The Trick Step, Part 1/2

[peskywhistpaw]

Title: The Trick Step | AO3 Link
Fandom: Harry Potter
Type: Gen, with hints of het and femmeslash (and some OT3)
Rating: PG
Word Count: 17,000
Characters/Pairings: Luna Lovegood, Pansy Parkinson, Draco Malfoy, and implied combinations thereof
Summary: The notes kept coming, and Luna kept finding them. Luna encounters a mystery that needs solving - one that takes her beyond anything she ever imagined.
Author’s Notes: Written for journeystory. Remind me to never procrastinate. Ever. Again. This is supposed to be set vaguely during the fourth book, just before the Triwizard stuff. There's kind of an unplanned emphasis on Pansy/Luna, possibly unrequited, because Pansy really, really wanted to like Luna, and I couldn't stop her. The connection between hope and feathers belongs to Emily Dickinson. I recently read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, and ever since, I've been really intrigued by how the transition between childhood and adulthood, and coming into oneself, is shown in stories. So I think Pansy is somewhat reflecting that here, especially in her attraction to Luna. My apologies in advance for the ending.



The Trick Step

The notes kept coming, and Luna kept finding them.

They were curious little things, really, containing always the same word, and written always in one of the same two hands on the back of what appeared to be a Potions essay. Written always, regardless, with the same sense of haste and urgency. What was not the same was where they turned up.

For instance, Luna had found the first one in the form of a dirty, tea-colored corner poking out from the bottom of her shoe halfway through Charms. She’d had no idea of when she might have picked it up, only that it must have been somewhere between the fourth and third floors, because she had not been wearing any shoes before then. The second note she had found floating in the lake beside a slice of toast that someone had abandoned for the Giant Squid to find. The toast was quickly pulled under the surface, with the note just as quickly following due to the suction, but Luna had excellent vision and had got a good look at both before they disappeared. The note -the one word-had been written on a small scrap of parchment in the same handwriting as before. The toast had been buttered generously.

Upon the discovery of the third note, Luna had begun keeping a logbook, which she carried with her at all times. There had been four more notes on the eighth of October, all within an hour of each other: one in the girls’ lavatory, one in the Owlery, and one tucked inside the pages of her Transfiguration textbook, as snug and purposeful as could be. The one from the Owlery had been the first to be written in the second hand, and Luna had almost dismissed it as a piece of someone else’s discarded letter when she happened to turn it over, and realized that the writing from the Potions essay was a logical continuation of thought from what had been written on one of the other pieces she had found. So Luna had secured this note, too, into the back of the logbook with all of the others (excluding only the one that had been eaten by the Giant Squid with a side of buttered toast).

On the ninth of October, Luna had found seven notes, including one that had got caught in her hair after fluttering down from a moving staircase, and another that she had had to fish out of her afternoon tea with a slotted spoon.

Perhaps, Luna thought, it was not she who was finding the notes; but rather, the notes who were finding her. Which begged many questions, the third-most important of these being: Who was sending them?

There had to be at least two people involved, she decided-or at least, two people who could write; there was always a chance of extra, silent contributors. And at least one of the people knew who she was, unless of course the spell delivering the notes had assigned a random target. The handwriting on roughly half of the notes more or less matched the handwriting in which the Potions essay had been composed, which suggested that one of the writers at least attended Hogwarts (a possibility she had not taken for granted, just in case). Though she could read it only in fragments, the Potions essay talked a lot about Gregory the Smarmy-at least, as ‘a lot’ as there could even be in fragments-and Luna knew for a fact that the fourth years had been assigned two lengths of parchment dealing with the ill effects of Gregory’s Unctuous Unction only a fortnight ago, because Professor Snape had not yet erased the board by the time she had arrived at class that day. One of the people, then, had sat in the very same room as she, just an hour or so earlier, and a year or so older.

She might have asked someone about which house had Potions when, if anyone could identify the owner of the handwriting, or if anybody had even noticed anything amiss as of late-such as the fact that Luna seemed physically incapable of looking for more than two-point-one-two seconds at the Slytherin table in the Great Hall, for some strange reason-but she did not exactly have any friends to whom she might pose such questions; she had no qualms about asking strangers, but strangers tended to laugh at or ignore her, and that was really no help at all. So as with many of the mysteries Luna encountered, she would have to solve this one herself.

Even with so many possibilities running rampant through her head, it never once occurred to her that, just as the questions were finding her of their own accord, the answers might very well be inclined to do the same.

As Luna hurried up to bed on the tenth of October, she worried she might be late. Curfew was only minutes away, and she still had several floors to climb; on top of that, she had not been back to her dormitory since leaving it that morning, due to the sudden appearance of some uncommonly fine weather, and so did not know offhand the answer to that day’s Ravenclaw Tower riddle. She never minded a difficult riddle, but if it took too long to puzzle out, and there was no one else around to ponder over it with her, she would most certainly be out of bed when she wasn’t supposed to be.

Readjusting the strap of her bag on her shoulder, Luna moved toward the tapestry she knew concealed a staircase that would take her to the fourth floor-a welcome shortcut when so little time remained. She brushed the tapestry aside, creating a space wide enough for her to slip through, and then she began the ascent.

It had been dark in the corridors at this point, the castle already settling down for a night of slumber, but the staircase, which was hidden by yet another thick tapestry at its peak, was so dimly-lit that she could hardly see her own hands before her. Pausing for a moment, Luna removed her shoes, shuffling them to one hand so that she could pull out her wand. She would need all of her senses if she was to make it up the staircase without hurting herself in her haste; bare feet always helped her better feel her way.

“Lumos,” she whispered to the blackness, and the tip of her wand cast a glow like moonlight on the stone walls on either side of her. Nodding in satisfaction, Luna continued on.

Then, because it had been waiting for her, her wand illuminated another stretch of stairs with a small scrap of parchment resting on one of them, its edges slightly curled. Momentarily, Luna forgot all about curfew. She climbed as quickly as she could until she reached the parchment-the parchment which she knew would contain another note, for they always found her when she least expected them, and she could see the familiar script slanted across its front. Her hand, pale as wandlight, reached out just as she ascended the last few steps separating her from her latest clue.

