Violet ended up spending the night at Grimmauld Place, seeing little reason to walk all the way back to Hogwarts after Apparating to the wardline if she was going to have to speak to Sirius the next day anyway. She slept until late morning, both because of the hour she arrived at and because sleep came fitfully, her body still filled with an electric rush from doing battle with the Elder Wand in hand for the first time.

Sirius hadn't been in when she arrived, and he didn't get back until the afternoon as Violet took advantage of the quiet to briefly converse with Satria over her mirror. At the sound of the door latch, she said a brief farewell and slipped the reflective ice away. Sirius half-stumbled in.

She smirked. "Had a good night, did we?"

"Huh?" Sirius asked, looking nonplussed to see her sitting at his dining room table, which still labored under the weight of his pyramid of takeaways.

"Well, either you've become a particularly messy vampire or that's red lipstick on your face."

"Wha—" He rubbed his face, looked at his hand, and groaned. "Of course today's the day you visit."

"I can't imagine why you didn't want to bring her here, really," Violet said sarcastically. "Why, one look at the decapitated elf heads and she'd have been all over you."

Sirius snorted and grabbed one of the takeaways. "Definitely don't need dating advice from a teenager."

"I wouldn't be so sure of that. While your list of past lovers may be longer, I guarantee mine is more remarkable."

"Remarkable," he parroted. "I don't think I want to know."

"I see." A moment. "All I'm saying is, I don't think I'll ever look at a cat the same way."

Sirius grumbled under his breath as he jabbed his meal with his wand until it was steaming, then shuffled off to get a fork. As he returned, Violet gave him a curious look.

"I thought you hated those old things. Didn't you buy a stainless steel set just to avoid using them?"

Sirius blinked, looking down at the fork. The unusually long, slender implement was one of the ornate silver utensils he had inherited from his family, embossed with the Black crest. "Oh… I don't know. I just started using them, I suppose. I guess they feel a bit better in the hand than the steel ones."

Violet arched a single eyebrow but let it slide. "You might want to, ah, compose yourself a little," she said to change the subject, eyeing his decidedly scruffy appearance. "Or not. Dumbledore might take it as a fashion statement. I think rose-red might just be your color."

"What's that about Dumbledore?"

"Oh, he's dropping by later today. Something about your brother betraying Voldemort, I think?"

Sirius choked on his chips. "What?"

Violet shrugged. "Don't ask me. I didn't even know you had a brother, let alone that he was a Death Eater. But apparently he had second thoughts at the end. R.A.B, right?"

"Regulus Arcturus Black. I…"

His eyes wandered, focusing on something off in the distance. Violet winced, suspecting she had said something slightly insensitive. "I'll, uh, be in the library, yeah? Let me know when Dumbledore shows up."

"Yeah," Sirius said. He shook his head. "Little Reg. Who would've thought."

~#~

Dumbledore arrived a short time later, took one look at Sirius, and sighed. "I suppose you've heard, then?"

"Not everything," Violet said, descending the stairs. "Just about his brother."

"I see." Dumbledore and regarded her inscrutably, then proceeded to give Sirius the short version of the cave, Regulus's final act, and Voldemort's Horcruxes. By the end, Sirius looked grim.

"They could be anything, then? Anywhere? Bloody hell."

"Not quite," Violet corrected. "One's soul would hardly remain in a vessel that is of no value to it, and the same should go for its environment." She waved her hand. "At any rate, that's not relevant at the moment. What is is what Regulus would have done with the Horcrux. Is it possible he might have destroyed it?"

"Perhaps," Dumbledore said. "Perhaps. Sirius?"

Jolted out of his reverie, Sirius shook his head. "Sorry?"

"Do you have any idea of where your brother might have stowed such an object—assuming of course he did not succeed in destroying it before his passing?"

"Uh, he wouldn't have had much time, right? Before Voldemort… well. So I reckon he would have hid it somewhere here." He sighed and ran his hand through his long hair. "Probably hoped I would find it, but I suppose he couldn't have accounted for Azkaban."

