The whispering trees knew where to dig down deep. They knew how to draw blood. They knew exactly where to strike for the greatest effect, how to drive the flesh insane, how to make it split itself apart. Wood was better than flesh. Wood didn't rot from the inside out of its own accord. Wood was stronger than flesh. Wood was more exquisite than flesh. Wood was more powerful than flesh...
And a stranger made of flesh and blood was walking in their woods.
Stranger angels, dangerous angels. They all follow me in the corner of my vision. Where are my angels, my dangerous angels of leather and lace, my dangerous angels I'm almost afraid to pray to, to want to love.
He told her sneeringly, "You have no family. You have no one but me. I'm all you've got. I'm all you've ever had. And I'm all you're ever going to have."
They were burning the Jezebel that lived down the street, the scent was on the air and there was no escaping it at all. The footsteps were coming closer, away from the dangerous angels, away from the dangerous angels.
What did she say all those years ago? What was she so afraid of hearing? "You have to look at yourself and decide what you want to do with yourself. Only you can make that decision. But I can tell you right now: your fears and your rages are only hurting you, making you much more self-destructive than you have to be. And you are doing this to yourself. You hurt yourself, as if you're setting yourself up to fail."
Make my dreams come true, and I'll be anything for you.
The dangerous angel is death.
The dangerous angel is dead.
The dangerous angel is here.
I know it, I know it, I know deep down where there is no knowing but knowing, there is no feeling but feeling. Something in me knows and there is something else in me that wants to drop down and worship the sky for not falling down all around me with the rest of it.
April is the cruelest month.
Just when you thought the hyacinths you were given would begin blooming again, there came a cold snap to kill them all dead. Just when you thought the lakes would stay frozen over, they broke, dragging you down deep to drown. Just when you thought it was safe to stand, the lightning would strike. Forests would burn down to the ground. The wind could whip the skin from off your bones.
And your heart could break and just stay broken.
Regina stumbled from the path in the sand and rolled to a stop near a riverbank. A little girl was there, dark hair in pigtails, her back to Regina. She was pulling petals from flowers, a small pile next to her, petals floating down the river.
“-he loves me not- - -he loves me- - -he loves me not- - -he loves me- - -he loves me not- - -he loves me- - -he loves me not-”
"Hi," Regina called, coming up behind the girl. The girl didn't bother to turn around, so Regina continued on as if she had. "I'm a little lost, and I'm not from around here. Can you point me to the heart of the Labyrinth?"
"The path is never the same, but the end result is the same," the girl said mournfully, tossing aside another empty flower head. She plucked up another flower, then began to pick the petals again.
"Why don't you start with ‘He loves me'?" Regina asked.
Now the girl turned. She had Regina's face and empty holes in her head for eyes. "Because he doesn't."
Regina ran in horror from the girl with no eyes to see, blindly down the path. For some reason, she was terrified, and couldn't control herself. A stack of empty, lifeless flowers and a river full of petals, a girl with no eyes to see, innocence lost, black hair in twin pigtails and such a mournful voice. The path was never the same, but the end result was the same.
Regina crashed into someone headlong, and he balanced her. “Severus,” she gasped, looking up into his sallow face. “Oh god, I can’t get out of here, I don’t know how. Please, Severus, please, help me...”
“I tell you this now, though you won't remember, and I tell you think in the hopes that you will someday, when you need it most. Not all is around you, not all is within you, not all is with you, not all is for you. But as much as you would love to think so, sometimes it's not to be, sometimes it's best not to be, sometimes it shouldn't be.”
“Severus, what are you talking about?”
He grasped her face between his palms. “I told you that you had no magic, that you were nothing special. I said you were useless and I never loved you, only used you.”
“Please don’t say that, please don’t...”
Snape let go of her. “You wanted the black egg, didn’t you? Or the Labyrinth? I can only show you one thing, one thing only.”
“What will help me?”
“Neither will get you out of the woods.”
Liar, liar... a voice said in the back of her mind. He knows the way out of the wood.
“Can you tell me how to get out of the woods?”
Snape’s face fell. “Not the easy way. I only know the hard way, and I don’t think you’re ready to go through it.”
No place else but to go through. “I’ll make it. I’ve taken on the world before.”
“I broke you.”
Regina sucked in a breath. She didn’t want to agree, but that was the truth of it, wasn’t it?
“I’m sorry,” Snape continued, looking past her. “I never meant for any of this to happen to you. It was never supposed to be this way.”
“How do I get out, Sev? Please.”
“It’s an accident you even got here. You should have stayed away.”
“I never do what I ought to do,” she replied, feeling an echo ring inside of her.
Snape reached into his robes and took out a black crystalline object. “This is the Black Egg, I’ve already taken it. I knew you would have wanted the unknown object. You always took the path less traveled. But it isn’t the way out of the woods.”
Regina took the egg. “I want to go home.”
“New York is far away from here, you know.”
She looked up, eyes brimming with tears. “You did more damage than you know.”
“I’m sorry. I never meant to.”
“It doesn’t matter what you meant to do, only what happened.”
“Sixteen years should have dulled the pain.”
“But it didn’t.”
There was nothing Snape could have said to that, so he remained silent.
“Show me the way out of the woods.”
With a sigh, Snape pointed to the river, floating petals away from them. “Follow the petals on the water. You’ll make it back in one piece.”
