Professor McGonagall was trying her best not to feel anxious as she scanned through the Transfiguration scripts before her listlessly. Tossing one into the pile on her right, she stared at the stack before her – although her mind was not on marking at all. What was going on?
There was a sudden burst of flames, and she jumped. The Floo network!
"Is that you, Albus?" She hurriedly made her way to the fireplace. Sure enough, Albus Dumbledore's face was in the fire; usually it was a rather merry expression, but now it was grim and worried, making Professor McGonagall even more jittery.
"Minerva, have you informed Mr Potter and Mr Weasley, as well as Severus, with regards to Miss Granger and Mr Malfoy's temporary absence?"
"I've followed all your instructions, Albus," replied Professor McGonagall, somewhat annoyed. "Now will you tell me what is going on? Where have you brought Mr Malfoy and Miss Granger?"
"As a matter of fact, I am now in my office, that is why I am able to talk to you through the Floo."
Startled, Professor McGonagall peered closely. "Then where are those two children?"
"They are on a mission for me, and I believe they are in need of reinforcements. Can you please round up the Order for me, and have them in my office immediately."
"Albus..."
"Minerva," he said firmly, but with a gentle tone. "I will explain everything soon enough. Please."
Professor McGonagall stared at the fire for a while, then she hurriedly waved the flames away and threw another handful of Floo powder from a pot dangling at the side. "The Order of the Phoenix!" she shrilled.
-.-.-.-.-.-
"Where is this place?" Draco wondered aloud.
He had zoomed straight into a place full of white light; it was as if he was in Heaven. For a moment, he half expected cherubims to sail over his head, shooting a couple of arrows and throwing a bunch of flower buds over him. Looking around suspiciously, he lowered the broom down. There was no flooring below, only white emptiness, but yet he was standing on something solid.
Yes, standing. His broom had disappeared.
There was a thump behind him. Draco turned around.
Hermione Granger lay curled on the floor, unconscious.
Suddenly forgetting where he was, Draco immediately knelt down and shook her hard. "Granger!"
She was still unconscious, her hair falling back onto his lap.
He pulled out his wand. "Ennervate!"
She still didn't budge. Her face seemed to be turning paler by the moment, and her hands were icy cold, as he reached out hesitantly to touch her.
Frustrated, Draco stuffed his wand back into his robes, looked up and around. The door in which he had come through was gone as well. It was as if he was in a dreamland, except that dreamland at least had more than just an empty, white space.
Rubbing his eyes, Draco gently placed Hermione down, stood up and hollered,
"IS ANYONE THERE?"
There was a very cold silence. Literally cold, and Draco could feel himself shivering even after all the heat had enveloped him from the dragon's fiery breath.
"HELLO, IS ANYONE – "
"Yes."
The softspoken voice startled him, and he spun around. But there was no one. Draco was quite sure it was not a female who spoke; it was gentle, but had a certain scruffiness to it as well.
"Who are you?" Draco asked, tentatively, pulling out his wand.
Nobody had appeared to match voice to face.
"SPEAK! WHO ARE YOU?" Draco gripped his wand fiercely.
"You have inherited your father's suspicious nature. It is good to be wary." The voice had turned to sneering.
Draco immediately paled. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
Out of the white emptiness, a figure of a man appeared. He was wrapped in dark robes, and had a large hat obscuring his face. However, both hat and robes seemed to be in tatters, and he walked with a limp.
As he approached, Draco backed away.
This was the man he had wanted to find all this while, and yet, there was a certain aura about this man that felt like he couldn't be touched.
The man stopped walking. "If it was anyone else, Draco Malfoy, I wouldn't have come to see him so quickly."
Draco could feel beads of perspiration dotting his face. He swallowed hard; it was hard to figure out whether it was a strong sense of relief at seeing him, or a vehement hatred bubbling within him to strangle the man who had indirectly caused his father's death.
"You bastard..." Draco muttered under his breath, feeling the fury snowball within him.
"Your father was more welcoming, you know..."
"I suppose you were pretty welcoming to him as well, weren't you?"
"Oh I was rather welcoming to you too, I thought. Pretty nifty skills you had there, with that dragon. I'm impressed."
Just under the hat, Draco saw a glowing pair of yellow eyes, that suddenly turned a bloody red, and his breathing halted abruptly.
"You were – you were that dragon!" He gasped. "You're an Advanced Animagus!"
"I see you have also inherited your father's sharp eyes. It was what made him a worthy servant of the Dark Lord."
"YOU SHUT UP!" Draco suddenly burst out, raging, his wand straight at the man. He was heaving as he screamed, "You don't have the right to talk about Father! You don't have the right to talk about the Dark Lord! You're a traitor, TRAITOR! And a MURDERER!"
