A House Homecoming for All

The way in which he stood - the pinnicle of a muggle business man with the fold of his suit\'s jacket futting out in tiny replicas of vertebrae, teasing the eye with their infrequent popping and descention back into that second skin of couture; it was a cheap disguise for him. But the Dark Lord was giddy with the harrowing pursuits he\'d imbued upon his latest diciples - hunting down the Malfoy spy like the dog he was whilst Big D penetrated Jessica through her own congratulatory fellow house founder of Ravenclaw. It was the perfect opprtunity really, to extract a cladestine ability even unknown to its possessor and claim it as another one of his denominations.

Andrew\'s form twitched with defiance as his strappings held taught and his glasses were in danger of falling off of his nose and shattering without the profound and frequently used benefit of \"occulus repairo\" as their cushion. The ostensibly affable man looming over him began to chant some absurd mantra until Andrew\'s mind fell flacid against its normal peak of resistance and Voldemort comiserrated through the mind\'s eye of a boy to his paritioners of perdition carrying a now depleted Malfoy in their collective clutches.

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Cait paced, which she wasn\'t prone to doing at the very worst of times. All of the Syltherin mentors had fled along with their presumably principally preserved protege and had most likely evolved into her tormentors more than anything else. Pomphry was making all sorts of calls to offices and sending owls willy-nilly but to no avail - it seemed a perilous task to attempt the traching of two reformed Death Eater/Spie, an indelible slant to the proceedings so recently imbued upon His clan.

And there was no doubt in anyopne\'s mind that He was the one behind all of it; even the revered and obtusely denial-ridden Dumbleodore had been taken unawares when Andrew\'s scrawl had been found with the first letter of his abductor, in his own blood. The Grey Lady, although she had previously taken to an air of indifference and slovenly pride in the boy, felt most repentent and had graced the ghalls her with presence immediately after discovering the tragic finding to Dumbledore.

Of course, Cait was nearly going mad just waiting and pondering in some Jess-imposed self interrogation; Jess had always been a notorious brooder and would spend hours in careful contemplation of the simplest of concepts to come across more abstract progressions of thought to heighten any one encounter for the benefit of an individual fortunate enough to receive her musings.

Although some would say she stuck to herself as an eccentric recluse, it were these selfless, ostensibly introspective acts which affirmed her faith in the human condition and which ulitimately proclaimed her a exceptional mentor to a brotherless world. Now, in the wizarding world, it was only too ironic that she should be stripped of something so inherent in her nature, divested of all opportunity to demonstrate this culminative gift, and instead fall in love with a man renowned for the dour verisimilitude which he created for the terrification ofenseenseless children.

Headstrong and alone, Cait was convinced that he was behind it all; suspsicion brimmed past all the boundaries of propriety and even common sense and Cait ran down into Hufflepuff\'s fair corridor until she came across Tiera\'s dwelling in the farthest reaches form Sprout\'s interestingly enough.

Although Cait had no particular inkling to implore Tiera for her mind blowing strength in the art of doubt and avoidance, Cait wasn\'t averse to the idea of appealing some sort of ethical code unto her in saving a girl whose mind gradated constantly into the ranges far from mere proximity to a notion, but to the furnishings of the depth of a midnight\'s sky or the spread of nation\'s historical grandeur in perfect symmetry.

Sliding through the unprotected door as policy had been recently altered due to the necessity of emergency communication in such times of emotional solace in another similarly berieved soul by Dumbledore himself (upon the still sane Minerva\'s insistence). However, Tiera\'s soul didn\'t appear to be conditionally burdoned as would be expected and she seemed quite pleased to be avidly paching her things in an undeverving Hogwart\'s Trunk whilst humming mildly.

Cait stood silent at first, not breathing and willing every orifice in her body to become hermetically sealed in order to preserve such a tainted scene with its own blatant evidence.
Mouth stuggling for a will to contort with purpose, Cait was finally faced by Tiera as she reached for her hairbrush.

\"Tiera... how could you?\" was all she could muster under the circumstances and Tiera\'s brows shot up defensively, a most predictable reaction for such a despicable collaboration.

\"I- I don\'t know what you mean...\" Suddenly, Cait\'s mind was no longer blinded and capriciously attached to the majestniquniquitous wrath that was Snape as she recalled Tiera\'s disgust and total refusal to associate with that same man at mealtimes and when she had snuck into the Infirmary the other night to distract her whilst Snape and Jessica had disappeared. The instability of the mind before her reeled her senses in a lacrymose wassail to dysfunction but batted off the relatively paltry expansion of concern for one so ultimately wretched.

\"I need to know... I mean, I knew about the prank gone wrong but... why did you have to push it so far to get revenge?\" Cait whimpered as she realised her own danger in associating so closely to one of the Big D\'s slavehounds; as quickly as realization and epiphones are able to spitfire through one\'s mind, so came another and it was of Jessica\'s constant predicament.

She had been assigned, from the very beginning, two prestigiously dark, cantankerous minstrels of evil and had not resorted to any semblence of it herself, but of only compensation for an unfriendly gesture over a loved one. In that one moment, Cait felt so compelled to take out her wand and severely maim the cowering cretin before her, now only avidly \"loyal\" to one master, which was the one who was supposed to take hold of Jessica first.

