Russian Roulette

RUSSIAN ROULETTE 3(You Can’t Fool) The Children of the Revolution

SON: And must they all be hanged that swear and lie?

LADY MACDUFF: Every one.

SON: Who must hang them?

LADY MACDUFF: Why, the honest men.

SON: Then the liars and the swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men and hang them up.

--Macbeth (Act 4, Sc. 2, lns. 58-64)

 

Moscow, Russia

December 31, 1995

 

"Narcissa!" His frantic call echoed in her ears, but she continued to walk, stiletto heels clicking out a panicked drumbeat upon the lacquered hardwood floor of the Russian Roulette.

"Narcissa!" When his voice sounded again, her walk quickened into an all out run. She had been fleeing from the memory of Sirius Black for fifteen years. Fifteen years that that all boiled down into one single instant as she slammed up against the hard wooden door that had once been the back exit to the Russian Roulette, bringing her flight to an abrupt end. She paused for a moment. Her collision with the door had knocked the wind out of her. She heaved a gasp, all thoughts of her pursuer temporarily erased. For one single instant she was a girl again, seventeen and hopelessly naïve, ready to offer her heart, her soul and everything in-between to any man who could get her out of Moscow. It was one of life’s ironies that her savior had been Lucius Malfoy, and seemingly interested in the wellbeing of none of the above.

"Narcissa!" Her hand tightened around the door, which Miriken had had in late December 1978 under the cover of darkness. Any activity in the sun’s light was unnecessarily risky, for day was a time when too much could be seen by unwelcome eyes. Unwelcome eyes were often attached to unforgiving lips, which would gladly blab tales to the wrong pair of ears, jeopardizing the future of the Russian Roulette. Miriken thought it best to move under night’s cloak and thus avoid the whole affair, eyes, lips and everything in-between. So they were forced to move under the cover of darkness, hemmed in like common criminals.

But, Narcissa thought with a rare smirk, criminals were exactly what they had been. However, they had been criminals with the best intentions of self-preservation. Miriken had intended for the door to be an escape route for the Roulette’s management in case the KGB "dropped in for tea". The irony brought a bittersweet smile to Narcissa’s lips, for when the KGB had come to call, the door had proved no boon to most of those trapped inside, their hands painted red with the guilt of free-enterprise.

It was no surprise to her that the Roulette had undergone a transformation from the skinny half-starved waif of a club to this posh establishment, dressed up and bejeweled like a rich whore. She wasn’t even halfway sorry to see the old club gone. For all of Miriken’s pretended camaraderie, the Russian Roulette had been nothing to her except a rusty prison. When her cell door had finally been broken open, when the two of them forced her to choose between uncertain freedom and gilded captivity, she had folded her cards and stepped behind the bars of her jeweled cage without so much as a backward glance. And yet, nearly sixteen years after she had been dealt her final hand, she was still haunted by the consequences of her decision.

It haunted her in the way her son moved, every condescending sneer leading her to wonder what he could have become if she had thrown caution to the devil, instead of bearing the devil through her caution.

It haunted her in Malfoy Manor, a sprawling estate in the middle of the Yorkshire moors. But when she was within its ancient walls she could feel 300 years of Malfoy ghosts watching her and whispering what she had known innately from the first moment she had stepped within the Manor’s walls. She had no more business living in Lucius’s estate, futilely trying to pretend that it was home, than Satan would in taking up residence between the Pearly Gates. Though she may bear its name, she was not welcome in Malfoy Manor.

Her decision haunted her most in the way that fate enjoyed sticking a dagger in her gut and twisting, by bringing her face to face with him, in this place, on this night, in these circumstances.

It was his fault. She was the victim and he knew it. He had known it then, sixteen years ago in the middle of Moscow’s coldest recorded winter. Even now, more than a decade later, he still followed her blindly like a faithful hound, trying to make some sort of penance for that bitter winter of ’79. But there are things beyond forgiveness, and some crimes have no absolution.

He had never loved her. She found herself wondering if he had ever really loved anyone. Like her, he had ODed on that most elusive of emotions at an early age. It had rendered her dead to love and loving, but she could only guess if it had the same effect upon Sirius Black.

Capable of love or not, he had never truly cared for her. Though neither of them had realized it at the time, their relationship had been all about possession. From the first, they were a study in ownership. She had been another motorbike to him, and for a short while he had been her one catharsis. But even the sweetest medicines can turn to bitter gall.

It had been sixteen years.

Sixteen years of moving on to things greater and better, sixteen years of trying to pick up the shattered pieces of her life, sixteen years of trying to forget the early days of 1980 and the empty promises that they had held.

"Narcissa!" Why wouldn’t he let her be, leave her trapped inside the confines of her gilded cell? It was what she had chosen. It was her own fate, her own fault. Her hand tightened about the doorknob, her nervous sweat glistening upon the burnished metal.

"Narcissa!" She was the victim and he knew it. He knew it with every sorry step he took, knew it in every terrible moment he stood, and knew it with every single-blood-pounding-heart-wrenching-world-stopping-ly guilty breath he drew. She turned the knob.

"Narcissa!" She could feel his presence behind her; hot breath sliding up her cheek as it had sixteen years ago. For one instant, they stood frozen, and the only sound she could hear was the steady drip of time, trickling through the eye of a needle. She jerked her head away, unable to stand the nearness of him. Forcing the door open, she stepped out into the frigid Moscow winter.

"Narcissa!" He was panting from the exertion of chasing her. He leaned against the open doorjamb of the Russian Roulette; the gentle light from dripping out from the inside of the club silhouetted his form like a moon in full eclipse, dark at the center, but bleeding away into brightness along the edges.

She turned towards him, exhaling slightly. Their breath hung ghostly white in the air between them, as transient and insubstantial as a lover’s dream.

"Hallo, Sirius," she whispered softly.

 

----

 

Moscow, USSR

January 1, 1980

"I don’t believe you," James said flatly, unaware that his mouth was hanging slightly ajar. "How can you even expect me to believe a word of what you’re saying--" he broke off spluttering, his boyish face red with indignation. "The Ministry would never engage in what you’re suggesting. Never."

"Pity," Ulyanov remarked, fingers tracing the lip of his shot glass.

James felt a wave of fear slide up the back of his throat, tasting of bile and lemonade. "I’m going to contact the proper authorities. I’m going to tell my father about your lies, I--"

"Can’t allow you to do that," Ulyanov finished James’s sentence for him. With a flick of his wrist, he motioned to Sasha, who limped to the edge of the bar, leaning forward and adding his body to the threads of the psychological noose tightening around James’s throat. "Now, Mr. Potter," he hissed dangerously, "we can do this the easy way or the hard. It’s entirely," his smile flashed dangerously, "your choice."

James’s ears burned red with feckless anger, making his head spin. When he finally was able to speak, his words were not borne of subversive cleverness, like Ulyanov’s, or cynical irreverence, which would undoubtedly be the tone of Sirius’s theoretical response, were he is James’s current fix. Prongs’s reply was full of nothing but naïve, idiotic courage. "Are you trying to proposition me? You’re wasting your bloody breath!"

"Shhh," Ulyanov cut him off with one swift hiss of air. "So be it." Without another word, he took James’s head between his hands and slammed it down upon the bar.

Through the veil of pain, James heard a voice from far above him whisper one single word, and though the speaker’s tones were somewhat muddled and fuzzy, as if they were a bad radio transmission, the spell was unmistakable.

"Oblivate."

He had time to feel mildly surprised before his entire world was shrouded in the impenetrable darkness of the unconscious mind.

James’s glasses spun away from his inanimate body, skittering across the black countertop to lie several feet away, one lens cracked straight down the middle.

"Leave him," Ulyanov snapped as Sasha bent down, attempting to pull the boy up into something resembling a sitting position, "he will wake up in the morning, not much worse for the wear." Sasha let go of James, but his blind acquiescence didn’t extend to his old eyes, shot with the cold light of concern. Ulyanov got to his feet, his hand feeling through the pocket of James’s coat. He was obviously searching for something, his face constricting into an intent mask as he felt the boy up and down and—

"Ah!" Ulyanov pulled his hand out of James’s breast pocket, a small burgundy leather booklet in his hand. With a deft moment he flipped the book open, a small smile growing over his ravaged features as he glanced at its contents.

"What is it, Doctor?" Sasha asked, bending across the bar to try and catch a glance at the booklet.

"The boy’s visa," Ulyanov said as he ripped out one of the back pages of the passport. Pulling a pen out of his overcoat he scrawled something upon the blank sheet, and then pushed both the visa and his note across the bar to Sasha.

"Six hundred thousand galleons for his return?" Sasha asked, picking up Ulyanov’s note and reading it aloud, his white brows crinkling into a mask of confusion.

Ulyanov bent down low over the bar, and only his eyes flickered upwards to meet Sasha’s questioning gaze. "Find an owl, put these in an envelope and address it to Alastor Moody, Department of Aurors, London."

----

 

Moscow, USSR

January 2, 1980

A change had come over her.

Instead of being consumed by a sort of all-encroaching desperation, so vacuous and yawning that it threatened to engulf her entire form, corporal and spiritual, swallow her hole and then spit her out with a satisfied "Ptooey!" she felt merely-- strangely-- content.

Content. It was such a little word for such a big feeling. For the first time in days, months, years, she was not on the brink of tears, or at the beck and call of a devious inner demon. In all truth, she felt nothing except a kind of fuzzy warmth in the pit of her stomach. There was a half-grin curving across her lips like a waxing crescent moon, luminous in its lukewarm luster.

It wasn’t anything really. No big revelation, no groundbreaking epiphany, unless you counted the absence of mind-paralyzing despair as a major coup. She did, as she couldn’t remember a time when she had not been trapped under the thumb of chronic sorrow.

It felt strangely liberating, but the possibility of a new and entirely different kind of imprisonment flickered across her mind as her gaze drifted downwards towards the stranger lying at her side. His hand was splayed across her stomach, fingers spread-eagled like a starfish’s legs, utterly disposable, part of the endless cycle of callers, customers, lovers .

Or was this particular hand so easily dispensable?

And was this particular man a stranger at all?

There was no circumventing the facts. She’d have to attribute this sudden contentedness to the man lying at her side. She looked at him, longish black hair falling down over his eyes, which were now closed; each guarded by its own fringe of dark lashes. He slept with his mouth open, breathing unevenly as a small trail of drool passed from his lips and onto the dirty wool of her black-market blanket.

He drooled. Like a dog.

And what alarmed her the most is that she found that mildly endearing. Had she thrown off one jailer, despair, for another, coming in the form of her liberator. If there was one thing she had learned from Miriken it was that appearances were always deceiving. And she didn’t know if she’d be able to bear another captivity, even if it came in the sweet guise of her savior.

But she soon dismissed this thought, for her fantasy was so powerful that it overrode all of her innate caution. The sweetest dreams always come to the most desperate.

She took a shallow breath, her chest tight to the point of immobility with a sudden irrational fear. This could not be love, everything she had heard about the most famed emotion was that it had always been a huge sweeping sanguine feeling, transcending all boundaries and overleaping any barricades. Her only symptoms were a warm sensation in the pit of her stomach and a contented half-grin on her lips. No, she decided, placating herself, it wasn’t love. But it was a smile.

And that is a start.

When he awoke, several minutes later by the faint rustle of an owl’s wings, her eyes were turned to the window, blue irises reflecting the haphazard message scrawled in the heavens by a careless God, splatter-painted stars visible in her gaze.

Shaking his head free of the last vestiges of sleep, Sirius caught the owl by the tail feathers, and relieved it of its roll of parchment. The paper was obviously cheap, so thin that it felt almost like newsprint as opposed to real vellum. Sirius turned the unmarked letter over in his hands, noticing how the thin parchment crinkled under his touch. Although the seal on the letter was intact the paper itself was decimated, wet, muddy and coming apart at the edges. The paper could have only come from one place.

In the middle of the decade, after Voldemort’s attacks on Britain intensified, the Ministry felt it necessary to redistribute funds in order to effectively battle the growing Death Eater threat. Though it meant that the wizarding world was significantly better protected, it also meant that it was worse equipped and although "high-priority" Ministry operations like the Department of Aurors had the financial backing to humor even their most outrageous whims, government programs that were not deemed vital to the war effort had to make do with second, or more realistically third or fourth, rate goods—hence the cheap parchment. Remus’s beloved Merlin Archives has been especially hard hit by the Ministry cuts, and there were rumors that Harold L. planned to scrap the project entirely, which Sirius thought was a mistake. But on the other hand, that was nothing new, as Sirius considered most of Harold L.’s actions foolhardy. His curiosity awakened, Sirius leapt out of his reverie and into the present, leaning forward to slit the seal open with his thumb—

He was interrupted by a sharp nip on the nose. The mail owl, which had been flying nervously about Narcissa’s tiny room since he had delivered his package, was more than ready to get moving. Without so much as an impatient squawk goodbye, the creature zipped out of the open window like a bat outta hell.

"Hey!" Dropping his letter on the floor next to his denim jacket, Sirius leapt off of the dilapidated mattress that served Narcissa as a bed and bounded over to the open window, shaking his fist at the delinquent post owl. "Come back here! What if I want to write back?" The owl pointedly ignored him, and Sirius could only watch hopelessly as it winged its way across the somber January sky. The tiny bird became smaller and smaller until it was only a pinprick on the western horizon, soon swallowed whole by the storm clouds gathering in the farthest reaches of the winter sky.

"Let it go," the quiet consolation was Narcissa’s, drawing him back to the mattress by the sound of her smoky voice alone. "It just knows it’s not welcome here."

"What are you talking about?" Sirius sat down beside her, intense gaze still focused upon the open window even though there was nothing to see except the gray contours of the city and the empty sky beyond.

"Owl correspondence is severely restricted," she said, dropping the unopened letter back into his lap. "It’s frowned upon by the SDE, because the Muggles wouldn’t have access to it. They see it as an inequality."

Sirius didn’t even bother to reply, eyes still scanning for any sign of the post owl. The bird had not only brought him a letter, but memories of England, home, normality thing he had almost forgotten the existence of, for they seemed worlds away from the cold Soviet capital. Although he was loath to admit it, he wished he could follow the bird home.

But James, always disgustingly noble and infuriatingly stalwart would have no copping out. Sirius could just hear his friend’s disgusted, and no doubt patronizing, reply if he suggested returning to England. "Well if its too intense for you, Sirius, then leave by all means. I was brought up to keep my promises and stand by my beliefs, but it would be foolhardy for me to expect that of everyone." Never mind the fact that James would most likely be dead if it wasn’t for him, or worse, blabbing the few state secrets that he knew to Ulyanov. Of course James would term this blatant breach of magical security "breaking the ice", negating its consequences in his own mind. Prongs would always remain as white as virgin snow in his sainted opinion, utterly unwilling to forgive anyone (example: Sirius) who was unable to live up to his ridiculous standards of morality. The only poetic justice Sirius could see in the entire situation was that not even James was able to attain the "noble soul" he expected everyone he met to possess. The same pigheaded arrogance that caused James to aspire to such high moral standards would always keep him from attaining them.

As Remus had pointed out sometime just after Hogwarts graduation, James was the perfect specimen of a born and bred Englishman; fiendishly proud, idiotically stubborn, and completely confident that the sun shone out of his own arse.

