Retreat - Act I: Occupation

6. Descent

The children of trees rose in defiance of the darkness. Clustered together in the image of their forbears' mighty forests, they sought the power of many. Damming and channelling the lingering traces of magic, the wands focused on one sole goal in perfect symbiosis with their witch and wizard wielders. 'ACCIO BROOMSTICKS!' boomed through the Tower and rung across the grounds like a vocal bell tolling the might of unsubjugated magic.

Hermione gazed out into the empty night sky and hoped that Lady Luck would smile on her once more, that she had recalled the wand-linking charm correctly, that the broomsticks would heed their call, and that--

--and that hope wasn't a mere figment of her imagination.

~~~*~~~

During the design of the Hogwarts broom-shed, it had been taken as a given that those in want of a broom would enter, pick out a suitable broom, exit, and then take off. Consequently, the shed had not been constructed to support a mass exodus of brooms brought about by one particularly powerful summoning spell.

The result of the majority of the resident brooms' (though not all - for some, the failing spells were too many, and they could manage no more than an uninspired hop) attempting to exit all at once through one door was thus the complete and chaotic destruction of the shed in question. And as it was reduced to so much rubble, the already frayed nerves of one very unfortunate badger were reduced to nothing very much at all.

~~~*~~~

In the Great Hall, a plodding line of newly arrived Hufflepuffs performed a spirited mass imitation of their troubled totem animal as Potions Master Severus Snape cursed like a man possessed by some particularly vile poltergeist. His broomstick had just taken upon itself to zoom out a broken window, and for this, it was duly damned.

Had he known it was heeding the call of Gryffindor House, he would likely have sent some poor Hufflepuff into a dead faint.

~~~*~~~

Having convinced the final batch of first-years that malfunctioning broomsticks were, in fact, preferable to trekking through a dark and monster-packed Hogwarts, Ron turned from the scorched opening in the Tower's outer wall to peer back at Hermione. She kneeled, perfectly still, by the corpse of the knight. He called her name. She remained immobile.

What had surprised her most about the corpse was the blood. Not the actual presence of an expanding pool of murky red - a perfectly reasonable side-effect of having a sword driven straight through one's body - but, rather, the absence of the fluid in the death scenes of the two zombies. An absence she had overlooked until blood, other than her own, had made its final, late appearance.

Before the sudden outpouring of blood, Hermione had fumbled her slashing way through a silver-age swashbuckler, where blood happened off-screen. Now, she had been flung headlong into the unreal reality of contemporary lowbrow action and horror.

That this morbidly mental metaphor effectively cast her as the monster-slaying bloody bimbo of her B-movie life didn't exactly help matters. Though, really, she was probably a bit too bright, a bit too brown, a bit too bushy, and a bit too - small - to be cast as the Blonde Bimbo with the Big Boobies.

Hermione was content to let her mind make these little excursions into a realm of metaphorical mirrors. They reflected a reality distorted enough to make it tolerable and, ultimately, manageable. Brutal, unfiltered reality would demand her undivided attention soon enough. For now, she would simply process.

She pondered the blood, its presence and absence.

She considered the connection between knight and zombies, and the bloody difference.

She tried to ignore the conclusion that while the zombies were beings fuelled by some strange form of magic - undead creatures bereaved of their negating prefix - the knight was a man of flesh and leaking blood. A man she had killed.

Murdered?

She traced the dull dents in the helmet clutched in her hands. She had vaguely hoped to find some inhuman monster underneath it. What she found instead looked rather like an adult Harry. Too much like Harry - even the eyes, staring, possibly at Death. A man killed by an ancient Muggle weapon, with eyes the colour of magical murder.

Ron's hand on her shoulder jerked her back into what she reluctantly recognised as reality. The helmet clattered to the floor. Ron spoke, too quickly for her poorly synched thoughts. She got the gist of his message without registering a word: They should leave. Quickly.

She lingered by the Tower's outer wall, sloppily seated on a hiccupping broom. The sword stood lodged in armour that, from a distance, looked infested with premature red rust. Unmoving and unmoved, it grew out of the knight's body like a potted wildflower - its murdering nature finally tamed, its thirst for blood satisfied, for another hundred years or so.

Eyes drifting across the rubble, Hermione experienced a curious sense of loss, finding herself half expecting, half wishing, her favourite puppy would burst forth, yapping reassuringly and wagging its stubby tail. Which, on the whole, would have been rather unsettling, as she didn't have a puppy, much less a favourite one. She was, after all, quite the cat person.

No, what she did wait around for, she realised, was herself. She hoped against hope that the person she had been - before the blood, before that night - would return to take possession of her body, giving the New Hermione a chance to rest in peaceful oblivion. Before the blood.

She also realised, for she was indeed a bright girl, that what she really wanted was to return - return to her idealistic former self, so sure of her ability to resolve any situation without resorting to excessive violence--

'Hermione! Come on!'

--to murder.

She followed Ron down towards the Hall, but she wanted to go back.

Back, before the blood.

~~~*~~~

Arthur Weasley was, like his youngest male offspring, having a long night. What he didn't know was that it would get longer, downwards, upwards, and round, round, round, in a not-very-merry-go-round. Of this, Arthur Weasley was blissfully unaware.

Not that Mr. Weasley's state of mind could be said to be in any manner blissful as he sat slumped over his desk at the Ministry's miniscule Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office, contemplating both the case at hand and the syrupy movement of silent night. Now, this night, devoid of any sound but the vague noises trickling up and down from more nocturnal branches of the Ministry, was not, strictly speaking, longer than any other night. Time, after all, remains a constant throughout the universe. Or so it is assumed by most, except by those perplexing perpetrators of so-called Relativity Theory.

The Wizarding World has its very own version of relativity, made popular by the late master mage Rufus de Quloque, who was wont to argue his theory at great length, and with many curious and convenient new additions, whenever he was late. Which was always, even to his own funeral, which was considered very tacky by those who had to listen to him boisterously reminisce the whole after-funeral party away. (This last incident was, coincidentally, the most popular example of a Long Night known to wizarding kind.)

de Quloque's theory went, roughly, as follows: Time is a matter of perception. Through observing the changing state of the world around us, we perceive the forward motion of Time. Since we all stand at the centre of our very own perceived universe, and other people very rarely stand at that same centre (since body possession and mind invasion are pastimes commonly frowned upon by the general public), we all experience a very personal passing of Time. No man's Time is the same as his neighbour's, and certainly not the same as his wife's.

