Chapter Text
Draco extinguished six separate tents and had just engaged another Order member by the time the rest of the Smokevigil arrived.
And it was easy to tell that they’d arrived, because the man Draco had been fighting was, rather abruptly, immobilized by glowing green tendrils of magic which gripped him hard enough to elicit a scream and then threw him hard onto the ground, revealing—
“Headmaster!” Draco cried.
Tom Riddle stood a few feet off in a precise battle stance, wand hot with recent magic and robes flapping in the wind hissing through the moor. At his side, towering several feet above him, was his husband, Professor Hagrid, who Draco saw just before the giant cast a spell that dropped a huge volume of conjured water onto a burning tent.
“Back to safety, Mr. Malfoy,” Headmaster Riddle said, and before Draco could even protest, he cast another spell that made someone behind Draco shout in pain. “The Smokevigil has this in hand.”
“I want to help,” Draco protested.
Pansy, who finally extinguished a particularly large fire that had spread from a tent to a nearby oak tree, turned and panted, “Come on, Draco! Now that there are people here actually qualified to handle the Order, don’t you think—?”
“What if the Ashbringer’s here?” Draco asked. The question had tumbled out of his mouth before he’d even had time to think about it. What if the Ashbringer was here? Since when had Draco ever wanted to confront the Ashbringer?
But something in him had shifted, though he wasn’t quite sure what. Perhaps he’d had enough of being tormented by the ghost of the man who’d made him an orphan and felt an impetus to hit back for once. Or perhaps now that he had other victims, Draco’s empathy prevented him from just walking away.
Either way, Riddle swept across the gap between them and put one hand on Draco’s shoulder.
“You do not need to rush toward your destiny,” he said, almost too low for Draco to hear him over the pandemonium around them. “I promise, it will find you whether you seek it out or not.”
But still Draco wanted to argue, wanted to stay. Before he could form the words, Blaise grabbed his elbow and drew his attention away from his Headmaster.
“You sent a whole bunch of people back into Flametree Gardens,” he said. “Some of them were injured. We should go check on them, at least, shouldn’t we?”
“That’s an excellent idea, Mr. Zabini,” Riddle said, right as someone—it sounded like Professor Warren—shouted Disarm or die, fascist! “In fact, I think… Severus!”
Severus Snape, Draco’s godfather and Potions professor, appeared with a burst of green wand light and a red-robed Order member toppling into a particularly soupy patch of moorland. He saw Riddle first, and his expression changed when his gaze moved naturally to—
“Draco, what in Merlin’s name are you doing out here?”
“Helping,” Draco said. “I want to help. I want—”
“I’m told there are a number of injured in Flametree Gardens, thanks to Mr. Malfoy’s evacuation orders. Your healing spells are among the best in the Smokevigil. Could you escort him back there and—?”
“Yes,” Snape said, anticipating the rest of the question. “Draco, Parkinson, Zabini, with me.”
It took Pansy’s urgent grip on Draco’s shoulder to finally pull him away, weaving through still-burning tents that Snape extinguished with spells he cast without stopping, and past two more battles between the Order of the Phoenix and the Smokevigil.
“Not an Auror in sight,” Snape said venomously under his breath. “Typical.”
It wasn’t long before they made it back up through the Pitch, which had mercifully avoided the flames, and subsequently up to the VIP area and back into the vestibule of Flametree Gardens, where a huge volume of people were slumped against walls and huddled together on benches, panting and bleeding and sobbing in pain and Draco couldn’t just stay out of it like this—
“I want to help,” Draco said, and just before he could start back for the rune out of which he’d just stepped, Blaise grabbed his elbow.
“This is helping, too,” he replied, and gestured to Snape, who was already crouched in front of a woman with a face half-covered in raw, bloody burns.
“Come on, Draco,” Pansy added, her face streaked with soot and sweat glistening in her dark hair, “you won’t be help to anyone if you get yourself killed.”
So Draco stayed. He put his limited knowledge of healing spells to use. He calmed down one particularly hysterical little boy who kept asking for his mother and father. It didn’t feel like helping, even though he knew that, objectively, it was.
Whatever it was, though, and however he felt about it, one thing was for sure: it kept his attention. Time slipped through his fingers in the way it did when he was consumed with single-minded focus. At some point, more people joined in to help with the injured, including Uncle Marc and a few members of the Flametree Garden staff. Then, at some point, Draco looked up and the sky had gone slightly gray with the dawn and a familiar voice was calling his name.
“Draco! Draco!”
Viktor was rushing toward him, out from the doorway leading into the rest of the building, dark eyes huge and frightened, a dressing gown pulled tight around his body.
“Viktor,” Draco answered, and as his attention was finally drawn away from soothing a young girl’s twisted ankle, the wave of exhaustion he’d thus far avoided finally caught up to him.
