Legacy's Fall

It had taken them all by surprise when it finally happened. It was almost fifteen minutes past nine, and they'd given up pacing and speculating and planning in favor of standing in a huddle, eyes fixed on the house below. Harry had jumped when a light appeared in a window, but it stayed on for a full ten minutes without effecting any change in the situation, and his level of tension slowly crept back up to its previous level.

Malfoy was late. He hadn't done it.

Malfoy was going to die when he actually did not deserve to, and there was going to be no sneering face on the Hogwarts Express and no one smirking at him in Potions class and no one knocking him away to grasp at the Snitch, and Harry had no idea why these particular images came to his mind and why these thoughts were making him sick to his stomach.

If he knew this was happening somewhere out there just beyond the range of his vision, he was going to try to stop it, and he leapt forward unsteadily on aching legs that had been still for far too long. He stumbled and fell into the dirt, but in another moment he was almost grateful for it. By then, the first explosion had sounded, and with the cover of the bushes far behind him, he probably needed to be on the ground anyway.

Harry went down hard, glasses knocked askew and dirt flying into his mouth and nose as the air was forced out of his lungs. He dimly heard Remus shouting at Ginny to get down over the dull booming noises that were growing closer and closer to them, bringing a more intense tremor to the ground and a brighter flare of blue light each time. He screwed his eyes shut and threw his hands over his ears. It was what he imagined being on the receiving end of a lightning strike must be, the loud sizzle, the flare behind his closed eyelids, the rush of air past his ears as though everything were being sucked into vacuum, the faint sharp smell of something in the air burning away into nothing.

He expected to see a heap of rubble when he opened his eyes, but the gates were still there, faint and gleaming through a sickly blue haze.

Through the ringing in his ears, he dimly heard the pounding of feet as Remus thundered past him and to the gates, wrenching an opening in them with a strength Harry wouldn't have thought the older man possessed. Ginny was immediately on his heels, squeezing through the narrow gap and taking off at full sprint downhill to the Manor. It took two tries to get back to his feet, but Harry surpassed the others quickly once he started running. He flew across the darkened ground, his heels throwing up dirt and pebbles behind him. Remus had instructed them to throw spells at the house, to make as much light and racket as possible, and Harry was adding to the fray with everything that came to mind, spitting out incantations rapid-fire, one of which he was fairly certain was a cheering charm, and he was sure it was luck rather than strategy that had made one of the front windows cave in like that.

Remus was still a little way behind him, and Ginny even further back, and although Remus had told them not to go inside without him, Harry didn't want to hesitate if there were people dying within. He also hadn't expected the door to actually be unlocked when he tried it, after all of this fuss. He paused uncertainly, and tried to remember how this sort of thing was done. He had pushed his body into action, but his mind had gone from torpor to complete maelstrom so quickly that he still hadn't adjusted. Remus was suddenly next to him, breathing hard and throwing his full weight behind the heavy door. Harry felt a rush of relief and stepped back, allowing Remus to push past him into the house.

They moved slowly, wands at the ready, into a dark, cavernous hallway. There was no noise, no movement, no changes in the pitch of the shadows from one corner to the next, only moonlight and two pairs of eyes narrowing at him warily in a large frame on the left wall. Remus motioned at Harry for quiet, which Harry had intended to be anyway, and poked his lit wand into a doorway on the right that led to a dark and empty room. Remus held up a hand to restrain Harry from doing the same with the door on the other side. They approached it together, slowly and had just crossed the threshold when a shadowy form launched itself at them from a corner. Harry had almost thrown a disarming spell at it when it resolved itself into a willowy blond woman who stopped short when she saw them and then threw herself on Remus with such force that she nearly knocked him over.

Harry very nearly attacked her anyway, until his brain caught up with his eyes and he saw that she was not assaulting Remus, unless being embraced to death counted.

Remus managed to detach her, but he kept a firm grip on her arms. "Where are they?" he said in an urgent, low voice.

"She's gone. But we have to move now. We have to get out of here."

Narcissa used Remus's grip to her advantage and forcibly moved him across the room, Harry following behind them. So the Death Eater was gone, and Malfoy was...

Harry had not thought that he still had the ability to be squeamish. He'd seen plenty of gore and violence, been scared many times, had even seen someone dead before, and as tense as this whole experience had been, he was not prepared for this.

Malfoy was sprawled on the floor in front of the window that Harry had shattered, and although a heavy table had likely shielded him from the brunt of it, there were still shards of glass sprinkled across his still form. He had to be dead, Harry was sure of it, because there was no way anyone could be surrounded by that much of their own blood and still be alive. His pale hair was streaked with red, it was visibly soaking through even his dark clothing, and there was a steadily expanding stain spreading under his outstretched right hand, which... Harry jerked his gaze away and took a deep breath. Dimly, in the back of his mind, he had the realization that Malfoy had been completely honest about everything, down to his own demise. It was a very strange thought to have about Malfoy, who had been a flagship of dishonesty in Harry's mind, almost as strange as actually seeing him dead and bloody on the floor and feeling something other than vindication and relief.

He felt rather than heard Ginny draw up behind him, her muffled gasp almost swallowed up by the gravity in the room. Remus threw himself down next to Malfoy's body and pulled the cloak away from his face. Narcissa dropped down next to them, not seeming to notice or care that she was kneeling in a puddle of blood. She wobbled slightly, and Remus caught her with one arm. Most of the blood on her had to belong to her son, but Harry could pick out a distinct, thin trickle coming from a gash above her right temple.

Harry swallowed hard. Here was someone else whose life was gone in an instant, and the fact that it was Malfoy did little to mitigate the sick feeling sweeping through him. Of all the people Harry had ever expected to mourn as having died for the cause of good, Malfoy was certainly the last one.

"He's breathing, but just barely," Remus announced from the floor. Harry could detect something like relief in that simple statement, and it occurred to him suddenly that Remus had been Malfoy's teacher, too, and that Remus had been kind to and cared for all of his students, even the unpleasant ones. Harry wondered if Malfoy had enjoyed those classes, had even paid attention, had thought he could learn anything from a shabbily-dressed werewolf. He was strangely unnerved by the idea that he would never learn these things, or anything, about Malfoy ever again, because he was dying in a bloody mess on the floor in his stupid Manor and Harry was going to have to watch it. That was so like Malfoy, Harry thought angrily, he probably wanted Harry to feel this way, and he'd orchestrated this on purpose to make one last, spiteful gesture. Harry wasn't going for it. He wanted Malfoy alive and well and intact, so Harry could yell and ask him what the hell this was all about, and possibly punch him.

"Can we get him out of here?" Remus gave him a brief glance when he spoke, but Narcissa looked up and leveled her gaze at him. Harry almost stepped back, but he forced himself to meet her eyes. They were dark and wild and unfocused, staring at him with a mix of curiosity and disbelief, and Harry would have looked away except for the shock of seeing eyes so like Sirius's in such a different face. Harry closed his eyes for a brief moment, and stepped back. He hadn't expected the family resemblance, and he pushed the sudden shock away angrily. Now was not the time, and he forced his concentration back into the room.

"Moving him would not be the best option," said Remus.

"You have to," Narcissa said quietly, keeping her gaze on Harry almost warily. "She'll be back very soon, and she won't be alone this time."

Remus's head came up briefly. "Bellatrix?"

