Detritus

Disclaimer: Harry Potter, etc. copyright to J.K. Rowling.

Harry was still groping the doorknob when Narcissa detonated the Noble and Most Ancient Malfoy chandelier. Fifteen hundred crystal pendants combusted at once and greeted Harry with diaphanous precipitation. Tonks and Lupin conjured Shielding Charms, which bloomed above them like mushroom caps, but Harry was too late to deflect the detritus. He saw a flash of rainbow, and then the splinters embedded themselves, needle-sharp, in his upturned face.

Narcissa took this opportunity to vanish through a corridor, barefooted, manic, pale-legged, and wearing a white silk nightdress. Lupin and Tonks took off after her, dipping beneath an arch of carved laurels with Charlie Weasley in tow. His hand was a raw mass of chandelier slivers.

"We're down this way!" shouted Charlie. "Go look for Draco…" The voice died away. Ron and Hermione ascended the marble staircase, troubling the diatom frost that had settled there. "He'll probably be up here. Harry, this way."

Harry hesitated. A speck of crystal had caught in his eye. He cast a precautionary Shielding Charm--an effervescent umbrella--and turned his attention to extracting the thorn with his index finger. He tried rubbing, but the shard aggravated his cornea with its tapered little edge, and he began to weep. His cheeks were bleeding, his robes glimmered with jagged snow.

After a moment, Harry succeeded in crying the prism out, and looked up. The Malfoy entrance hall was deserted, save for a hysterical house elf and her levitating dust pan ("Lowly cleans the mess, but where will Young Master find a chandelier so ancient, so heavy with Pureblood--").

Harry saw a diamond footprint, sparkling toe pointed toward the staircase, and bolted in that direction.

Narcissa rounded a corner and concealed herself in the first available room. Cobwebby, velvet-dark, and crowded with backlit mahogany bookshelves, the room revealed itself as Lucius' discontinued study. Narcissa lowered to the floor and fitted her feliform body in the desk's leg-space, like a jewel into a hilt. A spider probed the far fingers of her left hand, a tentative forelimb against a polished nail. Narcissa ignored it.

"Sundry?" she whispered. Right hand fingered her wand; bare knees, jasmine-white, protruded in the darkness.

Crack.

"Yes, Mistress?"

Narcissa nearly recoiled. A set of luminous orbs confronted her, just even with her crouching brow: Sundry, the practical elf. "Find Draco. Tell him to escape without me. I'll meet him outside the grounds on the other end--he knows where."

"Sundry will, Mistress, but--"

"Tell him he is not to Apparate. He'll never make it. He is to take a broom, or to slither out, however he may. The East-facing window on the third floor, if he can."

"Yes, Mistress."

Another whip crack sounded, and Narcissa was alone. She let the darkness settle, unfurl, disclose its sordid scent around her huddled form. She took a moment of pause to Disapparate. But then, by her foot, a gleam of moon. Her toes nudged against a silver cylinder, something dense: Lucius' emblazoned seal. A trifling heirloom, still edged with her husband's reticulated fingerprints. She reached out, purloined the little star.

"It came from in there," came Charlie's voice. Narcissa stilled her breath.

"Sounded like a whip--probably just a House Elf." Footfalls. "Wait, there's something under there. That shadow--"

Narcissa was stepping into the dark, lurching into unbeing and then--

"Stupefy!"

A jet of red light burst beneath the desk from the outside. Narcissa crumpled on the spot, hand still encasing the sterling seal.

"Hermione! Ron?" Harry shouted on the second floor landing. The hall was all tiled, glossed surfaces and reflected tracts of moonbeam, but no acoustics mirrored Harry's voice. The arches swallowed his echo.

But then, distantly, "Harry! We're on the third floor!"

"Stay there!" he answered back. The corridor eyed him in disapproval. "I'll meet you!"

Harry rejoined the flock in what resembled a florid trophy room, or a gold-speckled sitting room. The couches and armchairs were of pearly, dawn-colored satin, and the windows faced South. The trio scoured the corners and crevices with three illuminated wands, to no avail. They moved on.

Next door, a guest bedroom. Burgundy sheets, bereaved fireplace, shadowy mural. Harry backed out the door first, refocused his light on the next room. Something nacreous flitted in the distance.

"Guys!" Harry whispered into the bedroom. "I think--over there." He pointed, and jogged towards the skittering flicker. A human form slammed a door on the eastern wall, and Harry accelerated.

"Malfoy!" Harry couldn't curb his velocity and slammed against the door. "Alohomora! Now!" The bolt readjusted, slid into place, and Harry glided into the darkness.

It was a windowless bathroom, full of mirrors. A tremulous light swerved in the adjoining room, presumably attached to an uncertain pallid hand--a hand which at once fumbled with wand and broom and window latch. Harry made move to span the tiles, but a hard, cold, fervent obstruction suddenly pounced at him with its shadowy bulk. Harry reeled into a mirror and marred its silver with his sweat-slick face.

