Chương 44: 44. Chapter 44
Rey drops to barren earth on her hands and knees. There’s a thud nearby as Luke lands on his back, flailing like an upended turtle until he is ensnared by magically conjured ropes that bind his legs together and his arms to his sides. Rey has a brief impression of headstones and yew trees and a dilapidated church in the distance and a plethora of hooded, black-robed figures surrounding her, and there are several seconds of questions racing through her mind—Why was the trophy Portkeyed to a graveyard, who are these people, is this part of the tryouts—but then a cold voice speaks in a low drawl.
“Kill the spare.”
Rey’s vision fills with brilliant green light. It barrels toward her and she operates on instinct, rolling away while aiming her wand in the direction the spell had come from and firing off one nonverbal Stupefy after another. The shadowy figures are taken by surprise, she hears them yelling, she glimpses several of them dropping to the ground, unconscious, but she barely registers any of it through the haze of the adrenaline that has overtaken her senses.
Keep moving, she remembers Ben instructing the class during their dueling module. Don’t give your opponent anything to hit.
However, when facing off alone against multiple opponents, find or create cover as soon as possible.
Rey springs to her feet. A multitude of red, purple, and blue curses immediately come flying at her and she casts the most potent Shield Charm that is within her power, maintaining it while she physically dodges and counterattacks and puts as much distance as she can scrape out between her and her assailants. There have to be at least a dozen of them, she is very much outnumbered and it’s not enough to be fast, she also has to be smart—
Three more jets of that green light, creating deep, fiery furrows in the earth as each one misses her by a hair’s breadth. She knows what this spell is, she knows that there is no use trying to block it with Protego, so she cancels her shield and puts all her effort into dodging, seven years of having to be nimble enough to catch the Golden Snitch coming to her aid. Once the barrage is over, she flicks her wrist in a quick twirling motion, muttering, “Fumos.”
Smoke pours from the tip of her aspen wand, covering her and her immediate surroundings in a dense gray cloud. With her movements obscured, Rey ducks behind a large stone statue perched atop one of the tombs. Her heart pounds fitfully within her chest as she listens to the hooded figures rustling through the overgrown grass of the graveyard. Searching for her.
She hugs her knees to her chest, taking stock of the situation. Their D.A.D.A. teacher in fifth year had been granted a special Ministry dispensation to demonstrate the Unforgivables on spiders, so she’s all too familiar with that telltale green light. She remembers the spider scuttling on Professor Jerjerrod’s desk, how Jerjerrod’s wand had slashed through the air as he chanted, “Avada Kedavra.” She remembers how the spider hadn’t even twitched in death throes; the life had simply fled from it the instant the spell collided with its target.
The Killing Curse. The most sinister of the Unforgivables. And these hooded figures are doling it out like candy—and nonverbally, to boot.
Dark wizards, then. And one of them had called her the spare, which means that they’re after Luke…
“Bloody idiots,” grumbles the same cold voice from earlier. “Bested by a damn schoolgirl—fine warriors you are—”
“Feminism must be intersectional or it is not feminism at all!” Luke pipes up.
Then he utters a gusty Oof of pain, and Rey dares to peek around the statue to see his prone form being kicked in the ribs—repeatedly—by several of the figures.
“Shut up, Skywalker!” one snarls. “You have no idea what awaits you, we’ve been planning this for a very long time—here, get his staff! Too good for wands now, are you?”
A large, hulking robed figure retrieves Luke’s fallen staff and smashes it against a gravestone. The sound of splintering wood echoes through the air. Now that Rey thinks about it, though, she’s never actually seen Luke channel magic through his staff, and she hopes that means that he has a wand on him somewhere that the attackers won’t bother searching for.
But it becomes more and more apparent with each second that ticks past that it’s a futile hope that Luke will be even just the slightest bit proactive. He continues to be the recipient of heavy-booted kicks, alternating between cackles and moans of pain that are—disturbingly theatrical, which of course only serves to incense the dark wizards further.
Rey contemplates making a run for it while she still can. She can Apparate to just outside Hogwarts’ wards and then lead the professors and the Aurors back to this graveyard, to help Luke.