"And her little circle of friends," said Narcissa while Ginny gasped, and Harry gave an inward shudder. He suddenly had a much clearer picture of why Malfoy was in such bad shape, and this was Malfoy's aunt who had done this to him and it was a hell of a lot worse than a cupboard under the stairs.

"What did she do to him?" Remus's urgent, snappish voice was a strange counterpoint to the way he gently removed Malfoy's cloak from around his neck and pulled it away from his body.

"The usual," said Narcissa as she opened the collar of Malfoy's robes. A frighteningly satisfied smirk crossed her lips. "Then I leapt on her."

"He wouldn't be physically hurt this badly," said Remus. "Not from Cruciatus."

"There was something else, but after she threw me into the furniture, I didn't see much. Then the window exploded everywhere, and I, ah... panicked her a bit and she Apparated somewhere. So," she continued, her shaky voice somehow not detracting from the resolution in her tone, "you lot should get out of here, and take Draco, whatever happens to him, because that bitch is not getting hold of him again."

"Oh," said Remus irritably, while was binding the cloak around Malfoy's right leg, "and where are you going?"

Narcissa struggled to her feet and stared down at Remus. "Here is good," she said imperiously, backing away.

"No," snapped Remus, "you are not doing this to me. We are not - Harry, would you find me something to wrap his hand up? - going to go off and leave you here, because you cannot stand up to an army of Death Eaters on your own, no matter what you think about your own abilities, because you are emotionally distraught, and I think you are concussed, and it would be a stupid, stupid idea." He finished tying the cloak up with an angry flourish and turned around to glare at her.

Harry, who had moved on Remus's command, was watching the proceedings out of the corner of his eye while pulling an embroidered cloth from the back of a chair. Narcissa stomped unsteadily over to a large rug and kicked up the edge of it, exposing a network of intricate runes burned into the floor. She crossed her arms over her chest and glared back at Remus.

"I don't think so," he said almost cheerfully, as Harry held the cloth out for Remus to take. Narcissa made a snarling noise and snatched the cloth out of Harry's hand without looking at him, and dropped awkwardly back down on her knees. She lifted her son's hand carefully and turned it over. Harry's stomach lurched. Malfoy's hand had been completely crushed, and he could barely stand to look at it, except that Narcissa was plucking what looked like fragments of glass from the palm. Had he done that, when he had broken the window?

"Listen," Narcissa said urgently, "I have a chance here, to take her down and anyone else she happens to bring along. It solves a few of my problems."

"No grandstanding, just this once, please. Draco is going to need you. And I'll need your help."

"You think help is available to you now? Has the world changed that much?"

Remus actually laughed, a short, ironic burst that he quickly suppressed. "You're coming with us if I have to drag you kicking and screaming. I don't fancy explaining to your son that you wanted to stay behind and blow up yourself and half the countryside."

Narcissa smiled sadly and laid a hand on her son's hair. "Remus..." she said slowly. "I don't think-"

"I don't want to explain it to him," Remus said firmly.

"Maybe," Harry broke in tentatively. No one looked at him. "Maybe we should take him to the hospital?"

"No," said Remus and Narcissa in unison.

"But... if we carry him all over the place like that, aren't we going to make him worse?"

"I don't know," said Remus. "I don't know what will happen to him if we move him. The only thing I know for sure is what's going to happen to all of us if we stay here."

He stood, and held out a hand for Narcissa. Even with help, it was obviously difficult for her to stand, and she wobbled unsteadily on her feet. "I have to get something," she said, wrenching herself away from Remus and stumbling towards the door.

"If you're not back in two minutes we're coming after you, and there will be a body-bind put on you if necessary. Ginny, give me that broomstick, I have to go get the car. Seriously, she has two minutes." He sighed. "See if you can't find something to wrap around him." He took the broomstick from Ginny's outstretched hand and disappeared out the window.

Harry looked at Ginny for the first time since she'd entered. She was looking resolutely out the window that was no longer there, seemingly unable to take in anything that was happening in the actual room. Her jeans were ripped and her knee was scraped; she must have fallen on her way down the hill. Harry wondered if the dratted broomstick hadn't been what tripped her up. He opened his mouth to say something to her, but she wasn't looking as if she would acknowledge him, much less respond, so he stayed silent.

Half a second later, she spoke first. "I don't know where he thinks he's taking us."

"It doesn't matter," Harry said shortly, unable to care about pondering that question just now, and turned his attention back to Malfoy. He hadn't moved, and there was no indication that he was even breathing. Harry didn't see how he could be; Malfoy's face was streaked with drying blood, and it had clotted under his nose. He thought he ought to try and do something, but he didn't know anything about first aid and he didn't want to make things worse. He took a few steps closer, and noticed the almost imperceptible rise and fall of Malfoy's body. Apparently he really was breathing, but Harry thought it might be easier on him without that mess on his face. He traversed the room, searching for some other piece of cloth of manageable size that didn't look like it cost a million galleons, when his eye caught something sticking out from under the sofa.

He snatched it up before he had fully realized the thought that snatching anything up in Malfoy Manor might not be the best idea. It was just a piece of wood, however, that Harry didn't recognize as part of a wand until he'd located the other two pieces as well. He held them up in amazement, wondering if it was Malfoy's but not really sure. He'd seen Malfoy's wand a million times, but he had never paid attention to what it looked like.

"It's his," Ginny said dully from the corner, as if she could read his thoughts. Harry wondered how in the world she knew, but he tucked the pieces into his pocket regardless.

"It's useless," she said irritably.

"I know," he snapped. "He might want it anyway."

Ginny shot him a disbelieving look. "Suit yourself, if you want to go picking up after Malfoy. Where is she, anyway? Shouldn't you be off body-binding her right about now?"

"Not necessary," said a voice from the doorway. "And I'd like to see you try." Narcissa staggered in, a large messenger bag throwing her even more off balance than her concussion already had. She had tied a strip of fabric around her head to stop the bleeding, making her look like a warped version of a character in a bad adventure film. "I have to sit," she announced, pitching herself into a chair which she missed by a few inches. Harry started forward to help her, but she held up a hand to stop him.

"Where did Remus go?"

"To get the car."

"Oh, lovely, a car." Narcissa made to get up again, turned somewhat pale, and sat back down. "Is he still breathing?"

Harry nodded.

Narcissa gave a faint smile and closed her eyes. Harry remembered hearing somewhere that you weren't supposed to let people with concussions fall asleep. "Uh, Mrs. Malfoy?"

Her eyes flew open. "Who?"

"Um," Harry stammered uselessly, taking a few steps back.

"Right, I thought so. Don't call me that."

She didn't offer any suggestions as to what he could call her, so Harry hoped she didn't start to pass out again, because he doubted 'hey, you' would go over any better.

There was a sudden screeching sound from the top of the hill, a loud crash, and the rev of an engine. Reflected in the car's headlamps, Harry saw one side of the gate swing away into the dark. The car streaked down the hill at breakneck speed, the play of light making him dizzy as that car bobbed sickeningly up and down on the uneven terrain.

"We need something big to wrap him in." Harry had nearly forgotten Remus's order, and a frantic glance around the room provided nothing helpful.

"Pull those drapes down," said Narcissa. "They're probably ruined anyway, not that it matters now."

