Twenty-Four Hours

Twenty-Four Hours (5/?)

You were everything I thought I knew

And I thought we could be...

You were everything, everything, that I wanted

We were meant to be, supposed to be, but we lost it

And all the memories so close to me just fade away

All this time you weren't pretending... so much for my happy ending

So much for my happy ending

My Happy Ending by Avril Lavigne

"My Lord, the wisest course of action is to kill Potter and be done with it. You know how Draco is ignorant of the concequences of his actions at times..."

"Lucius, Harry Potter under our control is far more useful than a dead Harry Potter. True, eventually we will have to kill him, but as long as we can keep him alive, it is best to have him as our slave."

"Yes, of course, My Lord. But he is the only one preventing your full return and our complete domination. If we kill him--!"

"We will, of course, kill him eventually. But what have I told you about killing, Lucius?"

"Although killing is effective and helpful, use the victim to all possible uses before you kill," Lucius recited. "Yes, but--."

"But nothing, Lucius. Go tell Draco to stay away from Potter until we give him orders to do otherwise. Lock him up if you have to. Keep him away from Potter at all costs. We cannot have him ordering Potter to do useless things and wasting his strength."

And Lucius walked off to do as he was told, scowling all the way.

"Draco?" he asked, opening his son's door. "Draco, I have orders from the Dark Lord." He spotted his son sitting awkwardly on the windowsill, leaning against the wall on the side with his legs dangling out of the window.

"Yes, Father?" He turned his head to face his father and brushed his long, fluttering white-blond hair out of his face.

"Draco, the Dark Lord wishes that you do not go near our prisoner--for the time being, at least."

"Why?" Draco asked suspiciously, aware of the concequences he would receive for defying his father.

"You question the Dark Lord, Draco?" Lucius asked silkily. "Surely you would not ask Him why, would you?" Draco shook his head, scowling. "He does not wish for Potter to be subjected to unnessecary enslavement. It might... waste his energy when he can be doing our work." Draco did not believe his father's story at all, but he knew better than to say so.

"I see," was all he could say. "And why not just forbid me from commanding him to do anything, rather than keeping me from taunting him?"

"Crucio," Lucius whispered softly. He watched as his helpless son fell to the ground, writhing and kicking in pain, while he stood emotionless. He watched Draco suffer for asking him a question he had not wanted to answer. He watched as a boy of seventeen, notoriously trained in the Dark Arts, was punished severly for defying his own father. This had happened before, and each event was clear in Draco's memory as he stood up, brushing imaginary dust off of his emerald robes.

"Very well," Lucius told the boy. Both knew exactly what he was referring to- Draco was not permitted to scream or utter a single sound while being punished in that form. "It shows weakness," Lucius had told him long before, when he had been only seven. "Never show your enemy your weakness, or you will be at his mercy before you can count to ten." And Draco had nodded, still weak from the curse. Even now, at seventeen, the curse caused him the ultimate pain. He just didn't scream from it.

"Thank you, Father." He straightened himself up to his father's level and surveyed the man. "I will not go near Harry Potter," he agreed, stifling tears quite successfully. "Until, that is, you give me permission to." Lucius nodded curtly and walked out, leaving his son to sob on the bed. Through the slammed door, there was someone- somewhere- crying in the same patterned, even sobs. And yet, this was the last person Draco would ever share pain with.

* * *

She was crying. She had earned the chance to sob after all she had been through, so she was crying. "Hermione," Ron moaned, "please, please stop crying. Come on... please?"

Hermione stopped crying, but the tears continued streaming although silently down her face. "Hermione, look at me," Ron instructed her. He gently lifted her chin slightly upwards. "It's going to be okay," he told her, and his voice was surprisingly soft. She looked at him with questions in her eyes. "Listen, it's all right. Harry--Harry's fine. I'm sure he is."

Hermione just stared at him, as if not really seeing him fully. "You don't think that," she said flatly. "You want me to think that. You want you to think that. But you don't. I know that he's not all right. You know he's not all right. We're not all right, either."

Ron looked down. "We've won every time before. We always triumph in the end. Why is this going to be any different? Why are you giving up?"

"Giving up?" Hermione's breath came out in a hiss. "I'm not giving up, Ron. Be realistic. We are sitting here in a dungeon cell the width of Hagrid's hut. We are imprisoned by Voldemort--" Ron flinched slightly--"and his champion Death Eaters. The Order's secret has probably been revealed by now, and we--we're alone. How, Ron, do you think we're going to get out of this? Not every story has a happy ending, you know, and especially not real life."