You promise? she wanted to ask, but knew better. Regina dropped a soft kiss onto his mouth, then began to walk.
***
Draco had meant to be alone with Regina, to see if he could try a healing spell he had learned from his father a few years ago. It was stronger than most spells used by mediwitches, and he was starting to think that her coma was magically induced. She had been under for three days now, with no change.
Snape was sitting at her bedside, one of her hands clasped in his. He had been concocting potions to try and heal her, but nothing had worked. Now he just sat there, talking softly, as if that would be the way to draw her out.
“I’m sorry. I never meant for any of this to happen to you. It was never supposed to be this way. It’s an accident you even got here. You should have stayed away.” Snape was stroking her palm lightly, his head bent and eyes closed. It looked as though he was trying not to cry. “I think I could have pretended it was all for the best if I hadn’t seen you again, seen what I did to you. I thought it was for the best... I was trying to avoid this. I didn’t want them getting to you, using you against me. They could have, you know.”
Draco tapped the door leading to the private room. “She probably wouldn’t have listened to you if you tried to tell her.”
Snape whirled around, face unguarded for a split second. “Oh. Mister Malfoy.”
“Professor. I wanted to try the Dragon Breath spell.”
“I’ve tried it already. It didn’t work.”
Draco felt himself deflate. “Oh.”
“Again.... This is something else she has to work out alone.”
“Do you think she knows we’re here?”
“I hope so.” He didn’t sound sure at all.
Draco watched as Snape tucked her hand back where it had been, and then bend down to kiss her lips. “Be safe,” Snape whispered, then left.
Draco sat down in the seat that Snape had vacated. “Well, the tireless threesome haven’t figured out what your potion is all about yet. They’re still looking, though they probably told you all about it already. Er... I’m cutting your class, sorry. I had my midterm yesterday, and Dumbledore said I did really well. You’d be proud of me, I think.” He was silent for a long moment, watching Regina breathe. “I thought I loved you that way. But Ginny... it’s like we know each other best. But I don’t... I don’t understand it. I really don’t know anymore, if I ever did. What does that mean when you love someone, anyway? Why does it hurt so much? My chest still hurts when I think of you.”
He put his head down on the bed next to her hand. “Just wake up soon, okay? We still need you here... Something’s coming, I know it. And those silly kids are going to jump right in, not knowing anything, and it’ll make you cry when you wake up. You need to teach them what to do, this magic is too hard.”
Draco heard the door open behind him, and he fell silent.
“How long have you been here?” Ron asked suspiciously.
“Only a few minutes,” he replied, tiredly. “Not long.”
“We think we know what the ingredients do.” That voice was Hermione. It meant that Boy Wonder wasn’t that far behind.
Draco sat up. “Why am I supposed to care?”
“Could you ask Snape about it?” Hermione asked.
Draco snorted. “As if he would do it. He’d know what it was about. He was there when she started saying the ingredients.”
“But he likes you, and hates all of us,” Ron said.
Harry was just outside the door, silent, eyes trained on Draco as if judging him. Draco met his gaze, and Harry looked away first.
“Let me see what you think it is.”
Draco looked at the parchment Hermione handed him. The more he read, the more his hands shook. It wasn’t any spell he knew about, not in any style he could recognize. But it was clear by the way the plants interacted that it was meant to heal a body and guide a spirit back from the astral plane. Draco had to hand it to Hermione. By Merlin’s Beard, she seemed to have put all that book learning to good use after all. This kind of research would get her eyed by all the wrong people, he knew, and asking Snape to brew this potion would be a really bad idea. Even if Draco told him what it was for, Snape would never do it.
“I’ll do it,” he said in a firm voice. “I’m good enough at Potions to do it, and I think I can get most of this stuff anyway.”
“In Knockturn Alley, you mean,” Harry said, finally speaking.
“My father better be good for something.”
***
With two appearance-altering charms, the Boy Who Lived was now like any other gangling teenage boy wandering through Diagon Alley. Harry and Draco decided to go to Knockturn Alley by themselves, and Ron and Hermione remained behind to set up an area to brew the potion, and gather whatever they could from the student stores or Regina’s room. Draco thought Harry was insane, but Harry led them to Hagrid’s hut.
Hagrid had let them use his fireplace and floo powder to the Leaky Cauldron once they explained that they were going to get ingredients to try and brew a potion to heal Regina. Hagrid liked Regina, especially once she had given him seeds for various plants that could grow to be vicious, or could be used to feed the various creatures he kept for his Care of Magical Creatures class. Once her article had been written, she had spent some time with Hagrid, talking about various creatures she had seen in America. Hagrid had been charmed by the way she was enthusiastic about the topic, and had known of various kinds of creature that even he hadn’t been familiar with. She did refuse to get him some of the animals to raise, but that didn’t put a damper on their friendship at all. If anything, he respected her for her reasoning, since Regina had said that the creatures were too rare to raise apart from their families, and too little was actually known about raising them out of the wild.
“Now, you keep safe, ‘Arry. An’ you too, Draco. It’s a wild place, it is.”
“We’ll be careful,” Harry promised.
The Leaky Cauldron was bustling, as usual, and no one noticed two teenagers walk out into Diagon Alley. Draco led the way quickly to Knockturn Alley, and entered a shop with no sign above its door. Harry knew better than to ask where they were.
