Balance

Chapter 10: Into the Woods

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Harry was so startled, he dropped the lantern as he jumped to his feet and turned to see what had touched him. It went out. For a moment, everything was dark except for two glowing red eyes near his feet. Then the lightning flashed and Harry could breathe again. "Mrs. Norris!" He held out his arms, and the scrawny caretakers cat jumped up into them, butting her head against his chest. Never in his life had Harry expected to be glad to see her, but now he stroked her soggy fur and wished that he had some of Hermione's earplugs for her. "I'm so glad you're not a werewolf," he told her. "What are you doing in the forest?"

She yowled at him and set her teeth gently around his thumb, tugging at it twice in the same direction before pausing to look up at him, and then doing the same again.

"Are you trying to answer me?" he asked, and she nodded as if she were human.

"Harry!" Elisa shouted, catching him by the shoulder. "Are you all right? What happened to the lantern?"

"I'm sorry. I dropped it," Harry said, looking up to find Fritz and Draco just arriving. "Look. It's Mrs. Norris. She just came out of nowhere."

"Mrs. Norris?" the others exclaimed. Draco frowned. "Filch must be here somewhere," he said.

Immediately the scrawny cat yowled again and leaped from Harry's arms to Draco, who caught her with an astonished look before she touched her nose against his cheek and then jumped once more to land on the ground and pace up and down, yowling with impatience.

"I think she wants us to follow her," Fritz said.

"But what about Professor Snape?" Draco protested.

"Maybe she knows where he is," Elisa said, already following the cat on foot. Fritz bent to pick up the lantern and lit it before following the Ravenclaw girl. Draco and Harry exchanged worried looks.

"We'd better go too," Harry said. "I don't think Mrs. Norris would have come far."

"At least she's sort of going the right way," Draco said. "But I don't think she's taking us to the teachers."

"I don't either," Harry admitted. "But if Filch is out here..." he shrugged. "If it takes too long, we'll keep going after Snape and McGonagall."

Draco looked at him, curious. "That doesn't sound like you, Potter. I thought you were trying to rescue everyone, right down to the rats."

"I am," Harry said. "But without Professor McGonagall and Snape, I don't think there's going to be any point." He looked after Fritz and Elisa, thoughtfully, and realized that the lantern had stopped moving. "Look."

They caught up after a few seconds of flight and found Fritz and Elisa kneeling by a fallen tree, Mrs. Norris pacing along one of the branches. And under the tangle of branches, just visible in the lantern light, they saw Filch, looking even more pained than usual and quite unconscious.

"I think," said Draco, "that this is going to take some time."

"I think it's going to take more time than Dumbledore's got," Harry said unhappily.

"What do you mean?" Fritz asked.

"Madame Pomfrey was talking to Professor Trelawney. She said she needed Snape and McGonagall to keep Dumbledore from slipping away," Harry said. "We've got to hurry."

"We can't leave Filch alone here. He's hurt," Elisa said. "Look, I'll stay. You three go on."

"But we need four of us," Harry protested weakly, hating the idea of leaving Elisa alone with the unconscious caretaker.

"No, we don't. Not really. Elisa can stay here and I'll get some help from the castle. Look, I've found Filch's lantern. You can take this one," Fritz said, handing it to Draco. "It's you two who are the seekers. You seek out the professors and then signal for more help if you need it."

"Signals!" Harry exclaimed, pulling off the pack George had given him. "I forgot." He found two of the Muggle fireworks and gave them to Fritz. "You stay with Elisa and use these. George will send help when he sees them."

"Great," Fritz took the fireworks. "Listen, you should leave blazes behind you as you go, so you can find the way back more easily. One go ahead like before, but as the other one catches up, stop every few trees along and set some leaves glowing with the foxfire spell. Do you need me to teach it to you?"

"I know it," Harry said. They'd learned it in Herbology. Wasn't it last month? Or had it been earlier.

"So do I," Draco pulled on Harry's arm. "Come on." He started scanning for the voices again, his thin face intense. "Come on, Professor, say something."

