IMPOSSIBLE RISKS // Drarry

38) DEAD SIRIUS!

A/N: sorry about the late update. My family is moving so it has been super hectic. Thanks for reading!
TW: Homophobic Laungage, Character Death, and Torture.

Malfoy turns and raises his wand, but Tonks has already sent a Stunning Spell right at him. Harry dosn't wait to see whether it has made contact, but dives off the dais out of the way. The Death Eaters are completely distracted by the appearance of the members of the Order, who are now raining spells down upon them as they jump from step to step toward the sunken floor: Through the darting bodies, the flashes of light, Harry can see Neville crawling along Draco, who is still sobbing. He dodges another jet of red light and flings himself flat on the ground to reach them.

"Are you okay?" he asks as another spell soars inches over their heads.

"Yes,"says Neville, trying to pull himself up. He has a nonchalance to him that puzzles Harry. He looks completely calm about the fact that he has just been tortured and he merely shrugs, tilting his head over at Draco's hunched over form, "he's not."

Harry feels his heart ache but he doesn't let himself get too distracted, as they are literally in the center of a battlefield, "And Ron?"

"I dink he's all right - he was still fighding the brain when I left -"

The stone floor between them explodes as a spell hits it, leaving a crater right where Neville's hand had been seconds before. Both scrambles away from the spot, then a thick arm comes out of nowhere, seizes Harry around the neck and pulls him upright, so that his toes are barely touching the floor.

"Give it to me," growls a voice in his ear, "give me the prophecy -"

The man is pressing so tightly on Harry's windpipe that he cannot breathe - through watering eyes he sees Sirius dueling with a Death Eater some ten feet away. Kingsley is fighting two at once; Tonks, still halfway up the tiered seats, is firing spells down at Bellatrix - nobody seems to realize that Harry is dying. . .

He turns his wand backward toward the man's side, but has no breath to utter an incantation, and the man's free hand is groping toward the hand in which Harry is grasping the prophecy.

-"AARGH!" Neville has come lunging out of nowhere: Unable to articulate a spell, he has jabbed Hermione's wand hard into the eyehole of the Death Eater's mask.

The man relinquishes Harry at once with a howl of pain and Harry whirls around to face him and gasps, "STUPEFY!"

The Death Eater keels over backward and his mask slips off. It is Macnair, Buckbeak's would-be killer, one of his eyes now swollen and bloodshot.

"Thanks!" Harry says to Neville, pulling him aside as Sirius and his Death Eater lurches past, dueling so fiercely that their wands are blurs. Then Harry's foot makes contact with something round and hard and he slips -for a moment he thinks he has dropped the prophecy, then sees Moody's magic eye spinning away across the floor. Its owner is lying on his side, bleeding from the head, and his attacker is now bearing down upon Harry and Neville: Dolohov, his long pale face twisted with glee.

"Tarantallegra!" he shouts, his wand pointing at Neville, whose legs go immediately into a kind of frenzied tap dance, unbalancing him and causing him to fall to the floor again. "Now, Potter -"

He makes the same slashing movement with his wand that he had used on Hermione just as Harry yells, "Protego!"

He feels something streak across his face like a blunt knife but the force of it knocks him sideways, and he falls over Neville's jerking legs, but the Shield Charm has stopped the worst of the spell. Dolohov raises his wand again.