She’s about to put this plan into motion when a black-robed figure peeks out from behind the statue. His hood has slipped off, exposing the malevolent grin that he levels at her.
“Found you, girlie.”
Rey stares at him. Recognition jolts through her like a shockwave. Even if she hadn’t seen his face in the Daily Prophet on the handful of occasions that it had referenced the old embezzlement scandal, she would still have been able to put two and two together from his graying red hair and the arctic eyes and sharp features that are so much like his son’s.
It's Brendol Hux.
He raises his wand and she knows that he will kill her if she doesn’t act, and so she does. It’s a wizarding duel in the traditional sense of the word, victory hinging on who draws the quickest.
And Rey wins.
Brendol screams as he’s hurled several feet into the air by Rey’s well-placed Knockback Jinx. His cohorts charge at her and she braces herself and pictures the boundaries of Hogwarts in her head and she Disapparates—
—only to find that she can’t—
The magic doesn’t take. She remains where she is.
The graveyard is contained by an Anti-Disapparition Jinx.
Thrown for a loop, utterly caught by surprise, Rey’s unable to dodge or counter the next spell that descends upon her in the blink of an eye. It’s a variant of the same one that had been cast on Luke—ropes blossom around her wrists and her ankles, wrapping tightly like a myriad serpents, the knots digging into her skin. Her wand slips from her limp grasp and one of the figures grabs her by the hair and drags her forward, her body sliding along the ground.
It hurts. She presses her lips together, willing herself not to cry out. She won’t give her foes the satisfaction.
“What a pity,” says the cold-voiced figure who appears to be in charge. “I had hoped to grant you a painless end, child—you were only caught up in events, after all. Unfortunately, you have injured quite a few of my men. And we know a thing or two about vengeance.” He gestures in Luke’s direction. “Your death will be as slow as his.”
“Wonderful!” Luke bellows. He beams at Rey, the two of them trussed up like chickens. “We’ll be torture buddies!”
This is the worst day of my life, Rey thinks.
The leader of the dark wizards appears none too pleased with Luke’s cavalier attitude. He slips off his hood. Rey none too charitably estimates that he must be a hundred years old, with skin stretched taught over gaunt features and sunken eyes that glare down at Luke with an icy, venomous hatred.
“My name is Wilhuff Tarkin,” he tells Luke. “I am—I was—Lord Palpatine’s right hand. Because of you, my master’s glorious plans for the wizarding world were torn asunder and he languished in Nurmengard until he died, a broken man. You took everything from us, Luke Skywalker.”
“I mean, he was the one who abandoned you lot and flew off to America—” Luke starts to complain, only to get kicked in the head for all his trouble by the same large figure who had destroyed his staff.
“Enough, Johans,” Tarkin sneers. “Such a great hero will die by magic. It is only proper.”
“Not such a great hero,” Johans growls. His hood slides off, revealing a broad, craggy face ridden with scars, and he glowers down at Luke’s crumpled form. “Thought he’d give us a fight to remember, but he’s just some pathetic, half-senile old sod. Went daft during all those years in the Outback, I expect.”
“Yes, what a waste,” Tarkin agrees with a sigh. “Australia is a most brutal environment. It can’t be helped.”
“Eximious!” Luke chirps. “Sobersides! Buttress!”
Rey grits her teeth as she and Luke are dragged into the church. The interior is lit by torches and she can see that numerous Extension Charms have been cast to add several hallways and levels, making the place bigger than it appears to be on the outside. There are more black-robed wizards milling about, who all have no shortage of verbal abuse to spare for the captives. This church has been their headquarters for quite some time, judging from the beds and storage areas that Rey glimpses out of the corner of her eye through open doors.
Rey and Luke are unceremoniously tossed into a room at the far end of the eastern ground-level hallway. Johans gleefully announces that he and his cohorts just need to get a few things ready first, and then Rey and Luke are left alone and the door is slammed shut and bolted from the outside with loud finality.
“They’re preparing the torture chamber!” Luke tells Rey, his tone incredibly bright with cheer for someone who is bound from the neck down and has been promised that he will die tonight. “They’ll strap us to wooden racks and pry our fingernails off one by one!”
“Thanks, Master Skywalker, that’s very helpful,” Rey seethes.
