Author's note: I know it's been a long time, and I am sorry for that. Thank you so much for your patience and continued support! Life has been hectic, but I do have the next few chapters drafted, and an outline for the rest. I'm expecting this story to be about 77 chapters long. Don't worry - I will definitely be finishing this! The only uncertain thing is the time.

I hope you're all well, and thank you again.


67

Hermione pulled Severus behind a boulder and tapped his head with her wand to remove the Disillusionment Charm.

"What're you –"

"I'm checking you for injuries!"

He must have seen some of the panic in her expression, for he wisely said nothing, and let her look him over. She knew they needed to keep moving – the Death Eaters would catch up to them eventually, and there were Inferi everywhere – but Harry had said he saw a blood trail in the Mirror of Erised, and she needed to reassure herself Severus wasn't bleeding to death before she could focus on their escape.

He wasn't bleeding to death, but he was bleeding, heavily. Several of his obviously hastily cast bandages were already red with blood, and he was even paler than usual, shivering either from the blood loss or, she thought with anger and alarm, the after-effects of the Cruciatus Curse.

"I can heal some of these," she said.

He nodded, his gaze following her wand movements as she removed the first of his bandages and started repairing the damage to his skin with a healing spell his older self had taught her.

As if catching the thought, he said, with a small smile, "I taught you that."

"Yes," she said, smiling back, although she really felt more like crying. They were so close to escape, and she wanted nothing more than to take him back to her tent where they would be hidden from the whole world – safe, if only for a few hours, before they were thrown back into this seemingly endless war.

She was so tired.

"It'll be all right, Hermione," he said.

She gave a half-sniffle, half-laugh. "I should be the one comforting you! After they did all of – all of this –" She had to swallow hard to stop from bursting into tears. She had to get him to safety – then she could cry.

"It was mostly Bellatrix," he said.

Hermione looked up and met his gaze, fury blazing in her, fury and distress at the idea that he had suffered just as she had. Only she had been at Bellatrix's mercy for only a few minutes. How many hours had Severus been her prisoner?

Impulsively, she hugged him, and she felt him tentatively hug her back. She couldn't help pressing a quick kiss to his cheek before she went back to healing his wounds as best she could.

When she looked up at his face again, he was watching her with another little smile. It looked out of place on his pale, tired face, but she felt a fluttering in her stomach in response.

"I thought maybe it would only be the one," he said.

"The one kiss?" she said, following his line of thought with ease.

He nodded, shrugging a little. "The heat of the moment…"

She almost asked if that was how he had felt about it, but it would have been a stupid question. She could see from the look in his eyes that he was glad she had kissed his cheek just now.

"It won't only be the one," she promised. "Now be quiet, I need to concentrate."

He snorted a little, but fell silent as she tried to knit together a deep gash on his arm. It was cursed, and she couldn't get the wound to close.

"Try Confervo," Severus said.

She did, and watched in relief as the skin began fusing together, the Dark magic dissipating. "That's the worst of them," she said. "I think the others can wait until –"

"Down!" Severus hissed, grabbing her in the same instant and shoving her sideways into the snow. A second later, a scarlet streak of magic cracked against the boulder behind them, chipping off flecks of stone.

"Protego!" she shouted, and the next two spells ricocheted off her Shield Charm, melting the snow where they struck the ground. She could see two Death Eaters within range, and more following them, along with a number of Inferi they seemed to have picked up along the way.

Beside her, Severus cast a nonverbal spell, and one of the Death Eaters cried out and fell in a flurry of bloodstained snow. She held the Shield Charm in place, flinching as curses exploded against its surface. Severus, half-shielded by her charm, slipped into a quick, furious duel with the next closest Death Eater until, with a surge of satisfaction, she saw him drop as well. Then she and Severus were running, still just beyond the reach of the remaining Death Eaters' spells.

"Inferi!" Severus warned, and Hermione cast her bluebell flames at an Inferius to her right, not stopping to watch it fall in eerie blue silence to the snow. She and Severus dodged in and out of trees and rocks, sliding across a frozen stream and pausing only briefly to enchant the ice to break beneath the next person to set foot on it. Then they were running again, the light of a few futile spells flashing through the gloom around them before someone – Lucius Malfoy, she thought – yelled at the Death Eaters to stop wasting their spells.