What the hell was that?

The thing reared back and struck again, a stubby-legged charger. Harry's knees and shins throbbed in pain (the attacker was only waist-high, but had tremendous girth).

"Impedimenta!" Harry cried. The beast slowed, stopped. A claw-footed bathtub. A Noble and Most Ancient Malfoy bathroom fixture.

Harry slid past the open doorway--umber, gaping mouth--to dodge a Stunning Spell. Malfoy, wrapped in pearl-sheened, draping pajamas and a dark cloak, was straddling a broom and pawing at the windowsill. A few far-flung curses spilled from his ill-aimed wand.

"Malfoy, get away from the window," Harry commanded. A futile, but unconscious appeal.

"Fuck off, Potter! Go join your old codger underground. Fractis fenestram!" The pane shattered, a gust of effluvium brushed back Harry's hair. He heard Hermione gasp behind him.

Before Malfoy could kick off and away, a deft "Accio broom!" ripped the Nimbus from his protesting knees. Malfoy's eyes pored into the night, weighed the threat of Harry Potter against the inviting thorny coppice three stories below. His feet were bare, Harry noticed.

He seemed livid, bewitched; irises clung to solanaceous night. He raised his wand.

"Stupefy!" A red spray erupted over Harry's shoulder, aimed squarely between Malfoy's clavicles. Harry had a fleeting vision of Draco free-falling backward, a buoyant petal, through the window's open mouth.

But there was no Malfoy.

"What? I thought I had him!" Ron expostulated.

"He must've Disapparated," said Harry, and lowered his wand.

Hermione's eyes fixed on the with windowsill, as though an after-image of Draco still lingered there. An incredulous quiver stirred her underlip. "No, he didn't. Not quite."

Harry and Ron followed her gaze, and there, recumbent on the carpet, like a limpid dove, lay a severed hand. Beside it, with aristocratic self-importance, sniffed Draco's well-formed nose. A long, dry bone joined the coterie ("a femur," Hermione said), as well as three pretty ivory ribs struck from a pretty chest.

"Blimey. He splinched himself," Ron said after a moment. A long pause followed. "Well shit, what do we do now?"

Harry tried to imagine one of Draco's curving limbs, long, lithe, with a pellucid blond sheen dappling the outside, missing its upper bone. "I guess," he coughed, "we pick these up and look for the rest of him. He can't've gone far."

"First," Hermione said briskly, "I suggest we find Lupin." She pulled the cloak off her shoulders, and, one by one, Harry placed the mangled pieces of Draco in its cotton cradle.

When Harry, Ron, and Hermione returned to the entrance hall, the others waited with a limp, lirial Narcissa. Out of respect, Tonks had spared her the indignity of a Mobilicorpus Charm and levitated her instead; now, she lolled to the rhythm of a dreamy current.

Harry spoke up. "Lupin, we've--um--we've found Draco. He sort of, well, he partly got away."

"Partly?" Three pairs of eyes shared one inquiring glance.

"Most of him got away," Ron added.

"He splinched himself," said Harry finally. Unfolding the cloak, he proffered the remaining Malfoy pieces. "We don't know where the rest of him's gone."

"Outside, probably," Hermione conjectured.

"If we gets away, we can always ransom his body parts," Ron said with a quirk of the mouth. "I've always wanted him ripped to pieces… I just figured I'd be the one to do it."

Lupin considered the Draconian fragments. "We could try summoning him. With any luck, the rest of him will be in one piece."

"Can you fix the splinching?" Hermione asked.

"Tonks probably could." Lupin cast a moony eye at scowling Nymphadora.

Harry peered down at the pathetic, detached palm in the cloak-basin. A spliced wing. He drew his wand and murmured, "Accio Draco Malfoy."

There was a pause, a collectively held breath, and then a low moan issued from somewhere, increasing steadily in pitch and volume. Draco appeared, noseless, one-handed, as though being dragged backwards by the collar of his robes. His bare heels dug vainly into the floor, one leg longer and more flaccid than the other.

"Fucking Potter," he growled, collapsing on the floor in a boneless heap. He drew his remaining hand over the flat stump where his nostrils formerly flared and waited--uncooperative, but unresisting. "What have you done to my fucking mother?"

"She'll be fine, Draco, she's only been stunned," Tonks supplied, approaching him. "If you'll hold still, I can put you back together. We've got your nose here, and the rest of you. At least, I think so. Any internal organs missing?" Tonks cast a glimpse at Harry. Malfoy groaned. "If that's it, shouldn't take more than a few minutes."

Lupin spoke calmly. "When she's done, we're taking you back with us. You and your mother have a few questions that need answering, and a couple of trinkets we'd like to have back."