Not that Sirius didn’t like James. Quite the contrary, the two had clicked ever since their first meeting on the Hogwarts express. He could read James like Kindergarten English and Prongs could easily do the same for him. It was just that he had always felt somewhat disconnected from James and the rest of his affluent family. Sirius was of the firm belief that there were two separate wizarding Englands. There was the "upper-crust" pureblood families that may have had at one time had hereditary titles and still unofficially retained all the perks of such positions, and then there was everybody else.

Sirius was very much an "everybody else", while James and Peter, both from wealthy wizarding families with flowery genealogies longer than Albus Dumbledore’s beard were the dictionary definition of upper class. James could trace his lineage back to the Nordic wizard Sven the Splendiferous circa 408 AD, which Sirius, whose only family was his father and his batty old great aunt (and there was nothing particularly exciting about her, a victim of tertiary syphilis, all she did was sit in the corner and hum nonsense) found absolutely ridiculous. There was nothing special about a load of dead people, regardless of how many epithets they had attached to their names.

Remus, being Welsh, didn’t count.

Sirius’s "two England" theory had been developed and adopted on account of James’s father, Harold L. Potter. Since the moment they had first met when James brought Sirius home to the Potter’s Devonshire estate the Christmas of their second year at Hogwarts, Harold L. Potter had always made it quite clear that he detested Sirius, and Sirius was far from subtle when it came to expressing that the feelings were quite mutual. All of James’s worst qualities stemmed directly from his father. If James was of the opinion that the sun shone out of his arse then Harold L. was utterly convinced that he had an entire galaxy up there. Sirius was inclined to agree to this postulate in one respect, though he was dead certain that it was not the Milky Way that Harold L. was carrying around in his backside.

Sirius, who had cut his teeth on the gutters of Liverpool, was often the brunt of Potter’s bigotry. For his part, Harold L. insisted that "dirty Black boy" was corrupting his precious son, which to be completely honest, wasn’t that far from the truth. In defense, Sirius would say that James enjoyed being corrupted, which wasn’t that far from the truth either, despite the fact that Prongs would never admit to gaining any amusement from his Sirius-induced descent down the primrose path.

Shaking his head to clear it of the memories, Sirius turned his head to his letter. Careful not to rip the cheap parchment he reached under the lip of the letter, breaking the wax seal with his thumb. He didn’t have to look twice at the spidery cursive writing before he knew its author.

Sirius--

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. Peter sends his regards and XXXXXXXXXXXXXX didn’t have much trouble with the classified material. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. Thanks, pal. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.

Sirius broke off reading, staring at Remus’s letter in amazement. Every few words were blotted out by a thick black line, chopping the note into tiny fragments of information and breaking the letter's cohesive whole.

"It’s been censored," Narcissa said quietly, her blonde curls dusting skin as she looked at the letter over his shoulder. "All owls coming into the country are intercepted by the SDE and edited appropriately."

"Edited appropriately," Sirius echoed dully, staring at Remus’s ruined letter, a hollow forming in the base of his breast. The SDE had remained invisible for a good deal of his stay here, but now their presence hovered over him like a suffocating lethifold, forever watching, always waiting until just the right moment to smother its prey. If the SDE’s hand could reach so far as to intercept his personal communications, what else did they know about him?

What else had they already discovered?

Not for the first time, Sirius wondered how much longer he would be able to last in Moscow, a lion’s den masked as a city, only revealing its true form once the jaws of the trap had swung shut. Or had he just ignored the signs that he was in too deep, arrogance becoming his blinders, hubris convincing him that he could best the Soviet system. This letter showed him that he couldn’t even slip through Russia’s cracks undiscovered.

As Sirius’s eyes traveled back to Remus’s massacred letter his initial fear melted into molten anger. How dare they? The SDE had no right to spy and scrounge; blacking out his friend’s speech like it was an arithmetic mistake. For the true mistake was not Remus’s, but the SDE’s. He’d make them regret this intrusion in the end, or he’d damn himself with Voldemort and all of his minions. Lip curling into a scowl, he continued to read what was left of the letter.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX there is a Vladimir Ulyanov in the Merlin Archives, the only (slight) complication is the fact that he died in 1924. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. Vladimir Ulyanov is the birth name of Lenin. In case that doesn’t ring a bell, or more aptly, because that doesn’t ring a bell, Lenin was XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX simply wonderful.

XXXX, there are two possibilities. One, Vladimir Ulyanov is exactly who he says he is and you’re dealing with the ghost of a late Soviet Dictator. I seriously doubt the likelihood of something like that occurring, even to you and James. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Two, this man is playing on your ignorance, which seems far more feasible to me, but then again, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.

My suggestion: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX keep XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX your chin XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX up.

Best XXXXX,

Remus

PS- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXX, and of course Lily wants you to bear a message to James, I told her that XXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. She says if he isn’t home within the week, she’s going to name the baby after his father. I’d urge him to do as she says; the world could do without another Harold Potter.

There was no question in Sirius’s mind that Lily would make good of her threat. A wild, wicked little sprite with a soul burning as bright as the red flame of her hair, Lily had James wrapped around her finger like the 14 karat wedding ring he had given her last March, emerald to match her eyes. Lily was the only one who could beat sense into James when he was in one of his (numerous) states of pigheaded immobility, and she didn’t hesitate to use this talent, and thus make all of their lives a little bit easier.

Beyond her fiery spirit, Lily had the sweetest eyes and the lightest laugh and when she was smiling it was like the whole world was grinning madly back at you. Sirius supposed he was half in love with her. They all were really, Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and of course Prongs. He had once joked, though not without a trace of seriousness, that Lily hadn’t so much married James as wedded herself to the Marauders.

The thought of the Marauders caused Sirius to glance briefly back towards Remus’s damaged note, smiling to himself. Despite the censorship, it was times like these when he was so intensely reminded how far away home really was and, he thought with a pang of embarrassment, how much he really missed it. By home, he didn’t necessarily mean his bed and his bike and all of his familiar material things, but the camaraderie of the Marauders, and their close-knit circle. Sirius missed the security of being among people that cared about him. People that didn’t have hidden agendas stuffed up their sleeve, people who were not playing their own secret games of life and death.

His gaze lingered upon Narcissa, who was smiling contentedly upon his chest. She was so beautiful and yet, so incredibly alien to the world of friendship and security he was used to and had before now, taken for granted.

Even before Hogwarts, in Liverpool, Sirius may not have had vast ancestral estates like James or meandering genealogies á la Peter, but he had had friends, which had become, whether they knew it or not, his safety net to fall back upon and the only real family he had possessed. Narcissa had none of that, and it killed him, for the loneliness and desperation she felt had always been a stone’s throw away from his father’s tiny home on Wright street, something always lurking like a Grim in the darkest alleyways of his mind.

So he made his first New Year’s resolution. He’d give her a tiny taste of his life, if only one little sliver of the safety and friendship Peter, Remus, and James provided unquestionably for him. She deserved it more than he ever had, if only for the single reason that to his knowledge, she had never experienced such unwavering love. He’d be her James, her Remus, her Peter-- It was the least that he could do.

She looked at him, blue eyes crystal clear in the pale light of dawn. "Good letter?"

"You can read it if you want," he said, offering it to her. "What’s left of it at least," he added dryly.

She looked away hurriedly. "It’s none of my business. I shouldn’t have--"

"Don’t," he cut her off, sick of her timid shyness. She was like a scared rabbit. It made his sick to see a human being so conditioned by the system that they were afraid to speak their mind, frightened of their own thoughts. He took her hand firmly and placed the parchment in it, squeezing her wrist a little too tight for comfort. "Read it," he commanded slowly, as if he was speaking to a small child. "I trust you." He felt good saying those words, not because he particularly meant them, but because he though that they were something she desperately needed to hear-- needed to believe. It was impossible, Sirius thought with a twinge of foreboding for the girl, to love anyone until you loved yourself. He should know.

She squeezed the letter in her sweaty palm, frail fingers lingering upon the folded parchment. "Can I open it?"

"Yes," Sirius answered the question for her before the last breath of her previous word had left her mouth. He drew her close as she slowly unfolded Remus’s letter, wrapping his arms around her waist. She was so thin that the bones of her tiny ribs pressed into his arms, feeling like the bars of a cage. Her pale blue eyes traveled down to the parchment. The spidery cursive script that covered it came into view and—

"I can’t read English," she said flatly, a touch of regret in her voice. A lying thought crossed her mind, her fragile confidence unraveling inside of her like a badly sewn hemline. What if he was toying with her affections, with the intent to mock her horribly?

He felt her freeze up under his touch, and not knowing the source of her sudden discomfort, he tried to soothe her tension with a gentle squeeze. "I’ll read it to you."

"I don’t care," she sniffled quietly.

"Please," he said, "let me." It was more of a command than any kind of request, so she relented, allowing him to pry the letter from her clenched fingers. Drawing a breath, he began to read, tracing the words with his index finger as he went along so she could see what had been "edited appropriately" by the SDE.

When he reached the part about Vladimir Ulyanov, she graced him with a slightly amused chuckle, and he was so amazed to hear any sound of enjoyment from her that he set down the letter, an incredulous expression on his face. "What?" he asked.

"Of course he isn’t Vladimir Ulyanov," she said flatly, a small grin still lingering upon her lips. "I don’t know how he managed to get away with that alias for so long."

"Alias?" Sirius blinked somewhat taken aback, but after letting the new information sink in for a few moments, he wasn’t really surprised. Sirius had always known intuitively that there was more to "Vladimir Ulyanov" than initially met the eye. "What do you mean?" Sirius said cautiously, trying to keep his tone even. His instinct was screaming at him that he was on the edge of something very, very large. Probably Hagrid large, possibly Andre the Giant large, maybe even Snape’s nose large, but of course, that was only if he was very lucky. He knew had to contain his excitement lest he frighten Narcissa into her usual silence. If only he could keep the tight-lipped girl talking

"Of course Ulyanov is an alias. Vladimir Ulyanov is Lenin," she said matter-of-factly as Sirius leaned closer, baiting his breath. "It’s would be like someone walking around England calling themselves King Arthur."

Sirius remained silent for a moment, slowly beginning to realize that he now had solid proof that Ulyanov had screwed him over, and not just minimally. The bastard had pulled a fucking two-ton bag over his head. Sirius was not amused. "So if he’s not Vladimir Ulyanov, who is he?"

"I don’t know," she said. Her reply came a little too quick to be entirely truthful.

"Yes you do," he countered, pulling her tighter against him, afraid she may try to escape.

She went rigid, whether from his sudden affection or their tense discussion, he wasn’t sure. "It’s none of your business," Narcissa whispered tersely, eyes darting about in a nervous manner.

"What harm can it possibly do?" he said, stroking her hair gently, trying to diffuse her wild fear as quickly as possible. He didn’t fancy getting thrown out in the cold again. And if she chucked him out, he’d have twice as many questions floating around his brain unanswered, gnawing at the ropes binding his conscious mind together. He didn’t know how much longer he could take the constant stress of simply surviving in Moscow without snapping for good.

"Please, Sirius," she whispered, curling up against him. From where she was nestled against his chest, blonde hair streaming over her features, she didn’t look much older than ten. "Not now. Not here."

And he knew he could have wrestled it out of her; he was aware that her could have broken her, but he wasn’t able to make himself do it. It wasn’t fair to her, and for all of his disgust at James’s over-zealous mortality, it just didn’t seem right to him. He tried to reconcile his reluctance to himself by saying he would get it out of her later. But despite the nominal justification, Sirius knew that wouldn’t wrestle it out of her by brute force, not now, not later. He just didn’t have the heart to push her over the edge. So he simply ringed both of Narcissa’s wrists with his own and whispered: "You said the magic word."

She smiled a weak, relieved sort of smile, staring at his fingers as he let go of one wrist, hand gently traveling up the curve of her hip

She loosed his grip upon her other wrist and moved his hand into her own, their fingers intertwining. Somehow, his lips found hers and they met, tentatively at first and then harder, faster, deeper as her lips parted against the intoxicating kiss, her mind swam, dizzy and drunk with the sweet elixir of lust. She reached around his waist, fingers traveling under the cheap fabric of his ratty T-shirt, his slick sweat greasing her palm as she traced the curve of his spine, heart beating faster, the act of breathing becoming a desperate task, the moment so beautiful that it ached--

The door burst open, bouncing off the far wall with a violent clang.

Sirius broke out of the kiss as Narcissa froze like a deer in the headlights, a look of abject shock on both of their faces. Ulyanov didn’t even have the grace to even pretend to be embarrassed. "Here," he said gruffly, tossing a pile of pale-pink lace at Narcissa. "Put this on. Malfoy is waiting for you."

Sirius’s jaw hardened at the mention of Lucius. Shooting Ulyanov an acid stare he watched angrily as Narcissa slid out from under him, her manor that of an apologetic child. "Wait for me." Although it was actually a statement, the girl’s phrase had the tenor of a nervous question as opposed to an actual command.

Eyes blazing fury that he didn’t have the wit to hide, Sirius turned to Narcissa and made a point of replying in the direction of Ulyanov, who was hovering over their bed with the satisfied air of a cat that has just had the cream. "Of course," he said and then, simply to piss the older man off, he reached for her, bringing his lips down hard upon hers, felt her respond, body arching as the kiss oozed through them like hot wax. Her heart hardly dared to beat as she melted slowly into him

Ulyanov, always the romantic, cleared his throat. "Are you quite finished?"

Narcissa twisted away, blushing furiously with embarrassment. Sirius gave her hand a squeeze, more out of pity than any tender emotion. He would rather face 1000 Ulyanovs than spend one evening with Lucius Malfoy. Judging from the abject look of terror upon her own face, Narcissa seemed to share his sentiment. She shot Sirius one last warm smile through the frigid gulf of air as she scurried past Ulyanov and closed the door gently behind her.

The silence that followed was, if anything, excruciatingly uncomfortable.

Ulyanov finally broke the silence, his tiny tongue darting over the crocodile grin formed by his lips. "Mr. Black."

Sirius wasn’t remotely surprised that Ulyanov had learned his real name. In fact, he was more astonished that it had taken his "informant" so long to see through his shallow ploy. "Skip the pleasantries, Ulyanov," he sneered, reaching down to grab at his T-shirt, still lying in a crumpled green ball on Narcissa’s floor where he had abandoned it the night before. "I have had enough of your bull to last me a lifetime."

Ulyanov’s smile did not extend to his eyes as he reached into the breast pocket of his overcoat. Instinctively, Sirius tensed, half-afraid that Ulyanov was about to pull out a gun a shoot him on the spot. He relaxed somewhat when the older man pulled out a grubby leather cigarette case, which he snapped open. "Smoke?" he asked, offering the case to Sirius.

Sirius shook his head. "I don’t smoke."

Ulyanov continued to smile, showing all of his teeth as he slipped the case back into his overcoat. "Neither do I, but I find cigarettes useful for relaxing," he paused, searching for the right word, "acquaintances."

"Sedating your prey," Sirius muttered as he pulled the grubby green shirt over his head.

Ulyanov shook his old head slightly, fixed smile never wavering. "You have no tact, Mr. Black. You have the invaluable talent of saying exactly the wrong thing at precisely," his smile widened maliciously, "the wrong time."

"Is this going to be a discussion of my shortcomings, Ulyanov?" Sirius said tersely as he pulled on his jeans, standing up for the first time.

"No, I’ll touch on your merits," the other man said. "You’re highly intelligent, extremely cynical and," he added pointedly, "you have very good instincts. For instance, you knew not to trust me from the moment you arrived. Or if you’d prefer a more immediate example, when I reached into my coat a few moments back you thought I was going to produce this," he said smoothly, withdrawing his hand from the pocket of his overcoat. Closed in his fingers was a pistol.

