Insomniac

Chapter Five

Remus was still mulling over Draco's confrontation with Ginny when he returned to Hogwarts late in the afternoon. He'd followed Draco and Pansy all throughout Diagon Alley for another ninety minutes after they left Fred and George's shop, and he'd been bored as Draco while Pansy browsed the dress robes at Madam Malkin's. After an eternity the two of them Flooed back to Wiltshire (Remus confirmed this with Molly Weasley, who had an eye on the Malfoys' fireplace) and after a pint at the Leaky Cauldron to collect his thoughts, he Flooed to Hogwarts and tumbled into the library, dusting himself off.

He usually Flooed into the library - he felt it was less obtrusive, and it ran less of a risk of anyone seeing him. He sat for a few minutes on the couch where he had slept and reached into his pocket for his tobacco and rolling papers. To his dismay, he found that he had only two rolling papers left and barely enough tobacco to fill one. He closed his eyes and immediately opened them, feeling guilty for even worrying about his cigarette supply during a time like this. Harry is still kidnapped, he told himself sternly. Your cigarettes hardly matter right now.

He stared at the tobacco sadly for a moment and then returned it to the bag. The Order was convening in just fifteen minutes, not nearly enough time to go down to Hogsmeade to purchase more - and, he added ruefully, not nearly enough in his Gringotts account to spare. He crossed his arms and glowered out at the dark rows of books, tapping one foot impatiently.

:::

"Mum, did you Floo anywhere today?" Draco asked as he wandered down the upstairs hall. He could hear the faint sound of music coming toward him from his mother's bedroom, and he leaned into the room to see her sitting on her huge bed, looking far more put together than she had during lunch, looking through a large photo album and listening to the Wizarding Wireless Network. A half-empty highball glass sat on the table next to her, beads of water forming on its sides and rolling down to the glass coaster beneath it.

"I didn't, Draco, why?" Narcissa asked absently, not looking up.

"I heard this weird tinny noise, that's all. I think it needs to be repaired."

"Tell Kreacher to take a look at it," Narcissa said. Draco raised his eyebrows.

"Mum, he'd forget to put the powder in before he lit a fire. He'd just scorch the hair in his ears," he pointed out, laughing. "What are you looking at?"

"Old pictures," she replied. "You when you were a baby."

He wrinkled his nose. "Oh." Leaning against the door frame, he crossed his arms and looked at his mother for a moment. A deep crease had settled between her eyebrows. He knew she was striving to maintain an image that nothing in the Malfoy family had changed, but his father's absence was - there was no other word for it, it was strange. Draco was so accustomed to a family of three, and to be whittled to a family of two threw the balance considerably. He felt untethered.

In all honesty, he was terrified; he just didn't think on that.

Instead, and this was easier, he thought on the person now lying Stunned two floors over his head. It seemed inconceivable how his mother could be so placid at a time like this, when the antidote to all their struggles, all their problems, everything they'd worked for for longer than Draco had even been alive, was right there upstairs, defenseless and damned. Wasn't it killing her?

"Mum," he said. Narcissa looked up.

"What are we doing with Potter?"

Narcissa pursed her lips. "Draco - " she began, in a voice that was going to tell him that it wasn't his concern and that he needed to let the Dark Lord get on with it, but he cut her off.

"Mum, you have to tell me." He came into the room and sat down on the bed with her.

"Where's Pansy?" Narcissa asked. Draco rolled his eyes.

"Stop trying to change the subject. She's talking to her parents on the Floo. What is going to happen with Potter?"

Narcissa looked at Draco for a long moment and closed the album she was holding. "Thursday," she said at last. "He's going with Bellatrix on Thursday."

"Thursday." Draco mouthed the word to himself. He smiled. "And things will be over then?"

His mother smiled back and looked down at the stitching on the coverlet. "Draco, they will have just begun."

:::

"Enervate."

Bellatrix held her wand before her like a candle in a darkened room, and watched carefully as Harry Potter stirred and opened his eyes. This could be tricky, she knew - she remembered too well how efficiently Harry had dodged herself and the Dark Lord only ten days before. So she was ready when he bolted upright with the sudden realization of where he was.