"Faster!" she heard him shout. "We're close –"

Hermione could see the trees coming to an end ahead of them, their meager shelter vanishing into a gently sloping expanse of unbroken snow. She could already see the snow would be thicker there, more difficult to run through, and without the trees to shield them she and Severus would be easy targets.

"Erigo!" she gasped out, waving her wand at the snow and watching in satisfaction as it swept upward, condensing and solidifying into a solid, unbreakable wall. She and Severus darted past it as it formed, squinting against the flurry, and glanced back only long enough to verify that the wall stretched about the length of a Quidditch pitch in either direction.

"Brilliant," Severus said, as spells struck the ice, glinting through in scattered bursts of light, but unable to penetrate the wall.

"Let's hurry," Hermione said. "I don't know how long it'll hold."

They started the much slower trek through the heavier, shin-deep snow. Running was barely possible now; they both tripped and fell a handful of times each before slowing to a clumsy, trudging pace that had Hermione glancing over her shoulder every few seconds. She managed to levitate some of the snow out of their way, but the continued spell-casting was slowing her down almost as much as the snow itself.

And then, without warning, the snow beneath her feet turned to ice. She slid, instinctively grabbing hold of Severus, only to bring him down as well. But the ice, which some Death Eater must have charmed to trip them up, had an effect the Death Eaters could not possibly have intended: the ground beneath them was steeply sloped enough that, once Hermione and Severus started sliding, they couldn't stop.

"Oh, no, oh no!" she squeaked, as they were swept down the hillside, toward a little dip in the ground where she thought a stream might be waiting.

It wasn't a stream; it was a pond, and they smashed through the surface like a pair of hippogriffs, plunging into freezing water and, in Hermione's case at least, inhaling a mouthful as she reflexively tried to yelp at the cold.

She surfaced a moment later, coughing, to find the Death Eaters hurrying down the now de-iced slope, some of them laughing, some of them looking grim and determined. Hermione thought she could make out Lucius Malfoy's gleaming hair through the blur of water freezing on her eyelashes.

Beside her, Severus was coughing as well, and the wand arm he tried to aim at the Death Eaters was shaking. He fired off a spell that missed by several feet, and the Death Eaters jeered.

Then, loudly, Severus began reciting the incantation for Fiendfyre.

The Death Eaters stopped in their tracks, looking startled, then alarmed as an orange glow began to form at the tip of Severus's wand.

"Move!" one of them yelled.

"He's bluffing!" another yelled back.

The orange glow intensified, and a wild enraged crackling seemed to fill the air.

"RUN!" Malfoy shouted.

The Death Eaters scattered, just as a fiery dragon burst out of Severus's wand, blazing across the slope in a cloud of steam from the evaporating snow. As the Death Eaters scrambled for cover, Hermione couldn't help letting out a terrified, excited scream, reveling in the heat that washed over her shivering skin and resisting the urge to duck back under the rapidly warming water as the dragon spread its conflagration of wings and seared its way after the Death Eaters.

"Brilliant," she whispered, but she wasn't sure Severus heard her. His gaze was still focused on the fiery form burning up the slope, and she knew he couldn't simply release it – Crabbe's Fiendfyre had swept around to kill him, after all, and she had no doubt Severus's could do the same. It was already melting straight through her wall…

"Hermione!"

Hermione twisted in the water, searching the empty landscape in confusion for whoever had called her name.

"Hermione!" the voice shouted again, and she looked up to see Harry and, if she wasn't mistaken, Ginny circling above them at a considerable distance, both of them glancing between her and Severus, and the fiery dragon that could easily swallow them whole.

"Severus, it's time to go!" Hermione said, cautiously gripping his shoulder. "Harry and Ginny are here! It's time to end the spell!"

She saw the struggle on his face, heard the roaring of the dragon. Then, with a crackling of magic that she felt all the way down in her bones, he wrenched his wand upward, and the dragon burst apart in a shower of sparks.

Almost at once, Harry and Ginny were swooping down, Harry grabbing Hermione, Ginny hovering beside Severus as he struggled to climb out of the water and onto her broom. In the distance, they could already hear the Death Eaters shouting, and a few spells shot their way only to fizzle out in the blackened ruin the dragon had left behind.