But since we are such very communal creatures, we have constructed time, a universal constant in the same league as metres and intercultural misunderstandings. To make sure we can all keep track of this constructed constant, we have created clocks, small devices that happen in a very predictable and constant sort of way, except for when one forgets to wind them up, or accidentally drop them from one's bedroom window onto the surprisingly thick head of the local worm-chasing rooster.

Problems, other than the purely accidental destruction of mechanical devices, occur when a person's private Time is too far out of synch with time. Say you're a relaxed, leisurely, laid-back sort of individual, to use de Quloque's favourite example. Say you spend your days pondering the infinite problems of our Times. Say you do this particular pondering suitably reclined in some hammock or other, meditating on the big blue above. Say your thoughts speed about most vigorously while the sky happens very slowly, as it is wont to do on those bright blue days so very conducive to productive pondering of portentous problems. On such occasions, the ponderer's own Time may move very ponderously indeed while, elsewhere and just about everywhere, clocks keep happening in a most regular and unponderous manner. On such unfortunate occasions, the ponderer may arrive at places according to a personal Time most woefully out of synch with time, as related by those most regular little devices that so greatly disturb the concentration of the serious ponderer. But, it should most certainly be noted that the ponderer whose Time is always on time ponders at a most ponderous and ineffective pace, and is thus not much of a ponderer at all, and perfectly unlikely to solve the serious Problems of Our Times as the professional ponderer must eventually do, if left to ponder in peace.

Say, on the other hand (the short one lazing forth the hours), that your ponderings ponder themselves into what is generously described as a coma, and uncompanionably called a dead stop with scant hope of resurrection. At such regrettable times, with no distractions to pull you from your passed-away ponderings' frozen clutches, even the flickering of a candle (for these times tend to favour the darker hours) happens so vigorously in comparison to your own very much not happening thoughts that eons seem to pass for every unmissable tick of the, at such times ever-present, clock. It is at these times, when Time comes to a halt and time keeps on ticking, that nights, and the occasional day, feel longer than ever before.

Arthur Weasley's troublesome case at hand (the one saying 'Arthur', pointing at 'Work') also concerned the inconstancy of time. Or, to be more precise, the inconstancy of timetables. Not the accepted and assumed inconstancies always found in railway companies' optimistic time planning but anomalies that defied even what little reason the timetables did display.

Laid out before him on his desk were timetables for the London Underground. And he had to find a pattern to the anomalies.

The anomalies Mr Weasley was investigating were not actually listed in the timetables themselves. In fact, they had been most expertly covered up by both the London Underground and the Muggle officials in charge. Not even the notorious Muggle media had covered the case, nor had its only slightly less notorious Wizarding counterpart. They had, surprisingly enough, not considered the grumbling of disgruntled ex-employees sufficient proof to publish such unbelievable theories.

It was sheer luck that the Quibbler had had its pages full with stranger fictions at the time.

A little over a two months previously, drivers for the London Underground began reporting weird incidents, calling in sick due to unstable work conditions, or simply quitting altogether. The tunnels were misbehaving, they said. Hallucinations were an everyday occurrence. Those who didn't suddenly find themselves driving through fields of barley or other sorts of scenery not usually found beneath central London started getting to their stations ahead of schedule. It was hard to say which phenomena was considered the more unsettling and, frankly, unreal of the two.

At first, the Muggles had investigated possible gas leaks, bad food (not, it should be noted, whether the food was bad in the first place), possible terrorists at play with a surprisingly subtle form of chemical warfare, and had at one point theorised that perhaps it was all merely an elaborate practical joke, soon to be broadcast on some perky cable network. They had even entertained wild ideas of evil Tube driver union conspiracies, but, when all else failed, they had, as reluctantly as ever, turned to the Ministry for help. The whole thing smelled strongly, it was agreed, of magical mischief.

So, the Ministry investigated, with scarcely more impressive results than the Muggles. While the first investigators had trekked through the tunnels in search of gas leaks and biological weapons, the wizards scanned for lingering traces of magic. Like their forerunners, they found nothing unusual or unexpected. At least, they found no expected unexpected unusualness. Many were the tunnels they traversed with nothing more exciting happening than their hearing ghost trains approaching in the distance. Only twice did a train come round the bend, causing the wizards to test their Disapparation skills, and the Muggles before them to test their immediate knowledge of maintenance tunnels.

Those trains never arrived at the other end of the tunnel. Rather, they arrived at other ends altogether, as could be vouched for by a Tube driver who felt very strongly that folk should not be strolling through the Underground unannounced.

It was the Muggles speedily cramped into a maintenance tunnel who finally insisted that the Ministry be brought in, seeing as they were quite convinced the train that had nearly run them over was not merely some rampant mirage that had migrated from the African desert to settle underneath central London.

So, the Ministry investigated, and then, suddenly, the problems seemed to cease. No reports came in. No drivers quit or called in sick for anything but the usual unusual reasons. All was calm. The case became a low priority. Until Arthur Weasley, wrapping up loose ends, thought to ask one driver if, indeed, he had not experienced any anomalies whatsoever.

It turned out the driver in question quite enjoyed taking detours through the English countryside, with occasional glimpses of Italy and Morocco, and in no way felt this was something to complain about.

Resources were once more re-allocated to the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts and Misuse of Magic offices. Additional interviews were conducted. The hippie had stayed on because of the wild trips, man. (Though, the warthog he lamented having run over in a secluded Serengeti grove had probably not found it quite so groovy.) The former flight attendant had quit his previous employment when he'd seen a bear with a pink umbrella flying past the plane on a motorbike. (The English countryside was restful by comparison.) And no one had told young master Twist what the tunnels were supposed to look like. After all, expansive and curiously placed gardens were all the rage, werhn'ey, eh?

