The arrival platform was in chaos.
The wall that had sealed off Diagon Alley's old industrial district from the commercial area which Ministry had erected as part of the post-battle security arrangements, had been knocked down—not blasted apart with magic, but pushed over.
Rubble and broken brick lay scattered across a wide area of ground and dust still hung thick in the air. That wall had stretched several hundred feet.
The twenty-odd Aurors the Ministry had stationed throughout Diagon Alley to maintain public order now stood assembled before Harry's position, wands drawn, their faces tense as they faced the source of the disturbance.
"Those people are—"
Hermione didn't bother questioning how Harry had suddenly appeared beside her. She had her hand pressed over her mouth, her brown eyes were wide and moving rapidly across the scene before her. She was trying to process what she was seeing—the same effort Harry was making.
"At least they're not Death Eaters—"
Harry's voice was soft. But the dread rising in his chest was anything but soft.
The crowd that had toppled the wall numbered in the hundreds.
Hundreds of people who had walked in from the industrial district, who had organized themselves into a mass movement and directed themselves at a Ministry barrier and pushed it down.
Their clothing was the sort Harry had seen often in Hogsmeade—the plain, worn dress of ordinary village folk.
"Notice anything, Harry—"
Hermione's voice had gone tight.
"Not one of them is wearing robes."
"No." Harry swallowed. He was already studying the faces at the front of the crowd—the people who had positioned themselves at the vanguard. "And if wizards wanted to riot, they'd be carrying wands. Not fire tongs and hoes."
The objects in the crowd's hands were the objects of agricultural and workshop life.
It wasn't just Harry and Hermione who'd noticed. Among the spectators who hadn't already fled—those who had stayed to watch, who were pressed along the edges of the cleared road, murmurs were rippling through the crowd.
People were reaching the same conclusion.
These people had nothing to do with Death Eaters. Nothing to do with the dark wizards who had fought in the Battle of Diagon Alley and were even now being hunted by the Ministry's enforcement teams across the country.
"What do these useless squibs think they're doing?"
The word cut through the ambient noise of the crowd.
It reached Harry and Hermione at the same moment. They turned sharply, simultaneously, toward the wizard who'd said it. He was a middle-aged man in good quality robes, his face was twisted with contempt.
"What else?" a second wizard muttered back to him casually. "Stirring up trouble, clearly. The Ministry put them out of work, didn't it? But honestly—do they really think they can stand against a Ministry backed by Watson and Dumbledore? You-Know-Who himself couldn't manage that. What do a few hundred squibs with farm tools think they're going to accomplish?"
The first wizard snorted.
"Oh, well. If the Ministry smashed their livelihoods, I suppose they're entitled to howl about it."
It drew a ripple of laughter from the crowd around him. The onlookers were beginning to relax, settling in to enjoy the spectacle.
Harry and Hermione looked at each other. Both of them had gone pale.
'The Ministry smashed their livelihoods.'
The phrase sat in Harry's chest heavily.
"I don't understand," Harry said, his breathing turned shallow. "Hermione, what does that—what does that mean, exactly?"
"Don't ask me, Harry. I don't know either—"
Hermione bit her lower lip hard, her brown eyes were filling with worries. She turned the question back on him—less because she thought he'd have an answer and more because she needed to think aloud:
"What do you think the Ministry will do? Will they arrest them?"
Harry had no answer for that either.
Under the watching crowd's gaze—some anxious, some mocking, some angry, the workers who had flooded in from the industrial district began to move.
Not charging the Aurors on the arrival plaza in a burst of violence. But advancing slowly, steadily, their footsteps were uneven as they crossed through the gap in the wall they themselves had torn down, pressing through the dust still hanging in the air and into the commercial district.
"What are they planning to do!"
Hermione's voice jumped up in pitch. Harry knew what she was afraid of: not the protesters, but the Aurors. He could see them exchanging nervous glances among themselves, could see the deliberation happening in those looks.
And then turning their wands on civilians would be, in any calculation, a catastrophe.
Whoosh!
In the bright afternoon sun which continued its indifference to human drama by remaining warm and clear, a streak of sparks burst open in the air above the crowd, it was a standard warning signal.
One of the Aurors had fired into the sky in an attempt to halt the march.
It failed.
The sight of magic being cast sent a brief, rippling shudder of panic through the front ranks of the protesters. But after a moment's hesitation, after the ripple passed through and was absorbed, they found their footing again. They pressed on.
To Harry's eye, the Ministry's Aurors—veterans of the war, people who had faced Death Eaters and not flinched looked more rattled than the people they were facing. Even if those people couldn't manage a Levitation Charm between them.
"What do you people think you're doing!"
One Auror finally had the presence of mind to press the tip of his wand against his own throat and let his voice ring out across the platform as magically enhanced sound.
By now, the better part of the protest crowd had flooded onto the arrival platform, spilling through the gap in the wall in a continuous stream. The Aurors had been pushed back by the simple physics of available space.
"We want to speak to Bones!"
"Let Watson come out and face us!"
The front ranks of the protest finally broke their silence. Their voices, scattered at first, found each other and swelled, becoming louder. They rose together and rang out over the ruins of Diagon Alley rawly.
