Chapter 35: The Herald
CW for depictions of torture (non-graphic, physical).
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Celebrations raged past midnight. Fireworks thundered overhead like they were camped on the beaches of Normandy. Music swelled from every tent, accompanied by roaming parties of witches and wizards, most of whom hardly knew each other at all, drinking and firing spells into the air. Ministry wizards raced after them with torches and haggard expressions. They had to fight their way through a conga line of step-dancing leprechauns that stretched across half the tent city, and Draco came close to an act of anti-Irish aggression.
“Well,” said Mr. Weasley, when they reached the tent, “if you can sleep in this, please do; but as for me, I’m going to make some hot cocoa.”
They piled onto the moth-eaten sofas, nursing cups of thick fragrant cocoa in chipped white mugs. The chocolate was so good it could have nominated him for sainthood and Draco had to wage a guerrilla war to keep Hermione from stealing his, which distracted him from Charlie and Ron’s argument about the Scotch Pincer, and Bill’s rhapsody on Moran’s final goal; Ginny sat between Fred and George, and after she had been silent for a while, Draco looked over and found her passed out on Fred’s lap. Then Fred picked her up and carried her to bed, which was a cue for the four of them to retreat to their own tent with Bill.
In the dull light of the camping lantern, he changed into pajamas and set about the business of falling asleep. It was hard going. He was on the bottom bunk, under Hermione, and lay staring at the bed frame above him as the music thumped from their neighbor’s tent. Irritation at his inability to sleep kept him prickly and alert and uniquely ill-suited to sleeping, a compounding spiral of frustration. He had been up for almost twenty hours since daybreak and his face hurt with the desire to sleep, but between the ambience and the various breathy rustling of four other people sleeping in close quarters, he couldn’t focus. Hermione kept wriggling in her sleep, creaking the bed frame.
It was impossible that he’d fallen asleep, but when he woke up, he knew he’d been dreaming. A blind swipe of his hand caught no enemy but air, and he flipped out of the bed in a pulse of unlucid adrenaline, answering a subliminal commandment to run run run. He felt like his brain had been dunked in cold water and he hadn’t slept this badly since the Manor, when he’d grab a broomstick if he was out of Sleeping Draught and fly tight dizzy circles around the grounds until he woke the peacocks in their nests and got a honking rebuke.
A touch to his brow came away slippery, and his shirt was slicked to his chest. His heart clobbered his ribs. He grabbed his overcoat and his shoes and was out the door before anyone could wake to notice.
His watch read two o’clock. The air was cool and sweet and fresh like nights at the Burrow, the sea of lanterns issuing dreamy light, while residual smoke from the fireworks veiled the stars. He walked to the well and drank deep mouthfuls of ice-cold water that tasted faintly bitter but clean, rinsing the gummy bile-taste from his mouth, splashing his face in it. The shock purged the last of the tremors, and cleared his imagination of creatures in black cloaks creeping across his periphery. He wasn’t sleeping again, not after that, but it was a nice night, and the celebrations had dwindled to just a few guttering loci of lights and music, including a high bonfire from the Irish tents that he doubted would fade before morning. Now that the dark didn’t faze him, he ventured toward it.
A massive structure in the shape of a three-story log cabin — the outside alone was bigger than the Burrow — marked the end of a row of kingly tents. It was so big that it spilled over into the path, turning the lane into a cul-de-sac, which meant purebloods if it meant a thing at all: the lack of concern for campsite rules, or indeed anyone else’s physical comfort, was as good as a beacon in the sky. He found his feet carrying him towards it.
Firelight flickered on the deck, enchanted blue flames inside a glass fire pit. Watery light spilled over Pansy Parkinson, sprawled on her side in a lounge chair, wearing satin lounge pants and a Slytherin jumper. She nursed a copper mug and a cigarette, which she flicked into the fire pit as Draco approached. Beside her, the nine-year-old Astoria Greengrass sat in a wheely-chair under a blanket of bear fur.
Pansy stood up when she heard him approach. Her wand was out. She held it overhand, its point angled out and slightly downward, levied threateningly away from her body — an archaic grip, Hogwarts taught the western underhand, it was better for charmwork and safer to boot — but also the one Theo used, however. He wondered when she’d started doing that.
“Who’s there?” she snapped. Her eyes were a bloodshot rusty blue, like spots of oxidation on copper, and her sneer was startlingly cold. She looked like a feral cat.
He stepped into the firelight and felt a surprising amount of relief when she lowered her wand.
“I come to parlay.”
“Ugh. Draco,” she said, flopping back down in the lounge chair. “For Merlin’s sake. Wear a bell.”
“What’s the matter? Worried about rogue leprechauns coming to steal your gold?”
“That’s anti-Irish, prat.”
“For one: that is an incredible move to hypocrisy, from you, I have never seen such shamelessness and I am impressed. For two: you’re English.”
“Partial credit, but lacking detail. My grandmother’s from Dublin. Normally I don’t give a damn, except it means the whole family’s got to schlep out to this wretched den of anarchy to represent the Motherland. Thank God we didn’t lose to the Slavs, I think Granny Shea would’ve killed herself. Melon spritz?” She passed him her copper mug. He sniffed it, detected honeydew, citrus, and no major poisons, and sipped.
“And for your information, these sorts of things are hives of crime,” she said. “It’s inevitable, when you pack thousands of excitable wizards in a confined space and lubricate them with liquor.”
“I lost my mother-of-pearl pocket watch,” said Astoria sadly. “It was my great-gran’s. She got it from a mermaid.”