With a flick of her wand he was bound by thick black cords, but that didn't stop him from thrashing and struggling and trying to shout through the Silencing charm. She sat back on her heels.

"Patience, baby, patience," she said, her voice a low purr. "How are things?"

Harry relaxed a little and glared at her. Bellatrix shook her head. "Tsk, tsk. Don't bite the hand that feeds you, love. I brought you dinner." With another flick of her wand, eggs benedict appeared on a pale blue plate in front of Harry. He gave her a scornful look.

"Ah! Silly Bellatrix," she said next, laughing. "Harry can't eat that, he hasn't got his hands free." She took one bite of the eggs and then allowed them to vanish, but not before she noticed Harry eyeing them hungrily.

"You're hungry, aren't you." Harry's eyes shot back to hers and he stared defiantly. Bellatrix shook her head again. "You oughtn't deny it. That won't get you anywhere. Hungry?"

He didn't move.

"Stubborn little thing. I want you to eat. We don't want a wasted little ghost of a Potter, do we? You've got too much to do."

She saw him mouth I hate you. She smiled.

"But you're hungry."

He shook his head, not taking his eyes off hers.

"You're thirsty, then. I can see it. I know. You haven't eaten a thing since yesterday morning." She leaned in closer to him, so that their faces were only inches apart. "Listen to me. I can make anything come out of this wand, anything you want, any drink, any food, anything. You need to eat."

To demonstrate, she waved her wand a few times and the room was filled instantly with the aroma of some of the most delicious food Harry had ever seen outside Hogwarts. Against better judgment he closed his eyes and inhaled - roast pork, casseroles, and tarts and pastries and sundaes, and chicken and steak - he opened his eyes and it was all there. He stared.

"You are hungry," Bellatrix said. He looked back at her. "You like chocolate milk?"

He shook his head furiously and Bellatrix smiled again. "You do. Everyone does. I haven't met anyone yet who doesn't." She raised her wand again and said, "Imperio."

Bellatrix wouldn't have been surprised if the Imperius Curse didn't work on Harry - it hadn't worked well on his mother, either - but it seemed that Harry was too hungry to focus much on anything apart from allowing her to unbind him long enough to eat his fill of roast pork and rhubarb crumble. She was wary, though, of keeping him under the Curse for too long, because as he ate and regained strength she worried he might begin to throw the spell. She bound him again and Stunned him, and he fell back to the floor with a sudden THUMP. She stood, allowing the food to disappear, and looked down at him.

"Thursday," she murmured to herself. She needed him to keep up his strength until then. Only until then.

:::

When the Aurors had to perform raids on the old pureblooded families, they tried to do so in such a way as to make themselves look as polite-yet-in-charge as possible. So when they pounded on the Malfoys' front door at eight o'clock that evening, they tried not to do so too powerfully. This wasn't Ministry business, per se, but the Aurors were gaining authority every day and anything done in the name of the war was sanctioned.

Pansy Parkinson answered the door with Draco Malfoy on her heels, both of them wary as to who would be using the front door when nearly everyone they knew would use the Floo and come in through the kitchen. Pansy, at least, was completely unprepared to see Mad-Eye Moody and two young Ministry officials with Auror badges standing on Draco's front steps. She stared.

"Evening," said Moody, and he stepped into the foyer. With his magical eye swiveling around the room, he fixed his good eye on Draco. "Draco Malfoy, right?"

"Yes," said Draco, glaring. "Can I help you?"

"I need to see your mother."

"I'll get her," said Pansy in a small voice, and she ran down the hall as the Aurors began rifling through the Malfoys' foyer. Draco backed up down the hall as they came further into the house.

"Can I ask what your business is here?" he demanded once he had got his voice back.

"Ministry business, kid," said Moody. Near the kitchen door, the other two Aurors were conferring about the contents of a small ivory box that Draco knew had come from his mother's family.

