Midnight

Huge thanks to the very lovely people who commented on the last part - thank you LoopyLoopLuna, Ravenpuff, Dae T., RhianEnchanted and last but by no means least, the fabulous LexiSkyline.

I adore feedback - criticism is very welcome. If you read and enjoy, or if you read and think I can do better, please let me know!

Midnight

I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition
- T.S. Eliot, Gerontion

The water dripped onto the stone like a heartbeat. Nothing else disturbed the silence: even the wind was noiseless, slipping through the bars to flutter across his clothes.

Viktor Krum lay like an effigy upon the stone ledge, atrophying inside his own skin. His arms were crossed upon his chest, the stump of his hand blackened and encrusted with dirt.

Hermione could hardly reconcile this still figure to the boy she had known once. She drifted towards him, seeking something she could recognise. His face was slack, his eyes empty of any animation. Dirt encrusted him: she had almost vomited at the smell when she first climbed into the cell, a foul mix of ordure and sweat and the sickly-sweet reek of rotting meat.

On a shelf in the opposite wall, they had left Viktor's wand in a display of arrogance that infuriated her.

"How could they leave him like this?" she said, her voice trembling. "How long has he been here?"

"Not as long as some," Draco said. He moved to set his back to the door, wand and knife at his side. "I suspect Krum would think himself lucky, if he can still think at all."

She touched her wand to some of the angry wounds that covered Viktor, anger fuelling the healing spells that she laid upon him. Bruises shrank and cuts were reduced to mere seams as she worked. "What did they hope to gain?"

"Gain?"

Draco gave a soft laugh. She turned to glance at him, and saw his smile was as sharp as his weapons.

"You still don't understand, do you?" he said. "This isn't about gain, Granger. This is about loss. It doesn't just matter to the Dark Lord that he's won - it matters that everyone else understands exactly what they've lost and how deeply they have failed. That's where he finds his pleasure - in your pain, in the dark shattered pieces of yourself that's all that remains when the despair has consumed you."

She wanted to say stop, to say please, but she needed to understand just what it was she fought: even now, her mind was coldly analysing his words, his expression, picking apart the strain in his voice. A thought nagged at her, something she should understand about him...

"He'll be as personal and intimate and slow as your first lover, Granger. He'll harrow you, body and mind and magic, and when there's nothing left but tatters, he'll leave you to decay in the darkness to mourn what you once were."

"Viktor..." she croaked.

"Not him. Not yet." Something close to respect might have glimmered in his face. "They cut off his Snitch hand and he still wouldn't break. Pity. He's only prolonging the agony."

"Not anymore," Hermione said, and turned away from him because she couldn't bear to see his face at that moment.

She clutched the homunculus tightly. Then she touched her wand to its forehead and whispered, "Wake."

Gold light flowed over the figure and sank into it. Her eyes, though, were on the man, caged so long in his own flesh.

Viktor blinked, and then he gasped for air, and the sound was harsh as a curse.

He sat up slowly, and she felt unexpectedly nervous, unsure of what might have passed in all these long years. When his dark eyes met hers, she felt the shock of recognition - that old intensity, as he stared like a man whose world had ceased turning.

"Hermione?" he said in wonder, accent fainter than she remembered. "No. It cannot be."

"It is," she said, her throat suddenly thick with tears.

"Or it's Polyjuice Potion," he said flatly, getting to his feet. "I have heard of such tricks before."

She went up to face him: he was taller than she recalled, glaring down his nose at her with a stubbornness she recognised very well. His lips were badly bitten, his arms covered in scars, and he was rigid as stone when she touched his face as she had once before, long ago, before a kiss in Hogwarts.

"No tricks," she said, and she held out her wand. "Take it. It's mine. Check."

His face didn't soften a whit, but he pointed the wand at her and cast a number of spells that clung to her skin like mist. She knew them: truth spells, charms of revelation, and last, he said quietly, Leglimens, and sent her back to the only place now free of the war: her memories.

She stood beside the lake in Hogwarts, and looked at him, as exposed under sunlight as she was. Beyond them, she could see two figures walking - themselves, as teenagers, playing clumsy courtship games.

