Author's Note:

This chapter was a bitch that outright refused to be written, despite the sheer length to it.

Just a quick warning, there's reference to starving a child in the first flashback of this chapter and if that triggers you in anyway you should avoid it. There's also torture in the series of flashbacks towards the end of the chapter that should likewise be avoided if that is something you don't wish to read.

Enjoy

Harry Potter, the Valerians, and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Chapter Four: Reunions and Debriefs

Yoko wakes in safety, the Valerians reunite in Diagon Alley, and Arcana demands answers to Yoko's state.


Severus was waiting for the Valerians at the top of the stairs.

"Are you incapable of having a simple summer?" he sneered down his nose at the Queen.

"We had eleven very peaceful ones," Tarana countered, "at least until Hagrid arrived with that damned letter. If anything, I think this is your world, not mine, causing the annual disturbances."

Severus curled a lip.

"How's Yoko?" Fallen asked.

"My experience with healing in humans is limited to the bare minimum of field dressings and what I learned as a teen," Severus told him. "Healing your kind is beyond me. What little I can tell based on his last near-death experience, he's healing well and isn't dying." He held up a vial of blood. "I'll send this to Grubbly-Plank for a more in-depth search of poisons, but nothing from your world will show up so I don't know how useful running the test will be. Regardless, it will be at least a week before it sees a lab."

"A week?"

Severus tilted his head in the vague direction of Hogwarts. "Kettleburn and Grubbly-Plank retired at the end of the last school year. She will be upset to learn about Yoko's attack. Keep us both informed when he wakes."

"Of course," Tarana told him. "And Blaise?"

"Bruises and the broken rib. I've set the rib, but it will be tender for another few hours. Again, I'm not a healer and the boy needs one. He's suffering from severe malnutrition and dehydrated, but I don't know what additional damage could have been done. I'll be leaving enough nutrient potions to last him through the week, but beyond that-"

"We'll need a healer," Fallen repeated. "I'll take care of it."

There was the flare of Floo-Fire down in the pub downstairs and Fallen's ear twitched.

He knew before Tom greeted him that Lucius had arrived and glanced at Tarana.

Tarana raised her head and moved to the stairs.

XX

"Lord Malfoy, apologies for dragging you out of bed at this hour," Tarana said, descending the stairs and interrupting the conversation Tom was having with the blond.

Lucius and his son were likely to be mirror images over the following years. Long blond hair pulled into a loose tail at the base of his neck revealed nearly the exact same sharp facial features as his son, right down to the cool blue-grey eyes that turned on Tarana.

Even though it was turning toward midnight now, Lucius looked as though he hadn't seen bed yet, dressed in tailored robes and a suit, his dragonhead cane tapped the floor sharply as he gave the Valerian Queen his full attention.

"My son?"

"Is fine," Tarana assured him. "The attack was not based in Surrey, at least nothing that Draco would have come into contact with."

Lucius nodded sharply, cutting a glance toward Tom. "A room, if you please?"

Tom gestured for them to follow him and he turned toward the very same parlour that Tarana and Fallen had left a short time earlier.

"I'd like an explanation, Your Highness," Lucius said, sitting straight as a board in the armchair that Fudge had vacated not five minutes earlier, and looking twice as regal doing so. "I was under the impression this visit was a muggle matter."

"And it was," Tarana assured him. "Details are still being revealed to us, as Yoko is still Tranced and Blaise hasn't been in a good place to recall the fine details, but at the time that we messaged you regarding Marjorie Dursley, we had no knowledge of Blaise and Yoko's situation in the Moors."

"And that situation as you currently know it?" Lucius asked with forced calm.

"Dark approached Yoko at some point shortly after the school year ended and was, obviously, turned away at the border of the Moors. In the days that followed, Dark turned his Talent on Desmond Zabini, tore the Mansion Wards from Yoko, and has had them captive, and likely tortured, ever since."

Lucius' lips pressed together, the only sign of his anger and distress.

"Zabini needs a healer, Lucius," Fallen murmured. "A discreet one."

"Severus has already been, I take it?"

Fallen nodded. "He'll likely be leaving shortly. There isn't much else he can do."

"Over the following day or so, I'd also like to possibly get in touch with a Mind Healer," Tarana told him.

Lucius' lip curled. "I would like to see my son."

"Of course," Tarana told him, "however, there is something I need your assistance with. Something I believe we have all put off for quite long enough."

Lucius glanced between the two Valerians. "Desmond Zabini."

Fallen nodded. "What little information Blaise has been able to share thus far, implies that his stepfather is likely one of Dark's Thralls. If this is the case, we cannot allow him to return to the Mansion."

"I have been reluctant to get involved in the matters of another Family, Fallen, and you are aware of my reasons."

"I am," Fallen told him, "but you must see that the circumstances have changed, Lucius."

Lucius tapped a finger on the head of his cane before standing. "I will speak with my solicitors in the morning, but if they advise me that remaining on the sidelines is in the Family's best interests, it will go no further."

"You can claim Draco as having observed the behavior if it helps," Tarana said. "Your son is one of the most observant children I've ever met, and I have been around a long time, Lord Malfoy."

Lucius accepted the flattery but was equally as aware that it was both truth and sycophancy. "If this does go forward and Mr. Zabini is pulled from his stepfather's care, are you prepared to offer up an alternative housing situation?"

Fallen and Tarana exchanged looks.

Finding a place to house Blaise and Yoko was going to be difficult, as options were just as limited now as they had been when they'd first discussed the idea with Dumbledore two years earlier.

"We'll bring the topic up with Yoko as soon as we can," Tarana assured him. "Thank you, Lord Malfoy, your assistance and discretion are greatly appreciated."

"More discretion than you've brought forward recently," Lucius pointed out. "This is twice now that the Ministry had arrived at what is rumored to be the residence of Harry Potter. I don't need to tell you both that I am far from the only person with access to this type of information."

"No," Tarana told him. "You don't. And I assure you I've been looking into alternate living arrangements for Harry just as I have for Blaise, for much the same reasons that you've just laid out."

Lucius nodded. "My son, Fallen, if you would."

Fallen nodded and turned, leading his former charge out of the parlour and up the stairs.

XX

Tarana had originally asked for two rooms when she'd sent the letter to Tom at the Leaky Cauldron, but based on the fact that the boys hadn't been more than a hand's width apart from one another unless necessary, she had decided to keep only the one they were currently in.

It was this room, room eleven, that Fallen led Lucius to just as a strangled cry echoed down the hall.

Fallen moved easily into a lope that Lucius was hard-pressed to keep up with without running and came into the room as Draco was pressing his forehead to Blaise's own, Harry wrapped around the dark-skinned teen from behind and the three were swaying, Draco and Harry ignoring the tears that streamed down Blaise's face.

Lucius paused in the doorway; lips pressed into a thin line.

'Despite all that he's been taught, Draco is by far the caretaker of the group of friends. The fixer if you will,' Fallen told the blond, shifting from paw to paw restlessly.

Lucius' lip curled, and though Fallen could both sense and smell the displeasure from his former charge, Lucius said nothing until Blaise had calmed down.

A common misconception regarding the passing of the Bond from one family member to the next is that the previous one is completely eradicated to do so.

Though much of the Bond is lost, the Bond itself ties the Valerian and their charge too closely together to be completely erased when it is broken to be recreated in the child they take on at eleven.

Lucius and Fallen could still feel the emotions of one another, and, in an extremely dire situation that, for the Malfoy family, had only happened twice in all the centuries that they'd been bonded to the General, could communicate emergency messages down the Bond that allowed the human to speak telepathically with the Valerian.

Not that the two really needed it.

With Lucius serving a master that was Bonded, at least in part, to the Valerian Traitor, Fallen spent a great deal of those years closing off the Bond he had to his own charge, pretending that said servitude didn't exist as best he was able, so he wouldn't feel the constant need to murder his then charge.

To compensate, Fallen had learned to read Lucius without it, a trait that certainly helped him now.

The three teens on the bed were, at least consciously, oblivious to Fallen and Lucius' presence until Harry raised his head from Blaise's shoulder.

The brunette's expression drifted through a myriad of emotions before it settled onto a blank one with ice-green eyes.

Lucius' own narrowed on the teen but gave Draco his full attention when his son scrambled off the bed to face his father.

"Father!"

"Draco," Lucius murmured warmly. "You and I need to speak," he glanced over Harry, who had tightened his grip on the obviously shaky Zabini Heir and refused to let the other off the bed. "Privately."

Draco glanced at his guardian. "I don't want to leave them alone," he told the wolf.

'You will have this conversation, Draco,' Fallen told him. 'He is your father, he is worried, and he has questions. It isn't your job to watch over Blaise, Harry, and Yoko. Tarana will do that for us.'

As though summoned, the panther slipped behind Lucius and dropped heavily beneath the table that housed the Assassin's covered form.

Her gaze drifted over the two teens on the bed, glanced between Draco and Fallen, then she settled down as though to rest where she lay.

"Draco."

Draco's lips pressed together but, after wiping his hand down the side of his trousers, he followed his father from the room.

XX

Lucius didn't need to say a word when he and Draco were settled behind the closed doors of the parlour again, Draco simply launched into the story from the moment he'd left the Manor.

He shared with his father his opinions on Harry's muggle relatives, including Marge Dursley, the way they spoke to and about Harry ("Did you know that they told Harry that his parents died in a car crash? I don't know what it is, but it sounded mundane. Like that would kill a witch or wizard."), and the things that Harry was forced to do for them ("He cooks, and he cleans, Father. Like a House Elf.")

He told Lucius of their frequent trips outside the house ("Which is much, much smaller than the Manor, Father, I can't even believe that someone of Harry's status lives there.") to escape Marge and her filthy dog ("And she wanted us to breed one of the filthy mongrels with Fallen, to contaminate Fallen's pureblood."-"I'd like to point out, Draco, that I'm perfectly capable of choosing who I fuck regardless of the skin I wear."-"Sorry.")

Lucius remained a silent listener throughout the entire story, including Draco's point of view of Blaise and Yoko's arrival in Surrey.

"There was so much blood, Father," Draco murmured, looking at his hands and rubbing one of his knuckles as though the thick red liquid was still there. "His guts were spilling out onto the ground and I-"

"You did more than I should ever have asked of you," Fallen told him regretfully. "All I could think of at the time was that the Trance would fail if his intestines were outside his body and I refused, after last year, to lose him. It was nothing that I should have asked of a thirteen-year-old, however."

Draco shrugged but didn't look at the wolf. "He's my friend." He said simply.

"Thank you, Draco, for keeping him alive," Fallen told him, pulling the feeling from the bottom of his heart to share.

Draco's cheeks flushed slightly, because the sheer depth of Fallen's gratitude was nearly painful to feel, mixed as it was with his regret for having been unable to do so himself.

"While I am proud of the level head you've kept," Lucius told Draco, "you will, of course, be returning with me to the Manor tonight. I won't be risking your safety if Dark or his Thrall arrives to reclaim Blaise."

"No," Draco said evenly. "Unless you plan to bring both Harry and Blaise with us."

"Your mother is at the Manor," Lucius told him. "Lord Potter will be unwelcome."

"Then I stay here with them," Draco said firmly. "I can't leave Harry to be the only one to help Blaise through his nightmares."

"Neither of you should be doing such a thing," Lucius countered evenly, surprised that he was even arguing about this with his son. "That is a job for Fallen and Her Highness."

"I'm afraid that in this case, I will be putting my paw down. Draco will not return to the Manor so long as Narcissa is in residence without me. I will not be returning to the Manor until Yoko has awakened and I can assess how much mental trauma he has undergone over the last several months under Dark and his Thrall's care." Fallen told them both.

"He is my son, Fallen," Lucius said viciously. "His safety takes precedence over Yoko and for that I am sorry."

"Draco is safest here, where Tarana and I can watch over him," Fallen returned, not rising to Lucius' rare show of temper.

"She lost, Fallen."

"She planned to," Fallen sneered in return. "And more than that, she didn't lose to Dark, she lost to the King, who might I remind you was the second greatest strategist on Valeria, second only to his brother-in-law. Dark no longer has a second Valerian to turn against the Collective and he will not find Draco in Muggle London where there is no one to understand the battle we would be facing. Here, it is clear who the threat is, and your kind has rallied to Tarana in the past."

"That was centuries ago. Mortals are cowards in this age. You cannot expect them to do so again," Lucius said, though his argument was waning.

"Your feelings on your own kind are noted," Fallen smirked. "For Draco's safety, I will pull rank on this. He is not returning to Malfoy Manor while Narcissa resides there. Send her elsewhere and I will gladly return him home."

"Fallen!"

Lucius held up a hand to silence his son, staring at the wolf with narrowed blue eyes. "You would risk his safety with Dark because of Narcissa's condition?"

"I would honestly prefer neither," Fallen told him. "But I will not leave Yoko until I'm sure he's recovered, but I do not trust Narcissa to leave him be in my absence and you will have other things to do than keep watch on your thirteen-year-old son twenty-four-seven until I can return."

Lucius was clearly not pleased with the wolf's logic but likewise couldn't argue it. Narcissa's battle with her family's mental affliction was only getting worse as years went on and she was likely to turn her wand on Draco, though she didn't often see Fallen when she did so, whether he was physically present or not.

"Go gather your trunk, Draco," he told his son without looking away from the wolf. "I will return with your school trunk in the morning. Pray Yoko wakes soon, Fallen, for come the weekend, my son will be returning home."

Draco rushed from the room before his father could change his mind.

"You seem to be under the impression that I will be doing something in addition to what Tarana has asked of me."

"There's something that I need information on, and I need it done without her knowledge," Fallen told him. "The investigation into Sirius Black's escape. I need to know who's running it and the manhunt the Ministry has orchestrated."

"And given that you've just irritated me you expect me to do you this favor?" Lucius asked him, a sneer in his tone.

"I do," Fallen told him. "Because Cornelius believes that Harry is Black's target. Tarana doesn't appear to be taking this very seriously, given Black's connection not only to James Potter but to Ebony. You can't tell me that if he comes after Harry, that you believe that Draco will leave it alone."

Lucius frowned. "The Ministry has been keeping the nature of Black's escape, how it was done, and why, a secret since the breakout. I can't imagine that anyone would be very forthcoming about that information to an accused Death Eater."