Harry gave once last glance to Fritz and Elisa, already discussing exactly how to go about rescuing Filch, and then took position beside Draco, listening. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. He closed his eyes, listening all the harder.

"But it doesn't make sense!" The voice was younger than his own. Could there be another student out here?"

"Try again," That was McGonagall. Harry raised his hand quickly, to mark the right way, and hesitated when the young voice came again.

"I thought teachers were supposed to explain things." It wasn't quite a whine, but it did sound petulant.

"If you'd done the reading..."

"I did. It didn't make sense. It kept on going on about this stupid notion of 'looking deep'."

"You look deep, Mr. Snape, so as to understand what it is that you wish to change. If you do not understand the nature of the matchstick, you cannot coax it into becoming a needle."

Mister Snape? Harry opened his eyes and looked at Draco, who was pointing the same way as he was, and looked just as flabbergasted. Harry swallowed his uncertainty and double checked, concentrating along the line of his pointing finger.

"...Potions make sense! How am I supposed to know what's in a hedgehog if I'm not allowed to taste it?"

"Well, if it's Potions you prefer, then, give me a list of the contents of the Potions cupboards."

"If I have to," the young Snape voice said. "All right. Aconite. Also known as monkshood and wolfsbane. It's a poison, but can be used for..."

"We'd better hurry," Draco took to the air. "Don't let me get too far astray, Potter."

"Right." Harry kept pointing the way with one hand and got his wand ready with a lumos spell. It was fairly tricky, actually, keeping an eye on Draco's lantern, and sending him left or right, and still "tuning in" now and then to the distant conversation.

"Brighteye. Used in vision potions mostly. Brightfeather. A substitute for phoenix feathers, but not reliable unless it's been combined with Flamewort..." With each name, at least, Snape's voice seemed to get a little older. It cracked as he was in among the 'M's, just as Draco stopped to wave the lantern from side to side.

It was bloody frightening, trying to fly through a forest in the dark, even with the will-o-the-wisp of the lantern ahead. Harry found himself grateful for the lightning, and the excuse to stop every so often and light up a bank of moss on a tree. He looked behind him as he went along and realized that the foxfire was making a kind of a line that they could follow if for some reason they stopped hearing the teachers.

Draco was already concentrating when Harry caught up, and he'd had the bright idea of using a stick stuck into the ground to mark the direction so his arm wouldn't get so tired. He handed off the lantern to Harry without a word, but Harry paused to catch his breath and listen for a moment before he went on.

"Sweet William, which in spite of its name is not sweet, is used for..." At least Snape sounded like Snape now. Harry wished Professor McGonagall would say something, but he didn't want to take the time to wait for her to get a chance.

When he reached the limits of his turn with the lantern, he waved it at Draco and then found a notch to rest it in while he found a stick to mark the new heading and lined himself up as best he could to listen. His nose itched with the smell of wet burned wood, and he tried to ignore it as he turned his head, listening...

"...canthus," said Snape with a familiar dryness. "There are other things in the cupboards, Minerva, but you're not authorized to know what they are."

"I wish I could say that it were nice to be here," Snape said. "Why haven't you let go, yet?"

"Because I won't," McGonagall said flatly. "You've got your eyes open again, haven't you?"

"I did," Snape grunted, and then sighed. "There's no magic down here, Minerva."

There was a silence. "That's not good," she answered, while Harry tried to figure it what Snape meant by 'down here'.

There was no answer from Snape.

Draco landed next to Harry and started to pick up the lantern, but Harry waved at him to listen, wondering if he'd somehow lost the conversation. Then, after a long while, McGonagall spoke again. "How's the leg?"

"Still attached."

"And the arm?"

"Strangely..." Snape seemed, for once, to be at a loss for the right word. "Unattached," he settled for at last. "It doesn't hurt at all. Not even...when it should. It's as if there's nothing there."

