Chapter Five: The Prisoner
Star Wars + Harry Potter Crossover
A/N: Chap 4 review responses are in my forums as normal.
Chapter Five: The Prisoner
"Oh Harry, they're hurting you."
Harry could not see her, but he recognized the voice as he would recognize his own. It was his Ginny speaking to him. If he were not the Master of Death, he might think he was hallucinating her voice as a result of the torture he was currently undergoing.
Of course, being the Master of Death did not mean he wasn't hallucinating, only that there was the real possibility that it actually was the soul of his dead wife talking to him. God, how he wished he could see her and touch her.
The Imperials were hurting him. Though he could not see any of it for some reason, he knew they had his body strapped to a gurney that they could lower face-down onto something that hurt. He could not tell what it was, only that the pain was similar to the Cruciatus. It was not the pain of physical damage, but rather felt like direct nerve stimulation. They weren't even really asking questions, they were just torturing him.
I miss you, he thought to his wife, even as he screamed aloud. Some tough men thought they had to stay silent during torture, but Harry knew that silence meant nothing. Screaming was a release; an exercise in survival. So Harry let the screams come without hesitation. Meanwhile nestled deep within the folds of his Occlumency, he spoke to his dead wife.
"You know I'll always be with you," Ginny told him. "The kids aren't alone, I promise."
Harry was already crying from the pain, so what did a few more tears matter? I'm going to get them, Ginny. If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to get the bastards who hurt you.
"Harry, don't be a prat," she said, sadness colouring her voice. "If you want to remember us, then live and remember us. Protect the living. That's what you've always done. Protect the living and honour the dead. Be strong, love. Be strong and live for us."
Ginny, wait! Don't go!
"He's ready," a harsh voice said in Basic.
Harry felt rough hands grab his arms and yank him off the table. He could not see, but he could feel easily enough and struck out with magic at the man on the right. His efforts earned him a sharp, agonizing blow to the stomach. The pain was so intense he barely felt the needle thrust into his neck.
He did feel the icy cold creep of the drugs in his veins as the rough hands let him fall to the floor. The drug made his whole body feel heavy, so heavy not even his magic responded. He wished he could see—they must have blindfolded him. He wanted to see because the air grew colder, and he heard a strange new sound enter his space.
Hoooo-burr. Hooo-burr.
"Why can't I see?" Harry's voice shocked even him; it was so reedy and strained from his screams.
"You have been fitted with optic inhibitors," a deep, mechanical basso voice said. "Your demonstration of power just now has proven the Emperor's wisdom. He sensed your efforts from across the galaxy, and your power. You kill with a touch."
"Who are you?"
"It is I who will ask the questions." When the man did not speak, there was the interminable hooo-burr sound, like an old Muggle iron lung. "What did you do with the clones whose armour your slaves wore?"
Harry gritted his teeth and said nothing. He felt a sudden, shocking strike against his Occlumency barriers. It was as strong as anything Voldemort or Snape could do. If not for his experience and own skill, the attack would have easily broken through.
The monster continued speaking as if nothing had happened. "How did you obtain the conscript uniforms? How did you assume Daroon Holdig's identity? Where is Lieutenant Holdig?"
"Ask your mother, you bloody tosspot," Harry snapped.
The only thing worse than being back-handed by a large, powerful man was not being able to see it coming. The blow made the darkness flash white for just an instant, and Harry felt himself slamming against a hard, cold metallic wall.
"There is no question of whether you will answer or not," the deep-voiced man said. Harry struggled to get an image of him, and for some reason kept thinking of the bad guy from the first Conan movie—the one that really launched Arnold Schwarzenegger's career. "The only question is how much pain you will feel before you do so."
"Bring it on, Thulsa Doom," Harry whispered around the blood in his mouth.
And so the figure, whom Harry named Thulsa Doom in his head, did just that.
~~Revenge~~
~~Revenge~~
Harry learned a lot from the questions he was asked. He did not count days, but rather torture and interrogation sessions, which always went hand in hand. He was aware occasionally of being fed and watered, but those instances blurred. All that mattered was the torture and interrogation. Nor were the sessions always conducted by Thulsa Doom.
