A/N: Can I write? Up for debate. Can I count? Apparently not. Let's just give up on chapter numbers for a second.
A/N Pt 2: Sorry if you got a double update, quick edit (forgive me)
A Chapter : Shameika Said
.oOo.
Halloween, 1999
[Ginny]
As most often did, all eyes flew to Harry. And as they often were, his eyes were locked on Hermione, who sat on a bed in the infirmary, pale and incandescent with sweat. Madame Pomfrey hovered above her, astounded by her persistent wound, which would only heal over for a moment before tearing open again. One look at her friends' mortified expression sent Hermione diving for the leather straps that hung from the side of the bed. She bit into one, muffling her cries at Madame Pomfrey's unfruitful attempts, and pulled the curtains around her bed shut.
"Out, the lot of you, out!" The lot of them would do no such thing, of course, so they milled about the infirmary, trying to think of something they could do besides wring their hands and fret.
"Shall we get her to St. Mungos, then?" Harry asked, voice calm. His thumbs ran circles around an old pocket watch.
"She was hardly stable enough to bring to the infirmary, Potter," Madame Pomfrey called back. "You'll have to call the Healers here."
"Right. Gin, can you call for them?" He turned to the rest of their friends: Ron, pacing the infirmary, Luna, searching through dusty old cabinets for something she thought suitable, Neville, who sat next to Ginny and offered her a hand to hold in silent support. "Nev, you and Ron can try and track down whatever's done this to her while we wait for the Healers."
Before they could acquiesce, Padma Patil burst through the doors, looking as though she had fought her way through hell to get in. "It's a madhouse out there," she said, dropping her delicately embroidered mauve skirt from where she had gathered it in her hands to run. It fanned out around her ankles, an intricate gold trim at the bottom matched her heavily beaded top, and followed her as she walked through the closed curtains with enough clinical aplomb that nobody thought to stop her.
After a moment, she called out: "Over Granger's dead body will you be waiting for Healers."
"What do you mean?" Ginny asked. Even if they couldn't get her wound to close before the Healers arrived, Madame Pomfrey had said they could cycle enough blood replenishing potion through her system to at least keep her stable. Pomfrey, as well as every other voice in the room told her as much.
"Do you mind?" Padma asked quietly before yanking the curtains open, beckoning them over. "That's a contentious claim, frankly, but let's say you're right. What you should be worrying about is this," Padma said, grasping Hermione's chin and twisting her face upwards to look at her neck. Hermione let out a gasp of pain, and Harry looked as though he wanted to murder her, an expression she pointedly ignored. "Look."
She pointed to a thin ring of discolouration, almost imperceptible against the gashes in her neck. Ginny watched it with morbid fascination as the discoloration branched out. "I've seen this before — it's her damn snake."
Luna wordlessly handed Madame Pomfrey a bezoar, which did little but further strain Hermione's breathing.
"She's not supposed to be harmful to humans, but Granger was saying she's gotten bigger than expected." Padma continued, right hand massaging her temples as she thought. "She could be a hybrid of some kind? Whatever she is, if she's done to Granger what she does to her dinner, I'd give us" she paused for a moment, eyes racing as she made the calculations in her head.
"Padma?" Neville asked, hesitantly.
"Oh bugger off!" she replied, throwing a hand in the air. "We don't exactly study calculus here, do we? It's twenty six minutes to stop the bleeding, but there's still the matter of the poison-" A curious expression crossed Padma's face, and she stopped dead in her tracks. "We need Malfoy." She raced through the anti-venom the three had been working on, and how Malfoy was convinced he was close to the cure.
"Hasn't that potion burned through three cauldrons already?" Harry asked. "If you think i'm going to let Draco fucking Malfoy, of all people, play mad potioneer with Hermione's life, you've gone batty. We wait for the Healers."
"I'm not asking your permission, firstly; I am telling you that if we sit here and do nothing but wait, she'll be dead faster than a Healer can get here to shove a bezoar down her throat. Again." Padma looked around impatiently, waving towards Ron. "Oi, Weasley, you've got a vantage point, why don't you try and find Little Lord Fauntleroy?"
