Fyre, Fyre, Burning Skitter by mp3_1415player

Summary:

There's a very old concept in magic: Never call up that which you cannot put down. Shame the Death Eaters didn't know that...

Now they have Skitter.

Whoops...

A little present to mark the end of 2023! Just in time for the end of this year and the beginning of the next.

Chapter 1: Ready, Aim, FYRE!Chapter Text

"All right. If someone doesn't start explaining where I am and who you are right fucking now the bodies are going to start piling up fast." Taylor glared around at the cluster of strange people surrounding her in a rough circle, all of them wearing bathrobes and holding sticks. Some were only about her age, while others were anywhere up to around sixty or so based on what she could see.

Every one of them looked surprised, if not actually shocked, and most of them were pointing those sticks at her in a manner that suggested a weapon to her instincts. Glancing around she took note of the large room they were in, and the bizarre artifacts all around the place. Some sort of Tinker stuff? It had that sort of feel to it. Although in a sort of medieval way, for some reason, like it was a Tinker with a fixation on seventeenth century styling.

Which was weird, but so were Tinkers, and she'd heard of stranger…

The swarm she could feel was also… not the one she was used to. Spiders galore, which certainly fitted the ambiance, some sort of wasps a ways off, lots of flies, but none of them were the sort of insect she'd been sensing literally seconds ago, before that glowing portal had appeared right in front of her as she rounded the corner following Tattletale and Grue. Neither of whom were here with her, she noted with another glance around.

She had quite a few pretty nasty insects including a couple of dozen very large hornets under her hair, and a pocketful of brown recluses, but that was it for her normal loadout. On the other hand she did have two knives, a baton, and unusually for her a small handgun because Lisa had insisted she needed something more immediately dangerous than insects. She'd pointed out that her swarm was much more intimidating than a mere handgun, and if her friend didn't think a few thousand angry wasps wasn't immediately dangerous she hadn't been paying attention, but in the end she'd accepted the pistol since her friend was usually right about this sort of thing. Annoyingly enough.

Right now, without enough insects to fill even one small room never mind her preferred quantity, she was grateful her friend had insisted, and kept one hand on the gun ready to draw it. She'd landed flies on the backs of the heads of every single person in the room and the moment one of them tried anything she was going to do her best to hit the relevant fly with a bullet. Which she was entirely certain she could do, having practiced quite a lot just in case.

Taylor wasn't keen on killing someone, but if it came down to her or them, it was going to be her. Although hopefully not before she got the Tinker in question sufficiently convinced that sending her home was a really excellent idea.

Home might be a shithole but it was a known quantity, whereas this wasn't, and she didn't like surprises.

"Who's this?" one of the older robe-wearing weirdos demanded in a British accent, glaring at her. Most of them were wearing tacky white masks, suggesting a gang of some sort, she thought. "Where did she come from? What in Merlin's name is she wearing?"

"That's funny coming from you," Taylor retorted. "Did Bed Bath and Beyond have a sale on?"

He looked momentarily confused, making her smile to herself. Lisa would be proud…

"What?"

She'd begun bringing every insect she could locate to her current position almost immediately, of course, and even though she wasn't certain what all of them even were, in a fairly short while she was going to have a lot of backup. Even as this was happening she was trying to map out the place she'd found herself through the insects coming this way and found herself very confused. It seemed to be enormous, and underground, which was somewhat strange. Several floors above she found ground level, and beyond that was a city by the feel of it, although it didn't seem to be Brockton Bay. So that portal had carried her a long way.

"This is a trick of yours, Potter," a different man snapped, glaring at one of the younger figures that was off to her left. He also had a British accent, making her suspect that a long way was in fact all the way to the UK.

"Nothing to do with me you arsehole," the boy so addressed replied with a shrug. "You're the one who fired that spell, not me. What was it supposed to do?"

"Kill you, of course," the man snarled. "Have you not been paying attention?"

"You missed then."

"I don't care who she is, just kill her too," yet another of the black-robed men shouted, one with his mask missing and a very ugly snarl on his lips. "We're having a fight, not a pleasant discussion! Kill all of them! Now!" He raised his stick and pointed it at Taylor. She had no idea what sort of weapon it was meant to be but by his expression and his words she assumed it was lethal somehow.

So she shot him in the face.

