Prompt: (because all yours are ... alright but eh)

Gentlemen, it seems the only way I can convince you to leave my family alone. A final and assertive display that yes, I've still 'got it'


My prompt really isn't that great either because I wanted to do something more ridiculous. Which is also included.

Prompt the more ridiculous:

Due to the spike in sales of winged Little Folk, Harry Dresden was on his third day with less than an hour of sleep, and the hallucinatory mushrooms were making it quite difficult to tell Mavra and the PTA members apart.

These are open to anyone if Pers doesn't take them.

 

Since everyone else has thrown their prompts out there ...

Post-Hogwarts, Auror Harry:

"You should have dropped the case when I told you Potter." Robards gave his subordinate the same smile that he had used to shepherd Muggle-Borns to the Registration Committee.

Harry said nothing. Then he smiled.

It wasn't a kind smile.

 

Wow, talk about an embarrassment of riches/prompts. Thanks!

I've never been able to sit through Point Break, in large part because of how my wife (she of watching The Matrix eleven times in the theater fame) crushes on Reeves. Vir's is a good prompt that I wouldn't mind taking up someday, but I'm sort of in the mood to write an ass-kicking Harry in a serious piece. I think I'll take up Rents's or Peace's (or both). Expect something by Monday.

 

(2500 words; sorry.)

“To retirement,” Harry says, raising his pint glass.

Kingsley Shacklebolt, retired Auror, follows suit. “To watching someone else put up with all that shite.”

The two sip, mulling their thoughts. Aberforth’s old pub, now run by a firebrand named Meyers, is mostly empty as the luncheon crowd has left and the evening haunts have yet to arrive.

“It was all for nothing, wasn’t it,” Harry says, his mood as black as his hair once was. His face is lined—age, scars, cynicism.

“Hmm,” his one-time mentor says.

“The war, Voldemort, all the sacrifices, the friends we buried, and nothing’s changed. The Wizengamot still does the bidding of the old families. Malfoy and his lot still buy and sell the Ministry. Aurors still prosecute two sets of laws and take bribes to look the other way for those bastards. Hell, I had Parkinson dead to rights before his solicitor bought off the deal. Fucking Robards.”

“Still on about that? It’s been what, forty years now?”

Harry flips off the elderly man.

“Why do you think I couldn't wait to step down?” Kingsley says, sipping his ale. He’d retired from the ministry several years prior and was enjoying a quiet life in Hogsmeade. “We dreamed big, hoping that there’d be a fresh start after the war…”

“Hell, you were even Minister and—“

“And my hands were tied from the start. Believe me, Harry, there’s no way we could have locked up half of those who deserved it, not without another civil war on our hands. You remember how it was. The war as much as destroyed us.”

“You ever think it could have been done differently?”

“Nope.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

Harry takes a swallow of his ale, marveling at the efficiency of his mentor, conveying so much in so few syllables.

“What if we’d put away a few more of the bastards, taken down the Inner Circle. It’s an outrage to see the likes of Yaxley and LeStrange walking about, pure as pixies.”

“We could have tried, but it wouldn’t have worked that way. Even then, their solicitors would have argued that the whole ‘Inner Circle’ thing was a bit of fanciful rhetoric and they’d have the Prophet lapping it up. By the end of the week everyone would be in agreement that down is up, Celestina Warbeck had talent, and that Voldemort’s confidants were Bellatrix and Snape. Skeeter would have pushed the notion that they were as much victims as any. Oh, and don’t forget the Imperius. There was no other way it was going to play out any differently than it did.”

“It still isn’t right.”

Shacklebolt chuckles. “You’ve been around long enough to give up that dream. There’s no right or wrong. In politics there’s only power.”

“And those too weak to seek it,” Harry finishes. “Thanks for the pint, Shack.”

##

A Pack spell would see to Harry’s things, but there’s nothing like a personal touch as one puts away the mementos of a long career: photographs; awards; trinkets; a fistful of medals; old case files; newspaper clippings; decanters of Firewhiskey, heavily used; a wedding band, more scarcely so. Fifty years of chasing down dark wizards and witches, five decades of red tape and stonewalling, of friends’ betrayals and private conversations played out in the tabloids—he’s bloody tired of it all, to be honest.

Ginny had called him a masochist for doing it as long as he did and he grudgingly admits that she was right. She’d also called him a lot of other things in their train wreck of a marriage, but that’s neither here nor there. They’d parted ways, painfully, though he hears she’s doing well with that Ferguson bloke. Bully for them.

