A/N: It seems I can go months without being able to write anything, and then suddenly knock out a chapter in less than a day. I wonder if any has waited around long enough to still be reading this. Warning: bleakness and angst abound in this chapter. But it's extra long! Enjoy.


"What was that, exactly? What the hell was that?" Snape asked him hotly, not even waiting until they had both settled firmly on the ground from apparating. Theodore, still unused to suddenly appearing and disappearing, stumbled and almost fell over except for Snape snatching his arm, as much to hold him up as to shake an answer out of him. "What were you thinking?"

Finding himself able to stand and balance on his own, Theodore jerked his arm out of Snape's hold. "There wasn't exactly a great deal of time for thought," he answered shakily, and winced. His voice was quivering like a child's. Taking a moment to compose himself, he continued, his voice more steady: "I acted in a way I thought most befitting of a Deatheater. What else should I have done?"

"You acted in a way most befitting of a psychopath, Theodore," Snape rebuked, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I understand the difference is subtle, but it is important." He shook his head and turned to walk into the kitchen. "I need a drink."

Theodore slumped onto the couch in the living room they had appeared in. He looked around at the aging, lackluster decorating and asked loudly, so Snape could hear him in the next room: "What exactly is this Spinner's End anyway? Whoever owns the place must really not give a shit."

"I own it, and you are correct, in that eloquent way of yours, that I do not give a shit. It can stand until eternity, or God might have mercy on this pitiful earth and raze the blight to the ground, but I still wouldn't give a shit," Snape answered from the doorway, returning with two tumblers half full of a clear liquid, one of which he handed to Theodore. "Drink it. Your pallor is almost as bad as mine."

"You didn't bring the bottle? Your liver must be weeping with gratitude."

"It won't be by the end of the evening."

Theodore sipped his drink. It burned at the back of his throat, but he swallowed, and put the glass down. He pulled off his spectacles and tried to clean them with the edge of his waistcoat. "I can barely see a thing. How did they get dirty so fast?"

"Blood spatter does that," Snape informed him icily as he sat opposite of him. His drink was already gone.

All things together, it had not been a good night for either of them. Snape's edginess was excusable. Theodore gave up on his glasses for now and set them aside. Picking up his tumbler to take another drink, he noticed just how badly his hand was shaking. It was surreal to watch—his mind was surprisingly numb, but his body was still coming down from the adrenaline.

"You are going to need an exceptional stain remover to get the blood out of your clothes. It can leave some really stubborn spots."

"Would you be able to recommend a brand?"

He had just killed a man. Ought he to have felt a bit more emotional after killing a man? It seemed that it would be the natural course of things. He was sure there was some kind of experimental study where they concluded that killing fellow human being equals intense emotional anguish, anxiety, remorse, etc… but all he could do was to discuss stain removal.

If this was Snape's attempt to comfort or distract him, he was more of a screwed up bastard than Theodore had originally realized.

"No brand, but I usually keep on hand some of the custom product I designed and created for my own use. I'll see if I have any." Snape stood up and swept away through another door way.

Theodore looked at his drink again. His hand was still shaking, but he brought the tumbler to his lips and tilted his head back to swallow all of it. He choked, started a coughing fit, and probably spluttered half of it on to himself and the carpet.

Theodore had not felt well about the excursion from the beginning. His primary goal in this endeavor of his was to Find Draco, and he didn't see how terrorizing muggles would help him in achieving that. His secondary goal had been to Avoid Harming Anyone Permanently, because his life was complicated enough without the kind of moral crises that followed the committing of such acts.

So far, he had managed to fail at both.

They had gone into a predominantly muggle neighborhood to begin with one of the few wizarding families who lived there, above whose property they would leave the Dark Mark. While living in a muggle neighborhood did not actually make you an official blood-traitor, precisely, it was major demerits in the Dark Lord's book. Theodore's own assigned task had been to find the daughter and bring her downstairs. Easy, right? Even a green, seventeen-year-old, scared to death rookie could do that, right?

