Tim Granger ducked and bobbed along with the movements of the man next to him in the queue outside a theatre, keeping himself hidden from the trio of dark wizards who were beginning to attract a crowd on the pavement of Piccadilly Circus. Dressed in their wizard clothing, they looked like a roving publicity troupe for a newly opened show - like a new staging of Sweeney Todd, or maybe a grungy reimagining of Les Miserables.
The wizards stood on the pavement, under the neon and electric lights, glaring at the crowds of people moving down the street. They did nothing but glare long enough for the easily bored, slightly tipsy collection of onlookers to begin to egg them on, shouting songs at them, singing lines about "the worst pies in London" or the much more menacing "music of a people who will not be slaves again."
"What do they mean by it?" Amycus Carrow began to shrill as the trio of wizards moved into fighting formation, their backs to each other, turning in a slow circle. "Why do they hem us in? And what are these slogans they're shouting? How are we to - "
"Shut up, Carrow," Bellatrix Lestrange sneered at him. "I'll make quick work - "
"You will not," Corban Yaxley hissed, grabbing Bellatrix by her wand hand.
She yanked herself free. "You dare to touch me!"
"You dare to expose, in one idiotic swoop, my three years of undercover operations at the Ministry by drawing attention to me while I'm in the company of an escaped convict?" Yaxley countered. "We must go undetected by our own kind and therefore, you must hold your wand."
She stifled a shriek. "If you're so secretive and important, why have you come?"
He spoke through his teeth. "I ask myself the same thing. I am here on the Dark Lord's orders and for no other reason. I suspect, Madam Lestrange, that I am here as your leash."
She let out a loud cackle.
The Muggle audience watched the wizards' faces growing more and more animated, their exaggerated but unintelligible arguing with one another piquing the crowd's interest. The show must be starting, they reasoned, as they gathered in greater numbers. When nothing more happened, the crowd began to clap in rhythm, spurring the performers on.
Tim stood watching from his place in the unmoving queue beneath an awning, his heart pounding. Stupid tourists, in from the suburbs and out of town to make a show of themselves, now making a show of the dangerous wizards sent into the city to hunt him. All of these people were in danger they didn't understand. And the only way they would know it would be either if the wizards lashed out, or if he, Tim Granger, stepped out into the open to sound a warning before it was too late.
But such a warning would almost certainly mean he'd be caught. And that would mean Hermione…
But he and Hermione were only two people, and there had to be at least a hundred people here in the street. The calculation was heartbreaking, but not difficult. Still, he didn't move.
As the wizards turned in their trio, Tim took stock of their expressions, trying to gauge the threat they posed to the crowds. The small man looked frightened, which might make him desperate and prone to overreact. The tall man looked angry but guarded, tightly controlled but like a spring on a trap. His anger seemed equally divided between the crowd and his wizard partners.
The woman was clearly the most dangerous. She looked furious, but in a gleeful, excited way, as if she could hardly wait to get started. She bared her teeth and rolled her eyes, daring the crowds to advance closer, to give her the slightest push before she would run wild over them. She was raking her fingers through her hair, shifting it away from her face to better see what would soon be a battlefield.
Tim could hear her voice from where he stood, over the racket of the singing and clapping. She was still cackling, not like a witch in a Saturday cartoon, but low and eerie like a hag in a horror movie. The sound chilled Tim to his soul. Still laughing, she was drawing in a breath, like a mummer, her eyes tipping back into her head. She was on the attack.
Several things happened, all at once.
Tim Granger threw himself out of the theatre queue, shouting, "No! I'm here!"
The witch had surrendered her sense of sight to her spell and she could not see him - not at that moment. Without touching her wand, she sent out a wave of slow-moving green light, like a poisonous nebula, bursting from her sternum, drifting toward the crowd.
The drunks and lads cheered the light show, but a cry of tight, incredulous fear was rising from the more sensitive people in the gathering.
The large wizard snarled at the witch. He took both her and the smaller man by their wrists and they all seemed to twist and distort before they vanished from view.
And just as the green light was about to wash over the nighttime crowd on Piccadilly Circus, there was a rush of warm wind, like something hot and fiery but unseen had flown through the empty space the wizards had vacated. With it came a sweet, nostalgic smell like sherbet lemon candy. In an instant, these sensations had passed, and green light was gone - neutralized.
The crowd clapped and cheered for this fine finale before dispersing to find something new and better to look at, or maybe something else to drink.
Tim Granger watched the crowd go - all these happy, hapless people. The second phase of the chase had begun: the part he knew he would need to spend away from the crowds he had thought would keep him safe. These wizards must be faced alone.
He slipped down a filthy stairwell, back into the underground, to vanish.
Yaxley, Carrow, and Lestrange collapsed together on the lawn outside Malfoy Manor, all of them materializing screaming at one another.