“Mermaids don’t use pocket watches, Tori, don’t be dumb.”
“No, it’s true! A mermaid fell in love with her and made her a bridal gift of a hundred pearls, and sewed her a fishskin that let her breathe under the sea, and they were gonna get married and live in a palace underwater with lots of pretty fishes but my great gran didn’t like the fishskin because it smelled stinky, so she left the mermaid at the altar and ran away to marry my great grandad and had a buuuuunch of babies, but she could never go to the beach because she was scared the mermaid would come back and demand her bride price.”
“Dummy,” said Pansy, tweaking Astoria’s nose. Astoria squealed. “You’re a big dumb dummy, Tori, you know that? That story didn’t happen to your great gran, it’s a fairytale. Besides, mermaids are hideous, no witch would ever want to marry them.”
“Yeah durr,” said Astoria sulkily. “That’s prolly why she didn’t. You’re a dummy.”
“My God, you’ve got me. Draco, quick, help. Avenge my honor with your keen witticisms. I must burn my clothes and don mourning blacks for shame.”
He laughed. He had missed Pansy. She was such an awful unrepentant brat.
“Did the family come?” he asked Astoria casually. Pansy’s snort informed him that it was not casual enough.
Astoria puffed out her cheeks and whistled through the pucker of her mouth. “Um,” she said, “Mummy came with me. And Daddy, um… he doesn’t like quidditch? Because he says it’s super boring and um not good for your brain…?”
“Tori, you can tell him.”
The truth wheezed out of Astoria in a flurry of relief. “No. Daffy’s at home and they’re not letting her out and I don’t know why, she says she’s alright but there are always healers around and some nights they lock the doors to her room but they don’t lock the one in the back of my closet so I can sneak in and honestly she’s like fine, she just eats a lot and throws up and throws furniture around but I do that sometimes when I’m mad and my magic acts up so I think she’s just really really lonely.”
Her voice strangled out for want of air. Pansy patted her knee.
Draco gripped the mug between his fingers. Did that mean Daphne wasn’t coming back to school? Would they let her? It was actually hard to tell, based on Astoria’s testimony, whether she was well or not. She probably wouldn’t tell her younger sister if the answer was no.
“Relax,” said Pansy. She was smirking like his despair was her favorite ice cream flavor. “Daphne’s not keeling over dead anytime soon. She’ll be back at Hogwarts in September — now, whether Theo will have to stage a heist to get her out of that place, I wouldn’t wager, but she means to continue her education.”
“You’ve spoken to her?”
“Sparsely. I’m allowed to visit the Greengrasses if I say I’m seeing Tori here,” said Pansy, nodding at Astoria. “It’s a connection my parents are anxious to foster; they’re worried I don’t have enough friends that are girls. I told them Blaise is only a man every third Tuesday, but what do you know, they didn’t find that funny at all. So Tori supposedly keeps me out of trouble. Don’t you?”
“I’m not very good at it,” said Tori cheerfully, without a drop of remorse.
“No, you’re not, you perfect little gremlin,” said Pansy, showing unprecedented reserves of fondness. She reached into her pocket. “Toffee?”
“Yes, please!”
The gremlin was paid.
Draco leaned back in his chair, relieved. “Why isn’t Nott with us, anyway? I heard his father was around.”
Tori looked at Pansy, who merely shrugged. “Search me,” she said. “He’s barely been around the whole Cup. We’ve been abandoned.”
“He thays he’th buthy with hith dad,” said Astoria. The toffee had plastered her teeth together. “He’th alwayth buthy.”
“Yes, dear Prince Theodore has become the new darling of the British bureaucracy,” said Pansy dryly. “You’d think he’s the only reason the Ministry’s still standing, to hear him tell it. As if his dad would let him do more than carry paperwork and lick arses.”
Draco wrinkled his nose. “I thought he hated his father.”
“And I, for one, loathe Transfiguration,” said Pansy. “Yet somehow, I keep finding myself in the presence of Professor McGonagall. Striking, how that happens.”
“Professor McGonagall never hit you, did she?”
Pansy grimaced and plucked the mug out of his hands, her silence a tacit concession. “She’s not my mother, either.”
“If your mother hit you, Theo would have her boxed and ready for the undertaker by noon.”
“What makes you think she hasn’t?” said Pansy, with a cool awful little smile, which he was sure would have sent someone who knew her less into paroxysms of awkward. But she wasn’t half as good at bluffing as she thought she was.
“Don’t be crass. You’re mother’s a woman of class and dignity,” he said. “She’d have the help do it.”
Pansy gave a surprised and unbeautiful snort of laughter. “Ass,” she said. “Why didn’t you come visit me?”
He was startled and touched by the offer. “Why didn’t you come visit me?” he said, after a moment. “The Manor’s bigger than Parkinson Court. And my mother misses having a girl around.”
“Certainly. If you don’t mind my mother tagging along.”
“She’s worried about your virtue?”
“No, she’s worried about appearances. In fact I think she’d take heart if a few more people showed interest in my virtue,” said Pansy flatly, fishing a shred of mint from the mug and flicking it into the fire. “She was my age when she received her first marriage proposal.”
“I can take a hint, but I’m afraid my heart belongs to potions.”
“Not you, prat. Good Lord, can you imagine it? I’d rather marry a toad.”
“Unnecessarily harsh,” he said. Astoria, making a pitiful noise through her teeth, agreed.
