Author's Note:
I found the chapter particularly difficult to write, because a lot of the emotions in it are familiar to me in a way that they hadn't been when I originally wrote this story (age does this to you, I've found).
As I'm sure you've guessed from the last chapter, this one is going to detail a great deal of grief.
Just to get ahead of things, I'd like to point out (again) that I've dealt with all of these emotions in one way or another over the death of a loved one. That isn't to say that they are the only ways to deal with grief. Please try and keep that in mind when you deal with others who have lost someone, and try to remember that as you read about the characters here.
This chapter is, understandably, rather depressing, but I hope you enjoy it none-the-less,
Here's Harry Potter, the Valerians, and the Chamber of Secrets
Chapter Three: Comfort
Reeling from the sudden loss of their Queen, the remaining Valerians and their charges rally around Harry, beginning with removing him from the Dursleys' dubious care.
There was a heartbeat, maybe less, where the home of the Dursleys felt still, like time itself had paused.
And in the next moment, the next heartbeat that didn't come, havoc reigned.
Everything abruptly came up off the floor, swirling and swimming.
The air pulsed, echoing the scream of the broken boy sinking to his knees on the carpet.
The sofa went through the window first, shattering it and sending the tiger scampering away, tail between his legs and ears pressed against his skull as it shattered where he'd stood, blood still dripping down his once white jaw.
The coffee table followed, shattering into wooden splinters against a wall of ice.
Several picture frames followed it, the broken glass shimmering in the streetlights as the photos inside them were swept away with the wind.
The loveseat followed them, its heavy weight shattering Dark's feeble attempt to protect the direwolf from the uncontrolled grief and wrath of the child he had just taken everything from.
The wolf darted across the street, amber eyes still laughing at the chaos he'd created.
The life he'd taken.
Even blind, Harry threw the television out the window at him.
Dark and Arcana took off into the night, darting in different directions.
XX
It was instinct to reach for something as it disappears, to try and recapture it before it fades.
It was doubly true for something you'd had for decades, or even centuries, regardless of how conscious you were of having it in the first place.
It was also a known fact, that particularly strong emotions could grant access to feats that normally were borderline impossible.
While in Surrey, England, Harry Potter was destroying the house he grew up in, others around the world were reaching out for the severed bond to a Queen they had owed fealty to for more lifetimes than any singular human had ever had.
At that nexus of fear and agony, despite thousands of miles between them, Bonded and Valerian alike reacted to the agonized destruction in Surrey and, despite the impossibility, reached out to touch it.
To mold it.
To calm it.
Slowly, the flying debris dropped to the floor.
XX
Nearly two hundred kilometers from Privet Drive, Lucius Malfoy threw open the door to his son's room.
Draco's scream had faded, but the boy was in tears.
Normally, Lucius would have had something to say about the emotion his son was showing, but here, away from the judgmental public eye of the Wizarding World, Lucius was free to be a father and not a Malfoy.
Here, he could climb onto the four-poster bed and pull his son into his arms.
Here, he could let the boy cling to him, getting tears and snot on his nightclothes and his robe.
Here, he could press trembling lips to his son's forehead and whisper words he knew weren't true.
Because though he didn't have that bond anymore, although he'd given Fallen to his son, he had still felt the phantom vibrations of something snapping back on itself.
Of something severing.
And his twelve-year-old son had felt it happening in full.
All his reassurances were answered with the same words over and over.
"She's gone," he said through his cries. "She's gone."
Because his focus remained mostly on his son, it was a long time before Lucius realized that something else was seriously wrong.
The red wolf was gone.
XX
Even farther out, in an area that the locals only called 'The Moors', due to the fog that never dissipated and the water level was forever unpredictable, a boy, broken and bleeding, hid not on or in his bed, but beneath it.
He sported a black eye and cradled his throbbing wrist to his chest.
Unlike his friend, Blaise Zabini's grief was utterly silent.
He had long ago mastered the art of crying in total silence, and grief itself wasn't new to him. He had spent most of his life grieving his mother, and the safety that had died with her.
There was no sound in Blaise's bedroom, nothing that could wake the monster that lived down the hall, currently dead to the world, when the cracked door slid open a little more.
The silver fox was quivering, his grief so much more potent than Blaise's own.
It had never happened, where it was Blaise comforting Yoko, but Blaise opened his arms and the fox burrowed into his chest, a low mournful keen still coming from his throat and making his body quiver.
XX
The Dursleys peeked their heads around corners, taking in the power that had been unleashed on their home.
Rocking on the floor beneath the window, Harry, broken and hurting, was hunched over, arms wrapped around his middle as though to hold himself together.