Ron, as Gryffindor as any, took on the tempestuous task of explaining his whereabouts to Padma, who looked more murderous by the minute. Ginny tugged at Harry's shoulder, pulling him away.
"Harry, we have to get him. What harm is there in having him try?"
"You're right," he said slowly, brows furrowed.
Behind him, Padma yelled; "Minutes, not hours, Potter!"
"The Healers will be here soon, we might not even have to use it," Ginny reasoned. Harry Potter, the perpetual linchpin. What are you waiting for? she wanted to scream.
"He's had the chance before, Gin, at the Manor," Harry whispered, finally, and Ginny closed her eyes, understanding. She'd seen it happen before, the precise moment when Harry was taken back. How quickly the love of her life could come undone. So much had changed, and Harry, lucid, knew that, but Harry, threatened, could not see shades of grey. There was danger and then there was him, except, for all he had done for the Wizarding World, there was nothing Harry Potter could do for his friend.
"Arrange for the Healers," Ginny told the group. "We'll do as you say in the meantime," There was a moment's hesitation, she wasn't Harry, after all, but to his credit, he made no move to disagree with her. Doing her best impression of her mother, Ginny stood taller, hand on hip. "Minutes, not hours!" It earned her a wry smile from Padma, who began to make arrangements.
She turned back towards Harry. "Can you handle the castle with McGonagall then? The students will trust you over anyone else here." Let him channel his hero instincts somewhere he could use them.
"Gin, I can't. I have to stay here. Hermione, I-" he paused, and Ginny inhaled sharply.
Say it, she wanted to tell him, dare him even.
"She needs me."
"I think," she said, the words she chose both careful and cruel. "It's always just been you needing her."
Anger, real anger, flashed across Harry's face. It looked so foreign that for a moment, Ginny hardly recognized him, but just as quickly as it appeared, it was gone. He pulled her in, kissing the top of her head before dashing off to meet McGonagall. It left her unsettled, although she couldn't place why.
Unmoved by whatever had transpired between the two, Padma waved her over.
"...and whichever one of you is most decent at potions — Merlin, did any of you pass your OWLS?— to find our notes start preparing a new batch." Luna volunteered, Neville already having been dispatched to find the snake. "Ginevra, you'll fetch Malfoy, I assume, in Potter's stead, can I ask for your brother to help me get through these crowds? He's—"
"I'm tall, I know!" Ron pried his fingers away from where he had returned to Hermione's side, looking loathe to leave her.
It was something he did when he was sorry, Ginny realized later as she ran towards the Headmaster's office, that kiss on the back of her head. An apology for an argument she wasn't sure they had.
.oOo.
[Ron]
"Get out of the way, you lot!" Ron roared, hand tight around Padma Patil's as he forged ahead and cut her a path through the panicked crowd. "Where are we going, exactly?"
"The library, Weasley!" she replied, exasperated, nearly taking out Seamus Finnegan's right eye as she kicked off her heels. Her beaded lehenga sounded like a fleet of bells, chiming urgently as they took off down the corridors.
"The library? Are you sure?" He bounded over an ill-placed bench, lifting Padma up with him. "Ron's fine under the circumstances, I think!"
"Fine, Ronald it is. And we're not going to the library-library, so you're excused for your skepticism." As they rounded the corner towards the library, Padma forged ahead of him, switching the lead. "This time."
"Looks an awful lot like the library," Ron grumbled, allowing himself to be led through the stacks. Although he could not see it in the Pitch black library, he could feel Padma's dark glare. "Sorry."
"Look, here."
Padma began to tug books off the stacks: some she would pull like a lever and replace, and others she would rearrange. Suddenly, the ground began to heave underneath them, and the shelves creaked open revealing a narrow set of stone steps. Ron lit a sconce on the wall and followed her lead. When the tunnel finally opened up, they were in a cavernous round room, with stacks of shelves that went as high up as the castle, and ladders that swung back and forth along tracks. "Bloody hell." Ron let out a low whistle. "Where are we?"
