"Temporis Et Spatii"

CHAPTER 6.

"Seriously?" Tonks drove the door partway through our impeding clothes, surfacing us awake. She scarcely finished her statement before escaping. "Draco, you have a visitor, so … get dressed or whatever. Bloody animals."

We whirlwinded from the bed as Draco shouted at the door.

I did not feel dressed after the starless lace cleared my head, arabesque gossamer encircled my waist, nor inhabiting its baroquely swirled arms, but my corset now hung aloft a deserted margin of the universe. Draco was ready just as quickly, possessing as he did only boots, trousers and his indomitable, masterfully crafted coat. He seized my arm purposively, but rounded the bed instead. The window clanked when he struck it.

A rattle arrived at the doorknob. "I think I've got your style for this spell figured out," disclosed the voice from Draco's halls, escalating rather prematurely to whamming the door with his whole body. "You can't even cast it to its full scope. It's a shame you'll never see the Mars colony."

Draco's hands flipped at the air. "Again with this. I am not a bad wizard!"

"You're not a good man." The door abandoned its hinges and hurtled to the floor, unobstructing a sallow, carrot-haired stranger who simpered vaingloriously.

"What is going on up there?"

I accelerated backward as the man efficiently incantated at the book. The bed crowded between me and Draco; On it, though, the wand dutifully abided.

"Aw, Draco, did you make a friend?"

"She's got nothing to do with this, Percy." He cocked forward.

"Miss," Percy softened, beckoning me. "I'm very sorry, but this man is tricking you. Come with me; I can take you home."

I swiped the wand swift as a pistol and fired. "Bombarda!"

A spate of rust flared directly upward, cracking a beam from the ceiling. I shunted it, colliding with the nightstand, and Draco clambered over the bed to seize his weapon. "Never use my wand!" he pleaded, shimmering frenzied frost. "You must never, ever use my wand!"

"Do not break my things!"

Percy clasped his hands cordially. "Oh. Not to worry, Miss Tonks -"

"NO!" she screeched and clamped his ear in her nails, storming him down the stairs. "You will NOT bring this drama into my house. Go!" The door slammed like a thunderclap and she fusilladed across the small dwelling. "Draco Malfoy, get your ass down here!"

He took my hand and it was the most natural thing in the world. We descended to find her in the sitting room, stringently gesturing to a pewter wolf statue on the mantle, face fissuring in the breaching honey dawn. "This is a portkey. He'll probably see you in this light, but that's not my problem, is it?"

"Y-your face …" I winced.

A convulsion throttled Tonks, flickering the pigment from her locks and knocking her jaw loose. She cupped it in distress, the landscape of her countenance ulcering to cardinal scallops and falling. "This was supposed to be my sanctuary!" she clacked ferally.

"Flipendo!" She overbalanced into the air and clefted the wall, permitting Draco enough time to sprint me across the room.

"What is this voodoo?" I gasped. "What is happening to her?"

Tonks sucked in air, regarded her aberrant arm dismally. "This is no life," she shivered. "So cold. I'm … so cold ..."

Her knotted pine plunged from our feet and we galed beyond any color, cycloning weightless. Draco released the stately figurine and we were barreling toward the earth through my terrified wailing.

Solid ground arrived a relief. The stars canopied to deific gold massacring from the east. "Are we not going to help her?!" I huffed deliriously as Draco hoisted me upright. And then I saw him - truly saw my closest and dearest Draco - face contorted in unadulterated terror. He had no answers, no comfort to bolster me.

"Expelliarmus!" His wand sailed over the violaceous slope, and he made no hesitation to launch for it.

"Face me, you coward!"

Draco's desperate flurry fell short when Percy wrenched him about-face, savagely spindly, and bore his aspen weapon up his adversary's jowl. The amaranthine procession yawned to the horizon, fluttering fondly to the hemorrhaging sky.

Draco swallowed. "Why are you doing this? You've got your precious book."

"It isn't just the bloody book and you know it."

Already on advance to Draco's wand, I hastened my bare heels to their absolute zenith, heaps of dress bundled in blanched knuckles.

"How many times," Draco glowered as the corkscrew-embellished lance dimpled his throat, "do you need to hear that I never laid a hand on your wife?"

"You were the last person seen with her!" Percy sputtered, amplifying in anguish. "I did nothing but weep for months. My life hasn't moved forward. I changed, Malfoy." His eyes flashed rabidly. "Do you have the faintest idea what that's like?"

Draco had deflated, peering down his upended chin at a man uninhabited by the things which amass a human soul. "I swear to you, Percy … I didn't do it."

My feet scarcely arrested their momentum. The two men observed the wand focused nary inches from their faces.

Percy snickered. "You don't know how to use it."

"I know the whereabouts of your brain matter."

He released his grasp on Draco and regarded me hellishly. "You want to play with the boys, little harlot?" Slate gaze glimmering cutlasses through the ambrosia twilight, he elevated his wand.

"Imperio!"

But his weapon was already in flight as Draco's ambush uprooted him to the ground. Unabated, Percy scrambled for his armament.

I dove to Draco's side, wand outstretched. "Do it!"

"Temporis Et Spatii!"

. . .

Drumfire sprayed overhead as a metal cage enclosed around us, surveying a viridescently thicketed horizon below, roping smoke crisscrossing past our heads. An adolescent man, seated before a miscellany of clocks and dials, twisted to us with bloodbath-smattered pupils. "Fucking gooks!"

His revolver stared me down and exploded, spearing my eye asunder.

"AVADA KEDAVRA!" pirouetted us to the kaleidoscoping leaves of the earth.

I had never seen so many trees.