Vernon stormed into the living room once it was clear the storm was over, but Petunia got to him first, picking the boy up and dropping him onto the armchair.
Perhaps it was a decade of fearing the Panther Queen and constantly inserting herself between the boy and her husband, but she'd moved without thinking, knowing by the color of her husband's face that it wasn't going to be pretty if Vernon was the one who lay hands on their nephew.
Dudley clambered to his feet, face ruddy and red with fear and tears and grief, and Petunia was reminded of the odd relationship between Tarana and her son, created the night her son had put himself between Tarana and Petunia herself.
Standing beside the catatonic form of her nephew, struggling to hold himself together, Petunia extended her arms to her son and he burrowed as deeply into them as he could.
Over Dudley's shoulder, she could still see Harry and Petunia was forced to look away, because for a second it wasn't Harry that she saw, but what her sister may have looked like, dull-eyed and blank, as she lay in her home, dead because of that world.
Around the devastated family, Vernon moved like an enraged bull.
Nearly all the furniture in their living room was gone and what was left was out of place or didn't belong in the room at all.
Animal Control arrived promptly.
Petunia, busy with the two boys, wasn't sure what her husband told the officers to sell their furniture on the lawn and in the street, and the hole in the window, but she ultimately decided that it wasn't her problem.
They would eventually come to make sure that none of this was revealed.
They, after all, had taken care of everything when Lily and her husband had died.
Vernon ordered her to take Dudley and that boy, as Harry had suddenly become, upstairs and out of the way.
When she came back down several hours later, the hole had been repaired, as had all her carefully selected furniture. Even the television, which had ended up in pieces when Harry had magically thrown it out the window, was back in its place as though it had never been through the ordeal.
Vernon was red with rage and had the bottle of whiskey on the dining room table, amidst the remains of their dinner.
It was an easy distraction to begin clearing it away.
She was reminded of the other mishap of the evening when she stepped into the kitchen, the remains of their dessert still all over the floor.
Her lips were pressed into a thin, white line as she moved through that mess as well.
It wasn't until her third trip through for dishes that she noticed the thick parchment of that world on the dining table.
XX
Dear Mr. Potter,
We have received intelligence that a Hover Charm was used at your place of residence this evening at twelve minutes past nine.
As you know, underage wizards are not permitted to perform spells outside school, and further spellwork on your part may lead to expulsion from said school (Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery, 1875, Paragraph C).
We would also ask you to remember that any magical activity that risks notice by members of the non-magical community (Muggles) is a serious offense under section 13 of the International Confederation of Warlocks' Statute of Secrecy.
Enjoy your holidays!
XX
Vernon must have caught her reading it because his voice came from the living room.
"Boy didn't say he wasn't allowed to use magic outside that school," he rumbled. "Must've forgotten to mention it."
Petunia swallowed. "Vernon-"
"He's a menace, Petunia," Vernon growled. "Look at what he did to our house! He's staying up in that room, and I'll be damned if he ever leaves it again!"
Petunia exhaled shakily and, unbidden, an image she was sure was never going to leave her mind again came to her.
\/\/\/
The two men shook out the nondescript black bag sharply, with all the practice of having done so many times before.
Heaving the bleeding carcass took both men several tries, but they did, eventually, manage it.
Petunia barely even registered any of it.
Not until she was watching from her nephew's bedroom window as they chucked the body of a Queen, perhaps not her Queen, but a Queen, into the back of a van like so-much trash.
Petunia remembered the regal woman that had often appeared in her dreams in those early years of caring for her sister's son.
Though that woman and the panther didn't share a physical form, they certainly shared a baring.
Tarana, for all that she physically appeared to be a wild animal, could never have been mistaken for one.
No matter the form she had taken, she was clearly a Queen.
At least she had been in life.
She had the strangest urge to storm outside and demand that the men treat the panther they were transporting with more respect.
To know if they knew who, exactly, they were transporting and the things that would be done to them for that disrespect.
But the urge was lost as she turned from the window.
She closed the door behind her and felt nothing.
/\/\/\
Like that moment, she had the oddest urge to argue with her husband.
Harry was a child.
A grieving child.
Surely that must account for something, leeway of some kind.
But as before, that urge disappeared once she turned to the living room, dishes in hand.
She went about cleaning and never said a word.
XX
The following day, Vernon spent the morning dragging Harry's trunk into the hall, throwing his things into it, and dragging it down the stairs. After locking it in the cupboard under the stairs, he then went about installing a padlock on Harry's bedroom door, telling the boy through the wood as he did so that he would never again leave it.