“No, no. You’re perfectly good-looking,” she said, flapping a hand at him, “especially now you’re coming into your cheekbones, well done; but a marriage only works if both spouses agree who’s funnier, and you and I would never concede. Our dinner parties would be unendurable.”
“Thoughtful of you. What about Theo?”
“What about him?” she said, aghast. “He’s not said anything to you, has he?”
He smirked and kicked his feet up on the firepit. She rolled her eyes.
“The toad remains the frontrunner,” she said. “I can’t marry a man who’s seen me in diapers. Anyway, now you’re starting to sound like my mother. ‘What about the Crabbe boy? You know him, don’t you?’ Vince! Vincent Crabbe! Like Vince would know a girl if one bit him on the arse. His family’s angling for an arranged marriage with the Bulstrodes, anyway.”
“How do you know?” said Astoria rapturously, as if having access to Slytherin house gossip was the fount of all knowledge.
“Millie’s opposed,” said Pansy, sanguine. “She has a crush on the Hufflepuff seeker. I told her I could help her stage a scandal to get out of it, if she wanted, but she wasn’t interested.”
“I’d stage a scandal with you, Pansy,” said Astoria desperately.
“Thank you, my dear. I invoke the ancient law of ‘no takesies backsies.’”
Astoria fervently crossed her heart. Draco was quiet for a while. His pulse had gone steady and slow, eased by the fire and the idle chat, but residual tension still bunched in his hands and hamstrings. The creases under Pansy’s eyes made him wonder how much she’d slept. If at all. When her dreams woke her in the middle of the night, what did she reach for? What did she do?
Once, he would have hazarded a guess; but then, Theo wasn’t here, and maybe that was part of the problem.
There was a faint boom somewhere in the distance. Screams followed it. He didn’t stir. Sometimes a firework went off wrong, and accidents were commonplace with this much magic running around.
The second boom made them all turn their heads. It was closer, and the screams were clearer. A pillar of black smoke rose from the campsite in the distance.
Draco stood up and took out his wand. Pansy did the same.
“Did you—”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes sharp and sweeping the darkness. “Tori, go inside.”
“No! What’s wrong?” said Astoria, craning her neck. “You’re blocking me! I can’t see.”
“Doesn’t matter. Inside, lock the door, and get my dad,” she said. “Now.”
“I want to stay with you and Draco!”
“Tori, I swear to Merlin, if you don’t do as I say I will never visit you again, and I’ll tell all the Slytherin boys at Hogwarts you’ve got pubic lice,” snapped Pansy.
Astoria quivered with betrayal. “You wouldn’t.”
“I would! And you’ll have no beaux forever and and you’ll make no friends, and it’ll serve you right for being a brat!”
Moaning in misery, Astoria wheeled herself inside with the haste of a girl who took Pansy at her word.
Draco watched the door seal behind her. “You’ve a maternal touch.”
“She’ll be fine,” said Pansy dismissively. “Besides, she’s a shameless rat. She’s about to run straight to my dad and tell on me, which is good, because we’ll be safe when he gets here.”
He did not share her confidence in the matter. “Your father’s not an auror, is he?”
“He’s an Unspeakable,” she said, and it was the first time he’d heard her sound remotely proud, talking about her parents. “They might not have hired him to win fights, but he didn’t get the job by losing them, either.”
Before they could further litigate Prescott Parkinson’s skill with a wand, a third boom erupted. A blade of green fire slit open the darkness, so close that they both shielded their eyes, and when it dissipated a huge furl of smoke was opening like a hungry claw into the sky.
The Irish quarter was on fire.
The lanterns along the path flickered on and off, weakly, and then died. It was dark except for the firepit and the lights on the horizon.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Three more explosions went up, one after another, along the horizon, and the smoke billowed. The last one, a fourth, went up in the Weasleys’ section.
Draco was running before the sound had faded from the air.
“Stop! Stop! What are you doing?”
He barely heard her. A throng of people were streaming past the well. Their voices clashed in a violent cacophony of screams and fruitless shouting. Mediwizards raced stretchers through packed alleyways, bellowing for space. Aurors whizzed overhead on broomsticks, trying in vain to direct crowds. An old woman was knocked to her knees and disappeared under the thunder of feet. A witch in a green nightcap mounted the well and screamed for her children.
Vertigo struck. He listed against the nearest tent, head swimming.
“DRACO!”
He spun around. Pansy was trying to push her way through a pair of Bulgarian wizards. They shoved her back; she snarled, kicked one in the crotch, kneed him in the stomach, and leapfrogged across his back when he doubled over.
“Come back to the tent,” she shouted, grabbing his arm. “It’s not safe—”
“I can’t — I’m here with the Weasleys — the last explosion was on top of them—”
“The Weasleys?” She was baffled. He might as well have said the Dumbledores. “Well — but—”
“Whatever you’re going to say, consider that there has never been a worse time.”
“I was going to say they’ll be fine,” she snapped. “Let them take care of their own. We’ll take care of ours.”
“I can’t,” he said. At the thought of it, a peal of nausea almost drove him to his knees.
She gave him a stare that could have cut glass. Abruptly, she let go of his arm. Her lip trembled, like something fidgety was caught inside her mouth.
“Would you?” she said. “If it was me, would you? Instead of them?”
He stared at her.
“Despite your frankly appalling sense of timing,” he said, “I unfortunately do, yes, consider myself obligated to save your life, if and whenever possible, for any number of dim reasons not limited to being a remotely decent human being, and under certain circumstances even extending to — sod this. Yes. I would. Is that what you want to hear?”
She wilted. “No, I was afraid you’d say that,” she said.
