“Where is my son?”
Snape blinked at her. Her usually pale face had now regressed to being utterly stark with terrible anxiety, as she stared defiantly into the inky blackness of his eyes. He took half a step backwards, not daring to break her gaze.
“I don’t know,” he whispered. “Narcissa, you know as well as I -”
“Don’t give me that!” she cried. “You should have every one of His servants out looking for him!”
At this, the man’s lip curled. “It may alarm you to learn,” he said softly, “that the Dark Lord has more pressing matters to attend to other than the hunt for your recalcitrant child.”
“He did everything that was asked of him!” Narcissa yelled, her eyes blazing. “And more! When I came to you, in confidence, trusting you to help him, you promised me you would!”
“And I did,” he said slowly. The flame of one of the few lamps in the room flickered, momentarily illuminating his face with a cold, sallow light. “I warned him of the consequences of failure; I offered him help, but he was too arrogant to accept it!”
A sharp crack resounded amongst the clutter of the tiny living room as Narcissa let out an angry gasp and struck him clean across the face. “How dare you!” she seethed. “He was just a boy! Surely you and your boss knew that?! He couldn’t have been responsible for his feelings!”
Before she could lower her hand he had grabbed hold of it with his own, stepping out of the shadows that had concealed his face before to reveal pitch black eyes alight with fury. “You dare strike me again…” his hissed in menacing tones. “Your son was a pathetic little boy who had no idea what he had got himself into. You would do well to forget about him.”
She almost choked with disbelief. “Forget about my own son?!” she tugged at her arm, attempting to free it from his vice-like grip. Now she was incensed to the point of tears. “I could sooner forget my husband!”
His face contorted into something resembling a smile. “I thought you already had,” he whispered, moving even closer to her. “Or did he merely slip your mind for a moment..?”
She was shaking now. “You disgust me,” she spat, once more trying to wrench her arm free. “If you can’t help me then at least let me go!”
He seemed to consider this, eyes never leaving hers. “I want you to make a promise to me,” he said. She kept quiet, glaring at him, and he went on. “Narcissa, I want you to stay away - from me and from any of the others. Go home, and wait for your husband to return. Do not attempt to contact anyone, not even your sister. The Ministry are looking for your son, and no doubt they will come looking for you; they have already searched your house twice since the incident, and it would be better if they did not have reason to search it again.” He released her arm, and she snatched it back immediately. “Is that clear?”
She scowled at him, the lines of her frown throwing dark shadows across her pale face. “So, you are refusing to help me?”
“My advice is help!” he snapped. “You have no idea how the Dark Lord reacted to your son’s behaviour! He is a traitor to our cause! And as such, he is now no more than a marked man. If he is found he will be killed on sight, and you will be treated the same if it is discovered that you have been trying to help him!”
Trembling hands brushed away the furious tears that were now streaming down her face, as she shook her head from side to side. “No…” she muttered. “No - they can’t…” She turned away from him, moving tentatively from the room to the hallway.
Her fingers rested on the door handle, as she turned round once more to hear him murmur from the sitting room, “You have been warned, Narcissa. If you ignore my advice, then there is nothing more I can do for you.”
“Yes, I’m afraid it’s a definite case of Borrelia burgdorferi.” The man in the clean white coat snapped his clip-board shut with a click that seemed to echo for hours afterwards inside the boy’s head.
Draco blinked bloodshot eyes and listened hard through the thickness of his own thoughts to hear Alice’s puzzled tones, “It’s a what?”.
The doctor nodded. “Lyme’s disease.” He examined his fingernails in a nonchalant fashion, frowning under perfectly manicured eyebrows. “Uncommon on British soil, I believe, but not totally unheard of. It is contracted from a certain species of tick, Ixodes dammini, found usually in the mountains. You’re not a big hiker, are you?” He stared pointedly at Draco.
The dark-haired boy lifted a pale face and glared at him, but Alice spoke before he could say a word. “Does he look like the type?” she snapped. “Anyway, what does it do, this disease?”
