39

Lucius Malfoy was spending his evening glaring at his wife. This was something he had been doing a lot lately, ever since he had discovered that his disappointment of a son was not only gay but going out with Harry Potter. Well, to be more accurate, it was since about five minutes after that discovery when he got over the shock and decided to blame Narcissa for the entire thing. After all, she had always pampered the boy, given him everything he whined for and told him that she loved him almost daily. He, on the other hand, had tried to beat some sense into the boy. Weekly crucios were good for one's mental health; they should have given the boy some backbone. But no, that whiny, pathetic, Potter-loving boy Lucius used to call his son couldn't even do that right.

Narcissa, for her part, was glaring right back. Although her glare was a little bleary and so it was far less intimidating. The reason for this was that she had started drinking as soon as she saw the letter that her husband planned on sending to their only son and she hadn't yet stopped, although it was almost a week later. She knew what her husband was like, of course, and in certain aspects she agreed with his views and his actions. But when it came to their son, she just couldn't turn a blind eye anymore. She had tried to ignore what he was doing to Draco, tried to make up for her husband's mistakes and crucios with love and indulgence. She just wanted her family to stay together, and constantly arguing with Lucius over his treatment of their son would not help anything, she thought. But written death threats? Actually wishing that Draco would be caught and killed by Voldemort? That was something she simply could not ignore, however much she wished she could.

And so, locked in their glaring match as they were, neither noticed the snowy owl fly into the room until it dropped a letter into Lucius's lap. Cautiously, the aging blonde picked up the letter, eyes narrowing in suspicion when he saw the Black seal on the back.

"Ish probab...probably jush Andromeda," Narcissa slurred, swirling her wine glass, making the liquid inside slop over the edges, "Stop bein susch a drama queen." She paused for a second before bursting out laughing in high, hysterical giggles that could be heard all the way to the kitchens, and made several house elves quiver with fright.

"Indeed," Lucius replied, eyeing his wife nervously. Although she rarely displayed her talents, she was a formidable witch when she wanted to be, and he was slightly worried that she might start drunkenly throwing hexes around if he said the wrong thing. Of course he could take her in a normal duel, he would never have married a woman whom he could not. But the alcohol made her unpredictable, and so rather more dnagerous than she usually was. Putting the matter of his wife to the back of his mind for the moment, however, he deftly slit open the envelope with a perfectly manicured finger nail.

BANG! POOF! SPLATTER!

Lucius blinked rapidly as the smoke started to clear. His sitting room was now covered in blobs of multicoloured paint. And not only his sitting room, he discovered, as he laid eyes on his wife, but Narcissa as well. A horrible thought occurred to him and he gingerly raised a hand to his hair, tears welling up in his eyes when his fingers came back covered in purple and red paint.

Then he looked properly at his fingers and a high pitched scream ripped from his throat. Where before had been a perfectly manicured hand, now lay long, elegant fingers with blackened, fungal nails on the ends of them.

It was all too much for poor Lucius and he fainted dead on the carpet.

Eventually, the house elves worked up the courage to investigate the strange sounds and walked into the room to find their master covered in paint lying on the floor with the worst fungal nail infection that they had ever seen and their mistress lounging on the sofa, sipping from a glass of what appeared to be mostly pink and yellow paint and giggling to herself.

Needless, to say, they backed out of the room and went to do some dusting in an attempt to calm themselves down. The manor had never looked so clean.

Mad-Eye Moody grinned as he stood in the hospital corridor. He had just been discharged from St. Mungo's, but that wasn't the reason for his good cheer. In the room in front of him (the door was shut and warded, of course, but Moody's eye could see through basically anything) was a sight the old auror never thought he'd be lucky enough to see.

Lucius Malfoy lay on a hospital bed, covered from head to toe in brightly coloured paint. His hands were wrapped in bandages and his arms were strapped to the bed by his wrists. His eyes were open but unseeing as he stared at the ceiling.

Moody chuckled as he thought of what the nurse had told him, stifling a giggle as she did so. Of course, the situation was supposed to be top secret, but even Moody was better liked than Malfoy, so he had no trouble wheedling it out of her. Who knew that the key to bringing Malfoy down was his own vanity?