Luna stopped short. If she had been more prone to taking shortcuts, instead of the longer, usually more scenic routes, she might have remembered to jump over the trick step. Yet as she was not, her leg was now sunk calf-deep into the staircase, as if she had suddenly stepped off of a sandbar and into a bottomless ocean.

“Oh, my.” Luna sighed, set down her shoes, and began tugging at her leg. It would not budge-not out, at least, for she sunk in a little deeper. She strained with all her might. Her knee, now, was buried, and the lower part of her thigh. It was very uncomfortable, because of course only one leg had been captured, and her other had to extend out behind her in a sort of awkward splits to prevent her from feeling as if she were being pulled in half. Somewhere beneath the stairs, her leg had stopped meeting any resistance against it, and had begun to swing in the empty air of some unfathomable place.

Every effort seemed to make things worse.

Eventually, she began to debate between either doing nothing and seeing what came of it, and finding something else untried. Luna, who was somewhat passive but tended to avoid giving up, and who was usually calm, but had grown rather panicked as the trick step attempted to consume her, pointed her wand at her leg and attempted a Banishing Charm. The Charm hit something. She wasn’t sure what; her wand was still lit from before, and all the light concentrated on one point so close to her it made it difficult to see. For a few seconds, the entire castle seemed to hold its breath.

And then, just as she had seen the note being sucked down into the lake after an ill-fated slice of toast a few days prior, so did Luna find an unstoppable force pulling her into the step after the Banishing Charm, until she was once more enveloped in darkness, and falling through nothing and everything, and all that remained of her on the staircase was an old pair of shoes and a scrap of parchment that had snatches of a Potions essay on one side, and a single word in hurried letters on the other.

That word was: Help.

The fog had settled on the ground hours ago, and Pansy was still trying to pick her way through it. It made her uneasy, the way her feet disappeared in that unnatural swirl of grey and white cloud; the ground had been relatively even so far, but there was no telling when a large pit lie looming ahead, or a sharp rock jutted out just a little too much. For all she knew, she had been walking along the edge of a cliff this entire time. She would not know her misstep until it was too late.

She had felt calmer with Draco forging ahead beside her-someone else to help feel out the ground and warn of any dangers she herself had missed-but he was gone. At least when she had been frightened before, they had both been frightened; when they had held hands, as if sensing, somehow, an imminent separation, Pansy had felt him shaking, and she had felt a strange kind of bravery in the justification of her fear. If Draco was afraid, then she had a right to be, too. People called him a coward, and in truth, he did spook rather easily, but people didn’t know him, just as they didn’t know her. And besides, this was a steady fear; it was not the short, sudden terror of a monster jumping out at you from the bushes, only to discover moments later that it was really an enemy or a friend playing a joke. This fear was constant and real, one that sharpened the edges of the unknown world, because it was a world in which anything could happen.

What made it worse was that nothing really had happened. Not in the five days they had been there. There had been obstacles, of course: dangerous geography, a few tangles with rogue plants and enchantments.... These things had unnerved her. The silence, which pervaded almost everything; the sky, which never seemed to be anything but grey, even when the sun shone. In the five days since they had arrived, only one threat had remained constant, only one thing kept their hearts beating a little bit faster even after they had successfully avoided some scrape.

They could not get out.

They had decided together, after several minutes of arguing, that the best way to find an escape was to keep walking. If the realm was contrived of magic, it might simply run out; even if it wasn’t, they had got in, hadn’t they? Surely, there had to be a way out that they had yet to find. Staying in one place and shooting up sparks with Draco’s wand-hers had been lost on the journey there-had done nothing to help them, had only made their backs sore and their nerves twitchier as they started at every noise, their ears straining for the sounds of rescue.

But who, really, would rescue them? Surely none of their friends, who would rather protect their own expensive hides. Perhaps some were even glad that they had gone. The thought saddened her more than she had expected it to.

Then another thought occurred to her. Draco had been taken away from her, yes. But what if he had been rescued? What if he was safe at home by the fire, while she trudged ever onward through the fog, following their stupid plan until she kept on trudging over a cliff or died of hunger and exhaustion? What if he had been chosen to be saved, and she had been left behind, because she had not been worth the effort?

It was not very cold. There was no bite to the air, not in the afternoon, at least, because there was no wind-and there was no wind, because when the wind came, the fog swirled and left, and the fog had not finished toying with her. All the same, her arms prickled with gooseflesh beneath the sleeves of her robes, and she shivered, just once.

Pansy swept her eyes back and forth across the landscape, as she did when she wasn’t staring fixedly at her feet, worried what she might stumble across. Nothing seemed to have changed in all the hours she had walked, and indeed, she might have thought she had not moved at all had she not been able to look back and mark the dark silhouette of the tree-the only tree she had seen that day-under which she and Draco had spent the night, seed pods poorly transfigured into sleeping bags. It was only a tiny smudge behind her, a slightly darker grey than all the grey that surrounded her, but she was thankful to see it so far behind, at the same time she longed to be near it, so that it might once more break up the monotony of the plains. The fog stretched immeasurably in all directions, impossibly flat, not even sloping into distant mountains at its ends-as far as she could tell, it had no end. Even the ground beneath her feet, invisible as it was under the fog, lacked even the slightest incline of a molehill. Sometimes thin, sparse weeds tickled her legs, but they, too, were invisible to her.

Pansy reached into her robes and pulled out a water bag, raising it to her chapped lips. Draco had transfigured it for her-a river rock, this time-and she had filled it that morning in the small stream that had run past-and away-from the tree. But he had never been good at Transfiguration, and so the bag leaked sometimes, and at others, grew irritatingly heavy. Unlike Draco, Pansy had been rather skilled at Transfiguration, but she did not have her wand, and Draco’s refused to submit to her.

