Chapter Text
I woke like someone had pulled my head out of water, gasping and shaking and flinging a hand out in a blind panic.
“Shh, I’ve got you, shhh now,” Severus murmured into my hair and I clung to him, sucking air into my lungs as if I had just surfaced from the void. I wasn’t cold and wet anymore, though I was shaking like I was freezing, and it felt as though my spine was trying to shiver its way out of my skin. Severus' neck against my open mouth smelled of salt, of the sea, of burnt hair.
“Oh god,” I gagged, and shoved it down. “I- are you ok, is Sirius ok? Oh fucking god-”
Severus’ hand clenched hard in my hair, and I gulped to a stop, feeling like that one point of contact was keeping me from flying off the bed in a thousand pieces. “Breathe. I’m right here. Culus will be here in a moment. Everyone is ok.”
He had paused on ‘everyone’, hadn’t he? I fought his hold on my hair. I was so tired. “You’re lying, what did I do, oh god-”
“Stop it, I wasn’t lying, you’ve hurt yourself a fair amount, but between Zil and your own magic you’re mostly set to rights.”
Rubbing my hand across my face brought me the smell of burnt hair again, and I shut my eyes against the memory of screaming faces backlit by the blinding flash. “I burned you,” I whispered, my throat tight against the truth of it.
“Only a little bit,” Sirius said jovially from the doorway, and threw himself into the bed next to me, bouncing me enough to rattle my teeth against Severus’ ribs. “I’ve burnt myself worse trying to make breakfast.”
Brae’s snore-whistle punctuated the statement, from where he and Vhat were curled in an untidy heap of feathers and limbs in his blanket nest. Safe and sound.
A gasping laugh broke from me as I groped for Sirius’ weird leather hand, pulling him toward me and feeling for myself that his face was whole and unburnt. The laugh shattered into tiny hiccuping sobs, the stale, sour fear sloshing up out of my bones and pouring down my face. Sirius rubbed my back, Severus murmuring soft words that sounded like nonsense as I cried between them, shaking, for a long time.
When the storm had passed we didn’t move for a while. I thought maybe they had fallen asleep. I thought maybe I had too, wandering in a haze of the sensations of magic around me; burnt paper and fire whiskey, orange and fur, distant moonlight and… goats? But there was no feeling of being startled awake when something pulled me to look at the door a moment before a soft knock rolled into the room.
Severus glanced at me and I shrugged; I had been hollowed out by the panic and the tears and everything else; I had no room for embarrassment at being red eyed and likely snotty and squashed between my godfather and my… whatever Severus was to me.
The door opened at Severus’ word, and Remus stuck his head in, looking rumpled and tired. “Sorry to interrupt, but everybody’s awake, including our … new guests? Ron and Hermione are about 10 minutes from actually attempting to kill him, rather than just glaring at him. I’d like some help out here, if you could.”
Remus suddenly looked back toward the front room, and winced. “Probably more like five minutes, I think. Please hurry.”
Severus’ head thunked into the wall.
Sirius sat up and clasped his hands onto his thighs, over-cheerful. “Okay, here’s the thing, Harry. We all just had a reminder that right now, your emotions are a bit… volatile, yeah?”
I nodded, wary.
“Well, see our little scouting party brought back more than just intel, and you are going to be 100% angry when you see them, and that’s… just not a great idea right now, right?”
Dread pooled in my spine. Severus held me a little tighter, his fingers soothing.
“So Sev’s gonna hold onto the fuse for you, alright? Just… until we can explain, ok?”
Alarm rose at his words but I could feel it when Sev smothered it back down. He didn’t hold it long, just a brief press, like breaking the foam on a potion that was boiling over.
I gulped hard, a mix of shame and annoyance and anger bubbling up and being dissipated again. It left me unsettled, like losing a sneeze halfway into it, primed and suddenly empty. I shook my head, glaring at Sirius, and then twisting to glare at Severus too, but it didn’t have much heat in it.
“Logically I hear what you’re saying. Emotionally, even muzzled like a dog, I feel like punching both of you in the face,” I said flatly. “Let go of me. Let’s go meet whomever you’ve got stashed out there so I can get good and mad and you can stop me from blowing a hole in the cabin, since that’s apparently what I do. Let go.” I kicked at his shin impatiently.