^^^^^^^^^end of chapter 10

Chapter 11: Seek and Ye Shall Find

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"That doesn't sound good." Draco grabbed the lantern and took off again while Harry jammed his direction finding stick into the mud so he wouldn't lose the direction. He was about to double check the angle, when he saw the lantern light suddenly drop to the ground and the lightning showed him a glimpse of Draco falling too, not more than twenty yards on.

"Draco!" Harry yelled, and ran forward, slipping once or twice on the wet leaves of the forest floor. He got there in time to see Draco getting to his feet again and pulling his cloak free of the tree branch it had snagged on with a vicious jerk. Harry caught up to him and paused to catch his breath. "Draco, are you all right?"

"I'm fine!" Draco growled, rubbing at his right arm with his left. "Just bruised is all. Do you see the lantern?"

"Lumos," Harry cast the light spell on his wand and tried not to think that it was getting dimmer. He didn't see the lantern. The forest had begun to be scorched here, and the mud was black with soot.

Draco was looking for the lantern too, a scowl on his face. "Dammit," he complained, "why did they have to go off into the Forbidden Forest anyway?"

"I don't know," Harry said, deciding to let the smaller boy grumble if it made him feel a little less hurt and scared. Draco looked very young, just now. "Maybe they thought there was another balrog."

"Balrog." Draco stopped moving and his scowl grew more thoughtful. "Hang about. The Professor flew back to the forest after we'd already gotten rid of the balrog, right?"

"Yes," Harry said, "and McGonagall went with him. They flew in just to one side of where the balrog came out."

"Well they wouldn't have flown into the fire, Potter," Draco said exasperatedly, much more his usual self. "But they might have flown alongside it."

Harry found the lantern at last and pulled it free of the mud. "What are you on about, Draco?"

"Look," Draco said. "Balrogs don't live in the same ... same place as we do. They've got their own world. But sometimes the layer between the worlds can be broken through, right?"

"The merman said something about sending it back to its own time and place," Harry agreed, waiting to see where Draco was going.

"What if Dumbledore sent McGonagall and Professor Snape back to make sure that the nothing else was following the balrog? They'd go back along the line the balrog took, right?"

Harry saw it. "Back along the line of the forest fire! We can follow the burn!"

"It would be faster than trying to mess about with the lantern and foxfire," Draco said.

"I like the foxfire," Harry said as he set the lantern to rights and re-lit it. "It gives us a quicker way back out."

Draco nodded, recovering his broom from a bush. "And we should still check now and then, to listen. Just in case."

"Right." Harry set a patch of foxfire glowing between them. "You go left, I'll go right. We want to find the main path of the fire. If you find it, wave your wand up and down and I'll come to you."

"And I'll do the same."

It was Harry who found the path the balrog had taken, and while he waited for Draco to come to him, he set another patch of foxfire aglow and took a moment stare at the destruction revealed by the intermittent lightning. Whole trees had been knocked aside, and charred logs still steamed in spite of the rain. He was hovering near a huge hoofprint, half filled with rainwater and he shivered, realizing afresh how big the monster had been. He had to search a bit, to find a stick that didn't go to cinders in his hand, and he'd just started listening for the teachers when Draco arrived.

"...Neverwas much of a conversationalist..." Harry heard McGonagall and checked his direction quickly. The burn was taking them mostly the right way.

"I think this will work," he told Draco.

"Good. Let's go."

They flew shoulder to shoulder, as if they were both chasing the snitch, but for once Harry felt glad that Draco was a good flyer. The balrog had completely cleared a path nearly ten feet wide, really - beyond that there were still trees standing, however scorched they might be - but in that narrow channel Harry and Draco could make more speed, risking overrunning the lantern light when the lightning came more quickly, and only slowing a little when it didn't. They stopped once, and once again, to leave a patch of foxfire in their wakes, and Harry was just considering stopping a third time when he heard words, as if on a gust of wind.

Draco pulled up, signaling a pause, and Harry stopped to hover and listen too...

"...still haven't finished reading that book Albus lent you." McGonagall. She sounded thoughtful, her voice just audible, but wobbly, like a radio with bad reception, to the boys.

