The Last Lieutenant

The Stars Are Burning

Living with the Malfoys is like living two lives at once.

There's part of her that is still existing with Fred, who is fighting to keep Harry safe and stays up late at night to send secret messages to Fred across the parchment, who is reminded of Mrs. Weasley every time she hears Celestine Warbeck and is still carrying messages to Dumbledore.

But there's another part of her, one who goes to harass muggles in town with Emmeline just because it's fun to make other people feel small, and goes through Lucuis' old antiques without worrying what they might be used for, thinking only that they gave him power.   There's a part that hears screams from the dungeons and does not try to save them, who ran melted silver into a werewolf's wounds and sewed him back together, watched while he burned from the inside out just because she had been ordered to make it hurt.

"Are you sure you want to do this?"  The man across from her, more goblin than human, looks at her like he doesn't want to let her in.  Maybe he knows her parents.  Or maybe he just hasn't learned to stop judging a book by its cover yet.   "Might get hurt."

Audra digs around in her cloak and pulls out a bag full of gold, hears the clink when it falls down to the table.  Its double the entrance fee, the price she has to pay for secrecy.  "I'm sure,"  She says, and brushes past the others in line to where Emmeline was waiting for her.

It had been Vance who had told her about this place, that his buddies came here some nights after work just to watch other people get pummeled.   It was the height of underground dueling clubs, and only the best of the best even dared to play.

Audra knows she's one of the best.  It's a new thing with her, to have stopped pretending she's anything other than what she really is, because there's no point in telling herself that she isn't a monster.  It was time for her to give in, and she had- it seems like this was the only thing that would be able to calm the ache inside of her.

They give her plenty of time to back out.

That was their first mistake, she thinks later, to look at her and think she was someone young and pretty but not much of a threat, to forget that in nature the prettiest things are the most lethal.   It takes until she strips off her cloak with the dark mark flashing on her arm and wand whipping spells around the ring for them to understand that she wasn't something to be messed with, to have them put up a little bit of a fight.

In the end, she comes away with blood in her teeth and screams in her ears and a bag of gold weighing down her cloak, all of them calling after her to go one more round.  She passes the goblin guarding the door on the way out and throws five galleons down on his table, Emmeline hard at her heels.  Audra could hear her laughing the whole night, drunk off of all of it, off her power.

"It's an advancement."  She leans over the table and clicks the coin against his betting board, where everyone but Emmeline had voted against her.  "Next time, bet on me."

She and Emmeline don't need the gold.

That's the worst thing about all this, that even if they had told their parents where they had been and how she had one, this would just be one small pile amongst all their millions.  But it was the first thing that Audra could say that she had earned on her own, even if it was slightly illegal.

"What are we even going to do with this?"  

They couldn't take it to the bank.  They couldn't take it home, at least not to spend it.  It would just sit in some hidden corner until the war was over, and then, it wouldn't matter.  Audra's pretty sure she's either going to be dead or in jail.  Dumbledore can't protect her forever.