Hermione clutched Harry tightly as he tilted his broom toward the sky, and she saw Severus, pale but triumphant, clinging just as tightly to Ginny as she shot upward. Meeting his wild gaze, Hermione grinned.

They were free.


Severus had managed to get Savage and their two Disillusioned prisoners down the mountainside and into the cover of the trees without being seen, and thought it best to heal some of her injuries before they continued. There was still no sign of Alice Longbottom; James Potter had turned back to meet Lily, if he was reading the coin's messages correctly. If Severus and Savage were forced to make it out on their own, Savage needed to be back in fighting condition, and soon.

The gash over her ribs had grazed the bone and was bleeding heavily, and Severus turned his attention there first, cutting her robes open over the cut and ignoring the way she flinched as the cold air struck her skin. He likewise ignored the way her eyes followed his every move, reminding himself that it made no difference if she distrusted him.

He couldn't repair her bone without Skele-Gro, but he could heal the flesh around it, and did so, returning as much of her shed blood as possible to her veins.

"Have you ever considered a career as a Healer?"

Severus barely spared her face a glance. "I prefer research. I suspect Healing would become tedious very quickly."

"Is this tedious to you?" she asked, sounding both insulted and amused – and pained, but that was only to be expected.

"Abominably," he said, repairing another gash, this one on her neck, a hair's breadth from her jugular. He could see the blood pulsing quickly through the artery, and watched blood seep out of her head wound in time with its rhythm. She was lucky, very lucky, not to be dead. He wondered if it was Crouch or Lestrange who had inflicted this wound. The latter was already dead, thanks to Fiend, but Crouch? Severus longed to deal with Crouch.

Savage's pulse was still racing when he finished closing the wound in her neck, the skin jumping every other moment with some unknown emotion. Was she afraid, and simply hiding it? Angry that Crouch had escaped? Seized with adrenaline?

He shook the thoughts away. He had one wound left to heal, the shallow but steadily bleeding wound on her forehead. It was harder to ignore her relentless observation once he had cleaned the blood off her face and directed his attention to the cut over her eye. But then, would he not have observed any Healer with equal suspicion? Even Poppy Pomfrey had never earned his absolute trust. And who was he to this Auror but a former Dark wizard who had once borne the Dark Mark?

"I think that will suffice for now," he said, withdrawing his wand and checking his coin again, though he knew it hadn't burned. He hoped it was because nothing of note had happened, and not because the others were too busy fighting Death Eaters or being captured by them to send a message.

A little communication would have been welcome.

He was just stowing the coin in his pocket again when he felt Fiend's claws dig into his side, sharp and urgent. He looked up instinctively, casting around for whatever might have startled her, only to frown at the orange glow in the distance.

"Fire," Savage said.

"May I use your Omnioculars?"

Savage handed them over, and Severus peered through them, frowning at the orange glow growing ever brighter in the distance. He thought he could make out a wall – made of ice? – but a moment later the wall dissolved in a wave of water and steam, and beyond it –

"Fiendfyre," Severus said, eyeing the dragon with alarm and wary admiration.

He thought he could make out figures fleeing the fire, but whether they were friend or foe he couldn't tell. He wasn't sure who would have been more likely to invoke Fiendfyre – the Death Eaters, or his younger self. Surely the Death Eaters would have wished to capture their quarry alive? The Dark Lord would hardly have been pleased if his prizes had been reduced to ash. The only Death Eater mad enough to try such a stunt was Bellatrix Lestrange, and she was currently paralyzed and Disillusioned beside him.

"If the Death Eaters are using Fiendfyre –" Savage began.

"No," Severus said, more certain than ever that his younger self was responsible. He felt some distant, unspeakable kinship with the vivid dragon burning its way through the snow. "I believe the Fiendfyre is… on our side." There was hardly any need to inform her that his supposed nephew had likely just cast a restricted Dark spell.

She seemed to infer it despite his caution. "So it runs in the family, then… Prince?"

He resisted the urge to roll his eyes, keeping his gaze focused on the vibrant dragon in the distance. It must have been at least a mile away. Even as he watched, it disintegrated in a shower of sparks, far from the neat, controlled form the spell took when he himself ended it. His younger self must still be in distress, then.

Yet only a moment later, he thought he saw two misshapen forms take flight.