"Rowena's Library. D'you think Slytherin was the only one clever enough to install a trap door in this cursed castle? Hi, Ro." Padma murmured at a sleeping portrait. "They've all left their mark one way or another. Wait here," she said, hiking up her lehenga and climbing onto the nearest ladder.
He watched in horror and admiration as she made what looked like perilous headway up the revolving ladders. They did not stop as she climbed up them, rather, she held on until the ladder she was on aligned with the one on top of it and jumped.
Ron shook his head in disbelief and looped his arm around the lowest ladder. It swung back towards him, dragging him with it like the Whomping Willow "So what, did Lady Ravenclaw have to scale a mountain for some 15th century copy of Plants and their Actions and decide it wasn't dangerous enough?"
"Something like that!" Padma shouted from up ahead of him. "She liked puzzles, mental, physics, the lot. They weren't always to be this wild, but ever since the rebuilding-oh, here!" Padma leaned precariously off the top of a ladder, retrieving a large black tome. "It's really just a game of-"
"-Strategy, yeah." Padma pursed her lips into a thin smile when Ron, having caught up to her, took the book off her hands. "Doesn't seem to be a way to get down, though."
"Correct on both accounts." She extended her hand back towards him. "Full marks, Weasley," she said before she jumped.
.oOo.
[Draco]
Draco Malfoy had heard of the legendary Weasley temper; after all, it was the Grand Matriarch herself who had taken out his aunt - and good riddance. If you were to ask him, though, he'd much sooner guess he'd be on the receiving end of it than what was happening now: Ginny Weasley red in the face, threatening to have the Aurors thrown in Azkaban for inappropriate use of Level 3 interrogation tactics if they didn't release him this instant.
"I told her not to keep a fucking snake," Draco muttered, panting, as the two ran towards the dungeon while Ginny filled him in. "This way" He pulled her into an alcove, tapping the bricks that allowed them access into the old tunnels.
"What are these?" Ginny asked, eyes shining as the tip of her wand illuminated the cramped stone hallways, filled with old suits of armor and elaborate tapestries. The sound of footsteps ahead of them - was that Padma's voice?- shook her out of her reverie. "This way, right?" She didn't wait for his answer. Draco took off after her.
"Shouldn't you know? What they are, I mean? They're Gryffindor's tunnels, or so the story goes. Hopefully the next pet Granger keeps is less poisonous, so we'll have time for the grand tour when it mauls her."
Ginny, for the second time that day, surprised him with her laughter, smothered, of course, in good taste. She huffed instead, trying to keep the grin out of her voice when she asked: "Are you always this callous?"
"No, but I'm trying to graduate from cowardice so you don't have a lot of other options right now." He cringed, grateful that they had come up on the Apprentice Office so he didn't have to see her response to his speaking so plainly. He removed a brick from the walls of the old tunnels with his wand, prying out the phoenix heart the Aurors were after before tapping the configuration of stones that would let the two inside.
To her credit, Luna didn't look particularly surprised when the wall behind her opened up to the odd pair.
"Oh, good," she said, casually sweeping ashwinder egg shells she was grinding into a powder off the side of the table. "What? Your potion as written was hardly going to work."
"So you thought the answer to snakes was... more snakes?" Draco scowled. "For fucks sake, are we letting anyone in here now?"
Luna shrugged, unbothered as she took her curious glasses off of her face and extended them to Draco. "They'll help you see more clearly."
He deliberated for a moment, but took them, because also to Luna's credit was a faithful, fresher replica of the potion the trio had been working on earlier. "But we need more Mandrake."
Luna slipped out of the office in search of the Mandrake, and despite Ginny's unrestrained laughter, he put on the ridiculous glasses. He supposed he could use all the help he could get.
.oOo.
[Ron]
"Er, not to question your process, but we're on a bit of a tight schedule." Ron tried to keep the irritation out of his voice as Padma froze, hand on the doorknob. When she did not respond, he gave up pretenses. "Hello?!" He waved his hand in her face, and she turned back to face him.
"I could be wrong," she said. Ron wasn't sure he had ever seen eyes so wide. "There are a lot of variables."