The water sloshed feebly in its bag. It was nearing empty. Not for the first time, Pansy wished the wind would pick up and clear the fog away, if only so that she could find another stream, or even a river. Maybe then, she thought, more out of frustration than serious intent, she could save herself the trouble of walking any further, and merely drown herself. It would probably be quicker than any fate she faced by carrying on. If she couldn’t keep herself under the surface long enough, at least she would get a bath out of the whole affair. Draco’s Cleansing Charms were even worse than his Transfiguration skills, and after being nearly murdered by a bar of soap, they had both agreed that moving about like a filthy Muggle was the safer-though ranker-option. Of course, there were no Charms or Muggle remedies that could cure hunger when there was no food to be found. Pansy’s stomach rumbled.

Finished drinking, she lowered the water bag, and froze. Something was moving toward her.

A Gryffindor might have tried to find a weapon in their environs-though their options would have been sorely limited-so that they could fend off any threatening newcomers. However, Pansy was a Slytherin for a reason, and her first instinct was not to fight, but to hide. It took her a moment, her eyes sliding frantically across the scenery, then back to the figure bobbing toward her, until she bothered to look down. She blinked at the fog for another moment more, at the way it swirled around the bottom of her robes, making it look as though she were floating instead of standing, and then dove down, hoping she wouldn’t manage to bash her head in upon finally locating the only rock in the prairie. Luckily, the ground was as bare here as it always was, and she encountered only a minute patch of hairlike grass as she flattened herself down into the dirt.

She remained there for what felt like hours, her cheek pressed against the damp, fragrant earth, her heart pounding in her ears, her fingers clenching and unclenching like a Kneazle clawing at the curtains, her eyes squeezed shut. Vaguely, she noted that her right side was wet, and that she must have landed on the water bag, causing it to burst, and that she didn’t care, as long as whatever had come for her went away.

Pansy waited, longer than she thought she probably needed to. Then, she took a deep breath, scrabbled up out of the fog, and opened her eyes.

And screamed.

The figure was right before her-they were almost nose to nose! This close, the shape was blurred, but she could see a long, wild fuzz of white-yellow hair-or fur, was it fur? The eyes that blinked back at her were wide-though not with surprise-and blue. Pansy leapt backward, and the figure leapt into focus.

“Oh, hello,” said Loony Lovegood pleasantly. “Did you find what you were looking for, under the fog?”

Pansy opened her mouth, but no words came forth. She could only gawp uncouthly at the familiar but wholly unexpected face. Loony watched her patiently. She had on her Hogwarts robes, too, though the sleeves were too short, and Pansy could see the cuffs of a striped shirt poking out from under them. She was carrying an over-the-shoulder bag that looked as if it might burst at the seams at any second.

“What are you doing here?” Pansy eventually managed.

“Hm,” said Loony. “Looking for you, I think.” A thoughtful expression crossed her face, and then her eyes grew-impossibly-wider. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Are you barefoot, too?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Pansy snapped. Help had come, perhaps, but in the form of a lunatic. She kicked one shoe-clad foot above the fog briefly. “Why would I be barefoot?”

“It’s very sensible,” said Loony simply, hitching up her robes to her knees and raising her own foot, which was, in fact, quite bare. She wiggled her toes at Pansy. There was a slight, irritated red ring around her calf, with just the hint of a few bruises forming. Loony did not seem bothered by this-as if she could be bothered by anything-and returned her foot to where it had been. “Your notes did find me,” she added.

Pansy felt she must have been in shock, because she seemed incapable of processing anything that was going on. “Notes?” she parroted.

Loony opened her bag, and began digging about in it, apparently searching for something. After a moment, she seemed to have found it, and withdrew a small, square notepad with a mottled brown cover. She regarded it fondly for a moment, and then flipped through a number of pages. When she came to a stop, she tapped the page, and held it out for Pansy to see. Involuntarily, Pansy took a step closer. There, arranged upon the white pages, was a veritable scrapbook of all the pleas for help she and Draco had attempted to send over the past five days-four, really, because they had not thought of the spell the first day; they hadn’t even been certain it would work. Draco had claimed his mother had shown him how to perform it when he had first turned eleven, but memories from that time were hazy, as Pansy well knew, lost amidst the distraction and excitement of preparing to leave for Hogwarts, and Draco hadn’t known whether he had remembered the spell correctly. Loony had written neat little labels under each attempt-Figure 1.1, Figure 3.2, Figure 4.7, and so on.

Automatically, Pansy reached into her robes and withdrew the remnants of half a roll of parchment-Draco’s essay on Gregory the Smarmy for Professor Snape, which was one of the only things he’d been carrying with him as he and Pansy had come out of the library and headed toward their common room. (Pansy, who procrastinated such assignments with fervor, had not had even that. Just her wand, which she had managed to lose, anyway.)

“The very same parchment,” Loony said, nodding to herself.

“So, what,” Pansy began, “you found these-notes, and-”

“Oh, they found me, actually.”

Pansy shook her head. “Whatever. So you got these notes, and, what, you thought you’d come to the rescue?” She tried to ignore the quiet trill of hope that had taken up residence somewhere in the pit of her stomach. Loony might have been a Ravenclaw, but that was no guarantee she would be able to help at all, much less perform a full-fledged rescue.

“You could see it that way, I think,” Loony told Pansy with another nod. “Though I hadn’t planned on rescuing anyone quite so soon. I was still collecting clues about who you might be when I fell through the stairs.”

Any other week, Pansy might have found this latter sentence utterly daft, but just then, it made more sense than she would have liked it to. “You mean, the stairs behind the tapestries between the second and fourth floors?”

Loony smiled, though Pansy didn’t think there was anything in that worth grinning about.

“Yes,” Loony confirmed. “I was on my way to Ravenclaw Tower.”

“We were coming down from the library.”

“Ah”-Loony’s eyes widened again-“I thought there might be two of you. I suppose Draco Malfoy must be here, too, then?”