Sirius’s eyes flickered down to the gun and then back to Ulyanov. "Is it loaded?"

"Of course."

"You’re not like your friend, Mr. Black. You’re nobody’s fool, and I daresay it would be against character for you to stay here when it is so painfully obvious that you are not wanted. I hope you know what you’re doing Mr. Black, screwing with the powers that be."

"I’ve been screwing with the powers that be all of my life," Sirius hissed, his hand unconsciously clenching into a fist.

"As have I," Ulyanov said quietly. "Be prepared to pay dearly for it."

"Is that a threat?" Sirius growled, his eyes narrowing into dangerous slits.

"It’s a warning," Ulyanov said flatly, his face an unreadable mask. "A warning you don’t deserve," he snapped, falling back his old condescending sneer.

"Then why are you sparing the valuable time to warn me?" Sirius countered, his voice growing a little bit louder.

Ulyanov’s unnerving smile widened, and his low voice broke into a laugh. "I am wasting my time. You’re not going to leave. You British are so stubborn; from a purely intellectual standpoint it’s actually quite admirable, but I’m afraid your pigheadedness is not practical in the real world. This is not Hogwarts, Sirius Black."

Sirius tensed, at the mention of his former school. His anonymity, his privacy, basic human rights, had been ripped away to leave him standing dead still with shock, staring into the sneering smile of the man determined to be his downfall. "You said it yourself," he replied, black eyes burning with the flame of sheer obstinacy, "I’m nobody’s fool."

The other man laughed at this. "Very good, Sirius, very good. But I’m afraid I can’t keep you around to amuse me; you’ve already outlived your much debatable usefulness. If you don’t leave soon," Ulyanov said smoothly, putting on the façade of being rather bored with his rigged game of cat and mouse, "I will ensure that you meet with a regrettable accident, that is," he smiled nastily, showing all of his teeth, "supposing that Lucius Malfoy doesn’t get to you first."

Sirius couldn’t help but laugh sardonically. The day Malfoy made him pay for anything would be the night he’d murder James, and Wormtail would betray them all before that happened. "You’re very funny, Ulyanov."

"Oh, I’m not joking." Ulyanov looked it; his face was completely serious, lips pressed together in a slight frown. "I don’t joke. Not when I’m playing games with such high stakes."

"What if I had a royal flush up my sleeve," Sirius upped the ante, refusing to fold.

There was a glimmer of amusement in Ulyanov’s intense gaze, but whether it was on account of the poker metaphors or sparked by his own dumb pigheadedness, Sirius couldn’t tell. "I’d suggest," Ulyanov began, choosing his words carefully, "that you open your eyes and see who is really dealing you your hand, Mr. Black." The older man’s tone was slick with oozing mockery. "The Riviera isn’t the only place that is rigged."

"Clever," Sirius sneered drolly.

Ulyanov raised an eyebrow. "Yes, things do get rather clever when the Joker is holding all of the cards. That’s why most people take him out of the deck before they start to play."

"So why are you in the deck this time, Ulyanov?"

"Because I’m the dealer."

 

----

 

Lucius strode down the entry hall of Zvana Miriken's home, absentmindedly running his fingers over the dark wood paneling lining her walls. It really was a beautiful house, though its quaint charm didn’t approach the gothic grandeur of Malfoy Manor back in Yorkshire or even the rustic splendor of his summer villa in Cordoba. But as homes go, Zvana's was tolerable, especially considering that ever since the Soviets had taken over, the Russian ideal of edificial beauty had been four steel poles and several hundred tons of concrete.

But Miriken's home was pre-Revolutionary and thus spared this aesthetic suicide. The house was quaint enough, sporting a sprawling wrap-around porch and stone walls, all painted in lurid shade of cough-medicine purple. And though the paint was now watered and faded, Miriken's house still stuck out like a petrified birthday cake in the gray industrial wasteland of Moscow, radiating warmth, hope, and all sorts of various in sundry home-cooked values, in short, everything you would not expect to find inside the walls of an illegal whore house. Lucius scowled because that's exactly what Zvana’s home was: a whorehouse. And he wished that his father were still alive to see him sink so low.

His single hope was that his father could have hung onto his miserable life long enough to see the Dark Lord triumph. Lucius would have sold his soul in an instant to see the look on the old man's face on the day when Voldemort took over the seat now occupied by that idiot Potter, while Moody, Dumbledore and all of his father's old cronies watched helpless-- trampled underfoot. Ironically, the sight of such a day would have probably killed Angelo Malfoy. But there was no use in such childish fantasies, whatever fleeting satisfaction they gave him. The old man was long dead and as far as the hand of magic reached, it could not cross the River Styx, and break the barrier between who is and what was.

Lucius no longer had any business in Moscow thanks to the ineptitude of Vladimir Ulyanov. The next time he ran across that unfortunate man, Lucius planned to make the imbecile weep for mercy, ruing the day that his bitch of a mother brought him squealing into the world. True, there was the always the Potter boy to occupy his time, and his master would be greatly pleased if he managed to procure damaging information on the son of the British Minster of Magic, but Lucius was feeling far to languid to formulate any diabolical schemes. Besides, the Potter boy was an idiot by nature and would waltz into danger without any prior prompting. Lucius could simply sit back and watch the show. He was bored with world domination, and beyond that-- with the world itself. Ever since he had first set foot in Moscow, he had had the constitution of a wet rag and memories that he had been trying to repress for the better part of a decade decided to rear heir ugly heads. Was it only just a decade ago he had graduated from Hogwarts? Ten years seemed like ten long centuries, in which he had aged countless lifetimes.

Remembering Miriken's comment about wards he lit a cigarette with a slight wave of his hand. Truth be told, he honestly wanted to go back home-- to Spain. He hadn't been to England, home in the most legal sense of the word, since his father's funeral, ten months ago. He didn't miss it, because aside from the fact that Britain was rainy, gray, and miserable, Malfoy Manor, and the moors surrounding it brought him closer to the person he had been at his Hogwarts graduation, a short decade ago. He had left that person buried under thousands of feet of jungle mud. He couldn't tolerate the Manor, and the effect it had upon him.

Moodily, he exhaled, letting out a thin trail of smoke. The Manor though willed to him by his father, was unofficially his sister's, who, although she much preferred the south of France, took residence within its walls five weeks for every one night he spent there. Her absence at the ancestral Yorkshire estate wasn’t because she was haunted by memory but simply on account of the allure of the beaches and the cars and the Roulette tables of the Riviera. His sister was a professional socialite and made a career out of her idleness. Her fun and games weren't a complete waste however; she was a notoriously good gambler and doubled her slim cut of the family fortune annually. It was Lucius's pet theory that his sister wasn't so much a good gambler as a skilled cheater but he turned a blind eye to the "games" of his fellow Slytherin. How else did the world expect them to make use of their talents?

And while his sister frittered her days away on the Riviera, Lucius had turned to the Malfoy's ancestral home in Spain. Malfoy was actually a bastardized French version of Malfé, literally translated from the original Castilian as "bad faith". The Malfé had been a powerful clan of wizards in what is now called Andalucia, a region of Southern Spain. Infamous for their dabbling in the Black Arts, the Malfé had held wizarding Andalucia in an iron grip without any interference from the local Muggles, Moor or Christian, until about the year 1400. Contrary to popular belief, the Spanish Inquisition targeted not only Jews and Protestants, but Witches and Wizards as well. Fearing for their lives, the Malfé had been forced to leave their vast holdings in the grip of the Inquisition and flee across the Pyrenees to France with no possessions except the clothes on their backs.

Never admitting defeat, they managed to worm their way into the French court, which, unlike its neighbor to the South, had quite the taste for magic and necromancy. The Malfé, now Malfoy, whored themselves out to the French aristocracy, fashioning themselves seers and mystics in an effort to capitalize upon the noble’s obsession with the occult. Before long, the displaced Spaniards had secured a niche in Parisian society, and they managed to weather three centuries of court intrigue with a smile upon their lips and a phony crystal ball in their hands.

But the Malfoy’s time in France did nothing for their historic legacy as Dark wizards. Immersed in the shallow materialism of the French court, the Malfoys ancient ties to the black arts grew weaker and weaker until they finally snapped entirely, leaving a watered-down family of second-rate wizards who cared more for frippery than magic. But in 1789, everything changed. Seventeen eighty-nine was the year of the dawning of the rights of man, the year of liberté, fraternité, and égalité for all, and the year Dr. Guillotine’s device for killing chickens began its long slow climb into infamy. Seventeen ninety-eight was the year of the French Revolution.

Like many other aristocratic families, the Malfoys became émigrés, fleeing war-torn France for the relative safety of the British Isles. They finally settled in Yorkshire, and set to building the much-famed Malfoy Manor, which was completed in early 1801, exactly twelve years after their Diaspora from France. It was then that the Émigrés immersed themselves completely in British wizarding society, just as their Spanish ancestors had done in France four hundred years earlier.

It has only been in the last century that the Spanish Ministry of Magic, laOficina Mágica de España, formally apologized for the harm done to countless Witches and Wizards during the Inquisition. The Oficina began to pay nominal reparations, which the Malfoys gladly added to their already brimming coffers, and returned the deed to the Malfé’s ancestral estate in Andalucia. Despite these efforts at catharsis, Spain still suffered from the long-term effects of her Inquisition. To the present day, Spain had a significantly lower Wizard per Muggle ratio than most major world nations.

Lucius’s father had taken him to the Malfé Mansión as a small child. He had a bucketful of hazy sun-drenched childhood memories of his summers at the family estate. He remembered clambering up the villa’s imposing grand staircase on his hands and knees, chasing his sister through the Mansión’s endless olive groves, and watching the local Minotaur fights. Although he was entranced by the brilliant red of the Matador’s cape, and the sheer physical power of the monster, whose muscles rippled like liquid fire under his coat of black fur, above all, it was the scent of kill that captured the small boy’s imagination.

He had spent days in the ring, gray eyes peeping over the whitewashed partition between the actual arena and the stands surrounding it. Sometimes the ring’s occupants, man or beast, got so close that he could reach out a small hand and almost touch the fantasy. But more often than not, they had remained in the center of the arena, detached from his tiny reality. Still he remained, watching the fights day after day as the hot Spanish sun beating upon his back, eventually turning his pale skin a blistering red.

In those days, the Mansión had seemed like a playground to him, friendly and benevolent, like an ancient uncle ready to scoop him up onto his knee and whisper tales of the "good old days". But when Lucius had finally clambered up onto his Uncle’s knee, and heard the stories of the Malfoys in days when they had held Andalucia within their iron grip, the countenance of the Mansión had transformed from a smiling relative to a bitter old man, urging him with every passing day to rekindle all of the former glory of the Malfé. His brief spell in Moody’s army pushed him over the edge. Upon returning from deployment, he fled Yorkshire to Cordoba where the Mansión and its legends consumed him, until he was unable to distinguish his own will from that of his ancestors, the call of his blood stronger than that of reason.

As a child he had been oblivious to the omnipresent aura of Dark magic that lurked about the Mansión like fog from a B-rated horror movie, always drifting a few meters above the ground, billowing about his ankles as it wove its spell around his heart, icy fingers tightening in a stranglehold about his spirit. He knew the old villa was slowly drawing him in, playing a cat and mouse game with his soul, laughing as Lucius embraced the legacy his father had turned his back upon. Lucius did not so much embrace his legacy as his legacy engulfed him with as much ferocity as the bitter bite of the brand, burned into the naked flesh of his arm. He blindly followed the call of the Malfé’s magic, its ethereal tones reminiscent of a Mudblood’s scream, echoing in the stratosphere of his subconscious. The Dark Arts were in his blood. He needed no other justification for his participation in black magic. And as much as his father would like to pretend otherwise, one’s nature was predestined.

Inescapable.

But Moscow, with its bitter cold wind was a far cry from the olive groves of Southern Spain. And Lucius had wanted desperately to go home, home to his Mansión and his Minotaur ring, home to the place that called to him like England never would. But then, she had appeared.

He took a long drag on his cigarette, considering her. She was beautiful. But she was also a terrible bore, always silent and sniveling and shuddering, but even that was better than the inane prattle so many people made a hobby of. If there was one thing he couldn’t stand it was people. Most of them seemed perfectly adequate, and then they blew the entire gig by opening their mouths. Moodily, he let out a cloud of smoke. He wasn’t in love with her-- God, no-- but she was a perfectly adequate ornament who would fit his purposes for the night.

No one would ever know she was a whore.

Taking a drag on his cigarette, he pushed open the door to Zvana’s office—

--To find Mrs. Miriken jerking hastily across her desk, a telltale smear of lipstick on her chin. And turning from the scene of the crime to look at the intruder, his collar slightly askew, was Vladimir Ulyanov. The papers on Zvana’s desk looked like someone had just been through them with a whirlwind charm.

Lucius blinked mildly, appearing rather unfazed. "You do get around," he said scornfully to Ulyanov by way of greeting. Zvana turned a florid shade of red, and she refused to meet Lucius’s gaze, suddenly very interested in the collar of her ruby suit jacket.

Ulyanov, unlike Zvana, appeared completely unruffled. "At least I don’t have to pay for my kicks, Malfoy," he replied icily, unable to suppress a self-satisfied smirk.

Lucius was rather upset, not on account of Ulyanov’s childish taunt, but because he had always supposed that Zvana had been a bit of a nun ever since her husband’s death. When she had finally decided to cease her excessive mourning she had chosen a disgusting sot like Vladimir Ulyanov, old enough to be her father. If Lucius had been in Zvana’s position he would have chosen someone more attractive, stronger, and for the love of Voldemort, younger. Lucius would have chosen someone more like himself

"Narcissa is--" Zvana began rather hurriedly, wiping the lipstick from her chin. Narcissa? Was that the girl’s name? Lucius had forgotten. As he stared moodily at the mess on Zvana’s desk he noticed her glance nervously at Ulyanov who shook his head ever so slightly in reply to her unspoken question. He half-wondered what they were planning. He didn’t really care as long as they gave him the girl.

"Waiting for you," Ulyanov finished Zvana’s sentence, the slightest twist of mockery in his voice. He nodded disrespectfully at Lucius. "I’ll her you’ve arrived."

"Be quick about it," Lucius snapped, wanting to put the man back in his servile position.

Ulyanov didn’t even grace Lucius with a reply. He brushed past the younger man coldly, fixing his collar with one hand as he pushed the door open with the other. Malfoy listened to the pitter-pat sound of the other man’s footfalls ascending the rickety wooden staircase leading to the floors above before glancing at the obviously embarrassed Zvana. Noting her red cheeks and her inability to meet his gaze he realized that he had lighted upon the perfect way to revenge himself upon Ulyanov.

Lucius sat down across from Zvana sans invitation. Smiling, he took a long drag on his cigarette, blowing the smoke out into the woman’s face. His grim widened when she began to cough. "I was under the impression that you were still in mourning for your husband," he said tactfully, watching her squirm.

"You can only mourn for so long," Zvana said carefully after an uncomfortable pause. Her expression was strained and she was glancing about her tiny office like a caged rabbit.

Lucius bared his teeth in a wolf’s grin. "Before the memory fades."

"What?" she was rather unnerved under his intense glare.

"You can only mourn so long before the memory fades," he paused for the briefest moment, his amiable tone turning malicious. "I’m sure your husband would forgive you."

Zvana managed to look rather affronted. "My husband is dead, Mr. Malfoy."

Lucius’s voice was icy innocence. "I used the past tense."