The boys set aside the ingredients that they needed, as well as enough extraneous oddities that anyone looking at what they bought wouldn’t figure out what they needed. Draco stared down the little dirty man behind the counter, and the impressive sum was placed on the Malfoy account, to be paid out by Lucius later. He placed everything under a shrinking charm, and Harry took it, hoping he looked servile. Then Harry followed Draco out of the shop, and into a separate place, where Draco bought other supplies needed for Dark Arts. Again, it was placed on the Malfoy account, and Harry carried everything out. Finally, Draco led them back to Diagon Alley and its relative safety.
“What was all that stuff we got?” Harry asked, once they were back in Hagrid’s hut.
“Best that you don’t know about it,” Draco said shortly. “That way if someone asks you, you don’t get into trouble.”
“And what about you?”
“Oh, I’m already in trouble enough. What’s a little more?”
Harry reached out to grab his arm, and stopped him from leaving the hut. “What’s going on with you? Why are you being like this?”
“Like what?” Draco asked guardedly.
“What happened to attacking us at every opportunity? What happened to wanting to be just like your father and being a minion of the Dark Lord?”
“Just goes to show you, Potter.... You never really knew me at all.”
“And why are you helping us now?”
“Because Regina’s worth putting up with you.” Draco tugged his arm out of Harry’s grip, and took up most of the supplies he had bought.
Harry let him go, puzzled. Nothing was really as it seemed, was it?
***
Regina paused in a clearing. There was another house off to the side, nondescript but probably not welcoming. She was afraid of the spaces, the lack of spaces, the potential behind a closed door. She was afraid of the potential of closeness, the potential of darkness, the potential of emptiness and the potential of fullness.
I don't want to die here...
She was afraid of everything suddenly, everything and anything and everything.
And then the moment passed.
Regina broke out into a run. The end of the river had to come soon. She would be getting out of here soon enough.
***
Ron and Hermione were in the bathroom that led to the Chamber of Secrets, Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom. Myrtle was nowhere to be found, at least. Ron was looking around while Hermione set the flame beneath the cauldron to the proper level. “It seems so different in here now that we’re older,” he said, his tone reverent.
Hermione smiled as she came up to him, taking in the bathroom’s atmosphere. “It’s still a bathroom,” she said, giving him a look. A little bit closer, and she could have kissed him. She almost did, but Ron had turned at the last second.
“It’s boiling over!”
Hermione ran to the cauldron, decreasing the flame with her wand. She would add the poor man’s pepper first, since that needed to be boiled for at least four hours to make up the base of the potion. That done, she sat down on the floor next to Ron. “We’ve come a long way since then, haven’t we?” she asked, reaching out to hold his hand.
Ron seemed to visibly gulp, but he nodded. “Lots of things have changed, Mione.”
“But for the better, don’t you think?” she prodded.
“I hope so,” Ron replied. He kissed the back of her hand on impulse, and Hermione flashed him a beautiful smile.
They kissed, slowly and surely as they had gotten to know each other.
***
Regina turned a corner in the road, trying to wipe the grime from her jeans. She had no choice but to slog through a muddy tributary to the river, since the road continued on the other end. Most of the moisture had evaporated already, and she was trying to flake the mud from the fabric. She was humming to herself, to make noise and pretend that everything was still all right in the universe, even though it wasn’t.
“Gina, honey, you should change.”
Regina froze. She hadn’t heard that voice in almost twelve years. “Daddy?”
George Vial was sitting on a folding lawn chair, smoking a cigar and facing the oncoming road. He was grinning at her shock. “I know you like to run around and be tough, beating up all the boys, but it’s just silly, Reggie.”
Regina broke out into a grin and trotted over to her father. He stood up and held his arms out for a hug. He carefully made sure his cigar didn’t hit her by accident. “Daddy, I missed you. Is Mom here?”
“Oh, I think she’s over there, fishing. You know your mother.”
George looked exactly as he had the last time she had seen him, the night of that dinner in the city. He had on nice black slacks, a white button down shirt with light blue pinstripes spaced an inch apart. He was wearing the loafers that were a little scuffed around the edges. He had always joked that the grayish scuff marks matched the gray streaks in his dark brown hair, and he had the same hazel eyes as Regina. He was pointing towards the river, and Regina nearly gagged on the pain lancing through her.
The back of George’s head was missing, the bone pieces were gone and there were clotted bits of blood and brain and matted hair. She could suddenly see that night clearly, a flash of black sky above the skyscrapers, the three of them leaving the restaurant in Little Italy. “You’re too thin,” Eugenia Reven-Vial had said when Regina had come home. “Gina darling, we have to get you to eat something...” And even though her stomach had rejected the idea of food, Regina bowed to her mother’s wishes and accompanied her parents to dinner. At the time, there hadn’t been any foster kids at the house, so it was just the three of them. She had actually finished her shrimp fettuccine, surprising herself and delighting her parents. They had worried about her, they had asked about her and her friends had been painfully honest. They were glad she was back home; Morgan Harkness wasn’t good for her.
And they had left the restaurant as Regina was buttoning up her coat. She saw something out of the corner of her eye, a flash of white. Her father shouted her name, pushing her aside so that she fell away from the street.