Harry tugged on the unyielding fabric, shooting death glares at Ginny, who was watching the car's progress and apparently felt no need to help. They came down with a resounding whoosh and cavalcade of fabric that Harry had to fight his way out of. He eyed them critically. They were light enough not to be a nuisance, but there was something else embroidered and priceless-looking that he had to ruin, and he was probably going to get blamed for it later. He spread the drapes over Malfoy, trying not to cover his face, and pondering whether he should try and tuck them in under him, but Ginny hissed, "don't touch him!" and Harry jumped back quickly. He wheeled around to say something, but her eyes were hard and distant, and he wasn't about to start anything with her right now.

"Harry," Remus said urgently as he ran into the room. "You and I will have to carry Draco, I think. Do you need help?" he asked, turning to Narcissa.

"No," she said flatly.

"Come on," he said to Harry. Remus moved to lift Malfoy's shoulders, leaving Harry with his feet. "Try to hold him as steady as you can."

Harry heaved upwards, expecting a substantial weight, and was startled when Malfoy came off the ground easily. It was no struggle at all to carry him out of the room and down the hall, and it was only when they were negotiating the steps outside that Harry's arms got tired. Malfoy weighed surprisingly little, in fact, he was much smaller than Harry had thought he was, and that was saying something about a person who was generally seen against the mountainous backdrop of Crabbe and Goyle. Even Malfoy's much-hated face didn't seem so pointy and menacing, propped up against Remus's chest. It looked- well, bloody and pathetic- but like a normal person's instead of a sneering bully's, which was likely due to unconsciousness, but it still jarred him. Harry felt a twinge of sympathy and real alarm as blood began to seep through the drapes. He shot a worried look at Remus, who looked back at him, determined and resigned.

Ginny had gone on ahead to open the car doors for them, but had immediately climbed into the passenger seat, staring forward and saying nothing. On Remus's direction, Harry stepped back into the car, awkwardly juggling Malfoy's balance and his own as he scuttled backwards across the seat. With his legs bent up slightly, Malfoy fit on the seat with room to spare, although he didn't leave much room for anyone else to settle in comfortably. He ducked out on the other side of the car and looked across the roof at Remus.

"Do you by any chance know how to drive?" Remus asked somewhat dubiously.

"I think I could," said Harry with more certainty than he felt. Considering that his only other driving experience had been with a flying car, and he had ended that one deep in the Whomping Willow, he would hardly count himself an expert on the subject.

"We'll give it a try, then," said Remus. "I need to sit in back and look after Draco and Narcissa."

"Where is Narcissa?" She wasn't outside with them, and Harry didn't see her anywhere.

"Dammit!" Remus shouted, accenting the word with a swift punch to the roof of the car. He spun around and marched back up the steps and into the house. Great, thought Harry miserably, not only am I going to be cooped up in a car with two Malfoys, one half-dead and one clearly insane, I have to drive the car. Well, he self-corrected hastily, it was one Malfoy and one whatever-she-was.

Currently, what she was was being half-dragged, half-carried down the steps of the Manor, and although it was much to Narcissa's credit that she did not kick or scream, she did let loose with a barrage of language that was saltier than anything Harry had ever heard in his life. Remus had a death grip on both her arms, and he bodily steered her towards the backseat.

"Alright, alright! Let go of me, you overgrown puppy, I'm going!" She pried his hands away from her and slid into the backseat, settling her son's head on her lap.

"Harry, get in the car," Remus barked as he came around and got into the backseat on the other side.

For the first time in his life, Harry got behind the wheel of a car and tried desperately to figure out what was what without letting on to everyone else that he didn't already possess this knowledge. The key was in the ignition, and thankfully the engine started when he turned it. It really wasn't fair, Harry reflected as he watched the various gauges coming to life, he had spent five years at a wizarding school where driving was hardly a priority, and even during his eleven years in the Muggle world, he had never paid attention to this.

"Gas on the left, brake on the right," Remus put in quietly from behind him.

"So why is he driving?" Narcissa asked nervously.

"He'll be fine," said Remus as he reached up to grab his bag from the seat next to Harry. "Go slowly," he said, patting Harry gently on the shoulder.

Harry had no intention of doing anything but, and he felt a thrill of pride as he pressed on the gas lightly and felt the car inch forward. He angled it back up the hill, surprised at how easy this actually was, and he felt it was completely unnecessary of Ginny to be gripping the dashboard with both hands like that. He was feeling good up until he hit the first bump and stomped on the brakes out of reflex. The car lurched, Remus gave a loud grunt, Narcissa yelped, and Ginny gave him a nasty glare.

"Sorry," Harry said sheepishly.

"Stay off the brakes," Remus said tightly.

Harry winced and kept going, hoping he hadn't hurt Malfoy any worse by throwing him around. He heard various scrambling going on in the backseat, heard Remus mutter, "here, take this and clean him up a little," and Harry wished he knew what was going on back there, but he was afraid to take his eyes away from where the car was going.

"Which way?" he asked as he edged carefully through the gate, trying to avoid the mass of twisted metal Remus had created on the way in.

Remus started to speak, but Narcissa cut him off. "Left down that main path. It comes out on even ground and if you keep going, you'll find a road out there somewhere."

Harry wasn't entirely sure Narcissa was thinking clearly enough to give trustworthy directions, but Remus said nothing in protest, so Harry kept on. He risked a quick glance in the mirror and saw the two adults hunched over Malfoy in the cramped space. Remus had a pocketknife out and was attempting to cut Malfoy's trouser leg away from his knee.

"Look," Harry said nervously, not really sure why he was so frantic except on general principles, "is he really going to be okay?"

"Harry, I can't say," said Remus. "We're not entirely sure what Bellatrix did to him, and we haven't stopped the bleeding yet."

"Don't sugarcoat it," Narcissa said quietly. "I just hope that if he goes, he doesn't wake up at all. Oh, gods," she breathed suddenly, "Remus, look at this. Look at his neck."

Harry couldn't help turning his head to look, and he almost turned the wheel with him before he checked himself.

"It's on his knee, too- what is that?" Narcissa continued frantically. Harry couldn't make out much in the vague shadows behind him other than the occasional flash of blonde hair, but he attempted a closer look anyway.

Remus made a noise in his throat. "I don't know - I can't see very well- Harry! Watch where you're going!"

Harry turned forward again just in time to see a large tree looming out of the darkness and bearing down on them. He swerved quickly and managed to miss it, but he had also managed to send everyone flying. Ginny's head hit the window with a resounding crack.

"We have to get him somewhere fast," said Remus into the silence.

"Speed's not going to do us any good if we don't even know what's happened to him!"

"Cissy," Remus said firmly, "there has got to be something we can do. Can you get me that salve out of that bag, please?"

"We really should take him to the hospital, right?" Harry asked nervously.

"I don't-" began Remus, but Narcissa cut him off.

"Harry," she said, sounding as though she were testing out the sound of his name and not liking the results, "I believe you may have lost sight of the larger picture, you having been a permanent fixture on Voldemort's list for the majority of your life. What I think you fail to realize is that you aren't his only concern, and the priority he assigns to pursuing you tends to fluctuate a bit."

Harry felt supremely indignant, but didn't interject. He wasn't sure where she was taking this, or how she would react to being cut off, or if the stress of head injury and bleeding-to-death son would allow him to discount her words completely.