"They seem to be escaping," he said, his voice betraying none of his relief.

"It's time we did the same," Savage said, standing up and raising a wand to her head to Disillusion herself, only to freeze halfway through the spell. "Prince," she said sharply.

He looked away from the now nearly indiscernible forms of what he hoped were the escaping teenagers, and saw at once what had Savage so alarmed.

A wave of mist was rolling down the mountainside toward them, at a truly inescapable speed.

"Dementors," Savage said, even as the cold preceding their presence swept over them.

Severus raised his Occlumency shields at once, his mind as cold and untouchable as the Dementors' mist, but Savage raised her wand and incanted, "Expecto Patronum!"

An enormous silver tiger leapt from her wand, seeming to swallow the cold and filling Severus with sudden warmth. But one Patronus could hardly ward off what he could already see were hundreds of Dementors seething in the mist, their shadowed forms drawing ever closer.

Possibilities darted through Severus's mind. Could he grab Savage and fly? He had never tried to fly with another person before. Yet they could not hope to outrun the Dementors, and hiding was out of the question.

He would have to try. "Savage –"

"Look!" she exclaimed.

He followed her gaze to the sky, and saw a figure on broomstick surrounded by silver sparks of light. For a moment, he couldn't fathom what he was seeing; then he lifted the Omnioculars to his face once more, and saw Alice Longbottom surrounded by a flock of her hummingbird Patronuses.

"Alice!" Savage called, although it was hardly necessary; the tiger Patronus had broadcast their location more effectively than any shouting could have done.

Alice slid into a dive, not as smoothly as one of the Potters or some of the Weasleys might have done, but nonetheless an effective one. The moment she landed, Severus and Savage spoke at once.

"Take Prince –"

"Take Savage –"

They looked at each other, and for an instant Severus saw his own exasperation mirrored on the woman's face.

"You don't have a Patronus," Savage pointed out.

"You can't fly," Severus replied, and to prove his point he lifted ten feet up into the air.

The two Aurors gaped at him for a moment, in what might have been a satisfying level of astonishment if the situation hadn't been so dire. "On the broom, Savage," he commanded.

She obeyed without question this time, her gaze still locked on his hovering form, a million questions in her eyes. Alice had already recovered from the shock, her attention fully on the approaching Dementors. Her flock of Patronuses split itself in two, half of them remaining with her, the others surrounding Severus in a distracting, shimmering cloud of light. Savage's Patronus bounded into the air as they took flight, leading their way over the shadowed, mist-shrouded valley.

Neither of them spared a glance for the two Disillusioned Death Eaters they had left behind.


Barty Crouch, Jr. felt the soul-deep chill of the Dementors long before his captors noticed the approaching creatures. He could hear their conversation, their distraction at the distant Fiendfyre, and yet in his paralyzed agony all he could feel was the distant creeping hunger of his lord's greatest allies.

Come to me, he thought, wondering if they could sense his intent. He had never tried to summon them before, but he knew the Dark Lord had done so, and that it was a matter of bending one's will toward them.

Come to me.

Their distant cold began to glide closer, and he felt triumph rise within him.

Your enemies are here. Find them. Destroy them. He hesitated. And free me, if you can.

His captors were panicking now. He felt the warm brush of a Patronus, then the cold as it swept away. They were abandoning him. He would have smiled, if the paralysis spell hadn't held him in place.

Follow them, he commanded.

He felt them obey, not because they served him, but because his wishes were so closely aligned with their own. But he felt, too, that some of them had stayed behind, and were approaching him with cold intent.

He didn't allow fear to manifest in his heart. He knew they would feed on it, and he couldn't allow that. He let the certainty of his lord's power fill him, and thought, Free me.

Cold, grasping hands slid over him. Beneath their touch, he felt the spells binding him begin to break.

A question, cold and wordless, filled his mind: an unfathomable hunger, the desire to feed. Barty enjoyed letting a smile spread across his face. His lord would either punish or reward him for this, but he felt confident that nothing could serve their cause better.

Take them, if you wish. They are yours.


"You can't tell him, Sirius!" Lily pleaded, not for the first time.

"I'm his best mate! You can't expect me to keep a secret like that!"

"Sirius, it's my decision! I don't want him to find out like this –"

"He needs to know! Lily, we have to get you out of here, as soon as possible, and we can't Apparate you or take you by Portkey –"

"I know, Sirius! But I don't want you to tell him!"