He told Harry of the letter that had been delivered by his kind and cheerfully told the boy that if he tried to 'magic' himself out, Hogwarts would expel him.
Harry had given no sound through the door and Vernon appeared happier for it.
Vernon took Dudley out for lunch, telling his depressed son that it would 'do them both some good'.
Petunia had declined.
She hadn't felt much like eating that morning and didn't expect it to change much as the day went on, and judging by the greenish look Dudley'd had at breakfast that morning, she was sure that the boy felt the same, but was simply eager to be out of the house.
After lunch, Vernon had spent several hours on the phone.
It had been at least two before Petunia had managed to work up enough curiosity to step into the kitchen during one of them, and immediately wished she hadn't.
Bars.
Her husband was quoting companies to come and put bars on their windows.
That urge from the night before had come to her again.
To protest.
Before she could find the courage to open her mouth, however, the urge had faded again.
She turned and walked back out, leaving Vernon to what he was doing.
XX
Dudley was not ignorant of the state of his home.
His father was all but on the warpath, determined to pretend that the night before hadn't happened, unless any of it involved keeping Harry aware that it had happened.
Their lunch had been rife with his father telling him about the menace that was his cousin's world. He reminded him of the things Harry had done with his magic, of the destruction he'd caused.
Only once had Dudley dared to make his own opinion known.
He'd asked his father on the way home, about what that meant about Tarana.
Tarana who had dragged the wolf away from him and been nearly killed for it.
His father had viciously replied that the bitch, as he'd called her, brought it upon herself for consorting with dangerous types. He warns Dudley against making the same mistake.
With his father's reaction being what it was, Dudley wasn't sure what he should say to his mother.
His mother walked like a ghost through the house.
She performed the same actions, but it was like she wasn't there at all with them.
He waited until she was coming out of his cousin's bedroom, an untouched tray of food in her hands, before bringing it up.
"Why is he so mad at her?" he asked her. "Tarana died for us."
His mother's lips were pressed tightly together for a long time.
"He's scared, my boy." She finally said, her voice reedy and thin, none of the usual adoration he was used to in her tone. "He's scared and only doing what he thinks is best."
Dudley was left standing in the hall as his mother went downstairs.
He could hear his father calling Harry an 'ungrateful brat' for turning his nose up at the food he was being gifted with.
Once he was sure that his father was busy yelling about Harry to his mother, Dudley slipped into what had once upon a time been his playroom.
The room was dark.
His father had told his mother at dinner that some men were going to come tomorrow to install bars on the windows, to make sure that none of the others from Harry's world could come and get him.
Dudley wasn't sure how he felt about it.
He'd seen what his cousin could do and surely a more trained wizard could do more damage, right? They had to be even more dangerous.
But then, Tarana had been royalty.
She had called herself a warrior queen.
She had been dangerous; he knew that from the very moment they'd met.
But she had also been real with him.
She'd talked to him a lot, told him things that he knew his parents wouldn't have approved of, would have rather been hidden from him.
She could have left him to die.
She'd made it perfectly clear all summer that she didn't much care for his family, so why wouldn't she have left them to die?
Wouldn't it have been easier to leave him and his parents to die bloody and horrible like in the werewolf movies he wasn't supposed to watch while she took Harry and ran?
And if Harry was so dangerous, why hadn't he gone out to fight with Tarana? Surely, they could have fought off the wolf and tiger together if Harry had all that power.
Angry, Dudley turned to the bed, ready to yell all of that at his cousin.
The anger fled him.
Harry was looking right at him.
Or through him?
Dudley wasn't sure, but his eyes, even in the darkness, were red-rimmed and puffy and he was crying.
Harry made a keening sort of choking noise and Dudley bolted out the door, not wanting to be caught inside by either of his parents.
XX
Dudley quickly found that he didn't like going outside anymore.
He found excuses over the next few days to stay inside when his parents asked if he wanted to go somewhere, or if his friends called and said they were headed to the park.
He didn't want to be caught outside while the tiger and the wolf were still out there.
Inside was almost as bad though.
The day after the men had come and installed bars on Harry's window, his father had proceeded to pretend like Harry and Tarana had never existed.
His mother wandered through the house, obsessively cleaning or cooking, and had almost tripped on Dudley himself and never noticed.
For all that he now had his father's attention, Dudley was at a loss as to how to regain his mother's.
Oddly, the only escape he found was in the one place that he wasn't supposed to be in.
In Harry's room, Tarana had existed.
In Harry's room, there was an emotion he understood.
Grief.
Anger.
He couldn't tell how he knew that Harry was angry, because Harry hadn't moved or said a word.
