Chapter 39 - Danger Ahead

Although Dobby had at first intended to apparate Ron, Harry, and Luna back to the tent where he had also deposited Draco and Hermione, the house elf found that it was beyond his ability to apparate three people at once as opposed to two, and so had to settle for a closer location.

Not that where they ended up was a bad choice, though—Shell Cottage, the home of Bill and Fleur Weasley. It was peaceful, a place untouched by the war, and otherwise a strategically safe place where they could rest for a while.

Coming up on the surf like additional debris, all four friends collapsed onto the sand. Luna was the first of them to get up after the daze of apparating, and so it was she who first noticed the very bad problem at hand with what had happened.

During the apparation itself, of course no one had noticed that a cleverly thrown dagger was following them. Once the apparation was complete though, dagger and all, the weapon had found its mark and was now embedded in the torso of one of them.

Not Luna. Nor Ron. Nor, thankfully, Dobby.

Instead, it had been Harry himself who had been stabbed on the receiving end of Bellatrix's wrath, and he was now lying very still and looking extremely pale as he lay on the beach. The waves washed redness out into the sea from of the blood that poured out of his left side where the knife was still lodged, but Harry himself remained unmoving and unconscious to the pain.

"Ron! Dobby!" Luna called out, sounding uncharacteristically panicked for perhaps the first time in her life.

Spitting out sand, Ron hastily got up, followed by Dobby, who wore a look of horror and shame once he saw the state of his saviour and friend.

"Harry Potter is hurt!" the house elf breathed. Then, pounding himself on the head and slapping himself, he cried, "Bad Dobby! Oh, Dobby has killed Harry Potter! This is all Dobby's fault!"

"Shut up, it isn't your fault!" Ron snapped, though he looked both furious and worried, clenching Pettigrew's wand tightly and no doubt wanting to use it on someone there and then.

Luna used her new wand to levitate Harry out of the waves, though she had absolutely no medical knowledge to do anything else. One thing that even the most untrained person knew was to not make the blood-loss worse, and so unfortunately they had to leave knife embedded in Harry's flesh. With Ron leading the way, Luna followed and levitated Harry gently, careful not to move him more than necessary. Dobby followed last, still hitting himself and muttering about how he wished that he were stabbed and dead instead. Big tears were continuously cascading down his face.

Once at the cottage, the friends were quickly received inside by Bill and Fleur, the latter of which wasted no time in tending to Harry's wound. Although she was no expert medical practitioner herself, she had helped to treat Bill's wounds after he had been scarred by Greyback, and had enough basic knowledge to help remove the accursed dagger without making Harry's injury any worse. His breathing was shallow and once or twice he grunted in pain throughout Fleur's administrations, but otherwise remained unconscious. To make sure of that, Fleur even gave him a small dose of the Draught of Living Death, which prevented him from feeling the worst of what he could have.

"His heart rate is weak, but his condition is stable for now," Fleur announced after a grueling five hours of work on Harry. "I have done my best to close up the wound and used more dittany than is prescribed, and also put him in what muggles call a 'coma state'. This is the best I can do for him for now, but unless we can get him to St. Mungo's Hospital, I fear for his life." Her voice broke near the end of her announcement, revealing her true regret and fondness for Harry. Bill came forward and held onto his wife as she began to tear up, but there was no doubt that all of them were just as badly affected by what had just happened.

No sooner had they thought themselves home free, and now they had this to contend with. Worse yet, if anything happened to Harry, it might just be the end of everything—everything they had worked for, any chance of winning the war and destroying Voldemort, all of it.

"St. Mungo's is out of the question, I'm afraid," Bill announced at last, his face grim. "The hospital is too closely tied to the ministry, and right now we all know what trouble that is. No, I'm afraid that our only option right now is to do the best we can here and now."

"But, I—I can't do more for him, Bill!" Fleur cried, turning away from him. "H-his wound may heal in time with the help of the dittany, but that is not the main problem! Y-you see, h-he, i-it..." Then, to everyone's surprise and disgust, she accio'd the dagger from where it lay in the other room and, dropping it on a table, she pointed at the dark black stains that mixed with the stains of Harry's blood on the cloth which she had wrapped it in. "T-those black marks, I have never seen anything like them before. They were in his body too, and I could not clean them out. They reacted adversely to any spell I tried, and for a time almost seemed to be speeding along his healing process, closing the wound. I-I didn't know what to do and so I tried to administer a few of the draughts we have, things that I know have worked before, but when I checked again later on, they were still there, inside him! I-it's poison, but I don't know what it is or how to clean it!"

Ron's eyes widened in alarm. "Did they look like anything you'd seen before?"

Fleur shook her head, but Bill, studying the cloth closely, answered in the affirmative: "We've both seen it before, Ron. This is just like the time that dad was poisoned...by Nagini."

A/N: As I'm sure you can tell, I kind of cheated here with the whole dagger thing. I confess, originally I was going to have the dagger kill Dobby like in the canon, but then when I saw so many people in the comments hoping that he'd make it out okay, I decided to be nice and not do that. After all, what is a fanfiction without a little fanservice, right? That did still leave the problem of what to do with the dagger though, since it's too important a thing to write out or just ignore. So, as my solution, I put forth the following question: Who is someone who I can wound with the dagger, and yet not necessarily have to die? Well, given Bellatrix's excellent aim, the answer was obvious: the only person who can be mortally wounded and yet still survive in this universe is Harry Potter himself, so therefore it must be Harry who was stabbed. I think that ultimately, apart from being the best decision possible out of the four options I had, it's also a smart decision, and you'll soon see why.

Also, I know that this is a REALLY short chapter, and that this is already a delayed update because of the holiday season, but I know that a lot of you have been really curious to know what happened with our friends here and with the dagger, so that's to satisfy those worries. In truth, I'm quite literally swamped with work this month, as, apart from the holiday season that was not as restful as I had hoped, now I've got a lot of final projects and assignments to turn in by the end of the month and...yeah, it's just a lot to work with and I'm afraid I CANNOT handle additional writing on top of everything. So, while I did want to provide you at least a little something to assure you that the story is continuing and will keep going and all, I'm afraid that this mini-chapter that I've just now posted may be all that I can promise for this month. I know that it's not a lot at all, but until February at least, this is the way things have to be, sorry.

I hope that everyone will still continue to support this story and look forward to great things happening in future chapters coming soon, but for now please consider that all of January is a necessary hiatus. Real life and school comes first, right?

Anyway, best wishes for everyone until then, and see you in February for those who will still stick around and read-follow-favourite-review!