"Any help or information you can get me would be appreciated," Fallen assured him. "Ebony is a dangerous opponent to attempt to outmaneuver and if Tarana will not bring her ak-esh to task, then I will need all the aid I can acquire as quickly as I can get it."

"I will do this if you do something for me in return," Lucius told him.

"Of course," Fallen said.

"I don't like the…obsession my son has given to Harry Potter. When I tasked him with getting close to him, this was not what I had in mind. Fix it."

Fallen glanced at the door.

"Of course," he said evenly, already planning ways he could safely pull Draco's growing obsessive attention away from Harry, without severing the friendship the two shared. "I ask for your patience. It will be a fine line to walk, reminding him that he cannot give his entire being to Harry."

"I trust that you will do it correctly."

Fallen bowed his head. "I've taught him to think for himself his entire life. I don't doubt that I can certainly out-stubborn your son."

Lucius smiled mirthlessly.

XX

Hours turned into days and Yoko still didn't wake.

Blaise's dreams didn't get any easier, likely because Yoko wasn't waking, and Tarana had been forced to Walk with him when Tom had been forced to cast a Silencing Charm on the bed because the teen's screaming had woken half the floor every night and the room was simply too big to cast and maintain all night.

Two years previous, Tarana had Walked through Blaise's mind after he had a panic attack and had witnessed the Landscape his own mind created when he 'went away' during beatings with his stepfather.

It was this Landscape that she used now, though she Shaped a thing or two when she entered it.

Though her current form was that of a panther, her first skin, her true skin as far as she was concerned, was of a humanoid 'elf' as Harry had called her for most of his childhood. Spending hours in Blaise's 'away place', a large meadow that she is certain came from Valeria in some way, wasn't quite as comfortable for her as it was for the teen who it was literally built to protect and comfort.

And then, of course, there was the picnic she'd Shaped for Blaise simply so the boy could claim to have participated in one, even though the food wasn't real and the two of them were the only ones to 'attend' it.

The one thing she never did, however, no matter how often Blaise asked for it, was Shape the Valerian Assassin regardless of the skin.

She claimed it would be bad luck and promised to Shape the Assassin when he finally woke.

It wasn't all peace and picnics, of course.

Blaise had gone through something terribly traumatic and though he wouldn't tell Tarana what had happened to him, not yet anyway, he did spend a great deal of time crying into her chest, wrapped firmly in the arms of the Valerian Queen while she whispered reassurances in his ear.

XX

By the second day, when it was clear that Yoko wasn't going to wake and there was nothing more that Harry or Draco could do for their friend, Fallen sent them into Diagon Alley to slowly begin replacing the things that Blaise had been forced to leave behind at the Mansion, clothes, school supplies, and the like.

Lucius had returned that morning and, after reminding Fallen of his promise to remind Draco that he was a person and not a shadow, added a stipulation to his allowing Draco to remain at the Leaky Cauldron.

He forbids Draco from having such a hands-on approach to Blaise's recovery as what he'd walked in on when he had arrived the night before.

Draco had protested, but his father was firm.

Draco was to leave Blaise's mental and physical recovery in the hands of adults.

Fallen was, admittedly, less firm in enforcing that edict than he probably should have been, given that he was supposed to be breaking Draco of this drive to fix everything at serious cost to his sense of self, whether he knew that he was doing it or not.

XX

While Tarana spent her nights with Blaise, Fallen did the same with the days.

Blaise had woken the day after their arrival in London, after a night filled with no less than seven night terrors, three noise complaints, with a deep sense of guilt for both and a plan to be 'less of a hassle'.

Fallen recognized the forced apathy for what it was and ruthlessly dragged him out of it daily, reminding him that pretending that nothing was bothering him, that nothing could hurt him, was only going to make those night terrors worse.

The apathy he'd attempted to use as a shield became doubly useless when Tarana began to Walk with him, but his fear grew daily.

They were now closing in on a week at the Leaky Cauldron, and Yoko still hadn't woken.

XX

When Yoko finally did wake, it was at half-past two in the morning and it was violent.

He came out of the Trance unaware of anything that had happened between the time he'd entered it and waking, and it was rather unsurprising that he promptly rolled himself off the table and went straight for Fallen's carotid with his fangs.

Before Yoko could do any serious damage to anyone, be it himself or one of the children, Fallen tapped his Element and threw the fox from his back, ignoring the blood pooling on the floor beneath him to corral the half-feral fox under the table he had just spent the last week Tranced on.

'You're out, Yoko,' he told the Assassin, keeping himself well between the now wide-awake Harry and Draco, Blaise and Tarana only kept under by Tarana's Talent. 'Safe in Diagon Alley with Tarana and I. You're out, beloved.'

Yoko yowled viciously, thrashing against the wall and the Wind that kept him there.

Fire slipped around the edges of Fallen's barrier, signaling Tarana's return to wakefulness, further penning the fox safely away from the humans.

Fallen inched closer to Yoko, continuing a steady reassurance that he was free and in safe hands.

"Fallen," were the first words out of Yoko's mouth in almost a week.

Nearly as one, Tarana and Fallen released their Elements, just in time for Fallen to slip beneath the table and curl himself around Yoko.

The fox, to the horror of the children in the room, shattered, curling himself even tighter and sobbing into Fallen's chest.

Fallen tucked his head over Yoko's body as best he could, burying the fox beneath his larger form, a low rumble coming from his chest in an attempt to soothe him.

Tarana scrambled to her paws. "Out. All of you," she ordered, not unkindly. "This is nothing he would want you to see."

Even Blaise, though he was the most reluctant to leave, was gently, but firmly, ushered out of the room.

In the bar, while waiting for Tom to bring them a midnight snack of hot chocolate, Tarana kept watch as the boys tried to hide how unsettled Yoko's tears had been, probably in part because the skin he wore was supposed to be unable to produce them.

In all the years that each had dealt with their respective Valerians, this was the first time they'd ever seen one of them break.

It was a long time before Harry broke the silence.

"Is he going to be okay?"

Tarana looked up at the children, each drawn and fearful having watched Yoko's tearful awakening, particularly when there had been no sign of that fear and relief when he'd woken from his actual near-death experience at the end of the school year a few months ago.

"It will take time," she told them. "But yes, eventually Yoko will recover." The Queen frowned, turning away from the table. "Unfortunately, this is not the first time that Yoko has been tortured, both for the Collective and before he joined it. Systematic torture is simply something that no one ever gets used to."

XX

It came as no surprise to Fallen that Yoko didn't want to spend any time inside after he'd woken.

The first outing was an unmitigated disaster, with Blaise suffering from two panic attacks in the first twenty minutes, pulling Yoko down into a vicious protective rage.

Yoko had apologized and tried to turn back to the inn but Fallen and Blaise both had disagreed.

'You need this, Fox,' Fallen told him. 'You've been trapped inside for months with little to no contact with your Element.'

'But Blaise-'

'I can take him back to the Leaky Cauldron on my own,' Tarana injected. 'He may not be ready to see the outside world again without seeing threats, but Fallen's right, you need to be outside, where you know you're at your strongest and no longer chained.'

Yoko looked at Blaise, quivering between Harry and Draco.

'I can do this tonight,' Yoko hedged.

'Draco and I are returning the Manor tonight,' Fallen reminded him. 'And you probably haven't seen the sun in months. Your wellbeing is as important to me as his is to you. Let us help you.' He glanced over his shoulder at Tarana. 'Think of it as partial repayment for how long you and I watched over Harry last year.'

Yoko snorted, though there was little emotion behind it, the fox too weary to even try for his usual cheerful mentality.

"Come, Blaise," Tarana said, already anticipating the capitulation from the fox. "You and I will return to the Cauldron. You can work on that Potions essay you need to rewrite."

It said a great deal that the prospect of homework was a better idea than walking around Diagon Alley.

He knelt to hug the fox tightly. "I'll be better tomorrow," he promised.

Yoko rubbed his cheek against Blaise's but knew better than to accept that promise.

Neither one of them was going to be okay for a long time.

XX

As predicted, the second time out didn't go much better, though Blaise did manage to remain out with the rest of them.

This could also have been because Fallen and Draco were still at Malfoy Manor, and weren't expected to return until later that evening.

Tarana was bitten twice that afternoon, putting herself between Yoko's lightning-fast reactions to someone suddenly tooclose and the bystander that never even noticed the threat she'd taken for them.

Yoko was a mess.

'I'm sorry,' he whined, curled up tightly against the panther's larger bulk as Blaise and Harry ate ice cream at a table that had been shoved up against the ice cream shop's brick wall. 'I swear I didn't mean it.'

'Yoko,' Tarana purred, nuzzling the fox's neck until he was practically enfolded in the panther's body. 'You were tortured. Tortured in the name of the Crown. I will take this and more from you, given what you must have taken.'

The Queen was, admittedly, rather worried about her friend.

It was nearly three days in, and Yoko didn't appear ready to speak about why Dark had targeted him and Blaise for hostage-taking and torture.

She hoped that he'd feel comfortable sharing soon because the school year was approaching, and students would be arriving at Diagon Alley.

The Weasleys would be arriving.

And Arcana would be with them.

XX

Two weeks had passed since Yoko had woken in the room at the Leaky Cauldron and there was still no sign that the fox was prepared to share what had happened to him at the Mansion in the Moors.

Their greatest insight had actually come from Blaise, who had woken, shaking and terrified, from a nightmare the only night of the week that Tarana had decided that he needed to use to try and deal with the trauma he'd faced in his home.

"He didn't take him immediately," Blaise whispered into the dark. "Yoko fought and got us to my room, but he didn't stay there with me. He…he put up Wards or protections or something, then I could hear him and Dark fighting outside." Blaise swallowed wetly. "He never came back."

There was silence in the room, no one quite sure what to say, and it was Blaise again who broke it, mumbling into Tarana's fur. "Dark did though. They broke through my door a while later."

\/\/\/

Blaise had known they were coming and was already pressed into the corner when the door finally exploded under the spells and power Desmond turned against the protections Yoko had tried to give his charge.

Despite it being Desmond that had blown the door to pieces, he had remained in the hallway and watched with that familiar glint of hate in his eyes as Dark had circled the room, casually pawing at this or that, apparently at random, humming thoughtfully at one thing, only to scoff at another.

It seemed like forever until the Traitor had turned to look at the quivering teen pressed into the corner of the room, wand shivering where it was uselessly pointed at the floor.

The black wolf had grinned with no pleasure or humor.

"Yoko is maintaining a rather ridiculously difficult stance in what I've asked of him," Dark had told him. "Which is forcing my hand, you understand. A new tactic must be tried."

Desmond had finally stepped into the room, and Blaise had immediately regretted pinning himself into the corner, as it had made it impossible to duck around the wolf or his Thrall.

Desmond wasn't a physically imposing man, for all that he was the source of his stepson's worst nightmares (and given what he'd seen since starting Hogwarts that said a great deal), and thus when Blaise had immediately started to struggle he had nearly lost his grip.

None too pleased, he had backhanded the teen across the face and had shoved him hard enough against the wall that Blaise's vision swam.

"Don't be a fool, boy," Desmond had sneered, grabbing the boy by the hair and hauling him, stumbling, back to his feet.

"Please," Blaise had whimpered, his stomach churning as his vision continued to swim, he hadn't been sure if it was because it had been days since he'd last eaten anything, or if it had been the rancid scent of Yoko's blood, which sprayed the hallway immediately outside his room and then trailed down the hall.

Flies flickered in areas where the humidity of the Moors had already drawn them to the congealing blood that neither Desmond nor Dark had tried to clean.

It said a great deal that it had resisted the two house eves that the Zabini's still employed.

Blaise had distantly wondered if it was the Mansion itself that refused to release the evidence of Desmond's betrayal.

He had dry-heaved, unintentionally pulling Desmond to a stop, which only infuriated the man further and he had hauled on his hair again, causing the strands to pull painfully.

"Stop fighting the inevitable, boy," Dark had sneered.

Blaise had been a shivering mess and it only had a little to do with the concussion he had, when he had been thrown through the half-open door to his mother's - and it would always be his mother's - study.

His entire side had been immediately coated in something thick and cool, with a consistency he was, unfortunately, very familiar with.

Blood.

Yoko's blood.

He had promptly been sick, further adding to the mess on the carpet, though it was all bile and nothing of real substance.

"Useless brat," Desmond had grunted, hauling him up and out of the mess, throwing him roughly onto the couch by the fire. "Can't even bloody stand."

Like a lodestone, Blaise's attention had been immediately drawn to the corner where no less than three chains had been anchored into the walls.

Two had been linked through a spiked collar barely sixty centimeters in length and giving no quarter to the creature it contained.

The third had been set higher and had a longer chain, but it was linked through the end of a metal muzzle and kept Yoko's head held high enough off the ground to be uncomfortable, and completely unable to so much as toss his head and leaving his throat wide open if Dark had planned to tear it out. Blood dripped from the edges of the muzzle, telling Blaise that it had clearly been fastened too tightly.

It had said a great deal about the threat that both Desmond and Dark found the Valerian Assassin, when even as chained as he was, that neither stepped within striking distance.

Distance, however, had never mattered to Yoko, and his eyes had bled demon-black as he tapped his Element.

His back had been layered in the blue-black of his power and something had begun to grow.

"Crucio," Desmond had spat.

The Torture Curse had lashed through the air, shattering Yoko's concentration as he yowled his agony, the chains creating a cacophony of noise as he writhed.

Dark had chuckled, finally stepping up alongside the thrashing fox, and licking a strip up his blood-soaked muzzle.

Even in pain and in chains, Yoko had instinctively tried to snap his fangs at the wolf beside him. The chains connected to the muzzle rattled and the ones attached to the collar jerked, but all held fast, keeping him from moving more than a few centimeters at best.

Desmond's spell had lapsed, or Yoko, a thief and a master Weaver, cut it (Blaise's odds were on Yoko, given the frown on Desmond's face).

Dark had smirked. "Still so strong, Yoko," he told the Assassin, but the Torture Curse was over, and he wisely stepped away from his captive. "You have forced my hand, Assassin," he told him, sitting beside the desk as Desmond ducked down and pulled a massive Urn, easily two or three times the size of Blaise's head, from the space beneath it and put it on the edge closest to the Traitor.

