Author's Note: Neville Longbottom in this chapter maybe found to be off-centre & I have given a small explanation for it. I have always believed Neville to be a character lacking not potentialities but confidence and encouragement & so I think he's going to change even more when the Order decides to trust in his abilities.
DISCLAIMER: Everything belongs to Ms Rowling, lucky her!
-Chapter Eleven-
The British Society of Veroudostoffy
Decide now before it's late,
Whom to love and whom to hate,
And whom you really call a friend,
Decide now and all doubts end-
To trust or not to trust,
What is true and what is lie.
From the pages of the past
Shadows rise and whisper by.
He was kneeling before the Dark Lord, shaking and trembling in the dark room with tall flickering candles. The Dark Lord's voice was cold, so cold that it chilled his blood while his bones continued to burn. The Cruciatus curse seemed even more painful, if that was possible, after the few days of absence, the few days in which he had actually known comfort after a long time, in spite of having stayed with mudbloods and blood-traitors and the kind he had always learnt to recognize as filth.
"Did I send you there for you to come and tell me that you had no information to give?" said the high, menacing voice.
"Master I tried," he gasped, "I told you about Godric's Hollow…"
"You brought that piece of information so late that they managed to escape!" the voice hissed.
"But master I told you as soon as I found time, as soon as I was alone in that house…"
"If I be allowed to speak, my lord," a man with a hooked nose and a greasy hair stepped out of the shadows behind the Master and bowed respectfully beforehim, " Draco did bring us the information in time. What was interesting to note however was the way in which Potter and his friends turned their tails without even raising their wands. Perhaps Dumbledore's death has finally begun to sink into his oversized head."
The Dark Lord's lipless mouth curled into a horrible smile.
"Very well, Draco, we take Severus' words as an excuse for your first failure, but since then you have been staying at Headquarters for a week. What have you to tell us about your little vacation?"
"P-Potter has been staying inside master!" he stammered, "with Weasley, Granger and Longbottom."
"Hiding at home is he?" the Dark Lord repeated softly, "Not Dumbledore's brave little pet anymore, ready to duel the greatest wizard of all times, that arrogant pest! But is that all you have to show me for your efforts? Crucio!"
"Master, no please, have mercy, P..L..E..AS..E !"
-XXX-
Draco Malfoy sat bolt upright on his bed, sweating and shaking. That same nightmare again! He took long steadying breaths and slid down the bed to look outside the window. A dreary deserted muggle street met his eyes. He kept standing, letting the breeze wash over his tired face.
"Aren't you sleeping?" someone asked.Oh, not again! Draco turned to see Longbottom sitting up in the other bed, staring at him.
"I am not sleepy." He replied shortly. Why couldn't that idiot leave him alone?
Neville Longbottom looked at his roommate for sometime, and then climbed down his bed to walk up to him.
"You have been acting oddly since the last two days." Longbottom said calmly, with a measuring, calculating look that Malfoy would have never believed him capable of. "And I think your bath took a long time a couple of days ago. Where did you go?"
Malfoy turned paler than usual as he stared with horror at the boy whom he had always regarded as a joke. Would he report to Potter? He had to think of something fast. Seeing that a denial would be useless, he decided to admit it.
"I went home," he whispered, "to find out about my mother," Longbottom merely looked at him, saying nothing, "I can't find her and...and I am really worried." his voice shook, and with real emotions. He did not need to fake it. Longbottom seemed convinced.
"And so you can't sleep out of worry?" He asked.
Malfoy nodded, relieved at being able to convince him. "I am having nightmares," he couldn't understand why he felt this sudden desire to say this, to share, least of all with the boy who was standing before him. Without a word, Longbottom went to his desk, opened and closed his drawer and came back to the window, holding something in his hand.
"This is the root of soporuta, take it, it helps."
Draco looked at the green object in Longbottom's hand and he suddenly felt afraid. Longbottom seemed to read his fears, because he said, with a slight smile,
"You know, poisoning people is your speciality, not mine."
Draco took the root silently from him and put it inside his mouth as he climbed back to bed.
"It would stop your nightmares." He heard Longbottom's voice telling him from far away.
"Nothing can cure the nightmare that my life has become." He thought before he fell asleep.