"'Somewhere here,'" Violet said, distinctly unamused. "You mean the massive townhouse you still haven't got around to cleaning most of, with Boggarts in every cupboard and Doxies lurking in the curtains?"

Sirius grinned and clapped his hands together. "Well, looks like we're doing it now! Hey Dumbledore, you know any household magic?"

~#~

It turned out that Dumbledore was every bit as disgustingly good at household magic as at any other kind. At his slightest gesture, cupboards swung open and desks helpfully extended their drawers. Dust bunnies got up and walked into neat piles which he vanished with a flourish of his wand, and cobwebs shriveled away in his presence like rats from the light.

That was not to say Violet and Sirius had nothing to do, however. The upper floors, which Sirius had apparently barely set foot in since his childhood, also coincidentally were the most infested by magical pests and were littered with dark artifacts.

"Incendio," Violet said, torching a swarm of Doxies. Their charred exoskeletons clattered to the floor. "Merlin, those things are disgusting."

"They're venomous too," Sirius said darkly. "Damn things nearly killed me when I was trying to clean the lower floors. I ended up needing to ask Molly of all people for help."

Violet snickered. "Now that would have made for a glorious gravestone epithet."

Sirius shuddered.

With a quick flick of his wand that simultaneously repaired a patch of peeling wallpaper, caused the contents of a wardrobe to leap out of it and neatly line up for perusal before returning into place, and vanished an unusually large and hairy spider, Dumbledore stepped back, assessing his work. "Well, that would be one room done. I admit, this might take longer than I anticipated."

"Never thought the secret to Voldemort's demise would be cleaning," Sirius put in. "Imagine if Molly heard about it. Nightmare fuel."

"Some things should not be joked about," Dumbledore said with a sly smile.

"Right, yes, hilarious," Violet said. "But are we seriously going to have to hack our way through this mess a meter an hour like it's the fucking Somme? There must be a better way."

Dumbledore shook his head. "Alas, a Horcrux would be a rather poor method of immortality if it could be easily summoned or detected. I am certain that Voldemort would have taken every measure imaginable to conceal it from magical means of search."

"We could burn the entire property down with Fiendfyre," she suggested, not entirely joking. "Sirius?"

He grinned. "Sounds like a great idea to me."

"Aside from the fact that we would then never be fully certain that the Horcrux was, in fact, within the house at the moment of pyromaniac satisfaction, it would hardly be advisable to unleash cursed flame in the middle of muggle London."

Two synchronous sighs answered Dumbledore, who, in undaunted spirit, led the charge into the next room.

Two hours later, with Sirius dusty, Dumbledore irritatingly amused, and Violet dangerously close to rethinking the Fiendfyre plan after having a few inches of her beloved hair snipped off by a cursed pair of silver scissors, the house was no closer to admitting defeat. Indeed, it seemed to be lulling them into a false sense of security as it drew up reinforcements.

"I almost wish I hadn't freed Kreacher," Sirius muttered. "He knew where every stupid bit of jewelry was. Did I ever tell you that he kept trying to hide the junk I was going to throw out?"

"Who the fuck names a house elf 'Creature?'"

"My family. Lovely people. Death's too good for 'em, really."

Violet made something that could have been charitably construed as a sound of amusement, losing interest in the conversation. Something about what Sirius said stuck in her head though, and despite her best efforts to maintain a surly silence, she eventually relented.

"What was that about him hiding things?"

"Oh, you know. Anything gold or silver or with 'ancestral value.' Little bugger was persistent."

"Something like a locket stamped with Slytherin's heraldry, you mean?"

"Uh—" Sirius stopped short. "Maybe. I probably should have thought of that myself."

"Probably," Violet said with heartfelt sarcasm.

"He had this disgusting cupboard he'd knocked the back out of that he hid his salvage in. I think he crawled around in the walls at night sometimes."

"Delightful."

Sirius grimaced. "It, uh, might be somewhere in there."

"Joy."

Thankfully, Dumbledore came to the rescue again. Instead of having to blindly crawl around in the cramped spaces between the walls around the elf's cupboard, he used a clever adaption of the Disillusionment Charm to render them transparent. There was an immediate reaction.