"So it is you," he said, and the faintest of smiles touched his mouth. "Hermy-own-ninny. I thought-"

He cut off. She could not help but see his injuries beneath the unyielding light: old scars, the uneven line of his nose which had clearly been broken, his missing hand. There was very little of him to cast a shadow, and what remained was all bones and bruises. Regret surged over her.

"I'm sorry," she said, stumbling over her guilt. "I hid in Hogwarts...I was so afraid..."

"Why are you apologising to me?" he demanded, and his face was open and startled, all his wariness gone. "Do you think I blame you for any of this?"

"If I'd left sooner..."

He shrugged. "If this and if that. If you had come sooner, you might be dead." He paused. "They said you were dead."

She gathered herself. "Wishful thinking."

He was as grave as she remembered. "It will not be wishful thinking if you continue to keep company with Malfoy. He is dangerous."

"Yes," she said steadily. "But not to me."

"He is a monster," Viktor said, and a stream of Bulgarian followed, none of it sounding flattering. "You cannot trust him-"

"I know," she said. "Which is why I'm making him swear an Unbreakable Vow. And I want you to be our Bonder."

His silence was profound.

"You are mad," he said at last. "Typical English girl, lovely, but mad like all the English. It is the tea. It stews your mind."

She half-smiled. "Maybe. But someone has to stand up and fight."

"There are better allies." He hesitated, then took her hand, fumbling a little. His fingers were rough, but gentle. "In my house in London...they searched it, I know, but they will not have found anything. My trophies...there is a gold cup. Look on its base. There is a present from an old not-quite-friend that will help you. I kept it from them, even from him when he took my hand."

"How?" she said.

He smiled, but it was full of secrets and sadness. "Better not to ask, my poor mad Hermione. You will have far greater worries when you have a serpent clutched to your heart. The Dark Lord will be the least of your dangers."

Before she could answer, he ended the spell: the sun vanished, and there was nothing but the three of them in the stone cell, pressed between past and future with nowhere else to go.

X - X - X - X - X

Night in the city is chaotic and fractured. It's all dazzle and edges - light glancing from passing cars, streetlights mirrored endlessly in the shiny glass of high-rise buildings, headlights and neon and the cherry-red glow of cigarettes.

In it, a man can lose himself.

And Ernie Macmillan does more often than not. He loses himself and so he loses anyone who might be following him.

The brief flash of magic is lost in the London lights; a whisper is nothing amidst the bored chatter of city slickers, the laughter like gunshots, the blare of horns and the distant rattle of the tube. He might as well be invisible, a suit and a briefcase better camouflage than a flask of Polyjuice Potion. His spells are things of subterfuge - cast in the electric haze of the city, no more noticeable than a leaflet trampled underfoot.

He relies on being ordinary. He keeps his head down, gets on with it, works and works with the tenacity of a bulldog. A fistful of good exams got him that job in the Ministry, in the Department of Magical Communications and he's careful to appear more stupid than he is.

He works long hours, and they think it's because he's slow. If anyone remembers that he was part of Dumbledore's Army, they look at his stolid expression and his fumbled spells, and his meticulous but dull projects, and put it down to hormones or peer pressure or hunger for power.

He'll never be promoted, of course - the Death Eaters take no chances. Once every few months, they dose him with Veritaserum and quiz him. Have you seen these fugitives? Are you loyal to the Dark Lord? Have you performed any illegal magic?

The lies trip from his tongue easily, because he never knows they're lies until afterwards.

It's Luna's work, as charming and graceful as she is. He's always had a knack for charms, and he designed this one, but casting it on himself was too risky. It temporarily wipes out his dangerous memories - in those moments of oblivion, he's cowed and loyal, a testament to Voldemort's power.

He thinks, sometimes, of how careful her hands were. She laid him down on her bed, the door locked, her time bought, and as the charms sank into his skin, her hair streamed over one shoulder like a great silver river that carried him away. In the dim room, she was the only brightness, her eyes soft and dreamy and kind.

"Isn't it strange?" she murmured when it was done. "All these years, and you still need magic to forget what's right."