The car plowed into her father, knocking him to the ground with such force that the back of his skull shattered. She could hear screaming, knowing that something was not right, she had to do something, Revivo, Creata Divinatum, something, anything, her father, her father had just saved her from the car, but he was on the ground and there was blood, there was so much blood and her father wasn’t moving and there was someone getting out of the car and the jacket looked familiar and her mother was shouting and pointing and screaming was getting louder and the man pulled a gun out of his pocket and the bullets flew out and struck her mother in the chest, over and over and over and he was shouting at her, saying that Regina couldn’t ever leave, couldn’t stop belonging to him because he had marked her as his and no fucking bitch was going to take her away from him.
And when he turned the gun on Regina’s frightened face, it was empty.
George touched Regina’s face when he heard her indrawn breath. “Honey. We saved you and we didn’t think twice about it. It’s what we do. It’s what you do when you love someone that much, you save them from themselves and you show them the way out of the woods.”
“Daddy...” Regina began, feeling the tears form. “I fucked up.”
“Yeah, you did,” George agreed. He turned slightly, not enough to expose the fatal wound again. “Genie’s coming now. You get to say hello before we send you back.”
Her mother had been born with black hair, but had insisted on dyeing it auburn every chance she got. She felt it made her look more like a witch. Regina had always said that her mother reminded her of cinnamon and honey, and Eugenia had always taken it as a compliment, and had used the words to describe herself. But subtle she was not, and swept her daughter into an exuberant hug. Regina inhaled her mother’s perfume, felt the silk of the blouse Eugenia had been wearing the night she died.
“Sweetie, why aren’t I a grandmother yet?”
Through her tears, Regina began to laugh.
“Oh, you think I’m joking, do you?” Eugenia said, standing back. “Oh look at you! All dirty. Don’t you remember any of the cleaning spells I taught you?”
Regina shrugged. “I’m out of the habit of that kind of reflexive magic.”
Her mother’s blue eyes sharpened. “Get back in it. You need your reflexes back, it’s not like traipsing around the country to find those children for the schools. This is harder, sharper, this is the end of the world as it should be. You know this. You’ve seen what the Sisters have to show you, you know there’s nothing left if you let this slide.”
George touched Eugenia’s arm. “Genie, now isn’t the time.”
“There’s no other time! Gina, you’re all we’ve got! You’re the last of the Reven, the last of the Vial in America.”
“I’m not magic, Genie, you keep forgetting...” George interrupted.
“George, hush, you’re not helping...”
“Mom, I’m fine. I’ve warded myself, I’ve warded the house, I’ve made it unplottable and unmappable and it’s outside of time. It’s safe. There’s a place to go to, and it’ll work.”
Eugenia’s face softened. “I worry about you, honey. You take on too much.”
“So did you.”
“Ah, well... Those kids needed someone.” She smiled at her daughter, tugging on a lock of black hair. “You take after me, you know. In more ways than just magic.”
“I’m like both of you.”
“Heaven help us all,” George said with a grin.
“Oh George...” Eugenia said with a laugh. She linked her arm through her husband’s. “I can give you a gift here, something I should’ve said a long time ago.” Regina cocked her head to the side, curious. “Reven girls always get what they want, but it’s never given to them. It’s always earned. No silver platter, Gina. You have to earn what you want in life, you have to work for it. If you let your life slip through your fingers, you lose everything you’ve ever wanted, everything you’ve ever worked for.”
“You’ve told me that before. Where’s the gift?”
Eugenia reached into her chest without bothering to unbutton her bloody blouse. She reached out and handed Regina her heart. “I worked for you. I earned you. I couldn’t have any other children after you, so I contented myself with foster children. But you are mine, Regina. My blood, my magic, my heart. So here is my heart.”
Regina took the bloody bit of muscle and watched it transform into a silver heart-shaped locket on a silver chain. There was intricate etchwork on the front, and Regina moved to open the clasp and look inside the locket. Eugenia stopped her. “Now is not the time. But my heart will point you true, Gina. It was always there for you.”
Regina hugged her mother tight, desperately. She felt the hot tears forming behind her eyes, and blinked them back. “I miss you, Mom.”
“I know, honey, I know. I willingly made the sacrifice. I knew how that would end.”
“But I needed you both.”
“We were crutches, Gina,” George said quietly, and Regina pulled back to look at him with anguished eyes. “It’s true, and you know it. You would’ve come back home, you would’ve let us coddle you. And you didn’t need that, you needed to grow back your spine.”
Regina smiled wanly at her father, and then moved to give him one last hug. She held him in a tight grip. “And have I?”
“You’ve done what you felt you needed to do. You became strong because you needed to be, but you still have weak spots. You haven’t completely healed yet.”
“When?”
“Soon, honey. Soon you’ll have everything you ever wanted.”
George gave Regina a kiss on the cheek, and she could feel the stubble rasp against her cheek. He gave her a silver lighter. “I guess I don’t really need this anymore, do I?”
“Smoking causes cancer, you know,” Regina found herself saying, clutching the lighter in one hand and the locket in the other. Blood and fire.
George laughed. “As if that really matters anymore. Honey, we’re gone, you’ve mourned, you’ve survived. It’s all we could ask for. It’s what we hoped for. You need to survive, you need to wake up and get the hell out of here, get back to those kids you’ve nearly adopted, you have to teach them how to save the world.”
Regina sniffled. “I’ll miss you both.”
“You’ll see us again, honey. We’re not that far away.”