"I planned on reading it over the Christmas break," Snape said. "When there weren't so many students to interrupt me."

"We must be getting close," Harry said, excitedly and Draco hushed him and led the way down the slope where the balrog's path crossed a streambed. When they came back up the other bank they flew along, both listening hard.

When Snape's voice came again it was very quiet. "I'm getting cold, Minerva."

Harry swallowed and bent closer over his broom to cut the wind resistance. Snape was never cold.

"Think warm thoughts," McGonagall told him.

"Do you know," Snape said dryly, "I don't think I have any."

"After the day we've had?" McGonagall seemed to be teasing, ever so gently. "I should the think that demon was warm enough to last a while."

"True enough." Snape snorted derisively, but his voice when he spoke again was very tired sounding. "In a way it's too bad. This can't be the happily ever after you'd envisioned."

"Not the tall, dark mysterious stranger I'd envisioned at any rate," McGonagall

Snape chuckled. "I'm tall and dark!" he protested.

"But just not strange enough," McGonagall said fondly.

"Finicky female," Snape accused her in an amused tone that Harry had never thought he would hear from the man. "I suppose you prefer that black and white tom that's been hanging about Gryffindor tower."

"You mean that alley cat that attached itself to Jamison over the summer break?"

"Yes," Snape said. "Mister Mistofolees, she calls him. Man of mystery."

McGonagall made a rude sound. "Doesn't he wish!"

Both teachers laughed. But when McGonagall began to collect herself, Snape kept on laughing, helplessly, almost hysterically. Harry and Draco raced against the circle of the lantern's light, risking a little more speed in spite of snags and stumps and the suddenness of rocks in front of them. Another rise, and they could feel the brooms struggling now to gain altitude. Harry wished for more lightning, even a glimpse beyond the lantern light would ease the feeling that he was about to smash into something awful.

Snape's laughter was coming more ragged now, weakening into gasps for air. "Oh, please," he said, tears in the words, "please, Minerva, let go."

The ground dropped away below the lantern as the path led them into a deep bowl of a hollow, and the boys tipped their brooms downward to follow. Into the light came rocks, smashed trees, a glimpse of something bright...

"I won't," McGonagall said, nearly as wrought up as Snape was. "And I wish you'd ...stop, stop, STOP!"

At the very last second, Harry realized that the brightness was McGonagall's armor where she sprawled on the ground, and that she was yelling at him and Draco. He reached out and got a handful of Draco's cloak, pulling the other boy with him as he slewed his broom sideways to a sharp halt.

Draco lost hold of broom and lantern, and his weight dragged both of them and Harry's broom to the ground, but in the moments as they fell they could see as if in some kind of slow motion movie.

The lantern arced to the ground, illuminating McGonagall's grim face and the deathlike grip she held onto the trail of black cloth she was keeping all her weight upon to keep it from slipping over the tree root she'd hooked one elbow around for security. The broom went on straight, over her head, into a darkness that suddenly swirled with colors too tinted with black to be identified. It smashed the wooden handle into splinters and then smashed the splinters into nothing, bristles following with sparks of brilliant ebony as they vanished as well. And then the lantern went out.

^^^^^^^^^End of chapter 11

Chapter 12: On Edge

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Harry and Draco lay on the ground, breathing hard, staring in shock at the place where they'd almost gone the same way as the broom that didn't exist anymore.

"Minerva! MINERVA! ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?" Snape roared in the darkness.

It was Draco who recovered first, casting "lumos" on his wand and getting a dim glow in response. It wasn't much light, but it was enough for Harry to see that Draco was nursing his elbow.

McGonagall was staring at the two of them over her sleeve, her eyes gleaming cat-green in the dim light. "It's all right, Severus," she said, not at all calmly. "We've been found."

"That's the second time I've landed on that arm," Draco grumbled. "Couldn't you have managed to save our lives without breaking anything, Potter?"

"You're welcome," Harry said, disentangling himself from the other boy and crawling forward to the lantern. This time when it had fallen the glass had finally broken, but only on one side, and Harry set the lantern upright and cast a spark spell against the wick to relight it.