"If something else happens to set him off," Narcissa continued, "sure, he could continue to chase down Harry Potter, or he could take care of this other little thing, and then go on chasing down Harry Potter. Believe me, he can always go back to that. That anger isn't likely to go away anytime soon. Well, dear, something else has happened, and the way it all came out has turned his eye inward a bit."

"And that means we can't go to St. Mungo's?" asked Harry dubiously, feeling once again like he'd been insulted somehow and wanting to ask Narcissa if she'd been in Slytherin, too, because she certainly talked like one.

"What she means," said Remus, who apparently knew how to translate Slytherin into language the rest of the world could understand, "is that it's not a very good idea. First of all, I doubt they could do anything for Draco other than heal these cuts a bit faster. Then there's the fact that every Death Eater in the country, and probably most of the sympathizers, will know what has happened tonight within the next few days."

"That's overly optimistic; Voldemort already knows," said Narcissa quietly. "The rest are a matter of hours, and after the, ah... confusion dies down, someone will remember to come looking for us. And it would help if no one had seen us recently."

"She's right," said Remus. "With the number of people in and out of St. Mungo's, and no way to screen their political loyalties, the chances of the wrong person finding out where these two are is very high. Then no matter what happens with Draco's injuries, he's dead."

"So where do we go, then?"

"The boy asks a legitimate question," said Narcissa. "And I hope you have a very reassuring answer."

"I know where to go," Remus said calmly. "Harry, when you find the road, you'll need to let me drive."

Since Harry hadn't protested any of the actions he'd been asked to perform tonight, he felt no need to start right then. In fact, a part of him was glad that he was being asked to relinquish the wheel. He'd been doing well, he thought, as measured by the fact that he hadn't run into anything yet or given anyone but possibly Ginny any lasting injuries, but that was more likely due to the snail's pace he'd been keeping rather than true skill on his part.

Everyone seemed outwardly calm enough, and Harry hoped that the lack of noise from the backseat meant that Malfoy wasn't getting any worse. Ginny was still stubbornly silent, curled up against the window opposite him, and Harry was not sure how to fathom her behavior. She hadn't shown any inclination to shut up at all up until about an hour ago, and even then she'd only opened her mouth to snap at him. He didn't know why she thought she had any greater reason to be upset and short-tempered than the rest of them, but whatever it might have been, she was not communicating it.

"Harry, stop here," said Remus, "and put the brakes on gently."

Harry was too relieved to resent the instruction, or Remus leaning over the seat to set the parking brake. He looked back and watched Remus fussing over Malfoy's makeshift bandages one last time while pondering where to sit if not the driver's seat. He could budge over from where he was and sit next to Ginny, but that would necessitate actually sitting next to Ginny. His only other option was a backseat full of Malfoys. Harry gave a nervous glance at the back of Ginny's unmoving head, half afraid that in whatever distressed state she was currently in, she would likely punch him if he tried to sit next to her. She couldn't have been too happy when his erratic driving skills threw her into the window, either. He swallowed. Backseat full of Malfoys it was, then.

He was barely even settled when Remus took off like a shot, tearing down the road with the headlamps on full blast, going entirely too fast. After he recovered from the sudden inertia, Harry found that perching tentatively on the edge of the seat was not going to work. The blood-stained drapes were piled up in the floorboard on top of Ron's broomstick, leaving him little leg room. Harry realized with a sinking stomach that he was, in fact, going to have to sit back with Malfoy's legs across his lap and let Malfoy bleed on him. He readjusted his position, all the while really hoping that memory repression was something that could be voluntarily done. Harry then encountered the additional problem of having nowhere to put his arms that didn't involve direct Malfoy contact. Unfortunately, the most comfortable option involved resting them on the leg which was missing trousers below the knee thanks to Remus's handiwork.

When his psychological discomfort had faded to a more manageable level, Harry risked a look at Malfoy's injuries. Remus had bound his right knee tightly, but Harry could still see what had caused the earlier exclamation. All around his knee, and even down the length of his leg, were patches of darkened skin, shiny and raw as fresh burns, but the color of a deep bruise. They were on his neck, too, and Harry figured there were probably more of them that he couldn't see. He carefully rearranged his arms to make sure he wasn't touching any of them, and he tried very hard to ignore the stain on his hand when he moved it.

Narcissa kept giving him sideways looks, as if she was not sure what to make of him, and Harry wished she'd stop, because the last thing he could stand up to right now was scrutiny. Now that he had nothing to do, he felt tired, and absurd, and oddly hollow. He hadn't done anything, really, after all of that buildup. He'd driven a car, tentatively and not that well, he'd pulled down draperies, he'd carried Malfoy's meager dead weight around for a while, but it wasn't as though he could be particularly impressed with himself. There'd been no one to fight off, and the only present danger was that Malfoy might still die slowly, unconscious, with his feet in Harry's lap. He really was not sure what Narcissa was seeing, and he wished she'd stop her observations.

When he ventured up the courage to look back at her, she had leaned back with her eyes closed, one hand holding her son's injured one still, the other slowly stroking his hair behind his ear. She was difficult to make out, but she looked so frail, and oddly serene, and not at all how Harry remembered her from one brief glimpse a year ago. Harry watched the trail of her fingers across Malfoy's bloodied face, and in the silence, Harry could actually hear Malfoy breathing, slow and labored and wet-sounding and with long pauses.

Harry tried to count the seconds between each breath, and was just thinking that it was an unnaturally long time when he opened his eyes and found that the car was coming to a stop. He blinked hard, not sure how he'd managed to nod off during all of that. Malfoy's legs were starting to slide slowly from his lap, and he grabbed for them hurriedly, catching a palm-full of bare calf and fighting off the irrational fear that he'd just contracted some kind of Malfoy disease through skin contact.

Remus opened the door on Narcissa's side. "How is your head?"

"Still attached, unfortunately."

Harry was immensely grateful that the two of them pulled Malfoy from the car, which removed his personal space dilemma and left him free to get out and take in the surroundings.

It was too dark still to see much of anything, but there appeared to be a mound of greenery in a small clearing, and the mound of greenery had a door in it. Harry removed his glasses, wiped them on his shirt, and put them back on. Yes, it actually was a mound of greenery with a door in it. And now he had a smear of dirt across the right lens of his glasses.

Head still muzzy from sleep, Harry stumbled to the door, which Narcissa had left open so that Remus could carry Malfoy inside. He heard the car door shut behind him, but he didn't hear Ginny's footsteps behind him and he didn't wait for her.

The interior of whatever-this-place-was looked a little more promising than the outside had suggested. There appeared to be intact walls, and Harry could make out the silhouettes of furniture in the room he passed. He followed the sound of the adults' voices down a long, dark hallway and ended up in a smallish dining area that was almost completely taken up by a large table. They had laid Malfoy out on it, on top of the drapes, and he looked even more pitiful on his back with his limbs splayed around him.

Narcissa was standing near his head, trying once more to clean him up, and Harry's stomach turned uncomfortably when he saw that her hands came away covered with blood after she touched him. He was uncomfortable for an entirely different reason when he realized that she had Remus's pocketknife in hand and that her hands were so bloody because Malfoy's clothes were soaked in it and that she was trying to cut them away.

Harry could understand the medical necessity of that, but he sure as hell didn't want to stand around and watch the process, so he slunk off in search of Remus, whom he could hear rummaging around in the kitchen.

Remus had his head and shoulders submerged in a cabinet, and he stood up rapidly enough to bang his head on the top of it when Harry poked his head around the corner and asked if he could help.