The report of the gun echoed through the large room with incredible suddenness, making everyone other than Taylor stumble back in total shock. The man she shot collapsed to the ground, a large part of his head missing, his white-blond hair covered with blood and bone fragments. Holding the gun in a two handed grip, she slightly crouched and kept her senses and insects ready to counter the next threat. There wasn't much cover near her, so she started very slowly backing towards the gap in the circle of strange people, which had a sort of low dais on which stood an irregular stone hoop of some sort. The swarm she'd called was nearly here, and growing steadily as her power kept finding new creatures to call. For some reason she almost got the impression her power was excited by what was happening, since it was responding oddly well and her range had expanded far more than it usually was, which seemed to happen when she was threatened.

"She killed Malfoy!" a crazed-looking woman screamed in shock. Whirling from where she'd been staring at the dead idiot, she whipped her stick up and did something. A jet of green light zoomed towards Taylor, giving off a sickly sensation of evil. The girl ducked as it went over her head and vanished into the loop of stone behind her, then fired twice. The first shot hit the woman in the throat, the second took her in the chest, and she dropped like a sack of potatoes, the stick she'd used clattering to the floor.

A stunned silence fell over the room. "I warned you," Taylor said evenly, dumping all her emotions into her swarm and trying not to think about the fact she'd killed two people. Admittedly two people who were trying to kill her, but even so, it wasn't something she'd planned on doing when she left home that morning. "I don't know who the fuck you assholes are but I don't like people trying to kill me."

"Who does?" the same boy muttered, the one apparently called 'Potter.' "Doesn't stop them doing it." He sounded resigned, as if this was familiar to him, and she felt a certain amount of sympathy before common sense took over. Taking another slow step backwards, she kept approaching the whatever it was behind her. The way it looked it somewhat suggested to her it might be what had brought her here.

"Don't go through the Veil," a brown-haired girl standing near the Potter boy said urgently just as she got to the steps on the dais. "It kills you instantly."

Taylor stopped dead, still covering the black-robed people who seemed to be the bigger threat, all of whom were staring at the two of their number who were cooling on the floor. "Well, shit," she commented after a second.

"Get that bitch!" one of the masked people screamed at the top of his voice, diving sideways behind an obstacle even as he fired another light at her. Taylor had flies on several places on the arms of everyone in the room and was completely aware of exactly where their weapons were pointing, of course. She bent sideways as the light, this one a bright purple, went past her much more slowly than seemed sensible for an actual weapon, then returned fire even as she sent her hornets out to harass the rest of these bastards. It looked like the ones in black robes and masks were the bad guys, whatever that meant here, presumably belonging to some villain gang she'd never heard of. Tinker sticks and a murderous attitude did rather suggest people she didn't want to get any closer to.

The rest of them were mostly much younger, weren't wearing those masks, and crucially weren't trying to kill her. So she'd cut them a little slack for now, although she wasn't stupid enough to assume they were on her side. That was why each of them also got a hornet on the back of the neck just in case she needed a distraction.

Her first round spanged off the metal object the idiot who'd fired a purple special effect at her was hiding behind. The second one buried itself in one of his friends who'd taken the opportunity to take a pot shot at her while she was shooting at the asshole. He ducked at the last moment as he saw her aim at him and her shot caught him in the right side rather than the forehead, but that still took him out of the fight quite suddenly as he dropped and screamed.

That was the signal for a complete free for all, every one of the people present opening fire. Taylor dived for cover, hastily darting across the dais to duck down behind it while everyone was distracted by the light show. The Potter kid and his brown haired friend ended up next to her, the girl giving her a strange look before turning to lean past the protection, her stick ready. Taylor grabbed her sleeve and pulled her back sharply even as another green light flashed through the position her head would have been in a second later. "Keep your fucking head down," she snarled, lifting the pistol above the dais and firing again. Her insects guided the shot perfectly, the man she'd aimed at dying before he could scream.

"Who are you and how are you doing that?" the girl queried, her voice unsteady although strong.

"Skitter. Who are you? And how did I get here? Where is here?" Taylor wished she had earplugs, since the gunshots along with the explosions and screaming and yelling caused by whoever these lunatics were came near to deafening her.

"I'm Hermione, this is the Department of Mysteries in the Ministry of Magic, and I'm not sure. Dolahov tried some spell I've never seen before, hit the Veil with it at the same time as Bellatrix fired something else, and the next thing there was a strange blue glow in the middle of the room. When it vanished you were standing there."

"Spell?" Taylor stared at her, then shook her head. It wasn't important right now, and if these people wanted to believe in magic, that was their problem. She wanted to survive this firefight then make someone send her back before her friends and her Dad got worried.

"Who are those idiots?" she asked, taking another shot, which winged someone who was running across the chamber trying to get from one cover to another even as he was attempting to kill a different man. The black-robed killer yelped in agony, dropped his weapon, tried to retrieve it, and fell to the man he was after getting him instead. Landing on the ground he lay still, dead or unconscious.