She peruses their surroundings for a viable escape route. The cell is a shoddy construct, the rotten floorboards broken in several places to reveal wide patches of earth, but the walls are solid stone and the lone window is too high to reach and lined with steel bars, the rays of bright moonlight filtering through their gaps serving as the only source of illumination. There are probably guards posted right outside; even if Rey can somehow wriggle free of her restraints and get the door open and overpower the guards and obtain a wand, she will still have to fight her way through an entire church full of dark wizards.
It's a hopeless situation. But she still has to do her best. It’s not like anyone will come to her rescue—Luke is useless and no one knows where they are.
Rey scrunches up her nose and struggles against the bonds around her wrists. She tries to loosen them but to no avail. After several minutes have passed, she’s more than ready to use her teeth but, before she can begin gnawing on the ropes, Luke suddenly shimmies nearer to get her attention. Unlike her, he can’t sit up, so he has to haul his rope-encased body along the floor like a caterpillar. It’s a very unsettling sight; however, when she meets his eyes, they are the most serious that she’s ever seen them.
“I can’t get both of us out, Miss Nincompoop,” he says gravely. “So just sit tight. I’ll come back with reinforcements.”
“How on earth—” Rey starts to ask, but then—
—Luke changes—
He shrinks. His garments turn into a coat of grayish brown fur. His head grows rounder and his ears grow longer and more pointed and his nose transforms into a broad muzzle. His arms and legs shorten, sprouting razor-sharp claws where his nails used to be.
Rey’s jaw drops. The moonlight shines on a plump, grizzled Northern Hairy-nosed Wombat sitting atop a pile of loosened ropes that had been meant for a much larger and definitely more humanoid form.
Luke Skywalker is an Animagus.
An unregistered one at that, considering how Tarkin’s crew hadn’t accounted for it.
“I—you—” Rey sputters, unable to form a coherent sentence. She’s never seen an Animagus before, they’ve only ever discussed it in third-year Transfiguration. Only the most skilled witches and wizards are capable of such powerful magic, and it’s a process that takes years of study and hard work to perfect.
Ben hadn’t mentioned it to her, either, which means that he hadn’t known and that Luke had mastered this feat during his self-imposed exile in the Australian Outback.
Then again, there have clearly been a lot of things that Ben had never mentioned to her. If he hadn’t thought to bring up the fact that he had an ex-girlfriend with Veela blood, why should Rey assume that he would have told her that he had an uncle who could turn into a wombat?
Despite the life-threatening situation that she’s currently in, Rey finds herself getting bloody annoyed and utterly furious with Ben Solo all over again.
Wombat-Luke wiggles a whiskery snout at her, his beady black eyes twinkling. Rey gets the distinct impression that she’s being laughed at. Then he burrows, his paws prying aside chunks of moldering floorboard and shoveling up piles of dirt. It’s not long before he's vanished from sight, stubby tail disappearing into the hole that he’s made.
No wonder his human form had always been so grimy.
Rey scoots over to the hole and does her best to cover it up. With her wrists and her ankles bound, it takes a while. The frustrating and seemingly futile task gives her free reign to feel thoroughly sorry for herself. She’d just wanted to successfully complete the tryouts for the Auror program—she hadn’t asked to get caught up in Luke Skywalker’s weird drama.
She has barely kicked the last wooden board and heap of dirt back into place when the door of the cell bursts open.
And Ganner Rhysode walks in, still wearing his MACUSA uniform.
He doesn’t give Rey any opportunity to be shocked. His blue eyes narrow at her, his pale face turning an angry shade of red.
“Where is he?” Ganner hisses, such a far cry from the carefree yet friendly demeanor he’d adopted at the career fair. “How did he get out?”
Rey tries for nonchalance. Tries to pretend that she hadn’t just spent the better portion of a half-hour covering up a hole in the ground. And she clamps her lips shut, refusing to say anything.
Ganner scowls. He moves like lightning, aiming a cedar wand in her direction. “Legilimens!”
