Author's note: We're getting very close to the end now and this chapter has, in various different forms, been playing in my head for years and for once I'm really happy with how it turned out. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it - let me know your thoughts!

Chapter 64 – Deus ex Machina

Robert Avery awoke from dreams of smoke and fire to the blackness of his closed eyes.

Maybe if he didn't open them, he could hold on. Maybe he could pretend it had really happened. Maybe he could pretend it hadn't.

But the world has a way of making itself known, and even with his eyes shut, he could tell something was different. The ground beneath his back was soft and yielding, and the only sound he could hear was his own quiet breathing. He didn't know how long it had been since he'd heard silence.

Maybe this was a dream. He had been dreaming, he knew. Muriel Shaft had been there, so it had to be a dream, but… but she'd been old. She'd been real.

She'd told him that she was going to burn down Azkaban and everyone in it. She'd told him he was going to die. She hadn't seemed to realise that that had happened a long time ago.

And then Muriel was gone and the shadows held a pair of burning blue eyes in a dead face.

He remembered running, and blistering heat, and smoke clogging his tired lungs, and fire burning through unused muscles, and still there had been running.

A hand was interlocked with his, bony fingers digging into his skin as he was dragged through narrow corridors and tumbling rock and the echoing screams of the abandoned.

And then, suddenly, there had been wind and stars and fire reflected in dark blue eyes as something was shoved between his teeth, and then falling and darkness and nothing.

There wasn't nothing now.

With an effort, he opened his eyes.

He was on a bed in a small room, the walls made of polished wood scored with dark lines and twisted knots. Aside from a lamp on a table next to him, the room was bare.

Someone had changed his clothes. His clumsy fingers picked at the soft grey t-shirt and trousers that didn't hide how thin he had become. A hand raised to his head revealed uneven stubble that was all that remained of his tangled mess of hair. Probably for the best. He was sure there was been more than lice living in there.

He sat up slowly, trying to get his bearings. Either his balance was way off, or the floor was tilting underneath him. He swung his legs out of bed and stood up carefully.

Definitely the floor.

Boat?

There were two doors leading out of the room. Slowly, on legs that felt like they were made of lead, he made his way to the nearest one and pulled it open.

What lay beyond was not an exit, but something, to a man who has spent over a decade in Azkaban, infinitely more exciting.

He tugged off his clothes and stepped into the shower, turning it on full and leaning against the wall as pounding hot water poured over him.

Slowly, as heat seeped back into his bones and the grime of the years was soaked away, his brain began to shift into gear. Katherine had once teased that he was so sharp he could cut himself; that being the case, he was most decidedly blunt now.

She'd lied to him and he'd believed her. He wasn't sure who he was angrier at.

By the time the water had started to turn lukewarm, he knew it was her.

He shut off the shower and got dressed slowly before trying the second door. It opened into a softly lit walkway with two more doors leading off it and a short flight of steps at the end. He headed for them and found himself stepping into a warm cabin.

There were narrow windows set high on the wall, but thick curtains had been pulled across them and they gave no indication of what lay beyond. Directly ahead was another set of steps that led up to a hatch and presumably the deck, but he had no immediate interest in exploring outside.

Charts and papers covered a sideboard and bottles clinked softly in the racks along one wall. The other wall had a table set into it, the edges raised to stop anything placed there sliding onto the floor with every swell of the waves, and sitting at it, carefully winding a bandage around her wrist, was Katherine.

She looked up as he stood there and for the first time he really took stock of her altered appearance. The shadows of the Azkaban torches had greatly exaggerated her gaunt features but even in this warmly lit room she wasn't much improved.

The blue eyes were as dark and alive as ever, but they were underlined with circles the colour of bruises and her sallow skin and hollow cheeks reminded him uncomfortably of the skulls his uncle Jeremiah had kept atop his writing desk in the study.

He found his gaze drawn to her wrists; as far as he knew, it had never been thought necessary to chain up the inmates of Azkaban before, but clearly things had changed. Katherine Riddle had escaped once before; someone must have decided to make sure she couldn't reach a hidden wand this time.

Not that it appeared to have made much difference in the end.

It occurred to him now, watching her return to tying up the bandage, that someone who could hide an existing scar could just as easily make a nonexistent scar appear.

