Dapples of sunlight pierced the canopy overhead to lay strewn across the undergrowth like stars stranded on the wrong side of the sky. A restless breeze whispered its song through the trees, which in turn nodded their ancient heads in time to the music until the motes of light at their feet were set to dancing. Farther off in the wood there rang out the sweetness of bird song.

High summer in this forest glen was a time of peace, calmed from the flurried activity of spring, not yet caught up in the gathering frenzies of autumn. It lent itself to introspection, given the changeable yet never-changing nature of the living things that composed it. That, and the strange autonomy it had managed to lay claim to, free from the deprivations of the human race that had destroyed so many of its sister forests. There was none of the sort of trouble associated only with humans. No one ever came here, with one curious exception.

An exception who now stood gulping in lungfuls of clean air, swaying on his feet in the sunshine much as the trees swayed above him.

Lupin had struggled during those few frantic seconds of hesitation outside the block of flats, trying to bend his flagging energies to the question of where to Apparate. In the end, though, instinct had played just as crucial a role as logic, sending him off to the one place he knew no one else could follow, a place that for most of his life had spelled out safety.

The faint crack of his appearance had done little to disturb the tranquility of the woods, sending only the nearest birds winging away. He looked around. It felt like a breach of confidence, coming here bearing such evidence of the terrors of the outside world.

He looked down at her, limp in his arms. What choice did he have? It had come to him with a bitter shock of understanding that the one place she most needed to be was in fact the one place he of all people could not take her. A publicly known, openly distraught werewolf walking into St. Mungo's, the bearer of an obvious victim of violence? Any sane Healer would summon the Aurors first and ask questions later. And given that Lupin was the sole available source of information as to what had happened to her, possibly the only one who could do anything to help her quickly enough, while every second her life was ebbing away…

He was no such fool, no matter how badly she was hurt.

Lupin could not take her, and while this was something he accepted with almost habitual resignation, still, deep inside him anger simmered, and humiliation. Had he been a normal man, she would already be at the hospital where she belonged. Had he been a normal man, she might never have been hurt in the first place.

It bore in on him that he was wasting time. That his legs were shaking, that he was sinking down into the soft ground cover because while his mind ran in fruitless circles, his body had acknowledged that its last bit of strength had been spent in getting them to this spot. His knees slammed into the glen floor, every joint crying out, but somehow his arms stayed locked around his small burden as through sheer force of will he kept himself upright.

His thoughts chased themselves around his head in a mad parade. Help. He needed help. In order to get help he had to actually put her down. He couldn't put her down, couldn't move, she was dying in his arms and he couldn't do a goddamned thing to help her, even now when he'd gotten her away, he needed help

Pain lanced from one temple to the other, shocking him out of the sickening downward spiral of despair. Deeply buried resilience born of more than three decades of monthly torture exerted itself, and he gritted his teeth and bent.

He laid her on her stomach in the soft grass, her arms and legs in an ungainly sprawl. From a distance she might have looked like any ordinary child who, after tiring herself out from too much play, had simply thrown herself down where she stood and fallen asleep. Lupin's vantage point allowed for no such happy illusion. Her back was something out of a nightmare. He desperately wanted to believe that her unconscious state brought her some small measure of peace, but even that hope was crushed by the look on her face, the small, delicate features drawn so tightly together that he knew pain pursued her even in the darkness.

His body put up a vicious protest as he shifted to sit beside her. The sweet, wild smell of crushed grass and flowers rose up as he mentally flicked through the pathetically brief list of people he could call on for help, coming up with Moody at the top. Moody, who would flay him alive when he saw what had been done to her, but would at least recognize the need for haste and skip unnecessary questions.

Lupin's first two attempts at casting his Patronus produced absolutely nothing. Oddly, this unnerved him nearly as much as everything else that had happened already. It hadn't happened in years. He closed his eyes, blocking out the sight of the girl in front of him, and called up an old, old memory. The tight, sick feeling in his gut eased a fraction, momentarily soothed by images of a bright smile and brighter eyes, eyes that could still spark pain-edged pleasure even at a moment like this. They rewarded him with a surge of power up his arm and the luminescent figure of his Patronus staring back at him when he opened his eyes again.

