Everything was happening at once.
The earth beneath their feet began to tremble. Pebbles rolled across the cobblestones in every direction as though pushed by invisible hands, skittering and clicking against each other.
A howling wind tore through the air.
The Shear brothers, who looked on the verge of detonation, seemed to have transformed into a negative-pressure void drawing all the air around them in like a collapsing lung.
Harry's anguished scream rang in his ears, but Sirius had no time to move. He managed only one shout—
"Stay back, Harry!"
He struggled to wrench himself free of this living bomb clutching him in place, but the man's arms were like an unbreakable steel locked around his body making it impossible to escape.
All Sirius could do was watch in horror as Rolf charged toward Minister Bones, step by relentless step.
The chaotic magical surge radiating from both brothers had made Disapparation a fantasy.
The Aurors threw themselves in front of Minister Bones in sequence slashing their wands in desperate, overlapping arcs, trying to cut Rolf off before he could reach her.
The spells that crashed against Rolf's swelling chest sputtered out like sparks thrown against wet stone. Nothing worked.
Layer upon layer of magical barriers bloomed into existence before Minister Bones. The Aurors guarding the Minister allowed themselves the first fragile flicker of relief.
'Surely. Surely this would hold.'
But the horror in Kingsley's eyes had not faded by a single degree.
Because he had faced one of these human traps before.
He knew exactly how catastrophic the explosion would be.
'It's over.'
The same thought that had overtaken Sirius now rose in Kingsley's chest.
The only thing he could do—no different from any of his subordinates was throw himself in front of the Minister, summon every ounce of his strength into a shield, and perhaps, perhaps, buy her even the slimmest chance of survival.
Amid the roaring wind, Sirius was still fighting to break free from the human bomb locked around him when he suddenly went still. His gaze cut to the children group—to Harry, who was tearing himself loose from Luna's grasp without a thought for anything else.
'Luna?'
As Death raised its scythe, this was the strange, quiet thought that surfaced in Sirius's mind.
He looked at Harry, at the tears streaming down that young face, and smiled.
Twenty feet from the Ministry line, Rolf bloated to the shape of a barrel grinned through cracked, split lips. It was a grin that sent ice through the veins of Aurors who had seen men die a dozen times over in a dozen different ways.
"The Dark Lord sends his regards—"
'Death is here. Nothing matters anymore.'
Kingsley closed his eyes in weariness and let the infinite white light swallow the world.
The radiance that burst from the Shear brothers blinded them all.
The radiance that burst from the Shear brothers blinded them all.
Whether Sirius, or Kingsley, or the Aurors under his command—every one of them shut their eyes and stood quietly, waiting for death to come. Waiting for the earth-shattering blast that would erase them.
'The Ministry will not fall. Even if the Minister cannot be saved.'
Kingsley held onto the thought with everything he had.
'The wizarding world still has Albus. And Bryan. Especially Bryan. He has never been willing. But if the Ministry suffers a blow like this, he will step forward and take the Minister's post. And with him at the helm, the Ministry will not break.'
Kingsley believed this with absolute certainty.
"Riddle's regards—duly received."
A calm slow voice utterly without warning entered the mind of every person present.
The crowd lurched.
Sirius, Kingsley, and the Aurors who had been braced for death forced their eyes open against the searing light—
And there, in the blazing white, was a single dark silhouette suspended in midair.
Harry, tears pouring down his face, felt two new streams run down his cheeks before he'd fully registered what he was seeing. His green eyes flooded again but differently this time.
'Sirius is saved.'
The certainty arrived before the proof. Before anything had actually happened yet. In an instant, boundless hope filled the heart that had been hollow with despair.
'Bryan.'
Looking up at that dark figure, Kingsley felt the urge to weep but unlike the others who were overcome with relief, what rose in him was grief.
His eyes moved instinctively to Sirius.
There was no question: Minister Bones, Kingsley himself, and all his Aurors had been saved. But at that distance, Sirius had no chance of surviving.
Sirius seemed to know it too.