Sceptics reasonably questioned whether, perhaps, it had merely been a matter of the Underground hiring nutcases all along. So, communication with commuters was suggested. Five interviews were conducted before the investigators realised that making people question the unusual blackness of the tube trains' windows on some stretches was, in fact, rather counterproductive. Mass media attention and a mass exodus from the Tube were not on anyone's wish list.

The investigation yielded little new headway. Still, through the perceptiveness of the excursion-fond drivers, the essential nature of the problem was revealed to be far more physical than food-induced hallucinations or feisty mirages.

Unlike their Muggle colleagues, the Ministry wizards thought it perfectly plausible that underground trains could, for whatever reason, pop out in all sorts of unusual places. So they looked for landmarks described by the drivers, and found some most curiously placed Tube tracks; hidden in secluded valleys, shrouded by dense groves, laying half submerged in the moving Moroccan sand, all of them beginning and ending with - nothing. All of them falling into utter disuse as soon as they were discovered, providing no further clues.

So, clues had to be searched for elsewhere. And Arthur searched in timetables, seeking some pattern to the strangeness. It was fiddly work well suited to him, whose Muggle mania was, in many ways, no more than an extravagant form of the common Crossword Compulsion.

But he could make neither heads nor tails of it, and patterns emerged only when he was nodding half to sleep, on account of his going mildly cross-eyed. It seemed hopeless, and had it been the only reason for his working overtime, he would have already gone home to hear Molly chide him once more for his going along - like a mindless lump - with Albus Dumbledore's plans for Harry Potter.

But Dumbledore had asked him to keep an eye on things inside the Ministry that night, on account of what was happening outside the bunker-like premises. Dumbledore did not trust Minister Fudge to do the Right Thing in a crisis. Therefore, he wanted to be notified instantly if the night's Auror raid went awry, so that he could send in those members of the Order not already part of the Auror assault team - knowing full well that Fudge would never ask for his help. Not anymore.

So, Arthur kept an eye on things. And felt as though he was being watched. As if someone else was keeping an eye on him. Paranoia crept up his spine, tickling his tired senses.

The candle flared.

Most people ascribed the little candle on Arthur's desk to his infamous obsession with all things Muggle. It was a plain little light. Its only peculiar, and little known, trait was a predisposition on its part for having a tiny rotating eyeball appear at irregular intervals inside its burning flame. Except for the 'irregular' bit, the eye was the very image of Constant Vigilance. It spun around like a mad thing. The flame flickered moodily.

Arthur drew a deep breath, and sighed. Here were the news he'd been waiting for. But he'd been waiting to receive them in some other form. The form of the flickering flame meant that the news were most likely bad. Very bad. Dire, even.

Arthur put his left forefinger into the flame. It crackled. He winced. The scenery changed.

~~~*~~~

'What are they?'

It was the first thing she said on arriving in the Great Hall. She said it, and she waited, watching. She knew Snape and McGonagall had heard. Her steady gaze amplified her question, her demand for attention, for explanation, beyond mere verbal repetition. She waited.

Snorting, Snape stormed off to help maintain another part of the shields holding the strained walls together. The sound of crumbling stone and creaking wood filled the air, the students' frightened murmuring an anxious underscore.

McGonagall sighed, turned, and faced the inquisitive gaze of Hermione Granger. 'They,' she said, 'are the Origin.'

A grating, gleeful voice erupted behind her. 'Orgy? Wha's this about an orgy then?'

Two pairs of chillingly feline eyes, thin slits of vexation, locked on the intruder.

'Peeves,' said Peeves, saluting, as though they had not made the poltergeists questionable acquaintance far too long ago. 'Resident Morall Officicer tryin' t'inject a bit o'comic relief!'

'Please,' purred McGonagall, 'be so kind as to relieve yourself somewhere else.'

Peeves, being not entirely suicidal, promptly boosted his personal morale by shooting off in quite the opposite direction.

Hermione turned back to the professor. 'Origin of what?'

'Magic, allegedly.' McGonagall sighed. 'They claim we stole it from them.' She glanced at the teachers toiling at the shielding. 'And now they want it back, presumably.'

'Did we?'

'Steal it? Depends on your point of view, I suppose. Most important things do.' Her brows furrowed further. 'It's all rather complex and shrouded in myth. No one quite knows the truth anymore, I suspect. Except the Origin. They are, after all, immortal. The question is: Are they telling the Truth?' She quirked a smile at the look of surprise on Hermione's face. 'If, that is, you can be immortal without being alive in the first place. The Origin are, it would seem, pure energy and thought. They exist. Like water and air.' The floor trembled. McGonagall snorted. 'With a grudge the size of Mount Helena.' She turned around. 'I'm afraid I must assist my staff, Miss Granger. There will be ample time for discussion once this crisis has been resolved.'

Following McGonagall to Snape, Hermione did not feel quite so confident.

Leaving off questions like Why have I never heard of this before for later, she asked whether steel was the only thing that could kill these Origin.

McGonagall smiled. 'Yes, I heard the sword proved useful. I'm - proud of you for protecting my House in my absence, Miss Granger. But, yes, steel is our sole weapon against the Origin, thus far. Though it's more a case of short-circuiting them than killing them.'

Hermione glanced about, counting. 'Then how will we defend ourselves,' she asked in a voice suggesting that a Great Hall filled with exactly four sword-wielding pieces of armour was not an ideal place to make a last stand, all things considered.

Snape spun around, his eyes simmering with ire. 'We will not engage in physical combat with the Origin, the way you seem strangely keen on doing, Granger! We will stay put and the let the Ministry deal with it!'

'The Ministry,' said McGonagall, 'will send Aurors trained in combat using steel weapons. They've kept a small unit ready in case of Origin attack, even though it's been over a hundred years since they last appeared.' She quirked an eyebrow. 'For once, the Ministry appears to be prepared.'

Hermione wasn't reassured. 'When will they get here? Have you spoken to--'

Snape's anger flared again. 'Of course we've contacted them, you silly girl! Do you think just because your fabulous - sadly defunct - trio has saved Hogwarts in the past that the entire staff is incompetent?'

'We've sent owls,' said McGonagall. 'The Floo lines are too unstable.'

That brought another question to the forefront of Hermione's mind. 'What's happened to - magic?'

Snape turned to her, having just hurled a spell at the slowly cracking wall in poorly disguised panic. His perpetual sneer slid into a full-on grimace. 'Tell me, Miss Granger: Were you born a nosy, meddlesome busybody, or is that another thing you've caught from one of those precious old books of yours? As much as I'd like to say I can manage the Hall's defences on my own, I do require the Headmistress's assistance.' He leered. 'Think you can spare her, Granger?' He turned back to his spellwork, muttering, 'And spare me your incessant questioning.'

McGonagall smiled apologetically at Hermione. 'Professor Snape feels there's - a time and a place for questioning minds.' There was a snort behind her, and she added, pointedly: 'For we do, of course, encourage such minds at this school.' It was a sore subject that had gotten thoroughly infected since McGonagall became Headmistress. Hermione was sure Snape would have been fired had it not been for his work for the Order.

McGonagall gestured to one of the tables. 'Take a seat, and I'll explain all - or what little we know - as soon as we've secured the shields.' She turned around, decisively, and Hermione swallowed back her questions, a bitter aftertaste in her mind. She limped over to an empty stretch of bench, pulled out her adopted wand and began healing her wounds.

The spells were simple. She could peruse the Hall while performing them (repeated times, to reach normal results). Ron sat at the centre of a pile of young Gryffindor, a first-year on his knee. He seemed to be telling them some story, probably featuring both her and Harry, keeping their minds off reality. He reminded Hermione of his father, telling his plentiful offspring tales of those strange, fascinating Muggles. She looked away. She did not need to contemplate what a good father her non-boyfriend would one day make.

Seeing the students at their House tables, as though waiting for dinner to arrive, Hermione thought about what a comfort habit could be, when the vicious unknown comes knocking. Or, to be more precise, comes to knock down your massive stone walls.

A stone house had saved three little pigs from a big, bad wolf. But these Origin did more than huff and puff. Hermione looked over at the teachers and Aurors at work on the shields. With tentative relief, she noted that their attempts seemed successful.

She leaned back, closed her eyes, and let Three Little Pigs distract her troubled mind. The noise around her provided an unusual soundtrack for the silent fairytale flickering before her inner vision: The distant sound of Ron's acting out exciting scenes to her left, forced intellectual discourse from the Ravenclaws behind, timid singing from the huddle of Hufflepuffs to her right, spells bellowed all around, and an odd noise just on the edge of hearing.

Her eyes snapped open.

She sat up. Listening.

There. There it was. There they were. Sounds easily mistaken for the background noise of an overfull Great Hall. But it wasn't. It didn't fit. She looked about, seeking some source of the sound, but - like incompetent pop singers indulging in playback - it just didn't fit.

It almost seemed like an echo, of some previous gathering in the Hall. Or, she realised, the echo of another Hall entirely.

Ignoring the gasps around her, Hermione threw herself onto the floor, pressing her ear to the tiles. She listened. She heard. She saw the big, bad wolf climb down the chimney, falling into the boiling cauldron.

And she knew.

