Evlyn smiled to herself as she landed on the ground in a crouch, her feet hitting the dirt with a mild thud. I'm back, she thought to herself with a mild sense of contempt. She turned around and looked at the two of them, the knife that Blaine had given her tucked under the waistband of her skinny jeans. It was a peculiar appearance, that she should be so fond of muggle clothing. "Where to now?" she inquired coyly, a light smirk playing on the edges of her lips.

"To lock you up," Theo responded with an arched eyebrow. He motioned Blaine over. "And if you haven't already, I'd get your knife off her..." To this, Blaine cursed. Theo nodded, rolling his eyes. "Smooth, Malfoy."

Evlyn slid it out from her waistband, waving it back and forth. "You could just ask for it, sweetheart. A little bit of politeness goes a long way..." Her smile was devilish at this, a very faint hint of mania behind her eyes. Everything practically screamed that she was back to herself, and if she were to have to go out, she would enjoy nothing more than to go out fighting.

"Hand it over, then," Blaine replied coolly, walking forward with his hand out. In response, Evlyn scrunched her nose, a glimmer in her eye as she broke out in a grin.

"Nah, I don't think so," she replied, snapping the hilt into the palm of her hand as she took a more offensive stance. Blaine looked faintly aggravated, but not by much, moving forward to grab her arm and take the blade from the other...

But he was too slow.

In a fraction of a moment, Evlyn had the knife at his throat. "You should have killed me when you had the chance...," she breathed disdainfully, not without some measure of enjoyment.

"Would you really enjoy killing me?" he replied, stone cold and unaffected by his own blade at his throat. It put the girl off only slightly, his lack of panic. Then again, he too was raised in a house of dark wizards.

She guessed that came with the territory.

Evlyn scoffed, her eyes darkening. "You know that time in your life when you have to decide whether you care or you want to go insane? I chose insanity, and I'd rather enjoy the kind of crap most people squirm at. It's liberating, you know, never feeling confined by the risk of guilt or grief." She smiled over at Theo, who already had a throwing knife off the band of his jeans. "Did you know that it only takes two fingers to slit someone's throat?" she asked, her voice a pinnacle of false innocence.

Theo's eyes narrowed as he smirked, almost as disaffected as Blaine, except more vengeful. There was a layer under him that seemed to be bursting with anger. "Well, yeah," he scoffed in distaste. "I am a trained killer, after all."

"Then what exactly is it that you think you'll be able to do, darling?" she replied, her eyes flicking up to meet his for a moment. "By the time your knife reaches a vital organ of mine, your friend will be dead on the ground..." And maybe it was the seriousness of her voice, the look in her eye, or the past of all her actions that finally made Blaine clench his jaw and swallow.

"I can either let you kill him and get away with it, or kill you for it," Theo responded lightly, but there was a serrated edge to his tone. "Casualties happen."

"Theo!" Blaine shouted, his aggravation finally burning through. Evlyn smiled slightly at the scene she was making, feeling no shame in it at all.

"Fauve," Theo called over softly, a gleam to his eyes now that wasn't there before, "if I were to aim a knife at you, it wouldn't be a vital organ. If you do kill my friend, you're not going to be let off that easy... I don't have a lot of friends. I'd like to keep them at all costs, and if I can't, then I'll certainly make you pay."

Evlyn smiled over at him coyly, then letting her eyes wander once more to Blaine. "Who said anything about going through with killing anyone, anyway? I told him to ask politely, and he never did... Now, if he keeps this up...," she let her voice trail off, pressing the knife dangerously close to his jugular, moving her body even closer to his. Everything about her body language and voice was taunting them, as if she only thought of this as a game forged to amuse her.

"Is everything a game to you?" Blaine hissed through his teeth, keeping his body as still as possible. He was putting all his faith (which wasn't much) into trusting Theo into manipulating him out of this one, but Theo so far only seemed to be playing with fire. "People's lives? Do they really mean nothing to you?"

Evlyn laughed at the question in honest surprise. "Are you really asking me that?" she asked, an amused smirk spreading over her face. "Why," she began to croon, "do you really care about every living person overpopulating the Earth?"

