The Trick Step
Part Two

As it turned out, Loony's bag contained more than the odd logbook. In addition to housing her wand (Pansy had sighed in relief at that one), it also played host to an entire four-course meal—albeit a strange, Loony Lovegood-type one—packed neatly into a picnic basket that had clearly been Expanded to fit everything, as well as a handful of quills, a few books, a collection of Muggle flotation devices (Pansy had had to ask about these), and an extra shoelace.

"Loony, why does one person need so much food?" Pansy asked between bites of sandwich and gulps of pumpkin juice.

"I'd meant to have a picnic," Loony replied, "as the weather was so nice, but it was rather too nice for me, and I fell asleep, instead. So I suppose the weather was nice for napping, too. And it's lucky it was. It would have been rather wasteful if I'd eaten everything myself, and now I get to share."

Though it, too, turned invisible under the layer of fog, Loony had insisted upon spreading out the checkered blanket that was also inside the basket—for which Pansy had secretly been grateful, after finding dirt all down her front, hair, and cheeks. While Pansy ate greedily, Luna pulled her robes over her head, revealing the blue, white, and red-striped shirt Pansy had seen hints of before, and a pair of pale purple trousers that clashed with it terribly and only extended to the knee. The robes folded themselves neatly and packed themselves into Loony's bag while Loony pulled her hair back with an elastic. It didn't do much—the elastic. Her hair still clouded around her face and down her back, perhaps more determined than ever to avoid being tamed. She lifted up her wild ponytail, fanned the back of her neck once, and then, seemingly satisfied, abandoned the effort, and withdrew her wand.

"Accio Draco Malfoy!" she called out into the fog plain. Nothing happened. If Draco were in this place at all, he was definitely out of range. Pansy glared at Loony for once more getting her hopes up.

"I thought I should try," Loony explained in response to Pansy's look. "There's never any harm in trying, unless of course you're facing a flock of Migglewumps, and then you shouldn't try at all, because they feed off the energy of intended actions. Not trying keeps them quite perplexed."

Pansy ignored this small pearl of wisdom, returning the topic to Draco. "You can still find him, can't you?"

Loony nodded, little frizzy hairs bobbing with her, as if she had a head of soft, tiny snakes that agreed with everything she said. "There are many ways of finding someone," she replied. "Some of them are even quite easy, and always tend to work. I know just the right one to find your friend. Could I have Draco's Potions essay, please?"

It was taking Pansy a while to grow accustomed to Loony's odd way of speaking—the way she flowed from one coherent thought to another without any pause or attempts at transition. After registering the direction in which their conversation had turned, Pansy set down her apple and produced the essay. She handed it to Loony with only the slightest hesitation, reasoning that there was really no reason to hold onto it, now that Loony seemed to have unwittingly dumped a sackful of supplies into their laps.

With a word of thanks, Loony began smoothing out the parchment, tracing the torn edges with the tip of her wand. "Draco still has the other half, doesn't he?" she asked. Pansy assumed he did. Loony nodded. "Good."

When she began to murmur something quietly to herself, Pansy's curiosity got the better of her. "What are you doing?" she inquired.

Loony beamed at her, seemingly delighted that she had been asked. "This is very nice parchment," she began explaining, rubbing a corner between her fingers, "but also modern. That means it hasn't been made out of animal skin. It uses tree skin instead. It's rather more like paper, really."

"Trees don't have skin," Pansy interrupted, a bit unnerved by the idea—which was accompanied by rather grotesque mental images.

"Oh, yes they do," Loony assured her. "It's just different from ours, and far less painful to remove. Parchment like this uses special tree skin, though, usually from wand trees. Of course, all parchment made from wand trees is always a little bit magic. It's also quite exclusive, which means a piece of this kind of parchment always wants to stay together. If I access that want, this piece will lead us straight to Draco's piece, as it will be the nearest.

She rustled about in her bag, and once more retrieved her logbook. "It'll be wanting to have a sniff at these first, though," she said. "Or else, when I cast the spell, it will go straight to them, and they're already here, so they won't help us much. Anyway, it would be rather rude not to reassure the parchment first that there are already pieces of it safe, don't you think?"

"Erm," said Pansy, who was feeling rather incredulous about the whole thing. "Sure."

Loony smiled at her again, and Pansy felt rather warm. "People say Slytherins are rude, but I think everyone is rude sometimes, really, and polite sometimes, too. It just depends. You see? You're a Slytherin, and you were polite just now."

