IMPORTANT: THIS CHAPTER WAS A DOUBLE UPDATE. DON'T MISS CHAPTER 13.

14: He's Back

The castle was utterly empty; another detail filtered up through the shredding fog inside of her, and she recalled that her uncle had told her all of the tasks were to be held outside, on the grounds, and so that was where she went.

Finally, as her feet carried her through the dark, over the grass — Merlin, it was the same night, it felt like the same night — she felt her father's response, inside her head, laden with disbelief:

Calista?

Where are you? She asked him, urgently, I need to talk to you, now.

He didn't reply in words, per se; instead, she saw the flash of an image, briefly, across the surface of her mind where she had opened it her outermost barrier, to allow him to respond. It looked like a massive structure — no, a hedge of all things — but she recognised the stands of the Quidditch pitch at its edges.

I'm coming, she said, and she started to run.

No, his words were sharp, suddenly, in her mind. Go back inside the castle. I will come to you.

But I'm almost —

"Stupefy!"

Calista was hurled so suddenly and forcefully to her back that it took her a moment to realise she was no longer running, that the expanse of rotating darkness ahead of her was the sky; and nearly as soon as she'd realised it, it began to fade away.

No! She felt the piercing alarm of terror in her head, and she could not tell if she had broadcast it to her father, or if she'd even, perhaps, screamed aloud… but no, that was not possible, her body would not move.

She clung to the wavering vision of the sky above her, even to the shrill note of her own panic, the rapid, thready beating of her heart, and but it was not enough; she could feel her lids slipping closed, as unconsciousness slipped heavy, reaching hands over her.

The hands still gripped her, roughly around the arm, when her eyes blearily opened again; but she must still be out of it, because she could see the hands now, gnarled fingers and dirty fingernails, and —

"Hello again, lass," Mad-Eye Moody smirked at her, from behind the tip of his wand; the shadow of one of his eyes was locked on her face, while the other, magical one zoomed and whizzed in every direction around them. Her vision was still slipping in and out of focus, and her body felt like lead; she commanded her fingers to reach for her pocket, to search for her wand, but she could not even tell whether or not they were moving.

Moody chuckled. "Reckon you're wondering where your wand's got off to, eh? It's in my pocket, but you won't be reaching it in the state you're in."

Voices, or a voice — she could not tell if there were more than one or if she only imagined there were — boomed and rolled in the distance, coming in and out of focus.

"Useless," Moody grunted, almost off-hand, "And yet, there's still something happening in that skull of yours, isn't there, even after being hit with a Stunning Spell?"

She strained desperately against the fingers that had an iron grip on her arm, but the world was tilting around her; the voices in the distance became less and less distinct, and she felt her neck rolling back, helplessly.

"My father saw me as dirt, just like your mother did." The words floated over her, dimly. "But you and I — we have something inside that's far greater than they can hope to see, don't we? And that's why I'm going to help you, and I'm going to give you your wand back."

"Ennervate."

It was like a bolt of lightning lit up her brain, for an instant, and then the world swam back into focus; the booming announcements returned, and somewhere beyond Moody's terrifying face and his viselike grip on her arm, she registered the tall hedge distantly behind him; she was not certain if they were close enough to the surrounding stands for her to heard if she screamed, but —

Dad! Help —

"Imperio!"

A crawling, horrid feeling latched itself onto the outside of her mind, and began worming its way inward, and she could no longer invest any energy in calling out, with her voice or with her mind.

It was good that they had practised so many times, because she could feel the curse spreading rapidly, coating and numbing her thoughts, snatching up each strand of her mind, and turning it against her; but they had practised, and even as the memory of her mother's cold eyes and hard-knuckled fingers swam up behind her, she remembered what to do.

She withdrew utterly behind her second and third barriers, fortifying them both with every spare scrap of energy she could muster, and she made herself listen to the cloying, horrifying echo chamber that the curse had claimed for itself, in the outermost layer of her mind.

Ask nicely, if you want your wand back, the part of her mind that was no longer her own whispered, and even though she wanted to run screaming in the other direction, she remembered what her father had told her, during those uncomfortable lessons.

Don't try to take the first layer of your mind back, or your resistance will show in your eyes.

It followed, then, that if she were to fool Moody into believing the curse had overtaken her, then she had to obey, at least at first.

"May I please have my wand back, sir?" She might have choked on the words, so bitter did they taste, had she not spent the last six months pretending to be fine, but as it was, they came out so perfectly demure that anyone who knew her surely would have thought they could not be her own.

