A/N: Sorry for the lack of updates, guys. They're going to be a little less frequent for the time being due to A-Level work and so on...

Chapter 37 - Fruitless Efforts

"Nothing," Harry muttered, throwing his papers down with a dissatisfied groan.

It had been a week since the destruction of the Snatcher hideout in Yorkshire, and Harry's Aurors had found no leads since then. Harry himself was spending every evening in the office, working late as he combed through every file and report at their disposal, looking for any hint of the missing Death Eaters.

It was a difficult task, that was for sure. A few sympathisers, like Nathaniel Fletcher, had tried to return to their homes and live normal lives as best as possible, somehow not expecting the law to catch up to them. Harry, however, was concerned with the inner circle, the die-hard Death Eaters, many of whom had broken out of Azkaban many months ago, not once but twice, to aid their cause. And of Voldemort's inner circle, there was no trace. The Lestranges, Dolohov, Yaxley, even the double agent Rookwood, all of them had gone to ground, and there was no trace of any of them.

Next door, Harry heard a chair scrape against the floor, and the shuffling sounds of someone gathering their belongings. It had to be Neville – the other Aurors had all departed already. There was a gentle knock on the door, and Neville sidled in.

"How's it going?" he asked, but they both knew the answer before it came.

"Same as it's been going all week," Harry muttered. "No sign of any of them."

"Maybe they've disappeared for good," Neville shrugged.

"That, or they're planning something really big," Harry noted sceptically. "I don't know which is worse..."

"Me neither..." Neville trailed off. "Night then."

Neville slid out, shutting the door gently behind himself. Once he was gone, Harry slumped back in his chair, rubbing his aching brow with one hand. The window behind him was filled with inky black calm – Magical Maintenance had backed off after a third night of thunderstorms brought them a storm of hate mail – and the only light came from a magical flame, captured in an ornate jar on the corner of Harry's desk.

With the flickering orange light bathing his face, Harry shut his eyes and sank even lower in his chair. Frankly, he couldn't be bothered with the effort of Flooing home, and he felt too tired and frustrated to Apparate safely. He shifted slightly in his chair, finding a comfortable position, and slowly drifted off to sleep.

Many miles away, in Hogwarts, Hermione was doing anything but sleep. Like Harry, she had been working late into the nights – if anything, she had been working even later than him, and on a far stranger project.

At present, she was sat cross-legged on the dusty stone floor, as the Room of Requirement shifted and warped around her, still caught in confounding chaos. Hermione had her wand in her hand, and was staring around with increasingly sleepy eyes.

She had given in to curiosity, and had visited the Room of Requirement every night. The marvellous impossibility had become somewhat addictive to her as her visits continued – to someone with such an ordered and logical mind, this chaos was dangerously exciting. Furthermore, in something of a testament to the sheer reasoning power of Hermione's mind, she was starting to make sense of it all. Impossible though it may have been, there were still patterns and rhythms in the room's reactions, and there were threads amongst the chaos that could be caught and re-arranged.

Hermione had barely realised the effects of her visits upon her until Ginny took her aside and pointed them out that morning. She had puffy bags beneath her slightly bloodshot eyes, and the lack of sleep was becoming noticeable in her behaviour – she was extremely clumsy in lessons, and almost fell asleep in their last Defence lesson, while the others were practicing.

Despite all of that, there was something that kept drawing her back, a dim compulsion in the back of her, that was growing into an obsession. For Hermione, her lessons were rather uninteresting – she knew most of the subject matter already, and the only one which offered her any sort of challenge was Potions, which was accompanied by the bumbling annoyance of Professor Slughorn. Fixing the Room of Requirement, however, was a challenge, maybe even an impossible feat. Nonetheless, Hermione thought she was making progress. With each visit, with each thread she wove back into place, she could feel the room growing slightly more harmonious, slightly less furious.

Even as she considered this, she was working, not casting any spell in particular, but feeding her wand with pure, instinctive movements. She was getting far more adept at it – picking up the tiny tremor of each thread, and the intricacies of weaving it back into place amongst the heaving web that occupied the walls of the room.

Taking a quick break, Hermione fell back onto the stone floor, feeling rather exhausted as she tried to assess her work. Whether it had worked or not, she couldn't tell – the room was as chaotic as ever. Ornate pillars were stuck at angles in the walls, half way through trying to emerge, as rogue spells and forgotten objects cascaded from the roof at odd intervals, surrounded by a myriad of quivering stone shards, suspended in nothingness.

Hermione sighed. However immense and difficult the night's work – and the work of every night – had seemed, it had had very little effect. Resignedly, she picked herself up, and made to leave. She needed sleep.

Instants after that thought passed her mind, Hermione heard a troubled moan. She wheeled around in a panic, looking for an intruder, then realised that the noise, like every noise in here, was coming from the room, the pure consciousness that seemed to reverberate within the walls. And then, quite suddenly, she spotted the form emerging from the floor.

It was, unmistakeably, a bed. Hermione gazed around, half-hoping to see some face she could smile at. Whether out of duty or thanks, the room was trying to fulfil her needs. She needed sleep, so it provided a bed. However, it was a bed that looked somewhat unsteady. The room was groaning with the effort of keeping it in existence, and its silhouette flickered as if it might be extinguished at any minute. Hermione didn't fancy the prospect of being extinguished with it.

"Maybe when you're a bit stronger," she thought, too tired to even murmur the words out loud. The room heaved, and the bed fragmented. Whizzing shards of ethereal matter were swallowed back into the floor once more, as Hermione swept around, and headed for the door.