"You don't have permission - " Draco began, but he knew, really, that that didn't mean anything.

"Ministry's conducting raids of every family of a known Death Eater," Moody informed him brusquely, and he limped past Draco down the hall. "Now if I were you I'd be quiet and let me get on with my job."

"Mum," Draco said when he saw his mother hurrying down the hall. "Mum, I knew there was something with our Floo - "

"Draco, please go upstairs with Pansy," said Narcissa in a voice that didn't sound like her own.

"Mum - " Draco began.

"Draco, please go," Narcissa said, and her voice sounded half-hysterical. With his heart in his throat Draco went up the stairs, barely glancing at Pansy, who was standing stock-still in the kitchen with one hand over her mouth.

Upstairs he opened the bag Dingle had sold him that morning and, after a few strong hits, began to relax. There was a soft knock on the door and Pansy entered.

"Draco, this is insane," she whispered. "What are they doing here?"

"Pansy," said Draco breathlessly. "Pansy, they're here for Potter."

"Potter?" Pansy repeated. Draco got up from the bed, nodding, and began to pace the room. "What are you talking about? Potter's not here."

"He is, Pansy, he is, he's in our attic." Draco smiled at her, and he seemed truly, unaccountably happy.

"Draco, stop talking nonsense," said Pansy, who sat on the bed and watched him pace. He sounded the way he had in the last few days before the holidays had started, only his voice was higher and louder and faster. He wasn't making any sense. Very little of the past thirty-six hours had made much sense, and it was beginning to unsettle her.

"I'm not," Draco insisted. He stopped pacing and stood still a moment. Gradually he began to laugh, but it was a laugh Pansy hadn't heard before - it was shrill and eerie, like a banshee, and it filled the room so she couldn't hear the Aurors advancing down the hall. They were closer and closer, repeating Finite Incantatem. Finite Incantatem. Finite Incantatem. Draco kept laughing. Pansy felt a cold dread drain into her bones.

Suddenly the door banged open and an imposing Auror was in the doorway.

"Finite Incantatem," he said in his deep, slow voice, and the lights went out and Draco's clock stopped glowing.

"What are you looking for?" Pansy asked nervously. Draco had stopped laughing and instead was trying to focus on the Auror's face, which he couldn't see well due to the dimness of the room. The Auror lit his wand and shined the light in Draco's eyes.

"Anything related to You-Know-Who," he stated.

"You-Know-Who?" Draco repeated, and Pansy clenched her fists thinking Shut up shut up shut up. "You mean the Dark Lord? He's coming for you, you know. It's happening."

"We'll see," said the Auror. He waved his wand again and the room seemed to be illuminated from the ceiling now rather than his wand, casting them all in a comforting golden light. Pansy watched him, feeling faintly sick, as he went around Draco's room, opening drawers and rifling through the contents.

"You know what's going to happen," Draco was saying, belligerently, as he stood by the Auror's side. "He's coming. We have only begun. We have only begun."

"Yep," said the Auror. He reached Draco's bedside table and produced the small wax-paper bag. "What's this?" he asked Draco.

"That's mine," said Draco, and he made a grab for it but the Auror pocketed it.

"Powdered Dragon Claw's illegal," he informed Draco.

"It's not Powdered Dragon Claw," Draco retorted, and he called the Auror a name that made Pansy close her eyes in horror. "It's a Muggle drug, and it's not illegal."

"Well, it's mine now," the Auror said. "And now if I were you, I would calm myself down a bit. I'm sure you don't want to be Stunned."

"STUNNED!" Draco shrilled. "You know who's Stunned? You know who's Stunned? I'll tell you who's STUNNED!" Bright pink circles had appeared on his otherwise translucent face; Pansy found she could not look at him anymore as he stood inches from this tall, broad Auror, shouting.

"Who's Stunned?" the Auror asked, and he did not sound as though he were merely humoring Draco.

"Draco, please be quiet," Pansy said in a strangled voice, looking at the floor.

"I'm not telling you who's Stunned!" Draco shouted. The Auror regarded him for a long moment.

