Chapter Thirty-Three: The Protector

Star Wars + Harry Potter Crossover

A/N: Chap 32 review responses in my forums as normal. Thank you all for reading!

Chapter Thirty-Three: The Protector

Leia and Winter walked through the corridors of Home One after spending the entire night talking, until both passed out from exhaustion and the emotional release of grieving. Leia had a chance to grieve over Alderaan and the loss of her family with Harry's help. Winter, who was also an adopted daughter of Bail Organa, never had that opportunity until now.

So, after sending a brief com to Harry to let him know she was needed elsewhere, she simply settled into Winter's cramped quarters with a bottle of Alderaanian wine and iced fruit cream and shared with a woman who was, for all intents and purposes, her sister.

The next morning, after breakfast, the two went looking for Harry and were directed to an empty store room on the ship's 10th deck. When they arrived, both had to stop just inside to take in exactly what they were seeing.

Groups of ten mages were teleporting across the length of the room, going from one marked X to another. The moment they reappeared, they spun around and cast a red light with their wands at the next group that came up behind them, before immediately Apparating to the back of the line to repeat the process, while the next group took their turn.

The group being shot at summoned glowing blue shields that absorbed the red lights.

"Good. Good. Guerin, aim! Tannis, you can you do better than that." Maria De La Rosa walked up and down the side of the practice floor shouting like a drill sergeant, while Harry occasionally pulled someone aside after their round of the drill to speak to them.

"Alright, line up!" De La Rosa shouted. "Time for shielding practice!"

A universal groan rose form the lined up mages.

"None of that," Harry said, speaking just loud enough to be heard. "Blaster bolts are a helluva lot stronger than stunners. Your first course of action is not to be hit, but if you're without cover, then you need to know just how much magic it'll take to block one, and what you can't block. Guerin, get up here."

Beside Leia, Winter said, "They appear to be picking on him. He looks young."

Leia, having heard his story, said coolly, "He raped a girl on Avalon. They allowed him to join this squad as part of his sentence."

Winter stiffened and nodded.

The boy, still the youngest in the team and one of the youngest in the whole Alliance, stepped to a spot before a thick, conjured wall that served as protection for the ship itself. Maria swished her wand, and a rifle came flying from a supply bag against the far wall not far from where the two Alderaanian women stood. Maria noticed them but did not pause.

"This is a BlasTech E-11 blaster rifle," Maria shouted. " Stormtroopers are born suckling this for milk. It can alternate between semi- and fully automatic, has pulse fire settings, and has an extendible stock for shoulder firing. Guerin, raise your best shield, but cast it one foot to your right."

"Protego!" the teen said. Some spells he still needed to enunciate aloud, though Leia knew most adults did not have to verbally say the spells.

De La Rosa extended the stock, put the rifle to her shoulder, and fired. Guerin cried out as his magical shield cracked. Winter, though, pointed to the wall behind him. "Nothing got through," she whispered. "How are they generating those shields?"

"Same as their teleporting," Leia said. "Magic."

"Again," De La Rosa said. "Give it everything. Blocking one shot might be the difference between living and dying!"

Guerin repeated the drill. His shield did not crack the second time, but he visibly slumped when his turn was over and he went to the back of the line. Several could not block the blaster bolt at all, no matter how hard they tried. Rather than yell at them, Maria simply sent them back to the line. Harry, meanwhile, walked across the room to greet the two observers.

"Did you have a good night?" he asked.

"We did," Leia said. "This was the first time we've been together since…well, you understand."

"I do."

Winter, meanwhile, continued to watch the shielding practice in astonishment. "This 'magic' of yours is amazing," she said.

"I'm sure you'll get to see plenty as soon as we get Leia trained," Harry said. "Speaking of, I'm glad you're here. I want you to learn to Apparate by yourself."

Leia stared wide-eyed. "Don't you have to learn magic first?"