~~~*~~~

'A trap. 'Twas a bloody trap!'

The hallway was dark, faint moonlight filtering through lichen-frosted windows. Arthur would have squinted if he could, and in the safe candlelight of his office, he probably did. But it mattered little. Despite the greenish gloom, Arthur could survey the frightening scene with perfect clarity. The magical eye he co-inhabited registered shades and layers of reality beyond what any carbon-based being's synaptic nodes could ever process. The first few times he'd linked to the eye, he'd been sick for hours afterwards.

Arthur got a good look at walls, floor, and ceiling as the eye spun around like some particularly lively gyroscope. He got a good look at the eight Aurors leaning against the walls, tense and drooping, alert and weary, like animals hunted near the point of total exhaustion. He saw a member of the medical field unit crouched over a wounded Auror, and another body already abandoned further down the hallway. Through the ceiling, he saw worrisome shadows prowl about.

'We've tried to get through to headquarters, but whatever they've used to disable our wands has cut off everything but this,' Mad-Eye muttered, his eye glancing at the Muggle-style lighter flickering in his left hand. 'Let Fudge know we're most likely dealing with some sort of Origin trap, whatever made them creep out of their stinkin'oles.'

'Origin?' said Arthur, hearing his own voice only faintly. 'Are you sure?'

'No. But whoever they are, they set up the Death Eaters too, so we're fighting a bloody war on two fronts until those pureblood idiots get it through their thick skulls we're in the same leakin' rowboat and they need t'pick up an oar!' Moody growled.

There was commotion in the distance. Screams and echoing, repeated blasts. The Aurors readied themselves for retreat, two picking up their fallen friend, the rest forming a protective circle.

'Tell Fudge his precious, strange Inspector was one of the first to go down, and that old Alastor Moody has seized command of his pitiful excuse for a police force, consequences and procedures be damned. That should make him send reinforcements without delay, posh git.'

'Ehm.'

'The exact wording should do it, Arthur. And do hurry. But,' Moody held up a bulky, elongated Muggle object of black steel, 'before y'do, do tell me how to use this damn thing.'

Arthur hesitated. He wasn't quite sure how to use the Damn Thing. Though he had a fair grasp of what it did, to other things, and other people.