It took seconds to convey the message to the grinning fox, and even before it had disappeared on its errand Lupin was setting to work easing the fabric of Tonks' dress away from the markings on her back. They pulsed a dull, sickly green, in hideous contrast to the richer hues of nature around them, suggesting decay rather than growth. Her clothing was stained with the same colour, and soon his hands as well. He'd rather have been marked by blood rather than this evil residue, and blood there was, leaking from other minor wounds, but none came from the intricate, deadly runes that crawled over her skin.

A pop sounded behind him.

"Alastor," Lupin murmured, not bothering to turn. The air in the glade went still, the forest having scented and identified an outsider. Again he cursed the necessity of bringing others here.

"Remus? Merlin's balls, man, what happened?" Moody's voice, rough as ever, grated across the clearing as he stumped forward. "Why-"

The word cut off abruptly, replaced by a string of profanities. He'd seen her.

The soft thud of wooden leg on grass quickened, and the older man came into Lupin's line of vision, though he kept to his task and didn't look up.

"Tell me."

The two words were a blade sliding out of its sheath, quiet, filled with menace. Lupin winced. He'd known that the man was fond of the girl, protective even.

"We were set up, Alastor. Claremont knew who she was, he came for her specifically. He even knew that I—well, that someone in the Order—would be there. They ambushed us separately and took us to a flat nearby. He…wasn't gentle." He paused, leaning down to prise away a few dirty linen fibres that had gotten caught in one of the wounds, his fingers coming away feeling vaguely of pins and needles. When he looked up, it was to meet the furious gaze of the retired Auror. "Viscus Perussi. Ever heard of it?"

So far as Lupin knew of Moody, his magical eye wouldn't have stopped searching the perimeter of the glen from the moment he arrived, but now both eyes snapped forward, though a second later the electric blue orb moved to focus intently on her wounds. "Aye, but I've never come across it myself, only read about it. Filthy thing." He limped closer and squatted awkwardly down beside her body, opposite Lupin. "Is that what th' bastard did to her? What all this is?" One gnarled hand swept a gesture over the glowing ciphers.

Lupin nodded and gently prised away one last thread from where it stuck to her back.

"You know the counterspell?"

This time his nod was more cautious, and though he didn't look up, Lupin could feel Moody's gaze boring into his scalp.

"What else do I need to know?"

It only took a minute for Lupin to outline the damage done to the building in the course of the fighting and the possible casualties, his voice flat, as though somehow brevity and lack of emotion could distance him from what had happened.

Moody's expression was stony. "How long's the spell going to take?"

"I don't know," Lupin admitted. "Twenty minutes, maybe. Maybe more. Certainly not less. It's hard to gauge. I don't even know if it will work." He went to rub one green-slimed hand across his eyes and stopped himself just in time.

"You can do it alone?"

"Do I have a choice?"

Moody gave a nod of concession, heaved himself upright and shook out his cloak. "Do what you have to. I'll be back when I can."

"Wait, where are you going?" Lupin demanded. "She won't have much time once I'm done. After the spell is lifted she'll lose even more blood, you have to be ready, you need to be here to-"

"I'll be here. Think, Remus. Blankets, and some blood potion, she'll need those too. And someone's got to get over t'those flats before either the Muggle authorities or Ministry agents do, if it's not too late already. I'm no use to you right now, so let me go and do what I can, while there's still time."

Moody's gruff assessment of the situation stirred up both relief that more capable hands were taking command, and chagrin that he'd snapped at the man. "No more than twenty minutes," Lupin cautioned anxiously.

Another nod and the old Auror was gone. The glen seemed dismally empty in the wake of his leaving.

Lupin turned back to the girl, breathing deeply to steady his nerves. He was far more scared of what he was about to attempt than he'd been willing to let on. Once begun, the counterspell, like the spell itself, couldn't be halted without incalculable damage to the person on whom it was being cast. Not that Claremont would have cared an iota about that, Lupin thought, mouth twisting in anger. From his own side of the equation, however, there was no room for error.