A decade too late, he realised what should have been obvious: the Ministry had been listening. What other reason would there have been for putting Katherine Riddle in a cell with one of her old friends and leaving her unattended? He'd thought it had been an oversight – they'd corrected it soon enough, after all – right after she'd explained how she'd originally escaped and told him she couldn't get him out this time.

"You never had a wand in Azkaban, did you."

Katherine didn't answer him, but it hadn't really been a question. Instead she tucked the end of the bandage away neatly and looked up at him again, her cracked lips curving into the hint of a smile.

How hard would it be for a girl as stubborn as Katherine, a girl who could pull her soul from her body and change her appearance, to move herself somewhere else through sheer force of will? After all, wasn't that what apparation was in the end? She was simply doing it without the spell.

He moved over to the bench and slid in opposite her, watching in silence as she started to unravel the bandage on her other wrist. He looked away at the sight of the raw skin beneath, but she didn't even wince as she applied luminous orange ointment from a jar on the table.

"How long?" he asked eventually, as put applied a fresh bandage over the acrid smelling salve.

"How long what?" She asked. Her voice wasn't as rasping at it had been in Azkaban, but it was soft and low. In fact, as she relaxed back into the plush cushioning of the bench and met his gaze, he thought she looked quieter than he'd ever seen her. The wicked grins and impatient energy were absent, leaving stillness and calm in their place.

"Don't play games with me," he said wearily. "Not now."

She said nothing for a while, surveying him with what could only be described as a calculating look, then shrugged.

"How long have you been asleep? About 18 hours. How long were we in Azkaban? Thirteen years, two months and five days. How long did I have a plan to get us out? Approximately thirty four years."

It took a moment for Robert's tired brain to perform that calculation, but when he did, he frowned.

"You would have been seventeen."

"I was. The Daily Prophet ran an article on some guy who'd murdered his wife and they said he was being sent to Azkaban. I didn't know what it was, so I asked Severus. Didn't take long to work out it was where I was headed." She frowned at the memory, spinning the ointment jar absently so that it rattled loudly against the polished wood of the table.

"And then you and Regulus and Severus started making equally bad decisions and I knew I was going to have to save your arses too." She looked up at him, a ghost of a smile on her face. "Except it turned out Regulus had other ideas and Severus, well, he knew how to play the game better than I thought."

Robert had wondered when the subject of Severus was going to be brought up. Despite the more pressing questions clamouring for answers in his head, he found himself asking: "Did the guards tell you about him?"

Katherine stared blankly at him for a moment, her dark brows drawing together in confusion, then something changed in her expression and she looked down at her hands.

"They told you he was dead?" she asked.

"No - Katy did. She wrote to me. He used to visit her and Cass all the time, but it seems there was some sort of accident in his lab and…" He trailed off, not willing to say the words, even now. "It happened last year."

"Because Severus was such a careless potions master?" asked Katherine and there was a curious note in her voice that made Robert frown. Not quite guilt, but certainly not grief either.

He looked down at the jar of ointment in Katherine's hands, then at the steps leading up to the deck and crossed his arms over his chest, casting his eyes heavenwards. Definitely not the sharpest object in the drawer anymore.

"He's not dead, is he?"

"Needed someone to sail the boat," said Katherine, her dark eyes looking at him with a shade more pity than he thought necessary. "Would have looked a little suspicious – one of our close friends disappearing just days before Azkaban is burnt down. We had to make sure no one could suspect he was involved."

"So you got him to fake his death? Is that your answer to everything?" Robert demanded, scowling at her now as his initial anger flooded back in a rush. "Or is it just telling people that someone is dead?"

Katherine's expression switched abruptly from pity to guarded at his words, and she sat back against the dark green leather.

"Cassandra and Katy were never in any danger."

"You couldn't have known that," said Robert, his voice trembling with a mixture of pain and blinding fury. "You let Muriel walk around free for thirteen years. She could have done anything."

"I've had someone protecting them," Katherine replied, not quite meeting his eyes.

"Who?"

"An old friend." She looked up through dark lashes, expression serious. "They were safe, I swear. You honestly think I'd let anything happen to them?"

Robert glared at her, his hands curled so tightly into fists that his roughly cut nails dug into the flesh of his palm and left a row of small red crescent marks.