Ron stopped stuttering and fell silent, pondering the truth to her words. She continued, "And we can't get out of this as if it never happened, either. We're going to have to lose something. That's how life works. In first year, it was the Stone. Second year, it was Lockhart. Third year, Lupin couldn't teach at Hogwarts anymore. Fourth year, it was Cedric. Fifth year--Sirius. And last year it was Neville. But that was his choice, not a concequence of something we did."

"Something we did?" Ron squacked, jerking himself up. "So you blame us for Sirius dying, for Cedric, for Neville? Think again, Hermione. Sure, we screw things up and make a big mess with our actions, yeah. But do you know what we've spent a full year trying to convince Harry? It's not his fault. It's not our fault. It's all... it's all Voldemort's fault. Everything bad that ever happened to us was because of Voldemort."

And Hermione, recognizing the truth through his angry tone, stared at Ron for a few minutes and then began to cry again.

* * *

Harry wasn't alone. Someone was watching him. "Who's there?" he asked. His voice echoed around the apparantly empty room. He was not fooled. "I can hear you!" he shouted. A loud crash sounded. "Come on, I know you're there. Show yourself!" He was getting annoyed. Was it Draco, lurking in the shadows and preparing to order him to do something? Or was it Michelle, solely there to get on his nerves? No, they were too graceful to cause the loud crash Harry had just heard.

And it wasn't either of them, as Harry soon found out. It was the last person--or rather, creature--he would have expected to see in Riddle Castle.

He examined the beetle that had just knocked a paperweight off of a desk. No beetle was stroung enough to do that. And as he swatted the bug away, it just loop-de-looped. As he got a closer look at it, it had odd markings around its eyes. Remembering how his former professor had caused Pettigrew to transfigure in his third year, he clutched the beetle in his hands for a moment with the same scowl as Remus had had on his face.

Sure enough, Rita Skeeter transformed before his eyes. Rita Skeeter, the most unlikely of all people who could possibly be there at that moment, appeared in front of him.

She was looking much better than she had at the Three Broomsticks with Luna- in fact she almost looked like the snappish, lying, notorious reporter she had once been. Her hair once again dangled in gelled chestnut curls around her face and her eyes, turquoise as Pavarti's birthstone necklace, lit up her face once more. They were framed in large, gemmed glasses that somewhat resembled her old ones and her tight-fitting robes were aquamarine.

"Harry?" she asked incredulously, too stunned to say anything else.

"Rita Skeeter?" he demanded, equally astounded. "What in the name of Merlin are you doing here?"

"I could ask the same of you, you know," she told him. "You have chains on, I might add, while I don't." She seemed too shocked to be rude or delighted with this new reporting experience.

"Yeah, mind helping me with them?" he prodded her, struggling around in his bindings to make a point.

The old Rita was back in a flash as she shook her head slowly. "Not until you tell me exactly how you got here and why you're chained--and where we are."

"You mean you don't know where we are?" Harry wondered incredulously. "Well, it seems like some castle of Volde--"

"Shut up!"

"Sorry, You-Know-Who." He didn't know why he was respecting the woman who had completely destroyed his fourth year at school. However, if she was his only way out of here...

"Well, I'm not sure how I got here. You know Malfoy?"

"Yes. He gave me all the dirt on you a few years ago, if you remember correctly."

"Well, he has a little sister called Michelle. She said that up in the Owlry, Malfoy was casting the Cruciatus--"

"The what? I mean, I know what it is, but that's illegal."

"No duh, Sherlock," Harry snapped, repeating a phrase he had said as a kid, brought up by Muggles. "Anyway, he was casting the Cruciatus curse on me, and I just realized that there is no way I'm finishing this story. You can't get these chains off me anyway."

"Wanna bet?" Rita asked, prying a long-nailed finger into one of the chains. It promptly opened, and Harry was astonished to see that now his left hand was free.

"Now the other one?" he asked hopefully.

"If I'm allowed to do an article on this for the Prophet, and you'll give the the facts for once," she replied coldly. Seeing no other solution to his problem, Harry nodded.

"Okay, Harry, 'fess up," she told him, sliding her finger into the lock and watching it open. "Tell me the facts and then I'll take off the other chains."

But Harry never got a chance to tell Rita the facts, because just then the door opened and Lucius came in.

"Well, well, well, would you look at that?" he drawled, looking at the two people sitting in the dungeon. Rita made to transform, but Lucius was too quick for her. He snapped his fingers twice, and Rita was chained to the wall on one side of the room, Harry on the other. "Odd," he commented to someone outside of the room. "They never seemed to be friends before today, did they? She--" he jerked a finger at Rita -"amused Draco considerably during his fourth year at school, didn't she?"

"Blindius!" he muttered, and everything went black. "How did you get in here, Ms. Skeeter?" he asked in an expression of mock sweetness.