His fourth or fifth (he couldn't remember) session was handled by an extremely informative interrogator who sounded like he was in his twenties or thirties. It was from this interrogator that Harry learned that not only did the Empire not know who he was, but they had lost the Earth entirely!
Was Harry or his people connected with the destruction of the Imperial Star Destroyer Undauntable? How did he discover Admiral Helaw was the man who discovered Earth? Why did Admiral Helaw fail to divulge the coordinates of the world to Governor Tarkin? Why did Admiral Helaw slave the navigation units of the other ships in his command rather than simply provide them the coordinates? Was Helaw working in conjunction with the Rebels? Did the Rebels target the Undauntable because of his actions against Earth? Did Harry?
Those questions held back the tide of hopelessness that had been slowly creeping through Harry's soul. He learned that the attack on Earth was commanded by an admiral named Helaw who was now dead, along with his ship, and all the computers that held earth's coordinates. Which meant, at least for a while, any survivors on Earth, if there were any, were still safe That spark of hope was enough to sustain him.
The torture ran the gamut, of course. From deprivation, to physical beatings, to psychological torture and drugs, they worked him over repeatedly. All of it was made worse by Harry's blindness. But he said nothing to them other than to insult them and took the beatings in stride. Whatever happened to him, his people were safe. In Harry's mind, he had nothing left to lose.
~~Revenge~~
~~Revenge~~
Without vision, there was no way for Harry to track time magically. The Tempus spell was visual, after all, and while Harry was adept at using and learning spells, creating them was always Hermione's bailiwick. He could not make a spell that would speak the time. However, it felt like he was in his cell, undergoing daily interrogations, for months at least.
Things did not change, however, until he got a neighbour.
It was part of the general philosophy of the Empire that all the cells ordinarily have a common air circulation system. That way, if a riot required the central command desk to gas everyone, they could do so with greater efficiency.
Harry could not see his neighbour at all even if his eyes worked, but he could hear her clearly through the vents as she wept. It was not the weeping of a frightened girl, though. It was the crying of loss and rage in equal parts. It was an expression of what Harry himself felt so acutely, even if he could no longer cry aloud.
He wanted to say something, but he knew there was nothing he could say that would make it better for her, and in fact it would be seen as an intrusion to her privacy at best. So instead he lay on his cot and listened to the girl cry in rage and loss until he went to sleep.
~~Revenge~~
~~Revenge~~
When the door next opened, Harry thought and even expected to begin his day's torture and interrogation. However, the footsteps were too muffled to have come from his cell. Suddenly the voice of Thulsa Doom rang through the vent that connected Harry's cell to his neighbours'.
"And now, Your Highness, we will discuss the location of your hidden Rebel base." Accompanying the mechanical basso voice was the familiar, bitter hum and beeping of one of the many interrogation droids the Imperials used.
Harry strained despite not being able to do anything about it, until he heard the first whimper of pain, followed by a moan, and then a scream as the full torture session began. After a while, Harry stopped straining to hear, and instead covered his ears, flashing back to that terrible day in the Malfoy's basement, where he and Ron were forced to listen as Bellatrix tortured Hermione.
With all his might, Harry wished he could do something about it. Harry could accept pain and torture—his tolerance was beyond that of most because of his personal circumstances and his fate as a child. But his tolerance of others in pain was nil. What he could handle with resolve shattered him when applied to another. Though he did not immediately realize it, his magic responded in the only way it could. Not all at once, of course, but it definitely responded.
~~Revenge~~
~~Revenge~~
His neighbour the princess underwent two more long, gruelling torture sessions that made Harry curl up on his cot and weep in helpless, impotent frustration. On the third day, though, he heard the girl break.
There was no torture session, nor screams of agony. In fact, from what he could hear Thulsa Doom simply came in and led her out. Harry did hear a deep, reverberating thrum under his feet, but nothing to indicate what it was.
