A/N : Hello! So I've returned to the world of fanfiction after a very long time away, and of course immediately sprinted straight for some good old Harry/Draco. Found a few good stories but a lot of... questionable characterisation -_O so I decided to write one of my own, to see if a) I could and b) if I could take the characters in a believable direction. So yes, this story WILL BE Harry/Draco, so if you're not about that life, maybe find your kicks elsewhere. Other than that, I apologise that there is no Draco in the first chapter, what with setting up the story and that.

Follows canon up until Dumbledore's death. Oh, and I apologise if I make any errors with the Harry Potter mythos, and please feel free to correct me, it's been bare time since I've read the books.

Autumn is for dying

Chapter 1

The empty halls belied no mystery, no air of brilliance nor any hidden secrets. Not any more. Empty picture frames hung like question marks, doors half opened onto empty classrooms and candles long burned out sat like misshapen, dripping monoliths. Moving staircases stood frozen, most connected up but some jutting out and ending in nothing but a hundred feet of dust and darkeness.

It was at the top of one of these that Harry Potter stood. The toes of his boots peeked millimeters out over the precipice. He was around the tenth story of the building, eleventh maybe. He'd lost count as he climbed. His hand brushed the cold stone of the bannister next to him. A touch was enough to drown out the vertigo that was threatening to bring tears to his eyes. He lowered himself slowly down, sitting on the edge of the top step and dangling his legs into the void.

"Harry?" Her voice was far away, quiet and echoing, but distance couldn't disguise the worry in her tone. If he glanced to one side, he could see the tiny body, hundreds of metres beneath him, slowly taking the steps one by one. "Harry?"

"I'm here Hermione." He answered. He watched her head snap up to follow his voice.

"...Get away from the edge!" He caught her shrill yell, watched her hand fly up to clutch the front of her jumper. Harry smiled, affection blossoming in his chest. Hermione's mothering was a comforting balm to him, a familiar token that had only developed more as they found themselves in more and more dangerous situations year upon year.

"Where's Ron?" He called. She shrugged in answer.

"Here." An unexpected voice behind Harry startled him, and as he whipped around, he lost his balance on the precipice. Fortunately, Ron's quick lunge was enough to yank Harry back before the Boy Who Lived became the Pancake Who Died. Heart thudding, he used both his friend and the banister to pull himself up.

"Jesus Christ, Ron." He muttered.

"Sorry!" Ron replied sheepishly. "Did you find anything?"

Taking a steadying breath, Harry shook his head. "No." Not that he'd ever thought there'd be something to find in this sad, empty shell of a building.

Coming back here was like reopening a wound that had just begun to heal. It had been four years since Dumbledore had fallen from the tower, four years since Hogwarts had closed its doors to students for the final time. Four years since a lot of children found themselved having to become adults rather quickly.

The world had become a colder place. Colder and less saturated with colour, less filled with life and happiness. Quieter.

In the beginnning the disappearances were small, secret and only discovered in the aftermath. Mothers vanishing after tucking their children into bed. Children never returning home after a day of playing. Fathers leaving for work and never arriving. Bodies were never found. The ministry did what it could, in the beginning, to downplay and deny, but once whole families started vanishing without a trace, certain acknowledgements had to be made.

Investigations were initiated into the disappearances. But what became apparent to anybody who cared was the simple fact of what linked the victims. Their blood heritage.

Half-blood families. Voldemort had begun his siege upon the world in the simplest and most effective way he could. Striking at the hearts of communities unpredictably, but at the same time horribly reminiscent of his first attack upon the world, before a certain baby clipped his wings.

It wasnt until the summer following the school closure that war was officially declared. By then, Harry had already moved into Grimmauld Place, no longer assured of the safety of his blood relatives without Dumbledore there to guarantee it.

Hermione followed shortly after, having sent her parents somewhere warm and as safe as the world could get. The Weasleys remained in the Burrow, having extended Harry an open invitation to their hearth.

Harry thanked them with a smile and nod, but secretly would rather have died himself than bring the danger of his presence to their doorstep.

Grimmauld place became home. An old, gross, smelly and cursed home, but more of a home than Privet Drive ever had been. Lupin often visited, indeed, with Harry's unspoken but express permission, he'd claimed a large room on the third floor as his own, and stayed whenever he was in the area.

