The man opened the door. It swung open, keening inward on its fire-torqued hinges, and he slipped inside, silent as smoke.
The grey light filtering through the bare windows barely illumined the hall, but the scorch marks stood out against the walls like a stop sign; emblazoned in more archaic and violent signs than the former occupants could understand.
He knew it though, knew intimately the calligraphy of violence, the media of light and blood and fire that engraved itself into a place. Knew with an artist's knowing the way the wand and will had flourished into the scarlet blossoming below the muggle's bullneck. He waltzed into living room, conscious only of the cold, the light, the heft and fall of his cloak, of everything but the horror. And so he moved to the mantel, fingertips forward to tilt a broken portrait as delicately as they might turn a rose.
The same characters in every frame. The horse-faced housewife, the bullnecked man, the girl-the girl, who didn't appear until she was six, maybe, the girl with the heavy lidded eyes and coarse black curls, with the eyes, her eyes. Here, at six, at eleven, when she should have been-here, at fourteen, at sixteen, with her mother, dressed in scarlet and smiling.
He turned to not shudder, to not lose his senses, to see and seek only with his skin. But it was no use, as it always been with her, and the horror broke him from his reverie, broke him into himself and out of the perfection of death.
He ran, ran up the stairs, never minding how his footfalls echoed on the stairs, never minding the holes in the walls or the broken banister. He ran into the room, where Petunia's corpse sprawled shattered as an abstract on the lintel, and where the person she had hopelessly guarded was not.
The girl.
The window was open, but had been blasted from the exterior. The wall was bloodless in the silhouette of a body, elsewhere, it had been sprayed red.
He stopped, as his heart stopped, and shrunk within him, and looked frantically about himself for hope.
Picture frames on the walls, carved with rudimentary runes. The strange tension at the door, taut as a snapped piano spring. He did not need to lift the molding to know the girl had painted her blood below the wood, or test the wards to know the Death Eaters had broken them.
The dried flower bunches on the walls, full of holly and rowan branches along with the graduation roses and lover's trifles. Warding woods. A rock collection positioned strategically through the room. Amulets, foci. Even the embroidered curtains, the small silk tassels at the corner of her garments, hinted at the same. This was the house of a witch among muggles, every seemingly mundane object turned to purpose.
He sat down on the blood-speckled bed, suddenly weak with the unexpected loss. He had expected James' son, a son he now knew never existed. He hadn't expected her daughter.
The rising sun shone through the sheer curtains, and resumed a cursory inspection. The broken aquarium was empty. The green snake lay belly-up with a smashed skull some distance from the bed. The closet was filled with charred clothing, the dresser broken. He saw the glint of silver amongst the gore and pulled it free of the slick white bone that had been Petunia's scapula, and held it.
A simple chain, and a bit of peridot. He held it like a heartbeat, and knew it was hers. Terrified and desperate and hers.
"Hold on, Heather Dursley," he said softly to the dawn, palming the necklace into an inside pocket. "I'm here. I'm coming."
"I was under the impression she was dead."
The Headmaster appeared older than his years. "You'll recall the incident with Charlie Weasley being slipped that diary horcrux some years ago?"
"Difficult to forget, given the difficulties involved in cleaning a 4000 pound basilisk corpse out of the sewer pipes after the aurors demolished half my dungeons in killing it," Severus pointed out mildly.
"Well, yes. Minerva, Horace, and I occupied ourselves for some years after in destroyed the horcruxes."
"I'm amazed you engaged Horace in such an endeavor-I was under the opinion my old teacher preferred to remain undisturbed-Horcruxes?"
"Five, Severus. Five. I thought we'd had them all, I was certain of it. So when the Dursleys demanded that their daughter not attend Hogwarts, and Heather herself was so adamantly against it-well, I thought it would be more harm than good pressuring her. So many of Voldemort's former followers were still abroad, and all of them were looking for a boy. The safest place I could think of was the muggle world, within the blood wards."
"Alone, and uneducated," Severus confirmed distastefully.
"With her family, educated to the highest standards of Muggle education, and by all accounts, controlling her magic far better than the majority of untrained muggleborns manage. Arabella Figg can't even cross the sidewalk if she's feeling peevy towards Petunia."
"Arabella Figg is a squib!" Severus snarled. "Professor, it might have been enough to repel muggles, but with the Dark Lord searching for her-" he arose and turned to the window, nails clenching slender crescents into the soft pine of the frame. Head bowed in fury, the tendons of his neck taut with grief, and the old man, mute as an oracle.
It was a long time before he controlled his breath, and turned back, suddenly exhausted, to the Headmaster.
"I will find her," he spoke, dead. The words fell like stones, ponderous with fate, and the Headmaster heard them as a soothsayer, heard a thousand voices suddenly silenced at their speaking. And yet, he said nothing.
Because the old man had said much the same thing, once, in swearing vengeance against an old lover who had killed his sister.