But then the door slid open and Narcissa stepped into the room dressed in a low cut gown of pink lace with slit sleeves. Its drape was almost Roman in style, hanging over her shoulders in an entirely asymmetrical, yet aesthetically pleasing, manner. Her hair was done up in a haphazard bun, tiny ringlets floating downwards to frame her finely cut face.

Yes, she would be a satisfactory ornament.

And mercifully, Ulyanov was nowhere to be seen. When Narcissa saw Lucius, a flicker of muted resignation passed across her face. As he crossed the room to take hold of her arm, he felt her body tense under his touch, little pulse beating fast at the memory of their conversation the previous night.

Lucius also remembered, and he took a suggestive puff of his cigarette, engulfing her in a cloud of smoke. "It’s always a pleasure, Mrs. Miriken," he said insincerely, gripping Narcissa so tightly that her pale skin changed from white to black. The girl didn’t call out.

In a gesture strangely reminiscent of Ulyanov, Zvana inclined her head, a false smile upon her lips. "Do come again, Mr. Malfoy."

 

----

 

You don’t know gray until you’ve been out east. Behind the iron curtain, gray isn’t just a color, it’s the currency, the philosophy, a daily dosage. It invades every facet of life, the architecture: soulless tenement homes, the fashion: factory chic, pop culture: or realistically, lack thereof. Grey worms its way into every single aspect of life until it isn’t just a color; it’s a taste, a smell, and a sight, utterly oppressive, filling every sense with choking thoughts of doubt, cloying at any residual hope. Hope: Pandora’s tiny white bird that is the sheer determination of and driving force behind the firebrands of the human race. It is the fleeting emotion that stokes the flame of revolution.

For a proletarian utopia, Moscow was pretty damn gray.

And the Ministry of Magic’s diplomatic liaison office to the SDE was no exception. Even decked out for a party, the square gray rectangle of a building seemed subdued, half-alive. The red ribbons that were half-heartedly twined around the wrought iron banister leading up to the front door were covered in snow, their innate vibrant color bleeding out into the Moscow winter, staining the snow a weak shade of candy pink.

The green wreath on the door was wilted; its festive leaves falling out upon the doorstep in great clumps, like the hair of a middle-aged model, desperately trying to bleach the gray out of her aged locks. If Lucius breathed deeply, he could almost smell the peroxide, or maybe that stench was just from the tall smokestacks of the Moscow’s friendly chemical plants, generously dumping thousands of metric tons of carcinogens into their fellow Muscovites’ air every year. Because you see, in Communism we all share.

Gray eyes taking in the front of the deplorable embassy, Lucius’s lip curled in scorn. The diplomatic liaison office was run by the Department of International Magical Cooperation, and everyone knew that International Magical Cooperation was the division of the Ministry of Magic for poor boys who wanted desperately to make good. For anyone of any stature to be appointed there was a social black ball, as deadly as the timeless Avada Kedrava. Thus, International Magical Cooperation was full of disgusting scroungers who passed up no opportunity to suck up to Lucius, obviously hoping for some kind of handout. He couldn’t even walk into International Magical Cooperation’s offices without having four or five half-penny wizards wearing robes that looked like they had been filched out of a trunk at St. Mungo’s Youth Hostel kneeling down and offering to kiss his ass. But their efforts were in vain. He didn’t donate to charity.

Bastards. He couldn’t stand them. As a race diplomats, and those in the Department of International Magical Cooperation in particular, were good-for-nothing sods surviving on a diet of charity handouts and watered-down soup from the local wizarding shelters. They were the only people convinced of their own worth and any real wizard with half a brain could see through their groundless pride and hand-darned dress robes. As much as they deluded themselves otherwise, schmoozing with real people like himself would never make a diplomat worth anything.

Lucius wished he could get his hands around the throat of the man who had informed the staff of the Ministry of Magic’s Embassy to the SDE that he was in Moscow. Fancying themselves desirable company, the diplomats had invited him, along with a sizable guest list of British wizards in Russia with a yearly income of over 4 million Galleons, to their annual New Year’s soirée. Lucius supposed that if the diplomats themselves didn’t possess the flow they would try and surround themselves with it in the childish hope that it would rub off. How delusional.

Lucius would look notoriously bad turning down the invitation, especially considering that he hadn’t shown his face in England for almost a year. He’d drop in, cause a stir, prove that he was not dead and slip out again, hopefully before any of the Mudblood diplomats could latch onto him and suck his blood like the leeches they were. They made him fiendishly uncomfortable. "Socializing" with the Mudbloods, if you could even call it that, was like watching someone with the plague, knowing that if they got too close, you were as good as gone.

Lucius placed his hand upon the flat of the front door, trying to avoid the molting wreath. Narcissa cowered behind him like a frightened mooncalf. Now there was another thing: Narcissa. Physically she was appealing, but she was dumb to the point of annoyance, and he was beginning to believe that she only had half of a brain in her head. Lucius had been called laconic in his day, but he hadn’t heard her string more than four words together in the entire time he had known her. Not that he particularly cared to hear her opinion, it would just be a relief to know that the girl could speak and clear up some of the maddening funeral parlor silence that dominated their encounters like a solemn chaperone. He supposed that it was her beauty that branded her so heavily upon his mind, when so many girls faded away into the gray backdrop of his life. Her silvery curls, her wide pale eyes so eerily reminiscent of, well of his own.

Turning his eyes away from the girl, who looked passable in her pale pink dress (although Lucius privately thought the light dress drained her face of the little color it had; he would have much preferred her in a black gown), he rapped his knuckles against the door.

It swung open immediately. "Mr. Malfoy! What a wonderful surprise! We didn’t think you would come!"

Lucius pasted a thin smile upon his lips, and taking Narcissa by the arm, he confronted his host, a nondescript ass-kissing diplomat with sparse brownish hair and coke-bottle glasses. "I almost didn’t," he said flatly, smiling at the diplomat’s crushed expression. Reaching into the breast pocket of his heavy cashmere overcoat, Lucius pulled out a cigarette from the same case that bastard Ulyanov had pilfered the day before. "Light?" It was more of a command than a request. The diplomat rushed to comply, snapping his fingers and causing a flame to appear at the end of Lucius’s cigarette.

"The SDE’s laws against magic don’t apply here!" he said, determined to seem helpful and knowledgeable, when in all actuality, Lucius found the idiot grossly lacking in both respects. "This embassy is a direct extension of English soil, and it abides by the Queen’s law alone!"

"Rule Britannia," Lucius said drolly, pulling Narcissa along as he turned away from the tiresome diplomat and walked into the milling crowd without so much as a goodbye.

"Who was that?" the girl asked, reminding him of her presence as she spoke for the first time that night.

"No one I have to worry about," Lucius snapped. He had never bothered with Mudblood’s names; names were wasted on the beasts anyhow.

"He seemed to know you," she persisted, annoying him. He was beginning to prefer her silence if that ensured her blind acquiescence to his will.

"Many people know me," he said, "who I know nothing of." Scowling at her, he took a look at his cigarette, which he hadn’t yet smoked, and dropped it on the floor, crushing the flame with the tip of his shoe. "Mudbloods pervert magic," he said, grimacing at the remains of his contaminated cigarette. "They profane it, the most pure of all things, with their unclean use. They are not people like you and me. They’re beasts, animals," he slammed his foot down upon the cigarette again, and even though it was already out, he twisted hard, smearing its ashes across the hardwood floor in a blackened rainbow. "They simply have the facilities of speech and movement, but they can’t," he tapped his head, looking at the girl, "think. Two hundred years ago the International Confederation of Warlocks ruled that a Mudblood was exactly 1/6 of a full person, and though their official views have changed somewhat since then, there are many of us wizards who still believe that they were correct in that assumption. Mudbloods should be banned from using magic, for their own good. Put in Zoos with the rest of the beasts, but," he added scowling, "there are many who overlook the obvious and disagree."

"Like me," Lucius whipped around. His jaw dropped somewhat as the woman leaning against the wall next to him emerged from the shadows, wry amusement on her face. "But then again," she said, a hint of mockery in her voice, "I’ve always been insanely foolish, haven’t I, Lucius?"

He finally found his voice, which had been lost somewhere between his surprise and his alarm. "What are you doing here?"

"Exactly the same as you," she said.

"You’re lying," he replied, taking a step closer towards her, completely forgetting about Narcissa.

The woman’s smile widened. She grabbed hold of his wrist. "Of course I’m lying."

"Tell me what you’re doing here," he said forcefully, hand tightening about her wrist as she attempted to slide her fingers into his.

"I need some sort of reparation if I tell you, some sort of payment for my sacrifice," she said, in the same mocking tone she had used earlier.

"What kind of reparation?" he asked, more afraid of her price than eager for her answer.

"A dance," she purred, taking a step closer to him, the deep black chiffon of her dress brushing against the heavy wool of the overcoat he had not yet removed.

"No," he said flatly.

"No?" she raised a silvery-blonde eyebrow, a pout on her painted red lips.

"I don’t dance," he lied, taking a step away from her.

She reclaimed the lost distance between them with one stride. "You don’t dance or you don’t dance with me?"

"I don’t dance," he said truthfully, trying to make himself walk away from her. His feet however, would not obey the desperate urgings of his mind, "with you."

"Ah," she smiled at that, red lips mocking him. "So you remember the last time we danced? I was afraid that you had forgotten."

"I don’t forget," he said, lips narrowing into a thin, unforgiving line.

She reached up, tracing the line of his jaw. "Neither do I."

He jerked his head away. She laughed. "Do you want to know why I am here or not?" she exhaled slowly, the low tones of her smoky voice making an innocent question seem like a threat.

"It is your concern, not mine--" he tried to protest.

"My concern is your concern," she countered, squeezing his hand tightly. "You should know that by now, Lucius."

When he didn’t reply, she tilted her head upwards so she could meet his gaze. Her pale irises were lit with the cool flame of utter confidence. "Dance with me."

And against all of his better judgement, he allowed her to take him by the hand and lead him through the crowd to the almost deserted parquet dance floor, which Lucius supposed the Mudbloods had had installed for the occasions.

She let go of his hands and he could have turned to run, but somehow, someway, somewhy, he didn’t, because after all of this time she still had him in her palm, pulling his strings as one would a toy marionette.

She spun towards him once again; leg wrapping about his waist as they slowly turned about the floor. He could hear her whisper breathlessly in his ear, whisper his name, his heart was beating so fast it took over the back beat, and the distance between them was a contrived figment of the imagination, but the sight of her was smoke in his eyes, acrid seduction that stung at the edges--

"I’ve seen your husband," he whispered.

The music ceased.

Their dance was over.

"Oh?" She stepped hurriedly away, feigning an obviously false indifference. "Where? In Spain?" And without waiting for his reply, she pressed on, talking too fast for comfortable conversation. "Funny, as I haven’t seen him since last-- when was it, the Spring?"

"Valentine’s Day," Lucius filled in mechanically. "You came up to the Manor with him for father’s funeral."

"Oh that’s right I did," she said, crossing her arms over her satin bodice. "Frightful place, the Manor. I don’t blame you for fleeing to Spain, Yorkshire is altogether too wet and miserable for my taste, and so lonely, too! Gimmertown is half a days walk and you know when Gimmertown," she said the name with intense scorn, "is your closest link to civilization, something is seriously out of joint." She ceased her shallow soliloquy for one harried moment in order to heave a great breath. "And don’t get me started on the moors-- those awful, damp, dreary, wicked moors! I can’t imagine how you manage to even begin to put up with them, but now that I think about it, I suppose you don’t, living in the Spanish villa. Now, tell me about Cordoba, that’s somewhere I haven’t been since--"

"Why are you here?" he interrupted her prattle, gently touching the edge of her chin and bringing her eye-to-eye with him.

She paused for a moment before replying, regaining her breath after her unnecessarily long and excruciatingly empty tirade. "I could ask the same of you," she said quietly as he pulled out his silver case of cigarettes and flicked it open. Without being offered, she reached forward and stole one of his smokes, lighting it with a gentle wave of her hand. "Moscow isn’t quite the hottest tourist destination on the planet--"

Eyes still focused warily on her face, he plucked a cigarette from the case. She bent forward, lighting it with her own fag. "I’m here on business," he said tersely as she raised the cigarette to her lips and exhaled, gray smoke contrasting starkly with the ruby red of her painted lips.

"As am I," she breathed, "personal business."

"There’s no such thing as personal business," he said flatly, garnishing his statement with a cynical puff of smoke.

She shook her head ever so slightly, a tiny grin of dissent upon her lips. "Oh no, Lucius. Quite the contrary. Every line, every last bit of business is intensely," she took a step closer to him, "personal."

He stepped away, the nearness of her causing his heart to sink into his stomach and burn in the gall. "You still haven’t answered my question."

"You haven’t answered mine," she countered.

"You never specifically asked," he said, as she smiled slightly at his obstinacy.

"I came to see you," she said, shrugging the confession off like dead skin. Somehow, her careless manner lessened what would have otherwise been a gut-wrenching revelation. "But you knew that anyway."

"I did," he agreed.

"And yet," she breathed softly. "You still needed confirmation." The moment hung between then like a live wire. "Why?"

The seconds spilled into minutes as time itself held its breath. Yet, he could not bring himself to speak.

And when she realized that he did not intend to answer she dowsed the tension with a high-pitched laugh and a half-serious question. "Am I always so horribly transparent?"

"Always," he answered truthfully.

"But only with you," she replied back, taking a step towards him. "Only with you, Lucius."

This time he didn’t jerk away.

"I hide nothing from you," she whispered, her breath smelling so intensely of cigarettes and mulled wine that he could almost taste her words. "I don’t think that I could. All the world’s your ashtray," she whispered headily, fingers tracing the sides of his silken tuxedo jacket. "I’m just your Marlboro. Light me up and burn me-- you’re sick and you’re beautiful."

He didn’t respond, allowing her to press her hands up against his throat, and the pulse that beat therein. "Do you love me?"

"No," his pulse quickened.

Sinfully, she smiled. "Do you love anything?"

He tried to slide out of her grasp but she wouldn’t let him. "Least of all you."

She only responded with another question, red lips forming phrases rhetorical. "As Adam loved Eve? His damner, his downfall, but nonetheless, a part of him," she exhaled deeply, bathing him in halo of smoke. "I’m a part of you, Lucius, like a rib, a hand, or," she paused momentarily, allowing her painted lips to twirl themselves into a scarlet smile, "a cigarette-- burning slowly away, until there’s nothing left but the burn on your fingertips and your insatiable craving for just one more." He could taste her breath upon his lips. "I know you," she continued. "I know you because I am you and I can lie to the world, but I can’t lie to myself."

"Lucius!" a voice interrupted her, rudely reminding him that they were not the only two people in the world.

"And neither," she whispered, letting go of his jacket as more people rapidly approached them, "can you."

"Lucius." Malfoy’s eyes flickered upwards, away from the woman in the black chiffon to the girl in the pink lace, and the rotund man upon her arm. Narcissa’s paunchy companion was coated with a slick sheen of sweat, glistening like body glitter in the dim party light. Narcissa looked harried, her already pale features more white than usual as she strained against the man’s arm, looking for any excuse to get away. If Lucius had been a gentleman he would have rescued her, but as he was not, he simply watched Narcissa with a small smile on his face, relishing her obvious discomfort.