Apparently not. He had entered her bed room, while her parents were torn violently from their beds, their yells of surprise cut off, muffled, as they were moved downstairs themselves, and had found her own bed empty. Confused, he poked around the room, before he heard a whimper from inside of the closet. He walked over, stared at its sliding doors silently for a moment, listening, and then slid them open.

Owlish eyes, already red from crying, peered up at him. Damn, she could only have been thirteen or fourteen at the most. Had he seen her at school? Bumped into her in a hallway? He was glad the mask hid his face. He didn't think he could stand the idea of her knowing who he actually was. And he was supposed to hand her over to torturers, who were probably now mutilating and murdering her parents? He didn't have the stomach for this. He just wanted to find Draco. He just wanted to go home. The thought of taking her downstairs made him want to vomit on his own shoes.

Moral ambiguity was not good for his digestion.

He should have killed her, right then, without hesitation. Instead he'd had the brilliant, desperate idea to help her escape out the window. Temporary insanity. After some encouraging and with the help of some hastily acquired bed sheets, she dropped unharmed onto the bushes below.

He should have known that she'd never make it even half way across the front yard.

Two Deatheaters burst out of the front door. One of them yelled out a paralysis spell and with a rush of blue light she fell to the ground, her face in the grass.

"How'd she get out?" one asked, looking at the other who had cast the spell and was standing over the girl.

They both turned to look back at the house, saw the bushes, the rope of bed sheets, and then finally her open window, within which Theodore was standing. He couldn't move. He was busted.

"Stupid boy! Can't even overpower a little girl?" Theodore could tell from the man's voice that he was grinning under his mask.

"We'll have to do it for him," said the other, more quietly, as he levitated the girl's frozen body and had her float inside the house behind him as he and the other Deatheater returned.

Theodore turned his back to the window and promptly slid down the wall to sit under it. That had been close. Better to be thought incompetent than a hero. He might survive the night that way. The new primary goal was Make It Until Tomorrow Morning. All he had to do was sit here and wait it out—

That was when he heard the first scream. It was the beginning of many.

Her parents weren't dead yet. They began to plead, and then to beg, and then to sob horribly, unceasingly, a terrible counter melody to their daughter's own cries.

He was frozen below the window, helpless, a coward. He knew he could do nothing, just as he had never been able to do anything to stop his father's calculated humiliations and drunken rages, Draco's foolish plots and rash choices. Always at the whim of others, broken like an unwanted toy, something in the girl's screams reverberated at his core, a helplessness that twisted into frustration, and then to bitterness, and finally to rage. She was still screaming, but now he was screaming with her in anger and hate and in their shared shame—

"Theodore, come on, we've got to move," someone said gently. "It's over."

Theodore looked up at Snape, who was crouched over him with his mask in his hands. He had taken Theodore's and placed it on the floor. Theodore stared at it.

"Your stillness and silence led me to think that you might be dead," Snape explained. "They finished almost ten minutes ago—"

"I can still hear her," Theodore countered quietly.

Snape's expression was stony. "Theodore, they finished with the girl ten minutes—"

"I said, I can still hear her."

Snape stood up slowly, as if thinking, and finally answered: "I expect you may hear her for the rest of your life."

Theodore put his head in his hands. He could not look up at his former professor.

"Come, Theodore. The others will smell out your weakness if I do not return with you soon. They may have already."

Theodore took the proffered hand and stood up, then stooped to pick up his mask. They walked out into the hallway together.

The top of the stairs offered a good view of remnants of the proceedings. Three mangled bodies, destroyed almost beyond recognition, two larger than the last. The Deatheaters enjoyed their work. He had heard their laughter scattered among the cries of the newly deceased.

Theodore froze again at the top of stairs, at the sight of the girl's body, the blood on her face and her naked torso and legs, and that was when he began to shake.