And then her mother pushed her onto the path, and the heart charm began to tug her in the direction of the exit.
“We love you!” the shouted as Regina tried to wave.
And before she could reply, Regina was out of the woods.
And a stranger made of flesh and blood was walking in their woods.
Stranger angels, dangerous angels. They all follow me in the corner of my vision. Where are my angels, my dangerous angels of leather and lace, my dangerous angels I'm almost afraid to pray to, to want to love.
He told her sneeringly, "You have no family. You have no one but me. I'm all you've got. I'm all you've ever had. And I'm all you're ever going to have."
They were burning the Jezebel that lived down the street, the scent was on the air and there was no escaping it at all. The footsteps were coming closer, away from the dangerous angels, away from the dangerous angels.
What did she say all those years ago? What was she so afraid of hearing? "You have to look at yourself and decide what you want to do with yourself. Only you can make that decision. But I can tell you right now: your fears and your rages are only hurting you, making you much more self-destructive than you have to be. And you are doing this to yourself. You hurt yourself, as if you're setting yourself up to fail."
Make my dreams come true, and I'll be anything for you.
The dangerous angel is death.
The dangerous angel is dead.
The dangerous angel is here.
I know it, I know it, I know deep down where there is no knowing but knowing, there is no feeling but feeling. Something in me knows and there is something else in me that wants to drop down and worship the sky for not falling down all around me with the rest of it.
April is the cruelest month.
Just when you thought the hyacinths you were given would begin blooming again, there came a cold snap to kill them all dead. Just when you thought the lakes would stay frozen over, they broke, dragging you down deep to drown. Just when you thought it was safe to stand, the lightning would strike. Forests would burn down to the ground. The wind could whip the skin from off your bones.
And your heart could break and just stay broken.
Regina stumbled from the path in the sand and rolled to a stop near a riverbank. A little girl was there, dark hair in pigtails, her back to Regina. She was pulling petals from flowers, a small pile next to her, petals floating down the river.
“-he loves me not- - -he loves me- - -he loves me not- - -he loves me- - -he loves me not- - -he loves me- - -he loves me not-”
"Hi," Regina called, coming up behind the girl. The girl didn't bother to turn around, so Regina continued on as if she had. "I'm a little lost, and I'm not from around here. Can you point me to the heart of the Labyrinth?"
"The path is never the same, but the end result is the same," the girl said mournfully, tossing aside another empty flower head. She plucked up another flower, then began to pick the petals again.
"Why don't you start with ‘He loves me'?" Regina asked.
Now the girl turned. She had Regina's face and empty holes in her head for eyes. "Because he doesn't."
Regina ran in horror from the girl with no eyes to see, blindly down the path. For some reason, she was terrified, and couldn't control herself. A stack of empty, lifeless flowers and a river full of petals, a girl with no eyes to see, innocence lost, black hair in twin pigtails and such a mournful voice. The path was never the same, but the end result was the same.
Regina crashed into someone headlong, and he balanced her. “Severus,” she gasped, looking up into his sallow face. “Oh god, I can’t get out of here, I don’t know how. Please, Severus, please, help me...”
“I tell you this now, though you won't remember, and I tell you think in the hopes that you will someday, when you need it most. Not all is around you, not all is within you, not all is with you, not all is for you. But as much as you would love to think so, sometimes it's not to be, sometimes it's best not to be, sometimes it shouldn't be.”
“Severus, what are you talking about?”
He grasped her face between his palms. “I told you that you had no magic, that you were nothing special. I said you were useless and I never loved you, only used you.”
“Please don’t say that, please don’t...”
Snape let go of her. “You wanted the black egg, didn’t you? Or the Labyrinth? I can only show you one thing, one thing only.”
“What will help me?”
“Neither will get you out of the woods.”
Liar, liar... a voice said in the back of her mind. He knows the way out of the wood.
“Can you tell me how to get out of the woods?”
Snape’s face fell. “Not the easy way. I only know the hard way, and I don’t think you’re ready to go through it.”
No place else but to go through. “I’ll make it. I’ve taken on the world before.”
“I broke you.”
Regina sucked in a breath. She didn’t want to agree, but that was the truth of it, wasn’t it?
“I’m sorry,” Snape continued, looking past her. “I never meant for any of this to happen to you. It was never supposed to be this way.”
“How do I get out, Sev? Please.”
“It’s an accident you even got here. You should have stayed away.”
“I never do what I ought to do,” she replied, feeling an echo ring inside of her.
Snape reached into his robes and took out a black crystalline object. “This is the Black Egg, I’ve already taken it. I knew you would have wanted the unknown object. You always took the path less traveled. But it isn’t the way out of the woods.”
Regina took the egg. “I want to go home.”
“New York is far away from here, you know.”
She looked up, eyes brimming with tears. “You did more damage than you know.”
“I’m sorry. I never meant to.”
“It doesn’t matter what you meant to do, only what happened.”
“Sixteen years should have dulled the pain.”
“But it didn’t.”
There was nothing Snape could have said to that, so he remained silent.
“Show me the way out of the woods.”
With a sigh, Snape pointed to the river, floating petals away from them. “Follow the petals on the water. You’ll make it back in one piece.”
You promise? she wanted to ask, but knew better. Regina dropped a soft kiss onto his mouth, then began to walk.