Nothing happened.

"Spells don't work well here, Mr. Potter," McGonagall said. Harry bit back a swear word and started digging into the pack for the Muggle matches he'd seen earlier.

"Potter?" Snape asked querulously. "Is that Potter up there?"

"And me, sir," Draco said. "Malfoy." Draco hitched himself forward, carefully, toward the place where McGonagall was hanging onto the cloth, keeping his head low, and with every movement the light of his wand faded a bit.

"Hold on," Harry said. He'd found the matches and to his relief, they worked. The wick sputtered a little before it caught, and the flame writhed uncertainly until Harry thought of shielding the broken side of the lantern from the wind, but then the light steadied and illuminated the rainswept clearing.

Or rather, it illuminated half a clearing. The black barrier/swirl/whatever it was had cut off everything - trees, rocks, earth and all - for as far to either side as Harry could see. McGonagall was lying across a massive tangle of roots, some of them from a rowan tree that had been partly uprooted and was leaning against a neighboring ash, but mostly those of an oak that was still standing, despite being truncated by some massive axe. The cut had come out of the sky nearly vertically, taking off limbs and splitting the far side of the trunk downwards to some fifteen feet above the ground, and leaving the whole tree looking dangerously lopsided.

Draco kept going forward, a little more quickly now that he could see that the trees were cut off well above his head. He had to go under the trunk of the rowan tree to reach the edge without crawling over McGonagall, and all Harry could see was the back end of his cloak and his shoes for a moment before he backed out from under the trunk again, still favoring his arm, and twisted to look back at Harry. "I can't see. Bring the light, Potter."

"Right," Harry said slowly, trying not to stare as Malfoy's face shrank visibly down to the size it had been when they were both first years. It was hard to tell, given the cloak, whether the rest of Draco was shrinking too, but Harry suspected from the sudden looseness of his own shirt that Draco wasn't the only one changing. "Draco...do I look funny to you?" His voice cracked on the question.

Draco made an impatient noise, but he looked, and then his eyes widened. But he took a breath and managed an almost sneer. "No worse than usual, Potter. And we've got a rescue to do, remember?"

"Bring the light," McGonagall reminded Harry, and he stumbled forward and then took a breath and went more carefully. She was changing as well, although not in size. The silver in her hair faded to auburn as her face smoothed and then resurged as she began to look more and more like herself. "It's all right, Mr. Potter. We're in an area that has just been knocked loose from our proper place in time, and the effects are strongest near the perimeters. Once Professor Dumbledore and the others summon this part of the forest back to Hogwarts, we shall all be our proper ages again."

Harry shook his head, "Hogwarts is here with us," he said. "The whole castle. And Dumbledore's dying."

"Dying?" That was Snape, and his voice cracked too. "What do you mean, dying?"

"Madam Pomfrey needs you... both of you," Harry explained, picking his careful way across the roots with the lantern. There was a short branch above McGonagall's head on the oak tree - one that looked as if it had been broken long ago - where he thought he could hang the light. "I heard her telling Trelawney..."

"Professor Trelawney," chorused the adults, and Harry sighed a little, half grateful to know that they were still all right enough to care about something as stupid as forms of address.

"Yes, her... Madam Pomfrey said that Professor Flitwick and Professor Sprout could help keep him from slipping away, but Professor Trelawney said it didn't work like that, and they both said they needed you two." Harry waited for a moment for his legs to get longer before stepping over McGonagall's head. He hung onto the bark of the tree with his left hand, getting into position on the shoulder of a root to reach up with his right hand to the place he wanted to hang the lantern. He wasn't quite... was almost... was tall enough to hook the handle over the end of the branch now!

He almost lost his balance, and grabbed onto the tree with both hands, looking outwards, past the edge, into the exploding anti-colors of the space beyond the world. It wasn't just black nothingness - not exactly. It was more like the patterns that played behind pressed eyelids, only wrong and worse and warped into nothing that made sense for more than a moment at a time. For a second, for an eternity, it beckoned, promising sweet oblivion...