"Lucius," the paunchy man reiterated for the third time, emphasizing that he was on first name terms with the heir to the Malfoy fortune. "Lucius, Lucius, Lucius," the man’s glistening jowls vibrated as he spoke. Lucius shuddered. "I saw you abandon the company of this lovely lady for the company," he nodded respectfully towards the woman in the black chiffon dress, "of another. I decided to pick up your dross," he grinned at his own imagined wit, showing all of his yellowing teeth. "After all this is Russia, aren’t we supposed to share the wealth?"

Both Lucius and his companion managed an icy sneer in the face of this God-awful attempt at witty discourse. The paunchy man looked somewhat cowed.

"In this metaphor as well as in life," Lucius sneered, showing all of his immaculately white teeth, "the goods you are discussing are entirely mine."

The paunchy man inclined his head slightly, acknowledging, if not accepting defeat. "Then would you at least introduce me to your gorgeous possessions?" he persisted.

Lucius, having had been instilled from childhood with a small measure of social etiquette, acquiesced. "This is Narcissa," he broke off, realizing that he had no idea what the girl’s full name was, "Narcissa "

"Narcissa Vabka," the girl spoke up for the first time that night, giving the paunchy man a rare, and rather insincere smile. Her grin prompted Lucius to produce one of his own. She possessed enough wit to play along with his lies.

"Vabka?" the paunchy man, stared at Narcissa, practically lapping her up with his eyes alone. "That sounds vaguely familiar."

Narcissa opened her mouth to reply, but Lucius cut her off, afraid she might let something slip. "The Vabkas are old friends of the family. They are Russian wand makers, have a large business in the Far East."

"Of course!" the other man chuckled, compelled to speak by the power of suggestion. "No wonder the name sounded familiar."

Lucius smiled. His lie had gone over well, now if only the girl would stop looking like a scared chicken and continue to play along. "Ah yes," his heart stopped as the woman in the black chiffon dress opened her mouth. There was a pinch of sadistic humor in her voice. "I remember my childhood days on the Vabka estate well. It was in the Urals, wasn’t it, Narcissa dear? Or was it just on the River Lena? It's a truly delightful place, Siberia; I must get back there sometime. But you have to remind me where your estate is exactly, dear. I mean no offense, it’s just that I’ve always been so horrible with Geography, I’ve no sense of direction whatsoever!" She broke off, a sadist’s smirk upon her red lips. "I would get so terribly vexed with you when you stole my brother away for hours on end, horribly childish of me, I know, but, I really can’t help myself." Her eyes flickered from the rather stunned Narcissa to the obviously uncomfortable Lucius. She never got sick of watching him squirm.

The paunchy man bent down, kissing Narcissa’s hand. "I always did want to meet a heiress," the girl shot Lucius a panicked glance, crying for help. He ignored her, staring pointedly in the other direction. "Otto Bagman, at your service, Miss Vabka." The fat lecher then looked up. With the taste of once girl’s hand still about his lips, he turned around, hungry for the flavor of the other. "Do introduce me, Lucius," Bagman said, eyes never wandering from the woman in the black chiffon.

Lucius was disgusted at the ravenous glint in Bagman’s eye. "This is my sister," he said sulkily, giving the woman in question a disparaging glance. She raised on immaculately manicured eyebrow in reply. Scowling, he looked away. He didn’t trust her past the tip of his wand, knowing she would stop at nothing to make him squirm.

"As a piece of property, I don’t know if I’m qualified to introduce myself," she said, directing the sarcasm more towards her brother than the man she was addressing, "but I’ll try my best." She stared at Bagman, a false smile lighting up her patrician face. "My name is Ilona."

Narcissa wondered why she hadn’t seen the connection between Ilona and Lucius before, for the familial resemblance was unmistakable. Aside from their deathly cold gray eyes and their silvery blonde hair, which Lucius had slicked back off of his forehead and Ilona pulled into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, they had the same high haughty forehead, and although Lucius’s face was sharply defined and sharp at edges while Ilona’s features were finely cut, their lips, whether they realized it or not, were twisted into two identical condescending smiles.

"Pleased to meet you, Miss Malfoy," Bagman iterated, surfacing for air after his lips had remained pressed to the pale flesh of her hand for an obscenely long time.

"The pleasure, I’m sure," Ilona said, the hard edge in her voice slicing neatly through her sugary smile, "is entirely yours."

Bagman balked. Lucius smirked. Come wind, come snow, come diabolical Soviet-Death-Eater plots, Ilona never changed. As volatile as she was, she had been the one constant in his life since his Hogwarts graduation nine years earlier. She was his rock to hold onto, the hissing, spitting hellcat that always failed to surprise and thus kept him sane. She was the one sure thing he had to rely upon.

"I don’t know," a significantly paler Bagman stuttered, bending out of his bow to stare at Ilona with a taken aback expression, "what I did to offend, but--"

"You’re very presence is offensive," Lucius broke in, following Ilona’s lead and throwing all of his etiquette out of the window. Besides, he couldn’t allow for her to have all of the fun. "What are you doing here in Moscow anyway?" He coupled the insult with an inquiry, hoping to worm what could be useful information out of the sniveling Bagman, who looked about ready to regurgitate his no doubt extensive supper all over the hem of Ilona’s black chiffon dress. Some men were just born to be pawns. Otto Bagman was one of them.

"I’m working here," Bagman said, slightly annoyed, "in the embassy. I was transferred from the Diagon Alley offices three months ago. I owled you about it at the time."

"Oh?" Lucius raised a pale eyebrow. "I didn’t notice." In an effort to antagonize the paunchy bureaucrat further, he reached over, placing his arm around Narcissa’s slim shoulders. Her skin was like ice to the touch, muscles tensing under the weight of his arm. Her jugular rested just beside the crook of his elbow and he could feel her pulse beat, franticly throbbing, like the wings of a caged bird.

The girl wasn’t the only one to tense up at Lucius’s show of affection. Bagman’s bushy red brows knitted together and a lightning bolt of white-hot fury flashed across Ilona’s patrician features.

"It’s a pity" she began, chewing on her words like a piece of old beef jerky, as hardened and stringy as catgut, "that you live so far away from England, Mr. Bagman. You’d be a very," she took a step towards the pudgy man, "welcome guest at our Manor."

"I’m not sure that I’d like to partake in your hospitality, Miss Malfoy," Bagman said tersely, his Yorkshire brogue getting more pronounced as his anger increased.

"You may not want to partake in Lucius’s hospitality," Ilona said silkily, laying a hand upon Bagman’s thick arm. "You mustn’t let my brother vex you. He’s a spoilt child really, you can’t take him too seriously." Though her smile was as sweet as a sugar quill, Ilona’s eyes were flashing something dangerous, and Narcissa got the sense that she wasn’t really talking to Bagman at all. "He even upsets me. I don’t know how I manage to put up with him." Narcissa felt Lucius go rigid beside her, his listless grasp on her shoulder turning into a vice-like grip. She bit her lip.

"Yes, Mr. Bagman," Ilona purred, purposefully ignoring her brother’s knee-jerk reaction as she sidled up to the ample bureaucrat, black chiffon dress flush against the cheap material of his tuxedo. "I’m sure you’ll find I offer hospitality of a different sort."

Bagman’s anger had been skillfully stripped away, leaving nothing but his naked surprise. His eyes were wide with surprise as Ilona offered him a luscious smile, his mouth curved into a tiny "o" of shock.

"Ah " Bagman managed to bluster as Ilona wrapped herself about him like a cloak. "That’s a kind offer, I don’t see how I could say--"

"Goodbye," Lucius cut him off, not wanting to see anymore of Ilona’s disgustingly ostentatious foreplay. While his outward manner was relatively calm and unruffled, his hand gripped Narcissa’s shoulder so tight that her pale white skin became black, and antithesis in the flesh. "Narcissa is quite tired and she insists that I take her home." He dipped his head, "Bagman, Ilona--"

"Are you sure," his sister said abruptly, halting Lucius in mid-escape, "that Narcissa," she said the name with the utmost scorn, "is the one doing the insisting?"

"It’s been a pleasure seeing you both," Lucius lied, churning out vapid pleasantries in a futile attempt to ignore her.

"Or is in you who is indisposed, Lucius?" Ilona continued, overlapping his inane chatter. "Is it you who is insisting upon the premature departure?"

Lucius turned towards her, gray eyes holding nothing but malice. "I’ll say hello to your husband for you, how’s that Ilona?"

Bagman visibly recoiled, eyes flickering from brother to sister with a poorly disguised look of disgust upon his face. Ilona looked as if she had just been slapped. Dropping the paunchy Scot like he was a broken toy she took a step towards Lucius, her gray eyes reflecting the same cold hatred he held within his own. It was like looking in a mirror. "I see its folly to keep you waiting any longer," she hissed, a red flush coloring her translucently pale cheeks. "Its high time you got what you paid for in that whore," derisively, she jerked her head towards Narcissa.

"What?" Lucius said, color draining from his face as he feigned bewilderment badly. His worst fears had just been realized.

"You heard what I said," she sneered, the red flush in her cheeks contrasting starkly with the black chiffon of her dress. "As did your friend who will undoubtedly tell all of his friends who--"

"The girl," he said, jerking Narcissa roughly by the arm, offering her up to Ilona like a specimen, "is not a whore."

Ilona laughed hollowly. "It’s written all over her, Lucius." She turned the full force of her scornful gaze upon Narcissa, and although she was speaking to Lucius, her words were really directed towards his companion. "The way she moves, the way she talks, the way she looks at you, as if she were a naughty child and you were her father with his belt. She terrified of you," by now, Ilona’s voice had reached a fevered pitch, "It’s painfully obvious."

"Ilona," Lucius hissed, his already pale face stark white. "Contain yourself. I haven’t seen you like this," he added maliciously for Bagman’s benefit, "since your husband left you."

From the look of Ilona’s face, Lucius was obviously smearing salt into wounds that had not yet healed. "On thing I can say for my husband." she sneered, eyes still glued to the terrified Narcissa, "is that he freely admits to his indiscretions."

"You’re always," Lucius snapped, "so subtle."

"What can I say?" she sneered back, "it runs in the family."

"Narcissa," Lucius dipped his head at Ilona and a rather shell-shocked Bagman. "Is tired. I’m afraid we’re going to have to retire prematurely."

"Is she really tired, Lucius?" Ilona persisted, crossing her arms over her strapless black bodice. "Is she really? Or is it you the one who are uncomfortable?"

But she never got her reply, for they were already gone, through the embassy’s swinging double doors and into the swirling Muscovite snow.

It wasn’t as if Ilona had really needed confirmation anyway.

"So," Bagman cleared his throat nervously, an expectant grin on his face. "About that hospitality of yours "

 

----

 

He watched her almost sadly, silvery blonde hair spread out about her head like a halo, the soft twist of ice in the air causing her uneven breaths to freeze into tiny puffs of white. She was wrapped in his wool overcoat; her body had been shivering so much in the mid-winter chill that he had relinquished it, deciding to brave the snow in his tuxedo jacket. But now, even that had been discarded, lying forgotten on the floor of his hotel room as his eyes traveled across her slight frame.

Narcissa.

"Are you married, Lucius?" she asked quietly, her eyes barely open, painted lids hooding her tiny sliver of an iris.

"Why?" he asked automatically, the pale moonlight bathing their faces in an ethereal light.

"You’re a bachelor," she said, rolling towards him, his coat slipping down her back and exposing a shoulder nearly as white as the cotton bed she laid upon.

It was a while before he replied. "How did you know?"

She smiled, gratified that he confirmed her guess as true. "You have that air about you."

"Do I?" he said quietly. "Maybe I have yet to meet the right person."

"No." A shadow passed over her elfin features. "It is too late for you, I think."

"Ah." He forced himself not to look at her, lest he betray any emotion other than cool stoicism. "And as for you?"

She followed his gaze, and although she spoke to him, her focus was directed out the window at the sky beyond. "Its is too late for me as well."

The pale moonlight barely illuminated the shadows on their faces.

 

----

 

The streetlight wavered like an unsure politician, flickering on and off in the blink of an eye. In fact, the only thing that could be discerned was that the lighting fixture was on its last legs, be they illuminated or otherwise.

Josef Dzhugashvilli lurked in the shadows just beyond the faint circle of asphalt illuminated periodically by the flickering street lamp. All of the other lights on the road had long since died, and the state that had installed them was far too concerned in its own affairs to give a thought to replacing them, so the road was cloaked in darkness, except for the brief instants when the dying streetlight flickered on, casting the entire block in an ethereal half-glow, not unlike that of a strobe light. If he concentrated hard enough, squinting through the street in the brief instants when it was illuminated, Dzhugashvilli could make out a small cottage, made out of wood the color of purple toffee. The tiny home looked more like a child’s dollhouse than any real residence. This impression was only amplified by the fact that it was flanked on all sides by tall, faceless apartment blocks built in the soulless utilitarian style embraced by Soviet architects.

It was the one dot of individuality Dzhugashvilli could see in the entire city, and it was also the home of Alexander Miriken. Not that it was home to Alexander Miriken anymore. No, he had seen to that. Dzhugashvilli remembered a night nearly ten years ago when he had waited exactly as he did now, back pressed hard against the frozen concrete of this very tenement house, a white witch wind whipping by and snagging him with her icy cat o’ nine tails. His entire body shivered as he pulled his fur hat down low over his frozen ears, letting out all his breath out in a puff of white.

Dzhugashvilli preferred to move under the cover of darkness, even when arresting a man such as Alexander Miriken.

Alexander Miriken haunted Dzhugashvilli’s waking thoughts, obstinately living on, even four years after he was blown to bits in a mine explosion.

But it was only fitting that Miriken; damnably obstinate in life would remain so in his post-mortem state. He was the only man who Dzhugashvilli had even tracked who had regarded the KGB agent’s constant surveillance with a sick sort of amusement, playing with his new shadow as if they were engaged in the mockable travesty of a game, instead of a struggle that would ultimatly decide his life and his death.

He was the only man Dzhugashvilli had ever interned who had beat the carefully crafted system of dehumanization the State affectionately referred to as its Gulags. Miriken had been obedient to a sinister degree, playing up to his captors until they were the ones in chains, under his total control.

He was the only man Dzhugashvilli had met who simply refused to die.

Miriken was resurrected in the rhetoric of the Sad Clown; the dead man’s ideals and tactics replicated almost blow by blow in the work of the very living, quite infamous terrorist. Though Dzhugashvilli had no intention of admitting it to the terrified woman, he had believed Zvana when she had denied any involvement with the Sad Clown. It seemed incredibly unlikely that a woman, even of Zvana’s wit, would have the intelligence to carry off such a systematic plan of bombings. He was of the firm belief that the entire female sex together couldn’t even conceive of such an intricate plot. Their minds just didn’t work that way. But, he found himself watching Alexi’s old home, for Miriken was the only lead he had. If Dzhugashvilli had been the sort of man who believed in ghosts

But no. It was impossible.

But then again, Miriken had always been impossible. Impossible to track, impossible to capture, and once imprisoned, impossible to contain. And though Dzhugashvilli hardly dared to admit it to himself, impossible for him to comprehend.

Alexander Miriken was the antithesis of everything Dzhugashvilli stood for and held close; order, obidence, honor. To make the situation even more infuriating, the man refused to lay down and die like the common criminal he was. If Miriken was so worthless, why wouldn’t he just accept Dzhugashvilli’s inevitable victory?

Dzhugashvilli shook his head. He could not doubt. Doubt was the root of despair and despair was a one-way road straight towards defeat.

