Flying Without A Broom
Rage Unleashed
By Ruskbyte
Chapter Six
~ Rage Unleashed ~
Tonks was in desperate need of a stiff drink. Of course, drinking while on duty was against regulations. She had, however, come to the conclusion that since chasing after a drugged up, hyperactive Boy-Who-Lived wasn't in her job description either, then nobody had any right to begrudge her a shot or two or three or more of Fire Whiskey.
Her earlier game of "tag" with Harry had not lasted very long. In fact, it had not even begun before Tonks had completely lost all trace of Harry. The boy was harder to track down than one of Loony Lovegood's imaginary Scruple-Beaked Snorkles, or whatever she called them.
Of course, it wasn't her fault. She had to lay all the blame on the kiss. The kiss which had left her lying speechless on the ground, while Harry had disappeared from sight. The kiss which had so thoroughly scrambled Tonks' thought processes that it took her almost ten minutes before she realized that she had just let her target slip through her fingers - again.
Suffice to say that Dumbledore, and the rest of her superiors, would not be happy once she turned in her report.
It was bad enough that she had messed up to begin with, allowing somebody (probably a Death Eater) to sneak Black Lotus into Harry's drink. Bad enough that she had let him out of her sight. Bad enough that she had absolutely no idea how to fix this mess. But there she went and lost Harry for the second time today!
"What else could possibly go wrong?" she moaned as she hurried through the narrow streets of Hogsmeade.
This, unfortunately, was just the kind of question that the gods of bad karma live for.
The words had no sooner left her mouth than Tonks skidded to a halt and desperately tried to cover her face as the store window she was passing exploded outwards. Needle-sized slivers filled the air in a whirling maelstrom of glittered glass blades, tearing into everything they encountered. Including Tonks.
"That was a rhetorical question!" she shrieked as the razor-edged shards ripped at her school robes and exposed flesh.
The entire experience seemed to last an age, though it was probably only a second or two. Tentatively lowering her arms, which had been shielding her head, Tonks looked around in awe. Every single window up and down the length of the street was gone, shattered into literally billions of tiny pieces. Here and there people were poking their heads out from whatever cover they had hidden behind, surveying the damage with much the same amazement as Tonks.
Glass was usually the first thing to suffer, for some unknown reason, when magic ran out of control. When young witches and wizards performed accidental magic, it was usually when they were angry at something - and the glass paid the price. Tonks herself had once exploded a jar of pickled eggs when she was nine. But this...
The sheer scope and range of what had just happened was beyond what she could accept from a single person. And she knew without a doubt that a single person was responsible. Harry Potter.
"Shit."
That about summed it up.
Brushing her shoulder length brown hair, part of her disguise as Nikki Fraser, out of her eyes, Tonks became aware that her arms were covered in dozens of minute cuts. The storm of broken glass had sliced into her exposed skin, which was now slick with a sheen of blood. She had been lucky to have raised her arms quickly enough, or it would have been her face on the receiving end of such punishment.
Pausing only long enough to cast a quick charm to remove the tiny glass splinters embedded in her flesh and clean away the thin film of blood, she hurried down the street. She eventually found herself in front of one store, a small clothes shop, which she was reasonable certain was the source of the magic.
There was a wizard dangling from the street light.
He was tightly bound with thick ropes around his arms and chest. More rope was tied around his ankles, from which he hung suspended above the ground. His robes were upturned, succumbing to gravity, and covered his head as he struggled vainly to free himself.
"What on earth?" Tonks muttered as she cautiously approached the man.
"Who is it? Who's there?" asked the man. He could not see her, as his robes were in the way. He held still for a moment, waiting for an answer, but began to thrash about again when none came. As he struggled he swore to himself, "Dammit, Lestrange, I told you we should've just hexed the little twit from the start, but nooooo... you had to try and lure him into your grasp..."
This immediately confirmed Tonks' suspicions that the man was a Death Eater, which no doubt explained why Harry had strung him up like a side of beef in a butcher's storeroom. It was the mention of Bellatrix Lestrange, however, that caused her blood to run cold. She shuddered to think of what that vile woman might do to Harry if she got her hands on him.