"I don't know, Katherine. I thought I knew you, but clearly I don't. That woman tortured my daughter and you let her go. You said you'd been planning this break out since we were kids, but Muriel only turned up a few months before Azkaban so how the fuck does that work?"

"Plans can change," said Katherine softly. "I needed someone who could lead a rebellion within Azkaban – I had a couple of potential people lined up, but then I met her. She'd managed to persuade two guys to help her kidnap and hurt a little girl – she was the best candidate by a mile."

"You saw her use the cruciatus curse on Katy and your first thought was 'this women could be useful'?" yelled Robert, slamming his hands on the table and standing up so that his face towered about hers.

Katherine made no effort to move, just tilted her head up to meet his furious gaze and said calmly: "Not my first thought, no, but I might remind you that you didn't kill her when I gave you the chance. I figured she was fair game after that."

Robert stared at her, barely able to hear anything over the raging in his head. Katherine had shown her capacity for singleminded behaviour at eighteen when she'd started systematically picking apart Evan Rosier's life, but he hadn't realised just how far she could go.

"You told me you'd taken care of her," he managed, pushing away the images of Muriel and his daughter that had haunted his dreams for years. "She tortured my little girl."

"You think I don't remember that?" asked Katherine sharply, scowling at him now. "You think I was going to let that go? People don't get to hurt my friends twice. I needed her, Rob, but that didn't mean she wasn't going to burn. Now you're here and safe and she's ashes on the breeze."

"As I should be too," he growled, furious at her inability to understand what she'd done. "What's the point of being alive without my family, Katherine? I chose Azkaban for them – so that they wouldn't have to live a life on the run, always wondering if the next knock on the door would be the Ministry catching up with us. What am I supposed to do now? However clever you think you've been, there are going to be people at the Ministry who suspect you're behind this and they are going to be watching my family like hawks.

"You can waltz off into the sunset with Severus and disappear and they will never find you, but I can't go back to Cassandra and Katy. Even if I changed my face, any new person in their lives is going to be under suspicion. We can never be a family again without risking everything I went Azkaban to avoid. I won't do that to them, do you understand?" His voice was breaking now and tears burnt hot trails down his thin face, but he glared at her through the blur. "If you think I would, you don't know me at all."

Katherine leant forward so that her face was inches from his, the lamp above them making her dark eyes gleam like sapphires.

"Robert, I just orchestrated the destruction of the oldest and most well guarded wizarding prison in the world and you honestly think I can't find a way to reunite you with your family without the Ministry finding out? I think you've forgotten who you're talking to."

"Remind me then," he challenged, staring her down. In answer, she reached one hand down, pulled up a box from the seat beside her and pushed it towards him. He looked down at the black marble casing and frowned.

"What's this?"

"Your deus ex machina," she answered, sitting back in her seat and watching him with folded arms. Robert eyed her uneasily, then flipped the metal clasp up and lifted the lid. Inside, polished glass gilt with gold caught the lamplight and scattered dancing spots of light across the ceiling.

"This isn't…" He stopped as Katherine arched one questioning eyebrow. "You can't have…" he tried again, and again trailed off. He closed the box and dropped his head into suddenly trembling hands. The fury that had got him this far had dissipated and sudden his world felt wildly out of balance. "This is insane. The risk…"

"Aren't they worth it?"

The question caught him off guard and he looked up at Katherine through his fingers. She propped an elbow up on the back of the bench and leant her head on her raised hand, gazing at him thoughtfully.

"You know Remus once said that the primary difference between his Gryffindor friends and me was whereas they'd die for him, I'd kill for him. It wasn't supposed to be a compliment but I can't help thinking that it's a far greater sacrifice to give up your soul for someone than your life." She sighed, running a hand over her face and looking at his tiredly. "You and I have spent the vast majority of our lives tearing our souls to pieces trying to keep the ones we loved safe. It didn't always work, but we tried and in the end we survived. Now it's time to live."

Robert dropped his hands and gazed at her hopelessly, not because he didn't want her to be right – he wanted it more than he'd ever wanted anything in his entire life, but because there was a huge, insurmountable obstacle in the way.

"It'll never work," he said softly.

Katherine looked back at him, and then, very slowly, her lips curled into a grin and he saw a shadow of the rebellious teenager she had once been showing on her lined face.

"Well that's the beauty of the thing, Robert," she said quietly, leaning forward conspiratorially. "It already has."