"Apparition is a magical skill, but it's not dependent on knowing magic first. It's a matter of concentration and desire. And in your case, I think you'll learn it in a day. In fact, I have a bet with De La Rosa you'll Apparate within an hour."

"Oh, and why is that?"

"We're going to cheat." Harry winked at her and then stepped to her side and put an arm around her waist. She then felt his mental barriers drop as his presence flooded into hers. "Can you feel?" he said softly, almost whispering.

Leia, not trusting herself to speak, merely nodded. Winter, meanwhile, smirked as she saw the tell-tale signs of a woman head-over-heels in love. The smirk disappeared when Harry and Leia did, only for them to appear on the opposite side of the bay, ten meters away.

They popped back a split second later. "Did you feel that?" Harry asked. "Did you feel how my magic moved?"

Leia nodded, this time with brows furrowed in concentration. "I don't understand how you did it, though."

"Magic is, by nature, chaotic," Harry explained. "We use words and thoughts to give it form, but the most powerful agent of magic is desire. With Apparition, we desire to be somewhere else. We don't strictly define the method of how, merely define the parameters of what and where. I want to be there, and if I push enough concentration and magic into that desire…"

He popped to the opposite side of the room back to Winter's side. "…then magic will do the rest."

Leia closed her eyes, exulting in the feel of his presence in the Force. It was easy to desire to be by his side—the desire was a powerful, tangible thing for her, made even more powerful when they finally came together and made love for the first time on Hoth. She closed her eyes and reached out to him in the Force and let his Force presence bathe her soul, while thinking of how much she wanted him.

She felt the unfamiliar surge of power within her chest. It ebbed a moment after it grew, but she concentrated on her desire to be with Harry as if were a physical need. She could feel his body pressing against hers, his lips on her neck right behind her ear. She wanted that so much!

The surge came again, and this time she let go of her inhibitions and fears and let it sweep over her. With a thunderous crack and a squeezing feeling, she suddenly felt arms around her waist and those lips she loved so much on her neck. "You did it!" he exulted

"Vixe Maria!" De La Rosa shouted from the other side of the room. "She did not just Apparate on her first try!"

All training had come to a halt, and Leia realized with chagrin that everyone had been watching. Beside her, Harry laughed. "She sure did, and you owe me a garden when we get home!"

"But…but…nobody does it the first time!" Maria said in utter disbelieve. "That's like an eleven-year-old learning to pilot a starship the first time in the seat."

"Like my father did?" Leia asked, unable to help a self-satisfied smirk. "The first time he sat in a Naboo Starfighter he managed to destroy a droid control ship in a blockade that was invading my mother's home world. He was only a child."

"Sounds like a plot point of a child's movie," Harry noted. "Do you think you can do it again?"

"I may need you to be my target again," Leia admitted.

With a wink, Harry Apparated to Maria's side. Knowing what the magic felt like, it was easier this time for Leia's desire to shape it, and in half the time as the first, she Apparated to Harry's side. She then concentrated on Winter and did it a third.

"Porra," Maria cursed. "Fine, you get your garden. How'd she do it?"

"I think it was her Jedi training," Harry said. "She's still a fully trained Jedi Knight, after all, which means she has a finer awareness of her own body and mind than a typical mage. She came into her magic after the fact. The opposite of me, really. Plus, she's just that good."

"It's a good skill to have," Maria admitted. She turned to the others. "Okay, good work. Dismissed. Go eat lots of fatty foods and then hit the bunks. We're scheduled to perform the Fidelius charm on the heavy cruiser tomorrow morning, and it's going to take at least twenty of us to do it."

Leia grabbed Harry's hand. "You heard her, let's go." She rushed him out of the bay, ignoring a smirking Winter.

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

Luke stood waiting for them at the ramp of the assault shuttle three days later, which must have appeared odd to the rest of the bay personnel that could not see it under the Fidelius charm. Leia, like Harry and the rest of his team, wore a mottled green camouflage uniform provided by the Alliance, and augmented by Harry's own people with an assortment of cooling and silencing charms, as well as impervious charms cast with enough power to ensure they would last a day.