"Do you honestly care what I've done to the Dark Lord?" The man chuckled, finally lifting up his head to reveal a rather distorted face. At first, Draco thought that he was midway morphing into a dragon again. But there were no sign of scales, and the pair of eyes were back to its jaundiced colour. Still, half his face looked like it had been burnt off; the other half was wrinkled and dotted with patches, like it was diseased. Draco's eyes widened with horror, but he didn't recoil, merely glaring very furiously at him, his wand shaking uncontrollably.
"Or what the Dark Lord has done to me?"
"You're right, I don't care about the betrayal. All I want to know is how the bloody hell my father died," said Draco, his eyes set alight with fury. "What the HELL did you do to make him let you go not ONCE, but TWICE, and then he goes back to get AVADA KEDAVRA-ed!"
"Watch that wand when you say words like that, Draco," said Maldash Wentervale, with a smirk. Draco hadn't wielded the correct wand movements when saying the Killing Curse name, but he wished he had done so to wipe that infuriating expression off Wentervale's disfigured face.
"And now you want to kill me, eh? If it weren't for that –"
Draco stopped midway in confusion.
"The broom?" Wentervale chuckled. "I suppose I am your benefactor now, aren't I?" A sudden coughing fit over took him, and he hacked violently. Draco watched him in disbelief.
"You let me get away? Then – then what's with the labryinth? My father –"
Wentervale calmed himself down from his coughing fit before he spoke, "Your father gave you clues to find me, didn't he? I suppose Lucius couldn't give up after all, could he, after he created such an elaborate plan to find me. But he must have told you the wrong person." He raised his hands to reveal that they were either blackened at certain areas, or completely blotched with the same patches that were on his face. "He wanted you to come and find me for answers. Do you think you will get them, Draco? I am about to die. The Dark Lord wanted me to die with his secrets. And I am dying." He smiled morbidly, placing his left hand before him. "Soon enough, anyway."
"Your half-sister told me to come here." Draco narrowed his eyes, wand still pointing right at Wentervale. "And I know exactly how to get to her, so don't try any tricks!"
"Do you honestly believe you can beat me with that wand of yours, Draco?" Wentervale laughed coldly. "Do you think the entire wizarding world is scared of me without reason? Do you think I became a Death-Eater without reason? If you try, you'd really be in Heaven before you try anything on Lanneria. Besides, your father didn't send you here to kill me, I'm sure of that. Let's see, was he hinting to me that I should kill this naive little boy of his?"
Draco knew that if he said anymore with regards to his father, he might do stupid things with his wand. Trying his best to calm himself down, he remembered who was behind him.
"I want you to do something for me first," Draco said, in between gritted teeth. "You're a damn good Healer, aren't you? I want you to Heal her..." And he swung his wand to the unconscious figure of Hermione Granger behind him.
"Is that – ooh, a rather familiar face nowadays, isn't that one of Harry Potter's sidekicks?" Wentervale mused. Draco flinched at the mention of 'Harry Potter'. Suddenly, dealing with Potter in school seemed like peanuts to this.
"A Muggle-born, Draco?" Wentervale's voice was dripping with contempt. "You brought a Mudblood with you? Oh I know, she's the sacrificial lamb?"
"NO!" Draco reacted violently, and sparks flew out of his wand.
Wentervale laughed again. "Oh lamb she is alright, just that she's being protected. Beware though, she could be a wolf in sheep's clothing!" He seemed to find this amusing, and chuckled quietly.
"You had jolly well Healed her first." Draco was breathing heavily. "Then we'll talk."
"What makes you think I'll talk?" Wentervale raised his eyebrows, the infuriating smirk still hanging at the edge of his mouth.
Draco's eyes flashed. "I know you told Father some secrets about the Dark Lord – secrets that he left to you because you were one of the four trusted Death-Eaters. Father left me clues to find you. You even let your sister hint to me where you were. You could have killed me just now but you didn't. You could have made things a lot more difficult and life-threatening, but you didn't. I don't know where the hell we are, but I know I'm here and still alive because you led me here. You are going to talk because you want to!"
When he got no response, he growled and continued, "I know what these secrets are. They are the Dark Lord's Horcruxes." He thought he saw a flicker in Wentervale's yellow eyes. "You are here to destroy them."
Wentervale chuckled again. "You are a fool, Draco Malfoy. Just like your father."
Draco's mouth twitched. "You clearly don't want the Dark Lord to live. That's why the Dark Lord wants you dead."
"I don't think that's your mission, is it, Draco?" Wentervale eyed him. For one moment, Draco thought his Occlumency skills were failing him, but when he rummaged about in his mind, he was quite sure everything was carefully compartmentalised, and that Wentervale had no way of finding his way around.
"No, it isn't," replied Draco, his eyes glinting. "But it's yours."