"You want to see Minister Bones? Mr. Watson?" The Auror's amplified voice carried an edge that was trying to be authority and achieving something closer to strain. "That's a fantasy. Both of them have considerably more important matters to attend to than meeting with a mob like yours!"
'A mob.'
Harry's jaw clenched. Hermione made a sharp, indignant sound beside him.
"How dare he say that—these people aren't Death Eaters, are they!"
But what stopped both of them cold was the response from the crowd of onlookers around them.
Most of them agreed with the Auror.
"Who do they think they are? You-Know-Who?" Someone laughed. The presumption of these powerless, wandless people, these Squibs with their farm tools and their anger, standing against a Ministry that had just fought off Voldemort.
The absurdity of the comparison struck them as funny.
The Auror's words intending to stop the protesters had done exactly what a lit match does to dry kindling.
Even among the protesters who had been hanging back at the edges, who had been less certain than those at the front, who had been watching to see how this unfolded before committing fully: fear was burning into fury.
Harry could see it clearly. The faces at the front of the protest—weathered, dark, the faces of people who had spent their lives working with their hands in workshops and fields flickered with anger.
The crowd surged forward again. They had fully claimed the arrival platform now, and the Ministry's two dozen of Aurors had been driven back to the point where Harry and the others were standing.
"Ministry lackeys—you lot aren't afraid of a bunch of Squibs, are you?"
Someone in the watching crowd shouted it, and Harry felt his temper flare hot. He spun around, scanning the press of faces.
"Show them what you've got!"
There—Harry spotted him in the jostling mass. A wizard in comfortable robes, grinning at his own wit, enjoying the theatre.
"Shut your mouth!"
Harry's voice came out with enough force to cut through the surrounding noise.
"If you shout one more word to provoke this, I'll deal with you first!"
He said it directly at the man.
The wind shifted at that moment, lifting Harry's fringe back from his forehead. The movement caught the afternoon light at an angle that illuminated his face clearly, and the lightning-bolt scar still as vivid as the day he'd received it caught more than a few eyes in the crowd.
"Harry Potter—"
"Look, it's the one who defeated You-Know-Who—"
"That's him, isn't it? I had a friend at the Ministry who said that during the Battle of Diagon Alley, he—"
The whispers spread in a ring from his position. Respectful stares replaced the previous casual disapproval of the onlookers.
It did nothing to improve Harry's mood. If anything, the stares added another layer of discomfort to a situation that was already complicated enough.
He turned away from them, jaw tight, and endured the whispers pressing in from all sides.
"They've sent two of them back to the Ministry for reinforcements, Harry—"
Hermione gripped his arm, her gaze fixed on the standoff at the platform where the remaining Aurors were maintaining their positions with increasingly visible effort.
"Do you think we should do something?"
Harry didn't know the answer to that, either.
This was nothing like going up against dark wizards. Those confrontations had their own dreadful simplicity: the stakes were life and death. Against dark wizards, you knew what winning looked like.
What did winning look like here?
The protesters watched the two departing Aurors go—and grew louder for it.
They knew the two hadn't gone to fetch the Minister or the most powerful wizard alive to speak with them directly. If anything, the departure seemed to inject energy into the crowd, lifting something that had been held in check by uncertainty.
Thud!
Thud—Thud!
Thud—Thud—Thud!
The crowd's anger found a rhythm. The villagers clutching farm tools and lengths of iron and wooden handles scavenged from the workshops began beating them against the hard earth and against each other in time.
The sound filled the ruins of Diagon Alley, bouncing off broken walls and empty sky.
"We want work!"
"We want wages!"
"We want our lives back!"
"Ministry—end the tyranny!"
"Bones out! Fudge back!"
The chant built and then thundered across the ruined alley with a deafening rhythm.
The spectators who had been watching with amusement—who had found the whole thing entertaining, found they couldn't sustain the laughter anymore.
One by one, they began stepping back.
"Harry! Hermione!"
Ron appeared through the crowd, forcibly, less by his own navigation than by the press of bodies around him squeezing him toward them. He was hauling Lavender Brown along by the hand.
"Oh—hello, Harry, Hermione—"
Lavender's face was white. She managed a smile trying to maintain social normalcy.
For Ron's sake, Harry and Hermione managed thin, brief smiles back. Then both of them turned their attention back to the platform, their expressions were settling back into grimness.
"Lap dogs of the Ministry—get out of our way!"
The tension between the two sides had reached its peak.
Without warning, a wiry young man near the front of the protest, broke from the crowd's mass. He had a bottle in his hand and drew his arm back and hurled it at the line of Aurors.
" I protect! "
The Aurors had been on full alert—they weren't going to be caught off guard by a thrown bottle. The Auror who appeared to be leading them stepped forward and raised a shield charm.
Crack!
The dark bottle shattered against the magical barrier in full view of everyone present. The liquid inside sprayed out across the cobblestones where it landed, and where it touched the ground it hissed and the white smoke that curled up from those points of contact made Harry's breath catch in his throat.
"Damn it all—" one of the Aurors snarled.
That single thrown bottle was all it took.
The Aurors raised their wands in unison.
"Wait—don't—they're civilians!"
Hermione's voice tore through the air. She couldn't hold back any longer. She was already running forward, shouting, throwing herself between the two sides before anyone could stop her.
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