Luke wore black, though he did make the allowance of a tabard of the same camouflage material.

Leia smiled at her twin. "I'm glad you're coming," she said.

Luke's answering smile appeared strained. "Wouldn't miss it," he said. "Do you have the primary weapon ready?"

"Yep," Harry said. "Solomon is the secret keeper. He and De La Rosa will be on board a modified command shuttle that will control the weapon. When he has the ship positioned, De La Rosa will remove the secret from him and that will cause the ship to revert to normal space. We can then set off the explosives right by the core, and boom. We're done."

Luke shook his head. "A plan so simple it's amazing anyone thought of it at all. Are we ready to go?"

"Yep." They climbed into the shuttle, with Luke and Leia joining him in the cockpit. The sergeant Maria put in charge in her absence was another of her Brazilian Aurors, a man named Marcelinho Schmidt who sheepishly admitted upon their first meeting that his grandfather was a post-war German immigrant. Schmidt ordered the ten five-man units that would make up the strike team assigned to destroy the shield generator into their seats on the shuttle.

There was a real question of whether a Fidelius-charmed vessel could pass through an energy shield. Energy shields on the scale of what protected the Death Star shared similar power signatures to ion cannon technology. Rather than risk their only weapon exploding on contact with a shield, Harry convinced the High Command to take the shield out to make sure their lone bullet found its mark unimpeded. Harry considered himself an expert briefing the High Command; Leia and the rest, though, considered him to be a part of the Council going forward. It was clear within a few minutes that, despite his young appearance, Harry was an experienced and capable leader with a good grasp on the abilities of both himself and his people.

Luke took the pilot's seat, and in moments the shuttle was cleared and on its way. They were not ten minutes into the flight when Leia said, "Luke, you look troubled."

"I meditated last night," the young Jedi admitted. "I felt…a foreboding in the Force. I could not see anything definite, as if everything was being intentionally clouded from my sight. But I feel troubled. Did you feel anything when you meditated last night?"

Leia blushed.

"I see," Luke said with a wry smile. "It may just be me. Regardless, we should be on our guard."

"That much I agree on," Harry said.

An hour later, the swirling blue tunnel of hyperspace abruptly jerked back into real space to reveal the forest moon of Endor. The planet increased in size as they approached still at a fraction of the speed of light, though Luke was continually slowing them down. As they approached, they could see the Death Star itself.

The entire northern hemisphere that housed the superweapon was complete, but almost a quarter of the lower hemisphere appeared unfinished, with girders and superstructure open to the vacuum of space. What really caught their attention, though, was the Imperial Fleet that maintained a picket position around the planet.

"I'm counting four hundred ships," Leia said quietly with a glance down at her tactical display. "Star Destroyers, mostly. The Executor is there, though I can't believe they've repaired all the damage yet. I'm also detecting dozens of Interdictors—the whole area around the planet is covered in mass shadows. And there's one Executor-sized ship the computer doesn't recognize."

"It's a hit-and-run mission," Harry said. "The fleet is only going to engage long enough to get the weapon in the Death Star, and then we'll break off and escape. We never planned on engaging people magically in space. Plus, I have to imagine blowing the station will take out at least some of those ships."

"You're right," Leia said. She then paled noticeable. "I…Luke, the Force, is that…?"

"Yes. Vader is here."

Harry remembered what Luke had said two nights ago. "Well, before we get it into our heads to do anything stupid, let's get the mission done first, right?"

"What do you mean?" Leia asked.

"I need to face him," Luke said, not even bothering to try and lie. "I need to know for sure if there's anything left there that our mother once loved. But Harry's right, the mission comes first."

Leia stared hard at her brother, before finally nodding. "Mission first. But then…do you want me to be with you, Luke? Together?"

"I don't know," Luke admitted. "I'm going to follow where the Force wills. If you're meant to be with me, you will be."