"Death Eaters. This was a trap and we fell right into it," Potter said with an expression of apparently self-aimed fury.

"Some sort of gang?" she hazarded.

"You could put it that way," Hermione commented, putting her hands over her ears for a moment as an agonized scream rang out through the room. "Magical terrorists, that would also be accurate. They want to kill everyone they don't approve of."

"Which is most people," Potter added.

"Oh, wonderful," Taylor sighed. "Well, I suppose a target rich environment is playing to my strengths…"

Her swarm had arrived in bulk, a few insects slipping through various openings into the room leading the way for many thousands more. Seconds after the first flew in, she had enough to send them after every single masked crazy person in the sort of quantity she preferred. In other words, bury the fuckers in them.

The screaming that resulted was epic, while the buzzing roar made the entire room vibrate.

Taylor was not even slightly happy, and she was making that abundantly clear by sharing the pain. Apparently these 'Death Eaters', and wasn't that a name from someone trying so hard he was liable to cut himself on the edge, didn't appreciate her generous application of vast quantities of biting and stinging critters, judging by the sounds they were making.

The non-Death Eater contingent stared in horror as their opponents rolled around on the floor absolutely covered in a layer of the angriest insects they'd ever seen. Taylor felt a sense of vindictive satisfaction. And curiosity, because some of the things she was controlling seemed pretty odd by anyone's standards. Biotinkered life forms, perhaps? Whatever, they responded at least as well as normal insects did, and if anything her power seemed to be eagerly looking for more almost without her directing it.

'Spells' in different colors were flying around wildly as the robed figures tried to defend themselves. Most of them killed dozens of insects, but for every one that died, there were ten more waiting for the chance to join in, with more arriving by the second. As her power delved deeper and deeper into this weird building she kept finding new nests in out of the way places and took control of them, directing everything in range to head her way.

And thinking that she needed to make sure she took some of the more interesting ones home, because she could see some useful outcomes of them. Lisa would probably scream in horror, but she always was a little overdramatic when Taylor found a new cool thing she could do, for some reason.

It had only been about five minutes since she'd arrived here, but already half these Death Eater lunatics were either dead or wishing they were, with the rest quickly being overwhelmed despite their best efforts. The other side had retreated to any form of cover they could find and were still staring, apparently totally unable to work out what was going on but smart enough not to get in the way. She could feel more people heading in this direction at a run, which implied reinforcements although the question was which side they were on.

Then everything got much more complicated without warning.

"Fiendfyre!" a voice screamed, sounding ragged and furious. Hermione and the Potter boy, who had been cautiously listening to the battle rage, froze in appalled horror.

"Oh, no," the girl next to Taylor whispered, sounding like she was about to faint.

Even as Taylor was about to ask what the word meant, she found out. A massive gout of raging orange-white flame appeared on the other side of the room, engulfing two of the Death Eaters and a vast number of her insects, all of whom died instantly. The sound was bizarre, a sort of triumphant scream of eagerness, quite unlike normal flames, while the effect was similar to Lung when he was in a mood.

"Fuck," she said under her breath. Just what she needed, a pyrokinetic. Gathering the most lethal members of the swarm she had available she sent the entire lot towards him from several directions. Taylor was aware that the fire was rapidly spreading, and seemed from what she could tell to be burning everything. It clearly wasn't normal flames, it was something much more exotic.

The defenders had all frozen at the word, and even the remaining Death Eaters didn't seem happy about it, although it was hard to be sure since they were still being overwhelmed by her swarm. Even through that they started frantically trying to retreat, a couple of them making it twenty or thirty feet before they succumbed to her insects and collapsed.

"It'll burn the whole building down," Hermione said in a horrified voice. "Fiendfyre is almost uncontrollable, the books said. Only a very powerful wizard can stop it once it starts."

Taylor looked at her, then up at the orange-purple-white light reflecting off the ceiling and walls. It was getting rather hot, and she could tell through her insects that the flames were expanding unsettlingly rapidly. They engulfed the bodies on the floor and seconds later they were ash. Pulling her swarm back to preserve them, she tried to think what to do. Leaving very quickly seemed a good idea, but the minor problem with that was that the fire was between them and the exit as far as she could tell.

Reaching out with her power she felt around, using every creature available beyond the fire to seek out an alternative route. The people running in this direction had stopped and were now running in the other direction while alarms were going off outside in the corridors. Apparently they had a fire detection system.