Severus opened his arms and I peeled away from him, half wanting to crawl back under his arm and just let Ron try to kill our mystery guest as if it were -
With sudden clarity, I knew who was out there. Dread coiled, dark and thick around my chest before it was smothered again. “Oh no.”
“Told you he’d figure it out, point to me,” Sirius said to Severus behind me when I stiffened, my eyes going wide. I tried not to think about it, to force myself to think of somebody else, but who else could it be?
I left Severus and Sirius behind as I scrambled forward, pulling the door open and darting down the hallway.
It was a punch in the gut to see Draco FUCKING Malfoy sitting on the ugly floral loveseat, arms folded across his chest, clearly attempting to reciprocally eye-murder Ron and Hermione right back just as hard as he could.
“Malfoy,” I spat, and he looked at me, haughty disdain pinching his face even sharper than I remembered it.
“Potter,” he said, his voice toneless, and somehow more insulting for it. I grit my teeth as Severus snuffed the well of anger out before I could use it for anything entirely reasonable, like setting Malfoy's hair on fire.
Ron spun around, his eyes lit with rage, and I could see his lips moving as he snarled something at me and gestured toward the windows but I couldn’t hear it. My anger was blunted, but Ron’s was hot and sharp, echoing around him and building on itself, Hermione a blazing ball of indignation behind him, Malfoy himself a frustratingly blank null spot on the couch farther on. It would be so easy to grab that energy and smash it sideways into Malfoy’s stupid face, and I wouldn’t even have to take it in, Severus wouldn’t be able to pull it away if it wasn’t inside me to begin with.
Oh I wanted to.
I wrenched myself around, physically turning from the temptation and taking a few steps away. The numbed waves of anger churned in my gut, powerless to ignite with Sev smothering the spark as fast as I made it.
“Alright,” I said, in a perfectly reasonable voice into the strained silence as Ron stopped yelling to breathe. “I’m sure you have some kind of explanation.”
“Even if he doesn’t, you’re gonna be a good little Corvatica and leave him alone, right?” A new voice said roughly, and I frowned, looking around. That sounded like… Ron’s brother Charlie?
“Ach, no talking,” Zil snapped.
I spotted him now, laid out on one of the benches, tall and broad enough that I could barely see the wood holding him up, his legs bent at the knee with his feet firmly planted on the ground to keep him from falling off the end. Zil was standing over him with a hand sunk wrist deep into his belly, right through the intact skin, power thrumming around them in waves. Charlie was wearing a flight suit, just like I had been wearing only a few hours ago, but the front of it was shredded, some kind of black, oily smoke rising from the edges. Zil’s concentration was on Charlie, and whatever it was that made him sometimes invisible flickered over them both, leaving the bench empty, and then full, and empty again, like a badly made movie.
“What the hell?” I glanced at Severus, and he stared back at me, his eyes hooded. Remus patted my shoulder as he passed me, chewing on what looked like most of a loaf of bread. The edges of his moonlight felt… singed, and I realized why as he held the bread in his teeth and pulled out his little silver knife, his forearm already dotted with healing welts.
Zil made an impatient noise, flipping a free hand at Remus to hurry up, and Remus hummed as he pressed the flat of the silver blade against his skin, the wound welling with moonlight that Zil caught and directed to whatever he was doing… inside Charlie. I winced as Charlie’s booted feet jerked off the ground and clattered against the bench, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Malfoy wince, too.
Ron had gotten his breath back and was preparing the next wave of angry words, but stopped when I held out a hand, the tips of my fingers twitching into a please. Ron looked like he was chewing hot glass but kept his mouth shut, throwing himself down into Remus’ battered armchair hard enough that it wobbled and grew a stumpy extra leg to keep from tipping over. Hermione had her pen out, I just realized, her fingers curled tight around the barrel of the biro. She settled next to Ron on the arm of the chair, her eyes never leaving Malfoy.
Charlie grunted as Zil moved, yanking more on Remus’ sputtering moonlight, and I huffed in annoyance, marching over to the wall Remus was posted against and grabbing his arm to stop him from burning himself again.
“Zil needs energy; stop cutting off my anger for like, 30 seconds. I’m pretty sure I could power all of London,” I said to Severus mildly, and Zil looked up, his face twitching into a smile.
“At least some of you are thinking,” he said, and gratefully took the pulse of anger and suspicion that suddenly filled me as Severus let go. It roared up, my spine going hot and then cold as it drained away as fast as I made it. Remus slid an arm around my shoulder as I sagged. I wanted to bite him for just a moment before that too was siphoned off.