Harry wonders again what to do with himself without the daily grind of performance appraisals and cases, of kissing Ministerial arse and press conferences, without having to fight every year for budgets and being asked to do the impossible. Hell, Robards “that’s Minister to you, Potter” used to head the Aurors himself; the tosser should have a sense of what’s what.

Harry idly wonders whether he should get out the old Firebolt and take up Quidditch again, playing in one of those geezer leagues with Ron.

Yeah, that’d go over well for sure. His erstwhile friend had nothing but curses of the verbal and magical sort the last time they’d crossed paths. Weasley blood is thick and there was never any question whose side Ron would take in the whole Ginny fiasco.

Then he notices the bottom cabinet and stares at it for a while, feeling a subtle bit of aversion magic placed upon it. Had he not been systematically cleaning out his files, he would no doubt have overlooked it, but now there’s nothing for it. He casts a forensics charm, which indicates that he was the caster.

Curious. What’s he trying to hide from himself?

A finite incantatem later and the cabinet opens, showing a thick case file within, or rather a duplicate of a file. It’s clearly been copied, hastily it would seem. Whoever did it was in a hurry at the time. Harry has no memory of it, but something inside of him turns cold at what he reads.

Luna Lovegood – Homicide

There’s a note attached, in his handwriting.

See Hermione.

##

“I’m sorry, Auror Potter, but Ms. Weasley is unavailable—“

“The hell she is!” Harry thunders, pushing past the entrance to the Department of Mysteries. It’s been the better part of five years since he’s paid a visit to one of his first friends, a relationship that might be described as ‘strained’ now, but he remembers the way.

“Auror Potter!” the receptionist calls back. A moment later, Harry hears her say, “Security…”

Harry strides quickly down the tiled hallway, his boots clacking on the floor. He looks for the fourth door on the left and pushes it open, finding Hermione seated behind a large desk shaped like a lozenge. She’s older than before, though her brown eyes are no less shrewd. Her mane of bushy gray hair is tied back in a bun.

“Potter,” she says quietly, drawing her vinewood wand slowly, deliberately.

“Granger,” Harry replies, knowing what kind of reaction the use of her maiden name is likely to induce.

Hermione’s lips purse together, turning white. “Why are you here?”

“I think you have an idea.”

“The answer is ‘no.’”

“I haven’t asked.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Lovegood. I want my memories. I need them.”

“No. If you respect me at all or value our friendship in the slightest, you’ll not ask me to do this. Please, Harry…”

Harry slams his hands on her desk, his face inches from hers.

“Goddammit, Granger. They destroyed her fucking soul! They knew—how the hell they did is beyond me—but they knew I was Master of Death and could recall her otherwise, so did the most ghastly thing to put her out of my reach. I have to find who did this if it’s the last thing I do.”

“Harry…” Hermione turns around in her chair. Harry sees her shoulders shaking as she weeps silently.

“Please, Hermione,” he asks. “I have to, I can’t leave it.”

“Put up your wand, Potter!”

Lovely. Security has arrived. Harry raises his hands over his head, turning slowly. He no doubt could disarm them, though his back would be to Granger and she’d take him down from behind.

“No,” Hermione says. Her voice is icy and implacable. Harry turns his head and sees that only the tear tracks from her eyes betray her emotions. “Leave him with me.”

“Ma’am?”

“It’s okay. Potter and I are going to have an chat and then he will never come see me again.”

##

“I became that obsessed?”

Hermione sighs. “You were destroying yourself over it, Harry. You couldn’t let go. It ruined your marriage, your career, your friendships, your sanity, everything. I don’t want to see you go through that again. I can’t.”

“I left the files for myself, knowing that this was something I needed to do. Please, I won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t try. We both know how this has to play out. I want my memories. And I want Retribution.”

“God no! You’re insane.”

“Yes, on both accounts.”

“I can’t. I won’t.”

“Then I’ll brew it myself if I have to. Hermione...”

The Retribution elixir, originally conceived as a means of delivering a just death sentence to a murderer, is a variant of Polyjuice, but instead of changing into the form of a person, quaffing the elixir causes one to experience the final moments of death.

Tenfold.

It’s a bit of closely held necromancy, the worst sort of magic, but the Unspeakables have exhaustively documented its effects. Only one person in history is known to have survived a properly cast Killing Curse. That same man is the only known survivor of Retribution, taken in a manic moment decades before, a last resort when all other options were closed off.

That man can no longer cast a Patronus. This is the least of the tolls it has demanded.

“I love you, Harry, but…”

“I love you too, Hermione, even if you married that ginger idiot.”

“He’s grey now, no longer ginger.”