"Erm," said Pansy again. She wasn't certain of what she had been just now, though 'polite' would definitely not have made the top of the list. "How do you know all this stuff?" she asked, attempting to change the subject back to what it had been. "I mean, about the parchment?"

"Oh, Daddy runs The Quibbler." Loony took to the new subject happily enough. "He's very particular about what we print on. He wanted to use this kind, but it was too expensive, so we mostly use the kind that's been transfigured from sticks and stones, and all that sort. Sometimes we find dirt or sand in the folds, but that's usually only from a poor batch, and we make sure to return what we can."

"That's..." Pansy struggled for the right word.

"Mm, yes, isn't it?" Loony agreed, disregarding the unfinished nature of Pansy's thought, and shifted her attention back to the task at hand.

A few murmured incantations and encouraging pets later, the parchment began to vibrate ever so slightly, emitting a sound like a trio of lazy honeybees. Loony held her open logbook under what Pansy assumed must have been its nose, and swore she heard it take a few delicate sniffs before Loony closed the book again. Then, suddenly, its vibrations seemed to increase violently, and its honeybee hum instantly transformed into the angry roar of a hornet swarm.

"What's happening?" Pansy demanded, alarmed.

"I think it's time we packed our things," Loony replied evenly.

And she was right, for no sooner had the picnic basket been nestled into her bag and its strap slung over her shoulder, than the parchment gave an impatient squeal, and Loony quickly took Pansy's hand; faster than it took for either of them to blink, there came a loud bang, and they all seemed to wink out of existence.

Upon his unanticipated departure from Pansy and the fog plains, Draco had found himself in a desert. He had thought, as he sailed through the air, pulled along by some force that seemed to start at his navel and travel through his body, extending out of his back and to the other side, that the temperature had seemed to rise, and that the blurred surroundings were becoming less and less grey, but he hadn't realized just how different a place it was to which he was being taken until he had been deposited onto the hot sand.

Everything was orange—including the sky, which was ablaze in a fiery sunset that hurt his eyes too much to look at.

Everything hurt, too. His palms, where they had lingered too long upon the sun-baked sand, felt raw, and tingled uncomfortably, even after he had cradled them delicately against his chest for nearly an hour. His stomach ached, as if the force that had brought him there were still pulling on him like a spear passed clean through his gut, shooting periodic bursts of pain through him. Even his bones felt as if they were creaking with the effort to move. And his throat—he felt as if it were as dry as parchment, full of the dust and sand that stretched on in endless abandon.

He had never thought (in the few days he had known of it, at least) that he would long for the oppressive grey and cold of the fog plains, but now, lost in this stretch of dead nothingness, he held the image of them in his mind as he might his own home.

Home. His throat felt tighter.

What he would not give to be there now. Though not, of course, before a thorough bath—if he were to turn up at his own front door looking as he did now, his father would surely turn him away as if Draco were a common street urchin, half-mad and seeking shelter. One or two always managed to get past the wards on the manor, which was never a pleasant affair to handle. Draco could imagine the disgusted sneer on his father's face, the harsh grey glint of his mother's eyes behind him in the foyer, both convinced he was nothing but fetid vermin.

Draco shuddered under the heat of the sun. He had had nightmares of that very nature on numerous occasions, though they occurred most often when he was at his most stressed. At times he woke, gasping out into the middle of a cold night, and would fumble about in the dark until he found one of his mother's letters. If anyone saw him and said a mocking word about it in the morning, he would hex them silly. And had done, in fact. People could be quick learners if given the chance.

Draco smirked, despite everything that had happened. He waited a moment for Pansy to inquire after the joke, so that he could recount an incident with Crabbe, but then he remembered. His stomach clenched. Pansy was gone.

Though he had no siblings at home with whom to keep company, Draco had never grown accustomed to being alone. Someone—usually his mother, or that accursed house-elf, but sometimes his father, too—had always been there to look after him as a child. He had not had playmates; but at the very least, he had had company. At Hogwarts, he was constantly flanked by Crabbe and Goyle, and Pansy was never far behind them. They were awfully loyal, for Slytherins.

He could use their unfathomable sense of loyalty now. Or some company, at the very least. He did not want to be alone when rescue came—and he was certain that some would, soon. She would never abandon him. Not really, no matter what he dreamed. She had promised this would work.

As if somehow hearing his thoughts, two rather large objects suddenly somersaulted out of the sky and onto the ground before him. There was no time even to scream or panic—he simply stood there frozen, aghast as the bodies (they were bodies, he saw) continued to roll about. Would they attack? Perhaps. In all the days he had been here, alone or otherwise, no great beast had lain siege upon his person. Yet perhaps this strange, horrible world was changing its tactics. Nasty thing. His shaking fingers searched for his wand, but in his fright, it was taking him too long to locate it. The bodies began to rise out of the clouds of sand and dust.