"Start talking, mate," she told the Death Eater, stepping up and emphasising her order by landing a punch to his stomach. As he coughed and sputtered, she grabbed him by his hair and pulled him to one side so that his robes fell out of the way and gave her a clear look at his face. She did not immediately recognise him, but the face was familiar enough for her to be certain that this was not a misunderstanding of some sort.
"Who - who the hell are you?" he wheezed, looking up at her.
"I'm asking the questions," she told him, pulling hard on his hair and eliciting a grunt of pain. She glared down at him and demanded, "Where's Harry? What did that bitch do to him?"
The man looked at her in surprise, before sneering, "So you're one of Potter's Muggle-loving friends! Come to try and save him from the big, bad dark wizards?"
Tonks broke his nose with a quick jab from her free hand. He gasped in pain and began to hack as blood streamed down his face. She twisted his head to one side, forcing him to look down the length of the street they were in. Even with a newly broken nose, his eyes grew wide at the sight of the ruined store fronts.
"I'm not here to save him from a bunch of incompetent twits like yourself," she told him, waving at the first at the ropes binding him and then waving at the debris littering the street. "I'm here to try and stop him from doing something he might regret once he's back in his right state of mind!"
"I think you might be... a bit late," the man swallowed.
"What d'you mean?"
He looked up at her, his face a picture of fright, "Potter didn't even look at me when he did this. He didn't even wave a wand or a hand in my direction."
Tonks frowned, "What do you mean by that?"
"Bellatrix Lestrange was with me. Potter charged right into her like a rampaging troll," the Death Eater explained, his voice wavering as he recalled the events leading to his present position. "He grabbed her in his arms and just kept on going - straight through the window. I was going to follow, help her, but... one second I was on the ground, the next I was tied up and hanging here."
"So they're still inside the shop?" Tonks asked, looking at the empty window frame in front of them.
"I think so. I hadn't heard anything for a few minutes before you came," he shuddered. "Thank Merlin."
Tonks gave him a warning shake, "Explain."
The Death Eater shook his head, "Potter was... not happy to see her. I think he was hitting her."
This was something Tonks could scarcely believe. Harry, while in possession of a dangerous temper, had never shown any indication of being prone to physical violence. All of the reports she had read supported this. In any confrontation, usually with Draco Malfoy, it had always been Ron that jumped into the fray with his fists flying. It was never Harry, even when he was provoked beyond the limits of his control.
Thus it was with a great amount of trepidation that Tonks released her hold on the imprisoned Death Eater and approached the gaping window. Ignoring the man's muffled protests she hesitantly stepped into the shop and began to look around. Her ears caught a disturbing sound coming from behind the counter near the back. It sounded not unlike the repeated chopping of an axe into a wet tree trunk.
"Harry?" she called, creeping forward.
The sound continued without pause, though as she drew closer Tonks could make out soft mutterings. Licking her lips she drew her wand, silently berating herself for not having done so before now. Moody would have her head if he ever found out.
"I've tried to be nice."
"What?" she paused, now able to make out some movement in the shadows behind the counter. Each word she heard was paced with the rhythm of the smacking noise, which Tonks now thought sounded rather... fleshy.
"I'm tired of being nice," the voice, which she now recognised as Harry's, continued.
Tonks girded her loins, so to speak, and stepped around the counter.
"Oh gods," she choked out, dropping her wand and covering her mouth and nose with both hands in a desperate attempt to prevent her lunch from heaving out of her stomach. She fell to her knees, her legs suddenly too weak to support her, and wished that she could banish what she saw from her mind.
Bellatrix Lestrange lay limply on her back, Harry Potter straddling her waist. His left hand held her throat in a tight grip, squeezing the flesh so strongly that it was already bruised almost black. His right hand, however, rose and fell with a metronomic rhythm. He was like a machine, moving without pause, each movement precisely the same as the one before it.
"I'm not--"
Up and down. Thwack.
"--going--"
Up and down. Thwack.
"--to hold--"
Up and down. Thwack.
"--back--"
Up and down. Thwack.
"--any--"
Up and down. Thwack.
"--more!"
Blood coated his arm halfway to his elbow. Pale chucks of flesh which, Tonks realized with horror, had once been part of Bellatrix's face, clung to him here and there. The skin over his knuckles was split, swollen and bruised. It must have hurt beyond belief, most of the bones in his hand must have been broken, but Harry did not pause in his assault. Punch after punch rained down with nary a pause or hesitation.
