Hermione pulled Ron and the stunned Lavender back a few steps, creating just enough space. Then she pressed her wand to her throat, drew one deep, breath and screamed:
"Everyone stop—Harry Potter has been taken hostage!"
Every sound died at once.
The shriek tore through eardrums and many in the crowd flinched and winced and pressed hands to the sides of their heads in pain.
Both the marchers and the Ministry's newly recruited Auror force froze as though hit simultaneously with a full-body Petrificus Totalus and every pair of eyes on the platform turned to stare at John and Harry.
The silence that followed was the loudest Harry had heard in some time.
"Say something, Harry!"
The last scattered flashes of spell-light faded out. Luna wearing John's face and body leaned close to Harry's ear and murmured the instruction with calm urgency.
'This must be the most humiliating moment of my life,' Harry thought.
The blade was cold against his throat. Several hundred people were staring at him.
But if this would put an end to the standoff then there was nothing else for it.
Harry's face burned a shade of red that he was reasonably certain was visible from some distance. He cleared his throat.
"Ahem—ahem—I—" He paused then closed his eyes briefly then opened them. "I'm Harry Potter. S-save me!"
The silence held for one more second.
Then from behind him:
"Pfft—"
Ron clapped both hands over his mouth with desperation trying to contain the laugh that would not be contained. His shoulders were shaking.
The ferocious glare Hermione turned on him was the kind of glare that could have stopped a charging Hippogriff. Ron caught it, flinched, dropped his hands, and with tremendous effort rearranged every inch of his face into something that approximately resembled panic and anguish.
Harry Potter?
The thought moved through the Aurors like a current through water.
The Harry Potter?
The Aurors exchanged bewildered glances with one another. None of them quite knew what to do.
"That really is Harry Potter—I can see the scar from here!"
"No question. He and his two friends came to the Ministry last month for a hearing—I saw their faces myself."
The Aurors began clustering together in urgent, overlapping, increasingly agitated murmurs.
"Well done, John!"
Behind Luna—the marchers pressed forward, and someone reached through the crowd to clap a hand on the broad shoulder of John's borrowed body.
They looked at him with admiration—this man who had been quick enough, brave enough, to press a dagger to the throat of the most famous young wizard in Britain and turn the entire situation on its head in under a minute.
Without that move, they would already be forced to surrender in restraints, being led toward fireplace after fireplace to disappear into Ministry holding cells.
Not everyone felt the same way.
Along the edges of the gathered marchers, a portion of the crowd was casting uneasy sideways glances at Harry.
Holding a child hostage was an undeniably low act, whatever the cause. Yet to save their own skins and secure a seat at the negotiating table they had come here to demand, they pressed their mouths shut and held their tongues.
"Release that child—unless you'd like to share a cell in Azkaban with the Acromantulas!"
One of the Aurors had finally located his authority again. He took a step forward and threw a glare at Luna.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!"
He spat on the cobblestones with a disgusted sound and swept his gaze across the crowd with an expression of profound contempt.
"That boy defeated You-Know-Who for every all of us. What you're doing right now—this, here—you're not protecting your future. You are destroying it. You're destroying everyone's future."
Luna swept her gaze slowly across the platform left, then right, then back again waiting, waiting for these poor souls battered by war to voice their demands.
But ever since she had pressed the dagger to Harry's throat, the entire crowd seemed to have arrived, by some collective, unspoken agreement, at the conclusion that she was their leader. They watched her and waited for her to speak.
"We want to see Minister Bones. We want to see Professor Watson!"
Luna had no choice but to speak for them.
The crowd rallied behind her. Battered, bruised, many of them nursing hexed limbs or cuts from shattered bottle glass, the marchers raised their hands in ardent, unanimous support.
"We'd better start working out what we're actually going to say," Ron remarked, his face went blank as he surveyed the crowd's heaving emotion. "When the Minister and Professor Watson actually show up—don't count on threatening Professor Watson."
"He won't blame us for this," Hermione said stubbornly, her gaze leapt over the heads of the Auror to fix on Harry and John.
Never mind Harry Potter—any young witch or wizard caught in the hands of these trigger-happy duds would have been enough to make the Auror think twice.
After a brief, heated exchange among the Aurors, one of them turned, arranged his face into blankness, and stepped backward into the nearest fireplace. The green flames swallowed him.
Then came the waiting.
The two sides settled into a silent, straining standoff across the arrival platform. The air was filled with tension and dust and the remnants of spent spell-light.
Whoosh—
About five minutes later, the nearest fireplace erupted.
The first to step out of the fireplace was a wizard with dark skin who leaned on a cane.
His expression was grave. He strode toward them with purpose, and the column of people behind him moved with an entirely different quality than the Aurors who had surrounded the protestors. It was clear immediately, without anyone needing to say it, that this was a considerably more formidable force.
"Kingsley—you've been discharged!"
Hermione cried out in delighted surprise, and both Ron and Harry still caught in Luna's arm stared in astonishment.
Since the war's end, they had glimpsed Kingsley briefly at St. Mungo's surrounded by Healers and monitoring equipment. This was the first time they had truly seen him since.
Hermione darted toward Kingsley, her eyes were dropping to his prosthetic leg, her expression clouded with sorrow.