His eyes traveled down the long street-- darkness seeming to press in on him from all sides. But that was all right, Dzhugashvilli could handle the darkness. It cloaked him, swallowing him whole. Darkness had no doubt it just was. He didn’t need light to see, guided by the firebrand resolution of his own hate, which was directed at one man and one man alone. For despite rational thought, in spite of everything four years and disregarding six feet of solid earth, Dzhugashvilli was sure that Miriken was at the bottom of whatever was going on. Once again, Dzhugashvilli’s eyes wandered along the expanse of the snow-covered street to the flickering street lamp, currently out like, well, a light. And then, he saw a flicker of movement in the blackness that would have been bathed in light were the lamp in proper working order.

Breath coming out in soft puffs of white Dzhugashvilli began to walk forward slowly, his boots crunching on the snow. His heart was beating frantically within his old chest, straining against his tired ribcage, almost daring to break loose of the body that had held it for the last 62 years. A panicked feeling took complete control of him, steering him with the kind of urgency borne of raw intuition. He had to get to that lamp and the shadow moving through the darkness underneath it. So he began to run, feet sending up small whirlwinds of powdery white snow, footfalls sounding like muted drumbeats on the coated asphalt street. And amazingly, within a few seconds, he was almost there-- boots sliding on the ice, snow slipping over the leather lip of his shoes and melting between his sweaty toes, chilling him more effectively than any bitter north wind.

Dzhugashvilli reached the lamp. Panting hard, he laid his gloved hand upon the cold metal for support. It had been years since he had performed any sort of physical exercise and the short sprint had winded him completely. He dropped his head, letting it rest gently against the fur collar of his coat; he didn’t used to be this out of shape, especially during his army days—

There was a slight movement to his left. Dzhugashvilli jumped like a scared cat, and at that instant the street lamp flickered on, bathing him and his immediate surroundings in a harsh pool of intense light. There, a mere kissing distance from where he stood, was Alexander Miriken. His taut hollow features were curved into a spectral grin by the scar running up the left side of his face, a scar given to Miriken by Dzhugashvilli himself.

He was unmistakable.

And Dzhugashvilli had never understood the phrase "scared as hell" until this very moment. Dead men do not rise from their graves; dead men do not haunt the living; dead men do not smile and say—

"Hello Josef," Miriken iterated. His ghostly voice sounded amused.

The street lamp flickered to black. Choking back a cry, Dzhugashvilli reached forward to touch his former prisoner to see if he was more than a sadistic dream borne from the recesses of a tortured mind. Dzhugashvilli’s hand caught nothing but frigid air. Miriken, if he had even been there at all, was gone.

Dzhugashvilli heaved a deep breath. Dead men do not walk the earth. And he had seen Miriken’s ghost with his own two eyes. There was only one possible explanation, but it was an explanation that defied all logic, all reason, and anything stated by the official documents in the Kremlin. But, Dzhugashvilli thought wryly, only an explanation that did all three of these things would be worthy of his nemesis.

Alexander Miriken was alive.

Hand trembling, he took a step forward, as the lamp flicked on again, to reveal a street nearly deserted except for a couple moving slowly at the end of the street. Eyes narrowing, Dzhugashvilli recognized the man as the disconcerting blonde he had met in Zvana’s office the day before. Slowly he took a breath, almost unable to control his adrenaline-borne excitement. The blonde would lead him to Zvana, and Zvana would lead him to her Alexi.

 

----

 

"So where have you been?" Sirius was waiting in the doorway of the Russian Roulette when Narcissa got home, sliding in through the narrow doorway of the club, Lucius’s heavy overcoat still slung over her shoulders. It was only early evening so the Roulette hadn’t yet opened its doors and it was still essentially deserted. Ulyanov and Zvana sat in one corner of the club conversing in low tones. Sasha, who seemed more like a permanent fixture in the Roulette than an employee was spit-shining his shot glasses while James sat across from him at the bar, a morose expression on his puerile face as he stared off into space.

"Out with Malfoy," she replied, brushing the melting layer of snow off of the woolen collar. "You knew that."

"I did." Grinning wickedly at her he motioned her towards and empty table with one chair. Sliding it out and offering it to her he jumped onto the table itself. "So how was the evening? Delightfully exciting I’m sure." She didn’t reply, but then again she didn’t really need to, her glare was enough. "Well," he continued to tease, "while you’ve been off painting the town red I’ve been slaving away."

Narcissa assumed a somewhat skeptical expression.

"Would you believe working half-heartedly?"

She rolled her eyes.

"How about thinking about following some leads?"

"Give up, Sirius," she said in a long-suffering way, knowing in exactly what direction he was going to take their conversation.

"Fine," he said, still sporting a disarming smile. "I’ll be frank, I’m using you to get information, so you better speak up unless you want me to drop you and run home to the wife and kids." His puerile grin betrayed his joke.

"My lips are sealed," she said, smiling for the first time since that morning. "You’ll have to find yourself a new mistress."

"Hmm," he managed to look mildly disappointed. "And I was starting to like you too."

"Sirius--" she felt like a giggly schoolgirl, or at least how she thought a giggly schoolgirl would feel, as she had never been to school herself.

"Alright," he threw up his hands, feigning defeat. "You have me, I’ll be serious." Not being an English speaker, she didn’t pick up on his intentional (and rather bad) pun. "Tell me about Vladimir Ulyanov."

"No," she said flatly, her face instantly loosing its rare grin.

"I meant," he corrected himself, trying to save the conversation from rapid unabated descent into uncharted wilderness of angst, "the historical Vladimir Ulyanov." He supposed that it was a good a place to start as any. It wasn’t as if he had any real leads other than Ulyanov himself. To be frank, he wasn’t even completely sure what he was trying to find, other than the truth, and with every passing day in Moscow, Sirius was becoming more and more unsure that such a thing even existed. And so he masked his fear under the guise of careless ineptitude and hoped Narcissa could provide him with some easy answers to what had so far been a Herculean struggle. He had no way of knowing that in a span of a few short minutes, he would get more answers than he had bargained for.

"Read an encyclopedia," she snapped, sure he would find a way to make her reveal something that he wasn’t supposed to know.

"You, love," he schmoozed, leaning forward and tipping her chin up so he could stare her in the eye, "are my encyclopedia." Charm was a weapon that had worked very well for him in the past, with every female from Lily Evans to Professor McGonagall.

"I thought I was just a mistress," she played along, blue eyes looking especially alluring under her curtain of silvery lashes.

"You can be my encyclopedia too," he said, trying to focus himself on the issue at hand. Now was not a time to get diverted on a girl, even a very beautiful—no drop-jaw gorgeous girl upon whom pink was not that bad of a color—

Focus, Sirius. He cut himself off, feeling rather guilty when he looked away, breaking their gaze. "Tell me about Vladimir Ulyanov."

Narcissa obviously did not want to talk about history, even if it was a conversation with Sirius. "Vladimir Ulyanov was the first Secretary General. He took over after the fall of the Provisional Government. Eventually he died. End of story."

He waited for her to say more. Nothing came. "So he was a dictator?" he prompted, hoping to get something from her, anything that may help him get to the bottom of this mess.

"Lenin was the first leader of Soviet Russia," she said, voice strung with impatience. "His supporters overthrew Kerensky’s Provisional Government."

"You know a lot about history," Sirius remarked absently, his mouth generating inane filler as his head tried to string the pieces of the broken puzzle together into a cohesive whole.

"What do you mean?" she snapped suspiciously, her angry reaction jerking him out of his reverie.

"It was a compliment," he said, a little taken aback. "Nothing more."

She didn’t contradict him outright. Instead, she shook her head and looked away, silently seething.

He felt obligated to try and smooth over any offense he may have inadvertently caused. "It’s just that a girl like you--"

Her head jerked upwards, ice-gray eyes smoldering with fury. "A girl like me what?"

"Narcissa--"

"No, Sirius," she said, jaw white with tension. "I would really like to know what you think about girls like me. How you think that a whore doesn’t have a right to know anything except how you like it--"

"You’re not a whore," but his voice sounded dead even to his own ears, his eyes focused blankly on the ground.

"Don’t bullshit me, Sirius!" she snapped. "I am a whore, and maybe it’s not something to be proud of but when it comes between screwing strangers or sleeping in the gutter, I don’t see a decision. Maybe you’d have moral squabbles, but its pretty clear-cut to me. Honor doesn’t fill your belly."

His eyes flickered upwards towards her face, two red spots of fury forming on top of her cheekbones. A small placating smile rested upon his lips. "Neither does love."

She turned to look at him so fast her movement was almost violent. Though she put up a façade of disgust, her pulse quickened. "What are you trying to say?"

"Nothing," he smiled at her again, teasing her to interpret his comment at will. "I was just making an observation."

"You can get sent to the Gulags for that," she said quietly, feeling her anger run out of her like melted snow, pooling around her feet and being absorbed by the solid concrete floor.

"For what?" he asked, eyes never wavering from her face.

"Making observations," she replied, voice lowered to a mere whisper.

His lips twisted into a lopsided grin. "You’re worth it."

She couldn’t suppress the smile, although she turned her face away so he couldn’t see it. "You just are trying to flatter me into telling you about Ulyanov," she said, half-joking.

He rolled with her rare attempt at humor. "You’ve seen through my gig. I may as well give it all up and head back to Liverpool." And slid off of the table, making as if to go from the door. She reached out and caught his arm before he had taken two steps. He spun around on his heel, eyes laughing. "Well?"

"What do you want to know?" she said in a mock long-suffering way.

Grinning, he sat down beside her, swinging his legs off the side of the table like a little boy. "I knew you’d come around."

"Don’t push me," she said tersely.

"Tell me," Sirius leaned forward, trying to fish a question out of the boatload of facts swirling about his brain, weaving through the crevices of his psyche like wraiths, spreading confusion and bewilderment in their wake. The deeper he got, the more muddled the waters became. "Tell me " he paused, deciding to settle on a random question and see how far that took him. "Tell me how Ulyanov took the name Lenin. I’m supposing he wasn’t content with just Vlad."

Narcissa pointedly ignored his wisecrack and folding her hands in her lap, she began to speak. "When Lenin was born, the Romanov Czars were still in power. The Romanovs ran Russia like a police state. No dissent was allowed."

Sirius breathed outwards through his teeth, considering her words. "Ironic. So not much has changed."

"No," Narcissa agreed. "Not much has changed." She shrugged slightly, shoulders hunched with resignation. "So much for Revolution. The Czars had forced labor camps in Siberia, and most people who criticized the Romanovs were sent there. Ulyanov wanted to avoid this fate. So he settled upon a pseudonym--"

"Lenin," Sirius filled in.

"And published his writings on Communism under that name," Narcissa continued.

"But why did Ulyanov actually choose Lenin?" Sirius asked, leaning forward so that his shoulder brushed against Narcissa’s.

She gave him a small smile, looking up at him through her large doe-eyes. "The story I’ve heard is that he went to see the first Russian production of the Pagacalli in Moscow. The man playing the lead had the last name of Lenin, and Ulyanov was so impressed with his performance that he took the name."

"And Pagacalli is?" Sirius had never been an opera buff; his only image of it had always been restrained to old men in tights singing so high it made him ache.

"An opera," Narcissa said, shrugging, "which I’ve never seen. It’s one of Miriken’s favorites. He says that it’s a tragedy though about a troop of circus performers. The lead is a sad clown."

Automatically, his eyes flickered across the room to where Vladimir Ulyanov sat, a cigarette dangling listlessly between his fingers. But he didn’t smoke his fag; instead the old man periodically passed it to Zvana who would take a long drag. Ulyanov’s eyes were focused on the vodka glass in front of him, a thin piece of tissue stretched over the lip. With a flick of his wrist, Ulyanov would drop hot ash onto the tissue, watching, entranced, to see how long the fragile paper would hold before it collapsed, burning away into nothingness. Ulyanov passed the cigarette to Zvana, who obediently took a puff. Ulyanov then took the cigarette between his own fingers and flicked the hot ash onto the tissue with careless accuracy. The tissue caved, falling into the alcohol with a loud fizzle. For the briefest of instants, the old man’s lips curved into a slight smile, but then Ulyanov looked up from his game and his cold gray eyes met Sirius’s gaze.

Vladimir Ulyanov: the birth name of Lenin. Lenin, the sad clown. It was a simple geometric theorem, if a=b and b=c then a=c. Vladimir Ulyanov, the sad clown. It was so Goddamn obvious, and so diabolically brilliant.

From across the room, Ulyanov’s thin lips curved into an equally slim smile as he plucked the cigarette from between Zvana’s lips. Surrounded by a halo of the smoke he took the fag lazily between his fingers and smashed it down upon the wooden table, dowsing the tiny pinprick of flame. His icy gaze never wavered from Sirius’s own.

For once, Ulyanov’s subtlety left little to be inferred. Sirius could feel the metaphorical gun barrel as it pressed into his temple, hard metal scraping his skin.

There are six chambers in a gun. Six chambers and one bullet. What are your chances of survival?

If someone asked you to play Russian Roulette, what would you say?

But the gun barrel turned out to be nothing more than Narcissa’s gentle touch, brushing his hair tenderly from his temple and meeting his lips with a kiss, small and unsure. Sirius closed his eyes and prayed that the torture would soon cease. No one knows when they would run into a tight spot, but Moscow was turning out to a regular Spanish Inquisition, a vicious cycle of pain and passion-- intensity untapped and thus utterly inebriating. His head spun and soul ached with the red-hot distress of the spirit. He tried to will himself to forget everything: Ulyanov, James, Malfoy, even Narcissa, and simply loose himself in the moment, and find an escape from the inescapable task of living. Her lips brushed against his, delicate as a baby’s slumber and he sunk into her with all of a child’s open innocence, accepting her love, her tenderness not as a contrived part of Ulyanov’s high stakes game, but as genuine truth. The only way to cope was to suspend his undying disbelief.

And for a moment, it almost worked.

Almost.

James’s snide tone drew him back to reality with a sharp jerk, "Really Sirius," he said snippily, regarding Narcissa with undisguised disgust. "If you two got any closer, I’d feel obligated to write home to your wife."

Narcissa froze, her eager hands growing cold as they fell limply from his neck to hang dead at her sides. Sirius’s heart leapt into his throat, twisted and bleeding as he reached out for her blindly, but she had already begin to run—

Sirius leapt from his makeshift seat on the table and hurled past James, who was smiling in an extremely self-righteous manner. Once again, he chased her through the club, though this time around it was completely absent of clubbers. He vaulted over one of the deserted tables, but his longer legs almost didn’t equate to her desperation and she reached for the doorknob, panting from the flight. Her knuckles were white with fury.

"Narcissa, please," he began futilely.

"Your wife?" she yelled, twisting away as he tried to catch her wrist. "Your fucking wife! Just get away from me--"

"You’re a whore," James made himself exceptionally useful. "What did you expect from him? Exclusive love? That he’d marry you instead?"

"You stay out of this!" Sirius yelled.

"Does marriage mean anything to you, Sirius?" James yelled, an angry red flush creeping to his soft cheeks. "I tried to hold my tongue but you’ve gone too far."

"You don’t understand, James," Sirius said, trying to keep his voice even and his growing anger in check.

James ignored his friend’s comment. "No, Sirius, it’s you who doesn’t understand. What does ‘til death do us part mean to you?"

"James," Sirius grit his teeth together trying to shut out his friend’s accusations.

James would not be silenced. "I’d die before I did anything like this to Lily--"

"I said stay out of it!" Sirius exploded, slamming his fist onto the wall beside Narcissa. Turning away from the furious woman, he moved towards upon his childhood friend.