He knew he was eating again, at least a little, but Dudley didn't know how, because he was the only one who came into his cousin's room, and he didn't appear to ever leave the bed.
On the third day after she had died, Dudley found a gray owl screeching from one of the bars.
He quickly closed the door and, after looking at Harry, rushed to open the window and clumsily tried to take the letter from the bird.
It didn't want to stay still, and he ended up with more than one scratch on his wrist for his attempts, but Harry hadn't seemed to see or hear the owl and didn't move.
Somehow, the owl seemed to appear both ruffled and offended as it screeched at him once more and flew into the afternoon sky.
Dudley looked at the letter.
On one hand, he knew he should bring it to his mother or wait until his father got home from work and give it to him. Harry wasn't supposed to have contact with his freakish kind.
But…didn't Harry have friends?
Tarana had asked him to write to some guy named Fallen more than once, giving each word letter by letter and the words never made any sense to him, so Tarana must have had people she communicated with.
Hesitantly, Dudley approached the bed.
Harry didn't seem to notice him, so Dudley shoved the letter under his nose.
"Here." He said gruffly. "Don't tell dad."
Harry blinked slowly at him but didn't make a move to take it from him.
"Didn't you want to hear how your freak friends were doing?" Dudley asked harshly, waving the letter to tempt him with it.
Harry rolled over.
Dudley scoffed at him but couldn't say anything else to him as his mother was calling him to come down for lunch.
He tossed the letter on the desk as he walked by it, closing the door quietly behind him and relocking it so no one would realize he'd been where he wasn't supposed to be.
XX
Petunia noticed the note when she arrived with Harry's supper.
It was difficult to miss, as it was the only thing on the desk, what with Vernon having cleared the whole thing of anything remotely magical days ago.
It had clearly been read because it was crumpled up and tossed across the wooden surface, even though by appearance Harry hadn't moved from his bed.
Shoving the tray onto the desk to free up her hands, she quickly reached for it.
\/\/\/
The twins are coming.
Don't do anything rash.
/\/\/\
There was no signature and the handwriting was unfamiliar to her.
She didn't know who these 'twins' were, but after a glance at her nephew, she decided that there was nothing she could do to prevent their arrival.
She recrumpled the note into a ball and shoved it deep into her apron.
She sat down on the sofa with her son and watched a television show with her family, never saying a word.
XX
Dudley was home alone when something heavy hit the front door.
He didn't move to answer it, instead moving further into the house.
"I can hear you, mortal," a voice growled through it. "Open the door or I will blow it down."
Dudley shivered.
It wasn't that voice, but it was a voice like Tarana's.
A Valerian.
He watched in horror as the very air around the door seemed to turn bloody and the locks and chains all moved on their own. The screws that held the door in place unscrewed themselves and the door lifted straight off its hinges and floated into the hallway.
"Do not test my patience further," the red wolf in the doorway growled. "Where is he?"
Dudley swallowed. "Are you his friend?"
"She was my Queen." The wolf sneered, stepping further into the house.
There was a familiar violence to him, a violence not unlike what he'd faced when he stood between Tarana and his mother what felt like a lifetime ago now.
"She died on your property. By rights, I should be stripping your flesh from your bones, boy. Where is her charge?"
Shaking, Dudley pointed towards the stairs. "The door is locked." He said, immediately feeling stupid.
The wolf obviously didn't have a problem with locked things because he'd unhinged the front door.
He flinched beneath the unimpressed, blood-red gaze.
"Do you have a key, mortal?"
Dudley shook his head, then changed his mind and nodded.
Red eyes narrowed and fangs were bared.
"You test me."
"I know where it is!" Dudley rushed to tell him.
"Be swift." The Valerian grunted, disappearing up the stairs.
Dudley ran to get the key to Harry's room.
He halted in shock when he came back to the entry because the front door was exactly as he'd left it, locked and bolted.
For a second, he wasn't sure he hadn't hallucinated the wolf entirely.
"Hurry up, boy!" the wolf snapped from above him. "Are you looking to have your parents find your dead body on their precious carpets?"
XX
Harry wasn't sure how long had passed since…Since.
His head felt foggy.
This morning, there were paws on his floor.
He sat up quickly, hoping to find that, not for the first time, That Night had been a dream.
He has mixed feelings about his visitor.
It isn't the panther he expected, but it is a Valerian.
"Fallen." He croaked, struggling upright.
The wolf looked like hell.
Whether it was the family he was bound to, or simply a facet of the wolf's own personality, Fallen was rarely anything less than rather clean and well kept.
He had a drawing somewhere (where did he put it?) of Draco sitting cross-legged before the fire at Hogwarts and drawing a long brush through Fallen's fur one night before bed.