Rey’s mental walls automatically slam into place. She flinches when Ganner crashes into them with all the graceless strength of a blunt weapon, but they hold fast as she packs her mental suitcase. Merlin knows she’s gotten enough practice. She squirrels Luke’s Animagus form and his promise to come back with reinforcements into the most out-of-reach corner of her mind that she can and she buries these thoughts under heaps upon heaps of inconsequential memories and she zips the suitcase shut beneath lock and key. Only then does she let her outer defenses weaken, and it’s a tactic that pays off when Ganner plows through them—in triumph at first, and then in frustration as he finds the rest of her head sealed shut against him.
He breaks in a little further and it hurts, but she’d been anticipating that. Ben had taught her what to expect and how to deal with it. Her thoughts and her memories are impassable. They cannot be sifted through.
When Ganner finally cancels the Legilimency spell, his right eye is twitching and his brow is dotted with beads of sweat. “Someone taught you Occlumency, Miss Niima,” he says in little more than a tense whisper. “Has Hogwarts’ curriculum really improved that much since I graduated?”
Rey stares at him through the mottled amber-and-black haze of an agonizing headache. Her skull feels like it’s going to crack into a million pieces if she so much as moves a single muscle. But there’s a shard of information that burns through the pain, that she holds on to—for all the added confusion that it elicits in her.
Ganner had studied at Hogwarts… but surely Obi-Wan would have mentioned that they were welcoming back an alumnus…
The twitching of the MACUSA Auror’s eye intensifies into violent spasms. His features ripple and his body changes—increases in height, becomes leaner. Soon Rey is looking not at Ganner Rhysode but at someone she’s never seen before, an older wizard with eyes just as sunken and as cold as Wilhuff Tarkin’s.
“The first rule of long-term infiltration with Polyjuice,” he tells Rey in an undeniably British accent, through a thin, humorless smile, “is to pick someone with a known drinking problem.”
The flask, Rey remembers. The flask that Ganner had kept taking sips from. Polyjuice Potion allows the drinker to assume the form of somebody else and the effects of each dose last anywhere from ten minutes to twelve hours, depending on how well the potion had been brewed. Ben and the MACUSA Aurors hadn’t thought it strange every time the impersonator topped up because the real Ganner likes to drink.
“Where is the real Ganner Rhysode?” Rey asks, trying to keep her voice steady.
“Oh, I keep him around,” says the man. “I’m sure an intelligent student such as yourself knows that you need body parts for each brew and they have to be harvested while the person is alive. Unfortunately, given that I have already succeeded in sneaking into Hogwarts and turning the Cup into a Portkey that brought Luke Skywalker to our location, Rhysode’s usefulness has run its course. As has yours, Miss Niima—then again, we didn’t have much use for you in the first place. If not you, it could have been any other student that Skywalker accompanied through the maze.” He brandishes his cedar wand again. “Tell me how he got out and where he went, and I shan’t use any of the nastier spells while torturing you.”
Before Rey can muster any form of response, there is a series of loud bangs and screams, muffled through the old wood of the chamber door. The man looks annoyed; without another glance at Rey, probably figuring that she’s not much of a threat all tied up, he strides out of the cell, weapon at the ready. He slams the door shut in his wake.
Alone again, Rey sags against the wall. Had Luke already returned with reinforcements? Or maybe Ganner had escaped from wherever they were holding him?
Regardless, she can’t just sit here and wait. Whoever is out there wrecking what is from the sounds of it quite a lot of mayhem on these dark wizards, she has to help them.
She searches her prison again. This time, her gaze lands on a rough jut of stone slightly raised from out of the corner wall beside her.
As the commotion in the hallway increases in volume, Rey perches her bound wrists at a right angle to the corner and moves them back and forth, letting the sharp stone saw away at the ropes. It’s a grueling task and she doesn’t come away from it without her fair share of scrapes on the delicate skin of her wrists and her inner arms, but it works far more quickly than she anticipated, the ropes fraying away until her hands are finally, finally free.
Rey shakes feeling back into her fingers and then works on untying the knots around her ankles while explosions ravage the corridor outside, interwoven with layers of shouts and footsteps. She heaves a short-lived sigh of relief when the last of the ropes fall away; she may have gotten loose, but what good is that if she doesn’t have a wand—
—No, wait—
She stills, her heart racing with the beginnings of exhilaration as she realizes that that’s not entirely correct.
I do have a wand, she thinks. Mine.