"Potter! Pay attention!" The harsh shout raked across his ears and Harry shook his head and looked down into the chalk drawing face of Professor Snape, twisted up to look into the light. "I'd appreciate getting out of here."

Harry nodded, swallowing hard. It was a little better looking down - even considering that it looked like someone had taken a giant shovel and cut off the side of the world with it. Dirt had crumbled away in some places, and Harry could see a trickle of water coming off a shortened root to fall and splash into black-glinting destruction far below, but on the whole it seemed as if he was standing at the edge of a giant scooped out piece of land that curved away underneath him gradually so that he couldn't even guess how far down it went.

Snape was trapped by his cloak and the tangled roots, and to Harry's eye it looked as if some of the earth had fallen away around him, leaving him tucked in a little from the edge of destruction. His position looked awkward and uncertain to begin with, and it only got more so when he started go younger. If McGonagall let go, he'd never be able to hang on for long, and as Harry watched he realized that Snape was still wearing the chain mail. Even if it were tangled in the roots, it would pull free soon enough.

Draco had managed to get a little closer to the rowan. "Can you reach my hand, sir?" he said, stretching out as far as he dared. A rock came dislodged from under him and bounced off a root and out. It was destroyed, the same as the broom had been, but Harry noticed that it wasn't destroyed directly near the edge. Draco had backed up, unwilling to drop the entire edge off onto Snape, and was swearing.

"Shut up, Malfoy," Harry said. "I've got an idea. Stay there and watch while I toss rocks over Professor Snape."

"That's not going to help," Draco said sourly while Harry clambered back over McGonagall.

"It is if we can figure out how far out is safe. There's rope in this pack, you know."

"Rope? How unusually practical," said Snape, surprised. "Five points to Gryffindor for thinking of it, Mr. Potter."

"You'll have to give it to Fred and George," Harry said absently, starting to lob dirt clods gently out over the trapped man. "It's their pack."

"Then let us hope that it's a rope that hasn't been rigged to do something surprising," said McGonagall drily.

"I don't think so," Harry said. "It's meant to be supplies to get out of trouble with, not the other way around." He tossed another clod. "What do you think, Draco? If you lower me on the rope, can I get down safely enough to get a rope tied around the professor?"

Draco pulled himself out from under the rowan and came over to stand over Harry. By the quirk of the moment, he was a good six inches taller, and Harry was kind of surprised to see that there was nothing gloating in his eyes at the sudden advantage. "You could," Draco said. "But you're not going to."

"What do you mean? Even if we lowered a rope, I don't think he's in any condition to hang onto it," Harry hissed, not wanting Snape to hear. "I'm lighter than you are."

"Now you are," Draco said intensely. "But that's not going to last, is it? We keep changing. But what isn't changing is the way my arm hurts. It might be all right for tying a rope around Professor Snape, but I'm not going to be able to pull much with it."

"So what are we going to do? Try to lasso him?"

"You're going to lower me over the edge," Draco said, looking suddenly much younger. For a moment the two boys were eye to eye. "And then you're going to bring me back up. Aren't you?"

Harry looked down into the pale eyes and saw real fear in them. Draco really needed the question answered, and as he resembled more and more the frightened first year that had done detention in the forest with Harry, Harry found that he wanted less and less to somehow prove himself superior. It wasn't bravery to do something you weren't afraid of; it was bravery to go ahead and do what terrified you. He wanted to ask Draco which frightened him more - going over the edge or trusting Harry on the rope - but it didn't matter. Not really.

"If you hadn't wanted Slytherin," Harry said. "I think you could have been in Gryffindor."

Draco blinked. Blinked again and almost smiled. "I suppose you think that's a compliment," he said.

"Desperate rescues customarily are enacted with expediency, Snape's voice prompted from the darkness.

The boys grinned at each other. "I'll pull you up, Draco," Harry said, and went to get the rope.

^^^^^^^^^End of chapter 12