"Well you were pretty sure of yourself twenty minutes ago, if you've lost your confidence—"
"Considering our first options might be on their deathbed or Azkaban, I am still confident I am the next best choice," she said, voice tight and shrill. "I am just trying to figure out if it's good enough." For the second time that evening, Ron Weasley, perpetual sidekick, saw something in his former date he recognized.
"It is" he said, hands on her shoulders. "I know it. You're not Lady Gryffindor reincarnate or the Prince of Darkness himself, Padma, but, take it from me, you're nobody's second choice."
He was proven right, of course, when the green concoction she pulled out of a vial hidden in her book sizzled against Hermione's paling skin. It splashed and seemed to melt into her wound grotesquely, and Harry, who had taken up vigil after setting the castle in order, threw himself away from her bed. Eventually, it bubbled off to reveal the gash had stopped bleeding, still raw and slowly closing.
"She's still lost a lot of blood," Padma said, beads of sweat forming at the top of her forehead as she helped Madame Pomfrey force blood replenishing potion down her throat. "And there's still the matter of the venom, but I think—"
She was cut off by Hermione herself, who gave them all a weak smile. "I knew you were hiding books."
"You stupid bint!" Padma laughed, snatching the hardcover away from where Hermione was straining for it. Ron exhaled, shaky and relieved, and the two were ushered out by Madame Pomfrey, who admonished Hermione for talking, forget teasing, in her fragile state.
"Harry stays, please," Hermione asked. Stay he did, while Padma and Ron made their way to the dungeons. The Healers were said to be near, but Padma was unconvinced they could do anything for her.
"It's not that they couldn't help her," Padma explained as the two were off to the races once again. "It's just that they aren't equipped. That potion I used is hardly legal, and St. Mungos will have their hands tied with the usual options. We just don't have the time."
"Let's just hope Malfoy is half as smart as you, then."
"Of course he isn't," she scoffed, pulling him through another entrance to the tunnels they took back to the infirmary. Ron let her lead him through the labyrinth all the way to the Potions Apprentice Office.
"It wasn't because you're tall, by the way," she said casually, as the bricks in front of them arranged themselves into a door.
"What?"
"In the infirmary, earlier," she said, slipping into the office. "I didn't ask for you because you're tall. But do you think you could reach that cauldron for me?"
.oOo.
Lily Evans was wary of despair, it bound her limbs and tore out her tongue in a way that even on her best days, she simply could not afford. So, on what could be her deathbed, what was a girl supposed to do instead? She chose to focus on another thing she simply could not afford, at least not alone—her outfit. She had taken the most expensive fabric Narcissa Malfoy sent over and had it sewn into pants and a smart blazer. Frank was probably rolling over in his grave. At least, if she was to join him soon, she'd get to do so as the Wizarding disciple of Yves St. Laurent.
"He practically invented the woman's wear-to-work, this was supposed to be a moment for me, you know?" she tried to explain, when Harry looked at her with thinly veiled horror. "Can you please not look like that, Harry?"
"It's the only face I've got," he said with a rueful grin, reaching forward and then pulling back into his chair. "You're not supposed to be talking, you know. It's going to be a wicked scar."
"Are you really going to deny a dying woman her last words?"
Harry shook his head. "You're not dying, 'Mione, you've already made it past the worst," he said, so sure of himself that he almost sounded like his father, too. She still wasn't convinced she had anything to do with the boy, but he was undoubtedly James' son.
The thought of James made her sad, a toe-rag and a rascal, assuredly, but a smart young man who would likely adore his son the way all Potter men were said to. It irked her endlessly, how little James did to earn the accolades that came with his last name, but that Harry would never get to ride the rickety old broom James refused to give up (much to Alice's chagrin) because it had once belonged to his father's father...what did he know of his parents at all?
"You can't possibly know that," she told him finally. "And what if I had something important to tell you?" He shook his head again, this time, with a laugh. "Even if it were about your mother?"
It was stupid, reckless, she knew, but if she had to look at those damn, weary eyes a minute more without giving him something, the guilt would kill her before the poison ever would.
Harry inhaled sharply. "About my mum? What would you know about my mum?"
Before she could answer, Harry made up his mind, He walked over, gathering her legs to the side gently so he could sit at the foot of her bed. "Even if it were about my mother. The only thing I care about right now is getting you better, alright? Whatever it takes."