-.-.-.-.-.-
"Cissy, is that all you ever do at home?" Bellatrix sneered as she held up a tattered piece of knitting that had been frustratingly abandoned on the table. She eyed her sister, who was sitting on her rocking chair twisting the kerchief in her hands with much desperation. Rather irritated by her sister's lack of speech, she marched over and pulled the kerchief out of Narcissa's grasp, but the latter didn't react, merely fretting terribly as she wrung her hands together.
"What is the matter with you?" Bellatrix glared at her with a crooked expression on her garishly-painted face.
"I – I feel like Draco's in danger," whispered Narcissa, her hands trembling. "I feel like – "
What Narcissa really felt, Bellatrix had no idea, because there was a sudden burst of green light in the sitting room, and a loud bang. When the mist cleared, there was a sallow-faced Severus Snape, stepping out of the fireplace and brushing the soot off his black robes. Bellatrix snarled; Narcissa jumped.
"Severus!" She breathed hard.
"Narcissa," he said, stiffly. Then he turned to her ferocious-looking sister. "Bellatrix."
"What brings you here?" Narcissa asked, before Bellatrix could jump in.
Snape looked at her directly. "I am here to inform you that Albus Dumbledore has brought Draco on an excursion with him."
"An excursion?" Narcissa's eyes widened with horror, while Bellatrix screeched angrily, "What are you talking about, Severus Snape? How could you let Draco go with him alone? And what are you doing here? Do you really imagine for one moment Draco has the capabilities to kill that Dumblydork at this moment?"
"He promised me he knows what he's doing," said Snape, coldly, while Narcissa looked like she was about to burst into hysterics.
"He is in danger after all," she whispered. "No..."
"Did Draco learn his Occlumency well?" asked Bellatrix, curtly. "I don't suppose the Dark Lord will really appreciate knowing how incompetent his minion is."
"Bella!" Narcissa turned wildly to her sister. "Draco is not incompetent; he just shouldn't be in this!"
"It's an honour to serve the Dark Lord!" Bellatrix threw her hands up in the air, her wild hair becoming even more so. Turning to Snape, her eyes glittered insanely. "So, Severus, what excursion is this about?"
"I have no bloody idea." Snape enunciated every word clearly and coldly. "I have just come to warn Narcissa – since I am aware that you tried contacting Draco earlier, but failed to. There might be news coming to you that Draco is missing from school, but it is not as such. Dumbledore specifically told the Assistant Headmistress – " Snape's mouth twitched. "That he was bringing Draco on a little excursion. I was informed because Draco is a student of my House. I wish not to alarm you."
Narcissa couldn't have looked more alarmed that her son was with Dumbledore on a one-to-one basis.
"This is suspicious, highly suspicious!" Bellatrix's eyes were flashing.
Snape looked straight at Narcissa. "For all you know, this could be Draco's moment of glory."
"Of glory?" Bellatrix screeched with laughter, throwing her head back wildly. "Oh, Severus, do you really think that boy will murder Dumbledore? What if he fails? What was the Unbreakable Vow for? Why are you here?" She smirked. "Are you hiding something from us, Severus Snape? If you are on such good terms with Dumbledore, then I'm afraid I actually fear for poor Draco's life!"
"Bella!" screamed Narcissa, growing pale.
Snape glowered at Bellatrix. "I would have you stop questioning my loyalties time and again, Bellatrix Lestrange, I have explained it countless times, and it is highly insulting!"
Bellatrix merely cackled. "I revel in that."
"You must promise me, Severus, that Draco will get out of this alive." Narcissa grabbed Snape's hands, making him frown. "I cannot hope to lose one more person, Draco is my everything!"
"I made the Unbreakable Vow, Narcissa," Snape said, coolly. And if you see your son, you'd jolly well remind him of that! He wished he could say that aloud if not for Bellatrix's sharp eyes lurking at the side. Turning away briskly, Snape stepped into the fireplace once more.
"Shouldn't you inform the Dark Lord?" Bellatrix twittered, an amused smile hanging on the edge of her lips.
"NO!" Narcissa gestured wildly. "The Dark Lord must not know of this... what if Draco fails..."
"Cissy, would you stop being so hysterical!" Bellatrix was infuriated.
"I think it'd be best that you kept the matter to yourself," said Snape, curtly. "I would not want to endanger Draco unnecessarily." He eyed Bellatrix. "And it'd do you good too."
Bellatrix merely laughed like a hyena, and Snape was gone in a flash of green smoke and light. Narcissa fell back down against her armchair, looking weary and distressed.
"My Draco..." she whimpered, the kerchief in her grip completely ragged.
Bellatrix glared at her, then looked at the fireplace which had now lit up in its disconcertingly merry way. Her eyes then narrowed, and danced around playfully as she twirled a loose, straggly strand of hair with her slender fingers, a smirk hanging at the edge of her lips.
"Oh, Severus... oh, Severus..."
A/N: The 'Advanced Animagus' is my own concept.