"I’m your friend, Sirius!" James yelled back, unfazed by the fact that Padfoot was advancing upon him his face contorted in fury. "This is what I’m supposed to do! Let me help you."

"Help me!" Sirius raised his fist, but James stood tall, knowing innately that he could go to hell and back before Padfoot would strike him. For once, James’s flawed intuition was correct. Sirius stood paralyzed for a moment, his hand inches above James’s head, and then slowly, painfully he let it drop, his rising anger suddenly turning into limp lethargy. Because the worst thing was that James was right. Selfish, pompous, naïve, and still—always—James was right.

Sirius’s shoulders slumped, and it was as if the life had been wrung out of him. Limp as a wet rag, he didn’t know where to go, which place to turn. Now, when it mattered the most, he found his confidence wounded at its very root. He couldn’t be sure of anything any longer. "Help this, Prongs," he said quietly, reaching forward and taking Narcissa by the arm. His voice cracked in desperation. "Help this."

He kissed her. She squirmed in his arm, trying to turn away, but he held her fast, lips pressing against hers, trying to make a confessional out of another sin, penance through peccadillo.

And then, Lucius Malfoy stepped through the door of the Russian Roulette. "I forgot my coat--" He broke off, a deathly silence overtaking the entire club. He stared at Narcissa, motionless in Sirius’s arms. She was still wearing his overcoat. "Oh," he said icily. "I see."

Narcissa finally twisted out of Sirius’s desperate kiss, her cheeks flushed with fury and embarrassment. She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out. She was unable to set words to her fury.

So a desperate silence held the club in which Lucius reached a trembling hand into the pocket of his pants and pulled out a cigarette, which he lit with a wave of his hand. A thin trail of smoke rose from his lips. Still, no one spoke.

The door slammed open behind Lucius and Josef Dzhugashvilli burst in, gun held in front of his like a wand at ready. Brushing past Lucius as if he didn’t even exist, his tiny eyes scanned the nearly deserted club, finally settling upon the table where Zvana sat, frozen with fear. She remained immobile under Dzhugashvilli’s cold stare. All color had drained from her face, leaving her the stark pale color of dried cod. A calculating sort of smile slid across Dzhugashvilli’s lips. "Get up," he sneered, disgusted amusement on his face. He had the exuberance of a chess champion, glowing after he placed his opponent’s king in the inescapable mate. Zvana didn’t move, though Sirius wasn’t sure if her immobility was borne of pure obstinacy or abject terror. Whatever the reason, Zvana looked incapable of any motion at all, white knuckled hands gripping the table like they would never come undone, held captive within the vice of terror. "Get up, Miriken," Dzhugashvilli repeated a harder edge in his voice. The KGB agent had lost all of his previous satisfaction, the empty emotion now replaced by a merciless anger. Zvana didn’t so much as blink, let alone stand up.

Sirius could see the muscles in Dzhugashvilli’s jaw throb with anger, but when he spoke, his voice was unnaturally even, commanding in its calmness. "You’re making a very big mistake, Miriken." Sirius didn’t even realized that the KGB agent had fired until Ulyanov’s shot glass exploded into a thousand tiny shards, skittering across the bar table like the horrible travesty of New Year’s Snow.

"As violence seems to be the only language that you comprehend," Dzhugashvilli hissed maliciously, looking over the barrel of his quiet loaded gun. "I don’t know how I can be more persuasive than that. Now get up, Miriken and put your hands on your head or I will fire my weapon and I will not miss."

Sirius’s eyes instantly flickered to Zvana to gauge her reaction. However, the woman sat unmoved, frozen with fear. The tips of her fingers trailed listlessly in the puddle of spilt vodka, rapidly spreading across the wooden tabletop.

A sudden flash of movement jerked Sirius’s eyes away from the scene. Very slowly, Vladimir Ulyanov was getting up from his seat at the table. Almost mockingly, his cold gray eyes never moving from Dzhugashvilli’s own, Ulyanov lifted his arms and placed them on the top of his head.

Dzhugashvilli tilted his head towards the door, "Out."

Ulyanov began to walk forward. In all actuality, he was a very tall man, easily several inches bigger than Dzhugashvilli, who, despite his loaded weapon, looked incredibly weak and insignificant next to his prisoner. Still, the KGB agent cleared his throat and began to address the other man. "Dr. Alexander Alexandrovitch Miriken, in the presence of these civilian witnesses, I sentence you to death in the name of the People. For as a citizen of the United Soviet Socialist Republics, you are subject to the justice of its State--"

"Justice?" Miriken laughed hollowly, speaking to Dzhugashvilli for the first time. "I’ve met the Gulags, the tribunals, the special operative, but never once have I encountered justice within your beloved State."

"You have been convicted of deliberate escape from Gulag 117," Dzhugashvilli easily ignored his prisoner, considering with his canned official speech, "vandalism of the aforementioned State institution, political insurrection, and the murder of 1432 fellow Citizens over the past four years under the pseudonym of the Sad Clown."

"You say," Miriken interrupted, taking a step forward, "that I have been convicted of these crimes. When, Josef, was my trial?"

Dzhugashvilli’s lips cracked into a sneer. "Don’t play games with me, Alexander Alexandrovitch."

"It’s a fair question," the other man retorted.

Dzhugashvilli shook his head, "And you don’t merit an answer. Stop wasting my time, Miriken, or I will carry out the sentence here and now without following regulations and taking you back to headquarters. Don’t try me."

Miriken didn’t crack a sweat, but his response was barely more audible than a whisper. "You lead, Dzhugashvilli. You have the gun."

Dzhugashvilli’s thin lips pursed together as he gestured towards the door once again, this time with his pistol.

Complacent for once, Miriken took a step towards the door, then another, and one more still, passing Sirius, Narcissa, Lucius—

--Where Miriken had ever learned to move so quickly, Sirius would never know. In a single instant, he had leapt forward, right arm wrapping itself around James’s throat, strangling Prongs’s terrified yell. As he pulled the boy in front of his like a shield, Miriken’s left hand dived into his pocket, returning with the pistol he had used to threaten Sirius the morning before. His face an impassive mask, Miriken pressed the gun into James’s temple, undoing the safety with a quick movement of his fingers. James whimpered.

Dzhugashvilli didn’t miss a beat. Leveling his gun, he spun around and fired-- straight at Zvana, who hadn’t so much as twitched all throughout her husband’s arrest and the subsequent mayhem, paralyzed with shock. But even shock couldn’t keep her immobile when she was faced with the Angel of Death.

She crumpled into the pool of spilt vodka; clear liquid stained a cloudy red.

Sirius leapt forward with an indecipherable roar of fury, lunging for James, possessed with the vague half-baked idea of wrestling Prongs away from Miriken. He was infamous for doing extremely stupid things therefore leaping in front of an armed, deranged, and altogether unstable man, even with noble motives, was straight up his alley. Surprisingly enough, it wasn’t Miriken who fired but Dzhugashvilli, obviously wanting no audience intervention. Sirius hit the floor before he even reached Miriken.

Dzhugashvilli turned back towards his one time prisoner silently, and although he did not speak, his eyes radiated nothing but cold fury, silently stating: I’ll play your game.

As for Miriken himself, his wife’s death had only awakened in him a strange fury, for anger is the easiest venue for the desperate. Grief was a luxury that he could not afford, so focused he was on man’s primary goal since time began: survival.

Eat or be eaten.

Kill or be killed.

So Miriken tightened his grip around James’s throat, pressing the barrel of his gun so deep into the his forehead that he knocked Prongs’s glasses askew, letting them slip dangerously down the bridge of the boy’s nose.

"Shoot away, he is nothing to me," Dzhugashvilli sneered. On the outside he was as cool and dispassionate as a corpse though a faint red blush rose to his cheeks and betrayed his hidden anxiety.

There was a large crash behind the agent, as two new men burst through the door. Both were dressed in government issue black overcoats, long black sniper rifles in their grip. Turning his head halfway back, Dzhugashvilli smiled, and nodded towards the men. "Pavel Andreiovitch, Nikoli Ivonovitch," he addressed the two newcomers. "Guard the door. Make sure no one leaves." The men, presumably Dzhugashvilli’s reinforcements, hurried to oblige, one standing on either side of the front door to the club.

For Narcissa, it was surreal experience looking at the entire scene. Here was the Russian Roulette, reeking of blood and full of armed men, when just a stone’s throw away was Zvana’s idyllic home, visible through the open door, full of warm light and wooden floors and hand-knitted afghans. Not for the first time, Narcissa wondered what had possibly prompted the Mirikens to throw away their peaceful existence for a worthless hole like the Roulette, a fountainhead of sweet pain and selfish pleasure. Gazing at the body slumped across the table, she realized with a lurch that she would never know the answer, for Zvana had paid the ultimate price for her folly.

"Well, Alexander Alexandrovitch," Dzhugashvilli said quietly. "You are outnumbered. Don’t be foolish. Put down your weapon and allow us to carry out the sentence."

Miriken, generally as calm and unruffled as a frozen fish, was the polar opposite of his usual self. His thin face was red and shiny with sweat, which caused his dark gray hair to cling to his forehead in tiny clumps.

James looked just about ready to shit his in pants as his gaze traveled across the concrete floor of the Roulette to where Sirius lay, a small puddle of blood seeping out from under his limp form. James bit his lip, praying that Padfoot was only unconscious, praying that Sirius would managed to find a way to get them out of this deathtrap, begging whatever God that was out there that they would make it home in one piece. Fuck one piece-- that they would make it home alive.

It’s amazing how precious life really is when it gets snatched away.

Miriken opened his mouth to retort, but he never got the opportunity.

Narcissa wasn’t aware that things could happen so incredibly fast. Sasha, who had been standing silently in the corner, made a wild lunge at Dzhugashvilli, which was somewhat hampered by the fact that he only had one leg. The old man overbalanced and fell onto the cold concrete floor. The KGB agent however, didn’t miss a beat. Dzhugashvilli wheeled away from Miriken to place his gun over Sasha’s inert form.

He fired once.

(Without this story:

1. A bartender would still be alive.)

Miriken didn’t wait around to follow his one-time sidekick to the great Gulag in the sky. Arm still twisted about James’s throat, he rushed towards the escape door, dull iron ringing hard against the concrete wall as he threw it open.

Dzhugashvilli’s bullets buried themselves in the iron door as he spun away from Sasha’s corpse, feet pounding on the hard concrete floor and out into the street beyond like the ghastly continuation of the heartbeat he had just stopped.

Made heedless by high adrenaline and raw emotion, Narcissa ignored the KGB agents standing behind her with very large, very loaded rifles. She threw herself across the room to where Sirius lay, bathing in a pool of his own blood. She knelt down next to him, staining the knees of her delicate lace dress red. She didn’t care. She didn’t care about the wife. Didn’t care about the betrayal. About the lies.

All she cared about was if his breath caught in his chest, if his heart began to beat a rum-tum-tum rhythm echoing her own, if his eyes, closed and guarded by a fringe of dark lashes, would ever again open, sucking up the world they inhabited like a child tasting his first milkshake, and if his lips

If his lips ever found the strength to move again, be it in a kiss filled with tender pain, a joke, provoking a half smile on her own face or a lie, made too flattering sweet by her own desperation.

He was the first man, no, the first person, that she had ever met who had appeared to give a damn about what happened to her. Not her ass, not her tits, not even her low smoky voice, or the way she tasted of rich black chocolate and cheap cigarettes. Just her.

And even if that too was another sugary sweet lie, she couldn’t let him die, for that one illusion, that single day of delusion had almost made her forget, forget the pain, the agony, and the endless cycle of men too many to remember and boys too young to touch.

He was her catharsis, her Russian Roulette, and she didn’t care if the two of them had shared meant nothing to him in return. For one single day he had meant everything to her. And so, even if it meant holding a loaded pistol to her head, she wasn’t about to let him die.

Let him die and have him shipped back to England where his fat wife could weep hysterically over his body moaning how terribly sorry she was that he was gone, when she didn’t even have the brains to even begin to know the man whose surname she bore. She didn’t have the right to mourn Sirius. Narcissa wasn’t going to give the fat bitch that sadistic satisfaction.

"Sirius," Narcissa whispered, fitting her hand in-between his limp fingers. "Oh God Sirius " His hand coated hers with blood. The red liquid filled the rivers and valleys of her palm, that intense, unmistakable color causing her heart to scream silently in horror. Her breath lodged in her throat, and there was a queasy sensation in the pit of her stomach, because despite the blood, despite the gore, under her thumb, his pulse was still beating and as she stared at his inert form that slight movement seemed so false, so unnatural that she was overcome with a wave of revulsion. Death isn’t easy to stare straight in the face, especially when it is accompanied by a pseudo-life, obstinately hanging onto the mortal world by a rapidly unraveling thread.

Every new beat of his pulse sent a fresh wave of blood from the hole rent in his thigh. Shedding her squeamishness Narcissa put her hand upon the wound in an attempt to stop the bleeding. She wasn’t able to surpass a shudder of revulsion. It only took a moment before she realized that stanching Sirius’s wound was like trying to swindle a goblin, an utterly futile task. Dzhugashvilli’s bullet had done its job.

And then, she felt a strong grip upon her arm and someone took her hand away, squeezing it so tightly that when he loosed his grip he had left ten black finger marks around the curvature of her wrist.

Lucius.

Silently, he reached into his pocket. Narcissa heard the KGB guards tense behind her, but they visibly relaxed when he pulled out his wand. To Muggles it was just a thin stick of mahogany, varnished so dark it looked almost black. She felt a slight tingle of electricity when he passed it to her, but whether it was from the wand or the way his fingertips brushed gently against her skin like a light kiss, beautiful in its restraint, she wasn’t sure. She didn’t want to know.

"The spell is Asclepius," he said, lowering his voice so that only she could hear. Narcissa was acutely aware of how he kept his eyes focused upon her face, trying not to look at Sirius’s bloody body.

She felt utterly confused and more helpless than Moses in the rushes. "What?"

The flame of scorn flickered across his patrician features. "Say the spell," he said slowly as if he was addressing a very little girl. "And heal the Mudblood."

"But I’ve--" never done magic before. The words froze in her throat. Technically it was true. Narcissa had always known that she was a witch, but magic and the teachings of it had been banned in the USSR since the Stalin era. It was Josef Stalin who had first outlawed magic with the rational that it "disrupted the unity between magical beings and the common proletariat". This edict came right in the middle of the War with Germany, directly after Hitler’s largely unsuccessful three-pronged attack on Leningrad, Moscow, and the oil fields of southern Russia. Stalin had the leaders of the now defunct RUM, Ruski Urad od Magija, or the Russian Bureau of Magic, deported as "enemies to the continuing revolution". He set up the now infamous SDE in its stead. The SDE was a puppet of the Secretary General, a hollow bureaucratic institution set up to "protect the wizards of Russia". In all actuality, all the SDE did was crack down on the use of magic, sending those who disobeyed the State’s edict to the Gulags. Though many within the state lauded Stalin’s ground breaking "reform", there were whispers that his motives may have been less than pure. Don’t look so stunned, please! Even the best of leaders act politically now and again, and Stalin was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the noblest of men.

Hitler had long been enamoured with the occult and he allied himself with a Germanized-Turkish wizard known only as "Grindelwald". It was well known in the magical community that "the Turk", as he was derisively called by his many enemies, was gaining more and more sway over the German dictator every day. Due to the long-standing hatred between Turkey and Russia, Grindelwald urged Hitler to break diplomatic relations with Stalin and stab his one-time ally in the back. Looking for an excuse to sever ties with the USSR, and eager to gain access to the oil fields of Southern Russia to fuel his war machine, Hitler promptly complied. By outlawing magic in Russia, Stalin was sending a personal message to Grindelwald that his rash actions would not be forgiven.

