The Last Gift

Objectively, Hermione knew she was depressed. She could identify the signs and symptoms in herself. She slept too much, ate too little, cared even less about her appearance than usual, and felt so distant from everything that once mattered. Sure, she went through the motions; she helped with planning, brewed potions, went on reconnaissance missions, tutored anyone and everyone who needed it...but she wasn’t herself and everybody knew it. The formerly outspoken know-it-all was fading into the background.

What could she do? What could anyone do? There were others going through the same things, people who had lost more than her. She wasn’t special. She was just one of many whose lives had been torn asunder by the war.

So she drifted through some approximation of life, trying not to think about her parents. Trying not to imagine how they had died. Trying to deny the guilt that enveloped her and usually failing. Drinking cup after cup of strong black coffee as if it was nourishment for the small, dormant fragment of Lucius’s soul, always wishing she could do more to help him the way he had helped her, even from afar...

Harry and Ron didn’t push her. Though she saw them exchange glances often, looks that she couldn’t decipher, they weathered her silence with an incredible patience. Sometimes she thought it was only their continued support and reliance on her, that facade of normalcy, that kept her going.

For without them, she was very much alone.

Through the haze of pain, Lucius realized that something had pulled the Dark Lord’s attention away from him. He dared to open his eyes. His vision was blurry and his eyes stung from the sweat and dirt that clung to him like a second skin, but he could make out the shape of a man.

His form was very bright. Had he believed in some silly religion, Lucius might have thought it was an angel. He squinted hard, trying to make out who the man was, but it was like trying to find a hard line in an impressionist painting. His brain was too overtaxed. Lucius gave up and took the moment of distraction as respite from the last hour’s torture.

The room was deadly silent. He listened to the roar of it with the cold stone floor against his cheek. All he wanted to do was sleep. Shut his body and mind off and sleep. Just one precious minute...to hell with everything else. He knew that he was reaching that point, the one where a tormented prisoner gave up, but he didn’t have an ounce of energy in his body to care.

He was drifting off when something dragged him back. That...that was Potter’s voice. Suddenly, Lucius was awake.

“Nice trick, Harry.”

The shimmering copy of Harry smiled coldly. “I thought so.”

The Dark Lord seemed amused. He wore a predatory little smirk on his lips, the kind an arrogant man couldn’t stop himself from displaying when he thought himself better than his opponent. “Well, what have you come here to say?” Voldemort asked in a mockingly nonchalant tone. “We are all riveted.”

He was acting like an exasperated parent dealing with his child’s rebellious delusions of grandeur. The copy of Harry lifted his chin. Then he surveyed the crowd of Death Eaters. His eyes fell over Lucius last and narrowed slightly.
“I’m here to tell you what’s going to happen from this point forward unless you decide to surrender.”

Voldemort laughed. “You always were an optimist, Harry.”

The projection turned back toward the Death Eaters. “You all joined him because you feared what would become of you. You feared the perversion of wizardkind by those lesser than you. Those without pure blood. You were taught from birth that you were better, that half-bloods and Muggleborns and Muggles are unintelligent, undeserving, and dangerous. You never bothered to find out of these things were true. You just believed.” He looked down at his feet for a moment. “Well, I used to believe something, too. I used to believe that people were good. That prejudice could be overcome with education and experience. That given the chance, people would choose peace over war. I don’t believe that anymore.”

“I’ve told you before, Harry, that there is no good or evil.”

Harry looked up. “Yes. There is only power, and those to weak to seek it.”

“Ah, you remember.” The Dark Lord tilted his head. “Perhaps you are ready to seek it now?”

“I don’t need to. I’ve always had it. You and I...we’re two sides of the same coin. I was afraid of what that meant, but that isn’t going to stop me. Your advantage is gone.”

“Oh? You think so?” Voldemort looked like he was barely containing his laughter, and so did several of the Death Eaters.

“I know so,” Harry replied coldly. “I’m a part of you, after all.” He grinned. “In the end, a man’s greatest enemy is always himself.”

The Death Eaters were roaring with laughter, but the Dark Lord’s mirth was strangely forced.