“What?”
“Fine.” She raked back the sleeves of her jumper. “Let’s go find the stupid sodding Weaselbees. And don’t you expect a birthday present from me ever again.”
“I didn’t ask you to come.”
“And you never will,” she said sadly. He couldn’t spare the several decades it would take to unpack that remark, so he tried to ignore it. “But the thing about me is I’m secretly just as thick as Teddy, and I never knew how to t—”
But he never found out what Pansy didn’t know. A beam of green light paved the slate of the sky. Illuminated in its grasp were four floating figures, struggling against the grasp of the Levicorpus Charm. It was a man, a woman, and two children. They were being paraded through the tents like a float, their bodies bent into unnatural shapes.
“Muggles,” said Pansy.
“How—”
“Don’t be stupid, it’s muggles,” she said quietly.
Screams broke out. Tents shuddered and started to collapse. Tongues of fire ran up the sides of the path and leapt from tent to tent, roofing the paths in smoke. The woman’s legs were forced open and her head bent back, like a child playing with an unloved doll, trying to see where its hinges were. Her mouth was open, and she must have been screaming, but amidst the noise of the riot it was as if she were silent.
“This can’t happen,” said Pansy numbly. “The International Statute of Secrecy—”
“You think they give a damn? It’s a terrorist attack.”
“By whom?”
“I don’t know,” he snarled, elbowing his way through a group of fleeing Croatians. “Your dad’s the Unspeakable, you tell me.”
The smaller muggle child had started spinning, his limbs flopping around like so much puppetry.
“Someone needs to get them down,” he said, but he felt sick. Where were the aurors? Where was Runcorn, where was Nott?
The muggles floated over them, their bodies eerie and limp in the green light. Finally, Draco saw the figures holding them up. They were dressed in black shrouds, covering their heads, and wore black gloves and black robes — all black, save for the bone-white gleam of their masks.
He knew what those masks were. He’d seen one before.
He stepped back, into Pansy. She didn’t notice.
“Parkinson,” he said.
“My dad’s back at the tent,” she interrupted.
They stared at each other.
“Do you understand me?” Her voice had none of the warmth or vulnerability it held a minute ago, when she was holding his arm and entreating friendship. Her voice was not an invitation. It was barbed wire wrapped around a sledge hammer. It was a ten-foot wall of brick. “My dad is at the tent with Astoria. He’s been there all night. You saw him there. Do we understand each other, Malfoy?”
He had never seen anyone wear the expression on her face. No one.
Standstill. Deadlock on the tongue. Deadlock in the brain. He had only two options and both of them were lies, so he chose the one he could live with in the short term, cast away the implications he’d have to pick out of his shrapnel-ridden conscience later.
“Yes. We do.”
She nodded. “Good. Then we can go find your friends.”
The marchers passed over them, but another boom went up in the distance. There were multiple groups. Draco and Pansy wrestled through a glut of people surging away from the explosions, and got caught in a river of movement towards the edge of the campsite, where people were streaming in large congregations towards the woods.
“That’s the evacuation point,” panted Pansy. “If they’re alive, they’re headed there. If they’re dead, we don’t stand a chance of finding the bodies.”
“You’re a comfort in these trying times,” he snarled, and ducked under a stretcher carried by two mediwizards.
He didn’t think about Hermione. He didn’t think about Hermione. He kept moving, in no small part, because he wasn’t thinking about Hermione.
Damn Pansy.
A flock of birds zoomed overhead, forcing him to duck. He realized belatedly that they weren’t birds at all, but womanlike creatures whose arms and fingers had fused into bird’s wings, their feathers a resplendent white gold, their skinny legs an unnatural cross between claws and talons. One of them gave a earsplitting shriek and soared up to the floating muggle child, gripping him in her talons and beating her wings — trying to pull him free — but a green light darted out of the crowd below, struck her, and she tumbled out of the air.
The other veela screamed and peeled away, fleeing a barrage of spells that followed them.
“That wasn’t,” said Pansy, “you don’t think—”
Something collided with his knees. He stumbled and caught sight of a house-elf running for its life, gripping a dark purse in its arms. In the haze and confusion, his heart skipped, thinking it was Dobby — but no, it was a female elf, wearing a dishcloth for a cloak.
“Little sneak,” said Pansy darkly. “Expelliarmus.”
The house-elf squeaked and tumbled to the dirt, her bag leaping from her arms. Pansy caught it and stomped over her.
“Who does this belong to?” she demanded, shaking it. “Where did you get this?”
“Begging your mercy, m-m-mistress!” wailed the house-elf. “It belongs to my m-m-master—”
“Who’s that? Who do you belong to?”
Draco’s impatience and discomfort peaked simultaneously. He hauled her off the house-elf by her collar, dodging the hiss and the elbow she threw at him. “Parkinson, stop. That’s enough. She’s not hurting anybody.”
“Mimsy b-b-belongs to the Most Noble and Most Ancient House of Nott!” pleaded the elf. “Mimsy is a good and loyal elf, and she is t-t-trying to f-f-find her f-f-family—”
“Oh, really?” Pansy was scornful. “And who’s that?”
“Me, probably,” said a rather breathless voice, and Pansy’s head snapped up.
Theo stood in the alleyway beside them, his face a dalmatian mix of soot and cinders, his hair a static rumpus, and a bandage swaddling his left hand.
“Pans, would you please unhand my elf, before she pisses herself in fright? It’s rude to chew on other people’s toys.”