As for Bellatrix...
Harry must have been in a blind frenzy, Tonks realized. For that matter, he still was. She had been so worried about what Lestrange would do to Harry that she had not paused to consider what Harry would do to Lestrange. Beat her into a bloody pulp with his bare hand.
"Harry?"
He moved so fast that if Tonks had blinked then she would have missed it. He was on his feet, facing her and for the first time in her life, Tonks understood why Dumbledore was so certain that Harry could defeat You-Know-Who. She could see what the headmaster had always known... could see what it was that had frightened the dark lord so much that he tried to kill a year old baby.
And then he was upon her.
At first she had the terrible thought that he was attacking her, but belatedly realized that Harry was clutching to her in what seemed very much like desperation. He was hugging her to him so tightly that she struggled to draw full breaths. She wrapped her arms around him, returning the hug, and tried to calm him as best she could.
"Harry?" she asked, with some trepidation.
She could feel him pressing against her, burrowing his face into her neck as his body was wracked with sobs. Tonks did not have much experience when it came to weeping teenage boys. In fact, Harry was one of the strongest people she knew and thus one of the very last people she would have expected to react like this.
Gently stroking his back she asked, "Harry? Are you all right?"
"No," Harry sniffled, face still buried in her hair. "Do I bloody look all right?"
"No," she agreed quietly. At least there was some fire in his voice when he retorted. She gently pulled him away from her, amazed at how utterly fragile he seemed right then. She looked at his face, which was streaked with tears and spotted with flecks of Bellatrix's blood. "Please tell me what's wrong, Harry."
"I can't kill her, Niks," the young wizard whispered.
Harry's face was an expressionless mask, revealing none of the inner turmoil he must have been feeling. His eyes were a bit red from crying and his cheeks wet with tears, but other than that not his frozen features did not betray any emotion.
Tonks watched with mounting alarm as the façade began to crack. More tears began to flow as he curled into a foetal ball, his entire body trembling uncontrollably.
"I can't kill her," he repeated tremulously as Tonks enveloped him in her arms. She tried to reassure him, rocking him back and forth as she stroked his back. "I want to, so much, Niks, so much, but I can't..."
Looking over his hunched shoulders, Tonks had to bite her tongue to stop herself from saying anything. From her position she could clearly see Bellatrix's body and, more importantly, her face. She didn't need to check for a pulse to know that the woman was dead.
In fact, it was something of a mercy that she was - even with magic there would have been little hope of fully repairing the damage Harry had inflicted in his rage. She would have been horribly scarred for life if she had survived.
The reason she kept quiet was because she simply did not know how Harry would react to the news. On the one hand, he seemed devastated in his supposed inability to do just that. Learning that he had actually succeeded would probably cheer him up no end. On the other hand, Tonks wasn't all that sure it would be a good idea to stoke the fire in a boy who had just pounded someone's face into so much mince meat.
Besides which, she was fairly certain he would not react positively to the knowledge once the Aquila had been flushed out of his system. Then again, Harry had been showing a darker side to his personality since Sirius' death. For all Tonks knew, chances were he'd greet Bellatrix's death with the same stoic attitude he had developed over the summer holidays.
"...I just... can't..."
Closing her eyes to the sight, Tonks tried once again to banish the image of Bellatrix's mutilated face from her mind. It would not be easy, as Harry had been particularly vicious in his assault. If it hadn't been for the Death Eater, dangling from the streetlight outside, Tonks would never have known it was Bellatrix lying there. The only way Ministry would be able to identify her would be by her fingerprints or magical signature. Her face was... gone.
"No matter how much I punch her," Harry continued, almost babbling, "no matter how hard I hit... she just won't die!"
"Shhh, it's all right, Harry," she soothed, "it's all right."
Tonks never did know how long she held him there, probably only a matter of five to ten minutes, but it seemed an age that she comforted him with her soft words. Slowly the trembling died down and the tears dried up. A few startled gasps and exclamations pulled Tonks out of her contemplations, signalling the arrival of a group of witches and wizards. Apparently they had just found the Death Eater dangling outside the shop.
