Harry gasps.
Quirrell just knocked him flat, wrapping his hands about his throat- and appears to be trying to strangle him.
Only, he really isn’t having any trouble breathing. Save the nasty smell coming from Quirrell’s hands.
He quickly analyzes his situation in his mind. Ron is unconscious on the sidelines, in the chess room. According to Hermione, he’d been instructed to use his best judgement in sacrificing himself, so long as he is able to set up a guaranteed win beforehand- and he’d elected to sacrifice himself instead of forfeiting the match and starting over.
Hermione is waiting in the potion room. All he needs to do, is to reach her, and she can get him out to safety. Get the Stone out to safety.
“My hands,” Quirrell panics, lifting his hands to stare at them.
Something about touching him seems to be hurting Quirrell. He’s been completely unbothered each time, aside from a faint sting at the point of contact.
He gets an idea, and his hands shoot forwards. He locks both hands onto Quirrell’s arm, and grips it as tightly as he can.
Quirrell lets out a scream- before a sharp cracking noise comes from the arm. Quirrell tries to pull away, but Harry doesn’t let him. He removes one hand from the hold, though- one seems to be more than enough. That other hand, he reaches down to punch one of Quirrell’s knees. Maybe it’ll help, maybe it won’t.
The leg he punched cracks as well, and Quirrell collapses right off of him. He finally lets the man go, twisting over in the other direction to get a foot under him, before driving himself forwards as hard as he can.
He misses the flame door, by about five feet.
… The wall doesn’t put up much of a fight. He goes right through it, headfirst.
Hermione lets out a shriek of surprise, leaping away from him. She seems to have been leaning against the wall next to the black flames, holding the smallest bottle while she waited for him. Only, he’d decided to make a new doorway on her other side.
“Let’s go!” he calls to her.
She lands from her jump faster than he would have thought possible, had he not seen her rewrite the rules of impossibility during ‘falling lessons’. “Right!” She charges forwards to meet him, moving lightning fast- and then both he and she screech to a halt as a bolt of magic flies through the black flames, almost instantly coating the purple flames and that entire wall in hardened magic.
Hermione turns back towards the black flames and his new hole. “Trapped,” she snarls, drawing her wand.
Harry moves to stand next to her, drawing his own wand, but she blocks him. “No, let me protect you,” she orders.
“But-!” he begins.
She cuts him off. “Didn’t you hear Voldemort shrieking at him to kill you? I know you’re harder to kill than me, but I’m hard to kill as well- and you’re more important. Let me protect you.”
As if to prove her point, Quirrell comes stepping through Harry’s new door- and one of the bottles on the table shrieks through the air to smash into his face, even though her wand hardly twitched.
He blinks. “Was that-?”
“Poison,” she answers him.
Quirrell recovers just in time to block a second bottle flying for his face with a spell, deflecting it to smash against the stone- only for a third to hit him in the groin at full tilt.
“He’s healed himself,” Harry observes. “I broke his arm.”
Hermione tsks briefly. “Confringo! We’ll have to take him out quickly, then.”
Quirrell’s shield comes up only barely in time to intercept her spell, and completely misses both bottles closing in on the sides of his head at high speed.
“Expelliarmus!” Harry tries- but Quirrell blocks it, again just barely in time, as Hermione flashes off to the side, pushing him in the opposite direction.
He moves with her push, charging into the wall and making an attempt to run up it.
He’s just in time. Quirrell’s spell blazes past behind him, smashing into the magical barrier.
“Come on,” Hermione grumbles, sprinting across the ceiling. “Stupefy! Expelliarmus! Confringo! Er, Aguamenti!”
Quirrell splutters under the stream of water coming from her wand, having blocked all three of her leading spells- but manages to get a spell flying in her direction. Harry watches as it goes; she tries to dodge it, but she’s too slow.
Then, it simply bounces off her shoulder, reflecting into the floor to blast a small hole into the ground.
Hermione then slams into the wall next to him; he’s fallen back to the floor long ago. “Interesting. Killing curse, and it just bounced off.”
“Almost like me,” Harry answers.
