What flashed before Harry's eyes as he charged forward alongside Hermione wasn't the two furious crowds pressing against each other.
It was the face of Hogwarts' caretaker, Argus Filch. That long-nosed, perpetually sour face.
He remembered second year, just before Nearly Headless Nick had come to invite him to his five-hundredth Deathday Party; Filch had hauled him to the caretaker's office for tracking mud across the entrance hall floor.
There, in the cluttered disorder of a room that smelled of furniture polish and old resentment, Harry had discovered that the famously "notorious" Squib had been secretly enrolled in a Kwikspell correspondence course. A mail-order programme promising to teach Squibs how to perform magic.
When he'd told Ron and Hermione afterward, Ron had laughed himself absolutely sick over it.
Now, watching everything unfolding around him, Harry finally understood why Filch, old as he was, with his job secured and no real fear of losing it, had still gone to such lengths to try to learn magic.
Because being a Squib in the wizarding world placed you at the absolute bottom of its social order. Lower, even, than what the pureblood families so casually sneered at as Mudbloods.
These people had every reason to be furious.
The Aurors the Ministry had deployed along Diagon Alley were people who had survived the brutal fighting of just days ago.
In any other context, Harry would have called them heroes without a second's hesitation.
But these same men and women, people who had dared to stand against Voldemort's Death Eaters and dark wizards, were now raising their wands against a crowd of defenceless civilians in broad afternoon daylight. Even if the civilians had provoked them first.
The thought sat in Harry's chest like a stone.
"Stop—stop attacking them!"
Hermione screamed it as she threw herself forward but the Aurors hot with fury of people were not listening.
"This is dangerous, girl." The nearest Auror barely looked at her. "Not the place for a child!"
He grabbed the arm Hermione had latched onto and shoved her roughly aside then swung his wand back in a vicious arc. The red beam from its tip crossed the distance to a protester in less than a second and dropped the man cold onto the cobblestones.
The workers had clearly been bottling their rage for far longer than a day or two.
The Aurors' sweep sent them into a brief, scrambling panic but panic has a short half-life in a crowd that has already decided it has nothing left to lose.
From somewhere near the centre of the protest, a tall man with a plain, broad face raised his hand above the chaos and roared:
"Brothers! The Ministry wants to wipe us out—to bury their own tyranny! But we will not submit! We fight for our families! We fight for our lives!"
The words were not eloquent. They were not precisely true. But they were the right words for that moment, in that place, spoken by the right kind of voice and it had instant effect.
The fury in the crowd ignited.
With a roar, the civilians surged forward, heedless of the terrifying hexes flying toward them, heedless of the red and purple beams cracking through the air, a wave of angry, able-bodied men and women broke and advanced with whatever they could lay their hands on: hoe handles and lengths of iron pipe and heavy wooden mallets and the dark brown bottles of corrosive liquid that hissed where they shattered on the cobblestones.
They were Squibs, every last one of them, incapable of producing so much as a spark between them. But there was no denying what several hundred furious, powerfully-built people charging with improvised weapons looked like.
It was not, by any measure, a trifling sight.
The bystanders who had gathered to watch, who had been enjoying the spectacle from a distance, fell back in sudden alarm, jostling and stumbling over one another in the scramble to establish a different kind of distance.
"These damned savages think this will frighten us!"
The Auror who had shoved Hermione snarled. He levelled his wand at the broad-faced man who had rallied the crowd and fired a Stunning Spell.
But the broad, dull-looking villager was surprisingly quick. He dropped into a sudden duck and the Stunning Spell sailed clean over his shoulder and disappeared into the far wall with a crack.
The Ministry Aurors had no intention of killing anyone. Their purpose was control, not escalation. But even wand-arms moving in a blur couldn't hold back a crowd thirty times their number surging forward.
Still, If sheer numbers had been enough to overcome wizards, the wizarding world would never have survived long enough to become what it was.
Moving with the seamless coordination forged in war, the Aurors Disapparated as a unit.
The cracks of their Disapparition popped across the platform in rapid succession, and then they were simply gone and in the same instant, reappeared further back, spread out in a wide ring that enclosed the protest "unarmed" crowd from every side.
"Don't hurt them—they're not—oh, Ron, what are you—"
Hermione still hadn't given up on stopping this. She was calling out to the nearest Auror when Ron suddenly yanked her sideways, nearly sending her sprawling.
"What are you doing—"
But Ron wasn't looking at Hermione. His eyes were fixed on a figure moving through the milling, panicking crowd, a young man with dark skin and thick, calloused hands.
While his companions stumbled and pushed and milled about in frightened confusion now that the Aurors had closed the ring, this young man had a clear purpose. He was running straight toward them through the chaos.
"Can't you see she was speaking up for you?" Harry stepped in front of Hermione as the man reached them, his voice showed a distinct, clipped edge of warning.