Pansy gave a cry of exasperation and surged forward with violent speed, and Theo let her hurtle into his chest. He grunted and let her put her hands on his neck — an unwise move from a tactical view — where she latched onto him and clung like a two-headed creature conjoined at the breast.
“You’re fine,” she said. “You shit, you awful shit, you’re fine. You’re fine.”
There was something strange and othering about watching the two of them reunite, as if he were witnessing an arcane ritual to a god he didn’t worship in a language he couldn’t speak.
“When am I not?” he said lightly, and tweaked her nose. She snapped her teeth at him, and he whisked his finger away, shaking it. “Oi. We’ve talked about the biting. Evening, Draco. Terrible night for it. You’re not hurt, are you?”
“No,” he said curtly. “I’d ask the same of you, but it seems you haven’t had the luck.”
Theo glanced down at himself and shrugged. “Oh,” he said. “This wasn’t the riot. I ran into a bit of trouble with some French girls at the celebrations — you know how it goes, the old ‘voulez-vous coucher avec moi, monsieur,’ and you try to let her down easy, ‘Non, madamoiselle, je ne couche qu’avec des blondes qui pourraient me tuer, et vous êtes beaucoup trop une dame.’ Only I forgot the word for ‘kill’ so I said ‘terminer’ instead, which I think she took as an insult to her skills. Or possibly she was just a bad sport. Anyway, it turns out they do teach them something at Beauxbatons besides lipstick and charm.”
“Ninny,” said Pansy. “Why’d you bring your stupid elf out here?”
“Because my father doesn’t trust me to my own devices,” he said indulgently, “does he, Mims? Doesn’t Lord Nott trust his own son less than a paper umbrella in a windstorm?”
Mimsy turned green. “Mimsy c-c-cannot presume to s-s-s-speak for Lord Nott,” she squealed. “Mimsy is only a house-elf — no insight into the minds of wizards — she only serves—”
Theo snorted and cut her off. “Oh, shut up.”
“Send her away, if she’s not helpful,” said Draco coldly.
He raised his eyebrows at him. “I forgot,” he said, “you had a soft spot for stupid things. Alright, as you like. Mimsy, go back to my father.”
Mimsy groaned, rocking on her heels, and eyed the purse in Pansy’s hands covetously.
“What? What is it? Oh. Pansy, give that back to her. Why on earth do you have it, anyway?”
Pansy threw the purse on the ground, and Mimsy scrambled to pick it up. With a crack, the house-elf disappeared. “How was I to know she hadn’t stolen it?” she said scornfully. “You’re lucky someone didn’t snatch it off her before I did.”
“Nott,” said Draco, slowly, “where’s your father?”
Theo paused. “With the Minister,” he said. “Like always. Why?”
“I’m wondering how he plans to get the muggles down.”
Theo shrugged. “The aurors will deal with that bit, I expect. Really, most of the Ministry is working on crowd control. It’s no picnic, evacuating a hundred thousand people—”
“I should think,” said Draco, hearing his own voice as if through water, “that a demonstration of that size, considering the number of muggles in the nearby area, and the likelihood that other muggles were disturbed when those four were taken—”
“Yes, yes, we’ll do all the cleanup later. I’m sure there’s a whole department for these things, somewhere, buried under a sub-division of the Bureau of Something-Or-Other. Say, your pal Weasley might even get to be involved—”
“So does the Minister have any plan,” he said, and his voice sounded very loud, now, curious that, “to address the muggles being tortured in the fucking sky?”
Theo jerked.
“I don’t know,” he said. It was the first time he’d sounded honest, and perhaps not coincidentally, the first time he’d sounded afraid.
Draco didn’t think about Hermione. He didn’t. Didn’t, didn’t, didn’t. Say it often enough, and a word became a kind of spell. He repeated it, a litany against imagination, and it kept him fastened to the ground.
“I have to go,” he said, because his litany was starting not to work. “If you want to come, do. I’m going to search the woods—”
There was a searing light, like the sun had broached the midnight clouds. Something shimmery climbed from the treetops, snaking through the air like something living. It radiated the ethereal chemical glow of the Aurora Borealis, only green, cold green, antifreeze green, the green of death and unforgivable things. And the world beneath it was green, too, cast in its light like actors under a floodlight, locked in the heartstopping temporal freeze of a lifted curtain, staring at the skull and serpent twining sensually against each other in the sky.
“They put up the Herald,” said Theo.
He rubbed his hand across his mouth like there was a stain. “But why? It doesn’t — there’s no one to summon, it wouldn’t— forget it. There’s no time. Come on.”
He threw out his hands. Pansy took one unquestioningly. Draco hesitated.
Theo shook it at him.
“Malfoy. Hurry. Grapple with your masculinity later—”
“I’m not going with you. I have to find the Weasleys.”
“Great! Good! Wonderful! Let’s start by getting out of — bugger all. I don’t have time for this.” He grabbed Draco’s wrist and turned on his heel.
With a crack, the world flattened into a two-dimensional plane, and he felt himself inside it, squeezed along places that his three-dimensional body assuredly and vocally did not want to be: and then, just when the pressure reached an unbearable peak, he shot back into the third, as if the second had misliked him and popped him out.
He stumbled away from Theo, gasping. They had Apparated.
He’d done that before, but only ever with his mother and Snape, and this was the first time he had realized it was possible to be bad at it.
They were standing on a hill over the campgrounds, far from the smoke and the tents. They had crossed the wood, and now had at least an acre of trees between themselves and the Dark Mark, or the riots; Theo had put them on a grassy knoll with a cairn at the top.
