CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR;

THE THREE D'S OF APPARATION

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

Due to Snape's suspicions about Cassie's friendships with Neville, Ginny, and Luna, Cassie was forced to communicate with the three of them in privacy or using brief, coded letters in case someone deplorable intercepted them – which made it difficult when her birthday came by.

   Neville attempted to gift her some sort of plant, but after a strict glare from Professor Carrow directed in Cassie's direction, Neville cleared his throat and pretended as though he had merely been attempting to place his potted plant on the windowsill behind Cassie.

   She received no birthday gifts or well wishes for her seventeenth birthday, but nothing anyone could have given her would have been better than the assurance that she could now use magic outside of Hogwarts – meaning she didn't have to return after the Christmas holidays.

She could return to Moony – to Tonks, and Mrs. Weasley, and Fred and George – all of the Order members. Perhaps even Ron, if he had safely returned home.

   It had been nearly two weeks since Phineas Black had revealed in front of Cassie that Ron had split from Harry and Hermione, leaving the both of them alone on their hunt for Horcruxes. Cassie had done her best to explain what she knew to Neville, though she doubted he understood a word of what she was saying – it was beyond difficult to describe Harry and Hermione's quest without giving away the fact that they were searching for Horcruxes.

   Christmas holiday was creeping up on the students of the bleak school with surprising speed – and with it; the shivery, harsh winter weather that forced everyone indoors lest they wanted to be freezing their arses off in the courtyards. The Three Broomsticks wasn't an option to warm up with a bottle of butterbeer in, as the students of Hogwarts were forbade from visiting Hogsmeade. Cassie rarely even left her dorm when she didn't have to.

Had she been only a little bit more focused on herself, she would have realized how similar her routine was to that of when she had been grieving the losses of her friends and family: Little to no sleep every night, unfocused in classes (at least, unable to focus until one of the Carrows regained her attention with a Cruciatus Curse), invasive thoughts boring into her mind and providing unwanted anxiety.

But she wasn't focused on herself anymore. She was focused on Dumbledore's Army, that had been reinstated behind her back – she wasn't too upset about it, as she couldn't have been involved anyways – but she provided support for those rebellious enough to join. She was focused on Ron and spent her late nights worrying whether or not he had made it home, or wherever he was going, alright. She lost sleep fretting about Hermione and how difficult it must have been, not knowing where her own parents were or if they were still safe.

   Mostly, though, Cassie's mind found itself wandering to Harry. The Boy Who Lived. Cassie knew Harry – she knew him well enough to know he would be worried about all of these things, along with the Horcruxes and the war and all those other things he had to deal with while on the run.

   Cassie hoped against all odds that Harry was safe, but found even herself second guessing her own wishes; because who was really safe anymore?

   She spent all of her days worrying recently. In her bed at night, tossing and turning; in the library, usually poring over a thick book that her brain refused to retain any information from; sitting at the Slytherin table in the Great Hall, staring at her food but not moving to force any into her mouth out of fear that if she opened it, she would spill her guts across the plate.

Now she sat in the library with her face in her hands, her forehead pressed against the bare parchment on the table before her. Too long had she pored over this essay topic, unable to force herself to find the motivation and touch the tip of her quill to the paper. Astronomy had always been one of the easiest classes to come to Cassie – she had always been fascinated with the stars – but she simply couldn't complete this essay.

Perhaps she had dozed off for only a moment or two, but it felt like she had been asleep for hours when there was a gentle shaking of her shoulder. When she did not open her eyes immediately, the shaking grew more aggressive, until she nearly fell from the chair she sat in. Cassie startled awake, catching her quill from fluttering off the desk and removing her wand from its position of being stuck to her cheek.

Blinking the sleep from her eyes and tucking her hair behind her ears, she mumbled, "Hullo–?"

"Victoire!" Pansy's voice was splitting as ever, drilling a loud hole into Cassie's tired ears. "What are you doing?"

"I was napping," she replied quietly, rubbing her eyes. "What d'you want?"

"I had a question." Cassie waited, but Pansy did not continue and instead began to inspect her black nails. Cassie cleared her throat. Pansy looked back to her, then pressed her palms to the table before Cassie. "I was wondering..." She exhaled a deep breath through her nose as if this question were one that took a great toll on her. "I was wondering if you were going to return home for the holidays."