She scowls. “Yeah, but I don’t have your advantage. That shouldn’t have happened.” She leaps off of the wall, charging straight for Quirrell, her wand-free hand drawing back for a punch.
Quirrell tries to stop her with a shield, but she passes right through it, shattering it like so much tissue paper. So his wand flicks again, his fingers shift- and she’s suddenly thrown backwards, against the wall next to Harry… and her wand is forced from her hand. Harry opens his mouth to try another spell, but Quirrell summons his wand away as well.
Quirrell then deflects the final bottle, leaving only the round one to get through the purple fire, with his wand- before pointing it at Hermione, who immediately doubles over, shrieking in pain.
Quirrell huffs. “Well, that works,” he declares.
“There’s-!” Voldemort begins to yell, almost sounding like a warning- before Harry spots a flash of wood behind Quirrell, and the table smashes over his head. Quirrell’s in the middle of turning when the two halves, each surrounded by a navy blue aura, suddenly change course to smash themselves into the sides of his head.
Harry bolts forwards- but has to dodge backwards again to avoid a rogue spell from Quirrell’s wand. So he grabs the nearest thing he can- the rock, one of the fragments of the shattered wall. He twists violently, throwing it as hard as he can straight into Quirrell’s gut. At the same time, he notices Hermione’s wand, surrounded by the same icy blue aura as the bottles were, racing back to her.
Quirrell oofs visibly, eyes going wide as he folds around the speeding rock, flying backwards right on time for a lightning bolt to come thundering out of nowhere, right into his back.
Then Hermione catches her wand, pointing it up at him from her position on the floor. Her entire form seems to shimmer with that icy blue aura. “Stupefy,” she snarls.
This time, her spell isn’t a simple flash of red light. Rather, it’s a solid beam of red light, momentarily connecting her wand to Quirrell’s form.
Hardly a moment later, Quirrell is flat against the opposite wall, bouncing limply off of it. Draco Malfoy is some six feet off to the side of the impact point, empty-handed as he whirls to face the same.
How Malfoy got there, Harry has no clue.
Then there’s a sudden flash of bright green light, and he’s no longer in that chamber.
He’s… also standing on all fours.
He looks left, and he looks right. Where is he? There’s… clouds, it looks like, in every direction.
Something green flickers around him, picking him up. He catches a brief glimpse of something very dark blue before the green disappears, and his head snaps back up, pupils shrinking as he tries to process what had just happened.
Before he finishes, though, the green light flashes again, and he’s back in that chamber. Quirrell is lying face-down on the floor. He stumbles backwards, against the wall. “Woah…”
Hermione glances at him, rising from where she had been lying on the floor. “Welcome back, Harry. Um, is he still awake?”
Malfoy doesn’t move any closer to Quirrell. “Well,” he begins. “He-!” Malfoy vanishes in a flash of navy blue light.
Hermione blinks at the space he had occupied a moment before. “Oh… I guess that’s happening to you too. See you in a second.” She raises her wand, pointing it at Quirrell again. “Uhh… Harry, do you happen to know any medical diagnostic spells?”
He doesn’t move, nor say anything. He’s still trying to process everything.
Malfoy reappears in a matching flash of navy blue light. “Woah, that was weird. Um… Sorry about that, donno what just happened. Anyways, he… Yeah, he might survive.”
She raises an eyebrow. “You sure about that?”
He grins. “We’ve managed to break every bone in his body, cook him to a crisp, and shut his brain down in its entirety. I daresay he’s not moving anytime soon.” He scowls at Quirrell. “And… Yeah. His heart has gone to an irregular rhythm… and he’s not breathing.” Quirrell flips right-side-up with a cracking noise, and starts making sharp, sudden breaths. “There, that’ll keep him from suffocating, for now. Let’s get him up to where Madam Pomfrey can make sure he doesn’t wake up until Dumbledore arrives.”
“Right,” Hermione nods. “Um… I’ll carry you and Harry, you levitate him?”
Malfoy shrugs. “Sure.”
“Okay.” She picks Harry up with one arm around his midsection, stepping forward to meet Malfoy, who trotted forwards for her to do the same with him and her other arm. “Oh, and Ron’s unconscious in the chess room,” she informs him.