“My hair!” Pansy was fumbling at her head in horror. The little that Draco could see of it through her fingers offered very good reason for rage. “You twat! You splinched it!”
“What? Oh,” said Theo faintly. “Dreadfully sorry.”
He knelt in the dirt with his hand on his wrist, clamping it, breathing in and out through his teeth. Florets of red spotted the gauze on his arm, first a mere sprinkling, and then harder, faster, like snowfall.
“Nott,” said Draco in amazement. “You splinched yourself.”
“Is that what happened?” Theo’s voice cracked, a dreadfully pubescent sound. He was fumbling for something in his pockets. “You mean to tell me this doesn’t happen every time you Apparate?”
Pansy flew to his side, her hair forgotten, which was saying something, considering what it looked like. “Teddy! Oh, God, don’t move, don’t move.”
“Dial back the volume. It’s a paper cut with pretensions. Not that I don’t appreciate the hysterics — trust me, when I die, I’ll expect you to go full Niobe, but if you do it now it won’t feel special.”
“It is a truly hilarious cosmic joke that you think you’re a good liar,” she said. “I think of it and giggle when I’m blue. How bad is it? Apply pressure. Lift it up.”
“Look who’s a healer, all of a sudden,” he said through his teeth. “Shove off, I’m fine. It was worse before.”
“You did this before?”
“Where did you learn to Apparate?” Draco was stunned. “It’s seventh year magic.”
“Not really,” said Theo, with savage confidence that was undercut by obvious pain. “They teach it in sixth year at Durmstrang, and I’ve always been a dab hand at Charms. Anyway, it’s not that tough. It’s side-along that gets… tricky.”
“Yes! Wow! Maybe that’s the reason that you can’t do side-along before you’re twenty-five! Because of idiots who try to take two people when you can barely get all of you where you want to be!” Pansy had wrapped her handkerchief around his elbow and was tying it tight enough to compress the muscle, puffing out a small ring of purpling skin.
“In my defense, one of them was very small,” he said. “Ow. Ow.”
“Don’t be a wuss. Draco, do you have any healing charms? All I know is Episkey, and it’s not worth a wet toot for something like this.”
“It’s outside my wheelhouse,” he said, wishing that Hermione were here. Then he had to quickly slam the shutters on his own brain.
“Blood-Replenishing Potion? What about you, Teddy?”
“Sure, Pans, but I left it in my other trousers—”
“Okay. Shit. Okay. Fine.” She drummed her nails on her mouth anxiously; then, with a guttural, furious sound, she tore her hand away and wrenched up her sleeve.
“No,” said Theo sharply. “Stop it.”
Draco didn’t realize what she was doing, and then he wished he hadn’t.
Pansy sank her teeth into her wrist, bringing shallow wells of dark blood bubbling up around her teeth. When rivulets began running down her arm, she jerked her head free and spat a gobbet of red foam into the grass.
“Pans! No! Listen to me, you fool of a girl—”
“If you think I won’t knock you out and do this while you’re unconscious, Teddy—”
“What the hell are you doing?” said Draco, feeling ill.
Pansy wet her finger in blood — his gorge rose — and, tremblingly, drew a clumsy, ill-defined symbol on Theo’s wrist.
“The hell does it look like?” she said tightly. Her jaw was tight with pain. “It’s a rune.”
“Forget Apparition — where did you learn blood runes?”
“Not runes. Rune, singular,” she said grimly, sealing up her wrist and then sweeping her wand over the symbol. “Episkey.”
It blazed brilliant white, like a star, and then faded into rusty brown. The spots on Theo’s bandages stopped growing, and then started to shrink, leaving only ruddy brown stains where the wound had been. He swore violently and wrenched his hand out of her grasp, but the damage was done. His hand was whole, and his fingers flushed with a healthy glow, like they’d never been hurt in the first place.
“I — I didn’t know there were blood runes for healing,” he said numbly.
“There aren’t,” she snapped. It had taken a lot out of her: she was pale and shaky, and she lilted to the ground, on unsteady footing. Theo caught her and lowered her, snarling something inaudible into her ear; but he already looked better, stronger, as if she had infused him with whatever vitality she’d bled out from her wrist. “There is — ah — t-there is one for p-p- power, however, and I happen to know it, because I was the only twelve-year-old in h-h-history… to muster a f-f-full-force — Petrification Curse.”
There was an awful beat.
“Yaxley?”
“No, Filius Flitwick. Yes, Yaxley. And please, don’t bother reading me the Riot Act about Dark magic, because I’m going to hell anyway; it’s the only way I’ll get to have it out with him.”
“I wasn’t going to,” he said, which was true. The fact that blood magic was Dark had been only the fourth or fifth thing on his mind.
“First off, you’re not going to hell,” said Theo, with a horrible, uncharacteristic gentleness. He chucked her under the chin and stood up. “Second off: leave some fun for the rest of us.”
A glistening apparition came galloping out of the woods. He recognized the silver sheen of a patronus, bounding over the hill at top speed. As it approached, he identified the shape of an ermine.
It skittered up to his feet, cocked its head, and spoke in the haggard voice of Arthur Weasley.
“Find Draco. Tell him to meet at the Portkey,” it said. Then it dissipated into mist.
“That’s my cue,” said Theo. He clenched and unclenched his freshly healed hand, like it was resisting him. He turned to Draco. “Find Arthur Weasley,” he said. “He’ll keep you safe, for a given definition of safe, and a given definition of keep, neither of which I endorse personally, but then, my standards are usually higher than other people’s.”
