"Absolute rubbish!"
Sirius's temper snapped. His face had gone a sickly, greenish pale, the muscle at the corner of his eye had begun to twitch with a life of its own.
"You have no idea—the Ministry has been negotiating behind the scenes with the families backing the workshops you all serve. And how do you repay us? By kidnapping an innocent child and using him as a bargaining chip."
"Sirius."
Minister Bones cut him off with a sharp rebuke. She did not look at him. Her gaze was already moving.
"Sir—"
Amelia turned to face the man kneeling on the ground. Her expression was sincere.
"The truth is as I've said: the Ministry has been working to restore order to wizarding Britain. But I hope you can understand how difficult that work has been in the aftermath of a war that took something from every person standing on this platform today. Of course, I also understand your helplessness and your anger."
She paused to draw breath. "I owe you an explanation. The Ministry did not anticipate this confrontation and so the Aurors stationed here were not given detailed instructions on how to handle a situation of this kind. I will not deflect the blame onto them or onto the circumstances. It was my failure to foresee it."
Amelia steadied herself fully and looked down at the kneeling man.
"Sir, may I ask—who is it you're holding? A friend? A brother?"
"Andrew is my brother!"
The man's voice cracked open on the word. His arms tightened around the unconscious figure against his chest with fierce, clumsy protectiveness.
"He was hurt by the Aurors, just like everyone else lying on the ground around us!"
"Then, sir—"
Amelia raised her voice to carry across the platform.
"Let us first send the people injured in this misunderstanding to St. Mungo's. Then we can talk properly, without anyone being hurt, without anyone being afraid. I give you my word that I will remain here until you are satisfied. Does that work for everyone?"
Most of the marchers were followers by nature, not leaders. They looked back and forth between John who had Harry Potter in his grip and Rolf who was still kneeling on the cobblestones with Andrew, waiting for one of them to decide on their behalf.
Harry jabbed Luna in the ribs, signalling her to back Amelia up.
But strangely Luna, pressed close against him, had gone completely silent.
"I think that's a good idea, Lu — sir?"
Left with no real choice, Harry murmured the quiet prompt into the side of her borrowed face.
Luna's eyes strangely beneath the surface of John's dark ones had gone distant. They moved across the platform, from Rolf to the place beside Rolf to Rolf again, tracking something Harry couldn't see.
"I can also give you my word, as Minister for Magic, that no one will be arrested today."
Amelia read the unspoken fear in the crowd. She pressed the point while she had the opening.
"But the injured must receive treatment without delay. Any further wait could cost lives. There are people on this ground who cannot afford for this negotiation to take any longer."
"Fine." Rolf gave a slow, reluctant nod. "Remember what you've said, Minister Bones."
But before Amelia could allow herself even the beginning of relief, the man's voice came again:
"You may only send one person to collect the wounded. And no wands."
"Let me do it, Minister Bones."
Sirius stepped forward without hesitation.
"Be careful, Sirius—"
After a brief hesitation Amelia nodded.
Sirius turned to face the crowd, his expression went dark and grim that was quite different from the fury of a few moments ago. In full view of every set of eyes on the platform, he reached into his robes, drew out his wand, and tossed it openly to Kingsley.
"May I come across now?"
He called it out across the distance between the two sides.
Rolf gave his permission with a short jerk of his head.
Sirius began to walk.
Harry watched him approach step by step, reading the mixture of fury and fear that was on his godfather's face.
"Sirius—"
Moved by the worry in those grey eyes, Harry called out to him.
Sirius stopped. His gaze found Harry's.
"Don't worry, Harry. I'll get you out of this." Sirius said it like an oath. Then he turned a venomous glare on John.
"You." His voice dropped to something flat and cold. "Keep that knife exactly where it is. Understood?"
Luna met the stare with John's dark eyes and answered with perfect calm.
"Understood, Mr. Black, sir."
Sirius stopped. "Oh? You've actually heard of me?"
He studied the villager before him with a sharp, suspicious searching look. Then, remembering what his own notorious name had once meant to people, he let the question go with a shrug.
"Start by handing this one over to that Auror—"
Rolf clutched his brother tight, as if he expected the Ministry to betray them the moment his guard dropped. He motioned to the person nearest him to lift one of the unconscious marchers and bring them to Sirius.
Sirius hoisted the man onto his shoulder. After shooting Luna one final, withering warning look, he gritted his teeth against the weight and carried him away.
He walked straight back across the platform to the Ministry side. One of the Aurors flanking Minister Bones stepped forward at once and levitated the injured man steering him away and through the nearest fireplace in a single smooth motion.
The green flames swallowed him.
The fireplace went dark.
....
After a slow exhale, Sirius rolled his shoulders once, working something out of the muscles, and turned around. He walked back toward the crowd.
And so it went.
Trip after trip, in full view of every eyes on the platform. Sirius crossed the distance, took the weight of a person onto his back or his shoulder or into his arms, walked back, handed them over, watched them disappear through the fireplace. Then turned around and did it again.
By the second to last trips, his shirt was dark with sweat at the back and collar while sweat was running down his face, and he was bent slightly forward under the accumulated effort of it.
"Who's next?"
Sirius looked at the man called Rolf.