"Yes, Calista, you may; but since I have helped you, as promised, now I'm going to ask you to help me."

He reached into his pocket, and produced her wand; he held it, devastatingly close, but she had not been commanded to take it, yet; her fingers twitched, aching for it, aching to banish the toxic influence coating a sizeable portion of her consciousness.

Enter the maze, the insidious voice in her mind commanded, just as the smooth, familiar pine of her wand hit her fingers, but Moody's grip was still iron-strong around her other arm. Kill whoever you find inside, except for Potter.

Her fingers slid carefully down her wand, adjusting her grip; she would have only one chance, one instant before he realised she was aiming at him, and so it had to be a spell that would incapacitate him until her father found them.

"Potter's got to make it to his engagement alive tonight," Moody muttered, wand still pointed at her face, "Very important; don't forget that."

Go, the treacherous voice snaked at her, and atlast, Moody's fingers released her. She could feel the ache of blood rushing back into the fingers of her left hand, as he let her go.

Enter the maze. Kill whoever you find, except —

"Sectumsempra!"

"Protego!"

She barely registered the flick of Moody's wand, inches from her eyes, before her body was racked, utterly and suddenly, with searing pain; the black wall of the night sky rose up in front of her again, and she imagined she could see the echo of her scream, spiraling upwards into it.

"I told you you had to commit, didn't I, Lestrange?"

And then —

A shape hovered above her again, this time blocking out almost the entire sky around it; and a soft, haunting melody began to penetrate the haze of her agony.

"Vulnera Sanentur."

Dad?

"Vulnera Sanentur."

On and on the song, the countercurse went, and gradually, the heat of the pain seemed to dull, or perhaps she was simply growing used to it; a blur of motion caught her eye, and she saw a familiar wand gripped in a white-knuckled hand, moving across her body; and then, she felt the soft, heavy warmth of another hand at her cheek, and rolled her eyes upward again.

"Dad," she muttered, but was it? His face, looming over her, was an ashen, wasted mask of grief and horror; his mouth trembled, even as the countercurse's melody poured seamlessly out of it.

"Vulnera Sanentur," he crooned, again and again, until all of her wounds must have surely knit; until the once-searing pain had become a dull, deep ache, and her body began to shiver, violently, against a sudden chill; and then, as if he meant to cure that, as well, her father lifted her into his arms, hands trembling against her shoulders.

"Cal — sta," a broken gasp slid by her ear, and one of those white, trembling hands touched her face again, before pressing it to his shoulder, and for a moment, she could not distinguish her own shivers from her father's choked, wrenching sobs.

"I'm —" fine, she wanted to say, but suddenly the word was no longer in her vocabulary. " — sorry," she heard herself say, instead, and she thought she might have meant for the raw terror in his face, but he hooked the fingers of one hand under her chin, and brought her eyes up to his, and — oh, how could she ever have thought that he wouldn't forgive her?

"I love you, Calista," he said, voice raw; and there was something shiny on his face, in his eyes, that seemed impossible — she had never, not once, seen her father cry, "My strong, clever daughter."

A memory tore through her mind, lighting it up, like an explosion; the same exact words, whispered in her mind, almost a decade ago; the words that had given her the strength to hold her mother off just a tiny bit longer, until he could rescue her, and oh, the burning of it, of feeling consumed her, then; it roared through her, a Patronus driving away the horde of dementors that she'd invited inside, but —

It only burned for a moment; and then, her vision blurred, and six months' worth of hurt and lies and loneliness was pouring down her face and stopping up her throat, but her lungs and her heart were free, suddenly, of the fists and the weight, and she sucked in a massive mouthful of air, just to prove it to herself; and then —

"Dad," she choked, "Moody — he's —"

"Severus?"

Father and daughter started, simultaneously, and she was hauled to her feet as Severus rose himself; for a moment, her head swam and her legs threatened to buckle, and it felt almost as if she'd been hit with another Stunning Spell, but Severus seemed to expect it; or at least, he did not seem as if he were in any hurry to let go of her, or to let her stand on her own.

"Albus —" was all that Severus managed, before the Headmaster's keen gaze surveyed the situation; his eyes swept, in a fraction of an instant, from Severus' face to Calista's, to the sticky, dark stains in the grass and all over Calista's nightdress, and then —

"Who?"

"Moody," Calista heard herself say weakly, as another violent shiver ran through her limbs; the motion made the world spin again, and nausea crept into her stomach.

"We must stop the tournament immediately," Dumbledore said, as grimly as Calista had ever heard him say anything, and her father's grip on her shoulders tightened, again, in response.