Cassie blinked, her lips parted in a quippy response that died on her tongue. She drew in a short, breathy huff. "Why do you ask?"

"Daphne made me."

"Ah." Cassie nodded. "If you must know, I was planning on visiting a friend this Christmas."

"What friend?"

"Does it matter?"

"Of course."

"You don't know them." The conversation picked up in tempo, both girls firing back replies even before the other could close their mouth.

"I bet I do."

"It's a family friend."

"Just tell me!" Pansy's voice had gone from suspicious to whiney in a span of two seconds. Cassie winced.

"It doesn't matter," she repeated, rolling her eyes. "Why were you asking in the first place?"

"Daphne thought... Well, I thought you didn't have any friends to spend the holiday with," Pansy said, "so Daphne told me to ask if you wanted to spend it with us."

"No," Cassie replied, a bit too quickly. Thankfully, Pansy didn't catch Cassie's face paling or her eyes widening in the slightest. "Yeah, I-I've got plans for the holiday. Thank you, though. Now, do you mind leaving me alone? I've got a headache and work to do."

Pansy hummed, removing her palms from the table and nodding. "Alright, then. If you say so."

"See you in class, Pansy," Cassie chimed, already returning her attention to the work before her, and ignoring the growing pain in her head.

"You as well," Pansy replied, and left from the library with a flourish of her tailored robes. Cassie watched her go for a moment before returning her attention to the parchments before her.

"'The House-Elves Enslavement Act of 1241,'" she recited from her textbook in a mutter, shaking her head slightly. If Hermione were here for this History of Magic assignment, she wouldn't have stood for it. In fact, she would have probably insisted Professor Binns give them an alternative assignment...

And just like that, Hermione was on the other side of the room; though it wasn't the library, like Cassie had just so previously been seated in – it was a dull, sleek-looking room made almost entirely of dark woods. The floors shone with polish, reflecting the figures that stood above them — and with a jolt, Cassie recognized nearly every one.

Narcissa and Draco Malfoy stood on the same side of the room as Hermione, shooting spells at the people fighting next to Cassie; Lucius stood to the side, his left sleeve rolled up and arm extended, ready to press his fingertip to the ink stained on his arm; Hermione, on the floor, looking absolutely ghastly; and, as Cassie turned her head, Harry and Ron fought next to her, casting spells at the Malfoys and trying to disarm Bellatrix.

In one fell swoop, the Dark witch dragged Hermione into her clutches and pressed a handsome dagger to her pale throat, deeper and deeper until a red bead of blood broke from her skin. A great roar of anguish came from Cassie's side and she turned to see Ron rush forward, only to be forced back as Bellatrix pushed the knife deeper into Hermione's throat.

"Drop your wands!" she cried hysterically. "Drop them! Draco, go pick them up! Now!" Draco did as he was told, collecting the wands hurriedly. Bellatrix grinned a mad grin. "Good, good  — now, Lucius, it's time to call the Dark Lord. He will be pleased that we have both of his pretties, yes?"

Harry and Cassie met eyes, a grim understanding passed between the pair of them. Both of them would sacrifice themselves if it meant Voldemort didn't get the other, even if it resulted in their own deaths. One could not let the other be taken.

   And Cassie was determined to be the one sacrificed for Harry.

   In the blink of an eye – the amount of time it took for Lucius to raise his finger toward the Dark Mark on his pale wrist – Cassie was back to present times, panting and clutching her wand tightly.

   Cassie had never perceived a vision that revealed so much of the future. Her mind reeled as she focused on each aspect at a time: They had, if she had to guess, been at Malfoy Manor – but whether or not they visited by choice was another matter. Ron had returned to be with Harry and Hermione some time in the near future, which brought Cassie to the bit of her vision that made her heart pound – she, herself, had also been there.

   She was going to reunite with them.

   And she didn't know how she felt about such a thought.

The part Cassie had told Pansy of Cassie going to a friend's house for Christmas holiday was true – to a certain extent.

She hadn't put much thought into her plans for the break. Obviously, she couldn't return home, as they all believed her to be dead. She had no business going home with Neville, unless she wanted both of them to be Cruioed into explaining why they spent the entire break together.