He wished now that he'd paid closer attention to how Claremont had laid out the deadly twining pattern on her skin. The initial component of the spell was simple, deceptively so: a nonverbal spell that allowed raw magic to flow from the tip of the caster's wand as ink flows from a quill nib. The difficulty lay in retracing the lines that Claremont had already laid down. If Lupin deviated at all from those lines, whatever was missed would continue to burrow inward, consuming everything in its path.

He took a last deep breath, and began.

Ten minutes passed, and he'd only just reached her shoulder blades. The world shrank to contain nothing but the unnatural glow of the symbols he traced. A butterfly flitted nearby, coming to rest first on her hair, then on one thin shoulder, but Lupin never noticed. Fifteen minutes and his wand was flowing over the middle of her back. The sun shone overhead, marking noon. A bead of sweat trickled down his face.

At a bare inch left to go, nearly twenty-five minutes after he'd begun, another pop announced Moody's return. The ground trembled slightly under the weight of his steps, but Lupin remained so engrossed in his task that he never felt it. The old man stayed silent until, with a bone-deep sigh, Lupin straightened.

"Remus?"

"Almost done," Lupin answered the Auror's unspoken question. He raised his wand, steadying his shaking arm with his other hand. "Lac lactis caelestum."

Just as with the initial spell, nothing happened for several uncomfortably long moments. Both men waited, holding apprehensive breaths, hoping Lupin had done his job well enough. Green flared suddenly to white and began to bleed over the edges of her wounds in milky rivulets, soaking into the fabric of her ruined dress, dripping down into the grass beneath her. The white slowly turned to pink and then to red, reassuring both men that all of the transmuted poison had been flushed away in the upwelling of fresh blood.

"Gods," Moody muttered, and hurriedly stepped forward. "Here, wrap her in this."

Lupin took the thick blanket Moody held out and bundled her limp body up as best he could, willing himself not to panic at just how much blood there was, at how deeply the spell had eaten into her skin. He staggered as he rose with her once more in his arms. She felt so small, even wrapped in layers of heavy wool, far too fragile to survive something like this. Her skin was frighteningly pale, her features pinched, her lips tinged blue. Mercifully she was still breathing.

"Wait, she'll need this first." Moody used his teeth to uncork a small vial of thin blue liquid. With more care than Lupin would have thought him capable of, he pried her jaw open and tipped the contents in, rubbing her throat to make sure she swallowed the potion down. "Right," Moody said after he spat the cork onto the grass and gently accepted the girl, "I'll get her to St. Mungo's. You get yourself back to headquarters and fixed up before you land in th' hospital yourself. And wash that shite off your hands, no telling what it'll do to you."

"I will."

Remus continued to stand there long after man and girl disappeared. He felt empty, used up, pushed beyond exhaustion into numbness. He knew he ought to follow Moody's orders, go back and patch himself up, but he couldn't summon the will to Apparate. In his mind all he could see was the image of her face as Claremont's spell took effect. The terror in her eyes. The pain.

Without warning his stomach emptied itself, forcing him to his hands and knees to retch helplessly onto the grass. It was only afterward, as he stood and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his body trembling with aftershock, that he noticed a bright spot of colour on the ground.

There at his feet, its legs stained an unnatural shade of green, lay a butterfly, dead.


A/N: Lac lactis caelestum: literally, milk of the gods.

That wasn't a cliffie, right? Er... *points* Hey, look, a dinosaur!

It's more than a little overwhelming that people have stuck around despite a years-long absence of updates. Thank you. The fandom is truly inspiring at times. And a special thank-you to Lady Ruthless, without whom you all might have waited years more for the rest of the story. L.R., you win the prize for the non-violent prodding of a delinquent writer. This is a coupon for one free Contact-centric drabble of your choosing (have mercy, though, please, and pick something other than fluff, my tolerance for reading and writing fluff having dried up years ago—anything else goes). PM me with what y'ants.