Losing Harry

Batsnumbereleven

Story Summary:
Ginny Weasley knows she's lost Harry Potter before, and that he has a burden to carry that transcends any relationship they might have. That doesn't make it any easier on her when he has to leave her behind yet again. Harry knows now what he's leaving behind when destiny calls - after dropping out of Ginny's life on previous occasions without giving it a thought. How does he cope with that and his fate at the same time?

Chapter 03 - 3

Chapter Summary:
Next steps. Waking. Ministry interference.
Posted:
03/04/2007
Hits:
352


Living Again

A/N: Thanks once again to Felina Black for beta-ing this chapter.

It was early on a Saturday morning, and the Hospital Wing was silent.

For once, Poppy Pomfrey had no need to be up at the crack of dawn to tend to the normal handful of children in her care, fallen foul of the various teenage ailments and class-created mayhem and injuries that normally accompanied the school week. No, this morning she only had one patient: a young man with a shock of black hair and startling green eyes, who seemed to be the most regular patient she had ever had.

Harry Potter had lain in the Hospital Wing for several weeks since his dramatic return from Voldemort's lair, his body wracked with pain and suffering and clearly affected by a huge magical backlash of some sort. Although his initial arrival had created something of a stir, both in the manner of his appearance and the victory that it apparently symbolised, the furore had died down after a short time, and now there were only five people who regularly looked in on him besides Poppy herself.

Of the five, Ginny Weasley was the most insistent, ensuring that she spent whatever spare time she had with the young man she loved, desperate for him to recover and remain with her. It was with her at his bedside that Poppy had decided there was little else she could do and opted to sleep in, relying on Ginny to alert her if there was any significant change to the young man's condition.

An oaken staff lay beside the bed, too. It looked as though it might once have been mounted with a crystal or some other sort of magical focus, and some small shards of glass still remained attached to the tip. Poppy didn't know what it was, or where the magic had come from - all she knew was that the staff made her feel ill, and she stayed as far away from it as possible.

Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger sat together on a large rock close to the lake, watching the younger students frolic in the water on this hot, steamy July morning. School was over for the year and there was an excessive exuberance that the two of them could just about bear to watch, but not get involved in themselves.

They didn't speak, but they shared thoughts about their friend abed in the Hospital Wing, perhaps once more the saviour of the wizarding world, and eyed the playful children in front of them with a little envy at their carefreeness.

It was an uncertain time for the two Gryffindors. Some insisted that this should be a joyous time, that Voldemort was finally gone and the wizarding world could revel in freedom from his threatened tyranny, but for these two any positive feelings were balanced by the fate of their friend.

On the other side of the lake, two more friends watched and waited calmly. A round-faced young man, no longer an insecure, bullied child, but an adult who knew both defeat and victory, smiled sadly as he held the hand of a serene blonde girl with her wand tied up in her hair. They slowly wandered along the shore of the lake, not really watching anything or anyone, but taking comfort in each others' presence, knowing that the healing was just starting.

They too were thinking of their friend who had made yet another sacrifice to protect those he loved and those who expected it of him. To them he represented salvation of another kind - of doing what he could to help his friends, of rejecting the bigotry and narrow-mindedness of the wizarding world that had plagued them both in their own ways, and of standing up to bullies and demanding fairness.

Back in the Hospital Wing, Ginny was startled out of her introspective yearning by a slight movement.

His hand!

He moved!

She stared at him a moment, willing him to move again, to prove that it wasn't just her imagination.

He lifted his hand to his head and let out an unhappy moan.

"Madam Pomfrey!"

Ginny couldn't believe it.

"Madam Pomfrey! It's Harry! He's moving!"

The door between the Hospital Wing and Madam Pomfrey's living quarters burst open, and the school Healer burst into the room, her hair in curlers and her dressing gown still half undone as she struggled to force her arms into the sleeves.

She moved swiftly to a cabinet on one side of the room and gathered a number of potions, then rapidly stalked across to Harry's bedside.

"Mister Potter? Can you hear me?"

"Harry?" Ginny's voice trembled with the hope that had suddenly filled her.

"Gnnk!" Harry's response was rather less than coherent.

"Mister Potter?"

"Oh bugger!" Harry groaned, his voice raspy from the lack of use.

"Mister Potter!"

"Harry, are you okay?"

"Bleargh!" he muttered, before regaining some sense of understanding of where he was.

"Apart from feeling like I've been run over by a double-decker bus and that I'm in the Hospital Wing..."