I will find you. I will sacrifice my dignity and my self-respect and my integrity, forswear all other commitments, will become what I abhor for your sake. For you, Lily's daughter, I will kiss the hem of the one who murdered your mother, will kill and torture the innocent, will consort with those who repulse me. For you-for you, I will gain Voldemort's trust in torturing half the Order if I have to, and keep it by killing the rest.
For you, I will become the monster I might have become, except for your mother. Only for you.
"I will not see you again, Headmaster."
"No," the old man said mildly. "You will see me very often, since you will be spying on me."
Severus regarded him, unsettled, undecided.
"I trust you," the Headmaster said gently.
Had Severus been younger, and prone to dramatic outbursts, he might have raised Fiendfyre out of the grate to claw and coil around the older man's robes; to hiss and cackle about the phoenix's perch and leave spiral tracks of fire and charcoal against the walls, like an animate form of Van Gogh's 'Starry Night'. He might have called demons out of the wood of the desk, or menaced the old man with legilimanced nightmares, to remind him what he was.
At this age though, he knew that the headmaster needed no display more than his restraint to recognize him. Even now, the Professor regarded him with equal parts respect and disappointment. It was the almost professional attitude of a white wizard towards an adept of the dark arts-a kinship divided by trivial commitments to lesser beings.
The dark wizard bowed his head to his old master, out of respect, and left the room. In his pocket, the sumac wand had already begun to burn with anticipation.
The girl sprawled across the bed. Voldemort glanced in through the door crack, and dismissively shut the door.
The girl plied her needle with a dexterity Narcissa had seldom seen outside old women's circles, raising silver runes along the hem of her velvet skirts. She felt them jab, sharp as needlepoints, at the edge of her third eye, and her whole body fought not to close under the pressure.
Which was the intention.
She could only guess at the traps the room held, the wards the girl had chipped into the wood with her bleeding nails, the spell-knots tangled in the hairbrush, the innocuous arrangement of the furniture. Every day the house-elves swept out the debris of her spellwork, and every day, another ward awoke.
None of them were particularly powerful. The makeshift supplies were poor foci, easily destroyed by the magic bound up in them. In the course of time, they'd disintegrate naturally, burnt out by energies they were not made to hold. Any classically trained wizard would never have set those wards in anything less permanent than stone or silver. It was like building a bomb.
Narcissa blinked.
"A lovely dress, and befitting of your station," she commented neutrally.
Heather turned a knot that made Narcissa's eyes water to see it. The girl's own eyes were spotted with petechiae-from close concentration? Or was she not immune to her own work?
"Better than running around starkers," the girl murmured.
"You'll be like that sooner than later if you continue embroidering those runes into that cloth," Narcissa cautioned. "Runes are meant for stone, or metal."
Heather didn't raise her head. "Provide me with those then."
The woman sighed internally with exasperation. "If we were sure we could trust you with them, we could, but you haven't been exactly receptive to any of the Dark Lord's servants."
The girl ignored her.
Okay, Narcissa mused, at least she's intelligent enough to recognize that we're unsympathetic to her fondness for those Muggles that raised her. None of the usual bravado we get from younger captives. She decided to be frank.
"Heather," she began gently, "no one's decided on your position yet here. If you showed more cooperation, or showed more interest in the welfare of our people, you could very comfortable."
"I'm not fighting."
More's the pity. That's the only thing men place any value on nowadays.
"No one said anything about fighting. Learn how to use a wand properly. Learn about the culture and history of your people. Try to be a witch, instead of dismissing your heritage altogether."
Now Heather glanced up, and while her expression was noncommittal, the look in the girl's eyes hinted at something that turned her stomach.
"My heritage," Heather commented mildly, "is that of the Potter family, formerly known as the Peverells, who have been all but destroyed by your Dark Lord and the previous wars of this century. My other relations have been killed by their association with your world." She sat back in the chair, sewing forgotten. "I want nothing to do with witchcraft."
"Not even to avenge your family?" Narcissa enquired.
"If the Dark Lord is half as powerful as the Death Eaters who came to my house, I would not be so foolish as to fight against him. And if his enemies are even a fraction as powerful as he, I would not be so foolish as to fight for him." Her eyes pierced Narcissa's as the runes had. "I want to live."
"Sometimes," Narcissa warned, "living necessitates fighting."
The girl's lips compressed into a thin hard line, a look which, like her embroidery, seemed more appropriate to Narcissa's mother than this teenager. Narcissa hefted a bag from beside her chair, forgotten during their badinage.
"Read these," she told the girl. "Memorize every single spell and the wandwork. When I return, you will practice."
Her eyes narrowed. "You trust me."
It's not a test, girl, nor can you exploit this. "No."
At an impasse for this line of query, the girl opened a book, which Narcissa took to be simple acceptance. The older witch passed out the door, the runes still glaring into her shoulderblades as she left.