A Trio Sundered

A/N: Thanks to Phantom of Desire for beta-reading. Also thank you to foxsmum, HalleyPotter and Nayeli Tiaret for commenting. I'm glad that you liked it!

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He didn't ever think he'd seen Draco looking quite so stressed out and worried. Which, between the entire sixth-year incident and the second war with Tom Riddle, was saying something. Currently Draco was pacing the length of his study - formally Lucius Malfoy's - his cheeks flushed and an unholy light in his eyes.

It was almost enough to make Harry feel guilty for worrying him so, but every time he thought about recanting his mind flickered back to a blood-scented noon-tide not so long ago. Off he would disappear into the past and each time his thoughts would return more certain.

"Merlin's beard, Harry," Draco exploded again. Just as Harry had known he must. If only the conversation would let them move onto some new ground. Harry was sick of the familiar paths that his thoughts were carving through his mind - worried that they might sketch out the template of his dreams. "I still don't see what reason you have to refuse me. You've lead campaigns before. How is this any different?"

Then, "Yes? Come in."

The last was snapped in response to a quiet knock at the studies door. Harry barely glanced around to greet the newcomer. Only Nott both bothered to and dared to knock on that door. The slightly older boy had barely bothered to pause before entering and, while he seemed cool and remote as ever, his hair was lank and his robes creased. That defiant something inside of Harry wilted; clearly things were not going so well as they should have over at Parkinson's estate.

Dammit! He didn't want to hear about more of this! Didn't want to know that the Ministry was keeping up its daily raids on the last handhold they had. Didn't want to imagine that would happen when they were done there. Didn't want to think that, Unplottable wards of not, the Ministry seemed to have a good idea where exactly Malfoy Manor and the other safe-houses were located. Didn't want to admit that Draco had a plan - a plan that even Draco himself dreaded - a plan that might just work.

Nott had arrived that day looking like death warmed up - no pun intended on the Mark he had taken - and that simply never happened. Even Riddle hadn't seemed to faze Nott for long.

There was a hurried conversation held in hushed whispers in the corner of the room opposite to Harry, during which Nott shot several vicious looks his way. If one good thing could be said of Harry's relationship with Nott, it was that at least the other boy was honest in his dislike of him. Honesty from a Slytherin? Who would have thought?

With one last glare at Harry, Nott swept from the room, closing the heavy mahogany door behind him with surprising restraint. Harry wondered if maybe Lucius had charmed it never to slam.

Closing his eyes, Harry dropped his head back against the soft upholstery of the winged armchair he was sitting in. Draco wasn't pacing any more, but Harry could detect his quiet breathing over by the window. Draco would be gazing blindly out of the rippled glass panes, across the boundaries of this: his realm. His right hand would be pressed flat, palm down, against the windowsill, whilst the left twisted heavy velvet drapes around his fingers. He'd look pained and frightened and the image within Harry's mind was so vivid that he had to open his eyes to confirm it.

Right in all bar one aspect. Draco wasn't looking out over his ancestral home, but rather down at the Dark Mark on his scarred forearm. His sleeve must have fallen back as he raised his hand to the curtains.

Draco was regarding the Mark with an expression of intense scrutiny, perhaps as if he had never seen it before. Riddle's death had, to be entirely exact, erased the Mark itself, but the powerful surge of magic as he was destroyed had flashed through his followers in a shock-wave of pure energy. Harry had been unconscious and thus unable to see the immediate effect, though Ron had told him of a 'delightful, synchronised scream'. The effect lingered before him in the burnt scarring on Draco's flesh.

Even as Harry watched, Draco lifted his hand to trace a finger along what had once been a snake's coils. His face was puzzled, intent and he almost jumped when his eyes met Harry's in the window's reflection. "Does it sound crazy to admit that I never really looked at it?" Then he managed a droll laugh. "Not that it really matters, but not remembering the scales' pattern is driving me to distraction."

"I'll draw it for you some time," Harry murmured. Everyone needed distractions.

Draco nodded sagely before turning to face Harry directly. He perched on the windowsill, fingers tight on its rim. "It would appear that they finally breached Pansy's wards last night."

"Anyone hurt?" This was a script Harry knew too well.

"Warrington's dead. Everyone else will pull through." No. Clearly not a script he knew well enough after all. Was he ever going to stop feeling helpless in the face of death? Hermione had called it his hero complex. Draco told him it was a mental imbalance that was slowly driving him to suicide. Whichever it was, Harry wanted to be rid of it.

"Did they patch up the wards?" Draco nodded, distracted, and Harry just knew what he was thinking about. It was really the only solution now. Or, rather, the only viable choice. 'Solution' sounded far too much... like a way to fix their problems rather than a slow retreat into defeat. "Who are you thinking of picking as Secret-Keeper?"

"Pansy. Who else? It's her home."

Okay, Harry thought. He had rather been asking for that response.