Other than that the house still played base to the Order of the Phoenix, and a day rarely went by without a heavy booted wizard or witch breezing through the house, shouting for help or planning a meeting or even just looking for a place to rest for a minute before venturing back out into battle.

Harry had been under a strictly enforced house arrest until his 18th birthday, at which time whether his guardians wanted to or not, they couldn't stop him from venturing out into the world. And so he did, and for three years he and his two loyal companions had searched the globe for horcruxes.

"Hermione wanted to check the dungeons together." Ron said as they turned to walk back down the staircase together. Harry nodded, glancing at his friend. Ron had grown taller and broader in last few years, as had he. They were now physically the adult men that they'd been forced to mentally become over the years. The three of them had spent much of the previous year in South America, chasing what turned out to be a futile lead on a horcrux, and they all still bore the deep tans the weather had forced upon them.

Ron, unfortunately, also gained a nice new scar running from his chin up to his temple, thanks to a nasty little pitched battle against a group of Death Eaters that had caught up with them in Peru. They'd won the battle, mainly thanks to a series of preemtive curses Hermione had rigged the area with, but Ron would carry the evidence with him forever.

They walked in companionable silence together, down, down and further down. Harry hitched his backpack up, trying to stop it bouncing uncomfortably on his back. It held all his travel posessions, it had travelled with him across the world. Hermione and Ron carried similar packs, each charmed to be almost weightless.

It took a while for the pair of them to make their way back down to where Hermione waited, sitting on a wall and playing with her wand between her fingers.

"I think someone must have been into the rooms on these lower floors." She greeted them, hopping lightly to her feet. "They look ransacked."

"I thought you said the anti-muggle charms were still holding?" Ron frowned. Hermione fell into step with the pair of them, tugging her coat back down from where it'd rucked up.

"They have. Must have been a wizard." Death Eater? Unlikely. Looting was strangely not a part of their M.O. The roving gangs of dark wizards held with almost Viking-esque behaviour; murder and rape, burn and devastate - but not pillage. They probably thought themselves above the posessions of a half blood family.

They reached the stairway leading to the castle dungeons. How many times had they dejectedly trodden this very path en route to a Potions class? Harry looked down into the dark. Hogwarts truly had lost its charm. A draught whistled slightly, sending a chill down his spine.

Behind them, they'd left the main doors open. There'd been no reason to shut them, if the three of them could get in, so could anybody else, regardless of whether or not the doors were barred. The grey light came in with the wind, it would be getting dark soon.

"Well?" Ron mumbled, gently pushing past Harry and taking a step forward. He glanced back over his shoulder, tossing his head slightly to get his hair from his eyes. He grinned, winking at Hermione. "Let's break into Slytherin common rooms." Hermione snorted and the spell the dark had over them was broken.

They descended into the shadow.

It was unpleasant to find that time and desolation had not robbed the corridors beneath the castle of any of its slime. If anything, the floors were more treacherous and the walls greener.

"How could anybody live down here?" Ron asked, revolted. Harry watched as he swiped a finger along the wall as he walked and revealed a slick of some sort of dark green algae. "Fucking gross."

"It wasn't this bad when Filch was still here." Hermione commented, pulling her wand out for light as they walked deeper. Soon, the faint glow from behind them faded to nothing and her Lumos was the only thing between the three of them and the black.

"Snape's room." Hermione whispered as they passed a large black door on their left. Like the rooms on the floors above, the door was cracked open and as they walked, they could see overturned tables and potion spills, still slick and shiny on the floor.

"Only good thing that came from this place closing, that." Ron muttered darkly. "No more bloody potions."

After the fall of Dumbledore, Snape had vanished entirely. He'd been searched for by both the Order and the Ministry, but his absence remained a mystery. Harry supposed he'd returned to Voldemort, bathing in the good graces of his master after his victory over the headteacher.

They checked other rooms as they passed, but found only more of the same; dark, damp rooms, devoid of all life besides the green mould reclaiming each surface.

Eventually they reached the Slytherin portrait. Like every other painting, the subject had long since moved on.