But when the girl returned, she wailed with the despair of one utterly without hope. In his mind, he saw her fall to her knees as she cried, and he knew in that instance that she had broken. Even if she never told them whatever it was they wanted to know, a part of the princess's soul had broken. Harry felt a surge of rage at the monsters that would break a girl who was strong enough to go through so much torture, and with a sudden, almost audible snap and a sharp stabbing pain behind his eyes, Harry could see.
And a moment later, he appeared with a pop in a cell identical to his, but already occupied. His newly restored sight showed him a slim petite figure all in white, splayed out over the floor with her face cradled in her hands. Her wails had eased into a deep, despairing grief, but still she wept.
Harry stood frozen a moment, surprised not only by a blind apparition, but that his magic would bring him to her. Slowly, since his body was still stiff and sore from his torture sessions, Harry sank down onto the floor and studied the girl who was so lost in her own loss she did not even realize he was there.
Not, that is, until he spoke. "What did they do?"
Her response was instant. She stopped crying, scrambled in a crab-walk to the back wall, and glared with red, tear-streaked eyes. "Haven't you done enough!" she hissed.
"What did they do to break you?" Harry asked again. The need to know what they did to this girl overrode any other concern. "They tortured you for days, but that only hurt you. But what they did today, it broke you."
"I am not broken!" she said indignantly, even as she wiped her nose with the back of her hand. "I told them nothing!"
"You may have kept your silence, but you did break," Harry said. "I know I did, when they killed my family. What did they do to you?"
"It's a trick. You're just another informer."
"WHAT DID THEY DO?" Harry screamed.
The girl winced but did not shy away in fear. "They destroyed Alderaan. With a single shot, they murdered four billion innocent people."
Unspoken in her words was the message, And everything and everyone I loved.
"Was it Tarkin?" he asked.
The girl nodded. "Who are you?"
"My name is Harry Potter," he said. "And once upon a time I had a wife and kids, and dear friends who were my family. After a bitter life of fighting, I'd found peace, love and happiness. Tarkin took it all away because he burned through the prisoners on Despayre too fast and needed more workers. So they sent ships to my world—we'd never even made it past our own moon. We wondered if we were alone in the Universe, and the day we found out we weren't was the day Tarkin's star destroyers burned our cities to the ground, stole our people by the tens of thousands, and killed everything, and everyone, I'd ever loved."
"You're too young to have a family," she finally said.
"And you're too young to have your soul broken," he whispered back.
She bowed her head. "Leia. My name is Leia."
"Leia. Are we aboard the Death Star?"
"Yes."
"And Tarkin is here?"
She nodded mutely.
"If I got us out of this room, could you show me where?"
"Why?"
"Because I'm going to kill him," Harry said. "I'm not going to torture him or vandalize his body. I'm going to kill him quickly because the Universe can't abide to let monsters like him survive."
"He's surrounded by soldiers, and Darth Vader is always by his side. You'd never make it."
"I'll admit we probably won't make it off the station," Harry said. "But we could reach Tarkin. It would only take a moment to kill him."
The princess pulled her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around them. "It's a cruel trick, you know. Torture, and them murdering my home world. And now I'm supposed to believe you? What do you expect to gain? I'll not tell you anything…"
Harry held out a hand and summoned a bluebell flame. She stared at it with wide eyes.
"On my world, there is a small subset of the population that could use magic. The Wookiees on Despayre said I was a Jedi, but I don't think I am. I have the gift of magic. I can change our appearance—I can force other men's wills to my own, or remove any memories they have of us. I can force that door open, stun all the men guarding us, and then remove their memories of the escape so they never know we were gone. That should give us enough time to get to Tarkin."
"And then what?" she asked. "If you're so powerful, why haven't you already done it? And if you do kill Tarkin, do you think the Empire will just stop because you killed one Moff? The Death Star will still be around to destroy worlds. The Emperor will still be around to oppress the galaxy. What will killing Tarkin do?"