The man in the white coat wrinkled his nose slightly at her, his eyes flicking over her dyed black hair hanging in ropy strands over a hooded top which had clearly not been washed for several months. She was resting on a stool by the side of Draco’s hospital bed, tapping chipped purple nails on a blinding white bedspread, the awning of a genuine frown screening eyes smeared with some kind of dark green concoction which made her look faintly ill.
“Erm…” the doctor began. “Well - feverish symptoms, as you see here,” he indicated Draco’s internal struggle to stay awake. The boy’s eyelids were drooping ever heavier, the deep, hazelnut brown of his eyes now barely visible. “And there can be a rash, of sorts.”
“Is that what he’s got on his neck?” Alice interjected. “Christ, that’s disgusting.”
The total absence of articulation in her words made Draco spurt out something like a laugh. Before, such blatant evidence of bad breeding would have been enough to make him almost sick with contempt, but he felt that now he was beyond caring. As far as he was concerned, Alice was the only one responsible for his being still alive.
His blurry gaze found the doctor who was treating him; the name on his badge called him Dr. A. Dexter. After having been transported in the back of Frank’s car along buzzing, rain-washed streets and then carried through white doors that opened on their own, Draco had been thrown into a hard, blue chair from where he had gazed blearily up at this man’s watery eyes. Before he had even realised where he was, Dr. A. Dexter had plunged a long, silver needle into his arm and poured something vile down his throat. The next thing he had known, he was lying in a bed staring up at a turquoise ceiling, in a room sparse of anything but bright light and a million artificial smells.
He took in a ragged sigh. What has become of me?
The other two were now arguing about something, Alice and the doctor. Frank and Craig had left long ago, Alice had informed him, and Draco could feel nothing but relief about this. While he did not mind Alice so much, largely because he had rather a lot to thank her for, the drunken barbarity of the two men still frightened him somewhat.
“…Well, Joseph, you’ll need to stay here for, oh, a couple of weeks, perhaps?” the doctor was telling him. “Plenty of sleep, and, well, it would be best if you didn’t have many visitors.” He tapped his clip-board again in an authoritative manner, turned, and left the ward.
Alice glared after him. “Stuck up little…” she tutted inconsequentially at the door for a few moments, while Draco closed his eyes, his mind on other things. Suddenly he felt another hand on his arm, and snatched it away in one jolt.
“Alright, alright,” Alice muttered, retracting her skinny fingers and resolving to bite at the end of one of them. “I just thought…”
The boy sighed again, rubbing at the corner of one eye. “What is it?” he murmured.
“Well,” she leaned a little closer to him, lowering her voice. “The dye’s permanent, but it’ll start to show when your hair grows out.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, glancing over her shoulder at the two other people sleeping in beds in the same room.
The girl continued. “When your hair grows, it grows from the roots, right? So, the dye isn’t covering that bit - the new bit - if you get what I mean. The roots of your hair are going to be blonde. It’ll be obvious you’ve dyed it!”
He frowned. “Can’t I just dye it again?”
“Well, yeah, you can,” Alice said. “But you weren’t even bloody well awake when I was dyeing yours, mate - it takes a while. Plus, if you have to do it here, they’re going to notice, aren’t they?”
Draco leant his head back against the white plastic headboard, blinking sleep from his eyes. “What about these?” he pointed to the contact lenses that had turned his pale, grey eyes to a rich brown.
“You’ve gotta clean those,” the girl whispered. “Every night or something, ’wise they’ll bloody hurt.” Now it was her turn to sigh. “You’ve gotta get well quick, mate.”
It won’t last. They’ll figure it out soon enough and then what will happen to me? He closed his eyes again. He was so grateful for all that she had done to help him, but he feared that he had only hours to think of another way to get out of there.