"Hmph!" Madam Pomfrey's snort of humour was eloquent by itself. "Well, you've spent enough time here."

Any further conversation was muffled by Ginny more or less throwing herself on top of Harry and smothering him in kisses.

"Oh my God, Harry! You're back! You're back!"

"Miss Weasley!"

"Not that I mind, Ginny," Harry rasped as he opened his eyes a slit to take in his surroundings, "but I think Madam Pomfrey wants to check I'm okay before you throw yourself at me!"

"Oh you... you...!"

"If I may," Madam Pomfrey suggested, as she eased Ginny out of the way and back into her chair by Harry's bed, "I'd like to run a few tests?"

Harry sighed. "If you must."

Madam Pomfrey took that as sufficient acquiescence to go about her normal nursely duties, and started running diagnostic spells with her wand as she tracked it slowly over Harry's body.

"Hmm. Nothing much wrong with you that can't be fixed now," she speculated, and pressed two potion vials into his hand. "Drink those, then let me check your eyes."

Harry swallowed the potions and made a face towards Ginny at the taste, then sighed in relief as the pain reliever took effect.

"Ah, that's better!"

"Good. Now open those eyes nice and wide."

Some time later, Madam Pomfrey had finished checking Harry over and was shaking her head at his recuperation, muttering to herself as she left the room about young men managing to heal themselves despite all her hard work.

Harry looked bemusedly at Ginny.

"We all thought you'd lose your eyes," she said. "There didn't seem to be anything that Madam Pomfrey could do about them."

He blinked curiously, then shrugged his shoulders.

"I remember... I remember the pain as the crystal broke," he said slowly, recollection of events beginning to return to him.

He started to giggle a little.

"Harry?"

"Remind me to kill Snape if I get the chance."

Ginny paused for a moment. She could think of lots of reasons why Harry would want to kill his former Potions Professor, but none that would seem to explain why her boyfriend had suddenly brought the subject up.

"Err..."

"Oh, he played both sides nicely," Harry half-explained, "but still..."

He sighed slightly, then started to giggle again.

"I'll have to show you my memory of how I finally got him - but it will stay between us. It's far too silly."

"Get Luna to publish it, then," Ginny suggested with a smirk. "That way you get the true story out there and nobody will know whether it's really the truth or not."

Harry's giggles turned into chuckles and the chortles as the effect of the Quibbler running a story about Voldemort being kicked in the goolies played across his mind.

He quietened himself quickly though, not wanting to attract Madam Pomfrey's attention.

"She'll only get grumpy about my recovery," he reckoned.

"But since she's gone," Ginny countered, "I can think of another way to recuperate," and she pressed his shoulders down to the bed and climbed on top of him, laying her head on his chest and wrapping her arms around him.

They lay there for a moment, then Harry could feel her chest moving, and sobs breaking out.

"I thought you were gone, Harry!" she cried into his pyjamas. "I really thought you were gone!"

When Harry awoke again, he was alone once more. The Hospital Wing was dark and the only noises were of the occasional creak of the Hogwarts doors as they swayed slightly in the night time draught around the castle.

The potions that Madam Pomfrey had given him seemed to have done their work, and he felt as refreshed as he had done in many years, with the weight of responsibility loosened from his shoulders and the prospect of a life in front of him without the threat of Voldemort.

A sensation of pulsing magic attracted his attention, and he glanced around at his surroundings. He could sense the throbbing of evil from nearby, and remembered the staff he had brought back with him as he subconsciously apparated away from the site of his victory in agony.

The staff - Voldemort's final Horcrux.

It wasn't over yet - he still had to deal with this last remnant of the Dark Lord's soul to finally ensure that he wouldn't be able to reincarnate once more. At least this time he only had one of the damn things to dispose of, and with Voldemort disembodied once more he had a little time to do it.

Vaguely, he wondered whether any of the Death Eaters that remained were in a position to once more return their Master to a physically capable form, whether any of them knew the ritual that Wormtail had undertaken in the graveyard in Little Hangleton at the end of Harry's fourth year.

Time was still of the essence if so. He needed to destroy the staff quickly, before anyone else was aware of its existence.

He wasn't going to be quite that lucky.

"No, no, no. We can't have that!" Minister Scrimgeour insisted.

Harry buried his head in his hands in frustration at the obstructive Minister.

He'd hardly been out of the Hospital Wing half an hour, and had spent that time sorting out his things and generally packing up ready to be off from Gryffindor Tower, when the summons to McGonagall's office came.

For the past hour he'd been arguing with McGonagall and the Minister about the need to dispose finally of the Horcrux to prevent Voldemort's return, but they were both adamantly opposed to his intentions.