"Sorry," said Harry. "It's probably not the best idea to sneak up on anyone right now."

Remus cracked half a smile. "No," he admitted. He rubbed his temples and sighed. "Potions isn't one of your better subjects, is it?"

"Not really," said Harry. "But I'd rather, ah... I'd rather be in here right now."

Another long sigh. "Understandable, but unless you can concoct healing potions from memory, you're no help here. Where's Ginny?"

Harry shrugged.

"Go find her, please, and ask her to come inside. She doesn't seem to be doing so well." Remus chewed his lower lip thoughtfully, as though he were about to say something else, but thought better of it. "Then, if you would, go upstairs and find some decently clean linen."

"There's an upstairs?" Harry looked dubiously up at the low ceiling. "What is this place, anyway? Is it yours?"

"I used to stay here from time to time. It doesn't belong to anyone." Remus brushed past Harry to the dining room. "Go find Ginny," he said over his shoulder.

Harry would have preferred instructions such as "go find a rabid Niffler," or maybe "go find a horde of angry Death Eaters," because at least he might know what to do there, but he doubted that anything was really going to go his way tonight.

At least she wasn't terribly hard to find. In fact, she hadn't moved at all. She was still curled up on the passenger seat of the car, staring out the window and... oh, by everything holy, she was crying.

You have faced down Voldemort, Harry, he reminded himself sternly. You can handle a crying person.

He opened the driver's door, gingerly eased himself onto the seat next to Ginny, stared straight forward, and waited for her to acknowledge him. There was no sobbing, and no audible sniffling, so she couldn't have been crying too hard, and maybe he could get through this.

"I don't want to see anyone right now," she snapped.

"Then don't look at me," Harry said defensively. "Remus sent me out here; I would have left you alone."

There was a long pause, during which Harry stared resolutely at his lap. There were smears of blood on his arms up to his elbows, and large splotches of it on his T-shirt.

"Then why didn't you?"

"Because Remus is too busy to come out here himself, and he seems to be worried about you." He didn't even have another shirt with him, and if he couldn't get the stains out of this one, he didn't know what he'd do until he could find something else to wear.

There was a faint rumbling sound to his left, and it took him a moment to realize that it was Ginny's strained laughter.

"Right, he's busy," said Ginny disdainfully. "He's dealing with Malfoy's... mess."

Harry felt an irrational spike of anger. "Ginny, Malfoy's probably going to die, you know that, right? He wasn't lying, and this was obviously not some kind of a trap!" This was faintly ridiculous, arguing with someone who wouldn't so much as look at you sideways.

"He's done one thing that wasn't purely terrible, Harry, and we don't even know why he did it! Don't waste your time feeling sorry for him! You hate Malfoy. I hate Malfoys--" she whipped around to face him, finally, eyes wide open with fear, then she looked at the rest of him and curled further into her corner.

"It doesn't matter if I hate him or not!" Harry shouted, slamming a fist down on the dashboard. "I just don't think he needs to die; I'm sick of people dying-"

"Could you leave me alone?" Ginny said, in a voice gone small and oddly gentle.

"Look, I'm not trying to bother you. Remus wanted you to come inside."

She sighed deeply and looked over at him once more. Her face had softened perceptibly, and she looked sorrowful as she opened her mouth to speak. Ginny's gaze swept over him again, settling on his legs for a few seconds. She screwed her eyes shut tightly and drew her mouth into a taut line.

"You heard me," she said in a firmer voice. The sudden shift made no sense to Harry, and he gaped at her stupidly as she continued. "Get out of the car. I don't want to hear about how difficult your life is. Take your set of problems that are worse than anyone else's, and get out of here."

She hadn't raised her voice again, but Harry was stung, and nowhere in the rules did it say that you couldn't shout at girls. Harry was preparing to let her have it when she took advantage of his hesitation to shriek "NOW!" in a shrill, piercing voice in the vicinity of his ear.

He didn't have to be told twice, and he was surprised at how much he didn't want to be around Ginny at that moment, even to yell at her. He slammed the car door hard for good measure and was back inside the house before he realized that his jeans were stiff with drying blood all the way to the knee and that Ginny had said "Malfoys," in the plural.

********************************************

She was going inside for reasons of personal comfort only, Ginny told herself. It was growing too hot in the car because it was in direct sunlight, and she wanted some shade. She did not care one bit to see the interior of this rundown excuse for a cottage, and she most certainly did not care what the others were up to.

It was too dark inside, and it looked and smelled like dirt had made a hostile takeover years ago and it was too late to fight it off. Ginny wrinkled her nose and inched quietly down the hallway towards the source of light. She could hear activity off to the right; it sounded as though someone were cooking.

It would stand to reason that the first person she'd be confronted with was Malfoy. Ginny definitely had the upper hand, since the other party was unconscious on a table, but that didn't make it any more pleasant. She paused on the threshold, gripped by the illogical fear that Malfoy could someone see her, and was on the verge of sitting up to make a scathing comment.

Someone had spread his cloak out on top of him, hiding all from view from the shoulders down. He'd been cleaned up pretty well, save for the marks on his neck and collarbone, and of course, his blood-saturated hair, which had been swept behind his head. It wasn't that terrible anymore. She could almost take it.

Then, of course, Remus and Narcissa entered the room and ruined it. Ginny edged towards the wall and concentrated on making herself as small as possible, but they didn't see her. They were still covered, worse than Harry even, and they'd obviously taken no pains to rectify the situation. Ginny gave an internal shudder and pushed down the sudden nauseous urge that overtook her. She looked down at the cracks in the floor rather than directly at the blood.

Remus had a hand on Narcissa's shoulder blade, and was steering her to the table. "You need to sit before you collapse."

"I'm fine," Narcissa protested in the split second before Remus grabbed her by the waist and lifted her easily onto the table.

He rested his hands on her knees for a moment and peered into her face. "Do you eat?"

Narcissa countered the question with a withering look. "I'm on a liquid diet," she drawled in the same tones her son used when he was trying to mock. She drummed her fingers on the tabletop. "There were chairs here. What happened to the chairs?"

Ginny drew back and blinked hard, hoping the scene in front of her would vanish. Not only did it involve a bloody Malfoy, but it involved a Malfoy of an entirely different variety of bloody having been here before.

Remus shrugged. "Don't know. Vagrants, probably. What happened to the mayday?"

Narcissa snorted. "The same thing that happened to my privacy. I couldn't have used it even if I'd needed to," she said, shooting Remus a significant look. "Nothing went my way after I went back. Lucius was always around, and she was there almost the instant after the Aurors left with him."

"I was worried," Remus said shortly. "I was out of my head with it. And some people had the nerve to mention you, and I just wanted you out of there."

"I'm out of there," Narcissa said quietly, "but this time Draco's out with me."

Remus smiled, patted her knee again, and moved away. He laid the back of his hand on Malfoy's forehead and shook his head. "We'll need a fever-reducing draught."

"What I don't understand," said Narcissa, "is how you got there. I was not so indiscreet that my son could have known it was you."

"Of course not. Draco wrote to Harry."

There was a heavy silence, during which Ginny moved forward surreptitiously to catch the full effect of Narcissa's response.