The next few days were some of the most uneventful, yet the most anxious, that Draco had ever experienced. Alice, through some heated, and rather vociferous argument, had managed to convince the staff to let her stay in one of the apartments that were reserved for close family. He had no idea what she had told them, only that now everyone in the hospital called him Joseph. She would creep into his ward in the evenings and early morning, avoiding the scandalous eye of Dr. Dexter, to help him change his contact lenses. What she had said about his hair was already becoming apparent, though thankfully, the nurses had put this paleness down to stress concerning his illness. Idiots.
He realised that he was becoming increasingly impatient with everyone and everything around him. The Muggle lifestyle had concealed him well enough before that he had not cared about the primitive nature of his surroundings, but now that his health was returning, he often found himself longing to pull out his wand and just disappear.
He reached a tentative hand towards the knot of wadding and bandages at his neck, though decided that he did not have quite enough strength yet to touch it. The light from the street several floors down filtered gently through the blinds on the windows, a mixture of deep, navy twilight and the orange glow of the street lamps. The ward was totally silent, the absence of noise only broken by the gentle rumble of traffic outside. For the first time since his escape, it wasn’t raining in London.
Someone was snoring further down the ward, but Draco barely noticed anymore. His fever-ridden head resting on the cool whiteness of the pillows, he felt himself slowly drifting away, until all the aches and pains of his body had diminished into utter weightlessness. He breathed in deeply, and saw a familiar face before his eyes.
“Draco? Is that you?” It was a woman’s voice, broken as though she had been crying. A voice that could be cold and cruel, but also caring and anxious, as it sounded now. “Are you alright? Where have you been?”
He was standing in his living room, rich carpet beneath his feet, shining ornaments and leather-bound books lining each wall. Two leather settees were stretched before a glorious fireplace, ablaze with a golden heat that flickered across his face. He took a slow step forward, feeling the edge of an expensive tapestry rug with his bare toes, the warmth of the fire growing ever more real.
The woman who had spoken was perched on the edge of a luxurious arm chair, her silver-white hair glimmering in the fire light. She stared up at him with fear in her eyes.
“Draco! Oh, you’re alive!” She jumped to her feet, rushing towards him and pulling him into a tight hug. “I thought you were dead! Where have you been? What happened to you?!”
The boy tried to speak, but found that he couldn’t bring himself to admit his own cowardice to his mother. He stammered a few syllables, before she interrupted him again, her tone grave. “Draco, you can’t stay here. They’re looking for you - they’re looking for me! They’ll be here any minute, you must leave!”
There were tears in the corners of her eyes as she broke out of the embrace, pushing him at arm’s length away from her, her hands shaking. “Please, my son, you have to go.”
Her words were spoken with an urgency which sparked questions in Draco’s mind. “Go where? Mother, how am I here? Did I apparate?”
“It doesn’t matter how you got here, Draco, you must leave - now! Oh!” She threw her hands to her mouth as a loud banging came from the hallway. Someone was at the door. “Draco, my son,” she clasped his shoulders, staring directly into his face. “You must not make the same mistake that your father did - do you hear me? Find the Order, they will protect you!”
“The Order?” Draco murmured, frightened by the panic in his mother’s voice. The banging on the front door was growing more frequent by the second. “Who are the Order? What about Snape -?”
“No!” Narcissa cried. “You stay away from him! There is a price on your head, Draco, not just from the Ministry, but from Him as well! You need to stay hidden!”
With those words she pushed him away from her, and he suddenly felt weightless, powerless, as though he was being controlled by some other force. “Mother!” he cried, but she was too far away now; he seemed to be watching her through a window, a glass pane through which he could not be heard.
There was a crash somewhere in the distance, the sound of the Death Eaters breaking into the mansion. There were footsteps, heavy ones, pounding the rich carpet of the hallway, bursting through into the living room. And a scream, a terrified scream that could not be drowned out by the blazing fire bursting from its grate and filling the room with searing heat and a thick black smoke which was growing thicker… thicker… until his sight was swallowed by darkness, and he could see nothing more of his home.