"I need magic to remember too," he muttered glumly.

She smiled, and even that had an otherworldly quality to it, as if she floated between reality and whatever fantasy place she hid herself in. "Oh, I don't think that part's magic. That's just friendship."

So when they come for him, he casts the spell silently, and empties out like a vein. When they are done, and has lost nothing more than his dignity (strange how much he used to think that mattered), he goes home. Until he sees the bracelet beside his bed, he remembers nothing.

And then he is himself again: Ernie Macmillan, who has set aside his pride because he refused to set aside his morals and who still knows how hard you have to work for anything that is worth having.

X - X - X - X - X

Hermione sat on the dank stone floor, opposite Draco. Viktor settled himself between them, expression blank.

"Thank you," she said.

"Don't thank me," Viktor said shortly. "I don't think it is it a good thing, this Vow. I think it will only keep you safe for a time, until he cannot resist the call of the Dark Lord. If I could keep you safe-"

"You can't," Draco snapped. "Don't you think it will be a touch obvious if you escape in my presence? I might as well put up a large neon sign saying it was me wot done it, m'lord, paint a dotted line on my abdomen and write open this end on myself."

Viktor's eyes were too old. She felt, for a second, just what he had lost down in the dark. "I know I must stay. I am no fool. I must wait for freedom, and hope."

"Then if you'll hurry up and make the Vow," Draco said, "we'll let you get on with the wait. Even I can't stay here forever before one of the guards comes to check my progress."

Draco leaned forward and grasped Hermione's right hand with his. With a mirthless smile, Viktor poised his wand over them.

"Do you, Draco Malfoy, swear that you will fight against the Dark Lord to the best and the end of your ability?" Hermione said, her voice quavering a little.

The magic licked around their hands like a chain. It threw a demonic light upon their faces, and Draco seemed less human than ever, as much flame as flesh.

"I do," he said.

"And do you swear that you will not betray me by word or thought or deed?"

"I do," he said, but the words lingered on his lips as if drawn out.

The magic drew tighter about them, and she felt it as a tangible weight upon her.

Then he spoke and said, "And do you, Hermione Granger, swear that you will fight the Dark Lord to the best and to the end of your ability?"

Startled, she gazed at him across their joined hands. He only looked back, eyebrows raised.

"I do," she said, stung. The flame lashed about them like a whip.

"And do you swear that you will not betray me by word or thought or deed?"

Thoroughly insulted, Hermione glared at him, and dug her fingernails into his skin for good measure. "I do."

The Vow flared bright, and bit deep in her hand like a striking snake. She could not help but think of Viktor's words: when you have a serpent clutched to your heart...

The light vanished.

"It's done," Draco said, sounding bored. "Now can we get on with saving the world?"

X - X - X - X - X

Ernie walks into the dingy block of flats where he lives, as he does every day. The door squeals on cue, and the stairs are a long slog because the lifts are broken. His feet echo in the cold stairwell, the only other sound the keys jingling in his hand.

Inside his flat - apart from grimy white wallpaper and a dog-eared sofa and furniture scavenged from other people's leavings - there's a stamp album. He fills it with fastidious care, careful to let slip about it in conversation so that they laugh at his stupid Muggle habit.

And tonight, he clutches his briefcase and flicks through it to a certain page which is really no different from any other page, except for this: when he touches the torn green stamp, the world whirls around him as the Portkey takes him away.

He lands in a museum, a human one full of shoes. It's closed for the day, but it wouldn't matter if it was open, because he's in the storerooms, crouched in a musty corner. He recovers quickly, and hurries down the aisles: he opens a draw, and another Portkey whips him into the between place, where he's neither here nor there, real and unreal all at once.

Each time he lands in a muddle of items: a tip in Cambridge where he scratches in the muck for a crumpled picture frame. An old library full of law books in a collector's house, where a dry old tome about tort law flings him into a Scottish antique store. He travels the country in a breathless rush - lamp, chair, button, Aberystwyth to Hull to Cornwall - until at last, he touches the last Portkey in this carefully laid trail, and emerges in an empty side street.

