Chapter Twenty-Six: Stealing Trixie

Star Wars + Harry Potter Crossover

A/N: Chap 25 Review Responses are in my forums like normal.

Chapter Twenty-Six: Stealing Trixie

The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

Even the worst-laid plans of Kyle Katarn come off without a hitch.

Kyle and Amelia had everything planned down to the minute. Their entire team had doses of polyjuice to maintain their cover and supposed deaths. They had conjured auror robes to make it appear as if they were operating within Ministry guidelines, and they had invisibility cloaks to hold positions within the department of Mysteries to insure Harry's safety.

If should have gone as well as any operation could have. Naturally, it all fell apart before Harry even reached the department.

The first problem was just getting to the Ministry. The twelve of them—Amelia, Kyle, and the ten surviving members of their initial assault team—arrived via floo wearing red auror robes. Because of the timing of Harry's planned visit, they arrived during normal office hours.

Unfortunately, the Department of Magical Law Enforcement was just small enough that all the aurors and hitwizards knew each other. It was a risk that Amelia hoped would be ameliorated by the fact that most aurors did not stay in the public parts of the ministry.

At least, not when Amelia was in charge. However, upon their arrival, Amelia was the first to see the many red robes standing around the Ministry at various security points. "Bugger me," she whispered. "This will be a problem," she muttered.

The red-robed team, even in polyjuice, stood out from the crowds of Ministry workers. "We play the hand we have," Kyle said. "Do you know the auror at the security checkpoint?"

"Tobar. Decent man, two kids pre-Hogwarts age," Amelia said.

"Smart?"

"I try to limit the number of idiots in my department," she said archly.

"You let Tonks in," Aura Devereaux pointed out from the guise of a large, hairy man.

"Kiss my arse, Aura," came Tonks' response. She'd not bothered with polyjuice potion, instead using her native power to morph her appearance into that of a tall, flat-chested woman with a sharp, angry face.

"We're deputies," Kyle decided. "Deputy aurors just hired by Scrimgeour."

"Tobar will check to make sure," Amelia noted.

"No he won't." Kyle led the way, wearing the face of a handsome if slightly oafish blonde man in his twenties. Auror Tobar saw them approaching and frowned as he scanned their faces without recognition. "Who are you lot supposed to be?"

Kyle lifted a hand and waved it before the auror's face. "We're Director Scrimgeour's new deputy auror recruits. It's okay to let us in."

Tobar stared blankly. "Right, okay."

He turned and escorted the group of them to the security desk. "These are the director's new recruits. It's okay to let them in."

The young security guard in the drab uniform looked from Tobar to the dozen men and women in robes, and shrugged. "Your call, Auror." He made a note and then released the ward control to allow them to pass.

Once passed the line, Amelia hissed, "Shacklebolt saw us."

"One of Dumbledore's?" Kyle asked.

"Yes. Bugger all, he's following us. Far enough way not to be obvious."

"You noticed him," Robards said.

"I helped trained him," Amelia snapped back. She did not look over her shoulder. "Okay, everyone break up. Find a quiet spot, put on your cloaks and head down to the DoM. Kyle, Tonks, you're with me."

Without a word, their squad broke up, disappearing into the crowds of works finishing their day. To Kyle's disgust, Shacklebolt stayed with them. "We're going to have to do something about him," Kyle said.

Ahead, the waves of leaving Ministry workers were quickly thinning out. The work day was over and people were leaving very quickly. "Boss, Shack's a good man," Tonks hissed quietly.

"I know that," Amelia snapped back, herself frustrated with the situation. "He's also more Albus's man than mine."

"I was in the Order too," Tonks pointed out.

"Yes, but he didn't own your soul yet," Amelia said. "Let's keep going. Get your cloaks out in the lift."

The three of them sidled around one last clump of leaving workers and entered the lift. Kyle saw Shacklebolt giving up all pretense of stealth as he tried to reach them, but it was too late. "Cloaks out," Amelia ordered. Kyle reached into the enlarged pockets of his auror robe and dug around the many other implements he'd brought for the mission until he found his cloak. By the time the lift came to a stop at the black tiled hall leading to the department of mysteries, he, Tonks and Amelia were all invisible.

Unfortunately, that did not keep Alastor Moody from seeing them. The grotesquely scarred old auror stood waiting for them on their intended floor and his wand blurred as he lashed out with almost a dozen stunning spells in the first three seconds of the door opening, some coming even before the door finished. Kyle, even with the Force, was simply not fast enough as the stunning magic slammed into him.