Now, there were twigs, burrs, leaves, mud, and-Harry's mind shied away from this one-blood caught in the wolf's tangled fur.
"Mum's at the shops," Dudley said quickly, already closing the door. "Dad's at work."
"Get out," Fallen growled.
Harry flinched.
"What happened?" Fallen asked after several seconds of the two staring at one another.
Harry whimpered.
Fallen remained silent as the boy told him, between sobs and choked breath, that Dark and Arcana had found the house while Tarana was away. He tells him how the wolf had tempted the Dursleys and Harry out of the house. He tells him that Tarana had arrived to save Dudley.
"I tried!" Harry cried, twisting the blanket in his hands so tightly Fallen could see it beginning to tear. "I swear Fallen, I tried. I fought to go out. But she set the doors on fire and told us that we couldn't leave! I couldn't-I watched Arcana do it. He just-he tore it out like it was nothing to him." His voice caught. "He tore it out and now…now I can't see anything else. Fallen I didn't know how to help! I swear, I'm sorry! I should have helped her!"
The rage and grief that had driven Fallen the miles between the Manor and Privet Drive collapsed in on itself and was walled away.
He could still feel it, pulsing like a second heartbeat in the back of his skull, but the pity he felt for the boy, sobbing and trying to tell the General that he was so sorry he didn't help, gave him the strength to shove it away for the moment.
"Hush, Harry," Fallen told him, leaping onto the bed, pressing himself against the child. "You are not to blame for this," he assured him, curling paw and muzzle around Harry in as close to a hug as he could give. "I don't blame you. No one blames you for this."
Harry burrowed into the wolf's coarse fur and cried.
Fallen glared into the room, taking in the bars on the windows and the locked door behind him.
The rage had pushed to the forefront of his mind again, but it was pulsing to a different tune now.
Now it pulsed not to 'she's dead' but to 'I should have helped her'.
Harry had been living with that one thought for nearly a week.
Two adults in the house and their first thought had been to barricade a child into a single room, rather than give him the comfort and assurance that he was not at fault that he needed and deserved.
I'll kill them. The General thought viciously. I'll kill them both for this.
Oddly, he's not sure if he's referring to his enemies or Harry's when he swears it.
XX
The two were exhausted, Harry through his grief and Fallen through the days he'd spent moving.
Fallen had avoided all the major roadways so it had taken him far longer to arrive at his destination than he'd liked. His rage had given him endurance where he should never have had it, but now that it was gone, ebbing and flowing like a river, he found his body demanding rest.
His grief made him hyperaware, though.
Every creak of the house was abnormal.
He'd nearly severed the head of the woman that had come through the doors, supposedly to feed the child he'd found suddenly thrust into his care, and she had ducked back out and not returned, keeping the other mortals, the other muggles out in turn.
If Fallen had been feeling even a little more gracious, he would likely have thanked her for it, but he was still raging at the treatment of a wizard, of a child of any kind, abandoned and uncared for in the ways that truly mattered.
Considering how often he'd been woken over the course of the day and into the night, he was surprised at how quickly he realized that it wasn't one of the house's sounds that had woken him this time.
There was a bloody car outside the second-story window.
"What the bloody fucking hell do you think you're doing, Weasley?" Fallen hissed, slowly disentangling himself from boy and blanket alike.
It said much about Harry's exhaustion that he didn't so much as twitch when the wolf left him lying there.
Ron Weasley appeared just as startled to see Fallen, as Fallen was to see him, blinking through the bars.
"Fallen?" Ron asked, barely remembering to keep his voice lowered.
The two redheads in the front seat were much better about it.
"Fallen?" one of the twins hissed. "What's he doing here?"
'The better question is what are you doing here?' Fallen told them, switching from an outward voice to the telepathy that his kind was almost more familiar with. 'My Queen died here, and the world felt it. That same feeling would not have extended itself to you.'
Ron had tears in his eyes, and he coughed.
"Draco fire-called," George said when it became clear his younger brother couldn't. "Told Ron that he needed to do something, to get Harry out of his relative's home."
"'Where he belongs.'" Ron quoted wetly. "Thought he was being stupid 'til he told me about…."
"We offered to help as soon as we heard." Fred continued. "The car is dad's. We're just borrowing it 'cause it won't show up on the Ministry's radar or anything as us using magic."
'Shut up.' Fallen said sharply. 'Don't tell me another thing about that car. What I don't know won't get your father arrested.'
The older boys had the grace to look ashamed of their faux pas, Ron was too busy trying to pierce the gloom behind the wolf.
"How is he?"