He brushes himself off, legs a little unsteady from a hard landing. The Polyjuice Potion is a foul brown potion in a grubby bottle, looking for all the world like a piece of litter. He gulps it down, and stifles his groans as his body contorts and twists. When it's over, he tosses the bottle back onto the floor and makes his way to the main street, another man in a suit going somewhere in a hurry.

King William Street is busy: bars overflow with city boys and the city girls with high heels and shiny hair. He winds through them, unnoticeable.

The corporate offices are closed and silent. But one of them has a blue plaque on its wall, commemorating a tube station that everyone thinks is abandoned.

King William Street
City Terminus
1890-1990

Everyone except the select few.

He pauses and brings out a mobile phone, flicking it open as if it's ringing. The gold disc ornamenting the handset is a little flashy, to be sure, but no one notices anything unusual as he pauses by the wall, chatting away in that overloud, brassy voice that used to be his, before he learned the value of silence.

He works hard at his disguise. He's certain no one has followed him, but certainty isn't enough anymore. The details are important.

Details like the hyphen between the dates on the plaque. It isn't in relief: instead, it is a slot, like the kind you might find in a fruit machine.

Carefully, his thumb levers out the gold circle: a Galleon, a match to the one that Luna carries. As he rambles on about stocks and shares and the changing market, he switches the phone to his other hand: the coin goes into the slot, and the spells activate.

Across the road, the pedestrian light malfunctions. The traffic jolts forward - people are shouting angrily at one another in a storm of what are you doing and are you fucking blind and you could have killed me, you twat.

As heads turn to the commotion, and horns join the shouting, the bricks behind him part and Ernie Macmillan slips into the narrow passageway that leads down to King William Street station and the headquarters of the Order.

X - X - X - X - X

It was harder to leave than she thought.

"You must go," Viktor said, and gave her an awkward one-armed hug that only made her realise how much she had missed human touch. "I will be fine, Hermy-own-ninny."

That old nickname made her smile, and Draco roll his eyes.

"Do you have to reactivate the charm?" she said softly. "Can't you do anything?"

The coldness was back in Draco's eyes, distant and calm. "Anything I do puts us at risk. The best disguise is no disguise at all. Do you think Krum's such a fragile flower that he can't take a little more pain? He's got another hand and two feet to lose before the situation's desperate."

"He is right," Viktor said gruffly. "About the disguise. The situation is already desperate, but you cannot spare me. His kind despise mercy, and they would be quick to see any such magic. I will endure."

She swallowed. She had fled once before, and left a man to die. She was very afraid that she was doing it again, and it hurt like hell. "I'll come back."

His glance was intense, and full of a heat she did not grasp. "I am certain of it."

"Get back into the case," Draco said. "There's another draught on the table. Take it."

She did not obey. "While you do what, exactly?"

He met her eyes levelly, and he was beautiful and sinister as an angel of death. "Disguise us."

"No..." she said, understanding just what that meant.

"Hermione, go," Viktor said. "Please."

"No," she said. "Not this. Not now."

"Do you have a better suggestion?" Draco said icily.

She was silent: the vast library of her memory was open to her, and she searched it with determination. She had not spent three years immersed in study to fight with cruelty and violence; she was better than that, they were better than that.

He moved - and she stopped him, the answer bright in her mind.

"A screaming charm, and a numbing charm," she said calmly. "And then you do what you have to. I can make sure no one sees a trace of the charms. Viktor won't feel a thing, but they'll think he did."

Draco looked at her as if she was an animal that had performed an interesting trick. "That could work," he mused. "Better sit down, Krum. You're about to have the terrifying experience of screaming while Granger works her magic on you."

"Not on him," she said. "On the homunculus charm."

"That is dangerous magic," Viktor commented.

She flashed him a smile that, had she but known it, was a mirror image's of Draco's: cool, arrogant, sure. "I'm a dangerous witch."

She could not understand his unsettled expression.

X - X - X - X - X

The disused tube is full of noise. Above it, the Northern line trundles by. And within it, the Order bides its time and gathers its force.