~~Katarn~~

~~Katarn~~

Kyle woke to cold water in his face and sputtered. He forced his eyes open despite the heavy grogginess from the stunning spells. A quick glance around showed all the members of their team equally stunned, though most were on the flood of the small, cramped office where they were being held. Amelia, still in her polyjuice form, was on a chair beside him, still unconscious.

Tonks had changed shape again to someone faintly resembling the girl he'd met, but with mousy brown hair, smaller eyes and broader cheeks. Facing him stood the legendary Alastor Moody, flanked by Kingsley Shacklebolt and a thin, middle-aged woman he'd never met.

Dumbledore's pets.

"Right," Moody said to Kyle. He spoke with a maniacal glee. "Two ways we can do this. The fun way, or the less painful way. Frankly, I hope you tell me to go bugger off. It's a lot more fun that way."

"What time is it?" Kyle said, dread building in his heart.

"Oh, you'd like to know, wouldn't you?" Moody said with a cackle. "Make sure you got your little ambush set, wouldn't ya? It is not going to happen. Not on my watch. They're here, and you're not going to get to them!"

Kyle sighed. "Moody, Amelia said she liked to limit the idiots in her department, but Force-damned if you aren't a jackass. We're not the Death Eaters, we're the ones who were going to try and protect Harry. So, you catch us, use all your guards doing it. Who's guarding Harry, Lupin and Black right now?"

For a brief moment, Moody looked doubtful. Then he smiled. "Oy, nice try there. Nice try indeed. Now, who are you?"

Kyle tested his bonds and found them very secure. Then he looked at Shacklebolt. "A few years ago, you apparated into my house. I kicked you in the head and blew you out into the back garden."

Shacklebolt frowned. "That's not…Katarn is dead."

"Because your master let Snape give away Amelia's attack plan to Voldemort. Of course, that's assuming vampires could actually kill me."

"What's he on about, Shack?" Moody demanded.

Kyle turned and jutted his chin at his companion. "Wake Amelia up, and she'll tell you all about it."

Moody blanched and as quick as a snake cast the enervate charm on Amelia. She too sputtered awake before looking around the room. Though she looked nothing like her normal self, her voice was all too familiar. "Alastar Moody, you buggering old jackass, I'm going to kill you! Kyle, where's Potter?"

Kyle stared hard at the paling Order of the Phoenix members. "That's a damned good question."

"It's a trick!" Moody said.

"I don't think so," Shack said. "Amelia, what did you say to me on my first assignment?"

"Remember your training and don't die," came the response.

"Bugger me," Moody snapped. "Bugger the whole buggering world! Vance, get their bindings off. Damn it all, Bones, why didn't you tell me you weren't dead?"

"Because we don't trust Dumbledore with Harry's life," Kyle snapped back. "Snape's betrayal proved Dumbledore's judgment is flawed. Now let me out of this before you just hand my apprentice to the damned Death Eaters!"

Shack and the woman were already enervating the rest. Moody himself banished the bindings from Kyle and Amelia. Bones stood up stiffly and glared at Moody. "When this is over and I'm back in my office, we're going to have words," she said grimly.

"If we live that long, you can have them," Moody snapped right back.

Kyle was about to give them a piece of his mind, via his foot to their heads, when his entire existence narrowed to a thin pinprick of agony. He recognized the agony came from Harry, and from his own brutal experience years ago recognized it. "They've got Harry!" he gasped. "They're using the pain curse on him. You three go now!"

Once the team was enervated, Moody, Shack and the woman, whom Moody called Vance, quickly left the room. "Well, this worked out wonderfully," Gumboil said dryly. The older, morose hit wizard wore the form of an attractive, well-endowed young blonde woman.

"Cloaks on," Amelia said. "We stick to the original plan and just hope it's not too late. Kyle, were you serious?"

"Yes. He's alive but we need to go, now."

"Right. Everyone ready?"

Though still groggy from their capture, the team all gave nods before donning their invisibility cloaks. "So Moody can see through these?" Kyle asked as they left the room.

"He has a charmed eye," Amelia admitted as they tumbled out of the room. "We're still on the ninth floor. This way!"

It was hard to run with any type of order, being invisible, but when they happened upon the battle, Kyle was just as glad for it.

There were a lot of people fighting when they reached the Death Chamber. The Death Eaters were easy enough to recognize, since they all dressed in black with silver masks. The Order Members were fighting valiantly but unfortunately were badly outnumbered. As they arrived, one of the Order members fell with a pained cry, while another looked on the verge of doing so. Moody was personally fighting three Death Eaters himself while Shacklebolt was holding back two.