After a few seconds, Ron’s hands joined mine, his wire wool electric anger scratching as it passed, like swallowing a ball of dried grass. Zil made a pleased noise, and I heard Charlie sigh in what sounded like relief.
“That’s it, Feuerrot, that’s got it.” I opened my eyes to see Zil pull his hand away from Charlie’s stomach with a flourish, his fingers gripped tight around what looked like some kind of vicious eel, but felt as slimy and repellent as the memory of Voldemort’s magic.
I recoiled, my bones trying to get behind me, and almost lost contact with Remus’ arm, but he huffed a chuckle and laid his hand on top of mine, keeping the connection strong. My disgust was acrid ribbons in the stream of energy, and Zil glanced up at the knot of us as it reached him, wrinkling his nose as he deftly wove a net around the squirming evil magic thing with the combined strands of our energy. It kept trying to ooze out of his hand, growing baleful eyes and snapping jaws as he bound it tight, hissing at Zil with angry not-words in jets of oily anger that ate like acid at the wood of the cabin as it dripped around Zil’s fingers. A few seconds more and the last of the holes were sealed up with layers of our magic, bright and clean and wholesome, compared to the thing inside it.
It looked like an egg being held up to a candle, the writhing thing caught inside angrily absorbing as much light as it could. The polar opposite of a chocolate egg with a treat inside; a melon sized ball of patchwork magic filled with evil.
“Alright, that’s about enough I think,” Zil said, eyeing the egg. Remus tapered off the energy he was pushing to Zil and the rest of us did, too, though Hermione reached along the link and healed the last of Remus’ self inflicted welts with an exasperated backwash of power. How magic could be chiding I didn’t know but there it was. Remus pulsed a wisp of sheepish gratitude as he pulled his hands away, and I rubbed my hands across my arms, feeling colder without the threads of their magic woven around me.
I started to ask what he was going to do with it NOW when Zil licked his lips and threw a wink my way before he swiped his jaw from side to side a few times and then opened his mouth unnaturally wide, eating the cursed egg whole. He shut his eyes for a moment, and something rushed away from him, as if the skin of the world was a balloon that he had just blown a little more air into. The cabin swelled for just a moment, the shelves bulging, the candles thickening, even the glass in the windows rippling with distortions, before it seemed to exhale and go back to the way it had been.
Hermonie glanced at me, her brow furrowed, and I shrugged, entirely unsure what had just happened.
Charlie got his breath back in a few more seconds and then sighed and pushed himself upright with a groan. Ron moved to help him, but out of the corner of my eye I saw Malfoy twitch again, as if he had stopped himself from getting up. Charlie looked worse than I thought; there was blood crusted around his mouth, darkening the red of his mustache to black and thickening his beard into clotted mats. His eyes were ringed with deep exhausted shadows. He let Ron hold up his arm, but they both knew that had Charlie tipped over, there was no way Ron was going to be able to hold him up.
I frowned, and Sirius swept in with a brush of warm orange and black fur, taking more of Charlie’s weight, and between the three of them they got Charlie propped up on the battered couch, though I noticed that he sat on the side closest to Malfoy, not on the far side as I expected. Ron was going back and forth between glaring at Malfoy and looking at his brother like he wasn’t sure he was real. A few spells from Sirius, fussing like a mother hen over him, and enough of the dirt and soot had been cleaned away, and the ruin of his flight suit jacket stripped off, that I could really see him.
The thick line of Severus’ collar on Charlie’s neck stained his skin and dipped to the same point on his throat, bisecting the freckled, tanned skin, the edges lost in red hair. Where Zil’s hand had been pressed, the hair was singed brown and black, and he brushed at it irritably, sighing when the burnt hair came off and left him with a bald spot a few inches lower than his heart.
He let Sirius fuss without comment, but gratefully pulled on the quickly-expanded sweater Remus handed him, yanking it down over his chest, a tinge of embarrassment coloring his magic.
And I could feel him, unlike Malfoy, who was a numb spot in my perception of the room, Charlie was a solid presence. It had been him I had felt when I woke up, I realized, his magic something organic, but... metallic with a distinct scent of goat.
A snort escaped me before I could stifle it, and he looked over at me. “Sorry about the hard words earlier, eh” he said, his voice raspy, as if he had been screaming. “Couldn’t have you attacking my charge while I was getting my, uh, situation resolved.”