“Laugh all you want,” Harry said, “but all of you are in my way. You’ve gone after my family and friends. I hope you’re ready for me to come after yours.”

“Ha! Empty threats, Harry Potter. I know you don’t have enough cruelty in you to swat a fly, let alone play the games of warlords!” Voldemort bellowed.

“There’s cruelty in everyone. Some people don’t need any provocation to use it. Some people do.” The hologram of Harry strode forward, walking right up to Voldemort, standing nose to nose with him. “I am TIRED of provocation. TIRED of doing the right thing. TIRED of trying to prove that I’m just as good as anyone else in this room. If you people want to think we’re subhuman even though you have done all the killing and subjugating, go ahead. From this point on, we will be targeting you.” Harry turned back to the cowed Death Eaters, teeth bared. “Are you afraid of extinction? You should be.”

“You are a miserable liar, Harry.”

He ignored Voldemort and went on. “We will attack your homes. We will take your women and children prisoner and force them to work. We will kill your men. And we won’t stop until every pureblood is dead or polishing our boots.”

“He’s bluffing!” The Dark Lord swung a skeletal hand through Harry’s image, disrupting it for a short second. “Pay the whelp no mind.”

“Am I?” Harry held out his hands, as Voldemort had that day he sent his likeness to Hogwarts. And, just like that day, two severed heads appeared. Harry threw them down.

Everyone in the room jumped when they hit the floor with matching thuds. Up until that moment, no one believed they were real. The Death Eaters exploded into a flurry of shouts.

“The Carrows!”

“Amycus! Alecto!”

“He’s killed them!”

“How dare you, you half blood scum!”

If it was possible, Voldemort had gone whiter than he already was. His ruby eyes burned.

“That’s just the beginning. Unless, of course, you surrender. No one else has to get hurt,” Harry said.

The Dark Lord’s lips twitched. He almost appreciated Harry’s skillful manipulation of the situation. Almost.

“You will regret this, Harry Potter.”

“The only thing I regret is trying to be the good guy for so long. That time is over.” His eyes flickered to Lucius once more for the briefest of seconds. Then they settled firmly on Voldemort. “I’ll be seeing you.”

And with that, he blinked out of sight.

Harry came out of the astral projection with a jolt. For a long minute he felt completely disoriented. Then Firenze’s face swam into view; the centaur looked concerned, but impressed.

“You will feel very dizzy for a while. Don’t stand up.”

“No immediate plans to,” Harry murmured, blinking.

“How did it go?” Ron asked.

“I think I definitely spooked them.” The dizziness Firenze spoke of was spiraling the world into nauseating circles. “And Malfoy is alive.”

“Probably wishing he wasn’t,” Ron murmured.

“Definitely wishing he wasn’t. It seemed like I interrupted a torture session. He looked like hell.” Harry squeezed his eyes shut; now he was starting to get a headache.

“Hermione will be happy to hear he’s hanging on.” Ron had finally told her what happened in Australia two weeks before; she took it with such calmness that he knew right away she’d already figured it out ages ago. Why they bothered to try to keep anything secret from her was beyond him. Hermione was too smart not to see right through it.

“Will she?” Harry murmured. The strange emotional connection Hermione had with Lucius troubled him, mainly because he couldn’t figure it out and she didn’t seem to want to explain it. “What’s going on between those two?”

“I have no idea.” Ron turn to look at Firenze. “You see things, right? Visions?”

“Divination does not work that way,” the centaur replied. “It is not something to be summoned on demand. Answers come to you when they are meant to come to you.” He tilted his head to the side. “If you wish to know what exists between your companions, perhaps you should ask Hermione yourself.”

Harry and Ron were silent, knowing that Firenze was right. Unfortunately, this was a case where the obvious answer was a lot more difficult than it seemed. Hermione’s mental state was tenuous. Neither wanted to do anything that might hurt her.

“I think I’m all right now,” Harry said after a long silence. He eased himself into a sitting position. He still felt a bit out of sorts, but the vertigo had passed.

Firenze nodded. “You will be tired. When you sleep tonight, make sure someone is assisting with your Occlumency. The Dark Lord will likely try to see into your mind.”