In the middle of it, Harry Potter was pushing himself up to his knees. Even with the dim lighting Kyle could see that his padawan was flushed and trembling with the effort. He was only dimly aware of the vicious fighting around him, such was his state.

"Kyle, ten o'clock!"

Kyle looked to his left and saw a wild-haired woman screaming as she sent curses everywhere, even at some of her own people. Even as he watched, he saw how her eyes latched madly onto Harry. She'd begun running toward him, wand held in front of him. Harry collapsed back to the ground, convulsing with screams.

Kyle did not hesitate. He darted forward, borne by the Force and the urgency of his padawan's need, and slammed into the much smaller woman in a brutal tackle. Bellatrix Lestrange gave out a startled grunt and cry as he drove her to the ground. Before she could respond, he snapped a punch to her solar plexus that stole her breath, and then placed his palm to her forehead and crushed her consciousness into a deep, profound sleep before she could curse him.

He then slipped his own invisibility cloak over her before crawling to Harry. "I'm here," Kyle said as he cradled the shaking boy.

Spittle ran down Harry's chin and his face was so flushed red it looked as if he were having a heart attack. "You're late," he said through chattering teeth.

"Yeah, sorry," Kyle muttered.

He felt a cloak brush against him and Amelia whisper to him: "We've got her. We're getting her out now."

"Go. I'll get Harry out."

"Kyle, it hurts," Harry whispered weakly.

"Yeah, I know, kid. I'll stay with you." It was a thin promise, given the state of the fighting around him. Kyle ground his teeth and decided it was time to even the score. He reached into the enlarged pockets of his fake auror robe and removed one of his many toys from the enlarged pockets—a Correllian Mark 2 Heavy Repeater.

Based on the Heavy Imperial Repeater from the height of the First Empire, the Corellians took a good technology and made it better. Kyle lifted it from his pocket while the wizards played magical tag around him, and took aim at the now four dark wizards forcing Moody back.

A quick squeeze of the trigger and in a second two hundred slivers of high density metal were fired at near relativistic speed. The bolts tore through one of the wizards, who was dead before he even realized it. The man took a step to curse Moody and then simply dropped. Kyle had already moved onto the second and then the third before the first man hit the ground.

The sound of the repeater was completely alien to the wizards and none of the combatants at first realized what was happening since they were all concentrating on their opponents. The figure kneeling by the incapacitated boy did not rate their immediate attention.

Kyle killed another Death Eater, bringing his count to four, before they noticed. Four other Death Eaters left off their opponent, who staggered back against the wall in obvious pain, and charged Kyle in a conveniently tight formation that allowed Kyle to reveal the secondary weapon of the Heavy Repeater.

The concussion grenade shot out faster than the four wizards could see and exploded the second it touched the leader's chest. The explosion shredded the four dark wizards into a bloody mess that blasted their remains against the floors and walls of the death chamber. Given the nature of the chamber, the sound deafened the other combatants and brought the fighting almost to a standstill.

In the intervening pause, Kyle heard a wizard—he couldn't tell if it was an Order member or a Death Eater—shout, "What the hell was that?"

Kyle stood up with the gun. "This is my little friend from Corellia."

The Dark Wizards responded fairly predictably—by trying to curse him. Kyle's somersaulting days were over, but with the Force as his ally he was still fairly fast. And slugs moving at over a hundred thousand kilometers per second were faster. He rolled and pulled the trigger, and there was no discernable gap in time between his pulling the trigger and a wizard jerking violently as the metal shards made mincemeat of their body.

Unfortunately, magic played havoc with physics. The other Death Eaters cast shields that somehow were able to deflect the projectiles, but Kyle accomplished what he wanted as he slipped the gun into his pocket and removed yet another of his trusty old Byar pistols—he had at least twenty in storage. Repeaters fired projectiles—his pistol fired charged particles. It didn't have the ability to fire as fast, but as he blew through a wizard's magical shield and took the man's head off, the staggered Order was able to regroup and concentrate their efforts on those Dark Wizards who remained.

"He's here!" Harry suddenly shouted. Kyle frowned and looked down at where his Padawan was clutching convulsively at his scar.

He looked up just in time to see a wall of magic slam into him and the Order members, throwing everyone from their feet. Kyle scrambled back up, doing his best to ignore his bruises and the pain as he scrambled to his feet and ran back to cover Harry. As he did so, he saw what had happened.