"I think you should just ask her nicely, Malfoy...," Theo finally called from the other side of the hill. He sounded amused. Blaine grimaced.

He did not let the silence to go without a long, healthy pause.

"Please give it back to me, Evlyn," he finally breathed, his jaw clenching again. She pressed the hilt into the hand that wasn't on her other arm, pressing his fingers around it.

"There you are, sweetheart," she responded, and with that, she turned and walked away.

Theo jogged up to stand next to Blaine, a glint in his eye as he watched her walk away. "You alright?" he asked, eyeing the blood that was trickling down his neck. It wasn't much, merely a trickle, and the cut was shallow to begin with.

"Fine," he answered stiffly, wiping the blood away with his sleeve. "Her point, however, I don't understand at all."

Theo grinned, only the slightest hesitation suggesting he wanted the girl out of their hair as soon as possible. That wasn't to say he wasn't amused. "She wanted to prove she could kill you, Malfoy." Blaine shot him a look, only encouraging him to go further. "And from where I was standing, it definitely looked like she could."

Blaine's serious, unfaltering expression caused Theo's grin to fade if only slightly. His questioning expression finally led to Blaine continuing. "Listen, when you were gone the other night, she started telling me she's planning to stage a coup."

Against any prediction of Blaine's, Theo laughed. "She's planning on overthrowing the Dark Lord? God, I don't know which is worse... Good thing I don't live in the Wizarding World. Tough break, Malfoy..."

"This will affect you too."

Theo sighed. "I know. What do you want to do? Take her out now?" he replied, eyeing her back without an ounce of second thought.

"No." Blaine was also watching her, his words spoken with a measure of unease. She turned to look at the two, sensing the fact that they weren't following her, weren't even close behind. There was something beneath her calm, unaffected facade, a kind of betrayed anger.

Maybe something like hurt, but not quite. Something angrier, more dangerous.

"Don't even tell me you're getting soft, Malfoy."

"I'm not."

Blaine and Theo stood in an office, a formal place with people wearing dress robes and filing paperwork. In the center of the bold, broad room sat a handsome man with messy dark hair and looks somewhat like one Harry Potter's, except, where his father's eyes had been green, his were a dark doe brown. Theo was leaning against a filing cabinet, completely undeterred from doing so despite Malfoy's looks and the formality of everyone else around them. He feigned an interest in his nails (which were broken and somewhat dirty having spent the past couple weeks sleeping on the ground), giving the appearance that the only reason he was there was for the paycheck.

James Potter didn't like Blaine Malfoy too much- call it what you will, but he didn't regard them to be on any high standards, Gryffindor or not. Of course his opinion of Blaine was higher than that of his brother, but it also didn't change a few other details. The two young men who stood before him were hired out mercenaries for the Order. Of course this was never how it ran in the past, but the new head had certainly changed some things around. Maybe it was for the better, but that's all James would give it: Maybe.

At the very least, it cleared a few consciences and protected friends from unnecessary risks.

James leaned over and put two bags of galleons on his desk, his quill poised over a folder. It was stamped in red ink that shifted every few seconds between two boldfaced words.

CLASSIFIED

DON'T READ

James opened it up and motioned for the two to sit down. Blaine nodded politely whereas Theo just raised an eyebrow and stayed put. "Runner, do us all a favor and stop acting like a prick for five minutes," he snapped at the younger man, his patience waning if ever so slightly.

"You're going to make me stay longer, and I might have somewhere to be...," he let his voice trail off. Blaine snorted derisively and looked behind himself for a second. Theo finally sighed and took a seat with exaggerated movements, as though it were a great pain to him.

"Operative word there being 'might.' I think we all know that implies Theo over here has absolutely nowhere else to be and just takes a liking to being a thorn in all of our sides," chirped a voice from a female who had just entered, to which James smiled ruefully. His younger cousin, Rose Weasley had insisted upon joining up with the Order despite everyone's aversion to it. She was just out of Hogwarts at the time.