"You should be the one telling him!"

"I'm not ready!" she shouted.

They fell silent, both breathing heavily from their row, and Lily wanted to scream in frustration. She had already considered Obliviating him – she was certain she could cast the charm correctly – but he had a halfway functioning wand now, and she knew she wasn't going to catch him off guard.

How he had known she was pregnant was a mystery. He said he could sense it, because he was a dog, but could dogs really sense pregnancy within hours of conception? She doubted it. It must be some magical aspect of his Animagus form. Some magical, inconvenient aspect.

Why she was so opposed to James knowing about her pregnancy was something even she couldn't wholly explain. She just knew she was too overwhelmed, too tired, too frightened, to discuss it with James right now.

"Lily, what's going on with you two?" Sirius asked, frowning at her. "Did something happen while I was in Azkaban? After the wedding –"

She let out a sound that was part humorless laughter, part sob.

"Lily, what happened at the wedding –" He swallowed, and she thought she could see tears in his eyes. "I can't imagine what that must have been like, going through all of that, and then the stupid marriage law – but you and James, you're meant to be together, you know that, don't you?"

Lily said nothing. Sirius looked alarmed.

"Lily –"

"I don't want to talk about it!"

"We have to talk about it! I'm not just going to stand by and watch my best mate's marriage fall apart – after only a week, or however long it's been –"

"It's not falling apart," Lily said. "It's just – we're just – we're still grieving –"

"So tell him about the baby! It'll make him happy!"

"I don't want to!" she said. In her mind, she could see the Death Eater leering down at her, asking her if it was his Cruciatus Curse that had given her the right nudge. She turned away from Sirius in a wave of sweat and chills and retched into the snow.

"Lily! Is it morning sickness?"

She snorted, then spit out some more bile. "That won't start for weeks, Sirius."

"Oh… It won't?"

Lily rinsed her mouth with a handful of snow, then said, "I just don't want to talk about it, Sirius."

"Lily… You are happy about the baby, aren't you?"

She rounded on him. "Of course I am!" she snapped. Then, at his incredulous expression, she added, "I haven't had time to be happy! They tortured me, Sirius!"

He looked furious and anguished all at once. "Lily, I'm sorry. Tell me what I can do –"

"Just don't tell him!" she insisted. "I'm not ready!"

"But why?"

"I don't know why! Just don't tell him!"

Sirius grimaced. "Lil, they say pregnancy makes women a little crazy –"

"Shut UP!"

She wanted to storm away from him, but the moment she turned on her heel, she fell still, her gaze drawn inexorably to the figure soaring toward them on broomstick. Even from this distance, she recognized it instantly as James.

"Lily –"

"Don't you dare!" she hissed.

"Lily, how are we going to explain about you not being able to Apparate? He's never going to buy that stupid story about the Anti-Apparation spell –"

"You did," she reminded him.

"Only for a minute!"

Their argument had to cease then as, with his usual grace, James landed beside them. It was only then, when James failed to dismount, that Lily saw the alarm in his face.

"We have to go now," he said, his face pale. "The Dementors are coming, I saw the mist –"

Automatically, Lily turned to look back the way she'd come, but neither the mountain nor any mist were in sight.

"Trust me," James said, "they're coming. We need to Apparate out of here, we're past the wards here –"

"We can't," Sirius said, with a quick look at Lily. "They did something to Lily – she can't Apparate –"

James looked horrified. "Then we'll have to fly – but what about you?"

Sirius hesitated. Lily thought he was wondering whether he could trust his new wand with a spell as advanced as Apparation, but he said, "I can't leave you – you'll need all the Patronuses you can get –"

James looked at the broom, grimaced, then said, "It can hold us all. Lily doesn't weigh much."

Not for long, she thought, a little hysterically.

"I'll slow you down," Sirius said, still hesitating.

"Just get on," James said. "Both of you – Lily, you stay in the middle –"

They clambered onto the broom behind him, and he kicked off hard, the broom wobbling in protest as it tried to carry their combined weight into the sky. Lily glanced behind them, searching the sky for the mist James had mentioned, praying he was wrong…

They crested the top of a mountain, and there, just beyond, were the Dementors.