"How are we going to get in?" Hermione whispered. It felt wrong to speak loud in the suffocating quiet, each sound echoing and booming. Ron pushed on the painting, then hooked his long fingers beneath the rim and tried pulling. Failing to move it, he shrugged and stepped back, folding his arms.

Harry moved forward and ran a hand on the bumpy surface of the painting. It was perhaps the only clean surface they'd come across in the dungeons, charmed to be resistant to dirt for all time. The once gilded frame had not been given the same treatment, however, and was brassy and tarnished where it wasnt slime coated.

"Stand back." Hermione commanded in a mutter, pulling on Harry's sleeve. Harry remembered when she was taller than both him and Ron, a bossy head held high and proud. Now, her head was still proud and high, but reached no higher than his shoulder. She'd pulled her hair tightly up into a bun on top of her head, dark hair slicked into place with some gel. Years of running and fighting had taught them all the best ways of dressing to avoid accidents, and Hermione's hair had enough times been the victim of Death Eater hands grabbing and yanking that she now kept it tightly away whenever they were out.

They all dressed in dark colours. This wasnt by any way a means of camoflague, but the dark times they were in didnt feel like the times for bright, happy colours. Everywhere you looked in the world, you'd see the same at this point. Wizards once priding themselves in the swish of their long, maroon cloaks now favoured shorter, darker, more... well in Harry's opinion, more muggle fashions. Trousers, coats and boots. A world at war, and each person a soldier whether they chose it or not. It had been quite a few years since remaining neutral was an option.

Harry allowed her to pull him back and he stood shoulder to shoulder with Ron, drawing his own wand and zipping his coat up to his chin. There wasn't anything beyond the portrait door, he knew that, but they'd all learned the truth behind 'better safe than sorry'.

Hermione took a breath, then, flicking her wand in a deceptively casual fashion, blew the portrait inwards.

Dust filled the air and small bits of mortar flew towards the three of them, Harry and Ron now shielding their eyes.

"Hermione, what the hell?" Ron swore, grabbing the girl and pulling her to face him, eyes desperately scanning her for shrapnel injuries. She had none, and pulled herself out of his grasp.

"What?" She said defensively, avoiding his eyes. "It's a portrait lock, there's no way of breaking it if the painting has abandoned it."

"Well I sure hope nobody followed us this time, because if they did then I'm pretty sure they heard that giant explosion." Ron snapped. Hermione ignored him.

Harry let them argue. He'd long since learned his lesson about trying to mediate the two of them. If anything, his interference simply earned him the brunt of both of their ire. Instead, he slipped around Hermione, stood brushing down her coat, and awkwardly made his way over the shattered bricks and wood. Once inside, he cast a Lumos charm and threw it high, illuminating the whole room in a sickly pale, yellow glow.

"Oh, my god."

A stench that had, seconds before, been masked by the choking dust, hit Harry like the heat from an opened oven. He staggered back, retching.

"Shit..." He heard Ron gasp behind him. Hermione started crying. Leaning a hand against the algae encrusted wall to support himself, Harry threw up.

The yellow light showed the reds as blacks, and oh how much black there was. Scattered everywhere like broken dolls, mutilated and bloody, were the bodies of hundreds of house elves. Harry wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his coat and tried to stamp down his roiling stomach. He stepped away from his vomit and leaned back on the wall, breathing in through his mouth and surveying the spectacle ahead with blurry eyes. Hermione, sobbing, walked slowly back out of the room. Ron just stood, his face grey, eyes wide.

Harry couldn't take his eyes from the scene.

"There's dozens of them." Ron said hoarsley.

"Probably all of them." Harry answered, voice barely a whisper. "Murdered."

"Why?" Harry had no response. Apart from the corpses littering the room, the Slytherin common room was barely disturbed. Two long couches, probably green in the light of day but under the yellow light it was impossible to tell, were angled towards a cold and empty fireplace. Elegant, serpentine swirls of stone made up the mantle, the pristine white now splattered with fluids.

The same hollow, empty picture frames graced all of the walls, and up near the high celing, thin windows showed a night sky through dirty glass.

Two entrances on either side of the room led upwards with staircases; the bedrooms. Both were dark, the light charm only illuminating a few feet upwards.

"Should we..." Harry's voice caught in his throat as bile once again rose up. Swallowing hard, he resisted the urge to vomit. "Should we check the bedrooms?"