-XXX-
"So you are still allowing Malfoy to stay?" Ron demanded, for what seemed the hundredth time.
Harry dropped the parchments in his hands on the bed and leaned back on the bed where he was sitting with Ron and Hermione.
"I have told you Ron, Malfoy could not have told Voldemort about our trip to Godric's Hollow because he didn't know about it himself. Nobody knew about it except the three of us. So unless you are suggesting that I went and blabbed to him I see no point in continuing this argument."
Ron turned, exasperated, to Hermione who, Harry noted with some amount of amusement, was quick to come in Ron's defense.
"And what do you have to say to what Neville told us just now, about Malfoy's little trip to the bathroom?" She demanded. Ron snorted.
"Well he didn't deny leaving the house, did he? Its quite natural for him to be worried about his mother.."
"And so you believe his bullshit, do you?" said Ron angrily.
"Yes, I do." Said Harry quietly, "The two of you seemed to have missed a part of what Neville told us, that he too felt that Malfoy was not lying. Besides, Malfoy does not have access to any crucial information, he doesn't know our plans, the Order has closed door meetings and nothing important has been said in front of him. "
Ron shook his head darkly.
"You are forgetting Malfoy's experience in poisoning people and placing cursed objects at the wrong places." Hermione said in a determined voice.
"And you are forgetting I've asked Neville to keep an eye on Malfoy and I think he is doing quite a good job at that." As he said this, he suddenly felt a rush of affection for the round-faced boy who could never remember anything. He couldn't help but marvel at the change that Neville had undergone in the last few days. Joining the order, being able to follow his parents' footsteps seemed to have altered him altogether.
"I don't understand you Harry, last year you were the one who kept insisting that Malfoy was up to something." Hermione replied.
"When I saw him at the tower, I felt he was not really evil, just born in the wrong place. If Dumbledore was willing to give him shelter, so am I."
Hermione shook her head and went back to the enormous book that she was reading, titled "The Mystery of the Human Soul- A Comprehensive Study of The Effects of Magic, How to Control Souls With Spells, Charms and Potions and their Counter-Curses." It was written by a wizard named Burdock Muldoon and Hermione had taken it(along with a pile of other similarly fat books)out of the Hogwarts library by a special permission from Prof. Mcgonagall.
"Do you think you can finish reading that by next year?" Harry remarked in the manner of asking.
"You two will have to help me at it if you want to destroy the horcrux." She snapped without raising her eyes from the page she was reading.
"Think of you and Dumbledore looking for it in that terrible place when it was here in front of our nose all the time." Mused Ron, as he sucked a battered-looking sugar quill. "Do you think Regulus had entrusted the elf (Hermione looked reproachfully at Ron, who was completely oblivious to the fact) with it before he ran for it?"
Harry shrugged. He felt a faint chill of dread every time he thought of destroying the horcrux. They didn't know how to do it, and he doubted any book in Hogwarts was going to tell them that, especially when they had failed to find a proper explanation about horcruxes in any book at Hogwarts in the first place. True, he had been reading those books too, but he did it more from a sense of doing something rather than a hope of succeeding. And even if they found out, could they do it? He remembered Dumbledore's injured right arm that had looked as if it had died, that was the price of destroying a seventh part of Voldemort! And they had to destroy four more before he could take on Voldemort himself. He wondered if he would survive all the horcruxes to meet Voldemort. To take his mind of things, he went back to the parchments in his hands. These were the Veroudostoffy Society documents they had brought from Godric's Hollow, many of them in his parents' handwriting, dealing with their daily work, and he tried to imagine what their life was like. He was lost in these thoughts when he suddenly realized he had been looking at a piece ofparchment without reading it. It was an old notice issued by the president of the Society, regarding a Ministry directive about the necessary precautions to be taken by veroudostoffs when working in muggle localities. He started as he reached the bottom of the parchment, his eyes falling on the president's signature. Florean Fortesque- a veroudostoff?
Chapter 12: Troubled Times (tentative),Alternative title: How Miranda Took Got the Letter From Hogwarts!(I guess that sounds better!)
N.B: I have edited some of the previous chapters, especially Chapter6 which you may read again and tell me if you like the change. I have also published a new oneshot titled The Shadow of a Woman and a new story titled Old Ways which you can read if you like. Thanks to everyone who read & review me.