Harry tried not to roll his eyes, because he knew damned well within Jedi teachings Luke was absolutely right. And the fact that the Jedi had precognitive abilities that Harry, even with his training, could barely duplicate, put a damper on his scepticism.

"I'm inserting us over the southern pole," Luke said. "It's the weakest point in their picket and the point where we are least likely to be detected on re-entry. Vader undoubtedly knows we're here."

"Of course," Harry said. "They've been one step ahead since they destroyed Earth. We're going to win anyway. Leia, what's our time?"

"The Fleet will be entering hyperspace in just under an hour. Transit time for the entire fleet will be one hour thirty minutes, which leaves us two and a half hours to secure the compound and destroy the generator."

"The mission times are tight," Luke said. "We'll have to get in close to the facility to save time walking."

"Walking?" Harry said with a tight grin. "Who said we're walking? Apparition isn't the only means of magical transportation we have. Twenty klicks out should be sufficient and give us enough cover."

Luke and Leia exchanged a look. "Brooms?" Luke guessed.

"You'll love it, trust me," Harry said.

From their experience in piloting a Fidelius-charmed ship into Avalon, they knew that the charm itself did not prevent or hide the plasma that resulted from an object hitting the atmosphere of a planet at several thousand miles a minute. That was why Luke aimed the shuttle toward the southern pole of the planet.

Endor, being the moon of a radioactively powerful gas giant, produced powerful and breath-taking auroras as its strong magnetic field interacted with the particles released from the gas giant also named Endor.

Harry had to give it to his friend—Luke knew what he was doing. The flare of their re-entry was just one more light in a sea of brilliance that was enough to make even the best ship scanners hazy. With 'nary a bump, they slid into the atmosphere of the forest moon, while the skies above the continued to dance in a scintillating array of colour.

"I'm not jealous," Harry said aloud. "Just for the record, I'm not jealous of your brother's flying at all."

Luke grinned but was too Jedi to answer. Leia, though, patted his cheek and said, "Don't worry, Harry, you still have many other qualities you can be proud of."

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

As a little girl growing up in a palace on Alderaan, Leia never actually saw a real broom. She saw icons of brooms in the insignia of the Royal Alderaanian Janitorial Guild building, but pictures only. She knew the theory of a broom, of course. A primitive would hold the handle attached to a bundle of straw or some other stiff, fibrous material and use it to sweep away dust from their home. She could never understand how one went from sweeping dust with a broom to riding one, and making a sport of it as well.

"It's a part of our history, I suppose," was the best answer Harry could give.

Still, the brooms that the Mage unit displayed were not uniform by any measure. They differed in length, shape and configuration. A handful that looked similar, but even brooms by the same company with the same name often had minor differences just due to the nature of hand-crafting as opposed to factory production. "There was no automation in the magical world," Harry finally told her when he couldn't stand her indignation any longer. "Each broom is crafted and charmed by hand to fit the individual components best. It's not like we have a droid that can apply braking charms. So, every broom will be a bit different. They work, though." With that, he hung a necklace around her head. She lifted and looked at the small stone with the odd symbol on it.

"A Notice-me-not charmed necklace," Harry explained. He put on his own, before throwing one to Luke. "In large group movements, Disillusionment charms can do more harm than good since we can't see each other. You can imagine the dangers of friendly fire in that case. With these, people just won't notice us. Droids will see us, sensors will see us, but the people manning the consoles just won't notice or care. And since we're all keyed into the same type of charm, anyone wearing a necklace won't be affected."

"Smart," Luke said. "We can do something similar in the Force, but not having to concentrate on it is definitely useful." He pulled his necklace on and then viewed the brooms with a flat expression.

"Hold out your hand and say 'Up'," Harry said.

Luke and Leia both did as commanded. Harry was not at all surprised when a pair of brooms responded immediately. Though Luke was no wizard, given Harry's recent revelations on Adega he knew wizards and Jedi had common ancestors, and that magic was just another, albeit unique, expression of Force energy. While Luke would never be able to perform transfiguration or charms, his own native power was enough that the magic within the broom recognized power.