Ron broke his horrified gaze to look back at Harry. His face looked thin, thinner and older than it had before they'd set foot in this tomb.

"Is there any point?"

There was the crux of the matter. The reason why they'd returned to this empty, abandoned, cursed place. The search for horcruxes had led them, in a small town in Peru, to a clue.

It turned out that a young Tom Riddle had spent some time, nearly twenty years previously, looking for different ways to hide the pieces of his soul, other than the traditional placement in an object.

In South America he, and later Harry, had learned that it was possible to bind a fragment to another soul. Not just any soul, no, to the soul of one whose body was no longer a part of the earth. Through an elegant enchantment, the young Dark Lord had woven the fate of one of his horcruxes to the fate of a ghost.

Harry had questioned the usefulness of this, surely any living (technically) being could be reasoned with, and would Voldemort risk the ghost being found out and persuaded to take part in the destruction of the parasitic soul attached to it? Hermione had answered with a sigh and shrug.

"That's not how the enchantment works. It's not... stuck to the ghost's soul with glue, it cant be just removed. It becomes one with the ghost. It merges, becomes one." She looked into Harry's eyes, her own big brown eyes filled with a deep sadness. "The only way to destroy the horcrux is to destroy the soul of the ghost. Voldemort didn't just hide this fragment, he gave it the ultimate protection from destruction; a thinking, reasoning being that can..." She laughed without any humour, "That can walk through walls and vanish without trace."

In their searching, they'd been able to build up a rough timeline of when Voldemort had created each horcrux, although they were far from determining any locations, and so after learning this information, the three of them (mainly Hermione) managed to narrow down the time period of its creation to a time Voldemort was known to have been around Hogwarts.

"Makes sense." Harry had commented as the three of them stood in the kitchen of Grimmauld place, staring at a map of Hogwarts laid carefully on the big, wooden table. "He always thought of Hogwarts as his. That must include the ghosts as well."

And so, a careful plan and plenty of reconnaisanse later, they'd made the portkey trip to the grounds. It was a cold day, snow threatening to fall. A select few members of the Order knew of the mission, Remus and Bill Weasley among them, and were waiting outside the grounds, on high alert. They couldn't risk bringing more people into the castle for fear of rousing attention through numbers. If any Death Eaters had set any proximity alarms or sensor spells, it would be much easier for the three of them to quickly escape than a whole squad.

They'd been unsurprised to find the castle barren, empty of any spirits, but they had to check.

"If we don't check, why did we bother coming?" Harry breathed, looking across at Ron's face. Ron swore, glancing to one side and running a hand across his stubble as he was want to do when frustrated.

"Fine." He said shortly. "Leave Hermione outside, I'll check the girls. You do the boys'." Harry nodded, pushing back off the wall and walking slowly to the dark staircase at the other side of the room, trying to keep his eyes on the wall and off of the rotting bodies around his feet.

He turned as he reached the entrance, glancing back over his shoulder to his friend. Ron hadn't hesitated and was disappearing into the dark. With a breath, Harry did the same.

The staircase had a gradual turn to the left, like a traditional castle defense. He reached the first door and pushed it open, wishing to anything listening that it wouldn't reveal another massacre.

It didnt. Eight beds, still made and untouched, and a fireplace were all that greeted him. No ghosts, no bodies. Harry retreated and made his way onwards.

"Anything?" Ron asked as he entered the common room again, five minutes later. Harry shook his head. "Let's blow this joint then."

They left the bloody room without saying another word. What word could be said? Hermione was a little down the corridor, sat with her knees drawn up to her and her wand clutched tightly in one hand. She looked up at them as they walked towards her. Her face was pale beneath her tan, eyes red.

"Sorry." She said as they reached her, voice cracking. Ron extended a hand to her before Harry got the chance. She took it gratefully, allowing herself to be gently pulled up and into a hug.

Harry hung back slightly, out of earshot of the reassuring whispers Ron was muttering into her hair. He turned to one side awkwardly.

Huh. That was strange. From behind them, the direction they'd come in, a soft light illuminated the corner. That didn't make sense, they were many hundreds of metres and lots of turns away from the entrance, plus... plus the sun had set...