"How dare you bring us back to the Dark Lord before our mission is fulfilled?" Bellatrix screeched louder than the rest.
Yaxley bawled a reply almost as loudly. "How dare you jeopardize every other facet of our movement for this single mission? It is not what the Dark Lord intends after years of careful plotting and waiting."
"The Muggle!" Carrow was shrilling, throwing himself between the pair of them, pointing furiously at both. "He was right there in the street, stepping out from under an awning, calling to us just as you attacked the useless masses of them and you took us away."
Yaxley snarled. "No, he can't have been there."
"He was!"
Yaxley paced up and down on the grass, swearing and fuming.
"We would have had him if you weren't such a coward!" Bellatrix spat at him.
"No, we wouldn't have had anything," Yaxley countered. "Not in the pandemonium of the brazen mass murder of all those Muggles. Really, Bellatrix, I rather think I will enjoy hearing you explain this to the Dark Lord. There is no excuse for it but your selfish, undisciplined bloodlust."
At the word "undisciplined," Belltrix cringed. It was the very word the Dark Lord spoke each and every time he punished her.
"They're not murdered," Carrow wailed again. "Did you not see? I saw it as we disapparated. That mangy phoenix from the school came winging between Madam Lestrange's spell and the Muggle horde, sparing them all. Not a single hair singed among the lot of them. They won't have been able to have seen the bloody bird themselves, but it saved them all the same."
Bellatrix swore. "That sneaking, creeping, Muggle-loving headmaster scum."
"Yes, well, he's done us a favour this time," Yaxley said. "Now we can go back to London and round up the Muggle as we were meant to instead of crawling into Malfoy Manor on our hands and knees to plead forgiveness for prematurely exposing our undercover operations at the Ministry, and everything else that comes to light once the Statute of Secrecy is utterly and egregiously flouted."
"Utterly and egregiously flouted," Bellatrix parroted back to him in a mocking nasal voice.
Yaxley turned his back on her and waved both of his hands at the manor. "How am I expected to work under these conditions?"
Carrow's voice was rising again. "You would dare - "
"Shut up!" Yaxley and Lestrange roared at once.
Bellatrix was snatching at both of their wrists at once. "Enough. To London."
And with that, they were back in pursuit.
Tim went back to the house. If the wizards had already been there clawing through the recycling for theatre magazines, odds were they had moved on from searching for him at home. Sure enough, at home the back door was blasted off its hinges. A message was blinking on the answer phone, the police with an urgent message about a break-in at the surgery.
There was no time to grieve for it now. He recorded a message for Ann to find, letting her know that even though everything they owned was ruined, he was alive. Taking only some food and clothes and his passport, he got into the car. Even if the wizards recognized the car, they couldn't see in the dark, and if he kept off the major motorways, traveling on back lanes instead, he might be able to get out of London on his own, without putting anyone else in danger.
He drove, watching the skies as much as the roads, tense and sinking further into exquisite exhaustion. What happened to the green, evil cloud the witch had sent out to attack the crowd in Piccadilly Circus? It had looked as if it simply dissipated in a gust of wind. Maybe they were helping him - Hermione's people, the good ones. Maybe they were powerful enough to watch over him even as they kept their distance. The idea made him feel a little better, but also more tired than ever. His head nodded over the steering wheel. He needed to sleep or he wouldn't die facing mad evil wizards, but in a car wreck.
Pulling the car under the canopy of a sprawling ancient tree by the side of the road, he fell to sleep. What he did not know, and could not see in the dark or in the winter, without its leaves, was that the tree was a hawthorn - one of the largest and oldest ones in all of Britain. It was a species naturally blessed to provide protection, and to strengthen love. When this tree shed its twigs after windstorms, Garrick Olivander was known to travel here from the city to glean the wood for wands. Its living boughs gave Tim Granger shelter as he slept.
"It still feels like a smokescreen," Hermione said, hanging up an assortment of Draco's best black dress robes in the Gryffindor quidditch locker room on a Saturday morning when Ravenclaw was playing Hufflepuff and the room was deserted. "All these silly wedding details. It's Mum and McGonagall trying to distract us from something."
Draco couldn't answer, caught up as he was in glancing around the red and gold room lined with championship pennants, keenly uncomfortable. "Why aren't your boyfriends here yet?" He only called Ron and Harry that when he was profoundly annoyed.
She checked her watch. "They aren't even late." She looked up into his face, lovely but exhausted. Outside, the quidditch spectators cheered. "You're just early, darling. And that's because you hardly slept at all last night, didn't you?"
He sighed. "Snape did come back by morning. He wouldn't answer the door when I went to him, but I could hear him inside his study just before dawn. Don't these clever old people realize that the uncertainty of it all upsets us more than whatever it is they're hiding - probably?"