“‘Suppose’?” Pansy demanded, shocked that her and Draco’s disappearance should be phrased as a mere casual musing. “What do you mean, suppose? Of course he’s here. Or at least, he was. Hasn’t the school been looking for us?”

Loony didn’t even pause to think of more a tactful wording. “Well, no,” she admitted. “No one’s even noticed you’re gone.”

Pansy’s vision swam as her eyes filled with tears that threatened to spill down her cheeks. Quickly, she turned her back to Loony so that she wouldn’t be caught. She had known that her friends wouldn’t be quick to dash after her and Draco in a blaze of glory-or even a slow, glorious burn, as was the more Slytherin way-but she had still expected them to be worried about her. Even if they wouldn’t come themselves, they would still be bothered enough by her absence to send someone more suitable to look for her. Pansy could be cruel, but those who laughed with her were her friends, she had thought, and those who did not laugh at all were the ones they always laughed at, the ones who could never be her friends, because they were targets. Had those friends never been her friends at all? Had they merely laughed with her because it gave them free range to bully others without being the instigators, without being the ones who would get blamed? Surely, surely, they would at least have noticed?

And what about Professor Snape? He was their Head of House. Everyone knew he favored Draco. Certainly, even if he cared not a whit for her, Professor Snape would come after them both for Draco’s sake, for Draco’s safety. Pansy grew cold again. What if he had come for Draco? What if that was why Draco was gone? It became more and more difficult to fight back her tears, like one of the pathetic first-years she enjoyed hassling when there was nothing else to do. Was stupid, Mudblood-loving Dumbledore going along with it, too, because he thought this was what she deserved? A tiny sob escaped her, and she nearly punched her fist into to her own mouth to bar the way for anymore that wished to follow it.

Suddenly, she felt something light brush her shoulder, and then Loony was enveloping her from behind, her thin arms wrapped around Pansy gently, and her head resting against Pansy’s shoulder. Loony was warm, and smelled vaguely of mint.

“Please don’t cry,” Loony soothed. It sounded so much like a genuine entreaty that Pansy felt her lower lip quiver. “Everyone must be under a spell. It’s very puzzling that no one’s realized you’re missing, otherwise.”

“I’m not crying,” Pansy ground out, hoping the hitch in her voice was not as apparent as it had sounded in her head, and shrugged out of Loony’s grasp. Loony appeared not at all offended, which almost offended Pansy, in turn.

“How long have you been here?” Loony asked after a polite pause.

Pansy wiped her eyes, blinked, hard, and willed herself not to fall apart in front of the daftest human being she had ever met as she answered the question. “Five days. But Draco only disappeared a little while ago. Maybe an hour or two. We were walking, and then he just got... wrenched away. He kept going and going, like something was carrying him, and he was screaming, and I couldn’t-because my wand...” She stopped.

For the first time, the other girl looked vaguely worried. “Oh dear,” she said.

“What?” Pansy asked.

“I do hope that wasn’t my fault.”

“What?” Pansy repeated, this time as a snarl.

“I cast a Banishing Charm into the trick step as I was trying to escape-it had got hold of me very tightly, you see, and that’s where that mark you noticed on my leg came from; I believe it’s a tooth-mark, or it would be, if stairs had teeth-but I’m afraid I might not have aimed it as well as I would have liked.”

“And you...” Pansy felt her face heating to a red as deep as a Weasley’s-her mother would be so appalled. “And you-Banished him?”

Loony blinked at her. “I’m very sorry,” she said, and Pansy begrudgingly thought she sounded as though she meant it. “I didn’t intend for that to happen. I was very frightened, and about to fall a very long way. But don’t worry, I know how to find him again.”

“You had better,” Pansy snapped, and only half-wished she had kept the comment to herself.

As it turned out, Loony’s bag contained more than the odd logbook. In addition to housing her wand (Pansy had sighed in relief at that one), it also played host to an entire four-course meal-albeit a strange, Loony Lovegood-type one-packed neatly into a picnic basket that had clearly been Expanded to fit everything, as well as a handful of quills, a few books, a collection of Muggle flotation devices (Pansy had had to ask about these), and an extra shoelace.

“Loony, why does one person need so much food?” Pansy asked between bites of sandwich and gulps of pumpkin juice.

“I’d meant to have a picnic,” Loony replied, “as the weather was so nice, but it was rather too nice for me, and I fell asleep, instead. So I suppose the weather was nice for napping, too. And it’s lucky it was. It would have been rather wasteful if I’d eaten everything myself, and now I get to share.”

Though it, too, turned invisible under the layer of fog, Loony had insisted upon spreading out the checkered blanket that was also inside the basket-for which Pansy had secretly been grateful, after finding dirt all down her front, hair, and cheeks. While Pansy ate greedily, Luna pulled her robes over her head, revealing the blue, white, and red-striped shirt Pansy had seen hints of before, and a pair of pale purple trousers that clashed with it terribly and only extended to the knee. The robes folded themselves neatly and packed themselves into Loony’s bag while Loony pulled her hair back with an elastic. It didn’t do much-the elastic. Her hair still clouded around her face and down her back, perhaps more determined than ever to avoid being tamed. She lifted up her wild ponytail, fanned the back of her neck once, and then, seemingly satisfied, abandoned the effort, and withdrew her wand.

“Accio Draco Malfoy!” she called out into the fog plain. Nothing happened. If Draco were in this place at all, he was definitely out of range. Pansy glared at Loony for once more getting her hopes up.

“I thought I should try,” Loony explained in response to Pansy’s look. “There’s never any harm in trying, unless of course you’re facing a flock of Migglewumps, and then you shouldn’t try at all, because they feed off the energy of intended actions. Not trying keeps them quite perplexed.”

Pansy ignored this small pearl of wisdom, returning the topic to Draco. “You can still find him, can’t you?”

Loony nodded, little frizzy hairs bobbing with her, as if she had a head of soft, tiny snakes that agreed with everything she said. “There are many ways of finding someone,” she replied. “Some of them are even quite easy, and always tend to work. I know just the right one to find your friend. Could I have Draco’s Potions essay, please?”