And he was pretty sure the Damn Thing was called an Aykay-47.

~~~*~~~

'We're not safe here!'

'I ASSURE you, Miss Granger, even with failing magic, we can keep these shields up for a VERY long--' Snape broke off at a loud CRACK from the Gryffindor table.

All eyes focused in amazement on the frayed, dismal figure of Dobby the house elf, staggering about on the table, arms flailing, screeching: 'FLY MASTERS! FLY! BAD-THINGS ARE COMING!'

The entire Hall froze in incomprehension, staring at the elf.

The entire Hall, save one.

As Hermione ran for the far wall, a deafening CRACK enveloped her. Tables that usually served up delightful culinary feasts broke out in a decidedly less delightful array of warriors and monsters, all clearly willing to make this a Last Supper for everyone but themselves. It was a meal of nightmares, a mortal cuisine - the end of the siege.

As the strategizing part of Hermione's brain put in additional overtime, she ran backwards, shouting highly objectionable obscenities at every foe within earshot. Had Common Sense not called in sick until further notice, it would surely have suffered major coronary on the spot.

What Hermione did do on the spot was fall down, in a planned yet unsurprisingly painful manner. Blue bolts streaked through the air above her. She leapt back up. Using the Origin deathrays (there she went again, lolloping into B-movie lala-land) to her advantage had worked before, and being creative was, she decided, definitely secondary to staying alive. Hermione was a practical girl. Though, throwing herself headfirst into a blown open food-lift shaft, she had to wonder if she wasn't, perchance, practically potty as well.

~~~*~~~

No one manned the Ministry lifts in the middle of the night, it being visiting time only for people who rarely took kindly to such assistance. So Arthur Weasley paced in perfect solitude, and imperfect peace of mind, wishing for a speedier ascent.

The few messages travelling through the complex at this late hour flapped tiredly out of his circular way. When the Floo connection on his floor had failed, he'd considered sending a written message but had eventually decided Moody's specific wording was better delivered by mouth, even if this now meant he had to be in the same room as the irritable Minister to do it.

When the lift pinged to a stop, Arthur Weasley was in too much of a hurry to notice the crawling, crippled messages crumpling beneath his feet.

~~~*~~~

There was war in the Hogwarts kitchens.

If you're looking to throw an indoor war, there are few places more suitable than a large-scale kitchen. Plenty of sharp edges, and plenty of places to hide from them. A multitude of substances ready to be misused in ways only the most vengeful of chefs would in his wildest, most murderous fantasies contemplate.

The medieval warlords who greeted unwanted visitors with feasts featuring little beyond generous helpings of boiling oil never considered a more wholesome alternative for the early ladder-risers. And they certainly didn't contemplate the tactical advantage large amounts of boiling porridge could give a minor army of highly aggrieved house elves, levitating pots of the aggressive breakfast over the exposed heads of an opposing force of Origin origin.

All in all, kitchens provide excellent locations not only for various species of fungus and rat, but also for very messy minor wars. Very loud and messy. Which was why no one noticed the small, potty feline streaking towards the exit, dodging legs and oatmeal bombs, thanking its lucky gas fur-balls for making the kitchens the final destination of the food-lift it had just tumbled gracelessly out of.

~~~*~~~

Cornelius Fudge felt pleased with himself. It was not an uncommon sensation.

Cornelius Fudge felt pleased with himself for many reasons, foremost among them on this particular night was the fact that the Chief Inspector he had personally appointed had just handed him the Death Eaters on a plate. Figuratively speaking.

Acting on the advice of Inspector Strange - that most splendid fellow - Fudge had trusted a delectable piece of intelligence to the extent that he had sent nearly the entire wizarding police force, Aurors and all, under the competent lead of that same Inspector Strange, to come down like a mighty hammer on a large Death Eater meeting. And it had paid off.

'I wanted to tell you in person,' the Inspector had said ('and Floo silence is still in effect, for precautionary reasons'). 'I wanted to tell you in person: They've fallen into our trap. Every last one of them.' And he had smiled, and Fudge had congratulated him any number of times. And the wine would be on its way up as soon as the fireplace stopped sputtering.

Times were good. Fudge felt pleased with himself, and with the world at large. But mostly with himself, having masterminded it all.

And then Arthur Weasley burst through the door.

There was no denying that the Weasley's were an old and well respected pureblood family. Still, there was something quite upsetting about them. Far too many children, for one thing. It brought about a sort of inflation of the bloodline that was most unfortunate and ill-considered. And far too much of the boisterous offspring would undoubtedly marry into less distinguished bloodlines, diluting the ancient Weasley magic. There were simply not enough pureblood youngsters left. And they could hardly marry within the family. Especially considering the amount of boys Arthur and Molly had spawned. And, no, such connections were not to be thought of, even outside the family. Marriage was, after all, a Pillar of Society, and not to be defiled by such impropriety. Fudge had very strong views about this.

In fact, Cornelius Fudge had very strong views about everything. Not having the mental dexterity to grasp the finer points of ideas, he found it necessary to have strong views about them in order to hang on at all. (This is, coincidentally, why there is often so little difference between the local village idiot and the political leaders of the World.)

And Cornelius Fudge had strong views about the Weasleys. They were a nuisance, and a blustering, bumbling, boisterous bloody nuisance at that.

'What can I do for you, Arthur?' said Fudge, smiling congenially.

Arthur Weasley made no reply, staring in a most peculiar manner at the Inspector.

Fudge's smile turned into a beaming grin. 'You'll be pleased to hear, no doubt,' he bubbled, 'that the Inspector and his men have secured the mansion and captured every last one of the leading Death Eaters! I'd say that rather reduces this - war,' he displayed his distaste with all the subtlety of a drunk mime artist, 'to a personal skirmish between You-Know-Who and Albus Dumbledore, which we can no doubt deal with in due time.' He grinned again. 'Splendid news, wouldn't you say, Arthur?'

Arthur had at this point registered that he was, in fact, being addressed and had turned his noticeably divided attention to Fudge. 'Splendid? Oh, yes. Indeed.'

'You don't seem overly thrilled, I must say, Mr Weasley,' said the Inspector.

'What? I don't? No, maybe - maybe I don't.' His laugh barely even convinced Fudge of its sincerity. 'Long night, you know. Terribly long. Terrible shock - good terrible shock! Terribly good terrible shock! Terrific, even!' Arthur grinned like a madman. Fudge decided he probably was. 'In-deed!' exclaimed Arthur. 'Most - gratifying!' He backed towards the door. 'Must tell Molly. She'll be terrifie-- terribly pleased! Terrible-bly! B-bye, now!' With a grin that could have knocked over a grumpy rhinoceros and a wave that knocked over a small vase, Arthur exited.