“You know what I mean. And if anyone can do this.... Luna didn’t deserve this. If it’s the last thing I do…”

“It’ll be the last thing, Harry, I know it.”

“Then it’ll be righteous. It’s time that something I did actually mattered.”

“To whom? To Luna? She’s dead—worse than dead. She’s gone, forever.”

“To me.”

##

The world shifts sideways and he’s bleeding copiously from his vagina and anus. His arms are stumps at the elbows, tied off with crude tourniquets, and his left shoulder is dislocated. Clear fluid weeps from where his foot once was. Nargles hiss nonsense in his ears.

Hatred and pain, the world is nothing but. And then the Cruciatus twists everything within, plunging white-hot knives into his insides and outsides and whatever-sides.

Time passes, though slowly. Agony is eternity. Three or four such eternities pass.

Someone mutters something and there is a white light that slowly, ever so slowly, enters his chest, pushing into his flesh beneath his breasts, and everything shatters onto the parquet floor. It has a nice pattern, black and white and red, done up in a snake-like theme.

Everything shatters.

Everything. Everything, everything, everything.

He’s broken inside, broken beyond a mere broken body, broken bones, broken mind. He’s not himself anymore.

He’s not anyone anymore, just a broken thing, discarded.

The serrated knife is a merciful distraction as it slices through his throat, tearing and cutting. There’s pressure against his spine and his head tugs loose, bouncing on the floor with muffled thuds. His blonde hair sticks to his eyeballs and he tries to blink, but can’t quite close his eyelids.

Things begin to fade.

##

Harry screams and screams.

The Fates are merciful and he tears his vocal cords.

He screams some more and another piece of his sanity is gone, never to return.

Luna, you poor, dear girl.

##

Knock, knock, knock, knock!

Harry knocks for the fifth time. It’s three a.m., arguably a bit early for a social call. This is not a social call.

“Little pig, little pig, let me in,” he rasps, slightly delirious.

The door swings open angrily and Harry sees a wand in his face, a bald man with a sneering face holding it. The tip glows ominously.

“Potter.”

“Malfoy.”

“Whatever it is you want, couldn’t it wait for morning?”

Harry idly disarms the ponce, pocketing the hawthorn wand, feeling the tug on his magic as it acknowledges that he’s still its master, after all these years. He can’t help but smirk.

“Of course not.”

“Fuck you, Potter.”

“Sorry, I still don’t swing that way. Now if Astoria is up to a bit of a duty punch…”

“What do you want?”

“Your dungeon.”

“Why?”

“Luna.”

“Merlin, Potter. I was in Bonn with my family when it happened. I told you already.”

“I know, but whoever it was, they did it here. I need in.”

“No.”

“Yes.” Harry pats him softly on the cheek and smirks. “Now be a good little host and put on a pot of tea. This is thirsty work.”

“I hate you, Potter.”

“I know; I revel in it. Chop, chop, bitch.”

##

Harry closes his eyes and lowers his Occlumency shields, opening himself up to the psychic resonance of a thousand souls slain, culled before their time.

It’s maddening, the searing, haunting agony of a thousand psychic screams, cutting into his psyche, each demanding that their unique pain come to the fore. Harry fights them, searching for a solitary voice among the chorus, a single thread in a tapestry of misery.

A moment passes. A minute. An hour. Echoes of pain, indignity, shame, the worst of humanity playing out before him. Who knew that the Malfoys had centuries of kidnapping and Mugglebaiting to their heritage? Who knew the revels of old and the blood sacrifices?

And then, finally, he hears it, a quiet whimpering.

Luna.

He merges her consciousness into his, becoming her for an agonizing moment, shedding more of his humanity, seeing as she saw in her final, terrified moments.

And he gets a glimpse of her murderer, the man who’d sundered her soul.

##

"You should have dropped the case when I told you Potter, those many years ago." Robards gives his subordinate the same smile that he had used to shepherd Muggle-Borns to the Registration Committee.

Harry says nothing. Then he smiles at his Minister.

It isn't a kind smile.

“Why?” he asks.

“Whyever not, Potter? She was a non-entity, daughter of a tabloid printer, a nobody with no blood or inheritance, a non-entity in the scheme of things. Her only value was her association with you and you had to be brought to heel, to be reined in so your betters could rule the world. Your idiotic principles needed to be stamped out and dear Ms. Lovegood was the one we chose to pay the price.”

“Luna was my friend.”

Robards shrugs. “Friendship, so banal. You think you can escape, Potter? Your actions are being recorded as we speak. Make a rash movement toward me and you’ll be put down like the rabid dog you are. Aurors are on their way.”