"Shit!" Harry hissed, spinning back to his friends. "Get back!" They jumped away from each other, both wands drawn and pointing up in a fraction of a second.

"Fuck." Ron swore, retreating with Hermione pushed behind his arm. Sadness forgotten, she swatted his hand away in irritation.

"Where?" Harry's head swung back to the common room. It was the only exit, the corridor an abrupt and cold, dark dead end a few feet behind them.

"There's no way out of the dormitories!" Ron spat after Hermione, who was already scrambling through the rubble.

Harry gestured sharply at Ron to follow her, and with a filthy look and curse, he did. Hesistating for a second longer, Harry watched as the steady light flickered, long hooded shadows about to turn the corner. Leaping and running, he sprinted into the Slytherin dormitories.

"Come on!" Ron hissed at him from the foot of the girls' staircase, Hermione already halfway up. Swerving around, Harry made the distance in seconds, barely a step behind Ron as they ascended.

"Here!" Hermione was stood, a slender black clad figure sillhoutted against an open doorway. She disappeared inside.

"How many of them?" Ron breathed as he and Harry shot up. Harry shook his head.

"No idea, didn't see. More than two." The shadows had betrayed that much.

"Harry, Ron!" Hermione had shut the door gently behind the pair of them and cast a wordless locking charm on it, leaving a oil-slick like sheen on the surface of the wood briefly before disappearing.

"And how the hell do we get out of here?" Ron agonized, pacing up and down the neatly made beds. Harry stood in place, bouncing up and down on his heels. Hermione faced the door for a second, taking a deep breath, before turning to face them, a steely look of determination on her face.

"The same way we got in."

It took Harry a moment before he realised what she meant. He beat Ron to the punch though, a glance at his confused, sweat and dirt smeared face revealed that much. He took a breath and sat down on the nearest bed.

"Hermione," He started. She turned to face him, hands on her hips. "Even if that works, how do you know where we'll end up? It could be the lake out there. We could drown!"

She shook her head quickly, "No, no I remember seeing the common room windows from outside, this tower ends up just to the left of the lake. You can see it from the Astronomy courtyard-"

"Wait..." Ron interrupted, catching up. "Are you suggesting-"

"That we blow a fucking hole in the wall." If they weren't in such a dangerous situation, if they werent standing a few minutes away from the murdered bodies of fifty house elves, Harry might have laughed.

Hermione scowled at his phrasing, then her face cleared and she shrugged.

"If you can think of another way out, please. By all means." She whispered, folding her arms. Silence answered her.

"Well..." Ron started, "They might not even find us, they might just assume we left?" As if in answer, a sudden banging sounded from beneath them. Harry stood up quickly, his heart suddenly in his throat. Muffled shouting sounded, and small pops, like someone was casting curses at thin air.

"What are they doing?" Hermione whispered, her eyes wide. She backed away from the door, only stopping when she collided with Ron, who put a hand on her shoulder.

Harry stood ahead of them, staring at the door.

"They're just..." He listened intently, trying to discern which spells they were throwing around. "It sounds like they're trying to stun..." Realization dawned. He turned to look at his pale faced friends.

"They think I'm under an invisibilty cloak... guys, they know it's us." Heavy footsteps joined the cacophony of noises. Someone was climbing the stairs.

"Shit, shit, shit." Ron resumed his panicked pacing. Hermione, breathing rapidly, raised her wand and pointed it steadily at the door. Harry looked between his friends. The only people he had left.

"This situation is not in our favour." He stated. Hermione looked at him. "We're backed into a corner. We can't win this fight." It was true. Although the trio had faced off against Death Eaters in pitched battle before and come off victorious, it must be admitted that the odds had always been stacked in their favour, with Hermione's ingenious traps or simply by having the larger number. They might be the brightest witch, the Boy-Who-Lived and the bravest ginger in the world, but they were still 21 year old school drop-outs.

"What do we do then?" Hermione breathed, eyes large and dark as she looked to Harry for answers.

Harry shrugged.

"Let's blow a fucking hole in the wall."

Hermione smiled despite herself, breathing heavily.

"Ron?" Harry looked to the other man, who had stilled and was staring at Hermione.

"Let's blow a fucking hole in the god damn wall."