"You — you do whatever you want," he practically spat, "I'm taking my daughter to the hospital wing, and I am not leaving her side until —"

"No," Calista managed, an enormous effort; everything that had driven her here, that had happened here, was tumbling around in her head even as her surroundings seemed to do the same outside of her; and whether it was from blood loss, or the aftereffects of the Imperius curse, she did not know, but it seemed impossible to piece any of it together coherently. Still; she had to try.

"Moody — isn't Moody," she gasped, "And he — he wants to kill Potter — no, that's not right, he wants to kill everyone but Potter…"

Albus advanced, then, face stark white as it swam into her field of vision. "Where did he go?"

"I don't —" Calista started to say, but Severus stepped neatly forward, somehow managing to keep his supportive hold on her and block her from the Headmaster's view at the same time.

"He got away," Severus said grimly, "When I was performing the countercurse. I do not know where he went."

"He isn't Moody," Calista said again; even in her exhausted, terrorised, and utterly disoriented state of mind, this seemed critical to communicate. "He's — a Death Eater, or at least someone who wanted to be one — and I think —" she shook her head, trying to clear it, but that was a mistake; the edges of her vision darkened threateningly.

"The maze," she wheezed, remembering what the curse had told her to do; another shiver sent her clutching onto her father's robes to keep herself upright, "Is that what the hedges are?"

"Yes," the Headmaster said, and Calista told them, "Then that's where he went."

(¯ˆ·.¸¸.·ˆ¯)

Time, and people, and words, and most of all, her thoughts; all of it blurred, as Calista was dragged around the grounds, leaning heavily on her father.

She dimly recalled being led into a small, white tent, the thick, coppery feel of a blood-replenishing potion on her tongue; and she recalled her father arguing with Dumbledore, through the tent's flap, about it. Dumbledore wanted someone, one of the medics, to bring her back to the castle, and Severus was utterly refusing to let her go.

Her father seemed to have won, but even after he'd cleaned the medical tent out of its meagre supply of the potion, she felt only marginally better; her head had stopped swimming quite so violently, but her legs were still unreliable, and she could not stop shivering.

She heard Dumbledore arguing with a small crowd; several foreign accents reached her ears, and she picked up on a string of outraged French, thanks to all of Gerald's lessons:

"C'est inacceptable! C'est tricher! Nos champions ont été trompées!" Our champions have been deceived!

"Madam!" Dumbledore roared over the cacophony of voices, in a voice that triggered another Calista's shivers, "There is more at stake than the tournament!"

She recalled seeing the hedges come down; she thought her father had been part of it, though it had come during another wave of unsteadiness that made it hard to remember.

"We found three of them," she remembered Professor McGonagall saying grimly, "Miss Delacour was Stunned. Krum seems to have done something to Diggory; he's bleeding, but he's conscious, and Poppy says he'll be all right, once we get him to the hospital wing."

"Where is Harry?"

"Gone," McGonagall had said, ashen-faced and tight-lipped. "And Moody with him."

Dumbledore had spun on her, then, on Calista.

"I know you are not feeling well," he said, with a terrible urgency to his words, "But it is of utmost importance that you tell us everything you know, about the man disguising himself as Alastor Moody."

Do I know anything, really? She wondered frantically, as a firm hand on her shoulder steered her forward, Dumbledore at her other side. The next thing she knew, she was seated; she was back in the little white tent.

"Who is he?"

"I don't know." It was marginally easier, at least, to think, when she didn't have to concentrate on trying to keep her feet. "I — I never heard his name."

He and her father both peppered her with questions simultaneously, fast and urgent enough to make her head spin; how had she known he was not really Moody? Where did she know him from? What had he said, about Harry Potter?

The events of the night and the scraps of her dreams still tumbled about in her mind, not quite aligning; there was still a tinge of something foreign in between her first barrier and her second, and she realised that that was where the memory of the dream was; that was why she could not fully recall, but she did not need their two sets of eyes on her, boring into her, to know that she must recall it.

She remembered reaching out, clutching the collar of her father's robes, bringing his dark eyes close enough to reflect hers.

"Read me," she whispered, earnestly, "I'll try to show you everything I can."

Severus glanced behind him, but there were only the three of them in the tent; and then he bent low again, wand drawn, and:

"Legilimens."

She lowered her first barrier, revealing the jumble of sticky-coated thoughts; echoes of the curse that had briefly claimed this part of her mind still clung here and there, but if he recognised it, he did not immediately say so.