"Theodore, please," Snape pleaded as he reached out for Theodore's arm, which he never got because Theodore was already gone.

As he sprinted down the stairs and launched himself at the closest Deatheater, the one he knew had been in charge, something in the back of Theodore's mind told him this was a highly irrational course of action. But something else had already doused his mind with gasoline and thrown the match. The fire raged through his brain and through his body and down to his soul, and no barrier could stop it. It had been hidden away too long, festering like a sore.

Theodore had always been thin, but he was wiry and able to hold his own against the larger man. Perhaps the only reason Theodore did survive the encounter was because he had completely accidently knocked the Deatheater's wand out of his hand when he tackled him.

They rolled across the floor and knocked over a lamp stand. Theodore ignored the yells of Snape and the other Deatheater as he tried to land a punch on the man's face before he got a finger to the eye or a knee to the groin and got thrown off.

The crash of fallen vase, the prickling of glass on the back of his neck as he rolled over it, and suddenly the other man had a knife, which Theodore assumed had been a back up hidden in his coat, and was attempting to skewer Theodore's face, his arms, his chest, anything—

Theodore wrenched it out of his hands, rolled the man onto his back, grabbed his hair to pull his head back, and brought the knife to his neck. Suddenly the only movement between them was heaving chests of deep, desperate breaths to support their exertion. The room was also silent, except for the screaming in Theodore's ears, which crowded out all other noise.

The man was at his mercy. No one had ever had been at his mercy before. Theodore could see eyes underneath the man's mask, full of fear and loathing.

"Give me one reason," whispered Theodore, though it seemed loud to the others in the dead silence of the room, "give me one reason why I shouldn't kill you like you killed that girl."

The man swallowed, but said nothing.

Before the rage could begin to ebb, Theodore picked up the man's head by the hair and banged the back of it against the hard wood floor.

"I said, give me one damn good reason why—"

The door burst open and Theodore could see the boots and the edge of the cloak of the person who had come in.

"Why has the Dark Mark not yet been placed?"

The ice of her voice doused the remaining flames enraging his brain and clutched at his heart. Why did it always have to be Mrs. Lestrange? The rage was washing away… he was losing his nerve…

"The Dark Lord grows impatient, he does not like waiting. And where in God's name is Rodolph—"

Theodore knew he had just been noticed. Oh God, he was going to die. He didn't know what the punishment for assaulting another Deatheater was, but he was pretty sure it ended in death. Or that he would at least prefer that it end in death. The room again was silent until someone else came in through the open door, this time with a much more reserved step.

"What is keeping you all from completing your task? Have you forgotten the incantation?"

The voice was a gentle, curious hiss. Theodore knew who it was and barely bit back a whimper. The man below him let out a strangled cry, but Theodore just pressed the knife harder on his neck. Blood welled up around the blade.

Theodore had never been in the presence of the Dark Lord before. His own Dark Mark had been given to him by his father and Snape at the Nott manor house. He had hoped never to actually meet He-Who-Must-Be-Named in person. Some Deatheaters had gone through the entire first war without doing so.

"Why have you not finished what you have started, boy? You are distracting everyone else from their duties."

Theodore swallowed, and, with all his will power, forced himself to slowly raise his head to look up at his master. Dark red eyes bored into him like a drill, but an almost amused smile played on the Dark Lord's thin, bloodless lips. Apparently he had borrowed it from Bellatrix, whose face was utterly unreadable.

"The Nott boy, yes?"

Theodore nodded once, unable to take his eyes away.

"It would not do to leave undone what you have already begun. Kill him."

Kill him. Those words broke through the screaming like a dagger through the skin and to the heart.

"Do as the Dark Lord commands you, Theodore," added Bellatrix. "You must obey."

Theodore slowly looked down again at the man below him, and the screaming in his ears began to build to a deafening crescendo. So he cut it off with a swift stroke across the man's neck.