Voldemort definitely had a body because it was standing in the doorway of the Death Chamber in all of its glory. Well, not so much glory. The creature who stood there looked like a mammalian Duros, with slits for a nose, no hair, and disturbingly red, reptilian eyes. But that was just the physical. In the Force, the wizard was an utter void, as if life itself shied away from the abomination that was his very existence. Kyle had fought his share of Dark Lords over the years, from Sith to Vong to Jacen Solo, and never had he felt anything that felt so wrong.

The Order of the Phoenix members scrambled desperately away from the dark wizard, while the handful of surviving Death Eaters ran toward him. However, those red eyes shot right to Harry, and on the seemingly ordinary man kneeling over him. "Harry Potter," the wizard said. His voice slithered through the whole chamber, multiplying over itself until it overwhelmed every other sound.

He flowed from one step to another, his wand held daintily to his side in a pale, delicate hand. "Step aside, man. I shall grant young Harry a merciful…"

Kyle shot him.

It was obvious the Dark Lord had been expecting magic, since he almost lazily brought his wand to bear. However, the charged particles of a blaster pistol moved at two-thirds the speed of light. The dark wizard was shot an imperceptible span after Kyle pulled the trigger—far faster than even a powerful wizard could respond to.

Voldemort stared down, incredulously, at the hole in his chest.

"This is the part where you fall down," Kyle noted dryly.

Voldemort did not fall down. Instead, he roared and swept his wand before him. The magic produced by the motion was numbing in its scope. Kyle knelt down and did the only thing he could—he called upon the full power of the Force to protect himself and his charge. Never before did he experience such an illustration that the Force and magic were not the same power as when Voldemort's angry, destructive magic slammed into the Force shield Kyle produced.

The essence of rage met the purity of life in a roiling clash of energies that rejected each other with a resounding bang. The backlash sent Kyle flying back, while Voldemort stumbled and would have fallen if not for one of his supporters. As Kyle picked himself up, he saw the Dark Lord show weakness for the first time, clutching at the wound in his chest.

"Another time, Harry Potter!" he called before sweeping out of the hall. Kyle was sure the gesture was meant to be regal, but with the man's injuries, it turned into another stumble. Just like that, he and his supporters were gone.

Kyle nodded in satisfaction before he too crumbled to his knees, exhausted and hurting over every inch of his polyjuiced body. "Merlin's bones!" someone exclaimed from the opposite entrance of the Death Chamber.

Kyle tiredly looked up and saw Albus Dumbledore standing beside Cornelius Fudge, still dressed in a bathrobe and painfully bright fuschia pajamas. He was staring in utter dejection at a chamber littered with bodies. While most were Death Eaters, not all were.

He patted Harry's hand, as a silent assurance that the boy was not alone, before he stood and tottered unevenly to Moody. The old wizard looked even more battered and scarred than normal, with blood running from his hairline, and from another series of burns and cuts over his arms, face and from his shoulder. His thin hair had puffed out widely from the magic.

He watched Kyle with a look of challenge and admiration. "That was a fine bit of work there," he said. "Never seen anyone but Dumbledore push back Voldemort's magic like that."

"And I'd like to keep doing that work," Kyle said. "If anyone finds out we're alive, we're not going to be able to do it."

Moody's magical eye swung to the action behind them. "And what are you doing?"

Kyle leaned forward. "We're hunting and destroying the man's horcruxes. And I guarantee you we've done more for this war in the past month than Dumbledore has in the past two decades. Think about that, Moody, and then decide. He's in it to stop Voldemort. I'm in it to destroy the bastard, all his followers, and save my apprentice."

With that, Kyle turned and walked stiffly out the same entrance Voldemort himself did just moments before. He hated leaving Harry to the questionable mercies of Dumbledore, but they were accomplishing too much to stop now.

It's okay, Kyle. He felt his padawan's mind in his, weak but filled with resolve. I understand.

The old Jedi, wearing a young man's body, turned for one last glance. He saw Dumbledore and two other wizards leaning over Potter while the idiot minister wrung his hands in hopeless despair.

With that, he continued down the black tiled hall to the lifts. He was so tired and hurting so thoroughly he didn't even realize someone was holding his hand until he felt the pull at his fingers. Blinking tiredly, he saw Amelia Bones walking beside him. She didn't smile as she gripped his hand. Instead, she stared intently at him in silence for the longest time before she leaned over, took his head in her hands, and kissed him.

"You are one hell of a man, Kyle Katarn," she said softly.

"And I'll thank you to remember that," he said with a wry but tired grin. "Let's get back to the safe house. We can deal with our guest tomorrow—right now I need sleep."

Thanks for reading.