'In agony,' Fallen told him shortly. 'Pray none of you ever feel the things we are feeling, for I would wish it on very few.'
Ron swallowed and the twins exchanged wary glances.
"Ron," Fred said, handing him a coil of rope.
The boy gathered himself, taking the rope from him.
Fallen glanced over his shoulder at Harry as the rope was tied around the bars on the window.
The rev of the car engine brought him back to the window and he scowled.
'Idiots,' he growled. Taping his Element, he severed the bars from where they were attached to the window. 'Do any of you have a semblance of stealth in your bodies? Because that type of noise would have woken the neighborhood let alone the house.'
Ron looked sheepish as he hauled the bars up to the car. "Sorry." He whispered.
Fallen rolled his eyes. 'If one of you can stop being an idiot for ten minutes, the muggles locked the boy in this room. I assume his school things are elsewhere on the property. If you can do so quietly, I need you to go and find it. Much of what he has can be replaced if we need to, but I'd rather not do so unless necessary.'
There was some quiet swearing, as the twins climbed over the back seat and through the open backdoor, joining Fallen in Harry's bedroom.
'Do you need me to unlock the door for you?' Fallen asked, only half-mocking.
George shook his head and held up a hairpin. "Muggle trick." He told him. "We've got it covered."
Fallen nodded and took a moment to glance back at the sleeping child.
In a matter of minutes, the twins were through the door and slipping through the halls quietly.
'Keep him quiet.' Fallen instructed Ron, before following the boys out.
XX
Fred was picking the lock on the only locked door on the first floor when George joined his twin and the wolf.
"Dad said that Harry got a warning from the Ministry." He whispered. "Using magic in front of muggles."
Fallen grit his teeth.
"What do you think it was for?" Fred asked, glancing up from his work to look at the wolf.
Fallen knew what it was for.
Full-grown witches and wizards were known to lose control when witnessing something traumatic, and Tarana had been many things to the child in her care.
'I wouldn't dare to presume.' Fallen told them instead. 'But if I had to guess, the Ministry will be rescinding that warning as soon as Tarana's death becomes public knowledge.'
The twins are not always known for their tact.
Their pranks and their ingenuity, yes, but not necessarily their tact.
Fallen was grateful that neither one of them mentioned the break in his voice over the Queen's name.
XX
Harry hadn't slept so well Since, so he was surprised to find that at least a day had passed since Fallen's arrival and the sky outside his windows was dark.
He was even more surprised to hear quiet swearing in the immediate vicinity and sat up quickly.
Fallen was sitting near the end of the bed, still as wild and disheveled as when he'd arrived.
He was watching Fred and George Weasley try and shove Harry's school trunk into the boot of a car.
A car that was flying!
'Keep quiet, Harry.' Fallen told him, not even sparing the boy a glance. 'Thus far we've avoided waking the muggles and I'd like to keep it that way until we're well on our way.'
Harry nodded, stunned.
With a great shove of effort, Fred and George got the trunk through the window.
Hands on his hips, Fred turned to the rest of the room.
"Anything else you want here, Harry?" he asked with forced cheer. The smile on his face didn't reach his eyes, but Harry supposed he was trying to be cheerful for his benefit.
Harry pulled himself from his, now filthy, sheets and blankets, looking around the room.
Fred and George climbed back through the window and over the seat while Harry gathered what little clothes he had stored in the room.
Fallen curled a lip at the state and size of many of them.
Muggles.
The wolf tilted his head and turned away as Harry handed the clothes off to Ron and then followed them through to the backseat.
'He will be in better hands.' He told the approaching muggle. 'We will take care of him. Be warned, mortal, the Queen may have fallen, but Valeria is still watching.'
Fallen made the jump from the window to the backseat look effortless.
Like most vehicles used by the Wizarding World, the inside was more spacious than it appeared and there was plenty of room for himself, the two young wizards, and the birdcage that had likely once held Harry's pet/messenger owl, Hedwig.
XX
Outside Harry's bedroom door, Petunia Dursley put a hand on the wood and for a moment wondered what she could have done differently.
They had come for her nephew, as she had somehow always known they would.
He would be better taken care of there.
But how was she supposed to fix her family of everything that had changed with the blood and death on their front lawn?
XX
"Did you ever figure out who was stopping your mail, Harry?" Ron asked, nearly half an hour after they'd left the Dursleys.
Harry stirred from his mostly catatonic state.
"A Malfoy Elf." He said hoarsely. "Dobby, I think. He didn't want me to go back to Hogwarts."
The rest of the car turned to look at the Malfoy guardian.