"I don't know what to make of that," she said almost conversationally, and then she burst into a brief peal of musical laughter. "It makes sense, of course, but really... you're a piece of work," she directed the last bit to her unconscious son, laying one hand gently on his leg. Her thin shoulders kept shaking, and the laughter gave way to telling silence.

"I'm not crying," she announced to Remus.

"I didn't ask if you were," he returned quietly. "Sounds like Harry's done chopping and boiling, so let's get to work, if you're up for it."

"Why wouldn't I be?" Narcissa snapped, as she slid awkwardly from the table and stormed into the kitchen in a gruesome parody of a straight line. Remus sighed and followed her.

After their exit, Ginny realized that the hallway turned a corner to her right and appeared to bypass the kitchen completely, which was just perfect, really, and maybe she could find the upstairs and not be noticed for a while. The detour was absolutely filthy and choked with cobwebs, and Ginny was almost certain she saw a beetle skitter away into the darkness in front of her feet. She made a face and stepped forward cautiously, and thought that if Malfoy was awake, he'd be making a nasty comment on how this should remind Ginny of home, when this was the farthest thing from home she could imagine, and Malfoy never really had known what he was talking about, anyway.

The staircase was beyond the next corner, but since luck and all the gods had turned their backs on Ginny Weasley, there was an open doorway to the kitchen between her and escape. She shook her head and moved on, hoping everyone else was too busy making potions and fussing about Malfoy to pay attention to her, and her foot was on the bottom stair when she heard Remus say, "Harry, did you go upstairs for those sheets, yet?"

And no, Harry was not going to come upstairs if she was going to be there, and that was really the only thing that made Ginny wheel around and poke her head into the kitchen.

"I'll do it," she barked out, and spun around and left.

"I forgot to ask you who that was," Narcissa's voice drifted out into the stairwell.

"Ginny Weasley," said Remus.

"There's something else interesting," Narcissa replied.

Ginny wasn't sure why exactly her name was so interesting, and she didn't want to waste any more time pondering anything else that damned snarky woman said, because Narcissa had an irritating way of responding to everything as though it were the funniest or the most ridiculous thing she'd ever heard. Ginny didn't know why Remus had bothered to be concerned about her; he should have been more worried about anyone who tried to go after Narcissa. She'd have them annoyed to death in five minutes flat.

Ginny kicked open the first door she saw out of sheer frustration and spent the next small eternity waving clouds of dust away from her face. Obviously, no one had been up here in a very long time. And if the last person there had been Narcissa, Ginny highly doubted that she would have bothered to clean.

It was something she absolutely couldn't make sense of, and Ginny had encountered few of those things in her life. Narcissa had been here before, and when, and for what purpose? Had she gotten in trouble before, and had to run? Running away to the same place twice was a criminally stupid move, even Ginny knew that.

She dropped down on the first available surface, which happened to be a pretty poor excuse for a bed, and paused to regroup. There were too many things that were too strange about this situation, and Ginny wished desperately for her mother or Hermione or someone sensible, and normal, to talk to her and reassure her and tell the rest of these insane people where to go. Barring that, she was just going to have to reason it out alone.

She didn't trust Narcissa as far as she could throw her, and judging from the ease with which Remus had been dragging her around, Ginny could probably manage to throw Narcissa a respectable distance herself. Narcissa had been trying to pull something back at the Manor, something Remus had said would blow up half the countryside, and she'd been horribly uncooperative since then.

Remus she couldn't suspect of anything other than having been taken in by someone who was, for the most part, nice to him and who also happened to be your basic damsel in distress, and an extremely pretty one at that. Who wouldn't have wanted to believe her? But then again, if she was a spy, who was spying primarily on Lucius Malfoy, then she should have known when things were happening, and she should have been able to stop them, and they had happened anyway.

Ginny wrapped her arms around her shoulders and took a long, shuddering breath. Everything came back to first year in the end, and she knew she should get used to it, but it was a horrible thing that she shouldn't have to get used to. And Harry, of all people, should have known, should have considered, but he hadn't, and now he was one of the people blundering about frantically downstairs soaked head to toe in Malfoy's blood.

She really should have been back downstairs with the linen right now, and she didn't want anyone coming after her, so Ginny got up and started pulling sheets off of the bed. The ones on top were dirty beyond salvage, and Ginny dropped them to the floor and kicked them angrily into a corner. It occurred to her that this was pretty much what she did with her bedsheets at home until her mother barged in to deal with them and lecture Ginny for being messy. She blinked back a fresh wave of tears and tried to pull herself together. She wanted to be at home so badly she couldn't stand it, and if all she was going to be doing was avoiding everyone and running around after dirty laundry...

Ginny sat down again, and took a deep breath. Calming herself down wasn't working so well after all. She needed to be here. Everyone else was too close to the situation to look at it with a clear head. Ginny stared down through her spread fingertips. The fitted sheet didn't look so bad, and it was probably the best she was going to get, so she stood up, whipped it off the bed in a hurry, balled it up and carried it downstairs before she lost her nerve again.

There appeared to be an argument in full force down there, and Ginny would have stepped into the middle of it without a thought if she hadn't heard her name.

"She really shouldn't be here, Cissy, and her parents have to be worried sick. I can take her home and be back - "

"You can't leave! I need your help right now, don't you run out on me this time!" It was just great that Ginny's own fate was being discussed behind her back within the framework of Narcissa's neediness. Ginny scowled and paused on the stairs to listen.

"I can't very well say 'bon voyage, Ginny' and send her off on her own, can I?"

"That's not even what I'm saying, Remus, would you listen to me? I'm saying none of us can go running back and forth from here if we don't want to be found, and that includes runaway Weasley children and very recognizable werewolves! Stop being such a damn ... mother for a minute or two and listen to yourself!"

Ginny poked her head around the corner in time to see Narcissa throw herself back against the counter and put a hand over her face. Harry was leaning against the wall across from Ginny, looking apprehensive and probably trying to pretend that he wasn't there. Ginny tried to catch his eye in solidarity, and he had to have seen her already, she was standing right there, but he wouldn't look at her. Remus had his eyes closed, and he breathed deeply before opening them and looking at Narcissa evenly.

"I have to go out and buy some things, anyway. There are wizards in that village, I can-"

"No," she said brightly, "you can't."

"Pardon me?"

Narcissa laughed nervously. "I'm feeling a bit sheepish at present about the whole thing, actually--"

"Wolves eat sheep," Remus snapped. "And don't try to mess me about. What did you do?"

"It's not in my bag," she said with a cheeriness that Ginny was sure the situation didn't warrant, if the fury on Remus's face was anything to go by.

"What?"

"The Portkey," she said, "is not in my bag."

An awful silence descended upon the room. The line of Remus's mouth was positively dangerous.

"Yes, I know, I'm completely useless, but there's nothing to be done about it now, is there?"

"Yes, there is," said Remus. "I could strangle you, but I think we've frightened Harry enough. And there's still the little matter of running down to the village for things which we can't do without, and now thanks to your little error, none of us can go, and there are probably Death Eaters destroying my flat as we speak, damn it all straight to hell, Narcissa!"

Remus stormed into the dining room and Narcissa squeezed her eyes shut and expelled a breath slowly.

Because he was a stupid, overly useful person, Harry stepped forward and cleared his throat. "Um, Narcissa? I could- I guess I could go."

Narcissa removed her hand from her eyes and looked sideways at him. "That's a very kind offer, but it's not a very practical one." Harry looked at her blankly.

