The Last Lieutenant

September

They've got a plan.

She and Draco had spent nights sitting up in his bedroom, him spread out eagle-armed against his champagne colored carpet and her hanging backwards out of the window, arms stretching out like her fingers might be able to catch some of the fog she can feel brushing against her skin.  It had scared him, the first time she had done it, but after the hours passed into the early morning and their days grew numbered without them getting any better ideas, he stopped looking at her like she might fall and started looking like he might jump after her.

"How do you think he's going to kill me?"  Draco's a morbid little thing.  Audra hadn't noticed it, before, back when she thought he was all talk and empty threats, but she supposes being told to kill or be killed makes someone grow up faster they were meant to.  She should know.  

"You think he'll do it himself?"  The Dark Lord doesn't like to make personal visits.  Won't dirty his hands.  Audra doubts that Draco will be that important.

"Maybe it'll be you."  He twists his head to look at her, pale cheek against pale carpet.  There's a twist to his voice that makes it sound like he's mocking her, daring her to say the things they are both thinking, but it falls a little flat.   Mostly, he just sounds resigned.  "Good little soldier, following orders."

Audra thinks he knows more than he's meant to.  Suspects, anyways.  It could be dangerous, and not just for her.

"He's not going to kill you."  She flings herself away from the bannister, away from the night air, and lets the window panes slam close with a flick of her wand.  They close harder than she meant them to, banging against the oak, and the glass cracks.   Before, she would have repaired it, but now she doesn't bother- Narcissa has gotten used to the trail of debris that she leaves in her wake.  "You know why?"

"Why's that?"  

"Because I'm on your side.  And because I always win."  Clary would kill it hubris, tell her that in the old stories, the gods would strike you down for something like that.  Audra isn't scared.  Let them try.  "Besides,"  She sinks down to the floor beside him, and digs her fingers up the knuckles in the fluff of the carpeting, watches her hands fall away.  "If it was me, I'd make sure it wouldn't hurt."

He nods like it's actually a comfort, and then straightens up, pulls his limbs back in like he is putting himself back together.  "Alright then."  He shakes his hair out.  It is long and hanging loose around his face, not sleeked back like it always is in school.  It makes him look younger, thinner.  "What's your plan, Ms. badass?"

(He started that nickname two weeks ago, when he caught her out in the apple orchard, blasting the rotting apples apart and smashing the fallen ones underneath her dragon leather boots.  She hadn't bothered to tell him that she had broken more things, and this seemed safer.  Less permanent.  Less likely to leave a scar, when it was only dying fruit.)

"I don't know yet."  It's like living in clouds, his life, where nothing could hurt you because everything was safe.  Or it had been, anyways.  "Just wait and see."

In the end, it doesn't take her as much effort to figure out how to kill the greatest wizard in the world as she thought.

In the end, all it takes is a trip to Diagon Alley where she would walk past the twin's shop on the guise of buying new robes because she had never gotten to see it before.  In the end, it was only a half formed thought that sent her feet turning toward Knockturn Alley, and it was only a hump-backed witch shoving her into the brick wall that drew her eye toward the dusty window of Borgin and Burkes.

Emmeline had been with her.  "Are you alright?"  She's got her hand on Audra's elbow, voice loud and eyes too wide in her face, like after everything, she might actually believe that Audra could have been hurt by an elbow to the side.  "What's wrong?"

"Nothing,"  Audra heard herself say, but she doesn't really pay attention, because she is too busy chasing the shadow of a thought that has not yet revealed itself, chipping away the doubt and the reasons it might not work to find a way that it would.

After all, the worst attacks that you can't see coming.

Audra's the one to take him to catch the train.

Draco had told his mother it was so they could go over the plans, but Audra knew the truth- it was protect her.  Protect his mother from the stares and the whispers and the hands over the mouths that would not hide the way that their lips snarled and twisted and gaped.  Protect her from the last good bye where she would not be able to hold him as tightly as she would like, where she could not cry and say that she loved him, where she would have to watch her every move and breath and blink.  It was a sort of kindness that Audra had never been capable of, the sort of subtle protection that she had never even thought to give.

"You're going to be fine."  Audra isn't one for sentiment anymore, but she hugs him anyways, feeling the way the points of his bones press into her.  She hadn't realized that he had gotten so thin.  "This is going to be fine."

"It isn't going to work."  His hands were trembling, and his eyes, not used to hiding anything, were scared.  "It was never going to work."

"You've got other plans.  More ideas."  Ideas with too many gaps in the plans, where they would go wrong and lost and spin off in a direction he had not considered.  Ideas filled with the possibility of collateral damage.  "Mine is only a last resort."

"A back up."

"It doesn't hurt."  She presses a parchment with directions into his hand, one that they had worked with Borgin to make over the past two weeks under the watchful eye of Greyback for extra incentive.  "Dying.  Not the way you're planning, and not for a man like him."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

"It should, actually."  She doesn't know how to tell him that there were different ways to die, ways to go gently and ways to where it felt like your life was being wrenched from you, like you were being skinned, turned inside out.  "And for Merlin's sake-,"  She turned up the collar on his coat and smoothed down his hair.  "Try to look like you know what you're doing."

It's just a game, Draco, she thought, watching his retreating back until the engine's steam swallowed him up.  And it's one you need to learn how to play as fast as possible.

(She catches sight of Fred for a moment, a heart beat's time, one strangled half breath.  He's surrounded in steam up to the waist, cloak flying out behind him and wrapping at his ankles.   His face is caught in the middle of a laugh, hand stretched out to Ginny, and Audra can pinpoint the moment he sees her- the way his face goes slack, how he scrambles to keep the smile on his face.

He's gotten paler, she thinks, because the freckles stand out more and his cheekbones were never that prominent, so he had gotten thinner, too.  He's just as afraid as everyone else, and it shows.  We're all growing up so fast.

He turns away from her.  He turns away from her and she feels her heart wrench, her stomach twist, like every cell in her body was reaching out to him, stretching out of her skin to get even on millimeter closer.  She wants to call after him just to stop the ache, but that's not possible.  There are so many things that she cannot claim as her own anymore.)