Still grinning, he began limping away from Malfoy's room, heading to the hospital exit. He had already spent far too many months within its walls, and he was unwilling to extend that stay too much, even if it was for the pleasure of seeing Lucius like that. Besides, he had things to do, people to see, lessons to plan.

He almost couldn't wait to get back to Hogwarts, and begin teaching for real. That Potter kid in particular sounded promising; anyone who could see through a disguise as thorough as Barty Crouch's had been was somebody Moody wanted to know.

That Potter kid at that moment wasn't looking particularly promising. In fact, all he was looking was particularly asleep. Well, I suppose you could say that he looked particularly bruised as well, but anyway.

He was lying on the landing at the top of the stairs, his head hanging down the first step and soft snores issuing from his mouth. A nasty-looking cut ran down his forehead, slicing straight through his famous scar, and various bruises and grazes covered the rest of his body, most of which could be seen because all he was wearing was his leather pants from the Yule Ball. Still. Yes, he was gross and hadn't even showered since then. This was because, as usual, Sirius deemed other things (drinking, fighting, pranking Lucy) far more important than personal hygiene.

On the next floor down, the library door opened and Blaise stumbled out of it, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He was closely followed by Neville (yawning with a black eye) and a blonde woman who had introduced herself the night before as Ruby, and who they were assuming was Sirius's girlfriend.

"Well, I guess we found Harry," Neville chuckled, looking up at his friend before they all turned away and began trudging down to the kitchen. At the bottom of the stairs they found Draco (blood in his hair and dirt under his nails- possibly a first) slumped against a wall opposite the portrait of Sirius's mother. Directly underneath the portrait was a large black dog, curled up in what smelt like a puddle of his own piss. On closer inspection of the portrait, Neville decided that it was most definitely piss.

Wrinkling their noses, the trio carried on to the kitchen where they found Remus with a cup of coffee, a bar of chocolate, and a large book. He also had a split lip and a new ear piercing.

"Nice piercing, Remus," Ruby smiled, sitting at the table and thanking a hungover Dobby when he brought her coffee. Blaise watched the exchange with confusion, knowing that there was something wrong with the picture. Unfortunately, his usually quick mind seemed to be one reverse this morning.

"Thanks," Remus answered wryly, curling his lips up.

"You're a muggle though!" Neville suddenly burst out, and Blaise's eyes widened in realisation. Of course. Ruby just laughed.

"Yeah, I am," she said simply, "Harry and Padfoot let it slip the first night I met them. They were drunk of course, and I didn't believe them, thought they were just trying to impress me or some shit. But then over the weeks they let slip little other things and then one morning Dobby popped up and offered me breakfast. I thought I'd been slipped some shrooms the night before at first."

"Huh," Neville said intelligently, sitting down at the table and accepting the coffee Dobby brought over for him. Luckily, he was saved from having to carry on the conversation when Harry and Draco staggered through the door.

"Hey, guys," Harry slurred, collapsing into a seat and laying his head down on the table, only to sit up again speedily at the sting of the cut on his forehead against the table. "Err... where the fuck did that come from?" Clearly, intelligence was not a theme this morning.

"Some guy at the bar said Draco looked like a poof, you punched him and he bottled you," Remus summed up, his eyes never leaving the pages of his book.

"Huh."

"Here's your coffee, master," Dobby drawled, slamming a mug down in front of Draco, spilling half of the drink onto the table before flouncing off back to the stove. Dobby hadn't been impressed when his old master had turned up the day before, and clearly a night of drinking with the boy (Dobby had been transfigured to look like a very short human. Well, a human lady to be precise. Sirius was the one who had done the transfiguring, and the rest were all too lazy to correct him) had done nothing to improve the house elf's opinion.

"You know what, Draco," Sirius's voice came from the doorway and they all turned to look at him, "If you want to stay here, we're really going to have to do something about your hair."

Lucius Malfoy may have been lying in his hospital bed, staring at the ceiling for the last few hours but that did not mean that the cogs in his brain hadn't been ticking over.

Draco. Potter. The Dark Lord.

Oh, yes. There was a plan to be had here, a very good plan indeed.