Then, he noticed that one of the bodies had long, white-blonde hair. For a moment, his heart leapt. She had found him! Lowering his wand, he nearly cried out to her.

Nearly.

He was soon glad he had not, for at once, the dust began to clear, and he saw to whom the hair belonged. His heart sank. It rose only a little when he recognized the second figure, even though he was infinitely glad to see her.

Pansy dusted off her robes, seeming very put out. If she was still hoping to be clean in this place, she was fighting a losing battle. She looked an absolute fright. Lovegood waited beside her politely.

"Hello, Draco," Lovegood said. "I'm glad we found you, then."

Pansy stopped mid-dust. Her head jerked up, and her eyes darted to him, widening. (Admittedly, his heart did rise a bit more when he took in her expression, though he would never admit it.)

"DRACO!" she cried. She launched herself not at Draco, as he had expected, but Lovegood, whom Pansy kissed full on the mouth for a half second.

"Er," Draco said, before she kissed him, too. She had almost danced between the two of them, her feet moving with joy as if of their own accord. Draco felt himself flushing as she pulled away and grinned at him, her face uncharacteristically pretty without its usual sneer or simper. He might have stared at her and her peculiar behavior for a long while, had there not been something even more peculiar and troubling to occupy his attention. For Draco was not smiling, and Pansy soon seemed to realize this. Her grin faded, and she pursed her lips, her cheeks reddening slightly.

"What is it?" she asked, trying to thread her fingers through his. His hand felt limp.

He knew he should not feel so disappointed, and yet... Loony Lovegood was not who he had expected.

"I don't understand," he said at last. "Why is she here? I thought it would be..." He flushed again.

"What?" Pansy prompted when he did not continue.

He nearly kept the answer to himself. Nearly. They could blame his reluctance to speak on heatstroke, if they wanted. He studied the ugly-looking plant some ways off to his right. It looked as if it had arms, but it was covered in spines like a dangerous coat of fur.

Then his shoulders slumped. This was one occasion where lying would not help him. "Mother... She said..." He cleared his throat. "She said, with the spell, my notes would find her when I needed her the most. That's what she told me."

There, now. Let them do with that what they would. Draco looked defiantly from one girl to the other.

"I suspect the spell is meant to find the person you need the most," Lovegood mused aloud, speaking for the first time since her greeting. "Only, I suspect you must need me the most right now, and not your mother."

"Why would we need you?" He ignored the odd look that Pansy gave him at this.

"I don't know," Lovegood replied evenly. "I do have food, but I hope that I can help in other ways, too. It's lovely here, but I don't think I'd like to be stuck here forever."

Draco was peering at her sharply now. His stomach had begun to gurgle at the mention of food, but he hoped that it wouldn't be loud enough to hear. It certainly sounded loud to his own ears, embarrassingly so. After a moment, he realized that his mouth was hanging open hungrily, and his cheeks colored violently as he snapped it shut. Lovegood's smile was kind, and that made it even worse.

"But you haven't any idea how to actually get us out," he snapped at her. "You brought us food, but no escape. If you'd done that, I'd have been able to acquire my own fare, instead of relying on the charity of the partially-insane. You shouldn't have even bothered to find us until you knew you could accomplish something more useful!"

Lovegood's expression never wavered, and when she spoke again, her voice was pleasant. "Sometimes I find that too much sun makes me less agreeable than I'd normally be. I think perhaps you might be the same way. It must have been very hard for you to stay here by yourself for so long. You must be nearly out of water."

At his sides, Draco's fists clenched, though his throat gave a painful rasp at Lovegood's reminder. He was about to think of something particularly nasty to shoot back at her when something smooth was thrust into his stomach, causing his eyes to bulge with surprise and his hands to fumble out of their hold.

"Shut up, Draco," Pansy snapped. "Whatever you were going to say, just shut up, and have a drink."

Somewhere deep in the back of his mind, Draco supposed that perhaps Lovegood didn't entirely deserve his condemnations, but it was a seed very deeply planted, indeed, and his thoughts were now more occupied with the fact that what Pansy had shoved at him was a canteen of water. The unscrewing of the canteen's lid and the downing of nearly all of its contents succeeded in washing away only some of his misplaced anger.