"Time?" Harry called.

"Two hours," Leia said.

"Schmidt, get them mounted up," Harry ordered. "Guerin, Mendez, you're with me and the Jedi. Everyone else to your squad. Free formation through the trees. Go as fast as is safe for you but no faster. Anyone who runs into a tree is going to get my foot up their ass."

Leia, for her part, had seen enough flying while with Harry on Avalon to have a rough idea what to do. She mounted her broom and gently kicked off, rising a few feet above the ground. She wasn't at all surprised to see Luke above her.

"You'd think it would be easy to roll off this," she said.

"Stabilization charms," Harry told her as he joined her in the air. Behind him came two of the younger squad members—Guerin, and a man Leia's age named Adolfo Mendez. "I'm going to start out slowly until you're more comfortable. We have plenty of time—twenty klicks on a broom is a matter of fifteen minutes, twenty if we go really slowly."

"How fast could you make it, sir?" Mendez asked.

Harry grinned. "Four minutes, easy. But we're not racing, right?"

Mendez nodded. In just minutes, they left behind the shuttle, which was invisible to everyone but them, and began flying through the forest toward the massive shield generator. They flew ten to fifteen feet off the ground, at speeds fast enough to whip their hair with the passage of the wind, but not so fast that the trees blurred.

On three separate occasions they flew right by scout trooper patrols doing routine surveys. Since the brooms were silent and they were all cloaked in notice-me-not charms, none of the troopers even looked up as the flight of mages flew past.

They continued all the way to the tree line surrounding the main bunker, which appeared to be an elevated landing pad, a maintenance complex for the AT-ATs and AT-STs, and the tower itself. In the still blue, bright sky, the shimmering appearance of the Death Star dominated the heavens, while behind them the horizon burned orange with the rising of the gas giant Endor.

"You know, I hated the first one too," Harry muttered.

Luke, however, was studying the bunker and the generator dish intently. "The dish is ringed with automated sentry guns," Luke noted.

Harry lifted his own monocular and stared.

"See those blinking red lights?" Luke asked.

"Yeah?"

"Simple droid brains hooked up to laser cannons. I count ten around the dish itself, and another eight along the zenith of the tower around the dish base. I doubt a notice-me-not charm will work—they're droid driven."

Harry swore. "I don't want to waste time on the bunker part of the base. We're down to an hour and half, now, right?"

Leia nodded.

Harry leaned back in thought. "Every single time we've acted, the Empire's been one step ahead of us."

"You told the Alliance you were going to infiltrate the bunker and deactivate the shield generator," Leia pointed out.

Behind her, Schmidt snorted. "Madam Princess, this is Harry Potter. He does not deactivate, he blows things up."

"Schmidt's not wrong," Harry admitted. "But I'm thinking what will happen if we try to Apparate into that bunker is we'll immediately set off those smaller graviton generators Thrawn thought up and get surrounded by a bunch of Dark Side Vader-clones, or worse yet the whole building just blows up and the shield generator doesn't have a control bunker at all. I wouldn't put it past the Emperor to have built a fake base just to lure us into a trap. Between his foresight and Thrawn's brains, we can't really take anything for granted."

"So what do you want to do?" Leia asked.

"That explosive, what is it?" Harry asked Luke.

"Detonite," Luke said. "Standard Imperial issue—it's an explosive mixed with a putty gel. Relatively stable until a detonator ignites it."

"How much do you have?"

"We have about two hundred pounds between us," Luke noted. "That's more than you'd find in a small concussion missile."

Harry grinned. "You know, I don't need that stupid blastboat anyway."

"What are you talking about?" Leia asked.

"Keeping things simple," Harry said. "Sometimes, when you're dealing with people who are a lot smarter than you are, you have to do something really, really stupid just to catch them off guard. And I can honestly say I'm better at stupid than pretty much anyone I know."