Back in the Ministry of Magic, Harry had barely been asleep for twenty minutes when he was awoken by a loud crashing, which sounded unmistakeably like someone rushing through the huge oak doors of the Auror Headquarters. He drew his wand, and cautiously edged towards the door.

Just as Harry reached out for the handle, the door was thrown wide open, and Harry stopped, moments short of cursing Neville, who was clutching the doorframe and panting heavily. His eyes bulged at the sight of Harry's wandtip, before Harry quickly shoved it back into his pocket.

"What is it?" he muttered, sleepy yet urgent.

"Come quick," Neville panted, waving to the door. "There's been an attack. Diagon Alley."

At these words, Harry stood bolt upright, and made for the door. A moment later, he reconsidered, and ran into his office, grabbing a sheet of pale violet parchment from a tray on his desk and hastily scribbling a note:

Kingsley,

Attack in Diagon Alley. On my way now. Send the Aurors there.

Harry

He quickly threw the parchment into the air, and it folded itself into a neat paper aeroplane before shooting out over their heads. Harry quickly grabbed his dragon skin jacket, and was still pulling it on as he and Neville sprinted out into the hallway.

It took them a painfully long time to reach the elevators and return to the Atrium, and still longer to flush themselves out of the front entrance. Finally, with a quick glance of confirmation at Neville, Harry whirled around, and Disapparated on the spot.

When they arrived at Diagon Alley, the immediate sight was not as horrific as Harry had expected. When he heard "attack", he had been expecting something on the scale of Dolohov's assault, a whole street obliterated, or perhaps a building collapsed. Instead, with the moon high in the sky, and the time approaching midnight, they found about a dozen people, huddled at the end of an alleyway, just a few hundred metres from the glistening marble facade of Gringotts. Neville reached the scene first, whipping his wand downwards with a resounding crack, which dispersed much of the crowd.

"Can you please stand back?" Neville said, the authority of his voice faded by tiredness. "Who was the first on the scene?"

"Over here," called a man at the edge of the crowd. As the two Aurors looked over, the man pointed to the woman next to him, who he had clearly been comforting. She was hunched over, head in her hands.

"Neville, you take care of her," Harry murmured. Frankly, he thought Neville would do a much better job of being sensitive and caring than he would in his exhausted state.

As Neville moved over to the woman, Harry stepped into the alleyway. The victims were immediately obvious – two bodies lay stone cold in the middle of the alley. Moving slowly over, Harry saw they were a man and a woman, not young, but not quite at middle age, he didn't think. His immediate impression was that there had been no struggle. Neither of them had their wands out, and there were no curse marks on the walls. He was sure, without even hearing the witness statement, that they had been hit with Killing Curses.

"Lumos Maxima," Harry muttered, throwing a white orb of light up to the rooftops, as he heard a vague pop behind him. Turning around, he saw a dishevelled-looking Williamson stumble through the crowd, take one look at the bodies, and then let out a low whistle of surprise.

Over the next fifteen minutes, the other three Aurors appeared – Savage joined Neville in the questioning, and showed a surprisingly tender side, beneath the tough facade she showed during the day. Williamson helped Ron hold off onlookers and a few very determined journalists, while Proudfoot joined Harry in the alley, providing his usual, calculating attitude.

"Wedding rings," he noted, rather sadly, "they must be husband and wife. I'd guess mid-thirties... no curse marks, like you say, and no blood..."

"Killing Curse?" Harry ventured.

"Most likely. There aren't many curses that kill cleanly. Dolohov's curse is one, but I don't think he did this."

"How come?"

"Neither of them had their wand out. If Dolohov had walked up and killed one of them, the other would have at least tried to draw their wand and fight back."

"So you think there was more than one attacker?" Harry muttered, as he mulled the question over himself.

"Most likely," Proudfoot replied. "If I had to guess, I'd say two attackers, striking from behind."

"Right," Harry murmured, working things over in his mind. "Get Law Enforcement down here to recover the bodies, and tell Neville to bring the witness back to the Ministry."

An hour later, all six Aurors were back in the hub. Neville had spent half an hour taking a statement from the sole witness, then sent her off to St Mungo's for good measure, as she was clearly in some distress.

"So, we've got the witness statement... what else?" Harry asked the room at large.

"Law Enforcement won't have the autopsy until tomorrow," Proudfoot muttered, "but we don't need a coroner to know it was a Killing Curse."

"What about the victims? Identities, records?"

"Got them here," Williamson nodded. "Thomas and Sarah Foster. Both half-bloods, lived in Suffolk for the last few years."

"Half-bloods?" Savage murmured questioningly. "You think there's a motive there? Blood traitors or something?"

"No connection to any big pureblood families, if that's what you mean," Williamson replied. "It's more likely to be a random attack than anything blood-related."

"What about belongings?" Harry ventured.

"Nothing out of the ordinary," Proudfoot said, "but it doesn't look like anything was taken, either. They both still had full money bags and wands."

"So," Harry muttered hotly, "we've got no motive to speak of, every means under the sun, and no clue who did it?"

"That's... not quite true," Neville murmured, somewhat hesitantly.

"What?"

As Harry turned around, he realised he must have seemed far angrier than he really was, because Neville shrank back slightly in apprehension.

"After the witness gave her statement, I showed her a photo, on a hunch. She said the men in the photo were the men she saw tonight..."

"Who?"

Neville didn't respond. Instead, he slid one hand into his pocket, and opened up the folded photo within, before offering it in an outstretched hand. Harry took it cautiously, and looked down at the photo's two occupants.

He was staring into the cold, hooded eyes of Rodolphus and Rabastan Lestrange.