Rita was not stupid. She saw Lucius' wand in his pants pocket and knew that he was a Death Eater. She had even done a small article on that once before, and had faced a trial against Lucius in court. That had been her first and only time in Azkaban--four months in May during Harry's second year. "I'm an unregistered animagus," she informed him. "I can turn into a beetle." Harry could not see the calm, unconcerned look on her face but he could hear it in her voice.

"Wouldn't that be helpful towards your... cause?" she asked sweetly. Harry gaped. Sure, she was nasty. Sure, she had made his life miserable. But a Death Eater? Evil? Rita Skeeter? Yeah, right.

"Yes, it would, wouldn't it?" Lucius admitted, looking her over. He snapped his fingers and her chains disappeared. "Michelle, stay here and watch Potter. Skeeter, follow me." Harry assumed her vision had returned, because he heard the clicking of her heels all down the corridor rather than a crash as she bumped into walls.

"Visionela." Harry's vision returned as well. Michelle clapped her hands, a cozy armchair appeared near her, and she sat down. "So, Harry. You tried to escape with--with that?" She pointed to where Rita had been standing moments before. Harry ignored her. Maybe she was on his side, maybe she was trying to help him, but she was still a prat. He told her that, and she just sat there, biting her lip.

"I mean, no offense or anything, but from what I've heard, she made your fourth year at Hogwarts a living hell." Harry was surprised with how direct Michelle seemed to be, but remained expressionless. "And apparantly she also wrote that damned article in your fifth year that--" She broke off, glossy pink lips tightening over each other.

"What?" he asked, although he remembered quite clearly the article she was speaking of.

"Nothing," she replied, and they lapsed into silence.

* * *

"Hermione? What's the matter?" Ron demanded. His companion's chocolate-colored eyes had unfocused and a look of worry dashed over her already pale face. Her hand had flown to her mouth and she was gasping for breath, gazing at some inanimate object bound to be completely random.

"N-nothing," she gasped, her hand falling back to her side. She wasn't sure what exactly had happened, only remembered the world spinning, blackening, and memories that did not belong to her rushing into her mind. She heard a wand-seller talking to a small, dark-haired, turquoise-eyed boy and holding out a smooth wand. "Ah. I've been expecting you two. Evelyn and Dylan Burkhard, age eleven."

She saw a graveyard and instantly realized what it must be. Harry did not know it, but she had been experiencing the same dreams that he had ever since Cedric had died. She would not tell anyone- if she did, she had an odd, inexplicable feeling that Harry would be in more danger. At least, that had been her logic back at school, but now...

"Kill the spare," she heard Voldemort hiss, as she had heard many times before. She tried not to look as Wormtail carried out his Master's orders and murdered Cedric. Cedric, whom Hermione had admired and respected. The way Harry 'respected' Cho, she reminded herself with a pang. More unfamiliar- yet oddly familiar- memories spilled into her mind.

Ron shook her by the shoulders, a look of worry and anguish on his freckled face. "Hermione? Snap out of it. Please!" She blinked, and focused her eyes on Ron.

"Oh, thank Merlin." He relaxed slightly. "What happened? You went all- unfocused, sort of. It's not like you. What happened?"

She looked at him questioningly. "Nothing," she lied slowly. "I have a headache."

As Ron dealt with this newfound discovery, Hermione stared at the ground. What just happened, she wondered. She hadn't done anything, really, aside from shifting a bit in her chains. And she looked up, and saw the impossible.

Draco stood there, right next to Voldemort, and casted the Cruciatus Curse over and over again on Harry. Harry was crying, screaming, wriggling and trying to escape tight chains. But Voldemort approached him, an evil look of triumph in his red eyes, and hissed, "Avada Kedavra." And Harry died.

"Riddikulus!" she heard Ron cry. Could that be it? Hermione wondered, praying that it was a boggart and not really Harry dying before her. And, lo and behold, the image of Harry dead on the floor faded away. She sighed in relief and gazed up at Ron.

"Boggart," he explained. As if she didn't know. "I suppose that was what sort of messed you up?" She scowled at his choice of words, but shrugged. She had never really done that before. No, Hermione Granger knew all the answers. She never had to shrug, because she had extraordinnary knowledge beyond many people's expectations. She knew everything. But it was not important. What was important was escaping.

And that was what they were going to do.

But just then, a loud bang sounded and something very heavy hit the ground. A moment later, and a small, irritating beetle flew over to where Ron and Hermione sat, buzzing annoyingly.

"Is that--?" Ron wondered, pointing at the annoying insect.

"I'm... not sure," Hermione admitted. "No, it can't be. She's dead. Remember? Crookshanks, sixth year?"

"Animagi can only die in their human form," a soft, female voice came from the beetle. "I would have thought that Little Miss Perfect would have known that." And with a snap, the beetle transformed into none other than Rita Skeeter.