“Thank you.”

The centaur dipped his head in acknowledgement. He did not often like to take sides in the battles of humans even if he did see more good in them than the rest of his kind. However, from the moment he had seen the wraith Voldemort in the Forbidden Forest, lips wet and silver with the blood of a unicorn, he had known who the real enemy was. Though the young man before him shared a part of the Dark Lord, Harry was good in spite of the evil forced upon him. If anyone could defeat Tom Riddle, it was this young man.

Perhaps his greatest and most damning talent was his ability to see and read auras. Even among the Divination elite, it was a skill that was viewed as highly subjective and unreliable. An aura couldn’t predict the future, and to the humans, that made it useless.

It wasn’t. He could instantly identify a person’s mood by subtle changes in aura. He could tell when people were lying. He knew who was near death, who was creating life, and everything in between. And, most importantly, in some rare cases Firenze could see evil.

It wasn’t always the same. For some, it was a black shroud. For others, it was more of a feeling, a sense of foreboding that he couldn’t ignore. For Tom Riddle, it was neither of those. No...Tom Riddle had no visible aura at all, and that night in the forest, Firenze had felt a tangible manifestation of evil. He itched for hours. The others thought he had merely strayed into some poison oak, but there were no true signs of it, and the salves they put on his skin did nothing.

Firenze watched the two of them go. Then he began to pace; the clip-clop of his hooves gave him the rhythm he needed to think. He didn’t like to lie, but he knew a lot more about their friend Hermione and her curious relation to Malfoy than he let on. The only problem was that he didn’t know what it meant.

He hadn’t interacted with Hermione Granger much. It was well known that she thought Divination was all smoke and mirrors, so she never took his class. However, as anyone walking the castle would, he passed her in the corridors from time to time. Her aura was a strong orange-yellow; it was consistent with what he’d heard about her. She was intelligent, powerful, and analytical.

Malfoy...well, he was a man in flux, so it only made sense that his aura was constantly changing. There was red, grey, orange, turquoise, mustard, and black. Until now, Firenze had always interpreted a person with a cluster of black around his heart as one who was literally black-hearted. In this case, that was wrong. For Malfoy, it meant that he was sick of heart - heartbroken.

But the first time he had seen them together, he received quite a jolt. When they neared one another, their auras went white. He had to hide his consternation. While white could be considered a sign of purity, that manifestation was extremely rare and white more often meant that the person displaying the aura was near death.

As quickly as that shock came, another one followed. They went pink, with bits of cloudy grey swirled within, and they overlapped. Pink was perfection. He’d never even seen it in a human, and here were two of them who, it seemed, could only be perfectly balanced in one another’s presence!

When they separated, their auras went back to what they had been. Each was momentarily brighter, calmer, but as time went by, they both grew darker. Hermione’s shade of yellow went sulfuric, and Malfoy’s black sickness of heart spread to his mind.
He watched them more closely after that. Each time it was the same; when they were close, they went white and pink and seemed to merge into one another. When they were apart they grew dimmer. The Hermione he saw now, after the death of her parents and the capture of Malfoy, was as mixed and mottled as Lucius had first been.

It was very confusing on so many levels. He had puzzled over it more than once. Whatever the true answer was, it was plain that they needed to be together. The attraction of their auras was the strongest he’d ever seen. He hesitated to call it love - that he saw very plainly in others, like Molly and Arthur Weasley or the Lupins - but it was a strong, undeniable connection, the depths of which he couldn’t comprehend.

The story was Hermione’s to tell, and Firenze found himself hoping that Harry and Ronald would ask her one day soon, so that he might be able to put his curiosity to rest.




He was making a sound he had forgotten even existed. Lucius didn’t know where it came from. It welled up in him uncontrollably, spilling past his lips, twisting his face, filling the eerily silent room.

He was laughing.

Everything was wrong. Everyone was flipped about. Here he was, lying on the floor with every neuron in his body screaming with pain, because he was trying to save someone other than himself. He was one of the good guys. He, Lucius Malfoy, a good guy. That alone was absurd enough for hysterics. And there was Harry Potter, the scion of good, making threats, killing, sinking to the level of his adversary. Voldemort had at last created a monster strong enough to defeat him.