Interestingly enough, Stalin’s aversion to wizardry did not extend to black magic. Rumor had it that he secretly fostered many black wizards in his lifetime, sponsoring them with state money under the provision that they develop new dark curses. One of the "innovators" he bankrolled was a quiet English man sometimes called Tom Riddle. Riddle’s crowning achievement in Stalin’s labs had been a triad of curses that, though lauded at the time of their invention, were in later years called by wizards the world over "unforgivable".

Narcissa bit her lip, holding the unfamiliar wand in her hand. Although she had seem Zvana and Alexander perform spells many times before she had never herself held a wand before this moment and didn’t have the slightest clue as how to go about using it. But she didn’t feel that telling this to Lucius would be a wise move, especially under the current circumstances. She settled for a nice, non-specific: "I don’t know how."

His lips pursed together angrily. "The spell is Asclepius," he repeated, an icy edge in his tone, cutting into and scarring her reluctance with the razor sharp blade of fear.

"You do it!" She felt a wildfire of panic scorch through her entire body, stoked by Sirius’s rapidly fading pulse and Lucius’s equally weak patience. She thrust the wand wildly as Lucius like it carried a deadly disease.

"No," he looked at her coldly, gray eyes flashing daggers.

"Please," she jabbed the wand towards him, feeling a bomb of pure panic explode at the bottom of her stomach, coating her entire body with adrenaline. "Please! Just do it!"

"I won’t," he repeated, a closed look in his stone-cold eyes.

She was wild with terror now, for with every new second the thread holding Sirius to the world of the living was rapidly untwining. "You have to!"

"No." His hand was trembling.

She pushed the wand towards him again, her voice rising into a shriek. "I don’t know how! You must--"

"I can’t!" He exploded, bringing his hand down upon the outstretched wand, so hard that it hit the concrete floor of the Roulette, causing Narcissa to grit her teeth in pain. His fingers closed around hers as he twisted her arm back towards her own body, staining her skin in the process with a haphazard smattering of black and blue. "I can’t heal a mudblood," he said from between clenched teeth, his entire body as tense and rigid as the frozen skyscrapers of the urban wasteland outside. He exhaled; the air inside the Roulette was so cold that his breath froze white as soon as it left his mouth, drifting away into the never-ending expanse of air like a hero riding off into the sunset. "The spell is Asclepius," he said for the third time that night.

She turned away from him, and pointed his wand at Sirius. Then she muttered the spell, more out of fear than any faith in her own abilities.

Nothing happened.

He grit his teeth and when he spoke it was with an air of great annoyance. "Its Asc-LEP-ius, you enunciated the first syllable."

She was unable to tear her eyes away from Sirius’s wound, fear and horror twisting a tourniquet about her heart. "Does it matter?" she whispered.

"Yes, God dammit!" he roared, grabbing her arm and pointing it at Sirius. "Do you want to see him die or not?"

She wrenched her hand away, a sudden feckless passion gripping her soul. "Why do you care about Sirius?"

He went suddenly quiet, teeth gritting together, the flame in his gray eyes growing dim, until it was a just mere glow, like old embers quietly burning themselves out after the fire is long gone. "I don’t care about Black."

"Then why are you trying to heal him? Why won’t you let him die?" she hissed, all the anger and fear he had instilled in her since the moment they had first met, not twenty-four hours previous, pouring out in a horrendous quid pro quo. She was giving as she received.

"Because," he said dangerously, his breath coming out in a low rasp. "If anyone is going to kill Sirius Black, it will be me."

"You don’t deserve that honor," she spat contemptuously, tossing his wand down on the hard concrete. It skittered across the floor to land at the base of his knees.

He reached forward and caught her, twisting her arm around and jerking her upwards so that she was forced to her knees, directly opposite him. Their legs were already pressing together but he pulled her closer still, the frantic beating of her heart betraying the fear her face, locked in a mask of anger, did not. He moved his head forward, his locks mingling with her silver curls until it was impossible to tell where one’s hair ended and the other’s began, so alike was their color. She tried to twist away, gripping the floor for leverage, but he caught her hand and held it fast, roughly entertaining his fingers against her own, pressing their palms into the frigid concrete. She let out a wild gasp as he jerked her arm again, twisting her so close that the veins on her neck stood out like the stems of two flowers, yet if he plucked these blooms, her blossom would wither away in an instant, gone forever, like a childhood dream. His childhood dreams.

He could feel her breath: frigid upon his throat, its icy kisses ragged and uneven. The hot sweat sliding down her neckline to cling to his own chest contrasting sharply with the white puffs of frost they generated every time they spoke. "He should consider it an honor to be killed by me," Lucius whispered, in her ear, causing her to gasp involuntarily. "He doesn’t deserve to occupy so many of my waking thoughts."

"You’re nothing," she spat vehemently, digging her nails into his hand; the sharp jolt of pain cause him to smile "nothing compared to him."

"Have you ever stopped to wonder," he said quickly, his voice simply a whisper. She leaned forward to hear him better, her soft cheek brushing accidentally against his own frigid skin, causing him to shudder. "That he doesn’t love you."

"That’s not true," she said, their faces now on a parallel line, ear to ear, so not one could see the other, but only hear their voice and fell the touch of their skin.

"He’s married," he said harshly.

"I know," she replied, an easy lie on the tip of her tongue. "He told me, he loves me more than her--"

"You’re a fool," he hissed. She could feel the movements of his jaw against the side of her own face, making his words a visceral experience.

"Aren’t we all?" she whispered back, instinctively leaning closer towards him.

He jerked away. Spinning around on his knees, he gripped the sides of her arms and pulled her towards him until they were once again sitting forehead to forehead and it was impossible for either of them to get away from the other. From the place where his fingers rested inside the crook of her arm, he could feel the slight beat of her pulse, fluttering like a butterfly kiss. "Don’t generalize," he snapped. She took a deep breath and inhaled a mouthful of his stale air. "Generalizations are the mantras of weaklings. They pin responsibility upon man en masse instead of the individual, where it belongs."

"That’s horrible," she whispered back, anger replaced with deadened disgust.

"Truth is horrible," was his reply as a long shadow fell over them both. Narcissa heard the click of a rifle.

From somewhere far above, a KGB agent declared: "You’re under arrest."

Instead of the adrenaline rush she had always imagined she would experience if she ever found herself in such a situation, Narcissa found the whole affair very anticlimactic. In fact, she only had time to feel mildly dazed before the butt of a gun slammed into the flat of her skull.

It was a matter of seconds before Lucius lay beside her. Their fingers were still intertwined, palms stained red with Sirius’s blood.

 

----

 

The gunfire ricocheted off of the side of the tenement house; a spray fan of concrete spitting out of the tiny pin sized bullet hole. "Get down! God dammit, get down!" Miriken yelled, pushing James up against the side of the building. His boots slid wildly on the snow as he slammed back first into the hard concrete wall. From far above them, another bullet hit the window of the apartment building. The glass shattered, scattering the snow with razor-sharp shards.

James bit his lip so hard it began to bleed.

"Fuck," Miriken spoke for both of them as his eyes darted in the direction of the gunfire. Dzhugashvilli could not be far behind. Roughly letting go of James’s throat, Miriken tossed the gun, which he had been holding in his left hand, to his right. He reached into his pocket, pulling out a handful of bullets in the same movement. Quickly but methodically, he flicked the hitherto empty weapon open and began to slide the bullets in.

"You held me up with and empty gun?" James whispered, tasting the acrid blood in his mouth.

Miriken didn’t look up from his weapon to reply. "You didn’t call my bluff."

A bullet whizzed past Miriken’s ear, burying itself in the cement just above his left shoulder. "Go," he said tersely, jerking his head down the street, and away from Dzhugashvilli’s deadly fire.

James didn’t need to be told twice, though Miriken gripped him roughly by the shoulder and pushed him into a sprint. He was all too eager to oblige, adrenaline-addled reason telling him to get as far away from the shooting as possible.

His blood had frozen on his chin.

A shot echoed much closer to them. Miriken had finally managed to load his weapon, and was returning Dzhugashvilli’s bullets with a volley of his own.

The prisoner’s challenge was echoed by his former captor as the street lamp beside James exploded in a shower of broken glass and extinguished light.

From somewhere behind him, James could hear Miriken’s wild shout, "Go!" He didn’t need the extra incentive, utterly determined to find a way out of this city of flying bullets and equally deadly promises, a hell that had indeed frozen over. Reaching the corner of the street, James halted, stopped like a deer caught in the headlights. He slipped on the ice. As he fell forward, his hands hit the freezing slush, sending shots of biting cold into the soft flesh of his palms. He spun around uncontrollably on his stomach, eyes traveling to the end of the street, to momentarily rest upon the unmistakable silhouette of Josef Dzhugashvilli.

James felt Miriken grab him roughly by the back of his collar, wrenching him off of his belly. "Piss in your pants later--"

Taking advantage of their stationary state, the older man bent forward to shoot over James’s shoulder. The noise of the explosion almost deafened Prongs, causing his ears to ring madly as his head spun in a tarantella of terror.

James saw the shadowy figure of Dzhugashvilli duck, and then continue to run.

"I’m rusty," Miriken said flatly, pushing James roughly to his feet. He didn’t stop to look at Prongs, for his eyes never strayed from the dogged figure at the end of the street, who grew closer with every new stride of his legs. Not wanting to tempt a hitherto unfriendly fate, Prongs leapt over the curb, tripping slightly in the gutter. He would have fallen again if it hasn’t been for Miriken, holding him up with a quick steadying hand.

"Now run," the other man whispered.

And run is what they did-- feet crunching through the snow, the dread silence of the Moscow night periodically shattered by the loud crack of Dzhugashvilli’s gun and Miriken’s reply and James found himself counting the bullets until he realized that it was impossible as the number of gunshots climbed and soared until it seemed as if the entire world was firing back and forth and forth and back as their feet hit the ice and the shit hit the fan and the deathly night silence sang the requiem for a bespectacled boy—

All he had wanted was an assignment.

All he had wanted was some glory.

All he wanted was to get the fuck home alive—

"Down!" Miriken threw himself around a corner as Dzhugashvilli’s latest token of appreciation smashed into the wall of the building beside them, burying itself in rock-hard cement.

That was intended for you, Jimmy boy. And the human body cracks a lot easier than stone.

He exhaled, the frozen breath in the air and the frozen blood upon his chin, rude evidence leading him to the incomprehensible conclusion that he was still alive. But for all practical, intrinsic purposes, he was a dead man walking. Because if Dzhugashvilli didn’t kill him, Miriken would.

"Up!" Miriken yelled, reaching upwards as he spoke. Despite his apparent age, James’s former "informant" easily pulled his body up onto an old wrought iron fire escape that had been dangling mere feet above their heads. He reached down for James’s hand, to aid him up.

James didn’t take the other man’s offer. Gripping the escape with both hands and trying to ignore how the bitter cold metal burnt swaths of ice into his palm, he swung his body upwards, feet skittering along the small meter by meter metal landing. He lay there for a second flat on his stomach, cheek pressed against the cold grating before Miriken gripped him by the scruff of the neck and pulled him to his feet. "I don’t have time for you to assert your independence, not when my life is on the line," he hissed, spitting on the metal grating.

His spittle was frozen before it hit the ground.

And then, they began to climb, feet pounding against the ricochet frame of the fire escape, which was swinging precariously back and forth. Instead of being attached to the building by thick strips of metal it was suspended by chains, creating an altogether bumpy ascent. And James’s heart could hardly take more trauma.

From far below, Dzhugashvilli pulled himself up onto the fire escape, adding his two feet to the rhapsody of flight beat out upon the creaking metal of the old staircase.

"Jump across," Miriken utilized one of the many one-word commands he was so fond of, pointing towards the roof of an adjacent tenement house.

"What?" James was utterly dumbfounded. They had reached the top of the fire escape, and Dzhugashvilli was still a mere moment behind. The roof of the nearest building was a good five feet away and the ice coating the side of both apartment blocks did not make for optimal traction.

Miriken surprised James by turning to stare him in the eye. "Do you trust me?"

"Absolutely not," James said, gazing at the older man with ill-disguised confusion in his gaze. James had never been any good at masking him emotions.

"Start," Miriken commanded, pushing Prongs towards the edge of their roof. Gritting his teeth, James jumped.

It was one moment of sheer terror, suspended in midair over an asphalt street that he could easily be seeing pressed up against his insides in two seconds flat.

And then he hit the ice on the roof of the other building and for the first second he wasn’t quite sure if he had made it but the smile on Miriken’s face confirmed his worst suspicions and he realized with an alarming shock that he was alive and if he wished to remain so he had better pick himself up out of the snow and high-tail it out of Moscow. But something froze him in mid-sprint, causing him to forcibly turn around and watch the old man with the gun, once known as Vladimir Ulyanov, called Alexander Miriken, but in all actuality, just a mystery.

Miriken remained on the other rooftop; his gun leveled at the fire escape. But instead of aiming towards Dzhugashvilli, who was about halfway up the side of the building, he shot at the chains holding the metal staircase to the apartment building.

One chain snapped, folding in upon itself with the crack of a whip. The staircase gave an almighty lurch, swinging from its wall like a wounded piñata.

Another chain sprung free. As Miriken stopped to slip one more bullet into his gun, the fire escape swung away from the tenement house, slamming against the side of James’s building with a horrendous nails-on-the-blackboard-screech accompanied by a whirlybird shower of sparks worth of Guy Fawkes Day.

The third and final chain popped out of its socket and with a horrible groan the fire-escape fell, smashing into the street with a corpse-waking clang as iron met snow and the two became one.

There was a smaller, more immediate noise and looking up from the wreckage on the street below, James was amazed to see Miriken standing beside him, looking as cool and unfazed as a mild-mannered cucumber.

The man didn’t say a word. But in all truth, he didn’t really need to. His deeds spoke for themselves. Later, James found himself unable to remember much else. He vaguely recalled Miriken leading him to a small overhang on the far side of the roof, underneath which was a sliding metal door with an enormous metal padlock on it.

Calmly, Miriken shot the lock off of the door. Amazingly, ice or no, the portal yielded to his touch and slid open like it had been greased with butter.

"After you," Miriken said, gesturing towards the gaping hole. James couldn’t make out what was at the bottom though a soft glow of warm light radiated up at him. And that was preferable to this bitter winter hell.

He jumped.

James found himself in a laundry chute of shorts, falling forward at a terrifically alarming rate. He shut his eyes, bit his still bloody lip, and realized that this is how a bullet must feel trapped in the barrel of a gun, but he hoped like so many of the shots fired that night, he would not find his end buried feet deep in a cement wall.

Instead, he landed face first into a mahogany table, scattering paperwork all around him.

Miriken was a mere second behind, but of course, James noted with dull resentment, he managed to land on his feet.

Feeling rather dazed, James picked his head up off of the table to gaze around.

He found himself staring into the shrewd black eyes of Alastor Moody. But Moody’s calculating gaze was not directed towards James. Instead, his eyes were focused on Alexander Miriken, gun still smoking in his grip.

"You’re late," the Auror hissed, glancing at the burnished brass pocket-watch he held in his hand.

Miriken didn’t waste a breath. "No," he corrected smoothly. "Your watch is fast."