Blaise wished he could remember the details of the Urn, but he was so focused on his guardian that he barely registered that it was there.

Yoko, however, had sneered at the sight of it, before turning his attention determinedly away from it and the other occupants of the room, Blaise included.

"I've brought your human so he can see how heartless you're going to be about this," Dark had said, leaning forward with a vicious smirk. "See, I want my Urn opened and the only one with the power to do that these days is you." He had sneered, as though the thought itself was offensive. "How long have we sat in this world, Assassin, relying on humans, weak and pathetic as they are, to ground us out of the Ether? What have you learned since your arrival? Did you know that the mundane can only go a matter of weeks without food, surviving on water alone? I've rarely had the chance to test how long someone with a substantial magical core could last, and never with any semblance of finality. They always give me what I want before I can get an answer."

Yoko had sneered. 'And you've never simply denied them what you've kept from them afterward, have you?'

Dark had snickered. "We both know better, Assassin."

'I have been tortured by agents of yours in the past, Dark, and I've outlasted them. I will outlast you.' Yoko had told him, closing his eyes as though that was the end of it.

"And the mortal? Will he outlast me?"

Blaise's eyes had widened, and he looked terrified at Yoko, shaking his head.

'He is stronger than you give him credit for,' Yoko had said simply.

"Let's find out, shall we? For every day that you resist me, he will be given a single glass of water to survive on. Perhaps he will be begging for you to give in. How does that sound to you?"

Yoko had turned his attention to Blaise for the first time since the teen had been forced to enter.

'You know I love you, sprite,' Yoko had said to him, regretfully. 'I would do near anything for you, and even more to secure your continued safety and wellbeing. But securing your safety now, by unsealing the Kristavi Urn, will only put you in far, far greater danger when it's broken.'

There had been too much emotion in Yoko's voice for it to have been a general telepathic projection, so Blaise had known that those words had been meant for him and him alone.

"And of course, because I'm aware that time is of the essence, if you do manage to last more than a week or so, Desmond's blade will, unfortunately, find its way into human flesh. Take him downstairs. No need to tempt fate any further now that those pesky protections of Yoko's are finally obliterated."

Blaise had been crying, he knew he was, when Desmond grabbed him by the arm and forced him from the couch again.

Yoko apologized, over and over, until Blaise couldn't hear him anymore. The distance between one prison and the other too great.

/\/\/\

"The Mansion, it doesn't really have dungeons," Blaise whispered, hiccupping as his breath came unevenly, but no one could find it in them to stop the stream of words coming from the teen. "More like cells in the basement. I was there for…a long time, I think. Just the water at first, then a dish of food, but I don't know what Yoko did to earn it. I," he sobbed. "I threw it up. I tried; Yoko had done something bad so that I could get it. Something that he didn't want to, and I couldn't even eat it."

Yoko was in tears, pinned beneath Fallen's weight and burying his face in Tarana's side, blacking out the world.

'You did exactly what you needed to do, Yoko,' Fallen assured him, voice tight with emotion and banked hate. 'If you had cracked the Urn, Dark would have punished you for holding out. He would have sacrificed Blaise first so you could witness what he turned into. There is strength in knowing that and holding out against his pain.'

Yoko choked. 'How strong can I possibly be? My charge was starved. Beaten. Because I chose the Crown over my Bonded.'

Tarana pulled away abruptly, turning so burning blue eyes met the dull green of her best friend. Her Assassin.

"And when did you make that choice?" she demanded sharply, causing a low growl in Fallen that drew the attention of the children. "You are my Assassin, Yoko," she growled, ignoring Fallen. "You weigh odds and options against the choices of those around you daily. There was never a choice between the Collective or Blaise. If opening that accursed Urn would have secured you Blaise's safety, you would have opened in in a heartbeat or less. The threat of what lies within it was stronger than any threat Dark could have possibly levied against either of you." She shook her head, and none too gently used it to shove Yoko's own. "As grateful as I am that the Urn remains intact, Yoko, the fact that you and Blaise survived it. Are in safety again, mean so much more to me. And none of that could have been possible if you had acted any differently than you did."

It went unspoken between the three Valerians, that the fate Blaise would have suffered, possessed by one of the parasitic creatures contained within the Urn, was for worse than any beating or starvation he had suffered in his entire life.

Yoko turned away from her, but Tarana knew she had been heard, the seed of her logic planted. Fallen would, she was sure, continue to nurse and nourish it until Yoko could believe it himself in full.

She left the two to themselves, turning her attention to comforting the three teens curled together like pups on one of the beds.

XX

Good news came at the beginning of their third week of healing and 'exile'.

Lucius had, as promised, been in contact with his solicitors and they had immediately begun to search laws and rules that would allow him to legally stand in Blaise's defense against his stepfather.

It had been a slow-going process, because in the eyes of the Wizarding World, the male of the house, the Head of House, essentially ran things however they desired, in so long as it didn't interfere with the laws set in place by the Ministry.

Like any other governing body and law, there were loopholes to be used, and the Malfoy solicitors were well paid to know those loopholes well.

Fallen received his letter that Tuesday, too much tension of the table the group sat around in the Leaky Cauldron.

"Well?" Draco demanded.

Fallen narrowed his eyes on the teen. "Excuse me?"

Draco didn't outwardly flinch, but it was a near thing. "Does he have to go back?" he asked, moderating his tone according to the warning he'd received.

"Long term, we won't know that," Fallen told them, pushing the note toward Tarana and Yoko, the fox safely ensconced beneath the table itself and surrounded on all sides by his allies, regardless of age. "Lucius and Burrows have, however, filed, and got approved, an immediate motion that, until the end of the proceedings, which haven't had a date set yet, and he has been removed from Desmond Zabini's care. Though he stands in as Lord, Zabini can't remove you from any property, wills, or future titles you may or may not gain in the future until the legal proceedings are through."

Tarana smirked. "So, no pressure but the most ruthless wizarding solicitors in the business need to win?"

Fallen's grin was very unkind.

Blaise lay his head on the table, the weight of possibly needing to return to the Mansion, which he hadn't even realized was there, lifting from him with more relief than he could adequately put into words.

Draco and Harry each rubbed the shoulder closest to them, offering quiet support and unspoken congratulations.

Yoko, however, was only half as pleased and Tarana cornered him before they entered the Alley for the day.

"You didn't appear as pleased as I thought you'd be," she said, sitting in the doorway and preventing the fox from following the others in.

She and Yoko ignored Fallen urging the three teens further into Diagon Alley and away from the Queen and Assassin's private conversation.

"I have nowhere to bring him," Yoko admitted. "I'm glad that he is out of the Mansion, away from Desmond, but the problem we had at the beginning still remains. He has nowhere else to go."

"And we have months to figure that out, Yoko," Tarana reminded him. "School begins in less than a week, he will have a home at Hogwarts until then and it leaves us with nine months to find a place to bring the boys."

Yoko blinked at her. "Boys?"

Tarana shifted. "I would be lying if I told you that I hadn't been thinking of keeping Harry out of the Dursley's home next summer," she admitted. "Vernon has been getting progressively more and more unstable. Violence seems to be in his near future, and I would rather that not be around my charge. The situation you face, however, is similar. Neither of us has anywhere to bring them. But as Fallen has tapped Lucius and the Burrows Law firm, I have begun to reach out to those in charge of Harry's future fortune. Arcana has begun to feel out the state of the Weasley and Prewitt assets. The Valerians, all of us, have begun to tap our resources, Yoko. You're not alone. We will figure this out."

Yoko sagged so suddenly that it was only Tarana's swift lunge forward that prevented him from cracking his chin on the cobblestone ground.

"What are we going to do, Tarana?"

Her massive paw wrapped around the fox and drew him into her belly, hooking her head over his smaller shoulder.

"Everything," Tarana promised viciously.

XX

Tarana and Yoko found their charges, Fallen, and Draco in the Apothecary with another of the Gryffindors of their year, Neville Longbottom.

Though he wasn't part of the 'core' group of friends, not yet anyway, Neville was still considered a friend to nearly all of them, though none were as close to him as Blaise was. Therefore it was no surprise that when the two Valerians stepped into the shop, Blaise was all but leaning on his best friend.

Neville was a rather heavyset, though not overweight, child. He had grown several inches, not unlike Draco, and it had stretched out his form, distributing the weight differently and making it appear as though he'd lost some of it. His dark brown hair was of a similar length to Draco's own now, though it was closer to Harry's disorganized mess than the other pureblood's carefully maintained appearance.

"Good morning, Neville," Tarana greeted him pleasantly. "Shopping for the school year?"

Neville nodded, smiling brightly at the Queen, hazel eyes twinkling delightedly at having found them all.

Of the group of friends, human and Valerian, only Neville had openly and with no question, welcomed Tarana back even after it had been revealed that she had quite willingly not returned to inform the others that she was alive.

"Morning, Yoko," Neville greeted, waving with his free hand.

"Morning," Yoko said, partially distracted by the odd sense of relief that was coming from his charge. "Summer going well?"

"Better than yours and Blaise's, I think," Neville replied. "Bad one?"

"The worst," Fallen growled, warning the teen not to say anymore where they could potentially be overheard.

"What were you even doing?" Draco asked, looking at Neville skeptically.

It was common knowledge that Neville was one of the worst brewers at Hogwarts, only in part because of the deep, and very real, fear that the Gryffindor had of Severus Snape, and Snape's subsequent dislike of the 'idiot' in his class.

Neville blushed. "I wrote out a list of things I needed for Potions this year, but I lost it."

Draco rolled his eyes. "Seriously," he muttered scathingly under his breath.

"I was just going to get a bit of everything," Neville said defensively, face getting even redder.

"Except you don't know anything about what you're looking at," Draco sneered.

His cruel tone and remarks, however, meant very little when Severus' best student turned around and promptly fired off a list of ingredients rapidly and with little care as to whether Neville might actually need them, at the shopkeeper behind the counter.

Neville smiled and Harry shook his head.

"Do you have much left to get?" Harry asked Neville. "We've been here for weeks and have all our stuff. We could go around with you if you like."

He looked pointedly at Blaise, who was leaning 'casually' on Neville while he, quite obviously, spoke to Yoko through their bond.

"I-uh-I'm here with my Gran. She's got a couple of errands to run and I told her I'd be done by one."

Blaise blinked at his friend. "That's in two and a half hours."

"Remember who you're talking to," Draco shot over his shoulder. "Longbottom's probably got the right of it; he'll never be done in that time." He looked at Fallen and Tarana by the doorway, their larger frames making it difficult for them to move farther than that with the shop as packed with students and their families as it was. "Do you think we'll have time for that pitstop at Quality Quidditch?"

Neville smiled.

XX

With Harry and Draco pretty much taking over Neville's school shopping, allowing Blaise and Neville time to share their summer experiences - well, for Neville to share his experiences, as any time Neville pushed for how Blaise's stay with his stepfather had gone this summer, was met with a snarl from Fallen that got progressively louder every time he needed to make it.

It was a little after noon when the teens and the Valerians wandered back into the Leaky Cauldron for lunch.

Tarana requested a private parlour for the boys, figuring that Neville, who clearly realized that something had happened, something worse than normal, during Blaise's stay at the Mansion, wasn't going to keep himself held back for much longer.

Blaise gave him the basics, pretty much what everyone else already knew.

That he and Yoko had been taken hostage at the Mansion by Dark, that Yoko had been tortured, and Blaise had been starved.

It was the most open and most blunt that he'd been about his ordeal since he'd appeared in Surrey.

Neville's hand hovered over Blaise's wrist until something in his friend told him that it was okay to touch, and it had grounded the dark-skinned teen for most of the very short story.

"He's not going back, right? If his stepdad-" Blaise flinched. "-is a Thrall then he can't be forced to go back, can he?"

"Lord Malfoy is taking legal action against the Zabini Estate, particularly in getting Blaise partially emancipated. As of this morning, he does not need to return to the Mansion or Desmond's care."

"Good," Neville said with uncharacteristic venom.

"Only in the short term," Draco pointed out absently, stabbing a potato. "He obviously stays at Hogwarts during the school year, but even by our laws he's too young to stay by himself."

"Draco," Fallen snapped.

Draco blinked, looking up from his food, before promptly grimacing. "Blaise-"

"There are possibilities, though they'll take time to put into effect," Tarana assured the pale teen. "Under no circumstances will you be returning to the Mansion, even if we need to put you up here with Tom as your summer guardian."

It went unspoken between the Valerians that it wasn't a realistic plan. Tom, after all, had a business to run, and he couldn't do so while looking out for Blaise, even if it was only in an abstract sense, since Yoko would be the one to actually do the 'raising'.

"More importantly," Fallen said, "it's highly unlikely that Desmond Zabini will be able to hold anything once Burrows is done with him. He'll be lucky to have the clothes on his back by the time Lucius is through with him."

"But that would only work if Desmond doesn't have friends on the Wizengamot, wouldn't it? I mean, it's really rare that a pureblood be removed from their family, even at the expense of another pureblood family's request."

"Burrows is a rather…ah, ruthless solicitor," Tarana said, wincing at the understatement.

Solomon Burrows was the by her standards, the most dangerous member of the wizarding bar, because of how many dark practitioners he had gotten off since he'd begun to practice, shortly after the fall of Grindelwald from power and prestige.

It certainly helped that there had only been a few cases that he had lost - which could all be counted on one hand - and there were rumors regarding several of those that had come close, but then firmly landed in his and his clients' favor.

"I know someone who might be able to help," Neville insisted.

Tarana tilted her head. "Oh?"

"Gran was on the Wizengamot for years, and she taught a lot of them the ins and outs of it. I'm sure she can get plenty of people who wouldn't normally vote with Lucius Malfoy, to do so if she thought the cause was worthy enough. I can ask her to talk to them."

"I have a better idea," Tarana said, gathering her paws and meeting Neville's gaze. "Reintroduce me to your grandmother."

Yoko raised his head from his paws, blinking up at the Queen.

He recognized that tone.

The Shadow Queen had a plan.

XX

Despite the group having left the Leaky Cauldron in search of Augusta Longbottom at Tarana's insistence, she stopped them from going past Florean Fortescue's ice cream shop and settled them all on the patio.