"You're Harry Potter!" Ginny blurted out, because apparently he wasn't going to save himself from this one.

"I know," he snapped at her, not taking his eyes from Narcissa.

"If anyone's going to get recognized, it's you. If any wizards see you, it's going to make news somewhere- 'Harry Potter spotted in- wherever the hell we are!'" Ginny looked at Narcissa, who was regarding her with a inscrutable expression. "I'll go."

"You see, Remus," Narcissa said loudly. "We'll have to keep her. She's the only one who can go."

There was no response from the other room, and Narcissa sighed and walked in the direction Remus had gone, and for some unfathomable reason, patted Harry on the shoulder on her way out.

And Ginny was left in a room with Harry, and he was not acknowledging her, and he was staring at his shoulder warily, as though it was going to bite him. Ginny started towards him, but he pushed away from the wall and walked away from her. Ginny rolled her eyes. Yes, she had been harder on him than she had meant to be, really, and she felt a little guilty, but certainly not guilty enough to apologize. And sooner or later, someone would have had to point his problems out to him, and she was really only doing him a favor, and he didn't need to turn back to the ingredients spread out on the counter and poke through them as though he knew what he was doing.

She really couldn't expect him to understand that she'd only been trying to make him leave her alone. He wasn't going to add it all up in his head and realize what she was thinking, and she wasn't in the mood to try and explain herself to Harry. She had other things to be doing, anyway.

They necessitated going after Remus and Narcissa, and Ginny was not keen on doing that, although if Remus had made good on his threat and strangled the woman, that would be one less problem.

"It was in my bag," Narcissa was saying. "It was in there a few hours before we left; I didn't have the chance to check again."

Remus had his head down, with his hands braced on the table. She wasn't shocked by his level of anger; since yesterday, he'd acted in many ways she wouldn't have expected of him. Had it been her, however, she still would have been screaming, so she supposed she had to hand it to him for restraint, if not for actually trusting Narcissa in the first place.

"I know," he said in a barely audible voice. "I know. And you're right; it can't be helped now."

Narcissa leaned down and threw her arms around Remus, which was something Ginny wouldn't have expected of her, and she drew back unconsciously. Remus was hardly visible anymore, obscured as he was by the cloud of Narcissa's unruly hair. She hadn't bothered to tie it back, and Ginny had been watching her push it out of her face all night, and the blood had rubbed off into the vivid gold. It leapt out at her starkly, an ugly thing that didn't belong in the midst of that delicate color, something living and pulsing, a dully gleaming river of it in the candlelight....

She hadn't realized she had closed her eyes until Narcissa was saying, "it wasn't as though you were the Death Eaters' favorite son before this," and Remus was laughing, and when Ginny opened her eyes again they were standing and everyone's hair was back where it belonged.

"We need to give you a shopping list," said Remus, and Ginny jumped, completely startled. She hadn't thought they'd known she was standing there.

"Do you have a problem with buying cigarettes for me?" Narcissa asked, in a way that suggested that even if Ginny had a problem, Narcissa did not want to hear about it.

Remus, who was scribbling furiously in the corner, shot a disapproving look over his shoulder at her.

"What?" said Narcissa defensively. "I won't drink - apparently, it causes me to lose things - but I am not going to stop smoking just because some people have sensitive noses."

"I suppose I don't mind," said Ginny.

Remus rolled his eyes.

"A girl needs one vice," said Narcissa.

"If you limited yourself to one, that would be a fine philosophy," said Remus. "Here," he said to Ginny, as he handed her a roll of papers. She took it, eyeing it dubiously. "It's money," he said. "Muggles have paper money."

"Oh," said Ginny, who had only seen coins, "that seems... easily destroyed."

"Let's try not to do that," said Remus.

Narcissa was burrowing into her pockets, swearing softly to herself. "Ah!" she announced proudly. "There it is. It doesn't look like you have much, Remus - you might as well take this, too."

Ginny supposed that if Narcissa went wandering about to abandoned Muggle cottages and had free access to Remus's flat that it shouldn't really be a surprise that she had Muggle money, too. She took the larger roll from the other woman's hand gingerly, careful to avoid skin contact.

"It's probably half a mile from here, we passed it on the way in," said Remus, as he handed the list off to Narcissa to make additions of her own. "You'll have to walk. And if you see any wizarding shops, don't go in. And if anyone starts looking at you all funny, disappear as quickly as you can. Don't talk to anyone you don't have to talk to, and don't tell anyone who you are or where we are. Got it?"

Ginny took all of her sarcastic tendencies and buried them in a very deep hole for the time being. She nodded very obediently, and held her hand out for the list.

"And try and get on with Harry, would you? We may all be stuck together for a while."

The hole was not deep enough. "Wonderful," she said flatly, and turned to leave.

"Crabby little thing," said Narcissa somewhere behind her. "I like her."

They had both dropped their voices, and Ginny couldn't hear the response, which annoyed her somewhat, but in the next instant, she didn't care anyway, as her foot became entangled in something and she was thrown off balance and into the wall. She reached down to pull the offending object from around her ankle and found herself holding Narcissa's bag. Ginny's own need for privacy told her not to invade anyone else's, but she promptly told it to go to hell, reasoning that if Narcissa had any secrets, she wouldn't leave them lying in a hallway where anyone could trip over them.

There was a soft clinking sound coming from the bag as Ginny opened it, which wasn't quite right coming from a plain, musty-smelling leather bag. She pawed through the contents and drew out the first hard object she encountered: a small, glass vial filled to the brim with brown muck. She drew out several similar vials, all full of various dark and muddy liquids, none of which were labeled. Ginny possessed the typical Gryffindor enthusiasm for Potions, meaning that she'd rather spend an hour cleaning up hippogriff dung than sitting through Professor Snape's class, and she made it clear that she only entered the Dungeons under duress. Holding the vials up to the window in an effort to identify them was a futile endeavor; Ginny did not know what she was looking at and could only place it under the general heading of "Potions."

This did little to reassure her, however, because by process of elimination they were not medicinal potions, or they would have been used already. Whatever it was, Narcissa had taken the trouble to go back for it, so Ginny doubted it was anything as frivolous as a hair tonic or the like. Which left open a number of the more unpleasant, poisonous, mind-altering options.

Movement at the other end of the hallway forced her to drop the bag and scurry quickly out the door. Ginny kicked at the ground in frustration. She would have liked to know what else was in there in addition to suspected poisons. She was going to find an opportunity to look again later, because she would not be the victim of another sinister Malfoy plot, and if she was the only one around here thinking clearly, she'd have to be the one to stop it.

***********************************

There was only so much poking and prodding of boiling cauldrons and finely chopped herbs that one could take without going crazy from it and throwing their knife down and demanding answers. At least that was Harry's new philosophy, and he lasted an impressive two and half minutes after Ginny's departure before descending upon Remus and Narcissa.

"Who's coming after us, and how long do we have before they do?"

He was met with a pair of resigned expressions, and a brief sigh from Remus. "And the interrogation commences," he said mildly, as he crumbled mint leaves into the green substance brewing in the leftmost cauldron.

"You couldn't wait, could you?" said Narcissa testily. "Because we'll just have to explain it all again when the ill-tempered Weasley girl comes back, and this is really not rating on the list of my all-time favorite stories to tell."

"Sorry," said Harry insincerely, "but I'd rather not wait."