"You give me too much credit. I was just trying to be polite. Now, if I said I definitely had somewhere to be, you might feel rushed...," he replied with a sort of infuriating nonchalance. "Anyway, where's Robespierre?"

"Funny, Runner," James replied, having taken enough Muggle Studies to understand the reference. In fact, not even he himself had entire faith in the Head of the Order's sanity. "We just thought you would actually be interested in this debriefing since obviously, it's not exactly the usual. Then again, I don't know why we bother. Blaine is the only one who ever pays attention, and shockingly he's a Malfoy. No offense," he added with a quick glance to Blaine.

"None taken."

"Anyway, we found some files in her parents' house. I don't know if you know, but they went missing about a month ago, and they were recently discovered in their own house, their bodies mummified."

Theo laughed against all good grace at the unexpected detail and the somberness of his tone. "Oh, you were serious... Do go on."

James eyed him, then finally looked down at the printed sheet on top of the folder. "With it was a note that read, 'I don't want them to move, not even in death.'" Blaine exchanged a look with Theo, and then they both returned their gazes to James. "From what we can tell, she used acceleration spells to quicken the process. After going through their house, we found a mess of files, this one among them. It had her name on it, and the profile of her read 'Failed Experiment.'

"Their alliances, albeit unexpectedly, were paralleled with Nero's." A few flinches passed through the room, but James only rolled his eyes. The name wasn't even tabooed....yet. "They were trying to create an assassin of sorts for their side. This new Reign has been in the making for well over eighteen years, it seems. You can look at the file." He turned it around so the papers were facing them. "But I warn you, a lot of it is pretty disturbing.

"Her parents left her alone in the house to fend for herself when she was young- with the occasional visit from a hired nanny. That's how she ended up in muggle foster care; there had been rumors of a child living alone. See, that's a tricky system in itself. You can't let foster parents know of our world; it's not like birth or adoptive parents. You can tell them they've been accepted into boarding school, but some foster parents prefer to have the child close by, in the schools they might very well have grown up in. So that's why she was in and out of Hogwarts. She always caught up, and would occasionally go back to live with her parents. From all we knew, they were just traveling diplomats. Obviously, that's far from the case."

"But she wasn't a failed experiment," Blaine intoned apathetically, flipping through the papers as he scanned them, Theo's eyes trained on everything over his shoulder. "She killed in the worst ways for the League of Dark Wizardry."

"She never turned out to be loyal like they wanted her to be. She proved that with her parents, didn't she? She's not like an attack dog, so to speak. She was recorded time and time again as being disaffected and detached. She went in and out of muggle therapy, but she couldn't technically be considered what the psychiatrists or psychologists deemed her to be 'budding' as, because she was not yet eighteen. Antisocial Personality Disorder, psychopathy, sociopathy, all based on whichever their personal preference, but for as far as our interests are concerned- all basically the same thing."

"Did they really need a specialist for that?" Theo replied with a healthy measure of derision. Then he added on a second thought, "She's not a very good sociopath. Aren't they supposed to be suave and manipulative?"

"I have a feeling that she didn't even begin to scratch the surface of herself with you two. After all, you look unharmed." His eyes suddenly found Blaine's throat and barely concealed a smirk. ...Old habits. "Fairly."

I am afraid
Some dreadful purpose is forming in her mind. She is
A frightening woman; no one who makes an enemy
Of her will carry off an easy victory.
-Medea, Euripides

The moment that they had arrived at the Barracks (Evlyn had no other way to describe it, and she had no idea that this was what the Headquarters of the Order actually was, although she assumed it had been moved from the Black family manor) several guards had come forth to handcuff Evlyn with what looked like dark shadows. They wound their way up her arms and burned her skin, but left the surface unscathed. It was a deeper pain, like it was scarring from underneath. It burned with such intensity that she clenched her teeth rather than emitting the taunting words that had originally come to mind.

You could have just asked.