Draco had meant to be alone with Regina, to see if he could try a healing spell he had learned from his father a few years ago. It was stronger than most spells used by mediwitches, and he was starting to think that her coma was magically induced. She had been under for three days now, with no change.
Snape was sitting at her bedside, one of her hands clasped in his. He had been concocting potions to try and heal her, but nothing had worked. Now he just sat there, talking softly, as if that would be the way to draw her out.
“I’m sorry. I never meant for any of this to happen to you. It was never supposed to be this way. It’s an accident you even got here. You should have stayed away.” Snape was stroking her palm lightly, his head bent and eyes closed. It looked as though he was trying not to cry. “I think I could have pretended it was all for the best if I hadn’t seen you again, seen what I did to you. I thought it was for the best... I was trying to avoid this. I didn’t want them getting to you, using you against me. They could have, you know.”
Draco tapped the door leading to the private room. “She probably wouldn’t have listened to you if you tried to tell her.”
Snape whirled around, face unguarded for a split second. “Oh. Mister Malfoy.”
“Professor. I wanted to try the Dragon Breath spell.”
“I’ve tried it already. It didn’t work.”
Draco felt himself deflate. “Oh.”
“Again.... This is something else she has to work out alone.”
“Do you think she knows we’re here?”
“I hope so.” He didn’t sound sure at all.
Draco watched as Snape tucked her hand back where it had been, and then bend down to kiss her lips. “Be safe,” Snape whispered, then left.
Draco sat down in the seat that Snape had vacated. “Well, the tireless threesome haven’t figured out what your potion is all about yet. They’re still looking, though they probably told you all about it already. Er... I’m cutting your class, sorry. I had my midterm yesterday, and Dumbledore said I did really well. You’d be proud of me, I think.” He was silent for a long moment, watching Regina breathe. “I thought I loved you that way. But Ginny... it’s like we know each other best. But I don’t... I don’t understand it. I really don’t know anymore, if I ever did. What does that mean when you love someone, anyway? Why does it hurt so much? My chest still hurts when I think of you.”
He put his head down on the bed next to her hand. “Just wake up soon, okay? We still need you here... Something’s coming, I know it. And those silly kids are going to jump right in, not knowing anything, and it’ll make you cry when you wake up. You need to teach them what to do, this magic is too hard.”
Draco heard the door open behind him, and he fell silent.
“How long have you been here?” Ron asked suspiciously.
“Only a few minutes,” he replied, tiredly. “Not long.”
“We think we know what the ingredients do.” That voice was Hermione. It meant that Boy Wonder wasn’t that far behind.
Draco sat up. “Why am I supposed to care?”
“Could you ask Snape about it?” Hermione asked.
Draco snorted. “As if he would do it. He’d know what it was about. He was there when she started saying the ingredients.”
“But he likes you, and hates all of us,” Ron said.
Harry was just outside the door, silent, eyes trained on Draco as if judging him. Draco met his gaze, and Harry looked away first.
“Let me see what you think it is.”
Draco looked at the parchment Hermione handed him. The more he read, the more his hands shook. It wasn’t any spell he knew about, not in any style he could recognize. But it was clear by the way the plants interacted that it was meant to heal a body and guide a spirit back from the astral plane. Draco had to hand it to Hermione. By Merlin’s Beard, she seemed to have put all that book learning to good use after all. This kind of research would get her eyed by all the wrong people, he knew, and asking Snape to brew this potion would be a really bad idea. Even if Draco told him what it was for, Snape would never do it.
“I’ll do it,” he said in a firm voice. “I’m good enough at Potions to do it, and I think I can get most of this stuff anyway.”
“In Knockturn Alley, you mean,” Harry said, finally speaking.
“My father better be good for something.”
With two appearance-altering charms, the Boy Who Lived was now like any other gangling teenage boy wandering through Diagon Alley. Harry and Draco decided to go to Knockturn Alley by themselves, and Ron and Hermione remained behind to set up an area to brew the potion, and gather whatever they could from the student stores or Regina’s room. Draco thought Harry was insane, but Harry led them to Hagrid’s hut.
Hagrid had let them use his fireplace and floo powder to the Leaky Cauldron once they explained that they were going to get ingredients to try and brew a potion to heal Regina. Hagrid liked Regina, especially once she had given him seeds for various plants that could grow to be vicious, or could be used to feed the various creatures he kept for his Care of Magical Creatures class. Once her article had been written, she had spent some time with Hagrid, talking about various creatures she had seen in America. Hagrid had been charmed by the way she was enthusiastic about the topic, and had known of various kinds of creature that even he hadn’t been familiar with. She did refuse to get him some of the animals to raise, but that didn’t put a damper on their friendship at all. If anything, he respected her for her reasoning, since Regina had said that the creatures were too rare to raise apart from their families, and too little was actually known about raising them out of the wild.
“Now, you keep safe, ‘Arry. An’ you too, Draco. It’s a wild place, it is.”
“We’ll be careful,” Harry promised.
The Leaky Cauldron was bustling, as usual, and no one noticed two teenagers walk out into Diagon Alley. Draco led the way quickly to Knockturn Alley, and entered a shop with no sign above its door. Harry knew better than to ask where they were.
