Silhouette

She sat there, propped up against the wall, with blood oozing from her nose and a cut above her eye. Unmoving, she seemed to be waiting for something, for that moment of discovery. It was then he almost mourned her.
Silently he checked over the body, extricating her long, dark wand from a robe pocket. She hadn’t even had time to draw it. Behind him, shifting feet told him Ron was there. “Fallsworth,” Draco murmured, handing him the wand. It was simple enough, just an old wand.
“I know who it is,” said Ron, and Draco knew he was making a face behind him. Fallsworth had been an auror, a particularly good one at that, and a hopeful for the Order. No one had known her very well; after she had disappeared, it took a few days for anyone to report her missing. She did not look like the Death Eaters had treated her gently.
Draco’s eyes checked over the lifeless woman one last time, noting the blood-matted hair from the blast, then he turned away in disgust. “Come on, we need to tell someone. She’s starting to smell.” He stood and slung an arm over Ron’s shoulder, leading him away from the bloody scene. He and Ron were not friends exactly, but there had been a truce. Draco knew that Ron respected what he had done for the Order, despite the consequences of failing Voldemort. For his part, Draco respected that Ron had Hermione. There had to be something positive about the Weasel if Hermione had deigned him worthy of her love. It was that simple. So the pair walked on in the failing moonlight, cut off by thick, dusty gray clouds.
“I think Voldemort really is losing his bloody mind now. You’d think-”
Draco pulled a few leaves off of a tender branch that hung low over the sidewalk. “Yeah, I know. He’s always been bloody mad, but now… it’s like he’s killing off everyone around us, working his way in. Sparing no one, just in case. Eventually, when we’re all dead, he’ll find Harry. Really, I don‘t think it will take murdering the whole Order, just the people directly in his path.”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” muttered Ron, squinting into the streetlamp-less dark of the alleys.
“But you know it will.” Draco ripped the leaves the shreds and cast them into the grass to his right. It was a nervous habit of his, to kill things when answers were hard to come by. He thought perhaps he got the idea from his father.
“I know.” A silence fell between them, unbroken by the cool night air, the summer days approaching autumn. Uninterrupted, Draco’s thoughts drummed over the night's events. During patrol, Ron and Draco had discovered Fallsworth at the dead end of a back alleyway, and immediately knew Voldemort had attacked yet another off-work ministry employee seemingly out of the blue. Why he was doing this, they did not know, but after the fifth death, they stopped attributing the murders to any decent rationality. Voldemort was simply killing off anyone with loose connections to the Order and, though he could only guess, Draco felt sure Voldemort was preparing some trap for Harry and the Order.
“She must have hit the wall ten feet up,” Ron mused.
Draco struggled to regain the stem of the conversation. Fallsworth. “Right. Yeah, there was a bit of blood on the wall pretty high up.”
“Who do you think did it? Not Voldemort, Fallsworth isn’t important enough-”
“Let’s not underestimate Fallsworth. I think you’re right, though. It wasn’t Voldemort. Whoever did it had fun. Fallsworth was like a mouse caught in a cat’s claws. If I had to guess, I’d say it was LeStrange.”
“Bellatrix or-”
Draco cut him off. “Definitely my aunt. She’s hot-blooded. It would suit her to kill like that, nice and messy. I recognize her work in several of the other murders. I think Voldemort favors her.”
Ron rubbed his fingers together and produced a smooth gray stone in the palm of his hand. He threw it into a deserted alley, listening to the echoes. He conjured another, and another, throwing them absentmindedly as Draco spoke.
“That puts her in more danger, though. If she bollixes up one attempt, it’s her body we’ll find next, mark my words. I wonder what she’s done to be allowed these murders. It’s either really good or really bad. But it doesn’t matter. Once she’s mucked up one job, she’s done for.”
“Bloody bitch, she’d deserve it.” Ron punctuated this with a particularly hard throw. The rock skipped through the street, catching on the lips of cobblestones, and rammed into a shop door. The sound boomed in the air like thunder, and the silence after it was deep.
“Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn’t,“ said Draco after a moment, “It was Azkaban that drove her really batty like that, and the ‘good guys’ fixed her up there to begin with.”
“No, she was always crazy.” Ron flung his rock, and it skidded to a halt under a cart. Draco stopped and turned to face Ron, who also cut short his stride and locked eyes with Draco.
“How the bloody hell would you know something like that, Ron? She’s my aunt. I knew her before Azkaban. She wasn’t a good person, no, of course not, but she wasn’t a belligerent narcissistic psychopath. She just wasn’t very thoughtful, is all.”
Ron smiled. “Not thoughtful? Bloody hell, you really did grow up Malfoy, didn’t you, if you think the worst of LeStrange is her insensitivity.”
“Well, yeah…” Then Draco smiled, too. He remembered her as he last saw her, and he supposed that from Ron’s point of view, Aunt Bellatrix would be a bit more than inconsiderate. Compared to dear daddy, however, Aunt Bellatrix is a pussycat. Draco thought of Fallsworth, blood curling through her wild hair, and her eyes wide and cloudy. He would have to remember. He would have to remember her just as dead as alive. He realized then that his family would kill him, that his aunt would murder him, if they knew where he was. Just as he recalled so clearly Fallsworth across the dining room table from him, Molly’s good cooking in front of them, so someone would remember him after he died. Or would they?
“Come on, let’s get back,” Ron said. He had a way of interrupting Draco’s thoughts, but the blond didn’t care. It was better not to tarry too long in his mind anyway.
They rounded a corner and slid quietly into the Leaky Cauldron. Lupin and Tonks sat in a dim alcove. It was a small table- only two chairs- but Lupin saw them approaching and gestured to two more chairs against the wall.
“Join us. We were just talking about-”
“Nothing,” Tonks interjected, shooting Lupin a dirty look. His mouth opened and closed, but he was silent. Draco hooked the two chairs by their backs and hoisted them over to the table. Ron sat in the chair nearest Tonks, so Draco slipped into the one by Lupin. It teetered on its uneven legs, and Draco sighed wearily.
Tom the barkeep hobbled over to them. “Two butterbeers?”
Draco shook his head. “Firewhiskey for me, Tom.”
“Make that two,” Ron added.
Lupin leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. The two younger men had not seen the face he wore in several months, that fatherly smirk and cocked eyebrow, as if he knew something they didn‘t. “They sure grow up fast, don’t they Tonks?”
Taking the final gulp of her butterbeer, Tonks looked him over wryly. “Excuse me,” she said in mock-offense, “but I still consider myself one of those ‘they,’ if you please. I’m no more than a few years older than Ron and Draco.”
“I keep forgetting.” Lupin’s voice was quiet, raspy, though not laced with that poisonous despondency that it had been before Grayback had died. He seemed to be in constant vigil, keeping himself from happiness, but more in the way a man can be too tired for mirth than a man overcome with worry and despair. Draco could see why Tonks loved him. And she did love him, everyone in the Order knew it. What he couldn’t see was why Lupin was still refusing to acknowledge it. She was very beautiful today, with her straight, flowing ice-blonde hair. Her features reminded him of his mother… but he wouldn’t think of her now, he would save those thoughts for later, when he was alone.
“So,” half-whispered Lupin, “did you find anything interesting on your watch?” Lupin and Tonks were next to patrol, and reports were regular between those going off duty and their successors.
“He’s killed another one,” Draco said as Tom handed him their drinks. Draco passed Ron his whiskey as Tonks leaned into the conversation.
“Who was it this time?”
“Fallsworth,” said Ron, and downed the shot unceremoniously. “Where’s Harry?”
“We don’t really know actually,” sighed Lupin.
“The point is that he’s not here, and Voldemort obviously is,” Ron muttered, catching Tom’s attention and pointing at his empty drink.
“You know he’s looking for Horcruxes. He can’t always be around to babysit you, Ronald.”
“No one calls me Ronald but my mum and Hermione, Tonks, now shove off.” Ron stood, pushed his chair in to the table a little harder than was strictly necessary, and strode over to the bar where he took the firewhiskey from Tom. He downed it, paid and left the Leaky Cauldron in a huff.
“Talk to you later,” Draco said as he stuck his hand into his pocket and tossed some knuts on the table. He followed Ron out into the windy darkness, but his red-haired friend had already disappeared.
Draco apparated back to Grimmald Place.