For a moment, watching Draco standing at the window as sunlight streamed in around him and caused his hair to blaze, Harry couldn't help but feel cold. As cold and as lost as he ever had when Dumbledore had died. This was it. The end to their recruitment. Locking away the Parkinson estate behind Unplottable spells (hopefully better executed than the ones which warded Malfoy Manor) constituted severing their final link to the outside world. No one should be able to find them, for better or for worse.

Thinking so bleakly never helped, Harry tried to tell himself. It hadn't in the last war and it wouldn't in this cold power struggle. He just needed something concrete to do. "I can go and patch up the wards Parkinson's got. Just because they're about to vanish doesn't mean we shouldn't be prepared for every eventuality." He made to lever himself out of the chair.

"Constant vigilance, you mean?" Draco retorted with a mock-glare.

"Don't worry. I promise not to turn you into a fluffy white ferret." It was nice to see that old, outraged look on Draco's face again. Even better maybe, now that it was tinged deep down with something approaching amusement.

"I shudder in fear of the thought that that could be my Animagus form. Now get out of here before I change my mind and set you to something really useful." The amusement had fled, leaving stone cold eyes in its wake and a set to the other man's shoulders which reminded Harry of something he couldn't quite pin down before he realised it was the same stance that he himself took on when cornered.

Abruptly Draco dropped their glance, stalking over to his desk and fishing through the piles of paper instead. Harry could recognise a dismissal when he saw one.

The walk to the Entrance Hall, with its immense sculptured fireplace, took Harry a noticeable length of time. Before arriving here, Harry hadn't realised that private houses could have halls and landings which might actually deserve to be termed 'corridors'. Unfortunately for the beautifully fruit-bedecked fireplace, the floo network to any and all of the places that they might want to go to had been disconnected over a season ago. Instead things had to be done the more labour-intensive and dangerous route. Of course, Harry admitted to himself as he slipped out of the window next to the front door (the front door itself had been subjected to a rather interesting barrage of spells and curses when the Fringe first beat a strategic retreat to the mansion with a school's worth of under-eighteens. Some of the spells - those cast by friend and foe alike - had undoubtedly mutated and anyone walking through the door would be lucky to emerge in a recognisable shape) not going by floo did tend to cut down on the mocking he received about the travel sickness he inevitably caught on the network.

Malfoy Manor's front garden must have once been the envy of the British Wizarding World. Harry knew that because he had seen photos of it in the Morning Room. Multiple scuffles later, the front gardens were both a whole lot less charming and a while lot more dangerous.

Something seemed to be moving through what had once been the Rose Garden. Now it more resembled the thicket from Sleeping Beauty complete with the foot-long thorns. Thankfully whatever it was, the movement didn't seem to be showing signs of wanting to move in Harry's direction. Besides, if it were foe, the roses would have eaten it. They were still under Draco's control.

Probably.

Anyway, that was the roses. He was on the path. The path was mostly safe. The trick to the path, Harry had learned rather a while back, was to actually be on good terms with the current master of the Manor. Learning that had made Harry's first trip here eventful. At least the grass had been less... sharp back then. He wondered vaguely how Draco used to sneak inappropriate girlfriends home without the Manor causing a ruckus.

Maybe he'd never had inappropriate girlfriends.

The gates were looming up ahead and Harry pushed them cautiously open with an obscene sensation of relief at finding something not actively hostile.

The air outside the Manor grounds felt strangely open after a week within the walled grounds. Surely the same air was sweeping through both, although this felt fresher, if more vulnerable.

There was no time to dawdle however. Draco was adamant that everyone (and he'd glared especially at Harry then) be as careful as possible. Besides, Harry hadn't been able to spot either of the two Aurors that the Ministry usual had posted around this section of the Mooreland. That meant he didn't know where they were or when they'd return. So he quickly took out his wand, flicked his wrist, and felt the familiar twisting in his stomach as he vanished.

A moment later he reappeared at the rear of a rather large and hostile group of Aurors. So much for being careful equating to being safe. Luckily their attention was rather too focused on the farmhouse before them and Harry was wildly grateful to Nott for taking all of that time to teach him soundless Apparition, without which all could have been lost.

Nervously, Harry started inching back. While he had reasonable odds of making it out of this particular scuffle he doubted that Parkinson would think much of his spilling blood on her doorstep. Just, please, let him not step on something loud.

Thankfully he made it as far as the cover of a hedgerow facing the farm's drive without raising the attention of anyone. Ducking behind it, Harry quietly wracked his mind for an appropriate course of action. The farm was, quite naturally, too heavily warded to simply Apparate inside of and, while a few too many months of ward-setting had left him certain enough of the technicalities that Harry thought he could punch straight through the wards, he highly doubted that Parkinson would appreciate a great big hole in her wards any more than she would do several gallons of fresh Auror blood.