Hermione sighed in return. "I do feel badly for Snape. Between You-know-who and the Order and his vow to your mother, he's in an impossible position."
Draco hummed. "Snape feels different to me lately. Like he can't quite face me and I don't know why. Maybe things are so bad at the manor, he doubts he can go on protecting my mother."
Hermione stamped her foot. "Your mother is not like she was at Christmas. Not if she was able to save my mother. Trust her to be able to be involved in protecting herself. All of You-know-who's talk about her weakness and vulnerability is meant to manipulate you, Draco. Don't believe everything he tells you. But do get some rest before the boys arrive." She pushed him to sit on the bench between the lockers.
He touched the wood with his hands but quickly recoiled, faking a gag. "Can't believe I'm sitting here, where a thousand naked Gryffidor arses have sat."
She swatted his arm. "And here I was, counting on you to like Gryffindor arses. Awfully disappointing - "
She was attempting to flounce saucily away when he snagged her hand and pulled her into his lap. "That is NOT what I meant."
"No?" she said, brushing her nose against his, bouncing slightly in his lap.
"By the stars, Hermione, hold still..." he growled, closing in on her lips with his.
"Defiling our dressing room!" Ron called, pushing through the doors to interrupt them. "What kind of Gryffindor would bring a Slytherin here for a snog? Unthinkable, yeah Pansy?"
He and Pansy exchanged a smirk, revealing exactly what kind of Gryffindor had already thought to do such a thing, days ago.
Ginny came in behind him, groaning. "Can we please get on with it?"
"Why has everyone brought a girl with them?" Draco demanded. "I asked to meet me in a boys' changing room for a reason."
"Come on, Draco," Pansy said. "Hermione's here."
"Well, she's the bride, isn't she?"
"And Ginny's a bridesmaid," Harry said.
"And Pansy and I go everywhere together and refuse to answer for it," Ron finished.
Draco was in an impossible mood so Hermione took over, thrusting robes at Ron and Harry and shoving them toward the showers to change in private.
"I suppose I should ask if Mum and McGonagall have got you dresses?" she asked the girls.
Ginny yawned. "Yeah, Parkinson picked out something for us."
Pansy tossed her head. "Yes, you're both most welcome."
Harry came out of the shower room first, his hands and feet completely swallowed in the sleeves and trouser legs.
Draco rolled his eyes. "What are you playing at Potter?"
He waved the excess fabric in Draco's face. "Right, Malfoy, I've been holding back a growth spurt all this time just so I'd be ready to tick you off this morning."
Pansy was rolling her eyes and moving to get between them and explain how to make everything right but Draco was rising to it himself.
"They're self-tailoring robes," he said, giving the end of each of the sleeves a swift tug like Harry's Aunt Petunia might do with a window blind she wanted raised. With each tug, the sleeves and legs shortened themselves to an appropriate length. Draco kept Harry standing in front of him a minute longer, smoothing the wrinkles on his shoulders and pressing his lapels with his fingers.
The room fell into an amused silence, no sound of anything but Draco's hands moving deftly across the fabric - no affection in his touch, but no violence either.
"And what," Draco said, "is happening with your hair right now?" He flicked at Harry's part, and though Harry's shoulders rose defensively, he didn't flinch out of the way.
"There, Miss Weasley," Draco said, standing back, "how do you like your Chosen One now?"
"That is quite nice," Ginny said, beaming as she twirled Harry in a circle between her hands. "Quite nice indeed."
"Have you both finished?" Harry said. "You know, I have worn dress robes before."
"Yes, they were a dark bottle green," Ginny was quick to say.
"You remem - "
She batted her eyelashes. "Of course I do, Harry. I still had a crush on you in my third year, so naturally I remember exactly what you looked like marching into the Triwizard Tournament Yule Ball with Parvati Patil on your arm. Just like you, I'm sure, remember exactly what I was wearing and who I went with. Don't you?"
Draco had lost interest in Harry and was moving to cradle Hermione from behind, his chin on her shoulder. "Hermione was wearing this pink ruffly thing with the loveliest pair of crystal dancing shoes," he said, kissing her ear as he finished.
Ginny looked at Harry, her eyebrows raised expectantly but tauntingly as he turned very white, blinking at her, starting to stammer.
That was when Ron came shambling into the room in a set of fine, black, contemporary dress robes.
Pansy gasped.
Harry bowed with relief as Ginny's attention veered away from him, her mouth falling open at the sight of her brother.
"It's - it's not really me," Ron began.
Hermione rushed toward him, both her hands extended to take his. "Yes, Ronald, it is. I've always said you were a fine, lovely boy. Now you look to everyone else like you've always looked to me."
"But I told you already, Hermione," he said, piling her hands on top of each other and handing them back to her. "Don't try to make me look like a ginger Malfoy."