Apparently by happenstance, Augusta found them.

"Neville Longbottom!" the stern-faced woman called, drawing attention up and down the street.

The first sign of black or red, however, encouraged others to turn away from whatever spectacle might be happening around the Third-Year Gryffindor and his grandmother, because it had been pretty clear to the regulars of Diagon Alley that neither Tarana nor Fallen were in any particular giving mood over the last couple weeks, and no one wanted to risk being caught paying too much attention.

"I left you with one job!" Augusta said sharply as she stormed through the patio traffic toward the table where Neville was jumping to his feet, nearly upending Harry's ice cream into his lap when he accidentally bumped the table. "Instead, I find you with these friends, of yours." The look she turned on Draco made it very clear that 'friends' wasn't quite the word she wanted to use, but custom and politeness dictated she do so.

Neville's apology to Harry and his greeting to his grandmother became a single jumbled mess as it came out of his mouth, turning into nonsense.

At the same moment, Fallen rumbled low in his throat.

"We're done, actually, Mrs. Longbottom," Harry interrupted, smiling brightly at her. "We just finished lunch up at the Leaky Cauldron and left Neville's school shopping up at the room we're renting there."

Augusta reared back as though Harry had slapped her, which confused Harry because he didn't think he'd been rude at all.

As Augusta's expression turned rather sour, Tarana pushed herself to her paws and came around the table.

"Madam Longbottom," she greeted evenly, tail flicking in a silent warning that whatever words came next from the tall, thin older witch, it better be something flattering. "I'm glad to have found you. I was wondering if you and I could take a walk, or perhaps find somewhere a little more private to discuss a rather ah, sensitive topic."

Augusta was not unfamiliar with Tarana or vice versa.

Tarana had been responsible for several of the rather successful shadow strikes of not only the war against Voldemort but also against the Dark Lord that came before him, though she'd been less involved in the fight to deter Grindelwald than she was in the one against the one that, eventually, killed her then-charge and his wife.

Augusta, in turn, was a no-nonsense witch of a particular Age, where a witch with her level of power, both magical and political, was unusual and she'd needed to do a great deal to keep that level of political gain. She also had standards that were high enough that, even as Queen, Tarana wasn't often sure if she was capable of meeting, let alone her thirteen-year-old grandson.

Tarana had long since left the Wizarding World, self-evicting herself to take care of Harry, when the attack on her son and his wife had been performed by a fanatic of Voldemort's, but she understood the emotional blow the witch had taken, and likely better than most others, understood why she had closed herself off as she had afterward.

That didn't mean she was all that fond of the standards she was holding Neville to and if this conversation allowed her to give the boy a few minutes' reprieve then she'd take that win in addition to the one she planned to take in the forward momentum of protecting Blaise.

Augusta, without looking at her grandson, sharply told him, "Be ready when I return," before gesturing the arm ladened with her massive bag, for Tarana to proceed her down the crowded street.

XX

"A room, Thomas," Augusta barked as soon as she and Tarana had come in through the backdoor of the Leaky Cauldron.

Personally, Tarana wouldn't have spent the five minutes that they needed to wait while Tom finished with the table he was waiting on tapping the tip of her umbrella against the floor impatiently, but to each their own.

"A cup of tea, please," Augusta said as soon as she swept through the doorway, dropping her umbrella into the stand beside the door and moving for the, now familiar, armchair.

This room is getting a rather lot of work these last weeks. Tarana thought wryly.

"It's been over a decade, Your Highness," Augusta said primly. "What reason do you have for suddenly requesting audiences with my family, particularly given the company you've been keeping these last years."

"My relationship with the Malfoy Family is much like my relationship with yours. My charge is friendly with Draco, just as Lily and James were friends with your Frank and Alice. If it happens to put me in contact with those Lucius Malfoy may or may not influence, then that's really no one's business but my own, is it?"

The sour expression returned to Augusta's face, appearing not unlike she'd bitten into a lemon.

Tarana waved a dismissive paw. "I'm going to ask you to help me with something I'm well aware you're going to dislike," she said, "but the safety of a child is in the balance and I hope that you will, if nothing else, hear me out before you immediately discount me."

Augusta's sharp eyes drifted over the panther, as though it would somehow reveal what the Queen wanted from her, before waving a hand sharply.

"Firstly, how much do you understand of Blaise Zabini's home life? How much has Neville shared with you?"

Tom bustled in with a tray of tea before bowing to the two women and ducking back out.

Augusta reached over to doctor her tea as she thought over her response to the Queen.

"Neville hasn't outright told me anything regarding Heir Zabini or his stand-in Lord."

"But you have suspicions."

"I do," Augusta admitted. "I had thought about approaching the boy, but ultimately decided it to be unwise. There is little aid I can legally offer him."

Tarana, seeing as how the matriarch already suspected the abuse, outright told her that it was happening, before drifting into more specific details regarding the summer he'd just had at the Mansion.

"I can't say for sure what happened while he and Yoko were there, though I can do a great deal more than speculate given what little Blaise has shared in my presence," it went unspoken that neither he nor Yoko were sharing any information with the Valerians, though Tarana would never outright admit that to another adult. "I can tell you that, based on a nightmare he relived several nights ago, that Blaise was starved of proper nourishment, surviving on a single glass of water a day for much of his stay, if one can call it that, at the Mansion this summer. I can also tell you that Yoko was chained and tortured, at least once in front of Blaise himself, by Desmond, and Desmond himself has been Thralled by Dark."

"I assume you will be removing the boy from that man's care immediately," Augusta said venomously.

"Lucius Malfoy is taking legal action to break his custody of Blaise, and hopefully have him arrested for the abuse he's laid on Blaise as a minor. A motion has already been put down that will prevent Blaise from returning until these proceedings are over. I'm not nearly as familiar with wizarding law as Fallen or Arcana are, but as I understand it, these proceedings would go better if there was somewhere more stable for Blaise to go in the, rather inevitable, case of Malfoy winning. Though Malfoy certainly has the pull to win this case, I doubt that, given his history, anyone in the Ministry will allow him to have any influence over where Blaise ends up when Desmond is sent to Azkaban."

Augusta, like most of the Light Families, wasn't fond of the Malfoy family and it looked like it physically pained her to even consider working alongside the Head of the Family, but she clearly understood where Tarana was going with the conversation.

"You wish for me to take in another teenager? I am already rather old to be raising the one I have, Your Highness."

"Worst case scenario," Tarana hedged, though that was exactly what she wanted. "I would rather he be somewhere that Yoko will likewise feel safe, as, given the last decade between the two, my Assassin has gained several unfortunately necessary, but likewise dark habits that I need him trained out of if he is going to continue to serve me. If there is nowhere else for him to do so, then yes, I would prefer Blaise go to you than to some stranger that will push both their safe zones."

Augusta sighed, taking several minutes to simply sip her tea and stare into the middle space as she thought over what Tarana was - and wasn't - asking of her.

"I am advancing in age, Your Highness," she eventually sighed, putting the cup and saucer on the tray. "I can't say for certain how much longer I will have the energy to raise not one, but two teenagers, particularly given that state my own children are in. In this second request, I can only promise that if there is, indeed, no one else to take young Blaise in, then I will accept both him and Yoko into my home.

"On the previous matter, you are correct. I dislike the very idea of working with Lucius Malfoy on a blessed thing, but he is, thus far, the only one who has looked at that boy and seen someone that needs help. For that, I will speak to the friends I have on the Wizengamot and put my weight behind him, for what little its worth, in this endeavor."

"My thanks, Augusta," Tarana told her.

"Thank me when this is over and it doesn't blow up in our faces, Your Highness," Augusta told her evenly. "Though I don't doubt that Malfoy is doing this to help Blaise Zabini, I likewise don't doubt that he's doing this for Lucius Malfoy as well. I can only hope that whatever he's planning, doesn't drag our good name into it as well."

XX

Neville and the others returned to the Leaky Cauldron just as Tarana and Augusta were leaving the parlour, having spent nearly a half-hour talking about the potential pitfalls of the lawsuit they were bringing to bear against Desmond Zabini, who currently had all the political and monetary backing of a family he wasn't even blood related to.

Augusta wasted no time on conversing further with any of them, simply snapping for her grandson and sweeping toward the fireplaces.

"Keep in touch, Blaise," Neville said, squeezing Blaise's wrist. "Promise?"

"I will if you will," Blaise answered evenly.

"You can use Hedwig," Harry offered cheerfully.

"We'll be at Hogwarts in like four days," Draco pointed out. "What's the point of sending an owl."

Harry's grin got a little tight around the edges and he sidestepped just enough to 'accidentally' step on Draco's foot.

Draco winced and it wasn't because of the pain in his foot.

In a rather strange mirror to he and Harry the year before, Blaise had been more present in Diagon Alley in the time that Neville had been around than any other visit to the market street in the three weeks they'd been in London.

He wasn't necessarily closed off with him, Harry, and the Valerians in their room, but he just seemed…more with Neville.

It probably hadn't been a good idea to point out that any communication between Blaise and that anchor was pointless.

The fact that Neville, weak and pathetic Neville, had given him a rather vile glare as he turned to follow his grandmother, further pushed that idea home.

XX

On the last day of August, only a day before they were all to return to Hogwarts, the Weasley family arrived in Diagon Alley, having returned from their trip to Egypt less than a week earlier.

Harry and Draco come down for breakfast that morning and were immediately accosted by Ron Weasley, who had grown taller since they'd all last seen one another, standing almost three inches taller than Draco now.

"Harry! Draco!"

Following Ron was the massive form of the Valerian King.

Tarana, who was still recovering from her 'rebirth' and thus, hadn't quite regained her full size, would have stood nearly at Harry's lowest ribs.

Arcana, easily the largest Valerian the children had ever encountered, currently stood at about halfway up Ron's ribs, and considering the history between the white tiger and the others, Harry would never admit it out loud, but the large cat prowling after his new charge was rather unnerving.

"Hi Ron, Your Majesty," Harry said, smiling nervously.

"What happened?" Ron asked, ignoring the greeting. "You never answered my last letter, the one about meeting here."

Harry grimaced. "Yeah, we uh, we had some things happening."

Ron frowned. "Things?"

They were interrupted by Arcana, who had been scent-marking - that is, rubbing the glands on his cheeks against someone else, human or otherwise - his fellow Valerians, pulled back sharply and abruptly when he had moved toward Yoko, who was leading Blaise down into the dining area.

'Now isn't the time,' Tarana said firmly.

Arcana turned burning amber eyes on his hicari, the Valerians' version of a spouse that was bound to him in ways that the human equivalent could never be.

Tarana was unmoved by the banked, unspoken, and understandable fury of her King. 'Not now,' she repeated sharply, glancing pointedly around at the still gathering Weasleys and the other regulars and last-minute visitors before the school year.

Yoko shifted uneasily. "I'm recovering, Your Majesty," Yoko assured him quietly. "Slowly, but I'm physically capable of serving you if you have need of me."

Arcana shook his massive head and ducked it, rubbing against Yoko's own. "I have no doubt of that, Yoko," he said, in a voice much deeper than any of the Valerians that Harry was familiar with. "You'll, of course, do no such thing. Unless something comes up that you and you alone can aid us in, you'll take all the time you need to recover."

The tiger waited until Harry and Blaise had been swamped by Molly Weasley, Ron's mother, and Ron's twin elder brothers, Fred and George, had captured the attention of Draco and Yoko before turning back to Tarana.

'What. Happened?' he asked sharply.

'That's a story too long to share,' Tarana replied coolly, not at all pleased with the tone her hicari was taking and making it clear in her own. 'You'll need to wait until we can spare the time.'

Arcana growled, low and angry, but glanced at Blaise. 'The boy? Ronald tells me his home life is not well.'

Tarana lifted a paw, shrugging. 'About as well as Yoko, I would imagine.' She said before changing the subject. "How is your stint with the Weasleys going?"

"About as well as one would imagine," Arcana replied drily. "They can't afford to house me, and their financial status is rather rough."

"To be expected," Fallen pointed out. "When Molly Prewitt married her husband, he took on the debts she owed concerning you and whatever wealth they had was quickly lost and has continued to be lost."

Arcana grimaced.

It had been revealed the year before that the Valerians hadn't necessarily survived the destruction of Valeria. Arcana had been sent off its planet and had, to an extent, survived, but the others had all been destroyed, and when Arcana had arrived on Earth, he'd used an obscure (and forbidden) Ritual that resurrected the few Valerians that now walked on Earth.

What wasn't quite as widely known, was that the Valerians' connection to their new forms was tenuous and it had, after several centuries, begun to fracture and break down their new bodies. It had eventually been found that their Essence - souls to the beings of Earth - needed an anchor to their new home and they found it in the Wizarding World's most prominent and purest of bloodlines - the Sacred Twenty-Eight, though it would be centuries before it would be called that - and they founded the Ancient and Noble Houses when they Soul-Bonded to their Families.

Though Arcana was Soul-Bound to the Prewitt Family, the family that would never again have an heir like Draco was to the Malfoys, as all the surviving members of the family were women. Arcana's link survived through those women, and thus he was still grounded on Earth's plane of existence, even though he'd been a Thrall to his brother for over a decade.

After the end of the last war, the Prewitts, however, had been forced to pay reparations to those who had been attacked by Arcana by the Ministry of Magic, citing that Arcana was one of their 'assets' and it had been set loose on the Wizarding public (this wasn't actually the case and the Ministry knew this, but didn't much care at the time, as they were still looking for people to blame for the misfortune during and after Voldemort's reign of terror).

Molly and her sisters had already been married at the time, and thus their husbands had all been forced to assist in paying the dues (this led to many divorces, of course, because Dark was a ruthless son of a bitch and had no problem sicing his brother on mortals as he searched for his Bonded. It became very expensive to be married to the Prewitt sisters).

It was why, despite being a well-respected family with a well-paying job, the Weasleys barely made ends meet.

Their seven children didn't help.

Arcana couldn't say that he was pleased with the verdict of the Ministry, and had made it one of his first priorities to have that idiocy taken care of, allowing the Weasley family to, finally, thirteen years after the King had been Thralled, begin accumulating wealth again.

(He had also told Cornelius Fudge that if he came sniffing around any of the Prewitt sisters and their families looking for further reparations to the Ministry, he'd tear out his throat and leave his carcass on the front steps of Gringotts, but that was another matter entirely.)