"How are you feeling, Kingsley?"
Kingsley gave a faint smile and then his face hardened back into the expression he had arrived with. He squinted out across the platform.
"Harry's been taken hostage." His voice was dry and sharp as struck flint. "I must say—that's quite a surprise. Didn't Watson give you lot any training?"
"Well—"
An uncomfortable flicker crossed Hermione's face that communicated, briefly and eloquently, that is a fair point and I don't have a satisfying answer to it.
"We never thought—to be fair—"
She turned her head, and the thought dissolved as she noticed that the fireplace behind Kingsley had already gone dark again. Her brow furrowed.
"What's happening, Kingsley? Is Minister Bones refusing to come and speak with the people?"
"Not at all—"
Kingsley made a sharp gesture over his shoulder, and his team moved at once.
They swept the journalists who had been pressing forward with their cameras back behind a firm perimeter; dispersed the cluster of newer Auror members who had been standing in uncertain knots; redeployed them around the marchers in a wide, contained ring; and pushed the crowd of onlookers back to a distance that was both safer and less useful for photographs.
"We need to ensure the Minister's safety before she arrives." He stepped forward, fixed Luna/John with a cold stare and raised his voice to carry across the platform.
"I am Kingsley Shacklebolt, Head of the Auror Office. Minister Bones will arrive shortly. But you must guarantee that Harry Potter will not be harmed. If you cannot, the Ministry will not offer you another opportunity for fair dialogue."
"We have no intention of hurting this child."
"We have no intention of hurting this child," Luna continued, playing her part to the end. "We only want to protect our own rights."
"Very well."
Kingsley gave a slow, stiff nod.
"Minister Bones will respond to any reasonable demands. I ask that everyone present remain calm throughout the negotiations—so that the Aurors are not forced to misread the situation and trigger consequences that none of us want."
Luna turned to the crowd behind her. The faces looking back at her gave slow, cautious nods and appeared quite afraid.
"Then let the Minister come forward or Professor Watson." Luna called out across the platform. "Either will do. We need to speak to someone with the actual authority to solve our problems."
"She really should have been in Gryffindor, shouldn't she?" Lavender murmured softly, having overheard the exchange earlier. She was watching Luna with clear awe in her eyes.
Kingsley's gaze made one last careful circuit of the arrival platform—exits, sky, fireplace positions, the placement of his Hit-Wizards and Aurors, every angle of approach and every possible vector of threat.
His brought team of Hit-Wizards and the Aurors held every exit; broomstick riders also kept watch in the sky above.
Satisfied that the situation was as contained as it was going to get, he leaned close to one of the men at his shoulder and murmured something. The Auror turned without a word and stepped into the nearest fireplace.
Hermione watched the flames die down and then found she had nothing to do with herself but pace anxiously.
This crisis was already beyond what she could manage on her own.
The fireplace roared green again.
Before the Minister, Sirius appeared, his face was dark as the bottom of a cauldron.
Hermione could see how desperately he wanted to charge forward and get Harry out, but the scene nailed him to the spot. He took up his position beside the fireplace, his vigilant gaze swept the platform in constant, restless arcs.
Then, at last, Minister Bones emerged.
In reality, she cut a less-than-imposing figure.
In reality, she cut a less-than-impressive figure, she looked as though someone had dragged her straight out of bed. Her witch's hat covered most of her dishevelled hair, but the bloodshot eyes, the bruises of exhaustion under them, and the paleness of her skin spoke plainly of how little sleep she had seen.
Sirius stationed himself just ahead of her, ready to take a curse at a moment's notice, while Aurors surged around her on all sides, braced against any threat from any direction.
The Minister, however, did not want too many people clustered in front of her. She kept only Kingsley and Sirius at her left and right flank.
Everyone else fell back.
"I'm here," Amelia said.
Her gaze settled briefly on John and Harry, steadied, then swept across the crowd of marchers. Her voice was slow, almost gentle.
"I've come not only to ensure this innocent child's safety—but to listen to what you need. I'll admit it openly: I am not ignorant of your circumstances. The Ministry has been in negotiations with all parties, working toward a consensus. It's only that—"
"That's a lie!"
The voice came from somewhere deep inside the crowd — raw, cracking, the sound of a throat that has been doing something that isn't quite crying and isn't quite shouting and has been doing it for some time. It cut across the Minister's careful words and silenced them completely.
Every head turned.
Luna's eyes found the source first.
A voice cried out from inside the crowd, raw with grief. Everyone, Luna and Harry included turned to look.
Something pained moved across Luna's face. Brief and private, but there.
"That's the Shear brothers—"
Luna had since learned who John truly was in this web of people. Something pained flickered across her face.
"The one who spoke is the younger brother. The one he's holding is the older."
She kept her voice low, explaining quietly to Harry while the crowd's attention was pulled away.
"Your Ministry doesn't care whether people like us live or die!"
The man was half-kneeling on the ground with broad and rough-faced and he was weeping as he shouted at Minister Bones.
"Look around you. Look at the injured people here. Every one of them was put there by your Ministry's Auror. You never wanted to hear us in the first place!"
Harry saw the bitterness with which the man looked at him.
"If we hadn't abducted the famous Harry Potter, you would never have come at all—would you, Minister Bones?"
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