Hunting For The Sun

CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

Dove White

I couldn't help it. I kept casting glances at Ori as we gathered in the grand, rather ostentatious sitting room of Raven's apartments. He sat on one of the two sofas, stretched out across the whole length. I sat next to Perse on the opposite one, one arm draped over the side so I could look at Raven and Draco while they explained our objectives. At a round table to Draco and Raven's right, Adura, Neit and Cloud sat, Adura looking at her hands, Cloud with his arms folded across his chest and Neit fiercely attentive. Draco had his hands in his pockets and was looking at the floor. He hadn't spoken at all. Not that I really cared. I caught Ori's eye and smiled. He made an indecent gesture at me, and I blushed, looking back to Raven.

'... So that's why we need to split up,' she was saying. 'If we take more than four to Edinburgh, the group will be too big. So we'll split right down the middle. Four go to Hogwarts and check it out, see what we can pick up. The other four go to fetch Skye. Now, who wants to go to Edinburgh?'

I put my hand right up. Persephone nodded languidly. Ori raised his hand as little as possible to make it apparent that he wanted to go. Neit looked around us all, then put her hand up too.

'So that'll be Rae, Perse, Ori and Neit,' Raven checked. 'Draco, Cloud, Adura and me will go check out Hogwarts. See if there's anything worth having. Maybe a couple of prisoners. After that, we may need to go to the Light Temple. I don't really want to, but it depends on what we find.' She smiled crisply, clapping her hands together. 'Any questions?'

No one spoke, and then Ori raised his hand. 'It may take us a while to get to the prison. If we left now, we'd get the best travelling time. We could watch the guards change and get the lay of the land. That way, we may be able to find out the codes and things. We'd have to go and get her at night. Therefore, we need a hotel room near the prison.' He settled back against the arm of the divan-like sofa on which he sprawled.

Raven nodded, frowning slightly. 'You're right.'

Ori gave her a questioning smile. 'You mean you don't take it as a given?'

She laughed for a few seconds, then stopped abruptly, giving Ori a flat look. He grinned at her. I felt a small flush of jealousy, and was tempted to jump onto the coffee table and start to remove my clothes, screaming, 'Look at me! ME!'. Needless to say, I didn't actually do it.

'I'll arrange something for you. For now, go and get ready. You got one hour.'

She clapped her hands sharply together, signaling the end of this meeting. We all stood up, murmuring to each other and drifted out. Draco and Perse went to the right, Adura, Neit and Raven straight ahead, Cloud, Ori and I went left, but Cloud split off from us after the staircase. The moment he was around the corner and out of sight, Ori spun and slammed me up against a wall, pressing his lips to mine desperately. I recovered from the shock and kissed him back. He pulled his lips away, panting slightly.

'Come back to my rooms,' he whispered urgently. 'We don't need to get ready. Let's just have sex instead...' He was giving me the puppy dog eyes. I laughed and shook my head. He gave a little grunt of displeasure and kissed me again. 'Please! I spent the whole bloody meeting thinking about you! Raven was droning on and on but all I could think about was last night...'

I blushed and giggled. 'Not this time,' I said, ducking out of the circle of his arms. He growled and caught at my hand. I smiled to him and started walking back to my rooms.

At the door to his apartment, he kissed me again. 'If you change your mind...' he trailed off suggestively.

'I'll know who to call,' I grinned. 'See you back at Raven's in an hour.' I rifled through the clothes in my wardrobe. None of them were really mine. Nothing except the outfit I had been wearing when I first came. No. Wait. That was Adura's. I owned nothing. I had stolen or borrowed or been given everything. Well, apart from my boots. I unbuttoned my plain white shirt thoughtfully, slipping it off my shoulders and dropping it on the chair for the maid to clear up. In its place, I pulled on a plain black long-sleeved T-shirt. I pulled open the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe, pulling out huge piles of clothes to find what I needed. In the end, I came up with a pair of skin-tight black jeans.

After a small struggle, I dragged them up over my backside and buckled on my oversized weapon belt, strapping the garter for my gun holster around my thigh. I knelt in front of the chest of drawers, trying to find a matching pair of thick boot-socks. In the end, I settled for one grey and one faded black. They matched well enough, so I thrust my foot into the boot, deciding to tuck the bottom of my jeans into the knee-length boots. I straightened the long strip at the front and snapped the buckles across. I swung a black leather trench-coat around my shoulders and picked my gun out of my sock drawer, slotting it into place. I picked my dagger out of the pile of clothes on the chair and put that in the other side, checking the effect in the mirror. I dragged a brush through my hair, thinking that it really needed a cut, and then plaited it back away from my face.

I heard a knock on the door and glanced up at the clock, but I still had half an hour left. I went to answer it, hooking an escapee tendril of hair behind my ear.

I had already started forming my greeting in my mind, but it wasn't whom I had expected. Draco pushed past me and slammed the door shut. His shirt was unbuttoned completely and he hadn't done up his bootlaces yet.