“I just voke up to a commotion— Vhat is all this? Vhat’s happening?”
“An attack,” Draco said, swaying with the sudden fatigue. “The Ashrbringer—or his Order of the Phoenix—attacked the campgrounds.”
“So many injured,” Viktor said, sounding horrified, as his gaze moved across the vestibule to take in the chaotic scene of walking wounded. “Has anyone—?”
He didn’t have time to finish the question before a familiar voice cried, “Got one!”
Draco turned. Professor Warren, singed in places and with soot on her face, was triumphantly dragging a figure behind her by one arm. The figure, robed in red and with a golden mask slightly askew, was shorter than her and thrashing frantically against the magical bindings around his upper body.
Behind her, appearing one after the other after the other on the teleportation rune, came more members of the Smokevigil. Regulus and Snape and Hagrid and Riddle and Mrs. Parkinson—
“Mum!” Pansy cried, and dropped what she was doing to race toward her, whereupon she was promptly swept up into a tight hug.
—and even a few people that Draco didn’t recognize, all of them showing signs of battle, but all standing, grim with triumph.
“Inside,” Riddle said, and Professor Warren hauled her captive straight through the doors leading from the vestibule into the main lobby of Flametree Gardens, with its long wall of windows looking down onto the Pitch—and now also at the smoldering carnage of the campgrounds around it.
Draco followed at a distance, as did Blaise and Viktor just behind him, and then Pansy, hovering nervously at her mother’s arm.
Warren shoved the figure into an overstuffed red chair by a large fireplace, and immediately ripped the gold mask off.
“Pettigrew,” Regulus said at once, sneering. “Ever Potter’s sycophant, even after all these years.”
The man—Pettigrew, Draco supposed—was short and ratlike, with pockmarked skin and wiry hair. His beady eyes were frantic, moving rapidly across the room, and he kept squirming against the magical restraints around him.
“Right,” Warren said, “are we going to do this the easy way or the hard way, Peter?”
Riddle, who had at some point made his way to the front of the crowd and directly in front of Pettigrew, asked, “Who orchestrated this attack?”
The man started breathing harder, but didn’t answer.
“Shoddy Occlumency,” Riddle muttered, after a tense, protracted pause.
Finally, Pettigrew spoke, face twisting with fear: “Stop it! Get— Get out of my head!”
“No,” Riddle answered, cool and impassive as ever.
“The Headmaster’s a Legilimens,” Blaise said quietly, sounding surprised.
“What’s a Legilimens?” Draco asked, also quiet.
“A mind-reader. It’s a bloody hard skill to master, and when done correctly, completely undetectable. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but damn. Just when I thought he couldn’t get any scarier…”
“He doesn’t know much,” Riddle said eventually. “But the orders he received were not from the Ashbringer. At least not directly. They were relayed by—interesting—by Frank Longbottom. Does the Ashbringer have a new favorite, Pettigrew? Have the Potters fallen out of his good graces after James’s failure three years ago?”
“Get out of my head,” Pettigrew wheezed, thrashing against his restraints with renewed energy. “Get out of my head! Get out of my head!”
“How did he relay his message to Longbottom?” Riddle pressed, leaning forward and bracing one hand on the arm of the chair into which Pettigrew had been thrown. “What were his exact words?”
But Pettigrew kept screaming, kept thrashing, shut his eyes tight and curled away from Riddle and his probing eyes and powerful magic. It wasn’t easy to watch.
Then, finally, Riddle straightened and sighed. “He doesn’t know much,” he said again. “I’m not sure how useful he’ll be. Was he the only one captured?”
“So far as I can tell,” Mrs. Parkinson said, with one arm still on Pansy’s shoulder protectively, “the others all managed to flee.”
“Cowards,” Hagrid huffed, then sat down heavily on a nearby settee to rub his knee.
“We can’t just let him go,” Snape said. “He’ll tell the Ashbringer everything we’ve learned from him if he gets the chance.”
“A good obliviate would take care of that, perhaps,” Warren answered.
Snape shook his head. “Even the best memory charms leave a trace in the mind. And he’s been gone long enough by now that they’ll know to look.”
“Well, what do you suggest?” Mrs. Parkinson answered. “Just kill him?”
Pettigrew began hyperventilating again.
But Mrs. Parkinson continued as if she was discussing a lunch order and not murder: “We didn’t see a single Auror here tonight, but I bet we’d see dozens of them if an Order member was mysteriously disappeared. They’d trace it right back to the Smokevigil, and then that would be our problem for months.”
From the adjoining hallway: “So outsource your dirty work.”