The boys set aside the ingredients that they needed, as well as enough extraneous oddities that anyone looking at what they bought wouldn’t figure out what they needed. Draco stared down the little dirty man behind the counter, and the impressive sum was placed on the Malfoy account, to be paid out by Lucius later. He placed everything under a shrinking charm, and Harry took it, hoping he looked servile. Then Harry followed Draco out of the shop, and into a separate place, where Draco bought other supplies needed for Dark Arts. Again, it was placed on the Malfoy account, and Harry carried everything out. Finally, Draco led them back to Diagon Alley and its relative safety.
“What was all that stuff we got?” Harry asked, once they were back in Hagrid’s hut.
“Best that you don’t know about it,” Draco said shortly. “That way if someone asks you, you don’t get into trouble.”
“And what about you?”
“Oh, I’m already in trouble enough. What’s a little more?”
Harry reached out to grab his arm, and stopped him from leaving the hut. “What’s going on with you? Why are you being like this?”
“Like what?” Draco asked guardedly.
“What happened to attacking us at every opportunity? What happened to wanting to be just like your father and being a minion of the Dark Lord?”
“Just goes to show you, Potter.... You never really knew me at all.”
“And why are you helping us now?”
“Because Regina’s worth putting up with you.” Draco tugged his arm out of Harry’s grip, and took up most of the supplies he had bought.
Harry let him go, puzzled. Nothing was really as it seemed, was it?
Regina paused in a clearing. There was another house off to the side, nondescript but probably not welcoming. She was afraid of the spaces, the lack of spaces, the potential behind a closed door. She was afraid of the potential of closeness, the potential of darkness, the potential of emptiness and the potential of fullness.
I don't want to die here...
She was afraid of everything suddenly, everything and anything and everything.
And then the moment passed.
Regina broke out into a run. The end of the river had to come soon. She would be getting out of here soon enough.
Ron and Hermione were in the bathroom that led to the Chamber of Secrets, Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom. Myrtle was nowhere to be found, at least. Ron was looking around while Hermione set the flame beneath the cauldron to the proper level. “It seems so different in here now that we’re older,” he said, his tone reverent.
Hermione smiled as she came up to him, taking in the bathroom’s atmosphere. “It’s still a bathroom,” she said, giving him a look. A little bit closer, and she could have kissed him. She almost did, but Ron had turned at the last second.
“It’s boiling over!”
Hermione ran to the cauldron, decreasing the flame with her wand. She would add the poor man’s pepper first, since that needed to be boiled for at least four hours to make up the base of the potion. That done, she sat down on the floor next to Ron. “We’ve come a long way since then, haven’t we?” she asked, reaching out to hold his hand.
Ron seemed to visibly gulp, but he nodded. “Lots of things have changed, Mione.”
“But for the better, don’t you think?” she prodded.
“I hope so,” Ron replied. He kissed the back of her hand on impulse, and Hermione flashed him a beautiful smile.
They kissed, slowly and surely as they had gotten to know each other.
Regina turned a corner in the road, trying to wipe the grime from her jeans. She had no choice but to slog through a muddy tributary to the river, since the road continued on the other end. Most of the moisture had evaporated already, and she was trying to flake the mud from the fabric. She was humming to herself, to make noise and pretend that everything was still all right in the universe, even though it wasn’t.
“Gina, honey, you should change.”
Regina froze. She hadn’t heard that voice in almost twelve years. “Daddy?”
George Vial was sitting on a folding lawn chair, smoking a cigar and facing the oncoming road. He was grinning at her shock. “I know you like to run around and be tough, beating up all the boys, but it’s just silly, Reggie.”
Regina broke out into a grin and trotted over to her father. He stood up and held his arms out for a hug. He carefully made sure his cigar didn’t hit her by accident. “Daddy, I missed you. Is Mom here?”
“Oh, I think she’s over there, fishing. You know your mother.”
George looked exactly as he had the last time she had seen him, the night of that dinner in the city. He had on nice black slacks, a white button down shirt with light blue pinstripes spaced an inch apart. He was wearing the loafers that were a little scuffed around the edges. He had always joked that the grayish scuff marks matched the gray streaks in his dark brown hair, and he had the same hazel eyes as Regina. He was pointing towards the river, and Regina nearly gagged on the pain lancing through her.
The back of George’s head was missing, the bone pieces were gone and there were clotted bits of blood and brain and matted hair. She could suddenly see that night clearly, a flash of black sky above the skyscrapers, the three of them leaving the restaurant in Little Italy. “You’re too thin,” Eugenia Reven-Vial had said when Regina had come home. “Gina darling, we have to get you to eat something...” And even though her stomach had rejected the idea of food, Regina bowed to her mother’s wishes and accompanied her parents to dinner. At the time, there hadn’t been any foster kids at the house, so it was just the three of them. She had actually finished her shrimp fettuccine, surprising herself and delighting her parents. They had worried about her, they had asked about her and her friends had been painfully honest. They were glad she was back home; Morgan Harkness wasn’t good for her.
And they had left the restaurant as Regina was buttoning up her coat. She saw something out of the corner of her eye, a flash of white. Her father shouted her name, pushing her aside so that she fell away from the street.