'What do you want?' I snapped, trying not to look at his body and compare it to Ori's.

'I want to talk to you,' he said heavily. 'About Ori.'

'Turn around and go back out,' I deadpanned, opening the door. He grabbed hold of my forearm and used my grip on the handle to shut it. His touch made my skin prickle.

'I said that I wanted to talk to you,' he said firmly.

'I made it apparent that I didn't want to talk to you,' I countered.

'We are going to talk!' he shouted, shoving me away from the door. I fell backwards against a table, knocking the plant to the floor. He started walking towards me, and I rolled to the right, scrambling up and running behind the sofa. He vaulted over it easily, advancing on me. I was walking backwards into a corner, casting terrified glances behind me. Draco's hair was falling across his eyes and his fists were clenched at his sides. I gave a small gasp as my back hit the wall in the corner. Draco slammed his hands against the wall either side of me, making a cage with his arms and body. I shrank slightly, terrified.

'Do you know what I dreamt about last night?' he asked, his face close to mine. I could feel his hot breath tingling across my skin. I whimpered something. Draco was as strong as Ori, even if he didn't look it. He ducked his face and kissed me hard.

'I said, do you know what I dreamt about last night?' he repeated, more firmly this time.

'No,' I said, turning my face away. He reached out a hand and gripped my jaw painfully, turning my face back and kissing me callously. I spluttered and tried to pull away, but he held onto me.

'I dreamt about you. I always dream about you. Only this time, you were with someone.' He slammed his lips against mine again, breathing hard. My mind shot fearfully to last night. 'And it was real, wasn't it?' I didn't answer. He kissed me again, my lip bumping hard against my teeth and blood beginning to flow.

'Wasn't it?' he shouted. 'You were fucking that vampire, weren't you?'

'What does it matter to you anyway?' I said boldly, wiping blood off my split bottom lip.

'What does it matter?' he asked softly, deadly. Then louder, 'What does it matter?' He leaned forward slowly, stretching out his tongue to lick the blood from my lips and chin.

'It matters, because I say it does,' he snapped, hitting me across the face. I felt a jarring pain and a stinging as something rolled across my tongue. My head smacked against the wall and I fell to the ground, a single white tooth rolling out of my bloody lips onto the wooden floor.

'Get up!' Draco shouted. 'Get up!'

I couldn't. I genuinely couldn't. A searing pain was streaking around my skull, and it felt damp where it had hit the wall. Blood was flowing freely down my lip and dribbling onto the edge of the rug with a tapping sound in the heady silence. White clouds began to obscure my vision.

'Get UP!'

I groaned, trying to shift but slipping further down the wall until I lay completely on the floor, curled up in a foetal position.

'Rae?' He sounded scared now. Good. Damn him. So he bloody well should be scared. 'Rae, fuck it! GET UP!'

My head was really hurting. Like really. The pain began to solidify, becoming unbearable. It was centred along one line. A hairline, so tiny that it was almost insignificant, but so painful that it could have knocked over the Statue of Liberty. Hairline... Where had I heard that before? It was a hospital thing. A fracture. He broke my skull, didn't he? Bastard.

'Rae? Oh God Rae! Come on!'

I felt the floor shiver as he dropped to his knees, lifting my head to look into my glazed eyes. I moaned in vague pain at the movement, blood spilling over my lips and onto his clean white shirt.

'What have I done?' he muttered, a hand grazing my cheek as he made to stand up, but knew he couldn't.

There was a sort of echoing knock and I heard Neit's voice. 'Rae? Time to go... Malfoy? What are you...? HOLY SHIT BOY!' I heard her running over to me. Draco's hand fell away from my face and he rolled back.

'What did you do to her? Don't try to tell me you just found her like this,' Neit yelled, grabbing Draco by the front of his shirt.

'I... I don't know what happened,' he stammered, casting fearful glances at me. I watched them out of lulling eyes, twitching my fingers simply because I could.

'Liar,' I croaked, an ironic smile coming to my stiff lips. Neit drew herself up and slapped Malfoy hard across the face. His head snapped to one side, facing away from me, and he didn't look back. Neit dropped to her knees beside me and pressed a hand to my forehead.

'Rae, can you tell me what hurts?' she asked me clearly and slowly. I was slightly offended. I wasn't stupid. I could understand English.

'My bottom lip's split. My skull's fractured on the right hand side,' I mumbled, my lip already thick and swollen.

She blinked. 'Are you losing consciousness?'

'Dunno,' I said groggily. 'Can't really see all that much...' My tongue was like a huge wet fish in my mouth, cumbersome and too big. 'Why does this always happen to me?'

'What are you talking about?'

'I always get ... get injured. Yeah. Hurt. Pain and all that. Nothing ever goes right for me. I finally think I'm happy, and then I get my skull fractured...'