Camilla Zabini had appeared, wearing a translucent black chiffon nightgown that would have been absolutely indecent but for an opaque dressing gown tied loosely around her waist. At the sight of her, Professor Warren coughed loudly and looked away.
“Ms. Zabini,” Riddle said, perhaps the only person in the room unaffected by the presence of the most beautiful woman in fifty miles barely dressed. “Do you have a suggestion?”
“Give him to me,” she replied, padding barefoot across the marble floor into the middle of the huddle. “I’ll make sure that the Aurors follow a trail right to Cosa Nostra. Keep them off your scent.”
“Mummy,” Blaise said, aghast, as Draco worked through the realization that the mother of one of his best friends actually was a member of the Sicilian mafia.
Ms. Zabini smiled fondly at her son and patted his cheek as she passed him on her way to Riddle, at which point she stopped, focused her attention, and continued:
“It’s not like the DMLE has the resources or jurisdiction to prosecute a mob hit, after all,” she continued. “Especially if his body happened to be dumped in international waters.”
Pettigrew’s breathing had turned to wheezing, his thrashing to shaking.
“This is an awfully generous offer,” Riddle replied neutrally.
“If you know anything about the Ashbringer’s involvement with Mussolini during the First War, then you know that la mia famiglia in particular has an ax to grind with him and his ilk.”
“No! W-Wait!” Pettigrew wailed. “I— Don’t kill me, I can— I’ll turn coat, work for you instead!”
Snape sneered. “And we’re expected to trust the moral integrity of a fascist?”
“Put me under an Imperius!” Pettigrew was getting frantic. “I’ll even consent to it. I’ll be your informant. Whatever you want. Just…don’t kill me!”
The whole room went quiet for a time. Reactions ran the gamut: Snape’s skeptical frown to Riddle’s arched brow of interest and everything in between.
“I do know a few spells, Riddle,” Ms. Zabini eventually said, “as you might imagine, that excel at both control and concealing themselves.”
“We should say no more here,” Riddle replied. “Smokevigil, disperse for now. Be ready for a debrief tomorrow at Hogwarts. Ms. Zabini, may I borrow you a moment before I leave?”
“Certainly.”
The group scattered slowly in various directions; some returned to the open-air vestibule in which some injured still lingered, while others Disapparated almost immediately.
“Mum,” Pansy said, “would Riddle really have…have…”
“Killed him?” Mrs. Parkinson guessed. Her dark eyes were following Riddle as he left, Ms. Zabini on one side, his husband on the other, and Pettigrew dragged along behind on a magical lead like a disobedient dog. “It’s an ugly thing to imagine, isn’t it? But the context is important, sweetheart. The Ashbringer and his followers killed nearly a half dozen with this stunt alone. At a certain point, forcing a fascist to stop by any means necessary is no longer a radical option.”
“Draco?”
He’d been so spellbound by the conversation—exacerbated, most likely, but the extreme exhaustion that had settled like a fog over him—that he had completely forgotten Viktor was still in the room.
“You look terrible,” he continued. “Perhaps you should go back to bed.”
“I don’t think there’s much point in that,” Draco replied, rubbing a knuckle into one eye. “It’s already nearing dawn. We’ll have to check out soon.”
“Back to Grimmauld, then, and to bed,” said Regulus, who had at some point appeared behind Draco. “You’ve done enough for one day.”
“I wanted to help,” Draco said, not for the first time that day.
“I know,” Regulus said, expression soft. “You are your father’s son. But Draco, you need to be more judicious than this. You can’t race into danger like you did tonight, without any sort of plan or foreknowledge of what you’re getting into.”
“Vait,” Viktor said, “Draco, you… Vhat did you do?”
“I wanted to help,” Draco said again, once more for good measure. “People were in trouble, and it had something to do with the Ashbringer, so I…”
“So you vent and put yourself in danger,” Viktor said, “directly involving yourself in a problem that’s got nothing to do vith you?”
Draco stared. “Nothing to do…? Viktor, this has everything to do with me. This is the man who made me an orphan!”
“And that makes his battles yours to fight? Draco, I… I just vorry about you.” Viktor’s expression was wrecked, and his hand found Draco’s elbow, causing a tiny thrill of electricity to race up his arm. “I don’t vant to see you hurt.”
“I’m not hurt,” Draco said, though he almost didn’t, lest it cause Viktor to withdraw his hand. “But I’m also not going to stop fighting. It’s too important.”
Blaise wandered over before Viktor could reply, with an expression that seemed very far away.
“All right, Blaise?” Regulus asked.
“Yeah,” he answered vaguely. “I’m just… I can’t believe she’s actually…”
“If it makes you feel any better,” Regulus said, “everyone in the Smokevigil was just as surprised as you to learn she’s actually a mafiosa.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better,” Blaise replied.