Malfoy made a face.
“Your charge? So like, he’s your prisoner?” Ron said, sitting forward eagerly, relief pouring out of him in sloppy tendrils at being able to speak again.
I rubbed my hands over my face, feeling a little woozy. Zil appeared at my shoulder, and nudged me toward the other couch, letting me settle against the armrest before draping himself over the rest of it, a bottle already at his lips. I could smell sweet cherries and sharp alcohol. Severus stood by the fireplace, arms folded across his chest, watching the room as if he expected us to break out brawling any second.
Well, I guess he had a point.
Charlie glanced at Sirius, and I watched their faces twitch as they had a silent conversation. Ron huffed as nobody answered his question, his whorls of relief curdling around him. Zil finished the first bottle he was drinking, and Malfoy looked faintly disgusted when he threw the bottle over his shoulder to crash against some bookcase.
Or at least I think that’s what the look was. I had gotten used to Zil’s casual disregard of decorum, and hadn’t realized how much I had grown accustomed to being able to directly sense what someone was feeling, without relying on just their facial expression. I poked at the numb spot that was Malfoy’s presence on the loveseat, and he lifted an eyebrow, haughty as ever.
God, Jericho must want to punch him right in the-
“Hold on, where’s Jericho?” I said. I scanned the cabin, feeling the boys still curled up asleep in my room, but nobody else. Malfoy and Charlie both winced this time, and that was more than a little alarming. “What the fuck happened?”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you, mate, they left him and brought us Malfoy instead,” Ron said the name like a slur,
“Leave off, Jericho ordered us both to leave him; you can take it up with him when he gets back if you like,” Charlie said, his tone mild compared to the roiling anger Ron was holding back with some effort. I shot a glance at Severus; maybe he was getting some help, I couldn’t tell.
“You take orders from Jericho?” Ron sputtered, pointing a finger accusingly at Malfoy. “I don’t believe it, you’ve not got a collar and even if you did I wouldn’t trust you, piece of Deat-”
Charlie’s metallic, goaty magic went sharp and hot. He didn’t move, but my sense of him shifted, as if he put himself between his brother and Malfoy. A faint glimmer twisted the air around them, the sense of something big and dangerous suddenly looming.
Sirius snuffed the fiery words before they ignited the tension, fitting his gloved hand over Ron’s mouth just long enough to interrupt the fuse. Ron turned to glare at him, and he shrugged. “Give us a bit of time to explain, now that your brother isn’t mostly dead, hm?”
Slouching back into the couch, Ron gave in, his eyes shifting back and forth between his brother and Malfoy, concern and hatred flicking over his face like the sides of a spinning coin. Next to him, Hermione’s face was creased with thought.
The hot metal goat smell faded as Charlie stood down magically.
“So,” she said into the tense silence, when nobody else actually volunteered to explain anything, “Ron’s a Corvatica, and Charlie, but Fred and George aren’t, but are still yours. Do you have any other Weasleys in reserve, ready to pop out of the woodwork? Perhaps stored in the cupboards? You’re only 3 away from the whole set.”
That got a bit of a laugh out of Severus, and he shook his head. “Not even I am that foolish, to put the whole lot of them together and expect them to behave. Four is quite enough, thank you. The others are, last I had eyes on them, with the resistance.”
Some of the tension bled out of Ron’s body, and Charlie nudged Ron’s foot with his boot. “They’re alright. Mum and Dad too. Dumbledore has them in some safehouse, or as safe as anything can be right now, I guess, tho last I heard both Bill and Ginny were still trying to get back to ‘the front lines’.”
Dumbledore had told Ron that much, that his parents were safe, but had refused to confirm anything about his siblings. I thought it had been because they were dead, and Dumbledore just didn’t want to tell Ron yet, but he could have set his fears at ease about the two of them, at least.
“Not Perce?” Ron said, and Charlie paused for just long enough that Ron’s lips pressed into a thin line.
“Percy is recovering,” Severus broke in, and we all turned to look at him. And Charlie nodded, looking grateful the attention was off him. “Mine is not the only plot in play, of course, and Albus has his own ideas of what will fix things.”
Zil rolled his eyes, and I nudged him. “You don’t think much of Dumbledore, do you?”
“Albus is, to his vast annoyance, a minor player at this point,” Severus said, “so whatever Zil thinks of him is unimportant.”