He turned to Schmidt. "Stay here, I'm heading back to the shuttle."

Leia, having known Harry long enough, realized what he was going to do. "You're going to ram a blastboat into the dish?"

"Sure, why not?" Harry asked. "Those things can go sonic in the atmosphere. I push it up to full speed loaded with the Detonite, then Apparate out before it hits the dish. Easy-peasy."

"Those laser cannons will make short work of the Blast Boat," Luke pointed out.

"That's why you're staying here. You and Leia stay with the team as a back-up just in case those cannons do get me."

"Harry…" Leia began.

He smiled back and took her head. "Leia, even before the Empire destroyed my world, this is what I did. I'm a protector. I'm a fighter. And I'm pretty good at it. Trust me, I don't plan on dying today. My world deserves it revenge. My family does."

Leia let his hand go. "Then go with the Force, Harry. I love you."

He grinned, and said, "I know. That's why you're going to marry me when this is all over."

"Yes, yes I am," Leia answered back.

"Okay," Harry called. "All explosives in my pack, now! Hurry, people, the clock's ticking!"

When all the explosives were loaded into a backpack that should have only held a tenth of what it did, Harry shot through the trees three times faster than the team's first trip.

"Alright, men," Schmidt said. "Set up camp, set wards, and get ready to watch the fireworks."

~~Revenge~~

~~Revenge~~

Harry packed the explosives inside the cockpit of the blastboat, obscuring his own vision as he set the detonators to go off on impact, a nice setting to have on the detonators for the type of demolitions most soldiers used the stuff for anyway.

He bumped the edge of the cramped landing bay of his assault shuttle trying to get around Luke's X-wing, but eventually he made it out. With a shout, he pushed the blastboat up to full throttle and felt his body sink back into the bucket seat as the compensators tried to keep the increased gravity from squashing his brain.

The moment he brought the dish into view, he received confirmation that the Empire was waiting for him from the hundred or so TIE-fighters that just happened to swarm up from the trees like insects. Harry glanced at his broom in the co-pilot's seat and said, "Are you ready, Bolt?"

He took the broom's silence as an assent and pushed the Skipray's engines into the red. The airspeed indicator pushed past the 1,200 KPH listed as maximum atmospheric speed and started to approach fifteen hundred when the sonic boom shook the vessel. Harry realized then that Endor was not Earth, so why would MACH be the same?

TIE fighters came in blasting away, but Harry ignored them and made a straight line for the dish. He knew that once inside a shielded area, the generator could not be re-shielded again for fear of resonance feed-back. So there was no chance of shielding. The laser cannons began to fire, but Harry dropped his mental barriers and let the Force flood him as he was so loath to do. The feeling of surrender was the hardest sensation for him to accept, but he knew it was the only way to survive the short flight.

He began juking the blastboat left and right, anticipating incoming laser cannon shots. As he closed, he fired every single weapon the small ship had, which included two proton torpedoes, two small concussion missiles, and two laser cannons.

It was a testament to Imperial engineering that the automated defences took out both concussion missiles before they even armed. One of the proton torpedoes struck the dish, but the explosion carried right through the superstructure without destroying the whole, while the second exploded under intense laser cannon fire before it hit.

Now I know why Dodonna and the rest looked at me like I was an idiot when I suggested a frontal approach to the Death Star trench, Harry thought. Shots began to get through even his best efforts. He knew if he were Luke, he might do better. But he wasn't a super-Jedi.

He was, however, a ridiculously powerful wizard. Pushing as much magic as he could and more, he cast the most powerful impervious charm he'd ever used into the Blastboat. The magic swept through the small fighter/bomber like a wave of titanium. The power drain both on himself and the ship surprised him—the ship slowed slightly as his magic hampered its power flow, but the computer did not register damage with the laser impacts.

The dish loomed close now. "Take that, Emperor," Harry whispered before grabbing his broom and Apparating off the Blastboat.

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Author's Note: As always, 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.