"It's been taken care of," Arcana said, tail flicking.

"So I'd heard," Fallen smirked. "The rumor mill of the Ministry and the social scene says your confrontation was something to see."

"The Ministry simply ah, forgot, that we are not citizens or substandard 'creatures'," Arcana sneered. "They likely won't be forgetting it going forward. Particularly given the warning you gave them in May."

Fallen shrugged. "I was motivated."

"I heard," Arcana snickered, though truly the situation hadn't been funny.

By the beginning of May earlier in the year, toward the end of the children's Second Year, several students had been petrified by a basilisk under the control of some form or shade of Voldemort.

Among the victims of the basilisk was Yoko, though the fox hadn't been petrified, he'd been bitten, and his Valerian constitution was failing in the face of its venom.

As the fox had lay dying, Fallen was now the only Valerian to stand between the children under his charge - legal and otherwise - and he was grieving the potential loss of not only another of his Kin, but the love of his life.

'Motivated' might have been a bit of an understatement.

All eyes turned back to Yoko, who had survived the venom of the deadliest snake in existence, only to be tortured weeks later.

'I'm going to need a report, Tarana,' Arcana murmured. 'I need to know how much damage, and by who, was done to know how to plan for it when we arrive. Particularly as to whether Albus finds out about it.'

Tarana sighed. 'I don't disagree,' she told him. 'But you must be gentle, beloved. Yoko is still recovering, and his well-being must take precedence over any plans you wish to make to mitigate the damage.'

Arcana frowned at the implication that he would prioritize Yoko's well-being over attempting to do damage control at Hogwarts but lets it go for the moment, because there was another topic they needed to discuss, and it was just as likely to anger his Queen.

'You and I must also discuss Sirius Black, Tarana.'

Tarana's tail lashed, the only visible sign of her distress and irritation.

Logically, she knew that she would eventually need to decide whether to pursue Sirius as a threat to Harry or not, but given what she'd known of the boy - now a man - she still found it difficult to fathom the reality of Sirius having betrayed the Potters, even though everyone else was right.

Who else would Lily and James have used as their Secret Keeper, after all?

She walked away from Arcana and Fallen, leaving the tiger to stare after her in confusion.

XX

Though Ron was a great friend, even to Draco, considered rather odd to most of Slytherin House, because their families had tension, to put it mildly, with one another, he wasn't well known for his tact and it took a great deal of convincing to get him to drop the inquisition as to why Harry had ignored him, apparently in favor of Draco when the blond went to Surrey.

Arcana led the group into Diagon Alley, where Hermione Granger was waiting for them, sans her parents.

Hermione was not what one would call a pretty girl, and was, actually, rather ordinary. She had long, bushy brown hair, and while her smile was bright and welcoming, it clearly showcased her slight buck teeth.

Not nearly as concerned as to why Harry had stopped communicating with them when Draco arrived at the Dursleys', she threw her arms around Harry and waved at Blaise.

During their first year, Hermione and Neville had witnessed Blaise's abused mindset firsthand, and Hermione herself had witnessed Neville's handling of her friend's panic attack. She had learned then that the dark-skinned teen, particularly at the end of the summer or the beginning of the school year, wasn't fond of touch of any kind that he didn't initiate.

Blaise smiled at her remembrance.

"Hey, Hermione."

"Good summer?" she asked, looking away from Blaise to make it known that she wasn't asking him because his summers were never good, and they all knew it.

"For the most part," Draco told her.

"Had a couple rough spots," Harry added, glancing at Blaise.

Hermione frowned and it was clear that she wanted to ask for further information, but Ron scoffed. "Don't bother," he told her. "They aren't telling us anything again."

"Watch yourself, Ronald," Arcana warned quietly. "It may not have occurred to you yet, but not everything that happens to your friends or my Valerians is your business."

Ron flushed at the reprimand and fell silent.

"It's not our story or our business to be passing on," Draco agreed, glancing at Blaise.

Blaise's lips pressed tightly together.

He was aware that their group of friends, Valerians included, was simply too tightly knit to try and keep what had happened to him and Yoko a secret for long, especially since neither of them was in good mental health.

Hermione eyed her friends, lingering on the form of the panther queen, before turning resolutely to Draco.

"Did you get your books for Arithmancy yet?" she asked him. "I'm so excited to start it. I'm pretty torn between whether that or our Magical Theory class is going to be the most interesting."

Draco snorted. "I flipped through our Magical Theory text. I don't think it's going to hold my attention for as long as I'd hoped it would."

The conversation between the two more academically inclined of their friends, brought them all to the front doors of Flourish and Blotts, the primary bookshop of Diagon Alley, and the one most frequented by the students of Hogwarts due to an arrangement between the two institutions that went back decades or more.

It was currently responsible for selling, not only the books for their core classes but also those of their Third-Year electives.

Like the Monster Book of Monsters.

Tarana had been with Draco and Harry when they'd gone to the shop to replace Blaise's lost book and she had hooked claws into one of them to haul it out of the cage while the attendant kept the rest of the books away from them as best he could with a stick.

He had mentioned then, that this batch of books was the worst they'd ever ordered for Hogwarts and that the manager had already sent word to the school that they would be watching the professor that ordered them far more closely going forward and would retain the option to decline an order at any time.

The conversation had left Tarana feeling a complex mix of unease and pride for what it had implied about Hagrid.

When Hermione and Ron walked in and requested two of the books, the attendant, not the same as the one that had been present when Tarana, Draco, and Harry had entered it two and a half weeks earlier, had looked so close to crying that Fallen had taken unexpected pity on the man.

"Oh, do buck up, idiot," the wolf sneered. "What kind of shopkeeper are you that you won't even face off against a book in a bookshop?" he asked.

The attendant didn't even have a second to try and counter that these books were trying to eat each other let alone anyone who tried to put their hands in the cage to separate and sell them, before the metal cage creaked, then cracked open like an egg, spilling the monstrous books out onto the sales floor.

The closest patrons screamed as the books, quickly realizing that they were free, snapped to, and lunged away from one another and toward real freedom, regardless of who was in the way.

They ran into red-tinted and hardened air before they got more than a short distance from their starting points.

The attendant gapped at the sphere-turned-cage for several seconds.

"I don't suppose you plan to do something before I lose control over this rather ill-advised purchase of yours, do you?" Fallen snarked.

"Or they decide to further mutilate one another," Arcana added, tilting his head. "I could assist him, for a price."

The attendant paled and Arcana rolled his eyes and waved a paw dismissively. "Nothing quite so dark, boy," he assured him. "A discount for the purchase of every book bought by my charge and his siblings. Ten percent should suffice, I think, don't you agree? We'll even help you individually bind the rest of them for future, safer handling."

Again, the poor, overworked man looked ready to cry.

There was only a day or so before school would resume, but the day was still early and there were over two dozen books still to be sold. To have them already bound when someone came for them, would be a tremendous help and far safer for everyone involved.

"We'd be happy to accommodate, sir," he said, offering a sloppy salute that meant nothing to the Valerian King.

It was the work of nearly twenty-five minutes, for the Valerians to single out and separate books from one another, allowing the attendants of the store to bind them with rope and deposit them into a conjured glass case.

Two were immediately set aside for Ron and Hermione.

"I assume that this has something to do with the retirement of Kettleburn and Grubbly-Plank," Fallen rumbled. "And I'm both curious and irritated at whatever idiot Dumbledore has hired to replace them. What was going through this fool's mind to decide this was going to be his teaching aid this year?"

Tarana grimaced and exchanged a wary look with Yoko.

She'd wondered the same thing when Harry had received his book on his birthday, but the revelation that Kettleburn was no longer the professor for the Care of Magical Creatures department at Hogwarts had pretty much given her the answer.

Yoko was close with Hagrid, but even the fox knew that the half-giant wasn't what one would call reliable when it came to knowing the difference between dangerous and interesting. Like Tarana, he was having mixed feelings on the conclusion that they were both drawing.

XX

"Did you really blow up your aunt, Harry?" Ron asked as they all stepped out of the bookshop.

Harry froze. "How did you hear about that?"

"Dad," Ron said, shrugging dismissively even as he grinned at the rather obvious admission.

Tarana frowned. "Does your father make a habit of sharing Ministry information where his children can hear it?"

Ron flushed. "Well, he wasn't really talking to me, but-"

Arcana gave him a displeased side-eye. "Arthur tells his wife things, as any good husband does, though he appears to take it on faith that his children will suddenly stop listening when such topics come up."

Draco snorted. "He has met his twins, right? Pranksters? Nosy bastards?"

Arcana shrugged. "His heart is in the right place. He's oddly naïve for his age, however. Ronald was supposed to be in bed when that conversation took place."

"Were you not around?" Fallen asked, almost casually.

Arcana scowled and Tarana threw the General a warning look that he ignored.

Hermione, ignoring the others, had immediately turned on Harry, wringing her hands together. "Oh, Harry, you didn't."

"She sicked her dog on Tarana!" Harry retorted defensively. "I didn't mean to blow her up!"

"Honestly, I'm kind of surprised you weren't expelled," Blaise pointed out quietly. "Given last year and all."

"Please," Draco scoffed. "Fudge wouldn't let them expel the Boy-Who-Lived now. It would be the last thing he ever did as Minister."

Ron and Blaise nodded in agreement, though they both appeared to have not thought of it until Draco had mentioned it.

"Did you get your wand replaced, Ron?" Yoko asked.

Ron brightened, pulling the long stick of wood from his pocket. "Sure did! Fourteen inches of willow, with a unicorn tail hair for a core!"

Harry grinned. "Nice! Do you think it'll work better for you than the last one?"

"Given the state it was in, I think a stick picked up off the ground would work better than the one he had during the school year," Fallen drawled.

Ron flushed.

Ron's previous wand had started out as a hand-me-down from one of his brothers, Charlie, and hadn't been best suited to Ron to begin with (the wand chooses the wizard, after all) but at the beginning of the last school year, Harry had suffered from one of his worst panic attacks when he and Ron had suddenly been cut off from Fallen and Yoko, who had been protectively anchoring Harry in his fear of Dark and/or Arcana coming after him again, at King's Cross Station on their way to Hogwarts. In that panic, Harry convinced Ron to take Arthur Weasley's illegal flying Ford Anglia to Hogwarts, because staying where they were, in his mind, wasn't safe.

They'd ended up making it to Hogwarts, but the car died as they got to the property and they crashed it into the most temperamental piece of plant life on the grounds, the famous Whomping Willow.

Ron's wand and the Ford Anglia were the sole casualties of that collision, though the Anglia did get off rather lightly given that Fallen arrived to buffer it from the heavy, crushing blows of the aptly named Whomping Willow.

"So," Harry said, turning to walk backward and watch his friends as they traveled through the Alley. "Where to next?"

"Watch where you're going," Tarana reprimanded absently.

Harry rolled his eyes but turned around.

"We've got almost all our supplies now," Hermione said, "but I've still got ten Galleons. It's my birthday in September, and Mum and Dad gave me some money to get myself an early birthday present."

"The bookstore's back that way," Draco said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.

Hermione scowled at him. "I know that," she hissed. "I was thinking about getting an owl, I mean, Harry's got Hedwig, and you've got Archimedes, and Ron's got Errol-"

"I haven't," Ron interrupted, "Errol's a family owl-"

"And more than half dead and likely two-thirds of the way into the grave," Fallen added helpfully.

"-All I've got is Scabbers," Ron continued, not arguing the wolf because he was right. Odds were high that Errol would be dead in the next two years, he wasn't sure how the old thing had managed to survive as long as he had, and still, mostly, able to deliver mail. "And I wanted to get him checked over. I don't think Egypt agreed with him."

The redhead pulled his pet rat, also another hand-me-down, though this one tolerated at best, this one from his brother Percy (it was likely for the best that the creature had never made it into the hands of Fred and George, as the rat would likely have been used in one or eight of their product experiments), from his pocket.

The gray rat was thinner and in obvious ill health.

"In his defense," Fallen said, tilting his head, and eyeing the pitiful-looking creature with disdain. "I don't think any animal is made to magically travel as you and your family did across continents like that. It would be more merciful to put him out of his misery."

Ron's expression made it perfectly clear what he thought of that idea.

'It's a rat,' Yoko huffed. 'I've eaten rats on good days. I'll put it out of its misery if he likes. Can make it quick and everything.'

'It's a pet,' Arcana told them, though even he didn't seem convinced. 'He's attached to it.'

Fallen snorted. 'Of course, he is.'

XX

Harry, who was growing rather familiar with Diagon Alley after three weeks of only being able to travel within the market for entertainment, led the group to Magical Menagerie, one of the less 'high class' magical creatures shops in the Alley, figuring it would be better than Eelops' Owl Emporium, which boasted the best owls in the Alley, as here Ron could also have Scabbers checked over.

There was barely enough room for everyone to come inside, and even then, Tarana and Arcana needed to wait by the door.

Nearly every inch of wall space was covered in cages and, unlike Eelops', who kept a rather clean shop despite the number of birds there, the Menagerie stunk, smelling very much like it had exactly the number of animals and creatures contained within it. The smell was nearly as bad as the cacophony of noise. Every creature within it was screeching, squawking, jabbering, hissing, or yowling.

A single witch was manning the quiet - by business standards, obviously - shop and she was already assisting a wizard with, what sounded like, the care of double-ended newts, which left the teens to wander the cages.

Draco's nose wrinkled at the strong smell and he hovered around the cages closest to the doors and windows, specifically a rather spectacularly bejeweled giant tortoise that was glittering in the late morning sun.

Hermione and Blaise drifted toward the many cages of cats in one corner and were cooing over them - or as much as Blaise cooed over anything - and poking their fingers through the cages to scratch at the heads and sides eagerly presented to them for scratches and finger rubs.

Ron eyed a pair of enormous purple toads with fascination and disgust as they ate blowflies, while Yoko propped himself up on his hind legs to watch a fat rabbit change into a silk top hat and back again with a loud popping noise.

Fallen and Harry ended up the furthest into the building, where a noisy unkindness of ravens was contained. The birds immediately quieted as the wolf and teen approached, less like they were screaming and more like they were suddenly whispering (or whatever the bird equivalent was) about them.