It was taking Pansy a while to grow accustomed to Loony’s odd way of speaking-the way she flowed from one coherent thought to another without any pause or attempts at transition. After registering the direction in which their conversation had turned, Pansy set down her apple and produced the essay. She handed it to Loony with only the slightest hesitation, reasoning that there was really no reason to hold onto it, now that Loony seemed to have unwittingly dumped a sackful of supplies into their laps.

With a word of thanks, Loony began smoothing out the parchment, tracing the torn edges with the tip of her wand. “Draco still has the other half, doesn’t he?” she asked. Pansy assumed he did. Loony nodded. “Good.”

When she began to murmur something quietly to herself, Pansy’s curiosity got the better of her. “What are you doing?” she inquired.

Loony beamed at her, seemingly delighted that she had been asked. “This is very nice parchment,” she began explaining, rubbing a corner between her fingers, “but also modern. That means it hasn’t been made out of animal skin. It uses tree skin instead. It’s rather more like paper, really.”

“Trees don’t have skin,” Pansy interrupted, a bit unnerved by the idea-which was accompanied by rather grotesque mental images.

“Oh, yes they do,” Loony assured her. “It’s just different from ours, and far less painful to remove. Parchment like this uses special tree skin, though, usually from wand trees. Of course, all parchment made from wand trees is always a little bit magic. It’s also quite exclusive, which means a piece of this kind of parchment always wants to stay together. If I access that want, this piece will lead us straight to Draco’s piece, as it will be the nearest.

She rustled about in her bag, and once more retrieved her logbook. “It’ll be wanting to have a sniff at these first, though,” she said. “Or else, when I cast the spell, it will go straight to them, and they’re already here, so they won’t help us much. Anyway, it would be rather rude not to reassure the parchment first that there are already pieces of it safe, don’t you think?”

“Erm,” said Pansy, who was feeling rather incredulous about the whole thing. “Sure.”

Loony smiled at her again, and Pansy felt rather warm. “People say Slytherins are rude, but I think everyone is rude sometimes, really, and polite sometimes, too. It just depends. You see? You’re a Slytherin, and you were polite just now.”

“Erm,” said Pansy again. She wasn’t certain of what she had been just now, though ‘polite’ would definitely not have made the top of the list. “How do you know all this stuff?” she asked, attempting to change the subject back to what it had been. “I mean, about the parchment?”

“Oh, Daddy runs The Quibbler.” Loony took to the new subject happily enough. “He’s very particular about what we print on. He wanted to use this kind, but it was too expensive, so we mostly use the kind that’s been transfigured from sticks and stones, and all that sort. Sometimes we find dirt or sand in the folds, but that’s usually only from a poor batch, and we make sure to return what we can.”

“That’s...” Pansy struggled for the right word.

“Mm, yes, isn’t it?” Loony agreed, disregarding the unfinished nature of Pansy’s thought, and shifted her attention back to the task at hand.

A few murmured incantations and encouraging pets later, the parchment began to vibrate ever so slightly, emitting a sound like a trio of lazy honeybees. Loony held her open logbook under what Pansy assumed must have been its nose, and swore she heard it take a few delicate sniffs before Loony closed the book again. Then, suddenly, its vibrations seemed to increase violently, and its honeybee hum instantly transformed into the angry roar of a hornet swarm.

“What’s happening?” Pansy demanded, alarmed.

“I think it’s time we packed our things,” Loony replied evenly.

And she was right, for no sooner had the picnic basket been nestled into her bag and its strap slung over her shoulder, than the parchment gave an impatient squeal, and Loony quickly took Pansy’s hand; faster than it took for either of them to blink, there came a loud bang, and they all seemed to wink out of existence.

Upon his unanticipated departure from Pansy and the fog plains, Draco had found himself in a desert. He had thought, as he sailed through the air, pulled along by some force that seemed to start at his navel and travel through his body, extending out of his back and to the other side, that the temperature had seemed to rise, and that the blurred surroundings were becoming less and less grey, but he hadn’t realized just how different a place it was to which he was being taken until he had been deposited onto the hot sand.

Everything was orange-including the sky, which was ablaze in a fiery sunset that hurt his eyes too much to look at.

Everything hurt, too. His palms, where they had lingered too long upon the sun-baked sand, felt raw, and tingled uncomfortably, even after he had cradled them delicately against his chest for nearly an hour. His stomach ached, as if the force that had brought him there were still pulling on him like a spear passed clean through his gut, shooting periodic bursts of pain through him. Even his bones felt as if they were creaking with the effort to move. And his throat-he felt as if it were as dry as parchment, full of the dust and sand that stretched on in endless abandon.

He had never thought (in the few days he had known of it, at least) that he would long for the oppressive grey and cold of the fog plains, but now, lost in this stretch of dead nothingness, he held the image of them in his mind as he might his own home.

Home. His throat felt tighter.

What he would not give to be there now. Though not, of course, before a thorough bath-if he were to turn up at his own front door looking as he did now, his father would surely turn him away as if Draco were a common street urchin, half-mad and seeking shelter. One or two always managed to get past the wards on the manor, which was never a pleasant affair to handle. Draco could imagine the disgusted sneer on his father’s face, the harsh grey glint of his mother’s eyes behind him in the foyer, both convinced he was nothing but fetid vermin.

Draco shuddered under the heat of the sun. He had had nightmares of that very nature on numerous occasions, though they occurred most often when he was at his most stressed. At times he woke, gasping out into the middle of a cold night, and would fumble about in the dark until he found one of his mother’s letters. If anyone saw him and said a mocking word about it in the morning, he would hex them silly. And had done, in fact. People could be quick learners if given the chance.

Draco smirked, despite everything that had happened. He waited a moment for Pansy to inquire after the joke, so that he could recount an incident with Crabbe, but then he remembered. His stomach clenched. Pansy was gone.

