Reconstruction of a Death Eater

The Ball is in Motion

"Severus, can you hear me? Come on now, Severus; lie down, my dear. Rest, relax, come on now. Please, Severus, come along," Molly coaxed the stiff, upright figure, gently drawing him down onto the cot where he was supposed to be recovering.

His body was healing, the broken bones slowly mending despite his inability to stay lying down and quiet. Once Severus had passed the point of almost expiring once an hour, he had begun to move restlessly to the beat of his own thoughts. As strength, if not sense, returned to the skinny wiry carcass, he had insisted on springing upright and standing rigidly in a corner whenever the fits took him. They had tried a Full Body Bind, but he had fought it so hard, he had broken the spell, and even re-broken his forearm and shin. They had tried everything they could think of to bring him out of the occlumentic trance he had become caught in, to no avail. Even the St Mungo's expert Roger had persuaded to come into headquarters had been unable to penetrate the shielding Severus had thrown around his mind. All Molly could do was to gently coax Severus back to the bed when the fits of standing to attention came on him.

He didn't respond to any outside stimulus either, even when some bright spark put a lampshade on his head. Food and potions had to be administered one spoonful at a time, and even then the food had to be liquid as he did not chew or swallow voluntarily. Twice more, Roger had broached the subject of sending him to the Special Ward at St Mungo's, but Molly rejected the suggestion out of hand. Spells took care of his physical needs and, apart from having to be hand-fed, Severus was no trouble at all, she averred stoutly in the face of all opposition. Just leave him alone! She was worse than a mother hen with one chick.

Even Arthur could not approach her with any rationality on the subject, choosing instead to let her be. He knew his wife very well and knew that, once she embraced a cause, nothing short of a fatal hex would make her let go of it. And even that solution was not guaranteed to work.

~~*~~

"I think I'll grow a moustache," Ron said out of the blue, wasting breath he didn't have to spare as they jogged around the Quidditch pitch with the rest of the DA in an effort to get fit.

Harry huffed a laugh and rolled his eyes sideways at his running partner, studying his top lip. "You haven't enough hair to make a decent shave, never mind a moustache," Harry reminded him with a breathless laugh.

"Still, it's a thought." Ron never let an idea go easily.

Harry just shook his head and continued to take three steps to every two of Ron's long strides.

Ginny and Hermione followed their lead, running in tandem and with synchronised steps as they were of the same height and size. "Tell me again why we are doing this?" Ginny asked rhetorically.

"Because Professor Moody said that fitness increases stamina and allows for the longer and more vigorous use of magic in a battle," Hermione reiterated in time to her pounding footsteps.

"Do you think the 'mad' part of his name could also be applicable to the mood he creates in his students? Cus I think we're all crazy to be doing this."

Giggling, Hermione continued to run smoothly and as silently as she could while Ginny continued to catalogue all the ways 'mad' could be applied to Mad Eye Moody.

The rest of the DA was strung out around the Quidditch pitch, following their leader in an uneven string of sweating, panting agony. The Quidditch team members were not so badly off, but some of the less active members were truly feeling the pace. Neville, usually one of the more sedentary members of the group, was feeling both the heat and the effort, sweat rolling off him in rivers. Still, the dogged determination on his face was somewhat frightening in its intensity as he struggled onward. Since the terrible night in the Department of Mysteries he had worked like a Trojan to overcome his usual clumsiness and was succeeding admirably.

At his side, crowned with a mixed wreath of dandelions and daisies, Luna trotted along, seemingly unaffected by the heat or the exercise. Since the battle at the Department of Mysteries she had attached herself to Neville, the two becoming an unspoken, if odd couple who seemed to make more with each other than they did individually. Luna didn't laugh at Neville's clumsiness, and Neville took Luna's eccentricities in his stride. By the time they arrived at the gathering point, the others had began their stretches and bends, going through the yoga routine Hermione had devised as part of their cooling-down period.

"I think we have attracted some attention," Luna observed, stretching out a long, pale leg and pointing her toes rather elegantly.

"Huh?" Neville asked, struggling to bend sideways, not as easy for him as it sounded.

"Slytherins off the port bow," Justin Finch-Fletchley muttered loud enough to attract the attention of the rest of the DA.

"Just ignore them unless they start throwing jinxes about," Hermione said firmly, catching and holding her two friends' eyes with grim determination.

"And then blast them!" Ron added viciously, as a few of the scars the brain tentacles had left stood out whitely on his flushed skin.

"I wonder what they get from watching us like that," Harry muttered, a frown knitting his brow.

"To ogle all our superbly fit bodies and graceful movements, I should think." Michael Corner affected a snooty, snobbish tone, making everyone laugh.

In the stands, Pansy Parkinson hissed viciously, her hands knotted into fists. "Oh, how I would love to claw that Granger bitch's eyes out! How dare she flaunt herself like that!"