The pain was so distracting that she hardly could concentrate on walking, and was thus half dragged all the way to the main doorway and down into the dungeons where they kept all their prisoners. The most dangerous criminals were kept in the deepest tunnels, lit only by green torches on the walls. In this light her guards looked sallow with a hint of green tinge, like they had spent too much time on a ship at sea. The one, she noted, was missing an eye and did not take care to replace it with a synthetic magical one. Instead, there was only a shadowy pit on one side of his face.

He caught her looking amidst dragging her along and growled. Had Evlyn had any voice to speak, any dignity left to utilize, she would have contrived a snide rebuttal.

As it was, she had nothing and almost wanted to die from the humiliation. Almost.

Even more than that, she wanted to make them pay.

Finally, she was thrown into a cell, barred and tiny, the laces that had cuffed her hands winding back like a snake retracting from an attack. She was gasping from the sudden relinquishing of the pain, and she turned her body from her crouching position. "The two of you together couldn't handle a little girl?" she whispered with a tone, something dark and demonic, void of all amusement or even a flicker of good humor.

The two looked at each other and grinned, sick and twisted in their way, the skin on the one-eyed man's face crinkling up around his empty eye socket. They both pulled out their wands, and had Evlyn had any sense, she would have backed away. As it turned out, all she had was pride, and this was not a blessing given the current situation.

"How many people have ye killed, eh, girl?" the one said gruffly, the same twisted smirk still on his face. "Just common curiosity."

"Lost count."

"'ow about tortured then?" One-eyed asked, a tone belying his words that sent a wave of fury through Evlyn's nerves.

"Never bothered to start counting."

"Does it ever pull at yer conscience?"

"How about you? Do you feel bad for all the Phoenix Taxes? People starving in the streets while you live in luxury, turning their hard-earned coins into blood money? Do you know what happens to people who can't afford to pay the taxes? Oh, yes... You're probably the same people who drag them out of their houses kicking and screaming and crying. So, what floor do you keep them on? Am I going to have to listen to children crying when I try to sleep tonight, or will you all be kind enough to execute me before then?"

The two of them looked irate, like she had uttered the most profane insult, an utterly offensive set of words that were not only horrendous, but also completely untrue. Except they were true, and the state of denial was often the most easily infuriated. People would do anything to protect their own sanity.

"We don' go on killing sprees," the one said, his eyes darkening behind a shadow as he tilted his head. "And no, yer not going to be executed tonight."

"Oh no," she replied, an unamused smirk tainting her expression. "You just make them live as long as they can while rotting away in prison. I think I'm the more merciful one here."

"Hold yer tongue!" the one-eyed man roared, his wand tip pointed at her throat.

"The truth hurts, it seems," she replied with a small, bitter smile, her head cocked to one side.

"Crucio!" he shouted, and the end of his word was drowned out by her nearly instantaneous screams. When he lowered his wand, her gasping for breath merged with half-hysterical laughing, some fits of giggles coming with every breath.

"You don't quite have it in you to properly hold out a dark spell...," she intoned somberly, but a half-insane smile contradicted her words.

"I'm okay with that," he replied gruffly, and he left her cell and slammed the iron bars shut. They began walking away, and Evlyn pulled herself up and then sat against the stone wall, singsonging to herself between dark chuckles.

She would have her way.

"People should not be afraid of their governments;
governments should be afraid of their people."
-V for Vendetta

Even with having not grown up in the wizarding world and feeling no sentimental attachment to it as Blaine must have, Theo had heard of all the stories that surrounded the Potter name. How Lily and James Potter (the firsts, he supposed) had died to protect their son, Harry, and how Harry was protected by that charm as old as time. Then when Voldemort had turned his wand on Harry, the spell had ricocheted and hit himself.

But Voldemort too could not die, however, this had nothing to do with white magic, but dark. He had split his soul into seven pieces, and as long as they were not destroyed, he could not die. Theo's thoughts briefly flicked to his father and how much he just simply did not begin to grasp. All of this was deeply complicated; not all witches or wizards were heathens stirring malignant potions in the dead of the night.

Some were, but not all.