The wizard at the entrance checks Ernie thoroughly. He's young and battle-weary already. The familiar marks of magic are on his face - a scorch mark from an unwary spell, a few round scars like raindrops on his cheek.

"Business?" he says when the inspection is done.

"I have an urgent message," Ernie answers. The bracelet is tucked in his suit, quite safe. The Death Eaters think Magic Touch is just a seedy habit, that Luna's a schoolboy crush he ogles every week. She gives her bracelets to her favourites, everyone knows that, and her favourites are as often Death Eaters as they are ordinary men and women.

"Go on through," the boy says.

He climbs down the spiral staircase, careful not to slip on the dust. They leave most of the entrance in a state of decay, just in case a human should stumble in by error. No one has, yet, but you never know.

Down in the main tunnel, King William Street is a hive of activity. There are desk set up against the walls, and crude partitions made from old screens and hastily erected curtains. The station is office and hospital all in one - St Mungos is just an abattoir for Voldemort now - and beneath the human city, the last magical sanctuary thrives.

"Ernie!" Neville clasps his hand briefly and grins. He's tough and hard as granite these days, but his charm endured. "Anything?"

"From Luna," he says, passing over the bracelet. It's copper, which is an emergency. Gold is for gossip, green for good news, silver for a defeat. Black is for a death. He's carried too many of those.

Neville runs his fingers over the words on the inside, then claps his hands three times and announces to all and sundry that he believes in fairies. A few people grin, because even now they know how important it is to laugh.

Luna's voice fills the air, soft and beseeching, and there's a matching softness in Neville's eyes as he listens.

Clear out Chapel Weston. A Death Eater has caught its Secret-Keeper. There are Immolating Fireflies there. They're only native to Chapel Weston and Atlantis, so I think it'd be nice if you could save them too.

They move into action. Ernie is so used to it now that he hardly realises people look at him with a certain awe as Neville roars orders and musters people while Ernie lists spells and supplies they need, putting his methodical mind to use. At last he's done: part of him wants to draw his wand and charge into battle with the others, but he knows that no one else can do what he does. No one else can plod and dissemble and sit in the enemy's heart as he can.

It's hard work, long work, but he's used to that. As Neville vanishes to the surface with his chosen few, Ernie goes down to the hospital, where so many lie, too many. He heals until he is exhausted, pulling back increments of humanity with each spell.

Some will never recover. Susan Bones gibbers softly at her lamp, her hair a birds-nest no matter how often it's combed. Professor Flitwick limps heavily from bed to bed, advising as best he can in his garbled voice, because a curse deformed his mouth and left him unable to cast a spell properly.

When Neville returns, left side of his face streaked with blood, he gives Ernie a little nod. Then the people of Chapel Weston pour down the steps after him, silent and shocked, but alive. Some are weeping. Others only drift in like ghosts. They are haunted, and no words seem to stir them.

"How many?" Ernie asks.

Neville is dropping in a chair, his shoulders slumped. "Five," he tells the ground.

Ernie glances around. "And forty three saved," he says quietly.

"Five lost," Neville repeats grimly. He lifts his head, and his eyes are full of fire. "Not good enough. They had new spells this time. The things they did...god, the screams, the way they screamed..."

He shudders.

"Where are they getting them?" Ernie mutters.

Neville gives him a long look. "We need to find out."

A tube rattles overhead, the last of the night. Ernie leaves in its wake, sliding back out into the city and melting away. He is as methodical in his return as he was in leaving - a different path of Portkeys takes him back to his dingy flat, where he waits for the Polyjuice to wear off and puts on the TV to drown out his gasps of pain.

Tomorrow, he'll start to hunt down the spells and their maker, tracing them like a bloodhound. It will take time, but he's used to that. He won't give up. That's in his blood, his pure blood that got him that job and will get him revenge too, if he's patient.

And he is. He waited for the end of the world: and now he will wait for its rebirth, which is he is sure must come.

X - X - X - X - X

She woke again in the small room, air cold in her lungs. This time, Hermione could not recall any dreams of the dead, and she was glad. She climbed up the ladder, emerging in the kitchen of Grimmauld Place once more.