"Bollocks," said Narcissa. She turned to Remus. "You start."

"I can't," he retorted, "seeing as how I don't know the answer to Harry's question."

"I fail to see your point," she said haughtily. "Nevertheless, Harry, since I am compelled to narrate, I shall do my best. The simplified answer is... it depends on who is currently in Azkaban."

Remus made a strangled noise. "Oh, you had better keep talking."

"If Lucius and friends are still locked up, we only need worry about Bellatrix."

"Is there any reason they wouldn't still be locked up?" Harry asked anxiously.

"No one ever stays where they're supposed to be, dear," said Narcissa. "As for time, I bought us a bit of it, and if Draco caught on like I hoped, we should have a little more." She broke into a radiant smile that probably would have made her look lovely, but under the harsh glare from the stove, she looked rather sinister instead. "I had a little bit of an inspiration."

"An inspiration?" Remus asked dubiously, taking a hesitant step back as though Narcissa had said that she'd had a little bit of the black plague.

"You see," she continued slyly, "Lucius and Bellatrix both found me out." She paused to let the weight of this statement sink in. Remus shot her a desperate look. "Then dear Luce goes away for a while, and the last thing Bellatrix needed after her recent failures was to share glory with anybody, so she grabbed it all for herself. She lords it over me for a while, hoping I'll give away some more bits of crucial information. When that fails to happen, she goes on and makes her report, and appears all lovely and wonderful in Voldemort's eyes, and he orders my execution, to be carried out by my darling sister."

Narcissa seemed awfully unaffected by that last fact, but Harry bit back the urge to comment and waited impatiently for Narcissa to carefully scrape a cutting board full of nettles into the potion and light a cigarette before she continued.

"In the meantime, my clever little boy had reasoned things out and confronted me. When he didn't run screaming straight to Bellatrix, I realized there was still a small shred of hope left and it lit a fire under me, so to speak. Then I got to thinking... in her naturally suspicious mind, she's going to expect a counter-plot, and I would do well to provide the illusion of one. Of course, Lucius and I could have been in on this together, to discredit Bellatrix. And then there was Draco's little scheme." Her smile turned fond and wistful. "And there you have it. The pieces came together, and Bellatrix believed that the forces of Lucius were bearing down on her, rather than the forces of Lupin."

Narcissa exhaled a long stream of smoke towards the ceiling. "Forget what I said earlier. That's quite a delightful story to tell, really, and I shall add sweeping hand gestures and more pauses for effect when I relate it to young Gemma."

"Ginny," corrected Harry.

"If you say so," said Narcissa airily. "Am I forgiven yet?" she asked in a less self-important tone of voice, tilting her face expectantly in Remus's direction.

"You already were," he said, a slow grin spreading across his tired features, "but now my faith is restored, which is better."

Narcissa beamed at him. "I'm remarkably brilliant at times."

"As I recall," said Remus mysteriously. "Although you realize that what you've done, essentially, is to send your sister out on a personal vendetta against you, which is the less remarkably brilliant part of all this."

Harry, who was not only beginning to feel as if they had forgotten his presence, but that he'd probably be speaking only in questions for a while, broke in with, "So if everyone else is still in Azkaban, Bellatrix will be coming after us, but she'll be alone?"

"Like I was saying, Harry," said Remus, "she'll consider this a matter of personal revenge. She's made a mistake, and she isn't going to run to Voldemort and admit it. What she is going to tell him is that Lucius Malfoy is making some sort of attempt to usurp Voldemort's power. He's been the de facto head of the Death Eaters in the years before Voldemort's return and after Bellatrix was sent to prison. They expected something like this from him. He's been in charge for years; why would he want to go back to being just another follower? Narcissa rather cleverly exploited that fear."

"And they're going to waste a bloody long time trying to go after Lucius first," Narcissa put in. "Once they realize that Draco and I haven't been conspiring with him- which may not be long because Merlin knows Lucius can talk his way out of anything - Bellatrix will realize she made a mess of things, and she'll hunt us down to try and get back in favor with Voldemort."

"So we have a few days?" Harry persisted.

"Something like," said Narcissa casually. "Although I do wish she'd hurry it along. I do so enjoy a nice family reunion."

"Oh, keep your head," said Remus irritably. He removed a cauldron from the stove and extinguished the fire with a flick of his wand. "Let's take this in to Draco and see what we can do for those burns."

Harry followed them into the next room, figuring that he could handle seeing things he didn't want to see as long as the adults continued to be forthcoming. He wasn't used to being this well informed, and he didn't want anything interesting to be said if he wasn't there to hear it.

Malfoy's breathing hadn't changed much; it was still slow and labored, but steadier. Remus flipped up the cloak to expose the darkened patches of skin on Malfoy's leg. Harry kept his gaze on it long enough to see that blood was still slowly seeping onto the thoroughly ruined drapes, and then he cut his eyes away to the corner. It wasn't that it was too bloody for him to handle, really, it was just that if their situations were reversed, he wouldn't want Malfoy to look, either.

"He sounds better," Harry offered hopefully.

"He's comatose," Remus muttered distractedly as he soaked a long strip of linen in the potion and wound it around a mark on Malfoy's thigh. "At least he's not getting worse, but his body has just shut down."

"The Cruciatus," Narcissa said ominously. "Although he wasn't under it very long, and it still wouldn't account for all of these physical injuries."

"I've seen the Cruciatus Curse put people into comas before," said Remus. "But as you said, it's a psychosomatic response, and not- curses usually don't-" He paused, and wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. "What did you say happened to his hand?"

"He was holding something, and she stepped on it. And the burns?"

Remus winced. "What was he holding?"

Narcissa shook her head. "I didn't see it. And the burns? Answer me."

Remus sighed heavily, and glanced nervously at Harry. Harry countered it with a firm glare that said that whatever this particular revelation was, it was being made in front of him, because he was not going away.

"I've seen something like that once," Remus said quietly. "If you inadvertently absorb a great deal of magic, it's going to show itself physically in some way." A pause, as if he was finding it difficult to speak. "The last time I saw marks like these, it was a shielding charm that didn't have a chance to work, and... the person was dead."

Harry's stomach had begun swimming uncomfortably during Remus's speech, and the discomfort had gathered into a small, painful knot before he had the courage to speak. "It was my mother, wasn't it?"

"Yes," said Remus slowly. "Yes, it was, and it makes me think that perhaps this isn't entirely about what Bellatrix might have done to Draco. It was accidental, I'm sure, and we'll have to hope we have the opportunity to ask him what happened, because in a manner of speaking, he did this to himself."

***********************************

It wasn't until she had been smelling fresh, clean air for a while that Ginny realized how terribly that cottage had reeked of dirt and dust and the horrible stench of blood. She'd had to pause, head in hands, and suck in a few painfully deep breaths before her senses were clear enough to go very far. Once she was out of sight of the cottage, her thoughts caught up with her full force, and she leaned heavily against a tree, her head swimming. Poison. And half-dead Malfoys. And Remus was too trusting and Harry, of all people, didn't understand... Ginny dragged her hands through her hair as a desperate whine found its way out of her throat. She didn't quite understand everything that was happening back there, but the thought of an eventual satisfying explanation was no longer enough to comfort her. What she did understand was that a greater danger existed than what they'd faced back at Malfoy Manor, and that something had to be done about it.

Ginny stumbled onward, found the road, and started running.