"Disgusting," Violet pronounced.

"How did he get that much stuff in there?" Sirius added.

"Ah," Dumbledore said with a smile as he adjusted his glasses. "I believe I may have spotted it."

A plank of wood had been nailed to the interior of the wall to form a crude shelf, on which was piled what must have been the addled house elf's most precious treasures. A small platinum-framed painting of a glaring young woman with curly black hair; a deeply green emerald set in electrum; and a gold locket bearing Slytherin's crest.

"This should be a simple matter… ah, I see…" Dumbledore flicked his wand, scribing small, precise patterns into the air, and the wall regained its opacity. "I believe it should be possible to reach from the other room without tearing down any of Sirius's walls."

"You wouldn't hear me complaining if you did," he muttered.

From the room on the opposite side of the wall, there was a cutout beneath a stairway leading into a pitch black area beneath the stairs. Sirius knelt down, shining a light from his wand. "I think if I reach… Ah, Morgana's bloody—!"

He jerked backward, banging his head against the top of the cutout and cursing further. His hair wildly scattered over his eyes and covered him cobwebs, he vehemently announced, "There's something moving in there!"

Violet rolled her eyes. "What, a particularly large spider? I swear there will be consequences if you make me get my robes dusty because you can't handle a couple—bloody hell!"

Like a living shadow, something dark stretched up from under the stairs, reaching out for Sirius with one long robed arm as he shrank back, face white and huddled in terror. A hollow rattle echoed through the room, the walls suddenly far more cramped than a moment ago. The Dementor stood half again as tall as her. Before she could even think about it, the Elder Wand was in her hand, the words of a curse on her lips that probably should not have been used indoors.

"Riddikulus!" Dumbledore said behind her, his calm response making her feel slightly embarrassed for her reaction. Of course Sirius's Boggart would be a Dementor, and of course a real Dementor hadn't been hiding inside a wall for decades. She deftly slipped the wand away before Dumbledore could take note of it—and Merlin, that would have been quite a disaster—and took a step back.

The Boggart flickered, reshaped a dozen times, and eventually resettled back on Sirius. But this time its form was not that of a Dementor. No, it was Sirius himself, but as if through a crooked lens. He was taller by a few inches and stood with a regal, imperious poise. The deep wrinkles set into Sirius's face since his years in Azkaban were gone, and his skin had taken on a rich copper sheen. But it was the coat of swirling flame he wore that drew a disgusted hiss from Violet.

The real Sirius only stared in transfixed horror, and she swore there was a flicker of flame in his eyes that was more than a reflection. Dumbledore cleared his throat.

"That will be enough, I think. Riddikulus."

The air shook with the strength of his charm, and the Summer Lord that stood before them vanished with a crack, reforming as a frail-looking girl with rusty hair. Her skin was as pale as Death, and she pointed at Dumbledore with a single accusing finger.

"Riddikulus," Dumbledore firmly, and at last the Boggart vanished for good. He tucked his wand away. "Sirius, good man, would you care for a breath of fresh air? I believe Violet and I will be able to take things from here."

"I… yes, maybe that would be best." Sirius shuddered and gave the dark space under the stairs a final wary look. "I'll be… out."

"A most disturbing sight," Dumbledore mused once he was out of earshot. "Would I be amiss in assuming you have some knowledge of that apparition's significance to him?

"I might, but it wouldn't be my place to say," Violet replied, her head tilted in curiosity as she watched the spot where the strange girl had been. "I was surprised it took you three attempts to banish the Boggart. Are they always so resilient?"

Dumbledore chuckled. "Much as it might be my habit to profess modesty, I would have previously told you that no Boggart could have hoped to withstand even one RiddikulusCharm by my wand. This one must have grown unusually strong from its proximity to a piece of Voldemort's soul."

"Looked pretty real," Violet admitted. "Makes me wonder what it would have been for me, to be honest."

"A natural curiosity, certainly. There is some value in better knowing oneself, though you should take care not to place unwarranted weight on such things. Of all of man's nightmares, few are rational or constructive."

"Even so, it's best to be forewarned. Knowledge is always useful."