While he ate, they walked, and while they walked, Pansy and Lovegood told him everything they knew of their circumstances, including some bizarre lesson on parchment that Draco only half-understood, and only faintly remembered from many years before. It was the sort of thing his father would have lectured him on had he happened to pass his father's study at an unfortunate time, and which Draco, for all that he respected his father, would have duly ignored. He only paid attention to Lovegood's rendition because Pansy had made it quite clear beforehand that this was how they had come to find him, dropping out of nowhere to be presented right at his feet. When Lovegood backpedaled in her story to explain how he and Pansy had got separated in the first place, even Pansy did not protest his grumblings.

"But I think," Lovegood continued, raising her voice just enough to make herself heard over them both, and the scraping sounds their dragging feet had begun to make upon the sand, "that we might be able to use the same idea for getting around, ourselves. We'll have to be careful, of course. It would take an awfully long time for us to find each other again."

Pansy stopped, wiping her brow furiously under her fringe. The intensity of the sun hadn't lessened since they'd started walking together, so that even Lovegood's flyaway thicket of hair, tied up in an elastic as it was, was sagging despondently around her ears. "You want to Banish us, you mean?" Pansy asked hurriedly, sounding horrified at the thought. Draco was glad he wasn't the only one with such sentiments. He liked Pansy very much, and he knew that she liked him just as well; but in this horrible new world in which they were trapped, Pansy seemed to trust Lovegood's direction rather than his own. If Pansy had agreed with Lovegood, there would have been nothing to stop her from the idiocy of attempting to Banish herself, indubitably bringing herself (and perhaps the others, especially Draco) to harm.

"There's no way to control a Banishing Charm like that," he interjected, just as Lovegood was about to speak. "It's not meant to be used on other wizards." He distinctly remembered hearing about Longbottom's accidental Banishings of Flitwick, but clearly, that wasn't how things were supposed to be done.

Perhaps Lovegood was thinking of the same incident, because she said, "But it can be, clearly. Should and shouldn'ts are a bit different here, anyway, don't you think?"

He could see Pansy biting her lip, and knew at once that all reason was about to be lost. Pansy caught his glare, and glared back.

"Well, think about it," she huffed. "We couldn't see anyplace else except the fog plains until Loony's stupid spell brought you here. Now we're all here, we can't see anyplace else, again. It's as if we've got to... to hop from place to place, or something."

Draco sneered at her. "And there's no better way to do that, is there?"

"Is there?" Lovegood echoed, expectant. "I'd like to hear it, please." Pansy's glare fell away to reveal a blatantly hopeful expression.

Draco struggled to think of something, but in the end, he couldn't.

Neither Pansy nor Draco would allow Lovegood to be the one to cast the charm, but Lovegood, of course, didn't seem to mind. Draco didn't think she minded anything—or anyone, for that matter—and that made her even more unnatural than he had already thought her to be. Since Pansy had lost her wand, the task at hand fell naturally to him, which made him only a little nervous, loath though he was to show it. After some argument—or, on the part of Lovegood, a few mildly-intoned suggestions—they decided to form a circle of sorts, linking their arms together. They had wanted to hold hands at first, but obviously, Draco needed one free to grasp his wand, and that would have weakened their chain. They spent a few minutes debating which direction they ought to go, but that didn't seem to matter very much, considering all directions looked the same. It made sense to continue the way they were going, but what good it would do, no one ventured to guess.

Perhaps a quarter of an hour had passed by the time they were standing in position, Draco with Pansy on his left, and Lovegood on his right, and Pansy and Lovegood linked together to complete the circle. Lovegood's back was precisely in the direction they meant to go, which meant that sending her backwards would, theoretically, bring them all along. Or so they hoped. There were still many doubts circling about them like desert winds, even from Lovegood, who looked less certain than Draco had seen her yet. He liked to think that it was because, if their circle didn't hold, Lovegood would be the one separated from them, as she had done to Draco.

Squinting against the glare of the sun off of Lovegood's hair, Draco secured his hold on the girls, locking his elbows rigidly into place, and turning awkwardly so that he could point his wand straight at Lovegood's chest. For a moment, he saw her eyes flicker with something, and for a moment, whatever it was made him feel slightly guilty. But then, he squared his jaw resolutely, and cried, "Depulso!"

The sensation of being Banished was just as it had been before, but when he, Pansy, and Lovegood straightened themselves out of their jumbled pile, they soon discovered that they were nowhere near the desert—nowhere near anything familiar at all. This world, whatever it was, seemed to do nothing by halves.