Then again, the young man also doubted whether it would have made much of a difference to his father had be known. After all, he left his wife for it. It was probably the only woman he had ever loved, or in the way that his father loved, anyway. He did not know how he had become a hunter, besides family tradition, or what happened down the road that sent the family into such a dark task, and he had always had enough sense not to ask. It wasn't something that he really wanted to know, because he knew what vehemence and zeal and blind faith in one soul purpose could do to people.

"So, Runner, will you fight with us?" James' words brought him back to the present, and to this he only looked the slightly older boy in the eye, finally shaking his head after a moment.

"Not to be rude here, but it's really not my problem," he replied coolly, reaching forward to take his bag of galleons from the desk. James' hand stopped him. Theo had no intention to looking to his left to see Blaine's expression. For some reason, he doubted the other was on the same page as him, and he would not sway and potentially put his life at risk free of charge for a cause he didn't believe in just because his friend supported it.

"In a minute, you can go. But do you even realize what is at stake here?"

"Sure I do. You're all fighting for power, and I'm staying out of it. Keep pressuring me, though, and maybe I'll join the other side," he added darkly.

"Theo," Blaine began, a note of irritation evident in his usually composed voice, "just hear him out. That's all."

Theo wheeled on Blaine, a spark to his eye. "Why? Last I checked, people were dragged from their houses because they were thought to be supporters of the Dark Lord, just because they can't pay the Phoenix Taxes. I wasn't born into this world, and I sure as hell don't give a damn what goes on with the lot of you. Just don't act like I'm out of line when you people aren't even any better than the side you're fighting."

"That's...We're doing the best we can. We can't trust anyone anymore; how are we to know who is who?" James countered with an edge to his tone, and Theo laughed mirthlessly.

"Probably the ones who are paying the taxes is my guess."

Two guards came forward to grab Theo, but he jumped backward, pulling a knife forth. Blaine sighed, reaching for the hilt of his sword. "We can either force you to come down to the dungeons, or you can come freely."

"That's not necessary!" James snapped, drawing his wand. "Stand down."

CRACK!

"Bloody hell," Rose muttered from across the room, her eyes wide with faint surprise.

Someone had apparated into the room, someone with long dark brown hair tied back behind his neck, wearing long dark blue robes, and whose wand was also drawn. "I ordered it, James. I, on the other hand, think it's highly necessary. He is, after all, a highly skilled mercenary who is also quite dangerous, and has just now proven to be aligned with the dark side. Take him down to the cells, gentlemen."

Theo rolled his eyes upward. "What did I say," he murmured beneath his breath. The man flicked his wand, and Theo's knife was sent flying to the other side of the room. With another flick, his belt vanished and appeared again a safe distance away.

James turned on the man, his eyes lighting up. "This isn't right," he replied, holding his wand, and when the man tried his trick again, James held fast. Diplomatic conversation wasn't going to get him far. "Expelliarmus!" he roared, and although the man was thrown backwards, he too held fast onto his wand. He jumped up in a moment, as though he felt no pain, and pointed his wand back at James.

"Crucio!" he shouted, just as James screamed, "Protego!" but James' spell was sent just a moment too late, and he was sent writhing on the floor, moaning in agony as he tried to grit his teeth against the screams. The man walked toward James, smiling cruelly as he held the spell fast. "You're not your father. You don't have the protection he had, and you're not special. I am great, and you are nothing; do you hear-" Rose had drawn her wand.

"Stupefy!" but the voice was Blaine's. He looked at her across the room, and she nodded, pocketing her own wand before anyone else noticed. She really was the brightest witch of her age, just like her mother had been. One guard grabbed Blaine as another muttered, "Ennervate," and James, Blaine, and Theo were all dragged, struggling, down to the prison cells.

A/N: I...don't really know what sent me to make the guards talk pirate, but I think it was the missing eye. I also acknowledge I must work on my pirate, as it seems I am not flawlessly fluent in the dialect. Oh, and that how many fingers it takes to slit someone's throat was borrowed (remembered, more like) back from the Draco Trilogy, and if you know where she got it from, let me know, and I'll amend this. I don't even know if that was original to her fic, or if it was even credited.