"Perhaps," Dumbledore murmured. He smiled. "It would seem that we are still left with the problem of retrieving the Horcrux from the wall, and as we know, a Summoning Charm will most likely not do the trick."

Violet sighed. "Oh, very well. Not a word of this, though."

Awkwardly, she crawled on all fours through the cutout, then rose and squeezed through the space between the walls. The shelf holding the locket was just barely in reach when she stood on the tips of her toes. The house elf must have been able to move like a spider to reach it.

Dumbledore raised an eyebrow at her appearance as she emerged. "I see the dust was not nearly so bad as you feared."

She flashed a grin at him. "Nah. I was just taking the piss out of Sirius earlier. I don't get dirty easily." She tittered lightly. "Not in the literal sense, at least."

Dumbledore raised a single eyebrow. "I am certain I have no idea what you are talking about."

"Probably better that way, yes." Violet held the locket by its chain, slowly turning it in place. It caught the light and seemed to cling possessively to it for longer than should have been possible, flickers of deep yellow and red lending a malign depth to the gold. There was no doubt that this was the Horcrux.

"Seems almost a shame to destroy it," she said, admiring its sheen. "A piece of Voldemort's soul… Imagine if we could somehow use it against him."

"A tempting thought and all the more dangerous for it. A fragment of Voldemort's soul would never willingly turn against its source, and attempting any kind of sympathetic magic with it would have even more disastrous effects."

"I see. In that case, we should destroy it immediately. How did you go about dealing with the ring?"

"Most delicately and painstakingly, as I wished to avoid damaging the artifact itself. In this case, simple Fiendfyre should suffice as long as we take sufficient precautions, which I believe you to be… skilled with."

Violet clicked her tongue. "It's a soul of a sort, yes? A more elegant solution should suffice." Regretfully for a task as consequential as this, she drew not the Elder Wand but her spare and held it high.

"Avada Kedavra!"

Deathly winds descended, and when the flash cleared, the locket had been blown open and twisted into blackened metal. A faint impression of darkest magic lingered in the air, beyond even that of the Killing Curse. Dumbledore sighed heavily.

"There is another matter I wished to speak to you about," he said as they watched the blackened ruin of Horcrux smolder away.

Violet tilted her head in acknowledgment. "Oh?"

"If the Daily Prophet is to be believed, the Malfoy home burnt to the ground last night."

"That's your mistake right there. Journalists. Can't trust 'em."

"And yet, in this instance, I believe they write the truth." He gave her a very unamused look over his glasses. "Narcissa Malfoy never took a Dark Mark, Violet."

"Oh, please." She rolled her eyes so far she almost got a headache. "She's only married to a Death Eater, raising a proto-Death-Eater, spends her time with Death Eaters, and believes in a bright future for Death Eaters. I don't know where I could possibly have formed the idea that the whole family was a legitimate target."

"Yet, it still does us ill to assign guilt without evidence," Dumbledore replied grimly.

"Ha!" Violet cried, pouncing on the opportunity. "That would be why you took such pains to ensure Sirius's guilt before casting him into a stygian dungeon of torturous misery. Oh, wait…"

A long silence passed before he looked away. "Very well. I will not bring this subject up again. But take care: while the Minister of the day may be content to use you to eliminate problems that would be inconvenient to shed light on, there is a reason he desires plausible deniability for it. After the war, it is very possible that that he will find it less advantageous to support you."

"History's written by the victors," Violet replied easily. "And I intend to be the greatest victor of all. Besides, I think you misjudge Rufus. Now, is there anything else, or can I go make sure Sirius isn't drowning himself in liquor?"

"Of course. Do try to attend more of your classes in the future if at all possible. A well rounded education is a priceless thing.

~#~

The price for skiving off another day of Hogwarts was far greater than Violet could possibly have imagined.

One might have thought that destroying a fragment of the Dark Lord's soul would warrant a day free of obsessive Potions professors, volatile Weasleys, and worthless essays. Clearly, the universe disagreed.

"But Violet," said Fleur Delacour, growing ever more Summery with her agitation. "Surely you must be curious about zis too!"