"Harry, Hermione, Ron and Lavender."
The young man's eyes moved across each of their faces rapidly.
"Did you all have a good summer?"
Shouts and cries and roared orders filled the platform on all sides. Harry was half-convinced he'd misheard but the way the man's gaze moved, restless and searching, stirred something familiar in him.
"John, we agreed—no going after the children!"
A stocky woman one who had been hurling bottles of corrosive liquid passed behind the young man in a fast sprint and called out without breaking run.
"I know—I'm getting them out!" the young man shot back over his shoulder.
From that brief exchange, Harry had a name: 'John.'
"You—you know us?" Hermione had her wand up already, deflecting an Auror's hex that had been aimed at John's back—the spell ricocheted off into empty air and she was staring at the man with bewilderment.
"What a shame you don't recognise me—"
In the middle of all that noise and danger and flying magic, the man's expression went suddenly distant and vague.
He tilted his head at a small, considering angle and a hex skimmed past him on the left side as though he had simply and casually stepped out of its way, the way you step around a puddle without looking at it.
Then he turned back to Hermione and met her eyes with an expression of perfect, untroubled calm.
Harry's mouth fell open. He said nothing.
"Oh—you're—"
Hermione went very still. That specific, particular, utterly singular quality of detachment-that-was-not-detachment. The ability to be completely present in a dangerous situation while appearing to be mildly somewhere else called a single face to Hermione's mind.
She pressed a hand over her mouth, dropped her voice to a stunned whisper.
"Luna?!"
"It's me—"
The person called John nodded calmly apparently entirely unaware of, or entirely unbothered by, the alarm and disbelief and sheer confounded bewilderment he had just detonated across all four of them.
"L-Luna—but—how did you—"
Ron had turned into a stammering wreck. His eyes were practically departing his skull. He looked from the broad-shouldered young man's face to Hermione's face and back again as though one of them might resolve the situation into something that made sense.
"Polyjuice Potion!" Hermione caught up in an instant as her mind locked onto the solution. Then, immediately: "But why are you disguised as a—a—"
Luna seemed about to answer, but something made her go still. She turned to look at a row of fireplaces set into the far wall.
Whoosh—
Whoosh—Whoosh—
Whoosh—Whoosh—Whoosh—
The fireplaces erupted in unison. Green flame roared out from every one simultaneously. From each fireplace, an Auror stepped through onto the platform.
From the hard, closed expression on their faces, it was clear they hadn't come to negotiate with anyone about anything.
The terrified civilians lost whatever organisation they had remaining. They scattered in every direction at once while the newly-arrived Aurors moved with crisp efficiency, wading straight into the chaos.
Harry's eyes swept the edges of the platform and found what he'd already known would be there: the camera flashes.
Harry could already see it—off in the crowd of onlookers, camera flashes strobing in rapid succession. The frequency of those bursts told him the Daily Prophet photographer was absolutely delighted with what was unfolding.
The sight of one civilian after another going down made a vein throb in Harry's temple. He had to act. If this wasn't stopped now, today's events could easily become the scandal that shook the wizarding world.
"We need a different approach, Harry!"
Hermione's mind had snapped back into gear. She caught Harry's arm before he could barrel into the Aurors.
"Neither of us can stop this alone—they won't take orders from us!"
"You mean we should go to the Ministry for backup?" Harry demanded.
"That's not a bad idea." Hermione's voice was rapid, clipped, processing out loud. "But every moment we spend getting there and back, more people are going to be hurt."
She drew a deep breath. Her eyes were burning as she looked at Harry.
"I'm sorry, Harry. I have a plan. But I'm afraid it's going to require a small sacrifice from you."
Harry blinked. He stared at her. He had no idea what she meant.
With no time to spare, Hermione gave up any pretence of caring about Ministry regulations. A flick of her wand transformed the spatula in Luna's hand into a dagger. Then, before Harry could react, she pushed him directly into Luna's arms.
Harry was still catching up but Luna was already one step ahead.
The dagger came up and pressed against Harry's throat in one smooth motion.
The cold of the blade made him flinch. Then the logic of it clicked into place.
"You're planning to—"
"You don't mind, do you, Harry?" Hermione asked urgently.
Harry looked up at the ceiling of the platform sky and exhaled a long, unsteady breath that carried with it several things he'd decided not to say.
"Fine." He looked back at Hermione. "Let's do it your way."
"This is absolutely mad. Sirius is going to lose his mind when he finds out." Ron shook his head, his expression somewhere between appalled and disbelieving.
Hermione was already moving. She backed away a few quick steps, pulling Ron and Lavender with her. She pressed her wand to her own throat.
Took one breath.
The next second, a voice tore through the noise of the platform, cutting clean above every shout and crash and hex:
"Everyone stop—Harry Potter has been taken hostage!"
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