Though he had no siblings at home with whom to keep company, Draco had never grown accustomed to being alone. Someone-usually his mother, or that accursed house-elf, but sometimes his father, too-had always been there to look after him as a child. He had not had playmates; but at the very least, he had had company. At Hogwarts, he was constantly flanked by Crabbe and Goyle, and Pansy was never far behind them. They were awfully loyal, for Slytherins.

He could use their unfathomable sense of loyalty now. Or some company, at the very least. He did not want to be alone when rescue came-and he was certain that some would, soon. She would never abandon him. Not really, no matter what he dreamed. She had promised this would work.

As if somehow hearing his thoughts, two rather large objects suddenly somersaulted out of the sky and onto the ground before him. There was no time even to scream or panic-he simply stood there frozen, aghast as the bodies (they were bodies, he saw) continued to roll about. Would they attack? Perhaps. In all the days he had been here, alone or otherwise, no great beast had lain siege upon his person. Yet perhaps this strange, horrible world was changing its tactics. Nasty thing. His shaking fingers searched for his wand, but in his fright, it was taking him too long to locate it. The bodies began to rise out of the clouds of sand and dust.

Then, he noticed that one of the bodies had long, white-blonde hair. For a moment, his heart leapt. She had found him! Lowering his wand, he nearly cried out to her.

Nearly.

He was soon glad he had not, for at once, the dust began to clear, and he saw to whom the hair belonged. His heart sank. It rose only a little when he recognized the second figure, even though he was infinitely glad to see her.

Pansy dusted off her robes, seeming very put out. If she was still hoping to be clean in this place, she was fighting a losing battle. She looked an absolute fright. Lovegood waited beside her politely.

“Hello, Draco,” Lovegood said. “I’m glad we found you, then.”

Pansy stopped mid-dust. Her head jerked up, and her eyes darted to him, widening. (Admittedly, his heart did rise a bit more when he took in her expression, though he would never admit it.)

“DRACO!” she cried. She launched herself not at Draco, as he had expected, but Lovegood, whom Pansy kissed full on the mouth for a half second.

“Er,” Draco said, before she kissed him, too. She had almost danced between the two of them, her feet moving with joy as if of their own accord. Draco felt himself flushing as she pulled away and grinned at him, her face uncharacteristically pretty without its usual sneer or simper. He might have stared at her and her peculiar behavior for a long while, had there not been something even more peculiar and troubling to occupy his attention. For Draco was not smiling, and Pansy soon seemed to realize this. Her grin faded, and she pursed her lips, her cheeks reddening slightly.

“What is it?” she asked, trying to thread her fingers through his. His hand felt limp.

He knew he should not feel so disappointed, and yet... Loony Lovegood was not who he had expected.

“I don’t understand,” he said at last. “Why is she here? I thought it would be...” He flushed again.

“What?” Pansy prompted when he did not continue.

He nearly kept the answer to himself. Nearly. They could blame his reluctance to speak on heatstroke, if they wanted. He studied the ugly-looking plant some ways off to his right. It looked as if it had arms, but it was covered in spines like a dangerous coat of fur.

Then his shoulders slumped. This was one occasion where lying would not help him. “Mother... She said...” He cleared his throat. “She said, with the spell, my notes would find her when I needed her the most. That’s what she told me.”

There, now. Let them do with that what they would. Draco looked defiantly from one girl to the other.

“I suspect the spell is meant to find the person you need the most,” Lovegood mused aloud, speaking for the first time since her greeting. “Only, I suspect you must need me the most right now, and not your mother.”

“Why would we need you?” He ignored the odd look that Pansy gave him at this.

“I don’t know,” Lovegood replied evenly. “I do have food, but I hope that I can help in other ways, too. It’s lovely here, but I don’t think I’d like to be stuck here forever.”

Draco was peering at her sharply now. His stomach had begun to gurgle at the mention of food, but he hoped that it wouldn’t be loud enough to hear. It certainly sounded loud to his own ears, embarrassingly so. After a moment, he realized that his mouth was hanging open hungrily, and his cheeks colored violently as he snapped it shut. Lovegood’s smile was kind, and that made it even worse.

“But you haven’t any idea how to actually get us out,” he snapped at her. “You brought us food, but no escape. If you’d done that, I’d have been able to acquire my own fare, instead of relying on the charity of the partially-insane. You shouldn’t have even bothered to find us until you knew you could accomplish something more useful!”

Lovegood’s expression never wavered, and when she spoke again, her voice was pleasant. “Sometimes I find that too much sun makes me less agreeable than I’d normally be. I think perhaps you might be the same way. It must have been very hard for you to stay here by yourself for so long. You must be nearly out of water.”

At his sides, Draco’s fists clenched, though his throat gave a painful rasp at Lovegood’s reminder. He was about to think of something particularly nasty to shoot back at her when something smooth was thrust into his stomach, causing his eyes to bulge with surprise and his hands to fumble out of their hold.

“Shut up, Draco,” Pansy snapped. “Whatever you were going to say, just shut up, and have a drink.”

Somewhere deep in the back of his mind, Draco supposed that perhaps Lovegood didn’t entirely deserve his condemnations, but it was a seed very deeply planted, indeed, and his thoughts were now more occupied with the fact that what Pansy had shoved at him was a canteen of water. The unscrewing of the canteen’s lid and the downing of nearly all of its contents succeeded in washing away only some of his misplaced anger.

While he ate, they walked, and while they walked, Pansy and Lovegood told him everything they knew of their circumstances, including some bizarre lesson on parchment that Draco only half-understood, and only faintly remembered from many years before. It was the sort of thing his father would have lectured him on had he happened to pass his father’s study at an unfortunate time, and which Draco, for all that he respected his father, would have duly ignored. He only paid attention to Lovegood’s rendition because Pansy had made it quite clear beforehand that this was how they had come to find him, dropping out of nowhere to be presented right at his feet. When Lovegood backpedaled in her story to explain how he and Pansy had got separated in the first place, even Pansy did not protest his grumblings.