He had stopped fighting the arms holding him. He lay back with face turned up toward the sky, watching that silhouette above him and smiled, at peace.
'What a shame.'
The thought drifted through Sirius's mind as his life wound down—
'We could have been in-laws, in another life. That would have been something. But this isn't so bad either. I'll go see James and Lily. They'll want to hear everything about you, Bryan.'
High above them, Bryan looked down at the earth below, at the faces contorted in joy, in grief, in resignation and watched it all with an expression that held almost no trace of feeling.
He blinked.
Then, calmly, he watched the two civilians who were about to explode and raised one hand, pressing it gently against the air.
The blinding light softened.
A warm breeze brushed across Sirius's face which was unexpectedly, impossibly gentle—
'Oh. Is the explosion starting?'
Sirius kept smiling, and waited quietly for the darkness to swallow his mind.
Though everyone held the same posture of bracing for the blast, their thoughts had shifted to the same place:
'Bryan will contain the damage. He'll stop the explosion. That much is certain—and the sight of it will be something to behold.'
The spring-soft wind kept blowing. People began, almost without realizing it, to enjoy it.
The first to notice something was wrong was Kingsley.
Watching everything with cold clarity, he became dimly aware of something he couldn't immediately name. Scattered through the white light around him, tiny points of gold were flickering like distant stars.
A thin, irregular fragment drifted past on the warm current and brushed Kingsley's cheek with a sensation of almost weightless contact.
Then crumbled to dust against his skin.
He stood very still.
Time, which had been doing something strange for the last few seconds seemed to find its pace again.
Time seemed to begin flowing.
Without thinking, Kingsley raised his hand and touched the spot on his cheek where the fragment had landed.
He looked at his fingertips.
Like a leaf that fire has moved through, stripping it of everything except the memory of its own structure with nothing left but the brittle, feathery light remnant of ash.
He looked up.
More and more ash was falling through the air now, like cherry blossoms drifting from a winter branch.
Kingsley's gaze cut through the swirling petals toward where the brothers had been standing.
His expression went slack.
His mouth fell open.
'Gone.'
Somehow, without anyone noticing when, the Shear brothers had vanished.
No explosion. No shockwave. No deafening blast tearing the world apart.
The Shear brothers had simply disappeared silently, without a trace.
Only the platform, and the afternoon light on it, and the ash drifting down in slow spirals like snow falling in a place where snow has no business falling.
'The ash…'
Kingsley understood, suddenly.
He stood with the understanding, quietly, and said nothing.
The wind died.
The arrival platform fell into a silence so complete and so absolute that a pin dropped anywhere on those cobblestones would have been heard by everyone present.
No one else had realized what had happened. They all remained frozen in place, still bracing for the thunder of an explosion that would never come.
Sirius was the same.
Lying on his back on the cobblestones, face tilted up at the sky, still wearing the peaceful expression of a man who has made his peace with things.
He hadn't noticed that the arms holding him were gone. He hadn't noticed that the weight pressing him down, the grip of Andrew Shear's body, had simply ceased to exist.
He only felt lighter, and thought it was the onset of death that this was what death felt like. The gradual lifting of everything that had been heavy. This was its beginning.
Until the sun moved past a cloud.
The light stabbed at his closed eyes with a brightness that belonged to the living world.
Sirius came back to himself like a man waking from a dream. He rubbed his aching eyes. Then, finding he could move his arms freely, he stared down at himself in bewilderment.
No one was there.
"Where did they go?"
His thoughts seemed to float somewhere far away past the edge of what was happening, hazy and unmoored. He looked up at the figure of Bryan descending slowly toward earth and waited for something to make sense.
"Turned to ash."
Bryan said it plainly.
"Are you hurt?"
"I don't think so—"
Sirius looked himself over quickly, then lifted his head again, still dazed.
"What brought you here, Bryan? What about the prisoners in Azkaban—"
"The last group has been transferred to Avalon. The island itself is empty now, except for the Dementors—they're furious, and my words carry rather less weight with them anymore. So, I spent some additional time reinforcing the seals."
Bryan said this with complete composure.
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