The Dark Lord was wrong. Oh, true enough that the meaning of good and evil varied by who was defining it and in what context, but power was not the root of it all. It was survival. The man who fought for survival, not for any cause or ideal, was the one who would win. Life was sweeter than any victory of ideas.

It was so very ironic that the men and women around him, whom he had once counted as comrades, had begun all this because they erroneously feared for their survival. They were in no danger. But now, now that their enemy had at last been pushed to the point where they dropped the shield of morality, they would be destroyed. They had ensured their own doom.

He couldn’t stop laughing. He knew that he had cracked. Split in a jagged line, like a compressed egg, and he was leaking tears of impossible mirth. Lucius had never known that laughter could hurt so badly.

He was oblivious to the Dark Lord and to the crazed rage that was building inside the spoiled tyrant, and so Lucius was completely stunned when that white face blurred into his vision. With a flash of silver, he couldn’t laugh anymore.

Lucius did have such beautiful eyes, particularly when they were wide with shock. And a beautiful neck, its muscular cords bare and open. Such lovely blood, even now, when he was such a disgrace - it was the most enchanting shade of crimson.

He loathed him.

Lucius gasped for air that wouldn’t come. He understood what had happened. The Dark Lord slit his throat. Like everything else, it was painfully ironic; Lucius had finally arrived at that breaking point, where he would say anything, do anything, believe anything to escape the torture, and the Dark Lord decided to eliminate him. The gurgle of blood was the only sound he could make. Inside he was laughing.

Before pain overtook him, he knew that he had to think. His body wouldn’t survive this. Even though he was immortal, he couldn’t make use of a body that had bled to death, or a brain that was deprived of that blood. He’d learned that well enough in Knockturn Alley.

He had already died once. He knew what to expect and he wasn’t afraid. What was important now was the next step. He would have to find a host, a person or animal to contain his soul until his body could be revived by whatever twists of Dark Magic existed - if it could be revived. If it couldn’t, well, he would make do. The thought of never seeing his own face in the mirror again was actually quite welcome.

Lucius closed his eyes and tried to quell his body’s natural reaction to cling to life. He wouldn’t give the Dark Lord the satisfaction of thinking he was afraid or regretful or bested. He would die in peace.

Peace...he reached for those few tranquil seconds, the sea of white between living and dying, and dove in.


He was so pale now, alabaster and venous blue, more an Inferi than a man. Voldemort had killed, oh yes, many times, but he preferred his victims to die a certain way. He liked to see the fear imprinted in their eyes. The embedded regret, knowledge of their mistake, apology, the last bit of hope for salvation that would never come...

Lucius was giving him none of that. The son of a bitch. He thought he could laugh at him, did he, and then slip away into death like a gentle whisper? He thought he could dictate his own end?

Oh, no. No, no, no.

In the middle of the corridor, Harry was hit by a spasm of pain. His scar lit up like someone had drawn a red-hot knife across it. He stumbled and nearly fell.

Ron caught him. His voice sounded far away, but instantly Harry felt the now-familiar pressure of Ron inside his mind. He had learned Legilimency and Occlumency with a speed that had shocked everyone, and he used it to provide an extra layer of shielding for Harry whenever he needed it.

He knew that Ron saw what he saw - the fragmented images of blood and flesh and blue eyes. He couldn’t make any sense of the raging thoughts. He could, however, feel the intense violence and hatred that powered them. His hands shook with it. An old memory flickered through his mind, a snippet of one of the most traumatic nights of his life.

I WANT YOU TO LOOK AT ME WHEN I KILL YOU!

And as quickly as it had begun, it was over. They both sat on the floor, blinking and wincing.

“Merlin,” Ron murmured. “Was that what it was like every time your scar hurt?”

“Not every time,” Harry breathed, “but enough.”

There was a silence, and then Ron said, “Did he just...”

Harry knew what he meant to ask. “Yes.”

Ron seemed to be struggling. After a moment, all he could come out with was, “And our severed heads were fakes.”