'Strange man, that,' said Fudge.

'Indeed. Most peculiar.'

~~~*~~~

Hermione padded, keeping close to the walls, towards the Slytherin sector of the upper dungeons ('upper' being relative, she supposed, to the Pits of Hell, and an altogether inappropriate designation since going there was always a real downer). She hissed and shook her head, peeved at her prattling mind. Her mind was not happy with the Current State of Affairs, taking every chance to ignore them, and she was not happy with her mind. That this implied that she and her mind were separate entities - establishing her as firmly out of her mind - was something she'd rather not dwell on.

She needed to focus.

Reason for being in the downer dungeons: Finding Malfoy.

Reason for believing Malfoy to be found in downer dungeons: He wasn't in the Hall.

Reason for noticing his not being in the Hall: Unknown. She'd ask her mind once she got back to it.

Of course, Malfoy's absence could mean merely that he had been killed by the Origin. But she doubted it. The Slytherins would have been in a right state. And there was so rarely anything right about them, she'd have been bound to notice.

Nightly excursions had led Hermione to the conclusion that Malfoy spent his nights in very deep - most likely unnatural - sleep these days, as oxymoronic as it sounded. Maybe he had slept soundly through the attack, drugged out on Death Eater potions. It certainly had a more - Slytherin ring to it.

In any case, Hermione needed help. Everyone else was in the Hall, captives of these Origin creatures. She would simply have to make do with Malfoy.

Why me? she thought. Why me?

~~~*~~~

Like the small, inconspicuous candle on his desk, many were the things ascribed to Arthur Weasley's fascination with all things Muggle. The fascination itself was, however, not ascribed to anything in particular save the fact that Arthur was Arthur and, well, we all know Arthur, don't we? Now, had this same Arthur been a less good-natured and guileless soul, he might have felt vaguely offended by this line of reasoning, but, as it were, he didn't give it much thought; if any at all. Which was also roughly the amount of thought he himself gave to the origin of his fascination with all things Muggle. The foundation of his fascination held, in short, no fascination for him.

Had he dissected the development of his own character and its defining obsessions with as great a zeal as he did every possible Muggle contraption he came across, Arthur would have found that his very fist contact with Muggle mechanics had come at the age of six, through his then already ancient and now quite firmly dead great, great grandfather. This curious old gentleman had told young Arthur stories of how they survived in the olden days, during the last Origin War, when magic was leeched from the land and all those who did not flee had to live like Muggles. The stories had been enchanting, and some part of Arthur had never forgotten, nor ceased to try to understand how those wondrous contraptions might have worked, and did work.

But, in addition to the Muggle machines, his great, great grandfather had also spoken - darkly, seriously - of the Origin that the rest of his generation seemed to have purposely forgot. He showed young Arthur his trophies of war, among them a small blue ring of incomparable beauty.

The exact same kind of ring he had seen on the supposedly dead Chief Inspector Strange some minutes before.

Arthur's mind was troubled beyond coherency. He had to get to his desk, to warn Moody, had to get a message to Dumbledore, somehow.

Treachery. The Ministry had been compromised.

Panic pushed its unwelcome way into the lift with him. As the doors closed, Arthur turned around.

Inspector Strange was watching him.

~~~*~~~

The room smelled.

It smelled of dust.

It smelled of dust for the very simple reason that it was covered in that very same substance.

It smelled of dust because the very air, stale and stagnant, was imbued with it.

It smelled of dust because it didn't smell of living.

It smelled of dust, Hermione decided, with the single-minded evil intent of making her sneeze. After all, this was Malfoy's room. (A prefect perk. Though hers was a paragon of cleanliness in comparison.)

In addition to the overwhelming dust sensation, the room was infested by an oppressive, mute darkness. Hermione wished she hadn't had to change back into human form to unlock the door. Cat eyes would have been a blessing. Eyes now slow and human, she stood just inside the doorway, watching contours emerge, as though a blank room was lazily redrawing itself in response to an unexpected, uninvited visitor.

There were three big bookcases filled with books. Old, important-looking, presumably very interesting books. Hermione's feet itched to throw her body forth, into the dusty armchair wedged between two bookcases. Her mind craved the distractions the tomes could offer - wanting to escape further into the universe of Thought to escape an outside world of Terror.

An ancient-looking book lay on a bedside table, less seductive in its solitude, but an acceptable destination since beside it, on a plushly musty bed, lay the still body of one Draco Malfoy.

~~~*~~~

Much to the surprise of Minister Fudge's personal secretary, Chief Inspector Strange was talking into a small black box with a shiny stick at the top.

'We may have a - complication,' said Strange, still looking at the closed lift doors. 'No. I don't think it's anything major. He's a bumbling fool; stopping him before he gets word to the Phoenix will not be difficult. In fact,' he continued, lowering his gaze to follow the trail of crawling messages on the floor, 'I rather think our problem will take care of itself.'

'Excuse me?' said the secretary, advancing hesitantly towards Strange. 'Is that - a Muggle device?'

Strange smiled pleasantly. 'Very perceptive. It is indeed.' He put the walkie-talkie back into his pocket. 'This is too, actually,' he said and pulled out the gun.

A mere second after Strange had shot the secretary, Fudge's very best wine-glass crashed onto his expensive carpet - thankfully (due to the Floo still being down) not carrying any actual wine with it.

