Chapter Sixty-One: Knowledge and Belief

There were spells a mediwitch could use to reduce swelling, to contract tissues, to regenerate flesh so that no scar would ever show. There were anesthetics, contraction-inducers, and even pulse accelerants and decelerants. The Transpareo Illusia charm could indicate signs of birth progression, infant distress, or even the baby's facial expression during the birth process. It was safer for a witch to have a baby now than a Muggle, and the Muggles were down to the tiniest imaginable chance of childbirth mortality –one out of five thousand, approximately.

These statistics, however, were not the slightest bit comforting.

To put it in the mildest way imaginable, Narcissa was scared stiff. Nursing a pregnant prisoner was one thing, actually delivering a baby was quite another. For some horrible reason, Lucius and Pettigrew had elected to take the poor girl off the mind-numbing solutions about five hours after the first contractions began, so that Narcissa lived in terror not only of complications, but that Hermione might wake up in the midst of what she knew from personal experience was the number one Not Fun Activity. If she had a wand, she would have not only used a Body-Bind and several of her sister's best hexes on both men, but Apparated herself and the girl directly to St. Mungo's. She wasn't prepared for this. Delivering babies was not martini-slugging lazy women's work. It was a job for cold-fingered Healers in paper masks and hippie nurses who waved incense and talked about the New Life Coming Forth. They didn't mention the various solids and liquids that accompanied said new life, but judging from how Lucius had fainted dead away before Draco's birth, Narcissa wanted no part of it.

A soft mewling sound escaped the Dark's prisoner.

Ohhh…crap…

"Kid, you awake?" Narcissa prayed she wasn't.

"Owww…" She was.

"Lucius!" To her surprise, her husband actually came running. "You filthy sonofabitch, if you don't knock her out right now, you are never getting laid again and I'm not talking about my withholding it!" Again to her surprise, Lucius drew his wand and began an anesthetic spell. Pettigrew, the sorry little rat, had scurried along into the room and Narcissa restrained herself from hurling a very large potted plant at his head. "You! Mouse-boy! I want you to boil as much water as possible. Lucius, go sterilize three white sheets –the softer the better." Two other Death Eaters, just pulling their masks off, had appeared where Pettigrew had just run away. Taking charge, she spared no one from commands. "Get me scissors, white string, as many rolls of paper towels as you can find, and in the name of God get those filthy robes the hell out of here! Lucius, what the fuck took so long? Help me with the sheet –is this the best you could find? Get me a fucking house-elf, you useless nit. No, there isn't time! Shut up, you titanic asshole, I'm not using the rat for an orderly. Right there. Perfect."

"What precisely are we doing?" the aristocrat gasped, looking at his normally indolent wife in fear.

"We are delivering this baby and woe betide you if you try so much as a levitation spell on the kid. Hand me the other sheet. Holy crap, that's another contraction."

"Should…she be unconscious?"

"Would you risk the alternative? Shock?"

"Well, she'd be surprised, but-"

"You fool! Medical shock! Could kill her flat-out."

"Well…what about the whole 'pushing' thing?"

"Astonishing, you remember a little of how this works. I'm going to take care of that with a transpareo illusia and a manipulation charm. Unless you want to attempt it yourself, give me your fucking wand and check the kid's pulse."

"No need to curse."

"Lucius, there are few times in the history of humanity when cursing has ever been so appropriate!"

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"You are going to drop your wand. You are going to put your hands in the air. You are surrendering."

Draco's voice, when he wanted it to be, was as threatening as his father's. Crabbe's hands, shook, but he didn't relinquish the wand.

"You're not a Death Eater. I don't have to-"

"You are dropping your wand, putting your hands in the air, and surrendering." Crabbe dropped his wand and Pansy sprang forth to catch it as it fell. Draco caught her arm gently, not wanting her to take vengeance too rashly. Yet just as she leaned and captured Crabbe's wand, the thick-witted wizard caught her jaw with a stunning kick. She sprawled backward toward Draco and a little blood ran between her lips. Draco knocked Crabbe back with a blow across the face –using the hand that held his gun. With his former friend incapacitated by that, spitting out a few yellow teeth, Draco bent slightly and helped Pansy up.

"You alright?"

"Yeh." There was still a little blood coming from her mouth, and with an indelicate but swift movement, she spat it in Crabbe's face. "Bastard, did you think you were anything?"