"Looked pretty good to me, her and the She Weasel," Gary Pruit murmured back, causing the others to snigger, Goyle a few seconds behind the rest as usual.

"My question is why are they doing it?" Crabbe finally asked after a great deal of thought.

Everyone paused and turned to stare at the usually silent boy who looked back impassively. Draco leaned back against the hard bench and put his feet on the rail with a sigh. "Because our dear Mr Potter has finally grasped the concept that you have to be fit to throw decent hexes around for any length of time, or else you run out of the wherewithal to continue a battle, of course," he drawled eyeing his companions with a self-satisfied smirk. "Surely everyone knew that?"

"I didn't know that," Millicent ventured when no one else seemed to have anything to say.

"Humm, well, that is to be expected, I suppose," Draco drawled. "My father always insisted I take some physical exercise and not just the obvious sweating such as that lot of ... of Gryffindorks are indulging in."

"You exercise?" Pansy said incredulously, then moderated her tone as Draco swung his gaze lazily in her direction, always a bad sign.

"Obviously, that lot have never heard of isometrics, nor, apparently have you," Draco replied cryptically and rose in a swirl of robes to leap down from the stands and stride away back to school, his entourage scrambling to keep up.

~~*~~

Headmistress Minerva McGonagall observed the drama playing out near the Quidditch pitch, then turned away with a sigh. Gryffindor and Slytherin: always true to their founder's ideals and always at each other's throats. She wondered how scandalised the school board would be if she tossed the rotten Sorting Hat out the window into the lake and simply abandoned the Houses totally? If Dumbledore couldn't do it, then it was not likely that she could. Still, the thought was a comfort when she had to sort out yet another inter-house scuffle, and it would be nice if the inter-house scuffles were the biggest fights on the horizon, but they were not!

"You know, old man, I was rather counting on you to live forever," she said over her shoulder to the portrait hanging closest to her desk, but there was no response. The rest of the portraits were almost embarrassed to look at the very fine painting of Dumbledore that sat in a handsome gold frame in pride of place. The old headmaster stared out over the office that had been his home and dominion for so many years, bright blue eyes wide and staring, not a twitch of movement to be seen. The painting could well have been a Muggle effort for all the life it contained. In fact, Minerva and Filius Flitwick had subjected it to some pretty rigorous testing just in case someone had kidnapped the Headmaster's portrait but no, it was the real thing, just dead and inanimate. "And a fat lot of good to me, too," she added in a mutinous mutter. "Where are you, old man?"

For a second she thought she saw a glimmer in the portrait's eye, then realised the fire was calling her. Shacklebolt's head floated in the flames, flickering eerily. "Headmistress, we have a problem; Remus Lupin is either hurt or dead somewhere on Hampstead Heath, but no one is sure where."

"Oh no, not Remus!" Minerva covered her mouth to hold in her horror and turned to stare at the set of small coloured balls floating on silver wires in an elaborate sculpture. Each ball represented a member of the Order, and Remus' ball was floating rather low on its spiral and had a red-brown tinge to it. "No, he's not dead, but he is hurt. Could you or Tonks cast a tracker charm and see if you can find him?"

"We tried that but we get the trace of at least sixty or more werewolves. So that marker didn't help at all!" Shacklebolt stated, then his eyebrow rose as McGonagall snorted in disgust.

"For goodness sake, he was running with a pack of wild wolves trying to stave off disaster, no wonder you get so many! Try tracking cinnamon, chocolate and wolf in combination. That should get you a lot closer, the man is a chocoholic and always has at least half a bar on him somewhere."

"Really? Okay, we'll give it a try and call you back," Kingsley said and pulled his head away.

"So that's just one more thing to worry about!" Minerva muttered disgruntledly as she returned to her desk and the mountain of paperwork that never got any smaller.

~~*~~

Patrick and Judy O'Leary apparated into the area near the blasted oak, their wands at the ready. Dawn was just breaking and a few birds were just waking up to herald its arrival. The grass all around the area was flattened, the ground churned and broken by the scrabble of many feet. Patches of grass had been wiped clean or burned to a crisp, the insect life all but decimated in the aftermath of what had had to have been a hard-fought battle. Something rustled in the grass, and both wands homed in on the noise until a very odd creature came into view, the front end of a hedgehog, the back end of a frog.

"Whoops! Now that would be a talking point and no mistake," Judy commented as her husband quickly transfigured the poor animal back into a hedgehog. "I think you went the wrong way, hedgehogs don't try to hop."

"Oh. Sorry. There you are, is that more like it?" Paddy reversed the spell quickly, and the frog took off with an indignant croak. "Okay, should I just Accio Remus, or what?"

"No, silly, if he is hurt that sort of treatment would be the death of him. Try a Point Me spell. Ah, there you go, that way," Judy exclaimed in satisfaction as the wand spun her husband around and began to pull him steadily northward. They had travelled less than fifty feet when the double pop of apparition made them both spin defensively and drop to the ground in some long grass.