The car plowed into her father, knocking him to the ground with such force that the back of his skull shattered. She could hear screaming, knowing that something was not right, she had to do something, Revivo, Creata Divinatum, something, anything, her father, her father had just saved her from the car, but he was on the ground and there was blood, there was so much blood and her father wasn’t moving and there was someone getting out of the car and the jacket looked familiar and her mother was shouting and pointing and screaming was getting louder and the man pulled a gun out of his pocket and the bullets flew out and struck her mother in the chest, over and over and over and he was shouting at her, saying that Regina couldn’t ever leave, couldn’t stop belonging to him because he had marked her as his and no fucking bitch was going to take her away from him.
And when he turned the gun on Regina’s frightened face, it was empty.
George touched Regina’s face when he heard her indrawn breath. “Honey. We saved you and we didn’t think twice about it. It’s what we do. It’s what you do when you love someone that much, you save them from themselves and you show them the way out of the woods.”
“Daddy...” Regina began, feeling the tears form. “I fucked up.”
“Yeah, you did,” George agreed. He turned slightly, not enough to expose the fatal wound again. “Genie’s coming now. You get to say hello before we send you back.”
Her mother had been born with black hair, but had insisted on dyeing it auburn every chance she got. She felt it made her look more like a witch. Regina had always said that her mother reminded her of cinnamon and honey, and Eugenia had always taken it as a compliment, and had used the words to describe herself. But subtle she was not, and swept her daughter into an exuberant hug. Regina inhaled her mother’s perfume, felt the silk of the blouse Eugenia had been wearing the night she died.
“Sweetie, why aren’t I a grandmother yet?”
Through her tears, Regina began to laugh.
“Oh, you think I’m joking, do you?” Eugenia said, standing back. “Oh look at you! All dirty. Don’t you remember any of the cleaning spells I taught you?”
Regina shrugged. “I’m out of the habit of that kind of reflexive magic.”
Her mother’s blue eyes sharpened. “Get back in it. You need your reflexes back, it’s not like traipsing around the country to find those children for the schools. This is harder, sharper, this is the end of the world as it should be. You know this. You’ve seen what the Sisters have to show you, you know there’s nothing left if you let this slide.”
George touched Eugenia’s arm. “Genie, now isn’t the time.”
“There’s no other time! Gina, you’re all we’ve got! You’re the last of the Reven, the last of the Vial in America.”
“I’m not magic, Genie, you keep forgetting...” George interrupted.
“George, hush, you’re not helping...”
“Mom, I’m fine. I’ve warded myself, I’ve warded the house, I’ve made it unplottable and unmappable and it’s outside of time. It’s safe. There’s a place to go to, and it’ll work.”
Eugenia’s face softened. “I worry about you, honey. You take on too much.”
“So did you.”
“Ah, well... Those kids needed someone.” She smiled at her daughter, tugging on a lock of black hair. “You take after me, you know. In more ways than just magic.”
“I’m like both of you.”
“Heaven help us all,” George said with a grin.
“Oh George...” Eugenia said with a laugh. She linked her arm through her husband’s. “I can give you a gift here, something I should’ve said a long time ago.” Regina cocked her head to the side, curious. “Reven girls always get what they want, but it’s never given to them. It’s always earned. No silver platter, Gina. You have to earn what you want in life, you have to work for it. If you let your life slip through your fingers, you lose everything you’ve ever wanted, everything you’ve ever worked for.”
“You’ve told me that before. Where’s the gift?”
Eugenia reached into her chest without bothering to unbutton her bloody blouse. She reached out and handed Regina her heart. “I worked for you. I earned you. I couldn’t have any other children after you, so I contented myself with foster children. But you are mine, Regina. My blood, my magic, my heart. So here is my heart.”
Regina took the bloody bit of muscle and watched it transform into a silver heart-shaped locket on a silver chain. There was intricate etchwork on the front, and Regina moved to open the clasp and look inside the locket. Eugenia stopped her. “Now is not the time. But my heart will point you true, Gina. It was always there for you.”
Regina hugged her mother tight, desperately. She felt the hot tears forming behind her eyes, and blinked them back. “I miss you, Mom.”
“I know, honey, I know. I willingly made the sacrifice. I knew how that would end.”
“But I needed you both.”
“We were crutches, Gina,” George said quietly, and Regina pulled back to look at him with anguished eyes. “It’s true, and you know it. You would’ve come back home, you would’ve let us coddle you. And you didn’t need that, you needed to grow back your spine.”
Regina smiled wanly at her father, and then moved to give him one last hug. She held him in a tight grip. “And have I?”
“You’ve done what you felt you needed to do. You became strong because you needed to be, but you still have weak spots. You haven’t completely healed yet.”
“When?”
“Soon, honey. Soon you’ll have everything you ever wanted.”
George gave Regina a kiss on the cheek, and she could feel the stubble rasp against her cheek. He gave her a silver lighter. “I guess I don’t really need this anymore, do I?”
“Smoking causes cancer, you know,” Regina found herself saying, clutching the lighter in one hand and the locket in the other. Blood and fire.
George laughed. “As if that really matters anymore. Honey, we’re gone, you’ve mourned, you’ve survived. It’s all we could ask for. It’s what we hoped for. You need to survive, you need to wake up and get the hell out of here, get back to those kids you’ve nearly adopted, you have to teach them how to save the world.”
Regina sniffled. “I’ll miss you both.”
“You’ll see us again, honey. We’re not that far away.”
And then her mother pushed her onto the path, and the heart charm began to tug her in the direction of the exit.
“We love you!” the shouted as Regina tried to wave.
And before she could reply, Regina was out of the woods.
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