It's here, somewhere, she told him, It's just — it's in pieces, and I can't find them all…

Like calls to like, he reminded her, and she snatched at the first scrap of it she could remember — the duel, that memory was clear. She examined it until something in it sparked, lit up another piece of her mind.

"The funny thing, Calista," Moody said, sending a shiver down her spine for reasons she had not quite been able to understand, "Is that the name you've chosen instead doesn't have much more honour…"

The flickering, dimming torch; the dream she'd been having all along… but no, there was more to it than that, wasn't there?

Another scrap of memory lit up, and as she reached to examine it, she felt the particular chill of dread, of horror, that told her it was most definitely one of the ones from before. She forced herself to look at it, brought it to her father's attention.

The narrow face, smiling at her under the table; the yelp of pain as she cracked her head; and then, precisely the same voice, from almost her whole lifetime ago…

"Hello, Calista."

"Crouch," she heard her father say, hollowly, as the tendrils of his mind withdrew abruptly from hers, "I cannot — it does not seem possible, but — the man she saw, the one she believes is Moody: it's Bartemius Crouch."

"What?" Calista stammered, wondering if she had misheard, or even hallucinated his words; or had the memory somehow been damaged? "No it isn't — I've seen him before, at — at the Ministry, it can't have been —"

"Not him," Severus said grimly, seemingly for Dumbledore's benefit as much as hers, "His son."

His — his son?

A very familiar newspaper headline flashed across her mind; her mother's horrifying visage glittered at her, in black and white — and she had read that article, hundreds of times, in the early days, when she had struggled to believe that her mother really was locked away, really could not get to her; and she had seen two other names, besides her mother's, charged with torturing Frank and Alice Longbottom. Rabastan Lestrange, and… Bartemius Crouch, Jr.

Which meant — which meant that if the memory was real…

"No," Calista whispered, "No, he's — he was arrested with her — he can't be —"

Dumbledore spared her only the merest of glances, now that she had given them what they needed.

"Severs, have Poppy take her up to the hospital wing with Mr. Diggory," the Headmaster said, and that terrible voice was back, "We must —"

"Aurrrgh!" A growl rose from her father's throat, and then it twisted into a pained hiss.

"Severus, we must —"

"It's too late," Severus said; fingers scrabbling for the end of his sleeve; and then it seemed to Calista that the world stopped utterly, for just a moment; she saw stark, heavy black lines against the pallor of her father's forearm; but if the lines were black, that meant —

"He's calling us," Severus said bleakly, "He's back."

"Severus," Dumbledore said, quietly, "You know that I must ask —"

"Calista is still not well," her father said, and his fingers gripped into her shoulder once more, as his face went white. "She needs more of the potion, she needs dittany —"

"She will receive both of those things in the hospital wing. Severus, it is imperative that we locate Harry immediately—"

"I — don't — give — a — damn — about — Potter!" her father howled, sounding almost mad, "Send Karkaroff — despite his denial, he'll have felt it, too, and he doesn't want this any more than I do."

"Please, Severus. You have my word that I will ensure Calista's safety until you return with Harry."

"How am I supposed to do that? Snatch Potter from under the Dark Lord's nose, and come back —? You think he will let either one of us walk away alive?"

Calista would only remember the precise words of the argument she overheard later, when she sorted through the jumble of memories in her mind; then, in that moment, she could only dimly register three things:

The lines are black.

Crouch escaped Azkaban.

There is nothing stopping her, now.

And then, she was hauled to her feet again, and the world swam again, and she realised one more thing:

He is asking my father to go to the Dark Lord.

She reached blindly into the darkness that was clouding and tilting her vision, and clutched at her father's robes, thinking only that she would not let him go; or at least, that she would not let him go alone.

There was motion at the edge of her dimming field of vision, then, and Professor McGonagall's face swam grimly into view, the merest flash of a second —

"Albus, he's back! Potter is back, he's alive!"

She had only flashes of awareness, after that point, and some of it made her question whether any of it was real; Harry Potter, bloodied and horror-stricken, gripping what looked like a massive trophy, and he'd said the words, too:

He's back. Voldemort's back.

And, at some point, the distant, fuzzy echo of her father's voice, fading in and out:

… need to take care of her… too much blood… told you one vial would not suffice…

Again, a roaring silence filled her ears; again the world spun away into blackness; and while there were undeniably horrors all around her, and dark days ahead, she was not quite so afraid, this time, as her awareness faded, because it faded with the knowledge that her father had forgiven her; that he was not letting her go.

(A/N: This is the end of Part 1. I intended this shorter chapter to be a bridge between the two parts. Also, welcome to the AU. ;) )