“Good fakes.”

“Too good.” Now the redhead actually looked a little sick.

Harry was the first one to drag himself to his feet. He could brush this off, because he had seen and felt it before. On the other hand, Ron wouldn’t sleep. Harry hadn’t for nearly three days after the first time he witnessed the Dark Lord murder someone through their link.

He held out his hand to Ron. As he lifted his best friend to his feet, he offered the only consolation he could. “Malfoy’s better off.”

Ron nodded and took a shaky breath, and they walked on.

It really was amazing what power he had with magic. He could do anything, anything at his whim...kill and restore, create fear and adulation...and eventually, magic would give him the world. It was just these meddlesome children...

The Dark Lord watched as they fed Lucius potion after potion. Blood replenishers - he wasn’t conscious now, but he would wake later to find that he wasn’t dead. A wound was easily healed and the blood loss could be managed. If Lucius was to die, he would die a broken man, with fear and shame and desperation in his eyes.

His lips curled into a smile. He would see to that.

Harry stared into the chaos that was the Room of Hidden Things. His feet had brought him here automatically, as if guided by that slim shred of hope that continued to propel him to search the endless piles of trash and treasure for one bloody object, the proverbial needle in the haystack.

This, too, would end. They could no longer waste time with searching. Though he was more than willing to back up his statements to Voldemort with real action, he wasn’t eager to bloody his hands. If he could create fear through illusion, through tricks and deception, he would go that route. It had worked already with the cloned heads of the Carrows. They were only copies, but no one would ever be able to tell the difference. That was how he intended to keep things; people’s imaginations would do most of the work for him.

They were so close. All they needed was to find the Diadem of Ravenclaw and destroy it. That would render Voldemort mortal. And if Harry was able to pluck his location from Alecto Carrow’s weak mind, this could all be over. It was that simple...and that difficult.

He advanced into the room, eyes scouring pile after pile. If he didn’t find the Diadem in the next few hours, he was going to torch the whole damned place. Fiendfyre would do the trick. He had already consulted Professor McGonagall on the matter. The room’s wards would hold and the fire would not spread to the rest of the castle, since the room didn’t truly exist within its original structure.

This place was like a labyrinth. If he had not left markers, one of Hermione’s ingenious ideas, he could easily have become lost among the tremendous stacks of things. There were some valuable things in here, yes, but to him, nothing was more valuable than ending this war. Things could be replaced. Minds, hearts, and people couldn’t.

Harry rounded a corner and stopped short. There, with a dusty black cloth half-obscuring it, was a Vanishing Cabinet. It had to be the one Draco had used to smuggle the Death Eaters into Hogwarts a year ago.

One year. It had only been a year, and so much death...

He touched the dark wood, leaned his forehead against it. For the first time, he understood Draco. He understood the paleness, the exhaustion, the strain in his eyes, the tears...and to think, Harry had fired spells at him, so absorbed in his own drama that he was blind to the plight of someone so much like him, so similar...

Draco had spent the last year of his life struggling to save everyone that mattered to him. The world had heaped an unbearable weight onto shoulders not ready to carry it. He had bowed under its bulk here, night after night, trying to make the fucking thing work. And even when he did, it didn’t matter. It just dug him in deeper. There was no respite - nothing but death.

Harry felt his chest begin to heave. Enough of this. Enough.

His wand jerked up and the Vanishing Cabinet burst into spectacular flames.

Hermione brushed soot from his hair when he climbed into bed. Harry turned into her shoulder and closed his eyes to the world. He dropped into sleep quickly, as exhausted by his emotions as he was from holding them in. On the other side of Hermione, Ron was not so lucky.

Long after Harry and Hermione dozed off, Ron lay awake staring up at the canopy. He couldn’t stop himself from replaying what he had seen in Harry’s mind.

It was a miracle his best friend had not gone barmy. Wouldn’t most, with a madman intruding upon their thoughts? He rose up to look at Harry. His face was pressed firmly into Hermione’s shoulder, as if she could hide him from the universe.
Tentatively, Ron reached out to touch his mind. It offered no resistance in sleep, especially not after the day’s extensive work. This was his job, to bolster Harry’s defenses when he was vulnerable, and Firenze had warned that tonight would be one of those times. Perhaps it was good that he couldn’t sleep.