Her only option – the safest, out of all of them – was Grimmauld Place.

It, to her knowledge, hadn't been inhabited since her father had died and she left it for good. Of course, there was the possibility it had been taken over as a Death Eater hot-spot. Even still, Cassie couldn't stop her mind from spinning up questions, nearly all of which she was unable to answer.

Was Kreacher still there? Could she even get inside? Technically, since the estate was no longer Unplottable, could anyone stumble upon it? Did that make it unsafe?

   However, as she thought about it, the good weighed out the bad.

   Well, not really. The only favorable aspect to this arrangement was the fact that she literally had nowhere else to go. Grimmauld Place was her only option.

   So she signed the old parchment for the group of students leaving on the Hogwarts Express on the eighth of December, Victoire's name scribbled in formal yet messy cursive beneath Neville's signature and above Ginny's. And that was that – she would be leaving in a week to return to the last home she had known.

   The only problem now was Apparation.

   She hadn't taken the classes the year prior, as she wasn't of age, but Hermione had kept her up to date as much as she could. She usually provided Cassie with late-night rundowns of what they had done in Apparation lessons that day. From what Cassie had gathered, it was much harder than it seemed, and nearly everyone Splinched themselves at least once during their trials.

   Well, with no Mediwitch to handle her Splinchings nor an instructor to properly teach her, she was quite ill-fated. Luckily, she had found that the strict Apparation boundaries lifted during specific times in the night – when Snape or the Carrows had to report to Voldemort, she assumed. So, when the final lights in the Slytherin common room flickered out and the last lingering student had shuffled off to bed, Cassie stood squarely in the center of the green-clad room, shut her eyes, and focused on the Three D's of Apparation.

   Destination – across the common room.

   Determination – she poured all her focus into Apparating, her veins tingling with magic even before she had achieved the final D –

    Deliberation. She scrunched her brows together, inhaled a short breath, and willed her body to be where she had imagined it to be – across the common room, stood next to the armchair by the fireplace.

   There was an odd twisting sensation, then her gut felt as though it were ripped in half and her body was pulled to the other side of the universe. It was, quite honestly, the most odd sensation she had ever felt for a moment – and then she peeled her eyes open and found herself on the other side of the room from where she had begun.

   A sense of victory took over and she almost let out a soft laugh of achievement, before the pain registered and she winced, falling to her knees with a muffled thud. She almost couldn't tell where the stinging came from; not until she saw the blood, seeping into her robes.. Her stomach twisted again – the same sensation from before, except now it was due to the blood pouring from her shoulder.

   With a great effort, she peeled away her outer robes, leaving only the white shirt that had now been stained a deep red over her entire shoulder. Cassie inhaled through her teeth, trying not to cry out in pain, and twisted to get a better angle of her shoulder. 

   The pure white of her undershirt was tainted with the growing stain of deep red blood. The pain was almost unbearable.

   Cassie's uninjured arm searched the ground madly for her wand; when she found it, she lifted it and held it up to the Splinch. She opened her mouth, paused for a moment, and realized all of the Healing Spells she knew were to heal inner injuries like a broken bone or fractured rib.

   None that she knew would heal such a deep, physical gash in her shoulder.

   Cassie drew in another wince of pain, her blood splattered onto her hands and only spreading further as she watched. Panic grew – as did the stain on the rug beneath her – inside of Cassie. She couldn't heal her Splinch by herself, not with the limited catalog of Healing Charms she knew.

"Bloody hell," she exhaled, squeezing her eyes shut in a grimace as she shifted to a kneeling position. She lifted her wand to the wound once again and held it there for a moment. "Erm– Episkey," she decided after a hesitation. A faint trail of white light flew from her wand into the gash covering her shoulder – there came a feeble tingling sensation, though the spell didn't do much overall besides slightly lessen the pain. Cassie let out a short, labored breath. "Shit."

"Need a hand?"

Cassie nearly jumped – which, as a result, brought back a stinging prickle in her shoulder. She turned her head to face the stairs leading from the boys' dormitory, her stomach twisting at the sight of Blaise stood at the bottom step.