"Tell me what you know, Vincent." Draco spoke in a firm voice, neither commanding nor imploring. "I won't lie and say you can absolve your guilt in this, but you may be able to lessen the consequence of your folly by turning back from the Dark before it's too late."

The gun he held wasn't really his. It was one of the curiosity pieces that the Professors Tyler used in training and occasionally as light field arms –only twenty-two caliber, but large, very shiny and very long of barrel; definitely more show than power. Draco had chosen it from the cabinet for two reasons. One, he was more likely to need show than power. If at all possible, he did not want to fire it, and indeed, hadn't even checked to see whether it was loaded and with what. And two, perhaps the more embarrassing of the reasons, he had only fired a handgun twice.

"Your father and mother aren't here," Crabbe hissed.

"Where?" Pansy growled.

"You'd remember, you-"

The whole thing took less than a split second. There was only one clue, and that was an impossibly slight tightening of Crabbe's eyes toward Draco. Pansy, being a child of the Serpents' Den, caught it and leapt, just ahead of the knife.

"Pansy!"

Draco saw her fall again, this time flat on her back at his feet, with a dark handle sticking out of her shirt.

He did not hesitate.

The gun bucked in his hand, once, and then twice. Three bullets. One, he could see, had hit his old friend in the shoulder or the heart, going by the blood that sprung forth suddenly and horribly. He stood for just a moment in horror at the entire situation, then knelt at Pansy's side.

"Pansy, are you…?"

It was senseless to ask. There was so much blood, and that horrible dark handle, just under her left collarbone. With a grace never lent to her during life, Pansy raised a hand and touched Draco's cheek.

She didn't speak. It would have just been pain for both of them. But she smiled softly, and Draco recognized that face.

It was the face of a little girl who had gotten on at King's Cross almost eight years ago and been so happy to see someone she knew that she had hugged him. It was the look of a preschooler who had reluctantly given up on trying to make Blaise Zabini and himself play tea party while their mothers talked, but not shown any less fervor in a game of pretend-Aurors. It was the look of a fifth-year who had offered him her own lucky ribbon for O.W.L.s, tying it around his wrist under his cuff not out of any volition but good will.

He hadn't seen that look in so long. And now Pansy would wear it forever. Before she could leave him, Draco bent and kissed her, on the lips and then the forehead, as if to say goodnight. His heart was breaking, but there was nothing anyone could have done. She smiled and shut her eyes. She was free.

"Good god."

The voice was soft, but Draco would know it anywhere. He didn't turn.

"Professor-?"

Instead of a reply, there was a shot. He looked up wildly and saw Cass Tyler, a smoking gun in her hand and a tear streaking down toward a clenched-teeth fury.

"You hit Crabbe in the guts and arm. The neck or heart is a lethal mark." The Auror crouched and took off her hat, looking sadly at what had been Pansy. "Horrible."

"She brought me here…Crabbe threw the knife at me."

"I never gave her enough credit," the professor muttered, "but she'll be remembered as what she became, not how they treated her." Undoing the scarf around her waist and spreading it out, Cass let Draco cover the fallen girl. With a Muggle ballpoint and a bit of wallpaper torn from their somewhat bleak surroundings, she began writing something. "Draco, what's her full name?"

"Alicia Bellatrix Parkinson…everyone called her Pansy."

"'Turned sides for the Light, posthumous Captaincy.' That should settle any doubt." She scribbled her familiar signature, and taking the cord that held her badge and drawing it from her collar, Cass undid the knot and slid the badge off, tying the scrap of paper like a tag around Pansy's wrist. "S'the best I can do to make up for how I treated her."

"How did-?"

"Just like any dumb pureblooded Slytherin –with contempt. Maybe if someone had just listened, or maybe offered her a chance…"

"I don't think she had a chance from day one." Draco hastily drew a sleeve across his eyes. "Is Crabbe-?"

"Yes. If it makes you feel any better…she didn't suffer. He…did."

"But you finished it."

"I couldn't let you believe you killed him."

"Thanks." Draco breathed hard and stood up. "My parents aren't here. I think they may have her at Godric's Hollow."

"The car's outside. Is there anyone else around?"

"No."

"I'll be right there."

Draco took one last look at Pansy's covered form and left. Cass watched him go out of the corner of her eye and then strode over to Crabbe. The little bastard had used a spring-loaded wrist holster to hide the knife Draco had had to pull out of Pansy's chest. Apart from the four bullets, it was the only metal on him.

Draco's second shot had punctured the liver and Cass knew it. Hers had been into the heart of a dead body.

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