It would not do, she thought, for anyone to see Harry in such a state. The Prophet had made a full retraction of all the damaging slander they had printed the previous year, now promoting The-Boy-Who-Lived as an unsung hero, but public opinion was still a fickle thing. Besides, there was a dead and very bloody body not six feet away, something that would most assuredly not be good for Harry's image.
Taking hold of his chin and tilting his head up, so that she could look at him properly, she asked, "Are you all right now, Harry?"
"I'll be fine, Niks," Harry answered unconvincingly.
He lifted his bruised right hand into view and Tonks watched with quiet surprise and amazement as the blood, covering it almost to the elbow, seemed to evaporate away. His knuckles were almost black, so heavily were they bruised, and the skin was torn with deep gouges that oozed congealing blood. She could see what looked like one of Bellatrix's teeth embedded between the knuckles of his index and fore fingers. The tooth popped out and fell to the shop floor as the cuts healed, leaving behind only thin white scars to mark their passage.
"I'll be fine," he repeated softly, regarding his healed hand. "Eventually."
Releasing her hold on him, Tonks rose to her feet. She looked over the counter and could see a small crowd of wizards gathered outside the shop. Fortunately they were entirely focused on the trussed up Death Eater, and had yet to turn their attention away from him. She held out a hand to help Harry up, surprised to discover that he was heavier than he looked as she pulled him to his feet.
"Harry, d'you think you can walk?"
"Yeah," he said, head downcast and not releasing his grip on her hand. He was holding her quite firmly, almost painfully. He glanced up at her and asked timidly, "Why?"
"It's not safe, Harry. We need to leave," she told him. She glanced towards the shattered front window and wondered how they were going to sneak past the crowd. "We can't stay here."
Harry looked at her uncertainly and asked, "You want to go... someplace safe?"
Tonks regarded him cautiously, having noticed something in his voice when he posed that question. She did not know what it was, but she had a feeling that Harry had something planned. If there was one thing Tonks knew about her young charge, it was that he had an uncanny ability to sneak out from under peoples' noses when he really needed to. That and her time at Hogwarts had developed an implicit trust in him, something she couldn't really explain. Which was why she decided to find out what he had in mind.
She nodded, "Yeah."
A faint smile graced his lips as he nodded in return. "Okay."
And then they were somewhere else.
"Holy shit!" Tonks yelped in surprise, pulling free from Harry's hold on her and whirling around in disbelief. After gaping stupidly at the surrounding landscape, she turned to Harry and asked, "Where are we?"
"Someplace safe. Like you asked," he told her quietly, bashfully examining his shoes.
"Actually, I was thinking of Hogwarts," she muttered, once again surveying their new location. Suffice to say they weren't in Kansas anymore. Or anywhere else that Tonks recognised. Certainly no longer in the British Isles. "Where are we, exactly?"
Harry reached up and nervously scratched the back of his neck, sounding faintly embarrassed as he said, "Isla Sorna, off the coast of Costa Rica."
"Oh."
That was all Tonks could think to say.
They were standing on a bluff, overlooking the ocean. Waves roared and crashed against the shore, sparkling a brilliant blue in what looked like morning sunlight. It had been sometime in the middle of the afternoon back in Hogsmeade, but Harry had seemingly just Apparated the pair of them halfway across the planet, or at least the Atlantic.
Behind them was a lush forest, coloured with every shade of green imaginable and loud with the chirps of birds and the noises of other animals. Basically it was your everyday tropical paradise, complete with a few palm trees to the left, which were swaying languidly in a warm breeze.
"Meep meep," Harry whispered in her ear, startling Tonks with his proximity. He had sneaked up right behind her and was able to catch her as she tripped over her feet in surprise. He leaned in close and placed a feather-light kiss on her lips. He stared into her eyes, a playful gleam once again present, as he smirked, "Catch me, if you can, Niks."
He backed away and winked, before disappearing with a pop, only to reappear a moment later, this time on the edge of the forest. He waved cheekily at her and bolted into the lush foliage, quickly vanishing from sight.
"Tag," groaned Tonks, horribly aware of the irony of the situation. "I'm it."
She looked out over the island and the ocean.
"Nobody's going to believe this."
TBC...