"I'm alright." She was lying right through her teeth; but she had to have been a somewhat good liar to get to where she was, so hopefully her tactic would work against Blaise–

"Right," he said, completely disbelieving, "because that's what an alright person looks like."

Cassie managed a grimace-looking smile and shook her head decisively. "Go back to bed, I'm alright," she repeated.

"What happened?" Blaise asked, only moving further into the common room. Cassie fought back a frustrated huff.

"Carrows caught me out of the dormitory past curfew." The lies were coming too easily to Cassie, and she hated it – yet also, at the look of belief on Blaise's face, a deep part of Cassie relished in the power of being able to bend anyone's sense of truth. "They decided I needed a 'punishment fit for such a disrespectful Slytherin.'"

   "Sounds like the Carrows," he allowed, and rounded the couch to kneel next to Cassie. "Have you just been bleeding out down here? You could have gone for help."

"I very much could not have," she countered, raising an eyebrow and glancing pointedly to the blood gushing from her shoulder. "In fact, just the movement of sitting up to greet you had me rendered light-headed for a moment."

"Let me help you to Madam Pomfrey," he said, moving to help Cassie stand, but she shook her head quickly. Blaise furrowed his brow. "What, you don't want to go?"

"What if the Carrows catch us out of bed after curfew? They've already gotten me once tonight. Besides, they hate me enough already – I really think they would kill me if they got the chance."

   "Fair point." Blaise clicked his tongue, then stood from his crouched position and moved back toward the stairs leading to the boys' dormitory.

   "W-wait, where are you going?" Cassie asked hurriedly, shifting painfully to a sitting position. Blaise turned and held out a hand, stifling a smug smile.

   "Relax," he told her. "I'm only going to get a... professional opinion."

   He disappeared up the stairs for only a moment – though to Cassie, it felt like hours that she waited in the darkness of the common room for Blaise to return. Shortly after he had left, the soft padding of feet on carpet sounded around the room and Blaise emerged from the stairs with Theodore at his heels.

   "You've brought Nott," Cassie observed, straining her voice to keep the pain out of it. "Not quite a 'professional,' is he?"

   "First of all, bloody ow," pouted Theo, and he followed Blaise to sit next to Cassie, gingerly avoiding the growing puddle of blood. "Secondly, Blaise needed my expert opinion on a 'hypothetical' injury, so I – in my good nature, of course – followed him."

   "Good-naturedly, or nosily?" asked Blaise, shoving Theo's shoulder. "The Carrows got her. I was thinking we could use those... spells.. we learned over the summer?"

   Theo nodded slowly, a solemn and unfamiliar expression on his face. "Yeah, that could work. You remember how to do it?"

   "Of course I do," replied Blaise coolly. "Do you?"

   "Can we hurry up with the cryptic responses?" Cassie cut in before Theo could open his mouth. "I'm in a bit of pain, if you can't tell, and I frankly don't care if you use your – your Death Eater voodoo shit on me. Just fucking help me, mates."

   Theo and Blaise shared a glance over Cassie, sharing words between the both of them in a silent look that Cassie wished she could interpret. Finally, after Blaise had lifted his wand on the cue of a small nod from Theo, they cast the spell.

   Cassie couldn't understand what they said even if she were in the right state of mind. It was a series of short mumbles from both boys resulting in a string of purple luminescent light cascading from the tips of their wands and into Cassie's shoulder, providing an immediate and shocking sense of relief to the pain. Cassie's eyes moved to her shoulder once the pain dissipated completely – the blood was almost entirely gone, leaving in its place a faint scar. Cassie's jaw popped open.

   "You learnt that from... from your Death Eater friends," she whispered, unable to lift the volume of her voice, "did you?"

   "You should get to bed." Blaise avoided her eyes as he stood and extended a hand to her, helping her stand. "It's late."

   "Goodnight, then." Neither Theo nor Blaise replied to her comment, both boys hurrying back toward their dormitory. Cassie bit her lower lip. Against her better judgement, she called after them, "Thank you for helping me."

   She hadn't expected either of them to acknowledge her, so it was a bit of a shock when Blaise paused in his tracks and turned back to face her. "Of course we helped," he said, his voice low. "You're practically family now."