"It will be one less monster in the universe," Harry said. "They fitted me with optic inhibitors. I can't really use my magic if I can't see. But finally I was able to break the inhibitors."
"Why?" she demanded.
"Because of you."
For the longest time she simply stared at him, but in her brown eyes, which were a shade darker than Ginny's, he could see her mind working furiously, weighing the odds, the costs and the potential benefits. Finally, she said. "Okay. Why not? I have nothing else to lose."
"Good. Help me up, will you?'
Her eyes bulged. "You just bragged about all you can do, and you need help to stand?"
"I've been here for longer than you, and they've been working on me just as hard. I'm sore," Harry whined.
With a roll of her eyes Leia stood and pulled him with effort to his feet. Once standing, he was surprised at how short she was. Harry himself was five ten, and yet he stood a good nine inches taller. Having been married to a woman who was as tall as he was without heels, it was an interesting experience. For some reason, it made him feel more protective.
"What?" she snapped.
"You're short."
She stared, mouth agape, for a second. Finally she said, "Has the torture driven you insane, or are you just stupid?"
Unable to stop the grin, Harry said, "A bit of both, more as like. How thick is this door, do you know?"
"Why?"
"They put an optic inhibitor in me," Harry explained again. "I only just now got my sight back. I have no idea where we are or how thick the doors are. I only got in here because of your voice."
"It's perhaps a foot thick. Outside is a raised walkway, perhaps three feet above the floor in here."
Harry smiled, wrapped an arm around her waist, and Apparated eight feet forward and three feet up.
The two appeared in a narrow hall atop a raised grate between heavy metal doors. At the far end Harry glimpsed a larger open area, and with that visual confirmation, Apparated them again to it. He and the stunned princess appeared in a large, round room filled with half a dozen men in dark grey or black uniforms. Before any of the startled Imperials could bring their weapons to bear, he cast a broad-area stunning spell used by Aurors to quell riots.
It got everyone, including the Princess.
He cast a silent Ennervate on her and watched as she blinked awake, rolled onto her side, and then threw up. "Sorry about that," he said. "Most people feel pretty bad after their first Apparition."
When he was sure she was done, he vanished the mess. She scrambled to her feet, staring at him with wide brown eyes. "What are you? Jedi can't…do whatever it was you just did!"
"It's called apparition, a form of magical teleportation," Harry explained. "And I told you, I'm not a Jedi. I'm a wizard."
"Are there…are there others who can do that?" She looked around at the stunned men on the floor.
"Several million, though I was probably better than most," Harry said. Then he added, "Assuming they survived Tarkin's culling. So, you know where Tarkin is?"
"Wait, there were men captured with me. I need to know if they're still alive." She pushed past Harry, already over her shock at his abilities, as she reached the computer console and started paging through records.
He could tell the news wasn't good just by how her narrow shoulders sloped. "Dead, all dead," she whispered. "Vader ordered them all tortured to death. There were two hundred men on my ship."
"I'm sorry," Harry said simply.
She turned her expression setting into one of resolve on par with anything he'd ever seen before. "I can get you to Tarkin, but you're going to have to make sure they can't find us."
Harry levitated the stunned men to the centre of the floor and then Obliviated them. "Come here," he said, motioning.
She came to his side, hesitating only a moment, before she allowed him to pull her close. From the centre of his magical core, he wished for his cloak, and just as he and the princess disappeared, he enervated the Imperials.
Leia stiffened as the Imperials stood, shook off the effects of both the stunners and the Obliviation, and went about their jobs with no clue that Harry and Leia stood in their midst. With a nudge of magic, Harry made one of the officers behind the desk straighten and open the door out of the detention centre; the two escapees slipped past him easily.
Blinking in confusion, the Imperial went back to what he was doing and let the door close.
"How did you do that?" Leia whispered. She was clinging to his side with a tight grip. "Why can't they see us?"
"Because we're invisible," Harry whispered back. "Where to?"
"The over bridge probably requires security access," she said. "So we need to find an officer of sufficient rank to get us in."