"Mm-hmm," he said at last. Pansy let out a long breath. "Listen to me, Malfoy. You want to keep yourself out of trouble. You don't want an Auror tailing you."

"We already HAVE Aurors tailing us," Draco said, still in that loud, high voice. The Auror looked at him for another long moment, and then he returned to searching the room, Summoning things with names Pansy had only ever heard whispered and making notes on a small leaf of parchment. When at last he seemed to have confirmed that Draco's room didn't hold what they were looking for, he instructed Draco and Pansy to stay where they were and to let the Aurors continue their job. He left the room and Draco, who was shaking uncontrollably now, began to laugh again.

"Draco," Pansy said in a low, desperate voice. Draco kept laughing. He dropped to the floor and sat there laughing, looking out at the dark hall beyond the bedroom, where the portraits on the walls were whispering to one another in indignation and mounting panic.

:::

Bellatrix, this time, was prepared, and so when she heard the pounding on the front door she went up the stairs to the attic to retrieve Harry Potter. The Malfoys' home had an anti-Disapparation jinx on it, so she rigged an old toy broomstick of Draco's into a Portkey, and an instant later they were in the low, dark chamber beneath the drawing room.

Over her head she could hear Aurors passing. She heard Narcissa's footsteps. She heard Alastor Moody's voice. She settled onto the floor in the darkness and waited.

The waiting was the hard part, really - the Aurors were above her, and she wanted to angle her wand so the curse would blast right through the wood - but she had priorities, and dead Aurors were inviting but not high enough on her list.

This war, thus far, had been different as could be from the last one. For starters, she found that time had passed during her fourteen years in Azkaban; she was (though she hated to admit it) middle-aged now, and besides that so many things in the wizarding world had changed. There were innovations in Healing and in Hexing that hadn't even been murmurs when she'd gone in; none of the things that had held her interest twenty years ago was even occasionally discussed - nothing apart from, of course, the Dark Lord. She was doing his work, true, but things weren't as they had been.

This killed her especially: She loathed having to hide all the time. What she really wanted was what she'd had during the first war, when so often she'd felt like if she just lifted her hands the very weather would comply. She told herself that things would change soon, but that reassurance didn't make the hiding any easier to bear.

Beside her Harry's breath was shallow, and above her Aurors were passing from the drawing room - they hadn't found anything - and down the hall toward the stairs. She let out a breath.

:::

The rain that night drenched Hogwarts until the little streams that ran from the lake filled up and the lawn became a black and soggy moor. Remus, smoking his last cigarette, stood under the protection of a second-floor balcony and watched the downpour. The air was so damp, the balcony overhead provided him little shield, but the air felt good and besides, he did not want to go inside.

The Aurors had been very interested in what he'd had to say about Draco Malfoy - his comments to Ginny were provocative, and the thought of hauling Draco in for formal questioning had been thrown around. Snape, somewhat to Remus's surprise, did not appear keen on the idea. The Aurors had gone off to Wiltshire for the raid, ignoring Snape's prediction that they wouldn't find a thing - Bellatrix Lestrange is no idiot - and Remus had spent the last two and a half hours wandering the sighing, whispering, muttering castle and trying to put off having that last cigarette.

It wasn't that he didn't think he'd make it till the next morning without any tobacco; he knew he could do it, he just hated having to do so. He didn't like ever having his last anything; what if he wanted it later and there wasn't any left? Consequently the kitchen at Grimmauld Place had been filled with boxes of cold cereal with half a bowl's worth left and bottles of milk with only a few swallows. Sirius thought it a ridiculous neurosis, but Remus felt it was more of a self-protection.

A lot of people had come to him with concerned expressions in the first few days after Sirius had gone through the veil, and yes, Remus had been upset, but he wasn't as torn apart as the rest of the Order apparently thought he would be. If anything, Remus thought Snape was more upset. The Sirius Remus had lived with for the past year had not been the Sirius he'd lived with at Hogwarts, and beyond that he hadn't seen that former Sirius in going on fifteen years. He'd done his grieving already, twice - first when he'd grieved for all of them, and again a year ago, when they lived together again and Remus could see how desperate and changed their lives had really become.