To be fair to her, at least the Headmistress understood why he felt he needed to go ahead so swiftly with his plan, but she didn't dare try and argue with the Minister given her insecure position in charge of Hogwarts, especially when said Minister was endeavouring to "seek out the truth".

To Harry, though, Scrimgeour's "seeking" was nothing more than a political ploy to manipulate public opinion into his favour, and to ride of Harry's coattails as the primary destroyer of the Dark Lord.

"We must have a proper inquiry into the Dark Lord's defeat, young man. The wizarding world has a right to know what happened," he demanded.

"They do?"

"Of course they do. They have to see how you defeated You Know Who, and what lessons can be learned from the situation so that any errors aren't repeated."

Harry rolled his eyes. He didn't want all the fuss that an enquiry would entail. He knew that reporters would be all over such an event knowing that the Boy Who Lived would be there. Hero of the Wizarding World he might be, but a reluctant hero at that.

"I don't think they need to know about me bashing Voldemort over the head with his own Horcrux," he argued.

Scrimgeour's eyes bulged a little at the mention of the Horcrux, and his gaze flicked across to the staff that Harry carried.

"That's a Horcrux?" he exclaimed, as though suddenly realising the significance of the staff that Harry was toting around.

At Harry's resigned nod, the Minister's eyes became calculating, as though suddenly seized with an opportunity that he knew he had to grasp before it eluded him, and one which would require a political solution.

He pushed his chair back to study the staff, and a sly smirk crossed his face. "I demand that you hand that Dark object over to the Ministry for safekeeping!"

Harry ground his teeth together.

"I was intending to destroy it," Harry noted, and saw a glimmer of fear strike Scrimgeour.

"No, no, you cannot do that, Mister Potter. It's a dark item that needs to be carefully controlled by the Ministry to ensure that it doesn't end up in the hands of someone inappropriate!"

Harry was somewhat taken aback by the Minister's adamant approach to the staff, and cast a glance across at Professor McGonagall, to see her reaction.

As it was, she seemed more resigned than anything else.

"Traditionally, the Minister is correct, Harry," she said cautiously. "Dark objects have normally been turned over to the Department of Mysteries so that the Unspeakables can examine and study them to understand more about their nature."

He raised an eyebrow. There was something about the way she'd responded that sounded a warning in Harry's mind.

"In this case there might be other, political motives though?" he asked her.

"Given the intensity of the Minister's arguments?" she pondered. "Probably."

Harry turned back to Minister Scrimgeour, suspicion running through his next question:

"What exactly do you intend to do with it, if I do hand it over to you?"

"Do? Why ensure that it is buried far, far from the reach of anyone," the Minister said stridently, "and prevent any future Dark Lords from getting their hands on such an object or the knowledge of how to create it."

"Minister, don't you think destroying it would be safer," McGonagall tried to interject, but was over-ridden by Scrimgeour's bluster.

"No, no. Of course not! Who knows what Dark magic it might unleash if we tried to destroy it! It's not safe to even consider."

Harry sighed.

He considered telling the Minister that it was perfectly safe as long as you knew what you were doing; that he had already destroyed a number of similar artefacts. Then he realised that the Minister's response would be even more aggressive, and he'd want to know exactly how, how many and why, assuming he got over the initial shock of discovering that Voldemort had created so many Horcruxes.

No, that was a stone best left unturned at this stage, Harry reckoned. He was having a hard enough time trying to persuade Scrimgeour of the facts surrounding this single Horcrux. The inclusion of so many others into the story would only make things worse.

"Minister, the whole point of me permanently disposing of this is to ensure that Voldemort can never come back. Do you want to risk his reappearance should he find another pawn willing to make the sacrifices to re-embody him again?"

"No one would do that!" Scrimgeour half-shouted, clearly shocked by such a suggestion. "Necromancy has been banned for generations!"

Harry spared a glance at the Headmistress, who was shaking her head sadly at the Minister's naivety.

"Firstly, it's not a necromantic ritual," Harry noted, wondering whether that really made any difference. "His soul still survives - that's the point of the Horcrux.

"Secondly, I don't think that it takes such a stretch of the imagination to come up with someone who might be willing to make sacrifices to bring Voldemort back - in the first instance it was Peter Pettigrew, and he's still around as far as I know. But think of those who could otherwise find themselves the subject of further Ministry probing for their tacit involvement in this war and I'm sure you'd find someone willing enough."