He turned on his heel and went crack.
“Teddy!” Pansy staggered up. “He’s going to splinch himself again,” she said angrily. “He’s lucky he didn’t die. Two in side-along! I can’t decide if he’s arrogant or suicidal!”
“A strong argument to be made for both.”
She made a cross between a grunt and a scream. She fluffed at her shorn hair, helplessly, and then turned to him.
“You’re not hurt, are you?” she said, sort of despairingly, as if she really didn’t want to know the answer.
“No,” he said, though he didn’t feel too great about his toenails, to tell the truth. “I don’t think so.”
“Thank Merlin and Morgana,” she said. “No offense, but I don’t have another rune in me for you.”
“None taken,” he said, his stomach turning queasily. “Parkinson — how often do you—”
“What, rip open my own wrists?” She used Episkey to heal up the shallow bite on her wrist, but it was a mediocre Episkey, and it left a ring of crescent marks on the flesh. “Only on wrong Thursdays, you know — what the hell are you talking about? Does this look fun to you?”
“Yes, but I mean— at school— have you ever—?”
She burst into hysterical laughter. “Draco Malfoy,” she said, “are you asking me if I use blood magic to cheat on exams?”
“No, you ninny.”
“As if I care that much about my grade in sodding Charms? I’m not Granger. Now, she might.”
The thought of Hermione locked several muscles in his gut.
“We have to leave.”
She studied him for a moment and sighed. “Oh, piss,” she said. “Fine. Let’s go shelter with the blood traitors. I can’t very well go back home with my hair looking like this, anyway. ”
At the top of the Portkey hill, a huddle of people in nightclothes clustered under a Lumos-light, and when he was close enough to see the color of their hair he broke into a run.
Hermione saw him first. She gave a shout and tripped away from a tight three-way huddle with Harry and Ron, floundering down the hill. Her hair was tied in a silk kerchief and the hems of her pajamas muddied near black. Uninjured, however: apart from a long scratch on her cheek, she wasn’t hurt, and she was running like she could have done a neat half-marathon at daybreak. He could have cheered.
She tripped on a rabbit hole — she never did have the coordination God gave a fawn — and slammed into him like a Body-Bind. He hiked her up off the ground and sort of — this was embarrassing — wrapped them together, an arm around her waist and one hand spanning her narrow shoulderblades, and put his face in her neck and breathed, and breathed, and breathed.
She smelled like smoke and sweat and muggle soap. Probably there were other people trying to get his attention, but he didn’t actually care if there was another Mark going up over their heads. It would keep.
Hermione was yelling at him. It was a perfect moment.
“…woke up to find you GONE, no word, no note, the whole camp screaming on fire, you could have been KIDNAPPED—”
“Mmhm.”
“—or DEAD, for all I knew, trampled or trapped somewhere burning or caught by a stray curse, and we’d never find your body under the wreck, we’d wait here all night and never know it — Draco Malfoy, I could SKIN you—”
It was surprisingly gratifying that she’d worried about him; he’d been so caught up in worrying about everyone else dying that he’d had relatively little time to consider the non-zero risk of doing so himself. Alarming.
“I didn’t mean to leave. I was caught outside.”
“I know that NOW! And there were muggles, and they — I—” She broke off and shuddered with her whole body. She was so small. That was concerning. She hadn’t been so small last year, had she? He could hold her up without any effort at all.
“The muggles,” he said. But that was all. He had nothing to say. Nothing would make it better. Words couldn’t help it. It was a black pit of a thing, where sympathy and compassion and all the encouragement in the world would fly in and dissolve at the corrosive touch of the truth.
She gave a push on his shoulder, and he lowered her down. “You shoes,” he said suddenly, for she was still wearing her bed slippers, now shredded from running.
“What? Oh. They’re fine,” she said dismissively. “My feet are numb, anyway.”
Pansy cleared her throat. Hermione stiffened.
“Hello,” said Pansy. “Ciao, Granger. Glad you’re not dead, it’d be a pain to wipe Malfoy’s brains off my jumper. I’ll just be going, then, shall I?”
“What, by yourself?” said Hermione. “No, no. You have to stay with us.”
“Like any bad party, I appreciate being invited,” said Pansy, her lip curling, “but I’ll make do with a calling card. My father’s out there, and he’s worried sick.”
“Draco! Hermione!”
Harry and Ron hurried down the hill. They were quickly surpassed by the bounding strides of Arthur Weasley, who swept down in a midnight blue drawing-gown and a knit cap.
“Merlin’s blood! Thank God! Draco! You’re alright? Not hurt?”
“No, sir, thank you.”
“I’m so sorry we lost you, boy, it was pure chaos, when I saw you’d gone I was about to lose my mind — but I had to move the others, we couldn’t wait for you to come back—”
“I should say not,” said Draco, shocked. “That would’ve been— you shouldn’t have even thought—”
“Bill and Charlie are out looking for you,” breathed Mr. Weasley. “I’ll step away and call them back; pardon me for a moment.”
He was touched, and nigh astonished, that they had wasted time looking for him. Harry and Ron shuffled closer, and everyone languished in the sheer embarrassment of relief.
“We wanted to go,” said Ron, breaking the silence, “but he wouldn’t let us. I told him, listen, I can have this done in five: we’ll just listen for wherever the loudest complaining is coming from.”
“A good thought,” he admitted.
“Are you not a confounding variable?” said Pansy.
The four of them looked at her. She cringed.
“Don’t do that, it’s creepy,” she said. “Reminds me of phookas.”