“Got it,” Malfoy nods. “Once we get back out into the main castle, I can teleport us- all- to the Hospital Wing.”
Quirrell floats into the air as Hermione spreads her wings- wings Harry’s never seen. Except maybe as a glimpse during her falling lessons, but if so, it wasn’t enough to even ascertain their color.
She leans forwards, flaps them- and rockets through the purple fire, right after it dies a sudden death. She soars past the troll, and over the chessboard, slowing down so Malfoy can catch Ron as well.
“Got him,” Malfoy announces. “And Hermione, you forgot to watch out for those flames. I had to snuff them before you charred us all to death.”
Hermione blushes. “Sorry,” she mutters. The keys part instantly for her passage, and a bright, white light shines in front of everyone as she arcs upwards to the trapdoor… which Malfoy magics open. Hermione then lands, folding her wings just before walking through the door back into the rest of the castle, no longer carrying either Harry or Malfoy.
“You’re back,” Lyra greets. “Something happen?” She looks inquisitively at Malfoy.
“We beat him,” Hermione answers, as Malfoy floats Quirrell out past the door.
“He might survive,” Malfoy states. “I think.”
Lyra raises an eyebrow. “Oh…? Wow, he’s out cold, you must have hit him hard. Yeah, he’ll survive. Voldemort’s soul fragment is gone, though- might have been destroyed by the stunner. No way to be certain. But whenever this bloke wakes up next month, he’ll find his magic facilities- including the ones required to use a wand- are so thoroughly stunned I doubt he’ll recover anywhere near his full capability before he dies of old age.” Chuckle. “And, I don’t doubt he’ll go straight to Azkaban, either.”
“Wait, what?”
She nods. “Yeah. That was some impressive spellwork, whatever you three did down there. He’s been incapacitated for months, and permanently crippled. Don’t worry, there are spells to wake him up, or even to restore his magic facilities to proper functioning- but I doubt any of the latter will be pointed at him.”
“Wha- Huh?”
Draco turns suddenly. “Oh, sorry about that, Ron. You were… asleep.”
Ron wobbles as he lands on his feet. “Ah… Did we win?”
Harry nods blankly. “Yeah. We won.”
“Awesome!” Ron declares. “So, what next?”
“I’ll take this git off of you,” Lyra informs them; the aura around Quirrell changes from blue to gold as she speaks. “Then I’ll scrounge up your hazard pay and bring it to you sometime in the next couple days. After that, we basically pretend it never happened.”
“Hazard pay?” Ron asks, confused.
“Yeah. I didn’t tell you about it earlier, but of course the RESS is going to pay you for helping with our mission. Especially with as hazardous a mission as this one. I’ll have to check the books to see how much they’re paying, but I’ll guarantee you’re getting paid- whether or not you would have done it anyways.”
Harry blinks. “You’ll have to check the books?”
Lyra nods. “Yep. Didn’t bother reading up on the financial plans for that- too focused on being ready to fight, and coordinating your party.” She shrugs. “When the world’s in danger, the money can wait.” She chuckles. “Hay, even I’m going to be getting some hazard pay for this, probably. Not that I need it.” She vanishes into thin air.
Everyone lets out a collective sigh.
“You know,” Harry begins, looking up at Hermione. “That’s got to be the first time she’s stayed in one place long enough to answer all my questions.”
“Not surprised,” Hermione states, before glancing at him. “Er, that she never stayed in one place long enough before, that is. That did seem uncharacteristically long for her to be sticking around, didn’t it?”
Malfoy nods. “Definitely. I usually have to ask Bonbon instead.”
“Come to think of it,” Harry turns to Malfoy. “How did you get down there?”
He shrugs. “Teleported, I think. Something to do with my, ah, unique talent. Equestrian magic… I let it guide me. Some interesting combination of Equestrian magic and wand magic, and I got straight through all the teleportation wards in time to distract Quirrell.”
Hermione nods. “In time to distract him, by breaking a solid wooden table over his head. Sounds about right.”
Harry chuckles, while Ron just stares.