night. “Lord, where are you?” she called, still fighting- torn between the madness of the Concept and her insane need for Voldemort, knowing it was illusion but still uncertain. “ I’m right here, my darkest desire- beyond death, beyond life, the one thing I cannot abandon- is you, Bellatrix.” She screamed and exploded, literally disintegrating into a cloud of fly-like creatures that swarmed and stung. I rushed to cover my eyes and mouth but it was too late- they were rushing in, filling my lungs.

I fell to my knees, clawing at my neck- I couldn’t get them out, I could feel them in there, blocking my airways. My magic lashed at her, tearing great swathes of the flies away but she laughed, she simply didn’t care. Her face began to materialize, some part of the cloud retreating even as I coughed and choked. “Oh, you will die the darkest death for what you’ve tried here, fool man. The Concept wanted you dead but this one is for me. There can be no forgiveness for imitating him.” I was blacking out, but I still had the presence of mind to watch the stairs. Like clockwork, he came. I should have seen it before. Should have damn well seen it coming.

“NO” shouted Draco, and threw himself at her face, knocking it away from me and the cloud simultaneously. She shrieked in rage and her flies withdrew, seizing my wand as they did so. She rematerialized and grabbed him by the neck, plunging a jeweled dagger into his chest without missing a beat. I tried to cry out but all I could do was use my magic to cough away the last remaining bugs from my traumatized lungs, slumped against the wall. Draco looked at me as the light fled his eyes. Through bloodied lips he whispered “For… give…” and then he was gone.

“No more magic,” she snarled, stalking forward with my wand in her off hand. “No more friends down the stairs. You die alone, and afraid, and a failure.”

I sighed raggedly. “Before,” I started to say, and then burst into a coughing fit.

“Before what?” she sneered, “Before I kill you? Going to beg for mercy?”

I shook my head. “Before the friends. Before the magic. When I was always alone, and afraid, and a bit of a failure. I had guns. ” And beneath my robes I tightened my finger on the trigger of the pistols Haley had given me what felt like three lifetimes ago, that I’d carried with me through two worlds and every day since. The flaming, thundering rounds ripped out, and ended her. What was left of her body fell to the ground smouldering, a stunned expression on her face. But it wasn’t her I was looking at. “I’m sorry, Draco. I do forgive you. I hope, wherever you are, you can forgive me.” Only then did I give her body one last glance. “Ethics be damned, I do not regret killing you in the slightest.”

The rumbles from the duel in the corridor had ended. That was either a very good or a very bad sign, and I didn’t know which. “Time to see if my clock is going to be punched, I suppose” I said, limping into the hallway.