Her wand is right outside the church. In the graveyard.
Rey closes her eyes against the shivering moonlight. She takes a few deep breaths to center herself, blocking out the sounds of chaos beyond the closed wooden door.
Your magic doesn’t come from your wand, Ben had told her and her classmates. You are the source.
Rey holds out an open palm. Accio, she casts silently.
Accio, wand.
Her magic rises. Burns through her veins in a thousand sparks. Flows out of her fingertips.
She hears the shattering of glass as though some projectile has crashed through the cell’s lone window. Her eyes dart open and her aspen wand flies into her palm, its phoenix feather core thrumming as it recognizes the touch of its rightful owner. Her fingers close around the wood with hunger, with triumph. It’s like being reunited with a lost limb.
She casts a Mending Charm on the window-glass for the hell of it. She’d never felt as powerless as she had when she’d been separated from her wand. Then the door swings inward with a creak and Rey’s on her feet immediately. Johans and the same man who’d impersonated Ganner enter the cell, dragging Ben between them. Rey doesn’t allow herself to freeze in shock; there will be time for that later. She fires off two Stunning Spells in quick succession and the dark wizards drop to the ground, Ben falling along with them. He’d been hit with the Full Body-Bind, his every muscle locked in place, as still as death but his eyes wide open.
Rey seals the door with every variant of Locking Spell and Anti-Intruder Jinx that she’s learned at Hogwarts. Some are redundant, but she can’t leave anything to chance. The corridor outside seems to be silent now, which probably means that her other captors have moved on to deal with Luke’s other reinforcements.
At least, Rey hopes that there are reinforcements aside from Ben. Surely he didn’t come barging in here alone…
Once she’s exhausted her knowledge of wards, Rey scrambles over to Ben’s side, dropping to her knees. He’s staring at the ceiling, unsettlingly corpselike. She slashes her wand through the air over his torso and she mutters, “Finite Incantatem.”
He blinks slowly, motion returning to his system. Only then does Rey’s adrenaline ebb somewhat, allowing her to experience the full brunt of a very wide range of emotions at seeing him here. At knowing that he’d come for her.
The General Counter-Spell has also reversed the glamor on his face. The scar that she’d given him blossoms into view. It’s healed a bit, the jagged line is more of a pinkish hue rather than that horrible, angry, dark red, but the sight of it still sinks into the pit of her stomach like a stone.
Before Rey can say or do anything, though, Ben’s sitting up. He grabs her shoulders a little too roughly and then remembers himself at the last minute when she makes a sound of discomfort, his grip relaxing by millimeters.
“Are you injured?” he rasps, his dark eyes glued to her face like he’s afraid she’ll disappear if he looks away even for just a second. “Did anyone touch you—tell me who it was and I’ll make them pay—”
“Am I injured?” Rey echoes with something like disbelief. “What about you?” She scans him frantically but, aside from a few cuts and bruises, he seems to be in pretty good shape for someone who’d apparently fought his way through entire corridors brimming with dark wizards. “Where’s everyone else?”
“Outside the church. I think.” Ben stares at her a little while longer before scrambling to his feet. He goes over to the two limp forms that Rey had Stunned and begins rifling through their pockets.
“What do you mean, you think?” Rey demands.
“I assume that the rescue team has drawn out the majority of the cabal members, considering that no one has come moseying along wondering what happened to Pryde and Johans.” Ben finds his wand and tucks it back into his arm holster. He also stumbles upon a vial of what appears to be Draught of Living Death, several drops of which he doesn’t hesitate to pour down the two unconscious men’s throats. “However, I can’t be certain, because I went ahead.”
“And that worked out splendidly for you, didn’t it,” Rey snipes.
Ben shrugs. “I stopped fighting because this place is too big. My damn cantaloupe of an uncle couldn’t remember where you’d been locked up. I realized that I’d never find you on my own, so I took a chance that they’d throw me into the same cell as yours. Or in the same general vicinity as your cell, anyway.”
“I—” Rey starts to say, then snaps her mouth shut. Because she is completely flabbergasted. When she rediscovers the ability to speak, it’s to tell him, “There are so many things that could have gone wrong with that plan, Ben!”
“It was a calculated risk.”