Of all the things that had happened on this spectacularly disastrous night, this had surprised her the most. Did she overestimate what it would have meant to him, to have the abstract portraits of James and Lily Potter brought into focus? No, she didn't think so. What she had miscalculated, however, was how much Harry would be willing to give up. To do anything for the people you knew and loved. Perhaps this portrait of a Potter heir was half her own after all.
"Just tell me what you need, 'Mi."
"Well then," she said, reaching for his hand and lifting herself out of bed. "I hope you mean it, because if I'm going to die tonight, I won't be doing it in a bloody infirmary."
.oOo.
[Draco]
"I'm not accusing you of anything, all I'm saying is that's not how anyone I've ever seen prepare a fanged geranium." Ron was so tall, limbs everywhere, that even when he was on the other side of the Apprentice Office, Draco felt like he was peering over his shoulder. He whipped around, knife in hand, nearly knocking the precariously balanced chalkboard Hermione had nicked from Professor McGonnagall's office. No matter which way he drew out the numbers, the answer was the same. There was time, but would it be enough?
"Oh I'm sorry, if you want me to prepare this potion like a bloody fifth year, then sure, I can see if we still have Essential Elements of Potion-Making." Really, the man managed one decent set of dress robes and had the gall to tell him what to do?
Ron must have noticed Draco's silent appraisal: "It was a gift. Zabini sent it over."
"Blaise Zabini?" he nearly yelled.
For their part, Padma and Ginny were faring little better, breaking their stiff silence while preparing ingredients only to take turns admonishing the boys: "Ron, will you shut up about Blaise? He's not coming back for you," or, "Malfoy, kept your nerve long enough to survive a Dark Lord and you can't handle a single Weasley?"
They went on this way, bickering over technique and proportions, until it was nearly ready. The Weasleys, at least, recognized when they were out of their league, and had been relegated to keeping the potion moving as it simmered while Draco and Padma considered the ingredient of interest: the calcified phoenix heart.
"I'm telling you we need to grind it," Padma said. "It's a fucking stone."
"Are you taking the piss? You want to take one of the most invaluable ingredients in the world and you want to pulverize it?" Draco threw his hands up. "I wonder why they don't just sell it at the apocethary then, phoenix heart powder, right next to the dried fucking gillyweed."
"Well what would you have us do? Reconstitute it like a kashmiri chili? If you've ever done it, I mean," Padma spat, peeling tendrils of hair away from her forehead where they had been plastered with sweat. "Pillaged the world, and for what? Beans and toast?"
"Christopher Columbus was a Muggle! And not even British."
"He was a dark wizard with his lack of taste being his least heinous of crimes," Hermione interrupted from the doorway. "And the joke is on all of us if we think Malfoy's ever cooked himself a meal." Behind her, Harry was watching them in abject horror. "It's our process," she assured him.
Padma and Draco quickly retreated to the back of the office while the Weasleys greeted Hermione with identical seemingly suffocating hugs, their argument forgotten in their mutual distaste for the overt display of affection. "All that time with this lot," Padma shook her head. "I don't know how Loony does it."
Ginny whipped around from where she was appraising Hermione with concern. "Don't call her that."
"My apologies, Ginevra," she said in a way that did not sound very sorry at all. "Old habits die hard." The addition of Harry and Hermione and their copious feelings to their already crowded workplace was threatening to push Draco to his wit's end.
"Potter, you and your lot have got to get out of here. There isn't room to breathe in here, forget about brewing," Draco said, finally.
Harry's eyes narrowed. "Don't you need our help?"
"Please, Granger half-dead is still worth double the rest of you," he scoffed. "Give me fifteen minutes."
Harry looked as though he wanted to argue, but Hermione gave his hand a quick squeeze. "You have ten," he said, disappearing into the hall with the Weasleys. It wasn't until the door clicked shut that Hermione, who had stayed largely out of his vision up to that point, stumbled into full view.
"I thought he'd never leave." Hermione leaned across the counter in the middle of the office, her hastily cast glamor shedding as Padma admonished her for expending her energy on something so stupid. "Well it's not like they would have let me out of the infirmary looking like this."