The two newcomers wore red, a deadly colour, not quite as bad as Death Eaters but almost, in some circles. The taller of the two cradled some sort of device in his hand while the smaller one tried to peer over his arm to see it, too.

"It's not exactly accurate, is it?" the shorter, female one said in disgust. "I mean, look at it, it's wiggling back and forward as if it couldn't make up its mind. What does that mean, I ask you?"

"By the look of the place, I'd say it means he was all over the area and that sort of oscillation usually means two halves of the whole," the taller said heavily.

"Oh Merlin, no! Poor Remus, or... maybe he splinched and got himself spread about a bit?"

"And maybe the Death Eaters tore him to pieces. Damn the fool for taking on the Oldsby group on his own, by the look of it. We know for a fact that Denby and Jugson were in that party, and you know how badly they wanted Remus' hide after the Department of Mysteries fiasco."

"Yes, and just how did they escape when Malfoy and Macnair were taken cleanly?"

"Arrant stupidity on the part of the man in charge, who is now scouring out drains somewhere nasty, one fervently hopes. Come on, this isn't getting it done. We'll try the nearest one first. It's that way about twenty metres."

Before the O'Learys could move, the two Aurors strode forward and nearly stood on Paddy's hands as they all but fell over the couple in the grass. Wands quickly realigned until the two parties were at a Mexican stand-off. Judy glanced from the Aurors to her husband and carefully moved in between him and the humans. "What do you want?" she asked gruffly as the female Auror's hair changed colour like a kaleidoscope.

"We're tracking chocolate, cinnamon and wolf but you aren't the right one," the girl said in surprise, then grinned. "You don't happen to have an acquaintance with Remus Lupin, chocoholic and superwolf, do you?"

"Superwolf? Why do you call the Beta that?" Paddy asked curiously, then slapped his hand over his mouth.

"Some secret agent you'd make," his wife huffed, then glared at the Aurors. "He hasn't done anything wrong, none of them have."

"No, of course not," Shacklebolt said hurriedly, lowering his wand a discrete amount. "We know he was out this way and that he was hurt, so we came to find him."

"I told you he was hurt!" Paddy said in aggrieved tones to his wife. "I caught a whiff of him over that way but then you came in and ... whatever you were doing?"

"Tracking Remus' characteristics," Tonks said easily as she introduced herself to the couple. "Come on, let's not waste any more time, this way."

The four moved north again, intent on the tracking device until Tonks walked over a cliff and went tumbling down top over turkey until she crashed in an ungainly heap at the bottom of the slope. Judy let out a small scream, and Paddy had jumped halfway down the cliff in an effort to catch her before her breathless little 'I found him' drifted up to them.

"Tonks, get off my hand," Remus complained querulously as the other three came into sight.

"Oh sorry, mate, just fell down a bit, took the skin off my arse, I'll tell you."

"Yeah, well, it could have been worse. I broke my leg and it would have been worse if I hadn't landed fair in this nice soft marshy bit, nice soft cold marshy bit," he reiterated, with a distinct shiver.

"Merlin, Remus, you're blue! Come on; let's get you out of there." Both Paddy and Shacklebolt plodged in to pull him from the bog, Judy carefully casting a stiffening spell over his leg which bent in the middle of the shin most disconcertingly.

Tonks climbed to her feet and cast a drying and warming spell over her friend as the two men holding him decided what to do for the best. Judy listened to them, then huffed in disgust. "Listen, boys, don't forget he is a werewolf and St Mungo's will not let him through the front door, never mind into the treatment rooms. You know it's getting worse, Paddy, the prejudice I mean, especially after the last lot of laws and edicts the Ministry forced through the Wizengamot. If a werewolf needs medical treatment, they either have to sneak into a Muggle practice or go to a hedge witch."

"Gods above, is it really that bad?" Tonks asked in wide-eyed horror.

"And it's getting worse all the time," Paddy confirmed grimly.

"We will have to take him to headquarters," Kingsley said decisively. "I'm sorry people, but it's just Tonks and I can go there ...."

"... And Remus Lupin was never heard from again?" Judy snapped furiously, fear fuelling her anger.

"Judy, no," Remus said softly, staying the hand that was going for her wand. "I know where they are going to take me, and it is safe for me, I do assure you; safer than anywhere else in the country at the moment. I will call you as soon as I am patched up, I promise you," he assured the woman with a smile that was more like a grimace as his teeth chattered relentlessly.

"If I don't hear from you in two days, I am going to go to Auror headquarters and raise such a stink the Ministry will need to be fumigated before anyone can work there again. Understood, Aurors?" Judy said ominously. "Remember, Remus, two days, before Moon if you please."

"I'll fire call you," he promised as Shacklebolt apparated, taking him away, too.

"He will be fine, I promise," Tonks said softly before she followed her partner away.