~

I rubbed the tingling line along my skull where Raven had charmed the bones back together. She had also charmed the skin, not having the heart to shave my hair off. I was glad of that, certainly. I would have attracted a lot of looks around Edinburgh with a great chunk of hair missing. As it was, Ori, Neit, Perse and I looked like a bunch of friends up for a wacky weekend as we waited behind the clerk of the apartment building as he fiddled with the keys to our bedsit for the day. Ori had an arm around my waist and he stood stiffly, his lips a thin line of anger. Raven had only told him what had happened after Draco had left for Hogwarts. With all the healing, no lasting harm was done to me, physically. I wasn't even all that bothered about it, just a little alarmed that it made him that angry. Ori, however, was a whole different matter. He was furious. He wanted to kill Draco. They all did. That was what was odd. No one sympathised. No one was speaking to him. Raven had sent him ahead, partly because we needed him alive as my back up and partly because no one wanted to look at him. I don't think he wanted to look at himself.

The clerk shoved the door open finally, and we walked into the room. It was grimy and very small, but the clerk explained to us that there was some food in the cupboards to tide us over. It had been the only place near enough to the jail. Neit smiled and murmured something, closing the door in his face. We walked into the dirty flat, looking around ourselves distastefully. I went into the main bedroom at the back, pushing open the squeaky sash window and looking down at the forecourt around the prison.

'It's perfect,' I called.

Ori came up behind me, resting his chin on my shoulder. 'Are you sure you're alright?'

'I'm fine,' I smiled. 'Really. There's nothing Raven can't fix.'

'I'd like to see what she makes of what'll be left of Malfoy when I get hold of him,' Ori growled. He kissed my cheekbone softly and I snuggled into his embrace.

Perse came into the room, standing well back into the shadows. 'You three need to take half-hour shifts watching the prison until nightfall, when I can watch too,' she said. 'Rae, can you go first?'

I nodded, pulling a chair over to the window and sitting down. Ori kissed my cheek and followed Neit and Perse back into the kitchen. When Neit came to take my place, I had a square of magenta inside my eyelids the precise shape of the sky above the prison. Nothing at all had happened, but a patrol walked past every five minutes. I smiled gratefully and stretched out my stiff limbs, walking back to the kitchen. I was dreading what I would find. God knows what Ori would make of a Muggle kitchen.

Sure enough, as Persephone sat at the table, filing her nails, Ori sat on the sideboard, one knee bent up to his chest and the other dangling down and swinging backwards and forwards, his toe brushing the floor. He had a pot of jam and was eating out of it with a wooden spoon. He was having difficulty getting to the bottom, having already attempted to use an egg whisk. I remembered that he hadn't had to eat food for years and years. I had had to help him at supper the previous night, teaching him how to use a fork and reminding him to chew.

He looked up and grinned to me. 'How do you work these things?' he asked, looking at the jar. 'And what is it? Jam? What the hell is jam?'

'No one knows,' I grinned, rubbing my eyes.

'So did anything happen?' he asked.

'Not a bloody thing,' I replied, flopping down on a chair around the plastic table.

'Darn those bastards,' Ori said sincerely, although he was unable to keep the smile from his lips. I could see the haunted worry in his eyes.

'Ori, really, don't worry about Draco,' I sighed. 'He's ... messed up. He's had a hard time.'

'Why are you making excuses for him?' Ori asked, his eyes cold, putting the jam jar on the sideboard next to him.

'Because I don't think he wanted to hurt me,' I replied truthfully. I hadn't told any of them why he was there or that he had been kissing me. None of them had asked, after I shook my head the first time.

'Why...?' Ori sighed. He picked up his jam pot and stuck a finger into it, trying to reach the bottom.

'Ori, most people spread it on bread or toast, dear,' Persephone drawled, filing one nail with a flourish.

Ori frowned, then smiled. 'That would make sense,' he said, nodding. 'Rae, please stop trying to console me. I want to kill him. I want his blood on my hands and I want everyone to know I did it and why.' I shook my head. 'Rae, I never wanted him to touch you. I didn't touch you, out of respect. Of course, I could tell that you had a spell on you, and I worked out in time that it was him. I wanted to keep you away from him, but I didn't have the right to touch you and do that. I'm so glad that you're out of that, now. Now you know you don't love him and you don't have to have anything to do with him. He's just sour because he lost you to me.' Ori smiled confidently, knowingly. He was sure that all this was true. He really did think that I didn't love Draco. I could never let him know that Draco and I still loved each other.

Now Draco's face was in my mind, but not the same way as Ori's. Ori's was a happy memory, plastered to the back of my eyelids, and the face about which I dreamed. Draco's face was imprinted inside my skull, beyond seeing, and he invaded my nightmares.

~

By seven in the evening, it was dark outside and we all sat in the kitchen, certain when the watches changed and guards moved about.

'We'll go in, right after the guards. They'll change again at eight; if we slip in behind one lot then the next shouldn't spot us until we're inside.'

'What if they do?' Neit asked, pulling a black sweater over her head. 'Where would that leave us?'

'Bent, buggered and bewildered,' Ori announced, licking the back of a teaspoon. 'But we'll hope for the best.'

'Okay,' I said curtly. 'Let's bust Skye outta there.'