So many trips without incident had, it seemed, finally convinced Rolf Shear that the Ministry was not going to play games with the wounded.
Under the weight of every watching eye, he hesitated for a few seconds then, slowly and with great effort, he got to his feet.
Rolf crouched down and gathered his unconscious brother from the ground, looping one arm beneath his armpit to prop him up.
Sirius wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist and moved to take him.
"Don't you touch Andrew."
Rolf fixed him with a wary glare.
Sirius looked at this blunt, plain-faced man for a moment.
"Well." A sardonic edge crept into his voice before he could entirely prevent it due to old habit. "Didn't realise you cared quite so much about your brother."
He let it hang for only a second. Then he shrugged, made no further movement toward Andrew, and simply fell into step alongside the two brothers as they began the slow shuffle back across the platform.
High summer had technically passed. But the sun, indifferent to the calendar, still pressed down on the platform with a heat that the afternoon had not yet seen fit to relinquish.
The noon blaze had softened only slightly.
But after standing in that heat for the better part of an hour, everyone was drenched. The marchers showed it in their sagging postures and their faces gone red and dull. Even the Ministry's Aurors and Hit-Wizards were beginning to show it at the edges.
The crisp, precise alertness of their arrival blurred gradually into something that was still alert but had more human effort visible in it.
They watched the three figures shuffling back across the cobblestones at a crawl. Impatience flickered across more than a few faces briefly.
Still, Minister Bones kept her hands clasped and waited with perfect outward patience, and so everyone else held their line—alert, or at least appearing to be.
"By the way—"
Sirius had caught enough of his breath.
"Do you mind if I ask? Was this march organised, or did you all come together more or less on your own?"
"Not telling you."
Rolf's head stayed down. His voice changed on the words dropped and flattened into something mechanical as though he were deliberately keeping his eyes lowered, keeping the blood flooding into them out of Sirius's line of sight.
"Something's wrong."
Harry heard someone murmuring close to his ear, and a second passed before he realised it was the voice of the man called John—the man Luna had become.
"What?"
Harry asked, instinctively.
"Something's wrong—"
Harry wrenched himself free from Luna's hold and spun to face her in one motion, his whole body had gone tense.
"What did you find?"
Luna's face was unravelling.
The Polyjuice Potion seemed to be reaching its limit. Luna's silver eyes had already begun to shimmer in the sunlight, her pupils were fighting through the borrowed face.
She was staring, unsteady, at the Shear brothers who had by now crossed the invisible line between the marchers and the Ministry and when she spoke again, her voice was shaking.
The restrained Harry Potter had broken free?
The sight froze both the Ministry officials and the nearby marchers.
"Get away from him!"
The face called John was already distorting, mid-collapse back into Luna's own. She had no time to answer Harry's question—she simply screamed out at the figures in the middle of the square.
Harry had never seen Luna look like this. Her eyes, her voice—both were stripped bare with terror, as though she had glimpsed something monstrous bearing down on them.
'Get away from him?'
Sirius shuddered. He whipped around to stare at Harry—at the man beside Harry, whose face had gone as slack and structureless as wet clay.
"Sirius!"
It was Kingsley who roared first.
He saw Rolf who had kept his head bowed this entire time finally look up. He saw those eyes: every trace of life was gone replaced entirely by red.
A memory crashed into Kingsley's mind—the investigation into Hermione's attack, that house in the London slums, the moment a walking corpse had detonated. His blood ran cold.
Sirius felt it too.
He couldn't have said how. He caught it from the corner of his eye and his body was already moving on pure instinct before the thought had formed, pulling back, pulling away—
One second stretched.
Then stretched further into something infinite.
Sirius watched Rolf's face tilt up. Across that rough, weathered face and down the bare skin of his neck, cracks had split open in the skin itself, grey and branching, spreading from a common source like fault lines in stone when the ground beneath it shifts.
From every fissure, from every branching crack, white light was beginning to seep and pour.
Sirius could not remember the last time fear had hit him as hard as this.
In almost the same instant, the magic in the air around Rolf's body reached a threshold and broke detonating in a wave that set every nerve in every person within ten feet screaming in horrible way.
And he saw it that Rolf's vacant, light-bleeding eyes were not locked on him. They were fixed on Minister Bones.
'A premeditated assassination.'
The thought appeared with horrible clarity. They'd simply miscalculated the timing because the strange villager at Harry's side had exposed them one step too soon.
Beneath the stares of a hundred horrified eyes, Rolf broke into a charge straight for Minister Bones.
The platform erupted in the same instant at once. Screams of terror crashed together with the shriek of curses leaving wands and the shouts of Aurors and the sound of bodies moving fast in every direction, all of it were pouring crashing into Sirius's ears at the same time—
He has to be stopped.
The thought was the only thing in Sirius's head. He snarled and the foot that had already begun to pull back planted itself hard against the cobblestones. He reached for Rolf's shoulder—
Another hand shot out and blocked him.
It was the unconscious brother; Andrew Shear whose face had been hanging low this whole time and now he raised it.
Sirius looked at that face.
That face was covered in the same cracks, light was already seeping through.
The sight gutted Sirius so completely that only one thought remained:
'It's over.'
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