Harry was dreaming about Malfoy. Not the elder one, but Draco. Though Ron had made an unwieldy peace with Lucius, he still felt a shot of intense dislike for his son. In Harry’s dream, though, Malfoy was hunched over a sink in the loo crying his goddamned eyes out. Harry’s uneven breathing and the horrible sense of guilt that filled his mind made Ron realize that Harry was crying, too.

And then there were flashes of light, and blood, so much blood, and Ron could no longer distinguish whether it was Draco or Lucius or Harry himself lying in a pool of it.

He didn’t know how long it took or what it felt like to leave his body. Severus had come to his rescue in Knockturn Alley before he had to desert his corpse. This would be new, but since he could process a coherent thought, Lucius knew it would happen soon.

Awareness returned slowly, but as soon as it had, sensation came hard and fast. Nausea. Weakness. Pain. So much pain, still...

He couldn’t move to reposition himself. Everything was so heavy. He didn’t know if he was inside his body or not, if it was happening or if it was done, if he had any conscious control over himself or if he was just adrift. How did one move without a body? Was he supposed to use his thoughts? How was he having thoughts without a brain?
The only thing that made any kind of sense was to think of himself as a ghost. Ghosts didn’t need brains because they were spirits. It was the spirit that powered the brain and not the other way around. He was a spirit...a soul, and spirits moved the same way they had before losing their body.

Lucius concentrated everything he had into one command. Eyes open...need to see...

And it felt like lifting two great stone slabs, but suddenly there was light and a great blur, and his ears were ringing with sounds he couldn’t comprehend. Hands touching...cold...did he still have skin? How could a spirit feel temperature? Why did he...

A violent shiver wracked him and he promptly turned over to vomit. Spirit or not, there was no mistaking that sensation.

“--can’t keep it down, he’s going to die.”

“If he dies, you die.”

“He already died!” the first voice snapped back, clearly irritated.

“Just do your damn job, Zabini.”

“I wasn’t aware that bringing the dead back to life was in my job description.” There was the sound of rummaging, many bottles clinking, and Zabini growled, “Just get the hell out of my way!”

The first man gave him what he desired; Lucius could hear his footsteps fading in the opposite direction. He could hear something else, also - the feeble beat of his own heart. He wasn’t dead.

Tears sprung to his eyes. It was pain, it was grief, it was being plain worn out. He had nothing left. Nothing except Pansy, and what good was he doing her? The Dark Lord was biding his time. He had no intention of releasing her or letting her live.

“I’m sorry, Lucius. I have to do this. You heard him. If you die, I die.”

He turned his head to face a man he had known for a long time, a man who had graced his table at the Manor, been at his wedding, his family’s holiday parties, a man whose son had stayed in his home and vice versa. He turned to Alessandro Zabini without any understanding of how shocking his appearance was, nor any idea why he felt compelled to acknowledge the man.

The war had not left him unscathed. Alessandro’s wrinkles were deepening, his cheeks thin and hollow, and the once-inky beard that graced his face now bore a sprinkle of gray. His dark eyes were wide. There was consternation there.

“Merlin. Lucius, I’m sorry.” He picked up a potion vial and held it out, a slight tremor betraying his emotions. “You have to take this. Take it and you’ll feel better. It won’t hurt anymore.”

He could tell that the other man didn’t believe his own words. Alessandro knew as well as he did that as long as Lucius was alive, he would hurt. No potion would help. Death was the only escape and it had just been snatched from him.

Lucius turned away, to that same dimpled wall of stone that had been his scenery for the last few weeks. Soon he would be as grey as the wall. In time, he would be dust given flesh. Even his blood would become like smoke...each fresh billow would be more polluted, yet so ready to flow.

Zabini’s hands were cold as they took hold of his jaw and forced the potion down. Lucius was too weak to fight. He recognized the taste of a blood replenishing potion and realized that Alessandro had been given the unfortunate task of filling Severus Snape’s shoes. Yes, Alessandro could brew, but he was not the best by any means, and the Dark Lord’s residual hatred of his last potions master doubtless carried over onto him. It was a position no one envied, and one that was likely to end in death.