“Where did you come from?” said Ron rudely.
“Your mum’s house. She keeps a Portkey in her bedside drawer,” said Pansy immediately.
Ron’s eyebrows climbed the white cliff of his forehead, with shades of impressment. There was a beat as everyone fumbled for the lost end of conversation, like a bunch of blindfolded snake hunters chasing an asp.
Hermione said, after a moment: “Pansy — please don’t take this the wrong way — but what did you do to your hair?”
The veneer of calm shattered.
“It wasn’t on purpose!” she screeched. “I was splinched!”
“Oh! Oh, alright, I’m sorry then—”
“You think I’d go around like this in public if I didn’t have to? You think I’d let the hairwitch escape alive if she did this to me? I’d be in Azkaban for murder in the worst degree!”
“Murder in the ‘first’ degree, Pansy.”
“Not the way I’d do it!”
“I think it looks sort of cool,” said Harry, whose own hair did not give him a lot of ethos on the subject. “It’s all shaggy and modern. You’re like Courtney Love.”
Pansy quieted, but remained suspicious. “Who’s that?”
“Er. She’s a musician.”
“…Is she pretty?”
Hermione scrunched up her nose and opened her mouth, and Harry stepped on her foot.
“Yeah, I reckon,” he said. “Everyone talks about her all the time.”
Mr. Weasley galloped back up the hill, dressing-gown a-flapping. “Bill’s coming,” he gasped. “Charlie’s on his way, got caught up helping some Bulgarians out of a bind — he’s going to swing by the Portkey office on his way, pick up something to get us home.”
“Oh, good,” said Pansy. “I’ll be on my way, then—”
“You’ll come with us, of course,” he interrupted her. “Also. I’m sorry. Who are you? I fear Ron’s got more friends every time I turn around.”
It was hard to say whether Pansy or Ron was more appalled.
“I’m Pansy Parkinson!”
“She’s not my friend, Dad!”
“Parkinson as in Prescott, who’s my father, if that doesn’t ring a bell—”
“Not even an acquaintance—”
“—thank the Lord for small mercies—”
“—a third year Slytherin, she’s like an evil baby.”
“Enough.” Arthur cut across both of them. “Pansy, you’ll come back to the Burrow with us. I’ll contact your father and tell him where you are.”
“I should say not!” She was indignant. “I only came because Draco made me.”
“I did what?”
If her wrist felt strained from twisting the knife in his back, she hid it admirably. “I’ll be perfectly fine waiting here myself,” she announced. “There’s no need to shepherd me back to whatever ‘the Burrow’ is. I’ll just wait here.”
Arthur shook his head. “The riot’s not over. It’s not safe. I’m sorry, dear, but that wasn’t an offer. Harry, will you make sure she gets a hand on the Portkey?”
Choosing Harry was a wise move: Ron was gaping at his father like he was speaking Troll, and even Hermione looked like she had doubts. Harry nodded, accepting this surely painful duty with good-naturedness.
“You’re kidnapping me?” said Pansy, not so much enraged as disbelieving.
“No,” said Mr. Weasley, with much more gentleness than Draco would have, if he were accused of the same by a thankless child with terrible fringe. “We’re getting you back to your parents, just as soon as we can find them. Now, all of you come along; there’s Charlie.”
The dragonkeeper had cracked into existence on top of the hill, holding an old tire. He was harried. “Got one,” he yelped. “Basil’s office is overrun, Dad! Everyone wants out of here! Had to call in two favors with a mate from Games and Sports, and then I got jumped on my way out!”
“Thanks, Chucky,” rasped Fred. He and George were bundled up with Percy under a blanket, shivering in their pajamas. “You’re a real mate. You nail any Death Eaters on the way?”
Mr. Weasley flashed him a razored look. Fred fell silent.
“Why don’t we table mention of — that,” said Mr. Weasley, “until we get home.”
“Sure. Yeah, Dad. Sorry.”
“It’s alright,” he said. His shoulders slumped. “It’s alright, boys. I’m sorry to snap. It’s been… a very long night.”
They crowded the tire. Draco got sandwiched between Pansy and Hermione, shoulder to shoulder in the packed circle of tired faces and outstretched hands, and under the limpid green light of the Dark Mark, everyone’s face was pale and wan. He caught Hermione staring at it as though it were a crack in the sky itself, and the whole thing was about to fall down on top of her.
In a thoughtless impulse, he grabbed her hand.
Words were useless, words were drivel and dead cauldronwater, but there was still something to express. She was warm against him like a tiny radiator, generating twice the heat something her size ought to, and in the dark ghoulish basement of his mind a war drum still hammered on like a broken clock. He held on because it was that or get sucked down into that mental cellar and see the first thing he’d thought of when he saw the muggles floated overhead, the worst thing he’d thought of in years, which was an image he would have to carve out of his skull with a scalpel, and a terrible two-word litany: Not her.
-pansy my beloved. one of the most fun characters to write. like if you took a pack of nitroglycerin and gave it two pigtails plus a snotty accent
-on the subject of 90’s celebrities that pansy may or may not look like, in my head, I always envision her as a young Christina Ricci, who you may remember as Wednesday from the original Addams Family movies. Something about that kid’s killer glare just gives me tremendous Pansy vibes, I love it.
-apologies for the lack of hermione, this chapter; the next chapter will have much, much more of her!
-as always, incredible love to the wonderful commenters. my reason for writing!
-next chapter goes up on Friday, as per usual! It’s called “Mad-Eye Moody.”
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