Scrimgeour was slumped back into his chair by this point, looking almost devastated at Harry's straightforward analysis of the situation, and somewhat defeated, but a lingering brightness in his eyes suggested that he had other plans.

"But... but..."

"What do you really want out of this, Rufus?" Harry added, deliberately using the Minister's given name to indicate that he was considering himself an equal. "What on earth could benefit the world by keeping this Horcrux intact?"

The Minister sat silently.

"It's power, Harry," McGonagall pointed out, softly.

"What's power?" he asked.

"You can feel the magic pulsing from it, can't you?"

He paused. He hadn't realised that others could feel it too.

"Yes."

"It's that power that the Minister wants to harness," she explained. "That could do many things, Harry. It could power magical defences on Azkaban for hundreds of years, removing the need for the Dementors, for example-"

"Minerva-" the protest on Scrimgeour's lips died as Harry turned to glare at him.

"Go on, Professor," Harry said with a growl, turning back to McGonagall with the question in his eyes. "What other political benefits might our Minister be seeking from such an arrangement?"

The Headmistress sighed.

"It could power the Ministry building's ambient magic for eons. It's currently at the point where they have to pay a fortune for specialist mages to work Soul Magic on the place on an annual basis.

"Alternatively, the Ministry could use that power as a weapon with which to threaten other parts of society, say to force the goblins into giving up Gringotts, or as a foreign policy tool."

Scrimgeour was shrinking further and further back into his chair as Harry's face grew thunderous at McGonagall's suggestions.

"All of which, I'm sure, are worthy political statements, ensuring a long and successful reign for a Minister who was able to implement them," Harry said sarcastically, turning a furious glare on Scrimgeour.

"I've had enough of your politicking, Rufus," he spat. "I've damn well done what I was supposed to do, and I don't need you scheming and trying to make political capital from my sacrifices. I'm done with you!"

Scrimgeour took offence at Harry's words, and stood, pulling his rangy frame upright and towering over the seventeen year old Gryffindor.

"Done with me, are you?" he bellowed. "We'll see about that! I tried to make this easy for you, but you're too damn stubborn to see what makes sense! Well, let's see how you like it as an outcast again!"

"No! Rufus, please!" McGonagall pleaded.

"I will not tolerate such blatant disregard to my authority!" the Minister stormed. "I, Rufus Barnstaple Scrimgeour, as Minister of Magic for Great Britain, hereby deny Harry James Potter the right to citizenship of this magical community, use of magic in this country, access to Ministry-approved magical places, and that all magical belongings of said Harry James Potter are hereby forfeit to the Ministry.

"Now hand over that staff!"

McGonagall sat back in her chair, shell-shocked at the Minister's proclamation.

Scrimgeour stood defiantly in front of Harry, his hand outstretched in expectation.

Harry stood and slowly looked him up and down, then grasped the staff and struck its base heavily against the floor of the Headmistress's office.

"NO!" he bellowed, anger coursing through his veins as he measured up the political animal in front of him. "I SHALL NOT!"

And Disapparated.

"What!"

Ginny's scream was audible most of the way across Hogwarts' grounds, and a large number of students paused in their frolicking in the lake to find out what was causing the disturbance.

"What do you mean he's gone?"

Professor McGonagall stood before her on the steps that led from the lake up to the main entrance of the school with a resigned look on her face as she told the young redhead about Harry's sudden disappearance.

"What the hell happened?"

Ginny was seething at Harry's departure, but the Headmistress could see that she was at least getting to the point where an explanation might actually be heard.

Scrimgeour hustled past the two of them on his way out to the gates.

"It's a damn good job, too," he fumed. "And if I hear of any of you lot in touch with him, you'll be in for questioning quicker than you can say 'finite incantatem,'" He added, turning to Ginny with a snarl as he strode away.

"What the hell was that?" Ginny demanded as the Minister tanked off into the distance.

McGonagall sighed.

"That," she replied with some asperity, although she was trying to remain as calm as possible, "was the reason for Harry's departure. It seems that our Minister is more interested in profiting from your friend's adventure than on ensuring he doesn't have to repeat it!"

"Repeat it?" Ginny screeched.

This time nobody needed to stop what they were doing to hear her.

"What the hell do you mean 'repeat it'?"

Professor McGonagall wasn't the type to quail under the fury of one of her students, even Ginny Weasley, who it appeared had inherited her Mother's temperament, but she had to steel her resolve at that particular moment, and even let Ginny's epithet pass by without comment.

"Exactly that. Come inside and I'll explain."


Many thanks to Heather for beta-ing.