Alessandro released him. He lay there, trying to merge into the dirt floor. A man could die just from giving up, couldn’t he? If only he could give up. If only there wasn’t someone else for him to consider...

Zabini was leaning against the wall, watching him with a haunted look on his face.

“I’m sorry about everything, Lucius. I can’t imagine...if it was my Blaise, my Allegra...”

Lucius closed his eyes and clenched his jaw. He wanted Alessandro to shut up, to leave him the fuck alone, but he had not yet found the energy or the means for speech. The other man leaned forward, a guilty hope on his face.

“Are they all right? My wife, my daughter, my son...”

His son? What right did he have to ask? He had left them to save themselves while he cowered at the Dark Lord’s side!

“Your son? Your son!?” His voice was rough, like he had a throat full of gravel, and as he pushed to his hands and knees he felt the grains of dirt and rock digging into him. Zabini was too stunned to move. If Lucius could have seen himself, he would understand why; he was white, crusted with dried blood, and his skin stretched tautly over an undernourished body that hardly looked capable of breathing, let alone movement.

But Lucius knew none of that. All he knew was the rage that had welled up inside him. It was the old pain of Draco and Narcissa, that wild anguish that made him a tornado of action and emotion. For a long time it had been dormant, but Zabini’s thoughtless questions brought it boiling back to the surface with a fury that precluded the weakened state of Lucius’s body. He latched on to Alessandro’s neck with hands that felt like they had lost their ability to do anything but crush.

There was so much he wanted to say, to scream, but his throat was too raw and every ounce of energy in his body had gone to his hands and arms. To hold, to squeeze, to hate...

And Alessandro was fighting, but not as hard as he could have. He didn’t even reach for his wand. He just clutched at Lucius’s hands, trying to disengage him, his eyes growing ever wider and more desperate as he realized that a weak body meant nothing when a man’s will was strong. As his consciousness began to waver, he groped for his wand.

They could not blame him if he killed Lucius in self-defense. It would give the other wizard what he so obviously wanted, but without breath, how could he speak the words? He put the wand against his old friend’s throat, pleading with his eyes, hoping he would understand.

Death. I give you death...

And there was a slip in those ice blue eyes, one flicker of hesitation, and his hands loosened just enough to let air pass--

At that moment, a bolt of red light hit Lucius in the shoulder. The force of it knocked him sideways into the wall. His nails scraped along Alessandro’s neck, leaving bloody red welts, but the spell broke his hold. Alessandro gasped for air, wand still clutched tightly in his hand. Lucius was unconscious and draped across his lower body.

Emerson stepped into view. Lucius and Pansy didn’t know the name of their tormentor, but Alessandro did, and he hated the man. In fact, the only one who liked him was the Dark Lord. That was never a good sign.

“Aren’t you lucky I came along?” the young Death Eater said, his voice full of an eerie awareness. “Why, you might have been forced to kill him to save yourself if I hadn’t.” He reached down to tug Lucius away, dragging him through the dirt to the other side of the cell. When he was finished, he looked down at the blond with such malice that Alessandro felt a visceral shot of fear. What more could they do to Lucius? What more?

“He’s going to need more of the blood replenisher when he wakes up,” Zabini said, keeping his voice even.

“No, no.” Emerson’s thin mouth twisted into a sneering smirk. “The Dark Lord wants him alive. He never said he wants him healthy. As far as I’m concerned, if he has the wherewithal to attack you, he’s already had too much.”

“Of course,” he agreed. Alessandro pulled himself to his feet and gathered his supplies. As he was heading for the door, Emerson took hold of his arm.

“I would take care of those bruises if I were you.” His eyes scoured the fresh finger marks with a strange eagerness. “You don’t want people asking questions.”

He held the other Death Eater’s glance for a long minute. Then he pulled his arm from his grip and brushed past. As he walked, he had the sinking feeling that Emerson didn’t need to ask any questions at all.