In the descending lift, messages fell twitching to the floor, one by one by three.

~~~*~~~

Draco Malfoy would make a beautiful corpse. On a purely aesthetic level. In fact, Hermione thought, he would probably be more beautiful dead than alive, since it would make him rather less likely to open his mouth and spoil the pretty picture. As it were, Malfoy was merely deeply attractive and completely repulsive at the very same time. It sort of evened out in the end. Though, she had to admit, he looked quite beautiful there, a tumbled Greek sculpture in the dusty darkness. This, she decided, was because he looked pretty dead. (Pretty, her disowned mind sniggered.)

Pretty dead, but not quite. There was a faint pulse, but little presence of mind. (Maybe she could lend him hers. It was only being a nuisance, after all.)

She'd tried shaking him and shouting, to no avail. Time, like Patience, was something she had far too little of. She could hear movement further down the corridor.

She slapped him.

'GAAAAAHHH!'

Well, that did it.

Malfoy glared at her. 'GRANGER? What the hell are you doing?'

'Trying to save you. Though I don't know why.'

'Well, I certainly don't!'

Hermione grabbed his arm, hauled him off the bed and towards the door in one swift move.

'And exactly what do you propose to save me from, you madwoman?' cried Malfoy, stumbling along in befuddled bafflement. On '--woman' they entered the corridor. There were huge, spideresque - yet hardly picturesque - creatures lumbering up towards them.

'Pick one.'

Malfoy blanched. 'I - I'd - rather not.'

'Then please cooperate! And put that wand away - it doesn't work on them.'

Draco lowered his wand, looked at it, looked at the creatures, back at the wand, and said, in a distant tone of voice (for his mind was already running away at this point): 'I could - poke out an eye?'

There were quite a lot of eyes. Even more fangs. Draco pocketed his wand.

'COME ON!' shouted Hermione, rushing the way of Draco's runaway mind.

Draco turned. And he ran.

~~~*~~~

When the lift had shuddered almost to a halt, Arthur had decided to take his chances on the roof of the wooden device. However, once there, there was little to do besides wait for an opportunity to present itself. As it was a magical lift, there were no ropes to climb up, and the walls were sheer stone.

In fact, Arthur wasn't quite sure why he'd climbed through the little hatch and onto the roof in the first place. Still, as the lift dropped away from under his feet, he vaguely recalled that it had had something to do with not wanting the ceiling to crash down on him.

He could do the crashing quite well on his own.

He plunged downwards.

'Win- Wi- Win- WinGARDium LeviooohSAAAAAAHH!' cried Mr Weasley, and he knew, through his youngest son's long and tiresome harangues, experiencing some kind of strangely uplifting morbid amusement, that little Miss Weasley would have thoroughly disapproved of his unorthodox intonation.

Then he blacked out.

~~~*~~~

For some reason, he was keeping pace with the Mudblood. He pushed himself nearly to the limit, but not quite, and certainly not beyond, though the situation was undoubtedly dire enough to inspire supernatural strength.

Their pursuers were closing in quickly. He couldn't outrun them however hard he tried. So he might at least have company in death. The curving corridor had no side exits, no stairs, nothing to give them that extra edge. They could but run. So he kept pace. But why? Was this some badly timed nobility; a touch of chivalry from the Malfoys of old? And for a Mudblood? What would father say?

The curve of the corridor strained his legs, wearied his soul; no end in sight, no light at the end of the tunnel. Another curve, and another, and--

--Weasley?

The red-headed menace was pulling something out of a tattered bag slung across his shoulder. Draco's step faltered. Weasley might slow the beasts down. Sacrificial lamb.

Oh, father would be proud.

'DOWN!' bellowed Weasley, pulling back his arm.

A hand on Draco's back - Granger's - pushed him down before he could contemplate the consequences. He hit the hard floor in a burst of bafflement. Small spherical objects flew overhead.

There was a mighty bang, a composite of many weaker cracks, pops, and fizzles. Multicoloured light filled the tunnel, tinting the dense, white smoke billowing across them in all the hues of the rainbow. Shrieks and growls erupted behind them, but neither claws nor fangs ripped into their exposed backs. The fireworks had slowed the beasts down.

Ronald Weasley emerged from the smoke, offering his hand to Granger, his brilliantly red hair and terrified expression turning him into a gangly, cheap, demented clown amidst the psychedelic colours.

Draco pushed himself off the floor and hurried after Granger and Weasley, already vanished in the smoke. After a mere few steps, an arm shout out of the smoke, grabbed him and yanked him sideways into another corridor. The smoke cleared, and Weasley's bent head greeted him, a beacon of red. Granger leaned against a wall, echoing her boyfriends deep, shuddering breaths.

'Well,' huffed Draco, petulant purely by habit, having scant energy to feel anything but genuinely exhausted, 'what now?'

Granger's eyes unfocused. Her brow furrowed. Weasley regarded her with blatant, unwavering confidence. Draco wondered if she hadn't just zoned out from pure shock. He did, after all, feel pretty close to that himself.

'The Deeper dungeons,' said Hermione, eyes still distant. 'They're right underneath, aren't they?'

'Yes,' said Draco, 'but they're sealed off.' What did she expect them to do? Sink through the floor?

'We must be--' Hermione broke off, turning to Draco. 'Do you know of any - rooms - directly beneath the kitchens?' Her look made it plain: She had a plan.

Hearing growls from the dissipating smoke, Draco wasted no time. He turned and ran for a side tunnel, shouting 'This way!' over his shoulder.

~~~*~~~

At the end of That Way were three doors in a row, one of which attacked Ron with a plummeting pile of buckets. For Draco Malfoy, this was apparently vintage comic relief.

There was nothing comic about the relief Hermione felt as she finally managed to spell one of the other two doors open. But she had little need for comedy, not expecting their pursuers to laugh themselves to death anytime soon.

Relief turned to despair as the room behind the door revealed itself to be a simple storage room. A place where only rats and spiders dined. And they were rather too big for escape through a rat-sized hole in the wall.

She hurried back into the hall, finding the third door open and Malfoy's wand illuminating the inside of a small, wood-panelled office, covered in dust. Her sense of relief made a tentative reappearance.

'Oh, good,' said Malfoy, approaching the desk. 'We'll write a note saying we're too sick to be eaten today and forge our parents' signatures.' He turned to Ron, who looked around the room with the obvious befuddlement Malfoy was trying to conceal in tired witticisms. 'Though that would only be impressive in my case, of course.'

'Look for an opening,' said Hermione, already running alongside the right-hand wall.

Perhaps giving Hermione the benefit of the doubt, Malfoy waited till after he had found the opening to say: 'Jolly good. We can order a last supper. Brilliant plan, Granger. Allow me to worship your ugly feet.' Ron used his feet to kick the wannabe worshipper.