“Professor Dumbledore is a minor player?” Hermione said, her voice thick with skepticism.
“Sadly, yes, Miss Granger. Albus, for all his skills, is hamstrung by the consequences of past actions. It would take very little for the axe over his head to fall, and he well knows it.”
Zil hummed in agreement. “He is very afraid of me, this is true.”
Hermione and I both looked up at that.
“Afraid of you?” she blurted, “I thought…” she frowned. “I had assumed Dumbledore was on team ‘Sensus is bad.’”
“Oh, he is,” Severus drawled. “Won’t catch him dirtying his name with such dark and forbidden magic… a second time.”
“What?!”
“Ha! I called that, Hermione, you know I did,” Ron said, and Severus’ eyebrow quirked.
Hermione sighed, and pulled her notebook out, flipping back a few pages. “No, he did call that. He said that he was sure Dumbledore had been detected dabbling in Sensus in the first war, but that he was exonerated by his deeds.”
“Actually what I said was that he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and that’s why he never brought it up even when everything went to hell.” Ron broke in, “And then I said that he,” thumbing at Zil, “only makes any sense at all if he’s some kind of Sensus policeman. Police snake?”
Charlie snorted a laugh at that
“Coppa’lcoatl?” Sirius suggested, nodding at Ron with a grin. “I said the same thing, when the Bastard refused to cough up more information.”
Zil looked sourly at Severus, who held up his hands, mock innocence writ large over his features. “The geas is intact - you’d have felt it if I had crossed into the illicit - but someone once taught me that negation is not precisely the same as confirmation. I cannot help what ideas pop into their heads.” He gestured vaguely at us.
“I don’t mean to speak out of turn - ,” Malfoy said quietly, and the amusement on Ron’s face turned to stone.
“Then you should shut up, mate,” Ron said, and Hermione nudged him with an elbow.
“- but this sounds like information I shouldn’t be hearing.” Malfoy continued after the briefest of pauses, and glanced at Charlie. “Perhaps neither of us?”
“I believe you may have been retired from the front lines,” Severus said, surprisingly gently, and Malfoy did react to that, his hands clenched into fists against his thighs, and his gaze slammed into Severus’ like he was yelling, though I could hear exactly nothing. I watched them have a hell of a fight, only able to catch anything by the expressions that broke through the wall of control each had over their faces. After a few moments, Malfoy’s control cracked, just a tiny bit, and the null spot went icy, and my sense of him in the weird overlaid magic warped and sparked before he smoothed back into nothing.
“That’s it, then?” Charlie said, his voice stretched between longing and anger. “Seems to me you’d need him now more than ever.”
“Mm, I didn’t say it wasn’t inconvenient. However, as good as Jericho is at deception, he is only going to be able to hold up the ruse for a few more hours, at most.”
“So send me back then,” Malfoy said tightly, “Charlie can’t be seen; Acrudula knows he hit him with that curse, but I’ll just keep him out of sight. Worked for your lot.”
Severus opened his mouth to respond when a god awful shriek cut across the cavern like a knife in the throat.
The wall of sound shattered every bit of glass in the cabin, the windows first and then all the glassware on the table a millisecond later, including the Oh-Nos crab's tank. Everything throbbed as the pressure strobed wildly, and jagged spears of rock tore through the cabin, buckling the rafters and ripping up through the floorboards, the rugs tearing into shreds like cloth between teeth.
A green bubble shimmered into place around each person, stopping the various shards from ripping everyone to pieces, but the rugs and the comfortable couches and Remus’ wall of bookcases weren't so lucky. As the walls came apart I could see Brae and Vhat being saved by another green bubble. Everything was noise and nightmare flavored chaos for a heartbeat, the rocks straining against the green bubble with a grinding roar, before suddenly the pressure released and the bubble surrounding me expanded and connected to the one next to me with a faint pop and swelling into the next and the next until we all were in the same bubble, bobbing gently in the air. Dust swirled around us like the deafening silence left ringing in our ears.
There was a blinding moment where I reached out to everyone at the same time they reached out to me and each other, brushes of magic checking for injury. After a few seconds, a wind that felt like burning paper washed out around us, pulling at the filthy remains of my clothes, and slowly the air cleared, showing us suspended in the center of a floating debris cloud lit by the glow of our bubble, surrounded by darkness.
Zil, and the cabin, and the whole god-damn cavern, were gone.