“But I think,” Lovegood continued, raising her voice just enough to make herself heard over them both, and the scraping sounds their dragging feet had begun to make upon the sand, “that we might be able to use the same idea for getting around, ourselves. We’ll have to be careful, of course. It would take an awfully long time for us to find each other again.”

Pansy stopped, wiping her brow furiously under her fringe. The intensity of the sun hadn’t lessened since they’d started walking together, so that even Lovegood’s flyaway thicket of hair, tied up in an elastic as it was, was sagging despondently around her ears. “You want to Banish us, you mean?” Pansy asked hurriedly, sounding horrified at the thought. Draco was glad he wasn’t the only one with such sentiments. He liked Pansy very much, and he knew that she liked him just as well; but in this horrible new world in which they were trapped, Pansy seemed to trust Lovegood’s direction rather than his own. If Pansy had agreed with Lovegood, there would have been nothing to stop her from the idiocy of attempting to Banish herself, indubitably bringing herself (and perhaps the others, especially Draco) to harm.

“There’s no way to control a Banishing Charm like that,” he interjected, just as Lovegood was about to speak. “It’s not meant to be used on other wizards.” He distinctly remembered hearing about Longbottom’s accidental Banishings of Flitwick, but clearly, that wasn’t how things were supposed to be done.

Perhaps Lovegood was thinking of the same incident, because she said, “But it can be, clearly. Should and shouldn’ts are a bit different here, anyway, don’t you think?”

He could see Pansy biting her lip, and knew at once that all reason was about to be lost. Pansy caught his glare, and glared back.

“Well, think about it,” she huffed. “We couldn’t see anyplace else except the fog plains until Loony’s stupid spell brought you here. Now we’re all here, we can’t see anyplace else, again. It’s as if we’ve got to... to hop from place to place, or something.”

Draco sneered at her. “And there’s no better way to do that, is there?”

“Is there?” Lovegood echoed, expectant. “I’d like to hear it, please.” Pansy’s glare fell away to reveal a blatantly hopeful expression.

Draco struggled to think of something, but in the end, he couldn’t.

Neither Pansy nor Draco would allow Lovegood to be the one to cast the charm, but Lovegood, of course, didn’t seem to mind. Draco didn’t think she minded anything-or anyone, for that matter-and that made her even more unnatural than he had already thought her to be. Since Pansy had lost her wand, the task at hand fell naturally to him, which made him only a little nervous, loath though he was to show it. After some argument-or, on the part of Lovegood, a few mildly-intoned suggestions-they decided to form a circle of sorts, linking their arms together. They had wanted to hold hands at first, but obviously, Draco needed one free to grasp his wand, and that would have weakened their chain. They spent a few minutes debating which direction they ought to go, but that didn’t seem to matter very much, considering all directions looked the same. It made sense to continue the way they were going, but what good it would do, no one ventured to guess.

Perhaps a quarter of an hour had passed by the time they were standing in position, Draco with Pansy on his left, and Lovegood on his right, and Pansy and Lovegood linked together to complete the circle. Lovegood’s back was precisely in the direction they meant to go, which meant that sending her backwards would, theoretically, bring them all along. Or so they hoped. There were still many doubts circling about them like desert winds, even from Lovegood, who looked less certain than Draco had seen her yet. He liked to think that it was because, if their circle didn’t hold, Lovegood would be the one separated from them, as she had done to Draco.

Squinting against the glare of the sun off of Lovegood’s hair, Draco secured his hold on the girls, locking his elbows rigidly into place, and turning awkwardly so that he could point his wand straight at Lovegood’s chest. For a moment, he saw her eyes flicker with something, and for a moment, whatever it was made him feel slightly guilty. But then, he squared his jaw resolutely, and cried, “Depulso!”

The sensation of being Banished was just as it had been before, but when he, Pansy, and Lovegood straightened themselves out of their jumbled pile, they soon discovered that they were nowhere near the desert-nowhere near anything familiar at all. This world, whatever it was, seemed to do nothing by halves.

From the ground, it appeared as if there were a straight line of sticks jammed into the dirt. Their ends were not sharpened into points, and so they couldn’t be meant to fortify anything, however small. Nor had any branching twigs or leaves been trimmed from them, making it look as if a bored but meticulous child had made an afternoon of collecting whatever detritus he could find and making it into the only structure of which he was capable. When they stood, however, Draco saw that he had been mistaken. While the tallest of the sticks reached only midway up his calf-and even then, these were so few that most would have just surpassed his ankles-there was more to them than a simple straight line. The line had only been the beginning, and even that extended off to their right until Draco could just spot what looked like a gap wide enough for a person to shuffle through without lifting his feet. For beyond that gap-which could only be an entrance-was the most enormous maze he had ever seen. Like the fog plains and the desert, it was as if it stretched indefinitely toward the unseen edges of the world.

At least, it was until he strained his eyes, and saw, far across the maze, a definite end: a long, straight wall of sticks, broken only for a gap parallel to the one nearest them. The distance was impossible to gauge. Beyond the wall, there was something dark and possibly quivering, but its ends he could not detect, either, no matter how long he looked. Even Lovegood had no suggestions about what it might be.

“Do we walk across it?” Pansy asked, returning their attention to the maze. The paths within it, twisting and turning as they were, as short as their boundaries were, were distinctly human-sized. It reminded him of the stone maze he had once seen at the manor of one of his mother’s friends at some banquet or other; made entirely of shining river rocks, it had been arranged in the center of the vast gardens for some purpose he hadn’t been able to divine. He supposed it had been for decoration, though Draco-and his mother-had thought it ugly. Was this maze also for decoration, or did it hold some hidden purpose?