“It was not calculated in the slightest!”
She is beyond pissed. He could have gotten killed. Now she’s beginning to understand where his anger had come from the night she charged into the Forbidden Forest. The day she’d flown into the lightning-streaked sky to catch the Snitch.
Ben chooses, perhaps wisely, not to respond. Instead, he runs counterchecks on her wards and adds several of his own. He tries to expand the window—make it big enough for them to squeeze through—but it doesn’t budge. The church had been extensively remodeled with Extension Charms and the magic doesn’t recognize his spell signature.
“I can’t blast the wall,” he mumbles, more to himself than to Rey. “That might collapse the building and there’s a chance that the rest of the team has made it inside. I don’t have eyes on them.”
“Ganner’s here, too. Somewhere,” says Rey. “The real Ganner, I mean. That man—Pryde, was it?—has been using Polyjuice Potion to impersonate him. He’s the one who turned the Cup into a Portkey so that they could catch Luke and torture him to death.”
Anger spasms across Ben’s pale features. Rey thinks that it’s oddly sweet that he could be so infuriated about what had been done to his friend and what had been in store for his uncle, but then—
“And they dragged you into it,” he growls, his every syllable trembling at the edges with pure rage. He marches over to Pryde and gives him a swift kick in the ribs, with such force that the insensate man is actually rolled along the floor by several inches. He does the same thing to Johans. “Goddamn fossils. Been on every international watchlist since the fucking seventies and finally crawled out of hiding to terrorize an innocent teenager. Cowardly shits.”
Ben’s expression is murderous, but it softens when he turns back to Rey. She suspects that he’s too battle-weary to Occlude, and it’s been so long since she last saw him unrestrained that there’s a part of her that greedily takes in every drop even as she reminds herself that she’s mad at him.
His brow furrows as he appears to notice something. Or as if something has just belatedly occurred to him. “How do you still have your wand?”
“They disarmed me earlier,” Rey says, “but I managed to summon it.”
The way you taught me to, she thinks. And in the graveyard—I fought the way you taught me to, out there.
Ben gets a certain—look on his face. It’s a look that Rey would have recognized at any given moment in time. One that she would probably always feel in the marrow of her bones.
It’s that wolfish, mercenary look that Ben gets whenever he’s about to kiss her.
But they can’t.
It’s all still so unresolved between them. She’s still left so raw from how they’d ended.
He doesn’t know what he wants, and she can’t keep giving pieces of herself to him to receive only broken promises and an uncertain future in return.
Rey hastily steps back, widening the distance between them. Her gaze drops to the floor. “Brendol Hux is part of the cabal, too,” she says, changing the subject. “I saw him in the graveyard. I’m sure it was him.”
There is a long, long silence.
“I see.” Ben’s tone is… gentle, somehow, and she’s too unnerved to look at his face and try to make sense of it. “Well, Armitage Hux has been dragged along on this mission kicking and screaming. By Obi-Wan. I eagerly await what will without a doubt be an interesting reunion.”
Rey snorts despite herself.
And then she does look Ben’s way, because he’s casting the Patronus Charm. His stag shimmers into existence, filling the air with silver radiance.
He tells it to carry a message, detailing the interior layout of the church and what traps to expect. He reveals what Rey had told him about Ganner, as well as several names of the dark wizards that he’d recognized. He says that he’s found Miss Niima and they’re safe and waiting for further instructions.
He addresses the message to three people, whichever one the stag can get to first. Eryl Besa, Obi-Wan, or Tahiri Veila.
Rey’s mood sours. It’d been a really good thing that she hadn’t let this man kiss her.
The stag leaps into the air and vanishes through recently repaired window. “And now we wait,” says Ben.
“Brilliant,” Rey says crisply.
He glances at her with some confusion, but she busies herself with sitting down on the floor, leaning her back against the wall, and crossing her arms in front of her chest. It has to be almost midnight by now. She’d started the day excited to try out for a post-graduation program and she’s going to end it having just narrowly escaped torture at the hands of evil wizards, trapped in a cell with her ex who is also her professor as she stews in resentment over his ex while a battle rages outside.
Rey wonders what it’s like to have a normal, uneventful life. It must be nice.
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