The man's torn jugular sprayed blood across Theodore's face and clothes and hands, warm and sticky and vile. Someone grabbed Theodore's shoulder and pulled him up off of the newly deceased and planted him back on his feet.

Bellatrix walked over and kicked off the man's mask. Rodolphus Lestrange's face, twisted in terror, stared up at the ceiling.

Theodore visibly recoiled, not from the body, but from Bellatrix, who was now in front of him, smiling faintly. "Such a considerate gift, Theodore," she told him as she stroked his cheek through the blood on his face. "You're always so thoughtful." Theodore pulled his face away. He had just murdered her husband, and she was thanking him?

She kissed him lightly on the cheek.

"Cast the Dark Mark, Bella," said Lord Voldemort, "and then return to my side. The rest of you already have your orders." Then he swept away out the front door, and Bellatrix followed with the remaining, still masked Deatheater, leaving Theodore and Snape alone, if one didn't count the four corpses.

"We are getting out of here now," Snape told Theodore quietly but heatedly. "Hold on to me, you are in no shape to apparate. But if we get separated you are to find me at Spinner's End, all right? Come on."

Theodore grasped as firmly as he could to the front of Snape's cloak, and then they vanished with a faint pop.

Now Theodore sat on the couch, waiting for Snape to come back with stain remover. He watched the liquid in his tumbler. It had stopped quivering, and so had he.

"Here. Have your house elf use it." Snape was holding a green glass bottle out to him. Theodore took it.

Snape also had a full tumbler when he sat across from Theodore again.

Theodore looked up at him, away from his hands. "I can't hear her anymore."

"Is that good news? Because I could use some." Snape tipped his head back with practiced ease to swallow the rest of his drink. He did not choke. "Would you like another?" he asked, peering critically at his empty tumbler as if it were a first year's blotted essay.

"Yes, I would."

"Go get the bottle then."

Theodore rose to his feet. "If you keep dashing your liver's hopes like this it's only a matter of time before it commits a murder-suicide and takes the both of you down."

"Just get the damn bottle."

Theodore entered the kitchen and found a tall bottle of Ogden's finest on the counter top. "Are you supposed to drink firewhiskey in tumblers?" he called.

"What part of 'just get the damn bottle' did you not bloody well understand, Theodore?" Snape called back.

Theodore returned and placed the bottle on the coffee table. "You're an alcoholic."

"You're a foolhardy, barely-of-age imbecile who almost blew his cover this evening. I suppose you're proud of yourself?

Snape looked up from pouring himself another glass just in time to see the fleeting spasm of agony cross Theodore's face. He looked at his full tumbler, sighed inwardly, and then looked back his former student. "Let's clean you up and return you to your home," he told Theodore as he put his glass down on the coffee table. "Drinking myself unconscious can wait another hour or so."

Theodore didn't move, but stared again at his hands, which were handling the green bottle. "Do you think she wanted me to kill her husband?"

"Bellatrix is perfectly insane, Theodore. You shouldn't be concerned with what she does or does not want."

"It's kind of late for that, don't you think?"

Snape narrowed his eyes at Theodore. "What exactly is going on between you and the newly widowed Mrs. Lestrange anyway?"

Theodore eyes swiveled up and then swiftly back down again. "Nothing," he answered, and then briskly continued: "I think I should just go home. I can clean up fine on my own there."

"Fine. I'll apparate you over there."

"Haven't you ever heard that Buzzed Apparition is Drunk Apparition? I'd rather not have us both be splinched, thank you very much."

"Do you want to walk?"

"No."

"Then shut up," snapped the older man. "At least the rest of the Deatheaters will no longer think you're a scared little twit."

"Really?" Theodore asked as he took the hand Snape had proffered him.

"But now I know you're one."

"Oh."


A/N: Whew! That was a bit of an emotional slog. Be sure to REVIEW--and please comment as to whether you think I should move up the rating or not.