They approached the nearest wall, and stretched out their hands for balance so that they could step over it without scraping their legs and feet-though only Lovegood had to be truly careful. The moment Pansy’s shoe passed over the tops of the sticks, however, the sticks began to shimmer. At once, the three stepped back as if they had been bitten, which was lucky, because suddenly, the sticks began to elongate. They seemed to strain at their bases for a moment, and then they thickened and grew; as they grew, some began to curve around the others, so that in a few minutes’ time, Draco, Pansy, and Lovegood were facing what looked like a forest. But the sticks hadn’t become trees, precisely, for there were no gaps between them, and they still presented a perfectly straight line. He could see where one tree-like protrusion began and ended-and could see, now, that the sticks had come from a collections of different trees, ones which could not normally be scattered about in the same place-but it was as if they were fused together. They had become an impenetrable wall.

With only a glance between them as a means of communication, Draco and the others set off at a run toward where they had seen the gap in the sticks only minutes before. Despite her bare feet, and the odd black rocks that littered the ground, Lovegood reached the maze’s entrance first. By the time Draco caught up to her, she was standing in the entrance, half-hidden by the wall. Her hand shaded her eyes, though there was no harsh sun to cause her to do this. In fact, though it was perfectly light, there seemed to be no source to it. Draco paused in his step to crane his neck around and glance about the sky, but there was nothing. The sky itself was the palest of blues, almost white, and there were no clouds. Except for the maze wall, there were no trees to pierce it, either. He tried to look behind him to see what lie opposite the maze, since as far as he knew, it only extended out in front of them, but for some reason, he could not. His neck seemed to ache dully the more he tried to turn it, and his eyes kept darting forward of their own accord. The more he wished to see what lay at their backs, the more he became aware of a faint buzzing in his ears that sounded less angry than chastising. Because it frightened him, he decided to ignore it, and came beside Lovegood and Pansy, who had reached her first.

It was strange to stand in such a looming, impressive gateway, and to look beyond it and see the same, ankle-high sticks that had been there before. Clearly, only the wall Pansy had touched had grown. He wondered if all of the walls were like that. Before anyone could stop him, he reached down and grasped one of the black stones. It was impossibly smooth and round, and felt cooler in his palm, cooler even than the tepid air. It reminded him, somehow, of the Golden Snitch, a feeling which was strangely reassuring. He drew back his arm, and threw the stone as far as he could into the maze.

“What are you doing?” Pansy squeaked.

The stone hit a cluster of sticks a good distance off-too good, Draco secretly thought, as no one’s arm was truly that strong, least of all his. Without the slight hesitation there had been the first time, the wall that had been struck rose up to match the height of the one by which they now stood.

“It should be easy, then,” Lovegood said, “as long as we don’t touch anything.”

“We didn’t touch anything last time,” Pansy pointed out, “and that thing still rose up.”

“Oh, I suspect some of the walls are invisible.”

Draco snorted. Pansy did as well, but sounded less certain about it than he. Lovegood, as usual, seemed not to notice a thing, and, straightening her shoulders, stepped all the way into the maze.

Pansy did not notice that Loony was gone until she saw the expression on Draco’s face. His brows were furrowed, and his small mouth somehow looked even smaller as it hung slightly agape like a door on an old hinge. The change had been sudden; she would have sworn, only a second before, that he had been laughing at Loony alongside her. (Or rather, she alongside him. After she had discovered that none of her friends, those with whom she had always tormented others, those with whom she had always jeered and laughed, had not noticed her absence, the idea of constantly poking fun at Loony had become dull and unappealing, even tired. Loony was convinced that there was some sort of spell at work, preventing anyone from noticing two missing students, but a part of Pansy simply wouldn’t believe her.)

She reached out tentatively, and brushed his sleeve with two fingers. Draco barely acknowledged her touch, and to her tremulous queries, he only replied, “She’s gone.”

Fear gripped her-fear, she thought, that was not entirely for herself. She was so very tired of being afraid.

“She can’t have gone through, can she?” she asked. “We’d see her, wouldn’t we?”

Draco stared at her. “I don’t know,” he snapped, suddenly sounding cross. “Stop asking stupid questions. It’s not helping anything!”

He looked so badly shaken that she almost forgave him for being angry with her. But Draco was never angry with her or at her, never cruel. They had never before been immersed in a situation that had stretched them both so thin, that had tried their patience so wholly, and set their every nerve on end; but Pansy had never thought for one moment that there was anything in the world-or any other world, for that matter-that would cause him to speak to her in such a way. Her lip quivered, and she looked away from him. If there was any remorse in his face, she didn’t care to see it.

“Pansy-”

“Don’t,” she told him flatly, still not looking at him. Heart thumping painfully, as if it were made of lead, she marched into the maze.

As if she had just Apparated out of nowhere, or had removed a particularly efficient Cloaking Spell, Loony was abruptly quite visible. She stood only a few feet away, but had to have walked a while, because there was already one of the ridiculously tiny stick walls between her and Pansy. Pansy wanted to hug her with relief, but thought better of it immediately.

And after all, if she reached her arms over the wall, she would probably be impaled by rapidly-growing tree-things.

“Hello, Pansy,” Loony said. “Did you know, I couldn’t see you at all once I’d crossed into the maze. It’s nice you decided to come in. It’s so quiet, have you noticed?”

Pansy hadn’t, and said as much, but now that Loony mentioned it, she realized that it was true. When she spoke, it was as if she were breaking something, doing something unnatural. The air did not feel heavy against her ears, though, pressing into them as some silences did. She did not want to call it comfortable, because it wasn’t, but neither was it uncomfortable. Nevertheless, it made her shiver.

“Draco thinks you’ve gone,” she announced, trying to shake the feeling of the silence and the aftereffects of Draco’s rudeness like water from her ear. Speaking didn’t help much, but she didn’t care. At least she hadn’t started crying. That would have been unbearable-especially as Loony wouldn’t have made fun of her for it. It was bad enough that Loony had walked back through the maze and was reaching out to touch Pansy’s arm. Pansy allowed herself to enjoy it for a very short moment before shrugging away.

“I think I should tell him I haven’t,” Loony resolved. “I don’t want him to worry.”

Pansy couldn’t help it. “He’s not worried about you,” she snapped.

Loony didn’t look hurt, and Pansy was almost glad of it. “No,” she said. “But he is worried.”

Part Two