The last few months in Grimmauld Place had been the hardest and - Remus couldn't really say this, not yet - in some ways he felt relieved. Sirius had been angry and volatile, completely overwhelmed in this new world, and he'd chafed at Dumbledore's orders to stay indoors. Remus thought Dumbledore was right, in this respect: Sirius was a loose cannon, as Snape had once muttered to McGonagall in a voice he didn't bother to keep down. He had escaped Azkaban looking not for freedom, but to pick up where he'd left off, and he was not prepared for a reality that wholly contradicted his expectations. His denial had been complete, those first few weeks in Grimmauld Place, but as days stretched into weeks and weeks into months, Sirius seemed to slowly comprehend what was happening to him. Sirius had been thirty-six when he'd gone through the veil, but Remus didn't think on that; after all, he'd been twenty-one when he died.

A low rumble of thunder rolled across the sky over his head, and Remus dropped his cigarette on the ground and stepped on it. He exhaled a last thin cloud of smoke and stared out at the grounds. The night was going to be a long one; his bed in the library was still there, but he had no intention of going to it soon.

Vaguely he wondered how the Auror raid had gone, but it felt as though another, separate part of him was the one with these thoughts, and the Remus whose body he wore was the one with the cigarettes and nothing. He went back inside.

He was passing the Great Hall when he saw McGonagall leaving it. In the light he could see that her face was white and drawn.

"Remus," she said, sounding startled. "I would have thought you would be sleeping."

Remus smiled a little. "I wanted a walk," he said, and she looked him up and down.

"You're dripping wet. Here, I'll walk you back to the Tower." She gave her wand a wave and aimed it at him; soon he could feel warm air on his arms as they walked toward Gryffindor tower. He smiled a little but didn't say anything. He wished she would leave him to wander anywhere but the seventh floor; in his hours of roaming the castle, he'd carefully avoided that wing. Its very smells brought too much rushing back too quickly.

"Kingsley and Nymphadora have returned from Wiltshire," she said presently, as they wound their way down the dark corridors. On either side of them portraits snored softly, and distantly Remus heard the faint, rhythmic sound of dripping water. McGonagall waited for a response, and when Remus didn't provide one she continued: "They didn't find anything except for those Muggle drugs you were telling us about."

"Yes, you ought to keep an eye on one Harold Dingle more closely in future," said Remus dryly.

"Tomorrow we'd like for you to be on call," McGonagall went on. "We need for you to tail Mr. Malfoy or Miss Parkinson if either one of them leaves the house."

Remus nodded. There was a silence as they walked; the only interruption was a portrait of a rather inebriated young witch who hailed Remus as they passed (he remembered that portrait hanging rather closer to Gryffindor tower during his time there - Sirius and James used to flirt with the witch incessantly). He nodded at the girl with a smile as she stumbled around the chair she'd been posed in.

"Password?" said a sudden, sleepy voice, after they'd rounded a few more corners and gone up a few more familiar stairs. Remus looked up; before he had realized it they were beside the portrait of the Fat Lady, and she was squinting down at them in the dim light.

"Quidditch Cup," said McGonagall crisply, with a wry look in Remus's direction. "I changed it this morning."

"Up Gryffindor," said Remus, conjuring a grin.

"Up Gryffindor," McGonagall agreed, matching his smile. "Remus, get some rest. We'll be watching young Mr. Malfoy closely; we think he might break. Apparently he said some things to Kingsley during the raid that rather incriminate him."

"Right," said Remus. The Fat Lady swung forward, revealing a round hole looking into a brightly-lit room Remus did not want to look at. But McGonagall wasn't leaving and so, feeling a little like an errant fourth-year caught out after hours, he climbed through. The door closed behind him with a dull thud, and he was surrounded by a warm golden light that felt like twenty years ago. It smelled like smoke and spices, and its centuries of magic gave the air a weight like water.

46