Tiera\'s ire flared at the reminder of the trick she was so expertly coerced into repaying by Big D and she ran to the door stupidly to crash headfirst into Flitwick who was just coming to check on her before bed.

\"Oh, my dear, where are you going?\" his chirped voice beguiled a concerned tone whilse Tiera\'s face turned into a determined grimace of both pain promise and prophesy.
Gripping his tinyy collar ruthlessly to Cait\'s stunned awe, she llifted the admittedly irresponsible and cowardly filth up off the ground and breathed into his face, laughing as if she could crush his clavical with a minor twist of her thumb.

\"Perhaps you should go and check upon your daughter,\" and with that, Tiera garnered enough of a distraction based upon the disbelief of a classmate gone stray who could\'ve been moulded into a prize piece, and flooed away into the night and back to where she was expected to be.

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Snape and Jessica struggled to clambour up the grassy slope back to the castle; each were exhausted from the strained evacuation from the and both had similar queries as to thlidilidity of Lucius\' explanation. Either he was far more noble in entirety and sacrificed himself to the throng of nefarious sychopants or he had misjudged some tired, half a century old scheme which seemed somehoe more plausible.

Either way, both were discouraged and eager to make an accurate estimation about their sociopath friend for once; he still hadn\'t fully explained the significance of that amulent we was waffling on about with Draco before they\'d arrived. A nagging thread pulled as Jess\' gut, sting angling for her to not completely trust her obtuse tutor completely, especially from the way he still treated Draco even though he was no longer an accolade seeking toddler.

Jessica was panting behind her now betrothed (yes, Snape proposed in the most inappropriate of ways just after she\'d passed out and come to quickly), until they found the East entrance and were even more alarmed to find the castle compeltely unwarded and open to any miserly patrons in disguise. Snape kept on balking superfluously about Dumbledore\'s lack of foresight just because they had been abducted when Tiera\'s boney form collided with Jessica\'s uncontrollably tipsy one.

As soon as Jess looked up to see what mist still lay before their lived deprived of the most natural semblence of solace, Tiera hit her with a stupefy and ateempted a killing curse on Snape which narrowly missed his left ear.
Panting ferociously, Severus lunged at the puny villain\'s waist, it\'s circumference seemingly somehoe connected to the trunk which she clutched onto for dear life. Then it became obvious - the trunk was lumpy and bursting with its contents and Snape had a grasp as to just what they could be.

All of Lucius\' plotting and \"demonstrations\" in his own home had been for the Dark Lord\'s benefit which would clearly include the matter of the amulet.

\"Get your fucking hands off me, asshole!\" Tiera screeched and pulled at the tattered cuffs of snape\'s working cloak. Growling, he knelt on her midsection whilst grasping for the lock and muttering \"alohomora\" passionately. And sure enough, Tiera\'s previous oval package, this time a sort of puce instead of the fraudulent onyx at Malfoy Manor, glittered wantonly in the receding sunlight overcasting the telltale red dawn.

\"You vagrant moronic child!\" Snape moaned and slapped the girl unconcious whilst turning around to face his sleeping Jess. He had to return to the manor without her; he knew that Andrew was still in distress and wouldn\'t last very much longer at the hands of someone he could only ever dream about emulating Harry in the face of. He quickly located a scrap of parchment and scrawled a note telling her to monitor Flitwick and his halfling for as long as he was away; however, he was kind enough to repress the adamantine grasp of contingency he always carried with him - that he would die and she would be all the better for it.

Somehow, the halfling was still integral in this misplaced tribute to darkness and reaffirmation to the Death Eater clan.
Jessica\'s mind was working through her unnatural slumber and she found herself in a sort of pit with the house elf who bore to her a living prophesy.

\"It had to be someone oblivious to Miss Slytherin\'s fate, miss!\" Dobby chirped with the frail melancholy so perilous and frequent these days. No one had seen Dobby for awhile and it occured to Jess, even in her dreamlike semi-awareness, that perhaps he was even more devastatingly involved than his offspring.

\" Miss, you have to believe Dobby\'s word! You are in grave danger and the prsor sor will leave against his will unless you find me in time!\" Dobby tapped upon his knee reproachfully, as if he wanted to do such a precise chastizing reminder on her own knee.

\"Dobby, if this is some farce for me blaming Flitwi-\"

\"No, Miss! Go now!\" and with that, Dobby\'s voice sounded as if t had been struck by lightening if it was at all possible; the sound current morphed into something of a clanging symphony and Jessica realized she was listening to the dissonance of a wailing man. The curtains of foggy disillusionment separated and she watched Lucius\' form be mangled and branded in front of the Dark Lord himself... in a suit and tie? This wasn\'t at all what she\'d expected from her predecessor of sorts; where was the pinched snake face, the glowing satanic eyes and the knarled, crookly jointed fingers? Jessica\'s eyes popped open to look up sadly into a bluer pair which mirrored hers.

\"Jess, there\'s something you have to see.\"
Caickedcked her friend up tenderly and led her slowly to the Infirmary, leg twitching ominously.