"How smart are ravens?" Harry asked, tilting his head.

"Smarter than your average owl," Fallen answered. "And a lot more vicious. Ravens were used to carry war messages in the same manner that falcons were used by the nobility. They were viciously protective of what they were carrying and rarely got lost. Ravens are still used by the Ministry and several of the older Pureblood families, to send declarations of war and blood-feuds, though they usually get bought for the purpose as opposed to raised, hence finding the unkindness here."

Harry hesitantly extended a finger toward the cage, where a raven was watching him with a black eye, head twitching, and beak clacking.

'I wouldn't,' Tarana warned from the door. 'He's more likely to draw blood than to treat you like Hedwig does.'

Harry quickly retracted his finger and the raven snapped its beak as though upset at the lost chance.

"They're gorgeous," he muttered.

As though they understood what he was saying, several of the ravens 'fluffed' their wings, as though showing off.

Fallen snorted.

When the two turned around, the newt-wizard had left, and the witch was leaning over Scabbers with a pair of heavy black spectacles on her face.

"-en through the mill, this one," she was saying.

"He was like that when Percy gave him to me," Ron said, defensively.

"An ordinary common or garden rat can't be expected to live more than three years or so," the witch said. "Now, if you were looking for something a bit more hard-wearing, you might like one of these-"

She gestured to her side, where a cage of sleek, black rats that made the scrumpy-looking Scabbers look even more woebegone than usual.

Ron's lip twitched in an aborted scowl, but he couldn't mask the disdain in his tone. "Show-offs," he sneered.

"Well," the witch said, not sounding offended, though Harry couldn't understand why. Ron hadn't exactly been kind in response to her offer. "If you're not looking to replace him, you can try this rat tonic."

She reached under the counter and pulled out a small red bottle.

Ron nodded, already reaching for it. "Alright," he said, "how much-OUCH!"

A massive orange cat had leapt down from the highest cabinet, used Ron's head as a springboard, and launched itself, spitting madly, at Scabbers.

"NO, CROOKSHANKS!" the shopkeeper cried.

Scabbers immediately squirmed free of the witch's hands and scampered off the counter. Only Yoko's quick reflexes prevented the rat from escaping the shop, his paw coming down hard on the naked tail and pinning it there as Ron ran over to retrieve him.

In the meantime, Arcana had taken two massive bounds into the shop and hauled the ugly orange cat up by the scruff of its neck, the thing growled with angry misery as it dangled there.

"Perhaps you should take him outside, Ron," Tarana suggested. "I think that was a rather alarming event for him."

"Yeah," Ron said, glaring hatefully at the cat.

Hermione doesn't even notice as Ron, Harry, and Draco slip out of the store, fixated on the cat contained by Arcana's grip on its scruff.

"Aren't you wonderful?" she murmured, delighted.

Fallen rolled his eyes and slipped out the door after Draco and his friends.

Draco was going to have thoughts on Hermione choosing that cat.

He already had issues with Ron walking around with Scabbers on his shoulder.

Sure enough, Draco's first words when the rest of the group joined them was to comment on the 'deformed and ugly' cat she'd chosen as her parents' gift to her.

"All the animals, all the cats in there and you couldn't pick one that at least was nice to look at?" he asked derisively.

"He's a sweetheart," Hermione said defensively.

"Seriously?!" Ron cried. "That thing nearly scalped me!"

"Oh, he didn't mean to," Hermione crooned, making Blaise make a face behind his friend. Hermione was an academic, she just wasn't meant to croon. "Did you, Crookshanks?"

"Scabbers needs rest and relaxation," Ron insisted, jabbing a finger at the ginger cat. "How's he going to get it with that thing around?"

Hermione sniffed. "I don't see what the problem is. Crookshanks will be sleeping in my dormitory and Scabbers in yours."

"Here's your rat tonic, Ron," Blaise said loudly, cutting into the argument. "You forgot it on the counter."

Ron was still scowling, but he took the bottle and shoved it into one of his bags, still grumbling about the 'menace'.

XX

Yoko and Blaise had both been getting better about the crowds in Diagon Alley, which was a relief because the crowds in the halls of Hogwarts were nearly as bad.

The witches and wizards of Diagon Alley recognized the Valerians on sight, which was to be expected, as there weren't any other totally sentient animals running around the most popular wizarding market in England, and they were old enough to recognize the need to give them, and their charges, space.

The same couldn't be said for nearly a third of the school they would soon be attending.

Anyone Third Year and higher, by now, would know to give the Valerians their space, Yoko and Fallen in particular as they were generally testy and unpleasant upon first returning to the school (though in their defense there had been seriously extenuating circumstances for both years). First and Second Years, however, were often taught by blood and tears, which then put the Valerians at risk, because the extreme threat to the students and staff at the school ran the risk of the Headmaster throwing them out.

When the group returned to the Leaky Cauldron, however, Blaise was done.

There had been too many people, with too many potential threats, and it furthered the stress and anxiety he was feeling regarding his return to Hogwarts, where Dark was as welcome as the rest of the Valerians on the grounds.

He and Yoko gave a strained greeting to Arthur Weasley, who was sitting in the pub area, before Blaise pretty much fled to their room.

Arthur frowned after him.

The Weasley patriarch had retrieved Blaise from his home on the Moors the year before, and he had never revealed what, exactly, he'd witnessed, but he was of the few who knew exactly how bad the abuse at the Mansion was, though he wasn't in a place where he could have done anything against someone with the influence the Zabinis had.

He greeted the remaining teens cheerfully.

"Harry, Draco," it said a great deal about how well Arthur Weasley rolled with things that he didn't even stutter over greeting Draco, despite his feelings for the teen's father. "How are you?"

"Fine, thank you," Draco replied politely.

Draco had spent the last two years getting over his own feelings, feelings that he inherited from his father, on the Weasleys, having realized early on in his First Year, that not everything he'd heard about the family was true (and having to ignore everything that was true if he wanted to stay in Harry's good graces, despite how close the two were), but he still reverted to distanced politeness to prevent himself from saying something that might be hurtful.

Harry smiled at him, so brightly that Arthur couldn't help but smile back as he folded up his newspaper.

Tarana was unsurprised to find the now-familiar photo of Sirius Black on the front page.

"They still haven't caught him?" Draco asked, taking in the same at a glance.

"No," Arthur said grimly. "They've pulled us all off our regular jobs at the Ministry to try and find him, but no luck so far."

The Valerians glanced at one another.

"Would we get a reward if we caught him?" asked Ron.

"If it were so easy for Black to be caught, Ron, it wouldn't be children who did so," Fallen sneered, ignoring the ruffled feathers he'd caused with his words.

"Particularly given his Bonded," Arcana added.

"It's the Azkaban guards who'll get him," Arthur agreed. "Mark my words."

None of the Valerians looked half as convinced as Arthur did, but they were quickly distracted by an exultant cry from the hallway that led to the backyard.

"Draco!"

Fallen grimaced, causing Tarana to laugh, as Draco was swallowed in the grasp of the Weasley twins, Fred and George.

For some strange reason, toward the end of Draco's First Year - the twins' Third - the twins had apparently adopted Draco in a way that they hadn't adopted Harry, who they saw as a younger brother.

The twins and Draco had circled Harry for most of the previous school year, and an odd friendship had been born, given the age difference.

While the twins dragged the blond off to the side under their mother's displeased glare, the remains of the Weasley family approached.

Molly Weasley gave Harry and Tarana a tense, though pleased, smile before hurrying up the stairs to deposit her shopping before dinner, leaving Ginny, the only girl of the seven children, and Percy, the oldest of the children still at Hogwarts, with their father, the Valerians, Harry, and Hermione.

Ginny, who had been saved by a combined effort of Fallen and Severus, though Harry had been there as well, with a later assist from Arcana and Tarana, ducked her gaze away from Harry as he greeted her warmly, her cheeks turning almost as red as her hair. She waved with a weak smile at Fallen, who had, unsurprisingly, turned into her favorite Valerian at the end of last year, much to the wolf's displeasure.

He wasn't enough of a bastard to ignore the girl, given what she'd gone through the year before, however, and he tilted his head in acknowledgment, though he didn't say any more than she did.

Percy, who had always been the more 'distant' of the brothers, though that didn't mean that he didn't keep an eye on his siblings, to the displeasure of the twins, approached Harry and held a hand out to him as though they had never met before.

"Harry," he greeted. "How nice to see you."

Harry bit his lip but shook his hand regardless. "Hello, Percy."

"I hope you're well?"

Harry's lip twitched, but it wasn't in amusement, as he read the very real concern in the older teen. "Very well, thanks," he said, glancing down and back at his guardian.

Percy nodded solemnly but was elbowed out of the way by Fred, though when the twins had finished with Draco, Harry couldn't have said. "Harry!" he said with exaggerated, but very real, cheer, as he bowed deeply to the younger teen. "Simply splendid to see you, old boy-"

"Marvelous," George added, shoving his twin aside and seizing Harry's hand. "Absolutely spiffing."

Percy scowled at their backs.

"That's enough now," Molly said firmly as she descended the stairs, sans shopping.

"Mum!" Fred called, losing none of his mocking, overexcited cheer, seizing her hand. "How really corking to see you-"

Molly was the undisputed disciplinarian of the family, however, and wasn't half as amused as her smiling husband was.

"I said that's enough," she repeated, shaking her head and, once free of her son, pulled Harry into a tight hug. "Hello, Harry, Hermione. I suppose you've heard our exciting news?" she pointed at the shining silver badge on Percy's chest, causing the teen in question to puff his chest out.

Behind them, Draco rolled his eyes and Fallen's lip curled.

"Second Head Boy in the family!" Molly said, swelling with nearly as much pride as Percy did.

"And last," Fred muttered under his breath, sharing a none-too-subtle high five with Ron as his thirteen-year-old brother snickered.

Arcana sighed; this was obviously not the first time this had happened.

"I don't doubt that," Molly snapped, frowning at her other sons. "I notice they haven't made you two prefects."

Draco made a face, hidden behind a hand on his lower face, but neither George nor Fred hid their revulsion.

"What do we want to be prefects for?" George asked, sounding as disgusted as his expression said he was. "It'd take all the fun out of life!"

Tarana snickered, though it went mostly unnoticed, because everyone glanced at Ginny, brief though most of it was so as not to draw the girl's attention, as the redhead giggled.

It abruptly went silent when her mother gestured toward her. "You want to set a better example for your sister!"

Ginny's shoulders hunched up toward her ears.

"Oh, I don't know," Arcana murmured silkily. "I think the girl has enough influence from all her brothers to turn out to as strong-willed a witch as you are, Molly."

Molly narrowed her eyes on the tiger, as though looking for his angle, though her cheeks were a bit red.

Fred shook his head, dropping an arm heavily on Harry's shoulders. "We've been trying to get him to lighten up since he got the letter," he stage-whispered.

George leaned closer. "We tried to shut him in a pyramid," he whispered, gesturing to Percy as the elder stalked up the stairs, head held high. "But Mum spotted us."

Harry choked as he simultaneously tried to laugh and hide it.

Fallen didn't bother, his sharp bark of amusement startling several patrons of the pub.

"How's Arcana settling in? Ron's been asking a lot of questions." Harry murmured, distracting the twins.

Harry, who had spent most of the summer with the Weasleys the year before, was aware that space was rather tight at the Burrow for the seven Weasleys, let alone the two-hundred-and-fifty-pound tiger.

"He's nesting in the garden," George said grinning at the tiger. "He's been great at keeping those gnomes out."

Fred dropped to his knee and wrapped an arm around the tiger's neck. "We haven't degnomed the garden in over a month now!" he agreed cheerfully.

Arcana wasn't at all disturbed by the teen wrapped around his neck. "Gnomes are easy prey," he said, licking the tips of his paws, where his claws would be if extended.

XX

Molly, who had a talent for convincing the broken teens to step out of their comfort zones while in the safety and love of her family, managed to convince Blaise to join the rest of them for dinner.

That this left the room to the Valerians was, supposedly, a coincidence.

"Yoko," Arcana said, stepping into the room carefully, Tarana barely a step behind.

Yoko had been buried in the blankets on the 'bed'-previously known as a table-until Fallen had arrived and was now curled beneath it with the wolf and several blankets given to them by Tom that Yoko was certain the owner had cast some sort of warming charm on, because they were the most comfortable that he'd slept on in a long time (he might have been biased, given that he'd been sleeping, if one could call it that, in chains for the last month and a half).

As the King and Queen stepped into the room, however, he pulled his muzzle out from under Fallen to watch them.

Arcana lowered himself several feet away from the other two Valerians, amber eyes sad. "I'm so sorry, Yoko."

Yoko grunted. "Not like you knew it was happening, Sire."

"That doesn't change the fact that I hate when you go through this," Arcana told him.

Fallen slowly, deliberately, licked a fang, making his own feelings known without needing to say a word.

"Particularly because you're going to ask me what he wanted," Yoko said.

Fallen growled quietly. "Arcana-"

"I need to know what the damage was to Yoko," Arcana told him. "I have little more than twenty-four hours before I need to stand before Albus and defend the actions of our Assassin and I need a plan. More than that, we need to know how close Dark has gotten to what he wanted and how much breathing room we're going to get before he comes after him, or one of us, again."

"We do need to know how best to defend ourselves," Tarana agreed, "but you will not put Yoko's climb out of his black hole in jeopardy to do it."

Arcana's tail twitched, but it wasn't in agitation, simply thinking. "You'll let us know if we approach something that pushes you too close to your edge?"

Yoko didn't much look like he wanted to talk at all about it, but he pressed himself, if possible, even closer to Fallen and nodded.

"I need a verbal agreement, Yoko," Arcana pressed.

"I'll let you know if you touch a trigger," Yoko said.

Arcana nodded, shifting his weight as Tarana came and pressed herself against him, tucking his neck over hers.

Yoko let out a slow, even breath, and Fallen tucked him even closer to his chest by hooking his head over Yoko's, pressing him into the floor again, anchoring him in the present, causing the fox to go boneless.

"Dark showed up two weeks after the school year ended. He was there for a long shot agreement, offering safety for Blaise if I broke the seal on the Kristavi Urn."

Arcana inhaled sharply.

"You didn't know he had it?" Fallen asked.