As she extended her senses and her power, she suddenly noticed something… odd. Something that wasn't an insect, but was somehow close enough that her power was looking at it in an intrigued way, was in the room with them. Millions of whatever it was, actually, now she noticed it. How had she missed that all this time? It felt… hungry, and shapeless, and…

Taylor blinked.

That wasn't possible, was it?

It didn't make any sense. Her power didn't work like that.

She controlled insects, arthropods in general, and for some reason worms, not that she'd ever had reason to do so since they didn't seem very useful. Crabs, lobsters even, but this was not any of that.

But to her power, whatever it was felt oddly similar to a massive swarm of insects. There was an awareness, almost, split across a vast number of tiny things that were multiplying ferociously, spreading out across the whole room. Not really intelligence, but a sense of being that was vaguely similar to an ant colony or something like that.

Experimentally, she reached out and tried to take control of it. Not expecting it to work, and being more than a little surprised when it did. Without any effort at all. Her power seemed, if anything, eager to help, which was just another strange aspect of a situation that had started off as about as strange as anything she could have imagined.

"I don't believe it," she muttered. The two kids on either side of her, who had been frantically whispering across her while she'd not been paying attention, so fascinated was she by what was happening, looked at each other then her.

"Don't believe what?" Potter asked. "We need to get out of here, actually. Or we're all going to die."

"No, I don't think we are," Taylor replied, pushing herself to her feet and turning to look over the dais they'd been hiding behind. The other two gasped, but she saw with her own eyes what she'd been sensing.

The strange living fire had stopped expanding, and was just burning away on the other side of the room, the flames dancing and changing, forming the shape of strange and fantastical animals and creatures. She got the impression it was looking at her. Millions of tiny parts of it, all staring back.

"This is… different," she commented almost absently as she experimentally tried to make part of the flames move around. They obediently did exactly what she told them to do, so easily it was hardly noticeable. Just like her swarm, this was practically instinct. "Huh."

Both the others had now stood, very cautiously, and were staring at the static fire, then looking at her with expressions of bewilderment. "That's impossible," Hermione finally said with a strange note in her voice.

"Yeah, but it's happening," Taylor agreed, walking around the dais to approach the flames, although she was also making sure that she kept part of her attention on everyone left alive just in case. She wasn't stupid, and wasn't going to let her guard down even while investigating this new phenomenon. The other people around the room were slowly emerging from cover and looking between her and the flames burning merrily at the end of the room, everything inside them completely slagged to ash and cinders. The heat was impressive, but she tried commanding this odd living fire to turn it down, and to her astonishment it actually did. Walking closer, she peered into the flames.

The flames peered back.

"What's happening?" one of the men on Potter's team asked in a loud whisper, his expression totally confused as he stared at her.

"I have no idea, Sirius," Potter replied in a baffled voice. "She's… controlling it somehow? I think?"

"You are kind of pretty, aren't you?" Taylor said to the flames as they writhed and twirled mere feet from her. She studied them, her power prodding and pushing, trying to understand what had let her control them. Apparently, she decided, her ability had come to the conclusion that whatever was behind this strange form of combustion, it was close enough to a swarm of insects to count. Which made absolutely zero sense in her opinion but then powers never really did.

So apparently she had a pet fire now.

Not what she'd planned on, certainly.

Holding out her hand, she very cautiously made a tiny tongue of flame extend towards it, causing several of the people watching to shout a warning. The flames touched her fingers.

"Tingly," she commented softly, watching the flame wind around her gloved digits without leaving a mark, briefly forming into a sort of fire centipede, then a line of ants, then back to flames. The color was odd, but it was still obviously fire, and should have burned her. Nothing of the sort happened, and she knew it was because she told it not to. How that worked she had absolutely no idea, but she could see some interesting uses for this…

"How are you doing that?" Hermione, who had slowly approached and was watching with round eyes, asked.

"I don't really know," Taylor admitted, putting her gun away and playing with the fiendfyre, letting it slide from hand to hand like a slinky. She got the impression it was enjoying this. The larger bulk of the flames was still burning mere feet away but didn't seem to have any inclination to expand, her power holding it in place.

After another thirty seconds, Taylor let her new friend wind around her left arm like a warm burny bracelet, turned to face the group of robed people looking at her with a wide mix of bizarre expressions, and said, "OK, then. Let's try again. How do I get home?"

Behind her, the flames formed into a huge hornet's head, fiery antenna twitching. Outside in the main building, excited people were charging about hither and yon in a very confused manner. She waited more or less patiently, wondering what Lisa and the others would say when she showed them her latest trick...