And then a general stepped out of the nearest turbolift. "Cassio Tagge," Leia whispered. "Our sources say he's an executive officer. He'll do."
The man was obviously walking toward the detention centre Harry and Leia just vacated, probably to question the Princess further, but Harry stopped that. A quick, silent Imperius curse brought the man to a sudden stop. At Harry's urging he turned around and started back to the turbolift, and the two escapees followed right on his heels.
"What's happening?" Leia whispered.
"I have him under control," Harry said in a normal tone of voice. Through the marvel of Imperial Engineering, the turbolift travelled through a vacuum tube at incredible speed, traveling dozens of kilometres in just seconds, until it came to a stop.
"Authorization required beyond this point," a mechanical male voice said.
"Authorization Tagge, Cassio, Aleph Deltiria."
"Acknowledged, General." The door opened, and Harry and Leia followed Tagge onto the Over Bridge of the Death Star. Beside him, Harry felt Leia stiffen noticeable and he saw why immediately.
Through the massive view screen that dominated one wall of the over bridge, he could see a still cooling and expanding gas cloud that had once been her world. With the utter destruction of the planet, there was not sufficient gravity remaining for the material to re-accrete. "For them too," Harry whispered to her, hugging her tight.
"General Tagge, has the princess already been executed?" an old, wiry man with gaunt features and thin hair said in a clipped, precise tone.
The general stopped mid-step and blinked in confusion. "Excuse me, Moff Tarkin? What do you mean?"
Tarkin.
Harry let his cloak drop. "Forgive the general, Tarkin. He wasn't himself."
Tarkin turned and stared at the interlopers. He did not appear to recognize Harry, but his eyes widened in surprise at the princess. "Princess Leia, as much as I look forward to your execution, you most certainly did not have to come here to let me see it in person."
"Leia isn't the one who is going to die today, Tarkin," Harry said.
Around the bridge, security officers with oversized helmets and black uniforms brought blaster rifles to bear. Tarkin, though, ignored them, and said coolly, "Oh, and who might you be?"
"My name is Harry Potter. You killed my family; prepare to die." It was Ginny's favourite Muggle film,he thought to himself.
"How droll. Guards, kill them both."
Suddenly the over bridge erupted in fire, but not the kind Tarkin anticipated. Harry swung his arm and hand in a circle, and suddenly a whip of fire a foot thick lashed out in a circle that encompassed Tarkin, Tagge, Leia and himself, but cut off the rest of the bridge. Those guards who tried to rush the fire screamed as the living flame consumed them.
Tarkin lost his distracted smirk. "What is this?" he demanded.
Harry, though, let the flame go to continue circling them and pulled on the Hallows within his magic. The air between he and Tarkin shimmered, and suddenly four people stood where before was nothing. Beside him, Leia shivered, as if sensing on a fundamental level that she was in the presence of death.
"Harry, what are you doing?" the shade of Ginny asked.
"I want you to see who killed you, Ginny," Harry told her. "I want you to know that I've avenged you."
She shook her head sadly, while holding the grown children around her. "We are beyond vengeance, Harry. What you do, you do for yourself."
"Then for myself," Harry said. Beyond them, he saw horror on Tarkin's face as he too felt himself in the presence of something beyond life.
Harry struck the Moff with his most powerful entrails-expelling curse. Tarkin's face paled and he made several gagging sounds before he regurgitated his own stomach and intestines all over the floor at his feet. He fell dead seconds later. Tagge jumped at Harry, only to be banished back into the flame whip.
"Daddy," the beautiful teen-aged girl said, "don't let the anger make you a monster too. Please don't."
"I'll try, baby girl," Harry told her with tears in his eyes.
The shades faded, though, when a real monster strode into the charred, shocked over bridge. "What is happening here?" Darth Vader demanded with the voice of doom. Thulsa Doom, to be precise.
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Author's Note: Once again I just wish to stress just how much I appreciate Teufel1987, JR and Miles for beta reading yet another of my stories. As always, they make everything better.