Fallen shook his head. "I know every Elf born to the Malfoy house. Dobby doesn't belong to Lucius. He's likely one of the two or three that Nathaniel brought with him from France. They're bound to the Manor but not to Lucius and his line directly, an occurrence like that can only happen after severing your ties to the previous master, and Nathaniel will never allow that."
"But he'd still be able to use it to send a message," Fred pointed out.
"Why should he need to?" Fallen asked him. "Regardless of my bonding to Draco, I'm still a safer bet to deliver any such message to Harry Potter, because of my ties to him through both Draco and Tarana. And he could never guarantee the sanctity of such a missive through an Elf bound to the branch family because their first loyalty is to Nathaniel."
"Could Katelyn do it? Use one of her father's house-elves to try and scare Harry into not returning to school?"
Fallen snorted. "Katelyn Malfoy hasn't had a care in the world since she's arrived back from Hogwarts. She's been out every other day or so with her school friends, shopping and gossiping to her heart's content. She is planning something, of that I have no doubt, but I don't think it has anything to do with Harry."
Harry, who had remained silent throughout the whole conversation became the center of attention for barely a moment.
The brunette was staring blankly out into the night sky, watching the buildings below them pass by.
Ron looks at Fallen worriedly and the wolf sighed.
'Harry saw everything,' he told them dejectedly. 'He feels inadequate and useless, having watched Tarana die. No, Weasley,' he said, answering the unasked question. 'He is not okay.'
There was a long silence in the car that was eventually broken by Fred, turning bodily in the front seat to look at Fallen.
"How'd you get to the Dursleys anyway? Isn't the Manor in Wiltshire somewhere?"
"I spent the week following Her Highness' death running, Weasley," was Fallen's vague, and final, answer.
The twins exchanged looks up front, but the answer meant little to any of the children in the car with the wolf, and they filled in the blanks themselves.
XX
It was shortly after dawn when the twins dropped the car in front of a tall, leaning building.
Fallen didn't often get the chance to fly, and he admitted easily that it wasn't necessarily his favorite method of travel.
He clambered gratefully out of the car, shaking his fur free of some of the dirt and debris that had come with traveling to Surrey.
He deliberately didn't focus on the Burrow, the home of the Weasleys, for too long, as it was nothing remotely like the Manor and it would do no one any favors for the comparison.
"Good Morning, Mrs. Weasley," Fallen greeted, unintentionally giving her sons a heads up on her approach.
Molly Weasley was short, plump, and usually rather kind-faced.
Despite her distaste of Lucius, Molly was of one of the Ancient Families, of the Prewitts, who had once been bound to Arcana.
She remembered well how to treat the Valerians.
"General Fallen." She greeted tersely, bowing as much as she was able while still shooting glares in her sons' general direction. "I wish I could say it was a pleasure to see you, but considering the circumstances," her face was abruptly sad, and she searched the faces of the children until she came upon Harry's.
"You poor boy," she said, stalking forward and pulling him roughly into a hug.
Fallen took an instinctive step forward, but Molly began to sway, not unlike one of Yoko's more pleasant-or dangerous-plants, and did nothing else.
The boy was tense in her arms for the longest time, as though unsure of what to do with this sudden and unexpected affection.
And then, like a flicked switch, he was clutching at her and crying.
Molly, if possible, tightened her grip even more, smothering the boy with her body as though she wished for nothing more than to hide him from the world.
"I'm so, so sorry, Harry," she whispered wetly into his hair, as though his pain was her own for all that she had likely never truly knew Tarana, not as one of the Potters or the Valerians had.
"Inside," Fallen said to the rest of the Weasleys. "Go inside, this is not for prying eyes to see."
There was no threat in Fallen's words, but the three Weasleys moved as though they'd been bitten, darting inside.
Fallen followed them only as far as the front door, before turning back to keep an eye on the tangle of woman and child as Harry was offered the comfort he should have received immediately upon the death of his Bonded.
XX
He was surprised when the door opened again and he was joined, not by another Weasley, but by the Assassin.
"Yoko."
The silver fox had paused, mid-step, and was staring, as Fallen was, at the child in Molly Weasley's smothering, but desperately needed, embrace.
The fox took a shaking breath and finished stepping out of the house.
"The Ministry knows," Yoko said after several seconds. "Arthur Weasley turned up at the Mansion. Said that it was for the best if Harry had someone who would understand. I don't think they'd even thought of…."
Fallen tried hard not to be offended.
There was little love between the Malfoys and the Weasleys, and Fallen was tied tightly to the Malfoys as the Weasleys knew them, despite Draco's Hogwarts Sorting.
"Come," Yoko said, getting to his paws and pressing his body into Fallen's to make him move. "Come, Fallen."