"I had hoped, as we all did, that it didn't escape Valeria," Arcana said. "Dark never mentioned it to me over the last twelve years."

"He has it," Yoko assured him. "I didn't see it that first time he came. I told him he was an idiot and forced him off the property with judicious use of the Mansion Wards, bolstered by my Element." He took a shaking breath. "He showed up three days later, a new Thrall in Desmond. I didn't even know Desmond had the authority to access the Mansion Wards, but he used the cornerstone to wrench them from me, not merely my control, but me by force while Blaise was having lunch."

\/\/\/

The informal dining room of the Mansion in the Moors was only used when Desmond was on an alcoholic's wet dream of a binge.

As Desmond wasn't, technically, an alcoholic, simply a violent dick, he wasn't often out of the Mansion for more than a few hours at a time, usually to further the reputation of the Family he had, for the most part, taken as his own whether he had any real right to said Family or not.

With these binges usually lasting up to four or five days, it was the only time that Blaise had been given nearly full run of his own home, having been relegated, by necessity, to the section of the third floor that housed his room, his bathroom, and the private parlour across the hall from it.

This was the most difficult area of the Mansion for Desmond to access, because the wards were raised almost at all times, usually in so long as Yoko's power would hold out, which would amount to nearly twenty hours of safe haven for Blaise if Yoko was fully healed, but was usually closer to eight to twelve because the fox would never leave him unprotected long enough to fully recover.

There were, of course, a more powerful, potent secondary set of siege wards, but those were to be used in case of a far more outward emergency.

An emergency that was far closer than Yoko realized by the second day of Desmond's departure.

Because Blaise was rarely allowed to leave the trio of warded rooms, Yoko insisted on it when the opportunity arose.

This was, unfortunately, the reason that, while Yoko was on alert for Desmond's return, Blaise was not in one of Yoko's two most powerful areas of the Mansion, Blaise's Sanctuary or the Garden, when Desmond finally Apparated onto the property.

Yoko's hackles, already rising because of Desmond's return, rose faster when, uncharacteristically, Desmond didn't take advantage of Blaise being out in the open.

He had stalked past the open door of the dining room - opened for ease of escape - but had ignored the two in the dining room, striding with purpose deeper into the Mansion.

Blaise had immediately gotten to his feet and had begun the habit of putting his utensils in their proper post-meal place for the house elf to retrieve.

"Leave it," Yoko had said sharply, nerves singing. "To your room. Quickly."

They hadn't realized it yet, but they wouldn't be making it that far.

They were two hallways down when the first tingle of change ripped through Yoko.

The cornerstone, the fox thought, horrified. How did he even know where it was?

As any good Weaver, or in Yoko's case, Thief, knew, a building's wards were anchored not to land, but to what modern builders, masons, called a cornerstone. Because of the significance of the cornerstone to the safety of a home, the location and methods of protection for the cornerstone are more protected than nearly any other item on a property.

After the death of Delia, Yoko was, supposedly, the only one with any notion of where the cornerstone of the Mansion in the Moors was, and how to access it.

The assumption was, clearly, biting him in the ass now, as Desmond neatly tore the wards from Yoko.

To a normal Lord, this would be a twinge at best, because the wards changed hands, obviously, with every new generation.

The knowledge of these wards, for protection against the Lord's sudden death, Yoko was horrified to remember, was tied to the Signet Ring of the House.

The Ring that had sat on Desmond's hand since Delia's death, though it didn't rightfully belong there.

For a creature that had built the Wards, that was tied by essence to the wards (Yoko, after all, was always thinking of horrible outcomes and wasn't going to chance running out of a Family to keep him anchored to this reality) to have them suddenly ripped from him was agonizing.

He didn't know he was thrashing and yowling, despite tears and begging from Blaise, for nearly twenty minutes.

Plenty of time for Dark to step beyond the protection that was no longer granted by the wards.

It had been to Yoko and Blaise's, initial, benefit that the black wolf wasn't as familiar with the Mansion and took his time, either because he needed to or because he was so certain in his success that he believed he had all the time he desired.

Blaise had backed away from him, leaving the dreadfully still Yoko lying between them.

Dark had grinned, a slow and menacing thing, and allowed him the retreat.

"What did you do?" he had asked, hands shaking.

"Your idiot guardian left me with little choice," Dark had sneered. "Do you have any idea the amount of time I've wasted, finding this place? Waiting for my newest pet to come out of the Assassin's sphere?"

Dark had used one of his massive paws to drag Yoko closer, lowering his muzzle to the fox's ear.

"All you needed to do was say yes, Yoko," Dark had whispered, eyes on Blaise. "Now, we'll just have to see how far your-"

Dark's words had been abruptly cut off with sharp, agonized yelp, for Yoko's fangs had sunk deep into his lip and torn.

With blood pouring down the black wolf's muzzle, flesh jagged and, in one place, dangling off by a remaining scrap of skin and muscle, Dark had been an even more horrifying sight, but Blaise hadn't been given much time to see it.

"Go, Blaise!" Yoko had rasped, scrambled back to his paws, and had darted after his charge.

Blaise had turned and ran, his lunch now a heavy, unpleasant weight in his stomach and he knew it was going to make a reappearance, he just hoped it would wait until he was beyond the protection of his rooms first.

Blaise had nearly tripped over his own feet when he came to the stairs that led up to the higher floors of the Mansion, Desmond descending them, wand drawn.

To the end of his days, Yoko would never know how Blaise dodged a near-point-blank spell from his stepfather, but Yoko swung a wide right and pulled the man down the stairs, clearing the way for his charge.

Yoko's fangs drew blood for the second time, clamping down on his wand arm and forcing Desmond to drop it with a cry of pain and outrage, outrage that was echoed behind them.

Blaise hadn't hesitated, scrambling up the first one or two on his hands and knees before he could regain his feet, but he was halfway up by the time Yoko was again at his side, having taken a moment to send Desmond's wand skittering down the wooden stairs and across the carpet below.

Yoko had known that there would be only seconds before Dark and/or Desmond was at their heels again, and as soon as Blaise was across the primary ward line, they flared to life, far less potent for having not been given the additional boost that came from the Mansion's own wards, but they would buy Yoko additional time, though it wouldn't be much with Dark's additional 'weight' so to speak, being thrown against them in addition to Desmond's own knowledge of them.

Blaise had sunk down into his desk chair and was, as he'd predicted, promptly sick into the trashbin there.

Yoko had sagged against the door, limbs shaking with adrenaline and the aftereffects of having the Mansion's wards ripped from him after over two and a half centuries.

"What do we do?" Blaise had asked when he could properly breathe again.

Yoko had raised his head, cursing Desmond not for the first time, for ensuring that any other animal brought into the Mansion had a swift and brutal end, usually before Blaise's eyes to ensure the message was received.

They had no way of informing the outside world that Dark had effectively taken the two of them hostage.

No way of informing the Crown and Collective that Yoko and Blaise had dire need of them.

"I will keep you safe, sprite," Yoko had promised, unaware of how painful breaking this promise would later be for him.

"But the wards out there will fall eventually," Blaise had said. "They won't keep them out forever."

"I'm aware," Yoko had replied grimly. "I will be raising the siege wards on this room when I go back out. For a few weeks, at least, you'll be safe behind them. After that, take any opportunity presented to you to get as far from the Mansion as possible and activate your Christmas gift." Yoko had paused. "And put on a shirt with longer sleeves. Dark will recognize it."

Blaise had wrapped a hand around the braided bracelet around his wrist, three strands of precious metal entwined together.

It was of Valerian make and had been stolen from Dark the year before by his brother and gifted to Blaise for safekeeping. Supposedly, when activated by the blood of its user, it would transport them to whatever they deemed safe.

"Not without you."

"Yes, without me." Yoko had replied sharply. "By the time the wards fall, I'll likely be in no condition to aid or follow you. You will need to escape and get to Fallen."

Blaise had swallowed. "I don't know if I can do that," he had whispered.

"You didn't know if you could take on a troll, either" Yoko had replied. "Or protect the Philosopher's Stone."

"I had help!" Blaise had cried.

"But you did those things. You're stronger than you think you are, sprite. You can do this. I have faith in you. When the siege wards fall, you get out. Get word to the Collective."

Blaise had exhaled shakily.

/\/\/\

Fallen shifted until he was lying more on Yoko than beside him, anchoring his lover in the here-and-now, drawing him out of whatever flashback he was seeing.

'Come back, fox,' he murmured.

The Assassin was quivering, pulling Arcana and Tarana closer to block him even further from the outside world.

"Take your time, Yoko," Tarana coaxed, glancing worriedly at Fallen. "Slowly. This information isn't worth your mental health."

Arcana was worryingly silent on the matter.

It was several long, tense minutes before Yoko spoke again, tone detached.

"I had recovered enough by that point that the protection wards I'd placed lasted almost a full twelve hours, plenty of time to trigger the siege wards on Blaise's bedroom."

Siege wards were, as one would assume, wards that kept an outside threat from entering a particular area, though they likewise prevent anyone inside that area from leaving.

On Valeria, siege wards had been used not to protect people but places, like the throne room, armory, and treasure room.

Here on Earth, over the last century and a half, as the wizarding world got progressively more dangerous, they were cast on the rooms of the children the Valerians would later be bound to, offering protection in case of an attack, not unlike the one Dark had levied against the Mansion.

They were generally anchored to doors and windows and fed over time, building a well of magic to sustain it outside the Valerian's own.

That well, however, was finite and would eventually run dry.

The idea behind them was to deal with the threat before that well dried up and the wards fell.

"How long did they last?" Arcana asked.

"Nearly a month," Yoko replied. "Longer than I'd anticipated."

Tarana frowned. "They would have collapsed midway through July."

"I wouldn't have been able to tell," Yoko admitted. "I faced Dark again in the hallway outside Blaise's bedroom after raising the siege wards and, as predicted, lost. I held out, as best I could, for a day or two, but eventually I started to lose time. Dark didn't want to risk me dropping into the Trance, so he usually sat back and instructed Desmond on where to place his blade."

"He didn't use magic?" Arcana asked.

"He did, though not as frequently," Yoko told them. "Desmond has a creative streak when it comes to his spells, but he's not necessarily a powerful castor. It's likely one of the reasons that he prefers physical pain over magical pain." Lips peeled apart with a sneer. "It was his creativity that garnered Delia's attention. The man is physically and sexually no prize either."

Fallen snickered.

Unlike the other two, Fallen had seen Desmond at the few functions that the Malfoys and Zabinis had attended together, though their differences in 'parties' had kept them from mingling more than once or twice.

Delia had been a classic Italian beauty, which was likely the reason she'd managed to draw in so many husbands despite their repeated demises.

Desmond was a troll in comparison.

"I assume that it was this creativity that allowed him to continuously go after Blaise over the years?" Tarana asked.

"Yes," Yoko said tersely.

"The Urn, did you ever see it? Manage to authenticate it?" Arcana asked.

Yoko hummed, so physically pinned by Fallen that he couldn't even nod. "Blaise and I have both seen it. I don't know how he ended up with it, but Dark has it."

"If you activated the siege wards," Tarana said carefully, "how did Dark and Desmond get access to Blaise?"

"I'm not sure," Yoko admitted. "By that point, I had been bled and healed more times than I could count, but they'd never hurt me enough that I could slip into the Trance. I was replenishing my lost blood at slower and slower rates and was losing more and more time. I felt the siege wards fall and I remember the day that Dark and Desmond brought Blaise in."

Arcana opened his mouth, but Tarana interrupted him.

"Blaise had a nightmare several weeks ago and revealed to Draco, Harry, and us by proxy, that Dark and Desmond had broken through fading wards on his bedroom. At the time, I'd assumed that they were general protection wards, not siege wards. Dark used Blaise to threaten Yoko, ordering Desmond to prevent the house elves of the Mansion from continuing to feed Blaise. He had been surviving on a glass of water nearly ever since."

"I lasted weeks," Yoko told them. "Before I managed to negotiate with Dark that, if he fed Blaise, I would look at the seal on the Urn, making no promises to even touch it."

\/\/\/

"Your boy is dying, Assassin," Dark had murmured gleefully in Yoko's ear one evening. "Fading day by day."

Yoko had jerked his head weakly, trying and mostly failing to pull away those few scant centimeters allowed him by the chains.

Dark had snickered. "I always knew you were a cold-hearted bitch, Yoko," he had told the fox, obligingly stepping away. "I figured there wasn't much else that would have captured the attention of Valeria's coldest General. I didn't think you were quite this cold though. You've surprised me. I really didn't think you had it in you to let someone starve to death, given where you were rumored to come from and all."

Yoko had snarled tiredly.

Dark's news wasn't news to Yoko.

He could feel the tether that connected him to Blaise slowly beginning to unravel over the last few days (or so he assumed. Time was getting a little weird for the fox).

By this point, the chains were the least of Yoko's problems.

Blood loss was rarely a problem for Valerians because they replenished it quickly enough, especially in the Trance.

But Dark had been the Interrogator of the Crown before his true nature had slipped through. He was well aware of what the Valerian body, apparently regardless of the shape it took, was capable of handling before slipping into the Trance and he was walking that fine line with Yoko.

It wasn't simply the blood loss, either.

Yoko's healing wasn't working properly anymore, taking longer and longer to close wounds and allowing more blood to spill on the already saturated carpet.

"You can end this for the both of you, Yoko," Dark had told him bluntly. "Open my Urn and the boy gets fed. You get to heal, mostly. It's a win-win-win."

Yoko's flesh couldn't cooperate, but mentally the fox had curled a lip.

Outwardly, however, the fox had sagged in his chains. 'I can't.'

Dark had huffed and rolled his eyes. "How long do you plan to keep up this stubborn streak, Yoko? Blaise is dying. You are killing him."

'I can't.' Yoko had insisted sharply. 'Do you realize the level of talent that went into that seal, Dark? I probably don't even have the skill to do it when I'm at my best. I certainly don't have the ability now.'

Even through the haze of pain, rather a constant at this point, Yoko had been able to tell that Dark was pondering the problem.

"I'll grant you a two-day furlough, Thief. In return for that respite, you will gauge the level of power on the seal. We'll test that wizard concoction, the truth serum-"

"Veritaserum," Desmond had said from the desk, spinning the dagger point into a growing groove there.