"Why in the stars not?" Ginny asked.
Harry made a rather frightening choking sound. "Right, then," he said, pulling at his collar. "That's the wedding clothes sorted. We're off to catch the rest of the match, yeah Ginny?"
"Don't forget dinner with everyone in McGonagall's study tonight," Hermione called after them. "If you don't come, Mum will think I sabotaged it."
Draco and Hermione went back to the castle, making Ron and Pansy last to leave. He stood by his quidditch locker in the borrowed clothes, able to smell his sweaty equipment through the vents in the door, and asked her, "Well, what do you think, love? Look like a right git, yeah?"
She stepped forward and took his hand.
"That bad?" Ron asked. "You still can't think of anything decent to say?"
She looked up at him. "Do you remember?" she began. "Do you remember what I wore to the Triwizard Yule Ball?"
He jumped. "What? The night of my first kiss? Yeah, I do. You had this dress with a long skirt, all silvery coloured, and it had this fancy top with nothing at all to it in the back, just your warm, silky skin under my hand when they made us dance. Like I'd ever forget that."
She closed her arms around his waist and laid her head against his chest, swaying as if they were dancing at a ball again, though she was dressed in Saturday clothes - denims and trainers. Ron pulled her close, kissing the glossy black hair on the top of her head.
He said, "You must remember what I was wearing that night. I'll never live it down. The whole school remembers."
She lifted her head, looking into his face. "No, I don't remember," she said, not because it was true, but because it wasn't. "All I remember is that you were beautiful - every bit as beautiful as you are right now. And that even though I was heartbroken over Draco, and vengeful, and desperate that night, you were as gentle and kind and respectful to me as I'd let you be."
He pulled her onto her toes and kissed her, keeping her close to him after the kiss ended, speaking into her face. "You're going to think it's just all the wedding talk, making me barmy. But the truth is, Pansy Parkinson, I love you. All those years pining for Hermione - that did nothing to prepare me for what I feel for you. Liking Hermione was like wearing these dress robes all the time. Loving you is like - like being in pajamas, in bed, warm and comfortable and so, so happy."
She buried her face in his shoulder. "Ron," she mewed, dragging out the vowel of his name.
He spoke into the side of her head. "What is it, love? Did you want to say something? Say something to me? Something special maybe?"
"Of course I love you too," she said, glancing at his face only after she'd said it. "You are joy itself and I adore you."
He bent to kiss her again, gently and slowly, building as she opened her mouth to him and he gathered her against himself so close that he began to lift her off the floor. She hopped into his arms, her legs clamping around his waist. He was surprised enough that his voice sounded in his throat. She laughed into his mouth. Once again, he wasn't sure where to put his hands and he couldn't hold the position for very long before he broke away.
He cleared his throat. "So you'll be meeting my mum and dad tomorrow," he said, "and it might go better if we're able to look them in the eye."
She smacked a kiss against his cheek as she let her feet drop back to the ground. "Right. I'll wait outside."
Snape slept through breakfast, rolling over to sit up on the edge of his bed just before noon. He hadn't meant to sleep so long but the fatigue of the past months was eclipsing his strength. Lately, the Dark Lord had become more of a nocturnal creature than ever, and to stay with him, to keep him occupied during his wakeful hours so he wouldn't grow bored with his current playthings and call Draco to him, had become a second shift for Snape. It had to end. And tomorrow, one way or another, it would.
Today, at Hogwarts, Snape's responsibility was to find Granger and read the final draft of the incantation she'd written for the ceremony, to give his opinion on whether it would work. But finding Granger would mean facing Draco, and he shrunk from the thought. Draco, who loved his father, and Snape, who...
He fingered the spot on his forehead where Pettigrew had drawn out the memory of Narcissa Malfoy's face as she looked up at him from within his arms. True enough, there may never have been a way for Snape to prevent them from taking it, yet the thought that her image, that expression on her face existed outside his mind sickened Snape. It had been given to him in tenderness but then harvested for malice. That's why the Dark Lord had taken it - to sow chaos, rage and grief, to tear apart a family for vengeance and sport.
There was nothing Snape could do to take the image back. And what did it show, really? He hadn't betrayed the Malfoys. He had respected Narcissa's vows of faithfulness to Lucius, and as for his own vows, they were solely to protect the family - to keep their hearts beating. The rest was something he had never been sworn to. But he felt that he ought to let Narcissa know that the memory had fallen into evil hands, so when it was brought forward to ruin her in the future, she could face it prepared.
He dropped his hand from his forehead. Tonight, before he reported to the Dark Lord in the manor's drawing room, he would go to Narcissa for the last time before the ceremony - perhaps for the last time ever - and let her know the memory was now the Dark Lord's. He would tell her this, and tell her goodbye.