"And yet I exhibit no indication of it," Violet said, propping a heavy leather-bound tome up on her table like a fence between unruly neighbors. "Truly, a mystery that may never be solved."

Fleur sniffed. "I don't zink I believe you. What exactly are you reading that eez more eenteresting to look at zan me?"

She leaned over to get a look at the pages, prompting Violet to snap it shut and slam it down on the table before she could get a glimpse of contents Violet would really prefer not to be seen reading. "Fine," she snapped. "You have officially gained my attention."

Fleur, either missing the implicit threat in her tone or choosing to ignore it, continued oozing bubbliness. "Then what do you zink? Is eet possible?"

"That I'm somehow descended from an offshoot of Veela with an alternate form of your… Allure? Hmm, let me think about it." She started ticking off her fingers. "Well, my mother's parents were muggles, so that's out. Veela traits only transfer matrilineally, so that would count my father out too. Oh, wait, I know—he must have had an affair with a Veela woman and tricked my mother into believing I was her daughter!" She paused a moment as Fleur frowned. "Of course, that would hinge on her forgetting that she never gave birth to me, which might have taken a bit of convincing."

"You are mocking me," Fleur decided. "It eez said that sarcasm eez the lowest form of wit."

Violet muttered something about low forms of wit and blondes.

"How eez it zat you explain it, then?" Fleur leaned forward, lovely blue eyes wide and sparkling. "Please, Violet."

Violet groaned. Even with her prejudice against Summer, that look could have melted a heart of stone. "It's not really your fault you can't control your Allure. I was just being cruel."

"But I can," Fleur said, voice breathy with excitement. "I've been practicing—it's slow, but I know it can be done. There eez so much more to what I am zan I ever imagined. But eef I just understood it a little better…"

"Look—ugh. It's not really what you think. Besides, if did tell you, there might be… unpredictable effects."

Something had caused Summer's influence to wane in the Veela until it was little more than a shadowy suggestion of its once profane grandeur. But what fades may rise again, and Fleur realizing the truth about her nature might just cause Summer to start to reassert itself in her or, worse, Veela as a whole. Violet had absolutely no interest in a race of Summer quasi-fae in the mortal world.

But Merlin, she was attractive. And the more time Violet spent talking with her, the less she noticed her affiliation with Summer. The other Court was insidious like that; spend enough time around it, and it started to grow on you.

She heaved an exaggerated sigh. "Oh, very well. I suppose I could share a few ideas sometime. They might not help at all, you know. As you've noticed, my own… abilities are of a different nature."

"Oh, thank you!" Fleur said and seemed to practically float out of the room. She turned back, a little smile curling her lips. "And by the way? I had to live een this dreary place for weeks. I am quite aware zat Thoughts Forbidden eez actually a romantic tale."

Muffled giggling trailed away from the library. Violet groaned and glared at the offending novel, contemplating incineration. Reluctantly, she cracked it back open instead. Fleur was simultaneously the most and least embarrassing person possible to have been caught by, so it wasn't as if it could get any worse from here.

~#~

Spring had come early. The song of birds, freshly returned from their southerly retreats, was sweet and cheerful.

A silent circle of figures stood in still silence, ringed around an enormous pyre. Atop it was poised a single ornate coffin, of rosewood and laid with gold.

Draco's father was in that coffin, pale and sightless. Even now, weeks after he had learned of his father's death, the idea baffled him. Some deep, nameless part of him still couldn't reconcile the memory of his father's calm assurance, the way he had embodied the very concept of a powerful man, with the corpse that he had become.

He had demanded to see his father's body, and no one had attempted to stand in his way. The memory of his father's rent chest and unseeing eyes had haunted him since, coming to him in place of the sleep that escaped him. Dark circles rested under his eyes, and his pale complexion had turned gaunt. But he stood straight and allowed no sign of emotion, as his father would have wanted him to.

"Draco," said Bellatrix Lestrange beside him, more somber than he had ever seen her. "It's time."