Meanwhile, Hermione stared at the food-lift. The tiny food-lift. She had a plan; repetitive if not brilliant. Or rather, she had had a plan; decidedly not brilliant. A plan that - probably due to her self-preservation instincts' being doped up on adrenalin - had entirely failed to encompass Ron and Malfoy (neither of whom, she was pretty sure, had the ability to transform into small animals, Malfoy's brief and involuntary stint as a ferret notwithstanding). The dark hole in the wall stared at her like some particularly annoying plot-hole in a badly constructed novel. (A novel that, quite frankly, had used the Escaping Through A Food-Lift device ad nauseam.) Hermione felt as though her life was moving in plot-less circles, one bloody action scene after another, with no discernable goal in sight. It was as though Hogwarts had turned into an enormous PC platform game and that, in constantly moving down one level, she was going about it in quite the wrong way.

'It leads to the Deeper Dungeons, I think,' she said, by way of doubtful explanation.

'It's rather - erhm - small,' said Ron.

'Gryffindors!' huffed Draco, smashing a paperweight into the wood panelling beneath the opening. 'Noble and courageous and utterly stumped when faced with the need for some good,' he tugged away a piece of panelling, 'old-fashioned,' Ron and Hermione tugged along, 'destruction of property!'

The bared hole in the stone floor looked dark and decidedly uninviting. Gentlemen as they were, the stances of both Ron and Malfoy indicated that, by all means, the ancient courtesy of ladies first was to be observed. Ron then made it quite clear that he thought himself far more masculine than Malfoy - who was not one to seem a coward, or take the rear when Spiders from Hell were hopping about.

Thus it happened that Hermione Granger was shortly followed down a dusty lift-shaft by Draco Malfoy, who in turn was under the pronounced threat of Ron Weasley's accidentally slipping heavily onto that pretty-boy ferret head of his.

'Hurry up!' ordered Hermione. 'We're sitting ducks in here!'

'More like three sooty Santa-Clauses stuck up a bloody chimney,' muttered Malfoy, who nonetheless hurried his descent. Roasted Duck was not on his list of preferred future careers.

'Actually,' said Hermione, stopping, 'we - eh - are stuck.'

Plot-holes, plan-holes, food-lifts have such very small holes. Of course, the wood panel massacre should have alerted her to the problem but, alas, her mind was on an extended if erratic holiday.

She could get out. The boys could not. She explained this, carefully leaving out the first part.

It was not received with general cheer.

'I always wanted to die in a chimney,' said Malfoy, with the pompous air of a suffering aristocrat.

'It's not a chimney.'

'Leave my delusions alone, Mudblood.'

'Wait a bit!' exclaimed Ron, rummaging in his pockets. 'I've still got two Weasley's Wailing Whompers! We could blow our way out!'

Draco snorted. 'Your family is quick to alliterate, isn't it?'

'We are NOT illiterate!'

'I did not say--' Malfoy began, before Hermione's low growl reached his ears.

'Malfoy! Shut. Up.'

Malfoy clamped his mouth shut, the inexplicable sensation of being perched atop an angry lioness creeping over him.

Ron calmed, somewhat, at this. 'Hermione, you'll have to climb up a bit...'

''M on it,' came the muffled reply.

'Granger, you're not on it, you're under my robes!'

'That explains the smell then.'

'I do not smell!'

'Malfoy,' said Ron. 'Shut up!' And then he dropped the Wailing Whompers.

There was a wail.

'Great. Advertise our whereabouts, why don't you.'

There was a whomp.

There was smoke everywhere, but the passage was clear.

'Now, Granger.' Malfoy coughed. 'If you'd be so kind as to remove your face from my crotch?'

In the darkness above, Ron Weasley could manage no more eloquent objection to the mentioned placement of Hermione Granger's face than an incoherent splutter followed by an inelegant downwards kick.

'OW! You little shit!'

Four seconds later, a Granger-Malfoy-Weasley pile could be observed through the dissipating smoke of a dark and dank dungeon.

'Men!' huffed the nether regions of the pile.

There was no reply.

~~~*~~~

'Mind the gap.'

Julia Hartwood found herself more minding the glinting teeth and the yaps than the hardly present gap between floor and troubled soil.

'Stand clear of the closing doors.'

And she wondered how many more times the hyenas would heed the automated warning as the doors opened and closed, opened and closed.

This was not what she had expected when stepping onto the ten fifteen from Paddington. Though, after a hard day's work, she hadn't really expected much at all, beyond being bumped and absentmindedly humped by endless numbers of fellow commuters.

But she certainly hadn't expected the Serengeti.

Quite suddenly, and much to everyone's tightly packed surprise, the pitch blackness of the train windows had been torn open by flashes of moonlight, mottled by shadows of dense foliage. But while this had been worrying, the train had still been swishing along with comforting regularity at that point. The real problems came when they burst into full-fledged moonlight and the wide-open spaces of the African savannah. It seemed as though the grassland had more definite views about the layout of proper African wilderness than the preceding grove, and had consequently, and quite abruptly, done away with the misplaced Tube tracks.

The crash had happened for quite some Time. Everyone could be in unspoken agreement on this temporal point. Except for those who were already dead.

The radio was dead, as was the hippie driver. And the backup power was fading.

'Stand cleahr oofh theah cloahssenng doooah--' Click.

Well. At least the doors stopped on a closing note.

If it was all an elaborate joke, in the dead of night, the hyenas were the only ones laughing.

~~~*~~~

'So, what you're saying is, these aren't the Deeper Dungeons?'

'No. Yes. I mean, yes, that's what I'm saying, yes.'

'Glad we cleared that up, Granger. So, what are these then? The Not-So-Deep-Dungeons? The Superficial Dungeons?'

'I believe it's the guards' living quarters.' A bed which had no doubt been comfortable some hundred years ago seemed to corroborate her assumption.

Hermione glanced back at her two male companions and heaved a sigh. 'You know, we'd get out of here much faster if you'd help me look for another exit!' Then she swept off - to help herself, since no one else seemed much inclined.

Draco turned to Ron. 'Bossy, isn't she?'

'Shut up, Malfoy.'