That, Draco had to admit was true. He heard from Ginevra what happened, of course, and saw the way Desdemona methodically gut and paralyzed her prey, but it was different to see it on her. A webbed discoloration traced its way out from her cauterized, pulsating wound, branching across her jaw and dipping below her collar. Something trying to siphon life out of her. Her, exuding it, anyways.
She looked up at her friends with a breathless grin. "Not that I am not utterly appreciative of the advances allowing you two to save my life, but tell me Wizards have invented a potion for novocaine already."
Padma must have felt Draco stiffen, or seen the way he began to fold into himself when he thought of the last time Hermione had been that close to death, her hair like flames rising from her scalp from where she lay across the Malfoy's carrera marble floor. "Go," she said, pointing to the cauldron.
Potions, he reminded himself, he could do.
.oOo.
What happened next, Lily told the Healers later, she didn't remember. "I was just hurting, you know?" she would tell them, and they nodded sympathetically. The Aurors accompanying them could ask little without casting aspersions on Hermione's sterling reputation, so they wished her a speedy recovery and pretended they were not trained to notice she wasn't telling them the whole truth.
It worked, of course, their little gambit, and hadn't she just been so fortunate to have Draco looking out for her. She didn't tell them about how Padma had to fend off the Healers, how it took longer than they expected, how in the minutes between the phoenix heart sinking to the bottom of the cauldron like a rock in the Black Lake and its subsequent emergence (brilliant, black, beating), she held Draco's hand so tight she was surprised he had the strength to squeeze it back.
She bit into the reanimated organ, and potion spilled from her mouth like blackened blood as she choked down piece after piece. Her pulse was racing for someone who, as Hermione had once told her, was already dead.
"What were you thinking?" Draco asked, hastily untangling his fingers from hers. "What if I'd been wrong?"
You weren't, she told him, you're not. He told her that she was reckless and cruel; wicked and mad.
"But brilliant, yeah? The both of us."
Draco took her wrist, watching intently as the dark lines that colored her veins began to disappear. He looked as though he wanted to yell, or cry, or tighten his grip and shake her.
Instead, he pulled up his sleeve, the small scars from the Restricted Section still visible against his skin. "I don't know how things work in Gryffindor tower, but we don't hurt ourselves for a side project."
Something about Draco Malfoy had always seemed unsettled, like he was trying to escape from his name, his skin, but in that moment, he was alight with something closer to conviction. She covered his scar with her hot palm. "You're not a project to me."
And perhaps because she was lonely, or in spite of Granger, or simply because neither Padma nor Frank was there to ground her, when he called her Hermione-softly, hesitant- she pretended the first name was her own. His fingers were thin and cool, and she did not think twice about closing the gap between them when they weaved into her hair, a tangle of limbs all clumsy and aching. Lily caught a glimpse of her reflection in the silver doorknob when Draco's back hit the door, and wondered if it was death or desire that made Hermione's eyes look so dark.
"You're a wicked witch, Granger," he told her when they separated. Draco tasted like peppermint and something harder.
"What happened to Hermione?" She put on Luna's glasses, which had clattered to the ground. She wasn't sure what there was to say, and she didn't want him to see how she responded to it.
"Is that what you want me to call you?" he asked.
Ever clever, it struck her: as clear as the pinpricks of light now revealed in her reflection that swarmed to her person like she had never once told the truth. He tasted like peppermint, Lily realized as the answer poured like potion, unbidden out of her mouth. And, although he hadn't quite bitten his tongue out, like blood.
Yes, for a girl who was already dead, Lily Evans was very much alive. And for a potion that had no taste, Draco Malfoy tasted like an awful lot like Veritaserum.
.oOo.
A/N - We (I) love a long game, folks, but here we are! It's ~happened~.
I can't even express how nice it is to know that people are still reading - and maybe looking forward- to this! It's very grey where I am so I hope you are all staying safe with your loved ones and that this helps take your mind off things for a minute.
To those who left a note - thank you so much for your words about my words! I love them, kind or callous and anywhere in between.