Draco glanced up. She seemed to feel the vow like an old burn on her wrist, then the sensation was gone.

The silence was unnerving. He was making another potion: this one she recognised as the start of a felix brew.

"Making your own luck again?" she said.

"As ever," he said. There was tension in his hands as he diced and chopped, wrung juice from ingredients. "Tell me, Granger, do you trust me now?"

She wanted to say yes, she should have been able to say yes, but instead she found herself reflecting upon the Vow he had sworn and wondering where the loopholes were in it, where there was a crack wide enough to slide a knife into her back.

Her hesitation was answer enough. His mouth took on a bitter curl.

"Astounding," he said. "I've bound myself to you to the point where I will actually spontaneously combust if I betray you, and you're still sceptical. They may gossip about the fires in the Malfoy loins, but it's strictly a metaphor."

"A disturbing metaphor."

Draco looked amused. "I do believe the thought of my loins has disturbed many a woman," he agreed. "But don't worry, Granger, you're not my type."

"And what is your type, Malfoy?" she challenged. "Girls who don't fight back? The kind you can lock in a cellar and leave to rot?"

The shock blazed in his face for only an instant, but it was enough: later she could not erase it from her mind, the O of his mouth, the mask shed and the truth beneath it more terrible than she could have imagined.

And then it was gone - he was closed, bristling with hostility.

"What's yours, Granger?" he fired back. "Quidditch players with muscles where their brains should be?"

The attack took her completely off-guard. "What's Viktor got to do with this?"

He slammed down the chopping knife so hard that the table rattled. "You nearly endangered everything we're doing for that Bulgarian oaf."

"You would have tortured him-"

"I would have done whatever was necessary to keep us safe!"

"You just don't understand, do you?" she said with exactly the same coldness that he had spoken with in Azkaban. "If we destroy Voldemort with his own methods, we're nothing but shadows of him. And once we'll kill for the sake of appearances or for safety, how long before we kill for the hell of it, how long before it stops mattering, how long before the difference between us and him is nothing but a name?"

"You don't understand how powerful he is." His fingers were crunched into fists: his violence was barely restrained, perhaps by nothing but a vow and a burn on his wrist. "We will have to kill him. There's no other way."

"There's Harry," she whispered.

He snorted. "Potter? You want to use Potter as your weapon of mass destruction? Granger, if you want a Drooling Champion, then Potter's your half-wit. If you want a Duelling Champion, well, I'm just not sure that a catatonic vegetable will cut the mustard."

"But he will frighten Voldemort," she said very calmly. "Even the rumour of Harry..."

"And how do you plan to spread these rumours? I'm not exactly at the hub of high society anymore, and you're a wanted fugitive. Between us, we could fight crime, but writing fiction is beyond me. And Rita Skeeter is just a mouthpiece for the Dark Lord these days."

She smiled. "Viktor gave me a clue to some allies."

He stared, then it clicked. "Ah. A little tête-à-tête where I couldn't hear."

"We need to break into his house in London."

His smile was teeth and tension. "If we're going to do it, we had better make it look like a random attack. We'll have to vandalise the place. Torching it's the best way to eliminate our tracks."

She gave him a level look. "You just want to burn his house down."

"Business before pleasure," he said brightly. "And what a pleasure it'll be."

She could not help but to think of the other words, of Draco saying that's where he finds his pleasure - in your pain, in the dark shattered pieces of yourself that's all that remains when the despair has consumed you.

"Will it?" she said, mild. "And if I burned your house down, what would I find in the ruins?"

His smile vanished. His eyes were watchful, secretive. And when he spoke, his voice was hard and sleek and vicious. "Nothing living, Granger. Nothing but flesh and bones."

Now she knew. She recoiled from him, beginning to understand what Viktor had said to her, what he had meant when he said the Dark Lord is the least of your dangers.

He smiled, as if he knew what she was thinking. "Don't worry, Granger. As I said, you're not my type."

His words chilled her. But the Vow was warm on her wrist, and she had no other choice. Nothing but this: to fight the Dark Lord to the best and to the end of her ability, with a serpent clutched to her heart.

X - X - X - X - X

Thanks so much.