From the ground, it appeared as if there were a straight line of sticks jammed into the dirt. Their ends were not sharpened into points, and so they couldn't be meant to fortify anything, however small. Nor had any branching twigs or leaves been trimmed from them, making it look as if a bored but meticulous child had made an afternoon of collecting whatever detritus he could find and making it into the only structure of which he was capable. When they stood, however, Draco saw that he had been mistaken. While the tallest of the sticks reached only midway up his calf—and even then, these were so few that most would have just surpassed his ankles—there was more to them than a simple straight line. The line had only been the beginning, and even that extended off to their right until Draco could just spot what looked like a gap wide enough for a person to shuffle through without lifting his feet. For beyond that gap—which could only be an entrance—was the most enormous maze he had ever seen. Like the fog plains and the desert, it was as if it stretched indefinitely toward the unseen edges of the world.

At least, it was until he strained his eyes, and saw, far across the maze, a definite end: a long, straight wall of sticks, broken only for a gap parallel to the one nearest them. The distance was impossible to gauge. Beyond the wall, there was something dark and possibly quivering, but its ends he could not detect, either, no matter how long he looked. Even Lovegood had no suggestions about what it might be.

"Do we walk across it?" Pansy asked, returning their attention to the maze. The paths within it, twisting and turning as they were, as short as their boundaries were, were distinctly human-sized. It reminded him of the stone maze he had once seen at the manor of one of his mother's friends at some banquet or other; made entirely of shining river rocks, it had been arranged in the center of the vast gardens for some purpose he hadn't been able to divine. He supposed it had been for decoration, though Draco—and his mother—had thought it ugly. Was this maze also for decoration, or did it hold some hidden purpose?

They approached the nearest wall, and stretched out their hands for balance so that they could step over it without scraping their legs and feet—though only Lovegood had to be truly careful. The moment Pansy's shoe passed over the tops of the sticks, however, the sticks began to shimmer. At once, the three stepped back as if they had been bitten, which was lucky, because suddenly, the sticks began to elongate. They seemed to strain at their bases for a moment, and then they thickened and grew; as they grew, some began to curve around the others, so that in a few minutes' time, Draco, Pansy, and Lovegood were facing what looked like a forest. But the sticks hadn't become trees, precisely, for there were no gaps between them, and they still presented a perfectly straight line. He could see where one tree-like protrusion began and ended—and could see, now, that the sticks had come from a collections of different trees, ones which could not normally be scattered about in the same place—but it was as if they were fused together. They had become an impenetrable wall.

With only a glance between them as a means of communication, Draco and the others set off at a run toward where they had seen the gap in the sticks only minutes before. Despite her bare feet, and the odd black rocks that littered the ground, Lovegood reached the maze's entrance first. By the time Draco caught up to her, she was standing in the entrance, half-hidden by the wall. Her hand shaded her eyes, though there was no harsh sun to cause her to do this. In fact, though it was perfectly light, there seemed to be no source to it. Draco paused in his step to crane his neck around and glance about the sky, but there was nothing. The sky itself was the palest of blues, almost white, and there were no clouds. Except for the maze wall, there were no trees to pierce it, either. He tried to look behind him to see what lie opposite the maze, since as far as he knew, it only extended out in front of them, but for some reason, he could not. His neck seemed to ache dully the more he tried to turn it, and his eyes kept darting forward of their own accord. The more he wished to see what lay at their backs, the more he became aware of a faint buzzing in his ears that sounded less angry than chastising. Because it frightened him, he decided to ignore it, and came beside Lovegood and Pansy, who had reached her first.

It was strange to stand in such a looming, impressive gateway, and to look beyond it and see the same, ankle-high sticks that had been there before. Clearly, only the wall Pansy had touched had grown. He wondered if all of the walls were like that. Before anyone could stop him, he reached down and grasped one of the black stones. It was impossibly smooth and round, and felt cooler in his palm, cooler even than the tepid air. It reminded him, somehow, of the Golden Snitch, a feeling which was strangely reassuring. He drew back his arm, and threw the stone as far as he could into the maze.

"What are you doing?" Pansy squeaked.

The stone hit a cluster of sticks a good distance off—too good, Draco secretly thought, as no one's arm was truly that strong, least of all his. Without the slight hesitation there had been the first time, the wall that had been struck rose up to match the height of the one by which they now stood.

"It should be easy, then," Lovegood said, "as long as we don't touch anything."

"We didn't touch anything last time," Pansy pointed out, "and that thing still rose up."

"Oh, I suspect some of the walls are invisible."

Draco snorted. Pansy did as well, but sounded less certain about it than he. Lovegood, as usual, seemed not to notice a thing, and, straightening her shoulders, stepped all the way into the maze.