"That," Dark had agreed. "And see how effective it is on a liar of your caliber. A truthful answer will get food into your waning mortal."

Yoko had eyed the wolf with suspicion.

Two days wouldn't bring him back to fighting shape, but the reprieve might give him time to come up with a more reaching plan to get Blaise out of the Mansion, specifically out of the hands of Desmond and Dark.

At this point, even Voldemort's hands would be better than this. At least with the Dark Lord Blaise had a chance of doing something.

'Very well. An honest answer for a week's worth of food.'

Dark's grin was very unkind and Yoko's tired and hurt mind struggled to find the loophole in their possible agreement.

"Done," Dark had sighed, almost pleasantly. "Two days."

Yoko had tilted his head when the wolf's hot breath tickled one of his bleeding ears - Desmond and Dark had been very thorough - and grimaced.

"Don't do anything too stupid, Yoko," Dark had warned him. "Who knows just how much more damage this body of yours can take. And if you Trance, I will kill the boy before you come out of it."

Yoko had jerked his head, sending the chains rattling.

XX

Two days wasn't long enough.

Yoko's healing wasn't any more recovered than the fox was, not helped along by the fact that Yoko didn't often take the time to eat while he was at the Mansion.

He knew that his best bet was still to get Blaise out of the Mansion and to get word to Fallen.

The Mansion wards may have been torn from Yoko, and thus preventing him from choosing who came and went on the property, but Yoko had written the wards, at least in part, and whether they were together or apart, he and Fallen were as entwined as one could be without actually Mating.

When creating the Net, Yoko had hoped, one day, that he and Fallen would be reunited and had written Fallen's code into them as easily as he breathed with that possibility, even though the General had never been there.

Even if Yoko couldn't access the wards, Fallen already had it.

Given the state of affairs, Dark couldn't have known that.

Delia hadn't known it.

Though the Signet Ring would give the Lord of the House the location of and the protections around, the cornerstone, it didn't tell anyone what the Ward Net contained, so the knowledge that Fallen had access had likely died out beyond Yoko and the wolf in question.

One of the two house elves had arrived toward the end of the second day, with a dirty rag and a bowl of hot water, with instructions to clean Dark's prisoner.

'Meecha,' Yoko had murmured to the crying house elf. 'Meecha, I have a job for you.'

Meecha had shaken her massive head, ears flapping wildly. "Master-Lord-Desmond says Meecha is not to be listening to Master-Thief."

'I'm not going to ask you to do anything you haven't already been asked,' Yoko had assured her. 'I need you to see to Blaise for me, Meecha. Can you do that?'

"Master Blaise is in the Downstairs Place," Meecha had told the fox, wringing the cloth between her long fingers worriedly.

The 'Downstairs Place' was where Desmond took the house elves for punishment.

The reality was that it was simply the Mansions' version of a dungeon, though because of the Mansions' location and Yoko's presence, there was little use for them.

'We both know that Blaise didn't do anything wrong, Meecha,' Yoko had coaxed. 'Blaise isn't being punished down there, he's a prisoner. You were told to clean up Dark's prisoner, right? You can go clean up Blaise, too. Make sure he's alright. Can you do that for me?'

Meecha had met the beseeching green eyes of the longest-lived member of the Zabini House with her own bright, tear-filled blue ones.

The house elf had been with the Zabini family for nearly sixty years and Yoko had never been anything but kind to her. To see the fox in so much pain and still only thinking of Blaise, caused her to burst into tears.

Yoko had hushed her with gentle urgency. 'Hush now, Meecha. I know. But I need your help. Can you help me? Help me save Blaise? Keep him safe?'

"Meecha and Sheshe will do their bestest, Master-Thief."

'That's all I can ask. Thank you, Meecha.'

The house elf's eyes were still streaming when she finished her assigned job and popped out of the room, hopefully to Blaise.

XX

Dark didn't even wait until sunrise at the end of the second day, stepping into the room at midnight, the massive clock in the entrance hall two floors down not even through chiming.

"I hope your two days have been as productive as mine have, Thief," Dark had told him, sitting beside the desk and eyeing him. "You're looking better. Certainly well enough to see."

Yoko had curled a lip behind the muzzle.

"I decided that I still hate these mortals and therefore, I certainly can't trust anything they create, so I dug up an old tool of ours. I'm certain you'll remember it."

And Yoko did remember the device that Desmond daringly placed before him, close enough that even with the chains Yoko would have been able to reach out and knock it over if he wasn't so busy hating the sight of it.

Pulsing in silver and red, it was barely as tall as his foreleg, shaped like a rising, twisting spiral with a flat-ish base and a divot at the top, which was more a horizontal square with a large hole in it than anything else. Inside that hole, Desmond dropped what appeared to be a muggle spinning top, where only the tip settled into the hole and hovered there.

Yoko was relatively certain that this device was where Aurors and their unofficial counterparts around the world, had gotten the idea for the Sneakoscope because it would shriek and spin when the one closest to it was dishonest.

Unlike the Sneakoscope, however, this device, built for the interrogators and inquisitors of Valeria's Collective, had a rather fatal flaw.

It could only detect actual lies.

If one were clever enough, you could talk your way around the device's programming, avoiding the question entirely or wording it as such to not lie. That flaw had seen it falling out of favor with much of the Crown and Collective.

"It's admittedly not quite perfect, I had to rely on rather subpar human skill to remake some of the more damaged parts, but it should do the job well enough," Dark had told him, watching him watch the device.

Yoko knew he should feel a little sick over the fact that Dark had likely Thralled someone to fix this, and then promptly killed them when they were through doing so, but he felt very little.

In his coldest, hardest parts he would likely have done the same and it was that thought that usually terrified Yoko the most.

There was a solid clunk that pulled Yoko from staring at the lie detector.

Desmond had picked the Kristavi Urn up off the floor again and put it before the Traitor.

Yoko hated it on general principle.

The Kristavi Urn was, ironically, rather beautiful considering the ugliness it contained, dark gray with silver swirls and white lines that, if one stared at it long enough, appeared to form pictures.

Despite standing at only about seventy-seven centimeters in height and about half that in width, the Urn was heavy and that only had a little to do with the massive silver seal on the top of it.

The seal was a solid slab of silver etched in gold and emerald runes that, even over seven hundred years after their activation, still pulsed as strongly with power now as they did then.

"I don't think I ever asked you, Assassin, does the Urn give you the same sense of power I get when I look at it?"

Yoko had curled his lip even further, a low snarl escaping before he could contain it.

'It gives me the same sense of hate that the creatures inside it give me,' the fox had replied.

Dark had laughed, loud and sharp. "You lot would think so, wouldn't you? You've never seen what they were capable of firsthand. Always on the receiving end of the wrath and power of the Kristavi Kristines."

'Why now?' Yoko had asked. 'Why not try and free them sooner?'

"Because these mortals are so much easier to manipulate. Less effort. I suppose it's your fault really. I had gotten used to having someone with actual power at my side."

Yoko had huffed, because no Thrall was ever at Dark's side, usually under his paw.

"The loss of Arcana was a powerful blow," Dark had continued, ignoring the fox's obvious opinion. "But I think I'm going to like his upgrade even more. But enough about me. I think you've stalled long enough." The black wolf used his shoulder to shove the Urn closer to the fox. "Can you break the seal, Thief?"

/\/\/\

"You told him you could," Arcana said.

There were many secrets hidden within the Crown.

Among them, were the histories behind their greatest allies.

Yoko was not born to the Collective and he had been a highly successful thief beforehand, this he had never made a secret of.

The level of his ability, however, had been.

Arcana and Tarana, as the King and Queen, were aware of Yoko's true ability, or as much of it as Yoko had felt comfortable revealing to them, but Dark had likely not been aware of it, hence the assumption that Yoko was able to break the seal.

Yoko, in one disguise or another, had learned from the greatest ward weavers and thieves on the old planet, several of which had later been tasked with creating the seal that now stoppered the Kristavi Kristines' prison.

By that logic, the Valerian Thief was exactly what he bragged and claimed: the Greatest Thief Valeria had ever seen.

Yoko turned his face from the red wolf to give the tiger a dark, vicious grin. "Of course I didn't," he told him.

The rest of the Valerians stared at him.

"You lied to Dark? With the risk what it was?" Fallen gapped.

"Well, not technically, not with that thing spinning in front of me. I told him that I wasn't currently capable of breaking it. And I could have said that even if I was healthy. I was in a collar, a muzzle, and three chains."

Tarana shook her head. "That was risky, my friend."

"I bought myself a week," Yoko told them. "A week of healing and a week of meals for Blaise." The fox hesitated. "I didn't realize at the time that Dark had a wordplay of his own, though I knew that he was doing something."

Tarana grimaced, remembering Blaise's own admission of being unable to eat the rich food that had been delivered to him after so long without food.

"I'll inform Albus that you'll be given leave and to grant you additional space to recover," Arcana said. "Has Blaise recovered?"

"To an extent," Tarana told them. "He was seen by the Malfoy Healer the morning after we arrived and was prescribed a nutritional supplement and a list of foods to start with. He's not quite normal, but he's getting there, at least as far as recovering from his starvation."

"There were the beginnings of an infection in the deeper cuts and tears on his skin," Fallen added, "but it was taken care of. His physical health is otherwise fine."

"And you, Yoko, you'll let me know if there's anything else you need? I understand that Albus has given you issues in the past. It will no longer be a problem."

Fallen smirked.

Dumbledore did have problems with the Valerians over the last two years, though Tarana had done more than enough damage control two years ago that it might as well have been negligible, helped along by the fact that Dumbledore had, at the time, wanted something from them.

Last year, however, Fallen had very much been out of line and knew it.

He didn't feel an ounce of guilt, however, for assaulting the fraud the Headmaster had hired as the Defense Against the Dark Arts position. As far as Fallen was concerned, Gilderoy Lockhart, currently serving a stint in the Long-Term Ward at St. Mungo's, had deserved every drop of blood Fallen had drawn from him and more.

The General and the Headmaster had come to some sort of agreement after Lockhart had, somehow, managed to vanish every one of Harry's thirty-three bones and Fallen had come very close to tearing out the man's throat.

Tarana, once she'd been made aware of the attack, and Arcana had both told Albus that they were extremely lucky because Tarana was far heavier than Fallen and the damage would have been much greater.

Particularly in that she would have burned him to death if she'd been separated from him as they had Fallen.

Yoko, very much aware of Fallen's amusement above him, solemnly nodded at the King. "I'm an old hand at this, Your Majesty," he reminded Arcana.

"He's going to need time, Arcana," Fallen injected. "But we may not get it. There's a rumor out of the Ministry that Sirius Black's escape is not coincidental. He and Ebony may be coming after Harry."

Arcana shook his head. "Sirius wouldn't have betrayed the Potters. He has no motive to come after Harry."

"What other explanation is there?" Fallen asked. "There's no one else that James Potter trusted as much as he did Sirius Black, even I knew that, and there's no one else that Lily could have, not after she left school."

"Sirius is bonded to Ebony, Fallen. Given that, at the time, James Potter was Bonded to Tarana, he would never have allowed Sirius to betray the man to his death!"

"But Ebony's history is as long and storied as mine, Your Majesty," Yoko injected. "And he's even more likely to work an angle of his own. It certainly wouldn't be the first time."

Arcana appeared to double in size, and he growled, long and low, at the apparent insubordination and disagreement.

"Enough," Tarana snapped, surging to her paws. 'The children are returning. It's useless to try and guess what Ebony and Sirius are doing without additional information. If Sirius turns out to be after Harry, he and Ebony will need to strike against most, if not all, of the assembled Collective first or I miss my guess.' Fallen growled low in agreement. 'Ebony may have more raw power than the rest of us, but that's a risk to take that I'm not entirely sure he'd take for such a small target.

'On the flip side, however, Sirius is Harry's godfather and he took that role seriously in the time that I knew them together. In his right mind, Sirius will not come after Harry.'

It went unspoken, however, that Sirius might not be in his right mind.

The door opened to the strained atmosphere between the Valerians, causing Blaise, Harry, and Draco to pause in the doorway.

"Everything okay?" Harry asked slowly.

Arcana gave a full-body shake. "Nothing any of you need to be worrying about," he told them, stepping toward the door in search of his own charge. "Simply a difference of opinion."

Fallen snorted. "It isn't the first and it likely won't be the last," he smirked.

His light-hearted comment dissolved much of the tension between Arcana and the rest of them.

Arcana shook his head, but Tarana's voice rang in his head before he made it very far down the hall. 'Remember, hicari, that we've been without one another for centuries. Yoko and Fallen have been operating without our input or decisions in all that time. I needed to remind myself of this the first year we were reunited, and you will do the same as well.' Arcana paused. 'We've been separated for a long time, Arcana. We will all need to figure out where our new pieces fit best.'

XX

Harry had gone through every one of his bags and his trunk in search of the sketchbook that Draco had gotten him for his birthday.

"Maybe you left it on the table downstairs," Blaise said.

Harry tilted his head, frowning thoughtfully, before pushing himself to his feet and heading for the door. "Worth a look," he muttered.

"Be swift, Harry," Tarana told him. "You've still got packing to do and you all should get to bed early."

Harry nodded. "I'll be just a minute."

He was barely halfway down the stairs when he heard Arthur's voice, raised slightly in temper.

"-makes no sense not to tell him," he was saying. "Harry's got a right to know!"

"Sure," Arcana rumbled in return. "But thus far there's no evidence to back up the Ministry's theory."

"And the truth will terrify him," Molly added sharply. "Do you really want to send him back to school with that hanging over him?!"

"I don't want to terrify him, I just-"

"Can we help you, Potter?" Arcana asked sharply.

Harry jumped so suddenly that he nearly fell down the stairs.

"Sorry," he squeaked, quickly jogging down the stairs. "I was looking for my sketchbook and I-"

"Got lost under the eave," Arcana asked drily.

Harry grimaced.

Arcana chuckled. "Check with Tom," he told the teen. "He cleared the bar after you were through with dinner. He may have found it."

"Thanks, Your Majesty," Harry said, darting further around the corner to bother the bartender.

Harry knew better than to try and wait around hoping for more information about whatever it was that Arthur thought he had a need to know.