With great hesitance and reluctance, Fallen allowed his partner's slighter build to push him around the building, out of sight of the inhabitants, guests, or otherwise.
As soon as the two were hidden, or what passed for it in the open space, Fallen dropped like a stone, as though the strings that had operated him since the second he'd felt that familiar bond snap, were suddenly cut.
There was a soft whining sound, low and mournful, coming from somewhere nearby and Fallen struggled to twist himself around Yoko, to offer comfort.
But while Yoko was making a noise of his own, it wasn't the whining. It was a sharp keen.
It took the wolf far longer than it should have to realize that the sound he'd been hoping to ease was his own.
He hadn't realized he needed Yoko until the fox was there, entangled with his own limbs, and sharing his pain.
"She's-"
Fallen bit the words off before they were finished.
His rage had abandoned him.
His pain blinded him to everything around him.
His pride choked the howl he needed in his throat, so he sank his fangs into Yoko's nape and muffled it as best he could.
The fox was little better, a chittering noise echoed in the little space between them, high pitch and hurting.
Wrapped around one another, the lovers struggled to stay afloat as their loss enveloped them anew.
XX
It was nearly sundown when Fallen and Yoko finally managed to separate from one another.
It was Yoko, not Fallen, who gathered his strength and reminded Fallen that he had a responsibility that wasn't here at the Burrow.
Draco and Lucius both would be looking for answers.
Parting from Yoko had never been as difficult as it was when Fallen needed to tear himself away from the smaller canid to step into the painfully green fire and return to Malfoy Manor.
He didn't make it further than the Floo Hall, collapsing steps away from the ever-burning fire and panting as though he'd run for miles.
'How does one kill one's hicari?' Brandon asked the wolf, not for the first time since arriving at Privet Drive.
Also, not for the first time, Fallen promptly ordered his tenant to shut up. He wasn't ready to think about those repercussions when he was still struggling with the fact that she was gone.
Still reaching for a bond he'd rarely used, but now couldn't seem to ignore the absence of.
He spent a long time panting and struggling to regain his feet, despite having been dealt no physical wound.
XX
When he was eventually able to move again, Fallen didn't need to hunt for Draco or Lucius.
He knew he'd find them in Draco's bedroom, despite the years of Lucius telling the child that he was 'too old' for such displays of comfort and affection.
He slipped into the bedroom on silent paws.
The fire was banked low, offering deep shadows to the wolf as he paced towards the bed in the center of the room.
Lucius was, as Fallen had predicted, spread out along the bed, with his son curled up between his legs and lying on his chest.
Draco, who shared his father's care for his own appearance, looked as though he hadn't slept since the night Fallen had abandoned the Manor in favor of empty vengeance and information, information he almost wished he hadn't gotten.
Ignoring the usual rules of the house, Fallen leapt onto the bed and sprawled himself over the two humans' entwined legs.
"How is the boy?" Lucius asked quietly.
Fallen hesitated for only a moment before burying his muzzle in the blankets. 'Grieving,' he said sadly, showing more emotion to his former charge than he usually did to his current ones. 'He likely will be for years to come.' He hesitated again. 'He watched,' he revealed to the Malfoy Lord. 'Arcana tore out her throat and the boy watched every second of it.' He shook his head and looked into the darkness. 'A hell of a birthday present.' He exhaled.
They were silent for several minutes, each lost in the repercussions of such a thing in a child.
'And Draco?'
"Not well," Lucius admitted. "I'm surprised, considering their rather short acquaintance."
Fallen hummed. 'Quality does not always equal quantity,' he told the man.
"Very true," Lucius said, brushing a hand through his son's hair just as his face began to scrunch up in a nightmare.
"And you, Fallen? How are you?"
'Losing her was painful.' Fallen said quietly. 'I'd forgotten,' he added ruefully. 'How deeply the tie between us had run, despite the years we've spent apart until it wasn't there anymore. I keep…I keep reaching,' his tone was almost thoughtful, distant, 'reaching for her as though I expect it to suddenly reappear. For this entire ordeal to have been a creation of my mind, or an aspect of the Eye that I can…subvert. That I can change before it becomes a reality. But…this is my reality. And it tears the wound anew. Almost…you would think I'd never lost people before this….'
Lucius laid a hand between the wolf's ears.
Those losses have never been your Queen. He thought but didn't say.
"What can I do?" he asked instead. "How can I help?"
Fallen pressed his head into Lucius' hand, soaking the comfort he offered him.
"What I need, Lucius, the Malfoys' money cannot buy."
Lucius nodded his understanding.
The two were there for a long time, listening to Draco's hitched breath as he cried in his sleep.