Once, he had flinched at the musicality of her voice and the unseen madness it belied. Now it just brought a fresh kind of pain at how similarly she sounded to his mother, whose voice had been reduced to a weak whisper by electrical burns crawling down her throat. It brought pain, but even that seemed second to numbness.

"Incendio."

As waves of heat and flickering light washed over the gathered witches and wizards, they slowly began to drift backward. Soon, they began to break away, driven off by the heat into small gatherings where they whispered to each other of games of power and possibilities of vengeance. But Draco remained where he was, even as the radiant heat became painful. Often, he had imagined himself taking his father's place as the head of their great family. Never would he have believed he would do so before his seventeenth birthday.

Extant on these isles nevermore.

In a flash that left him almost dizzy, a bleak void within him was filled with hatred, bitter as aconite. Potter had done this. Hadn't she warned him, a mockery in itself? Even then, laughing behind an expressionless beauty that nearly hurt, had she been plotting his family's end?

He hated her, but there was no solace to be found in it. His father was just one more entry in an ever-lengthening list of the Dark Lord's followers who had met their ends at the point of her wand. Hating her was like hating Dumbledore or—spitefully, he continued with his treasonous thought—the Dark Lord. People like them simply did not exist on the same level as someone like himself. In a way, it was almost comparable to the superiority of pure blood over mud. He might rage against it, spout vitriol at the unfairness of it all, but in the end, reality was unchanged. Just as the mudbloods would eventually come to accept their place, it fell upon all sane witches and wizards to acknowledge that some of their number, some fortunate few, simply rose above all others, reaching a plane of existence where even blood ceased to matter.

And it fell to him, personally, to accept that the witch who murdered his father and maimed his mother was one of those lucky few.

Even in his fantasies, the torturous fates he imagined for her all involved the Dark Lord. To imagine overcoming her himself would have been too unbelievable, too impossible to be satisfying.

The Minister paraded her about, unable to see the way she was controlling him, as if her victories were the Ministry's too. The Minister was more foolish than Fudge if he truly believed that. The Dark Lord would never accept the Ministry's rule, so why would she?

The thought that he had once tried to gain her favor disgusted him. But now even that memory felt blurred and unreal. How did he even know if his memories reflected reality? He had been alone with her for hours, in which anything could have happened, and she was certainly not above the use of a Memory Charm. Innocuous memories of small talk and lazy flirtation now felt as false as a Leprechaun's gold.

A man stepped up beside him. Draco didn't even favor him with a glance.

"Go away," he snapped, realizing too late that all the other attendees of the funeral had fallen silent. The man was neither tall nor short, and though he was distinctly aristocratic of feature, his brown eyes were positively plebeian.

But living shadows were his robes, and Draco stumbled backward as the brown faded from his eyes in place of bottomless crimson.

The Dark Lord had come to pay his final respects.

"For a better follower, I could not have asked," he said, voice far warmer than Draco would have expected. He hung on to every word.

"Abraxas was one of the first to join our great cause," he continued. "When Lucius took his place, I doubted him at first. But he proved himself even greater than in his father in time." Those eerie red eyes slid from the pyre to Draco, making him shiver. "Will you do the same?"

Draco knelt, head bowed. "I will, My Lord."

"Rise, Draco," the Dark Lord whispered, the slightest suggestion of the serpent in his words. "Stand proud, for you are the head of ancient family whose name shall never be forgotten. Soon, you will take my Mark and grasp the place you were destined for in the ranks of the merry wizards and witches who fight for the future of all Wizardkind. But first?"

He smiled, and it was terrible indeed. "First, you shall avenge your father and strike a great blow against our foes."

As Draco stood again, perfect clarity took the place of anguish. He smirked, a hint of his old assurance returning. "I will do it, My Lord!"

"Yes," the Dark Lord agreed. "I believe you will."

AN: Thanks as always for the support! I greatly enjoy reading your thoughts on the story.

I forgot to mention this earlier, but I have posted a number of sample chapters for possible future fics to the discord server. There's still a lot more of Sleet and Hail to go before seriously thinking about that, but if you're interested in seeing where my mind's at and/or sharing any ideas of your own, you can join the discord and read them by following the link in my profile.