Regulus Apparated Draco and Marc back to Grimmauld Place, where Draco fell asleep almost before he hit the bed. He woke up shortly before noon with a splitting headache, though whether it was from the lack of sleep or lack of food, he couldn’t say.
He made his way downstairs toward the kitchen, but stopped when he heard voices from within:
“…understand. Better than you might think, actually. My father was a veteran of World War II.”
“Was he?” Regulus’s voice was gentle.
“He was in Paris when Germany invaded. Joined the resistance, even served under Charles de Gaulle for a time. My family has a long, proud history of fighting fascists.”
Draco crept toward the door, which was just ajar enough for him to catch sight of Regulus and Marc, sat close together at the kitchen table. Regulus’s expression was so open and soft that Draco found himself hesitating to interrupt the moment.
“It’s so strange,” Marc eventually continued, “to think that there was a whole second half to the conflict that no one knows about.”
“It was really only more of the same,” Regulus answered. “Fascism under a different banner with a different goal.”
A pause lapsed. They were inches apart, staring at each other quite intensely. Draco was starting to feel awkward about eavesdropping.
“I appreciate that you jumped in to help with the injured,” Regulus eventually continued.
“I wish I could have done more.”
“You did plenty. Pressure stops bleeding as well as a spell. And in hindsight, I’m glad you weren’t in the middle of the fight. You’re a Muggle. Enemy number one for the Order. And if anything happened to you, I— I’d—”
“Hey,” Marc said, interrupting Regulus’s stammering with a hand on his jaw and a thumb on his lower lip, “it’s all right. We’re both all right.”
And yes, Draco should definitely stop eavesdropping. He crept back several feet in the hallway, then tromped with deliberate volume forward again, giving them time to separate. He felt bad about intervening, but he really was hungry.
They were several feet apart by the time Draco made it into the kitchen and said so: “I’m starving.”
“Kreacher’s out doing a bit of shopping,” Regulus said, “but if you’re willing to wait, he could make you something proper.”
“I don’t know if I am willing to wait,” Draco said, and pulled open the fridge. There wasn’t a great deal to work with: a few eggs, a mostly-empty pint of milk, a few blocks of cheese, some chives… “I might be able to make an omelet, maybe.”
“I’ll make it,” Marc said. His chair scraped against the kitchen floor as he stood. “I think you’ve earned a calm afternoon.”
Draco smiled through the headache still throbbing between his temples and, as his uncle began grabbing everything he’d need from around the kitchen, went to sit down at the table with Regulus.
“The good news,” Regulus said, sliding a copy of the Daily Prophet toward him, “is that with the attack, no one paid very much attention to the rose thing or the dance.”
Draco took the paper. The headline, right over a very evocative picture of the blazing phoenix in the sky over the burning campground surrounding the Pitch, read: SEVEN DEAD, THREE INJURED IN APPARENT ASHBRINGER ATTACK AT WORLD CUP. Draco frowned.
“There is still a small article about you and Viktor on page eight, though,” Regulus cautioned. “Rita Skeeter’s work, of course. Hopefully people focus on what’s important.”
“God… Seven dead?”
Regulus sighed, leaned back in his chair. “Yeah.”
“Why? What was the point of it?”
“I don’t know. Riddle might have some theories at the debrief tomorrow. My best guess? I think it was a warning shot.”
Draco frowned. “How do you mean?”
“A public statement that the Ashbringer and the Order are back. Why else would they choose such a big event, then fly a phoenix in the sky like that? They want everyone to know.”
“All that destruction just to make a statement?”
“These are fascists, Draco. They’re operating on a different moral level than the rest of the world.”
“Calling it a moral level at all is a bit of a stretch,” Marc said as he grabbed a skillet off a hanging rack over the stove.
“So he’s back,” Draco muttered, and let himself sit with the idea for a moment, despite how cold and heavy it was in the pit of his stomach. “But if he’s back, why is he still giving orders indirectly through Frank Longbottom? Why hasn’t anyone seen him?”
“I don’t know,” Regulus said again. “Could be that he’s not actually back. I feel like if he was, Riddle would know.”
Silence lapsed uncomfortably. Draco had another question he wanted to ask, but wasn’t sure how to ask it in the right way.
Eventually, he just asked: “Did you see James Potter on the field?”
Regulus shifted uncomfortably. “No. Did you see him off it?”
“No. I spoke with him before I went to bed, though. His priorities seemed…skewed for a man who knew he was about to orchestrate an attack that would kill a half-dozen people.”
“Let me guess,” Regulus said dully, “he wanted to know all about Marc.”
Draco couldn’t help but laugh. “He really is predictable, isn’t he?”
“Predictably a narcissist, yes,” Regulus answered, which made Draco laugh harder.