“You seem to be laboring under the illusion that I care.”

“Of course you care. You won’t choose Azkaban, not over a death thirty years in the past, done and gone, a death best forgotten by all. Who was this Luna Lovegood that you would sacrifice everything for her memory?”

Harry remembers a tender evening together, one between the closest of friends, that they swore never to reveal, a solitary moment of perfection in a life of sorrow.

“I think it’s you who is laboring under illusions,” Harry says, finally, flourishing his wand and showing the world why, exactly, he was the finest of the Aurors, the one the Dark Lord had come to fear.

And there is another solitary moment of perfection as a defeated, corrupt Minister is made to swallow the elixir.

Retribution.

In his mind, Luna smiles.

##

Fin.

 

That was excellent, Pers.

Edit: If someone could post me a prompt, I'd be much obliged. I'm considering Rents', but I'd like some more options.

 

Thanks a bunch to everyone for the prompt(s).

 

Seemed longer than 2500. Pretty damn good.

 

Which one/whose did you use? didn't see it D8

Edit:
Oh I never read Peace's definitely awesome and a great story written off it.

Prompt please, never done this, please be gentle D8.

 

I ended up using Peace's, though had yours in mind as I put the story together.

Edit: Rewrote a few sections and posted an updated version to my collection of one-shots. Thanks again!

 

Ugh.
Ched.

'In the end, all toads lead back to the Astronomy Tower, and that perilous fall beyond it.'

...or something, whatever. kbai.

 

Someone throw me a prompt please. I'll answer it tonight.

 

Line: "And just how long has it been since you've raised your wand in anger old man?"

Length: whatever you wish

Time: 1 hour

 

Line: "And just how long has it been since you've raised your wand in anger old man?"

…

I pushed the pain to the back of my mind and tried to force the dry heaving to stop through force of will. My vision blurred as I coughed and gasped; a pool of vomit lay between my hands on the cold stone floor. I could feel the rough stonework beneath my palms, and small stones dug into my palms uncomfortably.

I’ve never felt so good in my entire life.

I picked up the Holly and Phoenix feather wand from the stone and stood; my hands still shook, but that would pass with time. I flicked my wand and banished the darkness from the Chamber of Secrets. The Basilisk looked smaller in the magical daylight than it did in the twisted shadows of the chamber. I glanced down to the diary; its pages were crisp and burned from the magical backlash that puncturing it with the fang had caused. I couldn’t see Fawkes in the Chamber, perhaps he had gone to fetch the Headmaster?

I set to work cleaning my robes and levitating the Basilisk off of Ginny’s corpse. It was a shame that she was crushed in the death throws of the giant serpent, but sometimes things just don’t work out the way that I had envisioned them. Being sorted into Slytherin was just an example of fate being against me. I tidied up her body as much as I could, but before I could make any further progress there was a brilliant flash of scarlet flames.

It looks as if Fawkes had returned.

I watched the expression on the Headmaster’s face as he surveyed the scene. His hopeful expression shattered as he took in the death and destruction that scattered Slytherin’s legendary chamber.

“Tell me, old man, just how long has it been since you’ve raised your wand in anger?” I said as I banished the corpse of Ginny at him. With a twist of my wand I set it to explode just as it arrived near his location.

Who knew being alive could be such fun?

The Headmaster’s eyes hardened and his expression closed from one of grief to one of absolute rage. That was good; angry people make mistakes.

It was less of a duel, and more of a brawl. I would scarcely cast a spell before he would cast the counter charm. The battlefield itself animated between us; stone dogs, elemental cats, and birds were created and destroyed at my barest whim. I had mastered magic to the point where I scarcely had to form spells, I merely willed an effect to happen and it did.

After I killed the old man, the world would once again fear my name.

After all, I am Lord Voldemort.

 

Dumbledore would wipe the floor with a 16 year old Riddle if they fought.

 

I'm amazed he lasted long enough to gloat.

 

Let me just say that Perspicacity's story is one of the best things I've ever read and definitely the bar as far as "Thank God You're Here" goes. If it was 100,000 words, we'd shit our beds.

That said, anyone want to throw me a challenge? The longer and more difficult the better.

 

Length: 2000-5000 words
Line: They say that harems don't work, but he planned to prove them wrong.

The line is a joke, but the challenge is to make it into serious short. Bonus points for making harem work in believable setting. What? You wanted it do be difficult.

 

Some pretty good stuff coming out of here these days. I'll take a challenge - I'm still working over that Naruto one at the moment, but a distraction might help.