****

“How can I just give my heart over to two things at once? I don’t know how people do it.” Hermione plowed the coffee mug back and forth in a little line between her hands. The coffee was low enough now that it didn’t spill over the sides, but it sloshed around inside like crashing black waves. “Ron can’t stop talking about ‘loving’ this and that. ‘I love quidditch, I love adventure, excitement, what have you. How can he compartmentalize his heart like that?”
“It’s just a phrase, ’Mione,” soothed Ginny.
“But why use it? Can you love more than one thing- or even one person, for that matter- at a time?”
“I think so, but only if it’s a different kind of love for each thing.”
“Don’t go Greek on me, Ginny.” The red-head’s face went blank. “Never mind-” Ron appeared at that moment with a little pop that seemed to both fill the room with sound and empty it. “Ronald! Back so soon?” Ron huffed down the hall without so much as a word of greeting.
Ginny caught Hermione’s eye and shrugged. “Who knows?”
A instant later, Draco apparated on almost the exact spot as Ron. “Where did he go?”
Ginny nodded down the hall, where the sound of Ron’s banging feet against the stairs could be heard. “He’s a drama queen, that one,” but she smiled, and the whole room seemed to relax a little. Draco must have felt her eyes on him, because he turned to Hermione and gave her his best may-I-help-you face.
“Sorry,” she mumbled. “Think I’ll turn in, too. ’Night, Gin.” With that, she followed Ron’s echoing footsteps up the stairs, Draco close behind her.
On the stairs she could sense his presence looming over her, feel his breath tickling the fly-aways at the nape of her neck. “He’s not himself, ‘Mione. Something’s wrong.”
“Of course something’s wrong,” she whispered, “He’s bloody mad with worry over Harry, isn’t he?”
“Will you talk to him?” There was an urgency in the closeness of their bodies, a secrecy in the hurried hushing of his voice.
Hermione closed her eyes. “Yes. But I make no promises.” Cold, drafty air replaced his body at her back, and she knew he had moved away, waited for a step for her to unknowingly create a lag between them. At the landing, his room was first on the right, and she heard the door open and shut without turning back to look. Second to last on the left, Hermione twisted the handle. The door moaned unhappily as it opened.
“He sent you, didn’t he?”
“Oh, Ronald, the whole world doesn’t revolve around you. It’s eleven and I have a watch in the morning. I came up here to sleep.” Ron nodded once, then left the room. Hermione put on her night-clothes in silence, extinguishing the lamp with a feeble “Nox.”
Much later, Ron returned to their room. He watched Hermione sleep, watched her silhouetted figure take deep, even breaths. “Tomorrow we will see what each of us is made of,” whispered Ron through the darkness, “For your sake, Hermione, I hope you’re stronger than me.”