Damn it, but the most sensible course of action would be to go and collect someone keyed to walk through the wards. Someone Parkinson trusted enough to have the right to take other people through the wards with him and someone who - at the same time - trusted Harry himself enough to take him. Which more or less narrowed the choice down to Draco. Pity. Draco had looked like the last thing he had wanted was another addition to his list of responsibilities.

Harry was just about to leave and head back to the Manor when the farm before him vanished.

It occurred to Harry that he'd never actually seen a Fidelius Charm activated before and that the effect was really rather impressive.

The Aurors seemed rather less delighted. Currently they were swarming about like a rather large and angry nest of hornets and, after giving Harry a rather worrying moment or two to ponder upon the likely odds of their random walk taking them straight to him, he noticed that they weren't randomly walking. Rather, they were breaking into a run and his only excuse for taking so long to notice was that the Aurors themselves seemed to have had problems picking up on what was going on. This was - as Harry, watching, now saw - a sudden avalanche of movement beginning with only a handful of people who seemed to have noticed something that no one else had.

Harry turned to look for whatever that 'something' might have been, the proverbial falling pebble, and spotted Bulstrode, barely two kilometres off, running hell for leather and suddenly blindingly obvious after the disappearance of an ancient farmhouse and half of its land.

In fact, some of the Aurors were running straight over the patch that Harry knew had held an immense pile of bricks in the form of a building apparently non-the-worse-for-wear and passing what must, in some dimension, still be solid stone and mortar.

Come to think of it, didn't the hills look closer now, as though sucked in to cover a gaping hole in reality? Or was that just a lack of good solid perspective that had, until recently, been provided by a rather battered front gate?

Harry's head hurt, and really none of it mattered, because he had already Apparated. For a moment he faltered and nearly fell as his feet sank several inches. He'd forgotten how boggy and marshy this ground could be in Welsh valleys midsummer. Still, he got his head up in time to see Bulstrode's eyes finish widening in surprise and start to narrow with grim determination instead.

Bulstrode's legs pounded a steady beat and Harry promised himself that he'd never let Ron mock her again for being too large and heavily built to be a 'pretty girl' because instead she was strong and brave and mad and how in the name of all that was magical had she never ended up in Gryffindor?

But Ron wasn't by his side to reprimand. Quite probably never would be again, and Bulstrode was heading towards him, arms pumping like pistons and as unstoppable as a steam train. The Aurors behind her were catching up, but that didn't matter because she was so close and dammit, but why did the Anti-Apparition Wards that the Aurors set up have to be so much thicker here than at the front gates? Just because the Aurors were lazy sods that couldn't be bothered to hike to the front gates each morning. Couldn't they have been stupid and made the wards equally slender all about Parkinson's home? Dammit, he'd helped drill them well in the war against Riddle too.

A handful of Aurors had drawn up upon seeing Harry appear. One took aim - at Harry himself or Bulstrode's strong back, Harry wasn't certain. He was certain that the curse he shot back wasn't going to leave that particular Auror in the running for this fight any longer.

His action seemed to be a general command for the other Aurors to pour forth spells and hexes, and really, one man wasn't meant to be laying down a protective barrage against fifteen, but then Bulstrode was a hand's breadth away and she was throwing something - something blue - and she wasn't aiming it at the Aurors, just getting rid of it. Then there were hands on his shirt and the familiar twist of a Portkey at his belly and he ended up straight back where he had started - in Draco Malfoy's study - exhausted and exhilarated and without having done much of anything.

Draco looked up from behind a large ledger as they materialized and Bulstrode doubled over to spit something out. The glass vial shattered on the stones and spilled forth liquid from within it to bubble briefly before evaporating and leaving a rather substantial hole in the floor. Bulstrode looked relatively embarrassed by this and Harry supposed that spitting suicide potions onto your host's carpet after escaping from near-certain death was just one of those things that well mannered little purebloods just didn't do.

Draco was too polite to mention it, of course. The only concession he made was to pour her a rather stiff brandy which just made Bulstrode's face flush further after she downed it. Sometimes Harry did have to wonder whether of not it was coincidence that Draco would offer comfort at the same time as showing off his own collected calm.

"Honestly, Potter! Can't seem to trust you with anything. I send you off to be the bloody cavalry and it takes Millie to rescue you from the damn Aurors." It wasn't entirely fair, but Harry decided that right now might not be the prudent time to argue his virtues. "I trust the Negative Portkey worked as planned, Millie? Glowing when you escaped the barriers and activating when released? Either way, it sounds rather like we need to offer a toast to out latest Secret-Keeper." He raised his glass to Bulstrode and Harry barely felt a flicker of exasperation at being left out of all this drinking business in a flood of concern that he hadn't seen Draco pour himself a drink. Maybe he'd had one all along or maybe Harry's observational skills were dulling with age. Personally Harry rather hoped it was the latter - having Draco turn to drink in the midst of this crisis was the last thin anyone needed.

Pity that Draco had set a precedent in the last war, spending most of it stoned on pot.