Chapter Three.

In which there is more walking, Plan C, and a cat.

I Disapparated from Kansas City just as a magical fireball screamed towards my face, briefly appeared in a field of extremely startled sheep, and found myself standing on another city street in a hellacious downpour. The dark storefront across the street read St. Louis Bread Company, so at least I was where I'd intended to be. I huddled into the wholly inadequate shelter of a doorway and took several deep breaths. Think clearly, old boy, I told myself. Evaluate the situation.

Situation: I had just been attacked for the second time in one night. I was alone and far from home, and apparently being followed by both this Dies fellow and international agents. The only person who did seem to know what was going on who also didn't want to kill me (well, mostly) was Weasley, who had quite probably been hexed to uselessness already. While I did derive a certain adolescent satisfaction from the idea of him oozing up the pavement in the form of a tentacle-faced slug, in a practical sense I was fucked. I couldn't very well take action against an enemy I knew nothing about, and if Dies was capable of spoiling the plans of the ICW...as much as I hated to admit it, he was probably both wealthier and better-connected than I. The bastard.

What next? I had probably shaken my pursuers for the time being—they couldn't possibly know where I had Disapparated to. I had, I admit, some experience fleeing countries in the dead of night, though this was spectacularly short notice. I also had more than a few friends from whom I could call in favors. It would be difficult to transfer my Gringott's accounts, of course, and there would likely be a few touchy weeks until I got settled, but with speed and a bit of luck I could easily have been in, say, Australia, before daybreak.

I raised my wand to Disapparate.

I hesitated.

Let me make it absolutely clear that I was not acting out of any actual concern for Weasley. In fact, I was still quite cross with him for what he'd put me through in the course of protecting me. However, I couldn't really be sure of any plans I made; until I knew exactly who Dies was, I would be forever looking over my shoulder, and I couldn't argue against my detention by the ICW if I didn't know what they were detaining me for. I needed more information to take proper precautions. Weasley had that information.

Damn him.

I conjured an umbrella and set out for Kiener Plaza.

A few facts forced themselves upon me very quickly. The first was that, in my haste, I had Apparated rather further away from downtown St. Louis than I had intended. The second was that I actually knew very little about how to get around that particular city. In my defense, I'd only been there a few times, none recently, and anyway what sort of self-respecting wizard spends time studying Muggle neighborhoods? As I didn't dare ask the few Muggles I saw for directions (I was dressed in mud-drenched wizard's robes, and really, they're Muggles) I walked what felt like the length and breadth of the city, crossing the same street at least three times and stumbling several times in puddles of unexpected depths. Coupled with the crawling and walking in Kansas City and the steady rain, I was very thoroughly miserable by the time I reached the plaza at a quarter past two in the morning. This doesn't have much to do with the story, but I thought you might like to know.

Kiener Plaza was well-lit and quite empty; Weasley was clearly not there. Since I didn't know whether he'd already been and gone or if he had never made it this far, I thought it best to wait a bit in case he turned up. What I really wanted to do was sit down, but I felt too exposed standing in the open, and the trees in the plaza seemed to exist solely to cast jumping shadows as they thrashed dramatically in the wind. I eventually tucked myself into a corner near the little amphitheatre, which offered no shelter from the elements whatsoever, to meditate on my misery and consider the relative merits of running away to Australia versus Singapore. If I kept up my current rate of getting run out of countries, I thought darkly, I would exhaust all possibilities in the Anglophone world before I turned forty.

I will now confess—for the first and last time—that when Weasley chose that moment to appear, he scared the living shit out of me.

"Malfoy, you idiot."

I may or may not have said something along the lines of "Yeeearrrgh!" as I spun around; I will admit to slipping on the slick pavement and landing on my arse, because it just emphasizes my abject misery at that moment. Weasley was approaching from the shadows of an antique courthouse across the road, limping slightly and with one hand clenched over his side. His face was the color of old oatmeal again, though, I suspected, for entirely different reasons. "What exactly have I done wrong now?" I asked when I had regained my feet again.

"Aside from failing to watch your back?" He stopped and leaned against a pillar, instantly taking the weight off his left leg. "For one thing, you're on the highest part of the plaza, and for another, with these shadows you wouldn't see someone right in front of you until they were already close enough to fuck you up five ways from Sunday."

"I humbly beg your forgiveness." Why, I wondered, had I been waiting for him again?

He shook his head, bent stiffly over and cast a binding charm on his left ankle. I suppose you're expecting me to wax sentimental about how he had gotten hurt protecting me; I'm sorry to disappoint. Well, actually, no, I'm not. He'd clearly invited the whole situation upon himself by getting into a profession that involved kidnapping and hexes. And I'd come to meet him here for a very specific reason. "If you don't mind my asking—"

He shook his head. "Not now. Plan C."

"We're already on Plan C?"

"Plan B required us to be in Kansas City."

"Ah." I smothered a yawn. "And tell me again why I shouldn't just flee the country and hope Dies doesn't follow?"

"Because Dies will follow." He pushed his hair out of his eyes—the fool hadn't even bothered to conjure an umbrella, the brown dye or whatever had rinsed out completely—and looked at me oddly. "After what happened to Kidd, I'm surprised you'd even consider it, truthfully."

I considered trying anew to explain to him that I had never heard of any Kidd, any more than Dies or Greenplate, but I was too tired, wet and sore to be bothered. Instead I said, "Plan C, then."

"Follow me."

"More walking?"

"Don't dare Apparate again."

I sighed. "Lead on."

This is the last extended description of all the walking he made me do, I promise. I've just been trying to set the tone, and give you an idea of what I had to put up with, and how utterly boring this fiasco was in between people trying to kill me. Rain kept falling and we kept walking, though at a more normal pace, probably on account of Weasley's ankle. While I don't want to give you the impression that I like Weasley or enjoy his company, it wasn't exactly the most scintillating journey of my life, so I thought I would make an attempt at conversation. "I'm surprised you haven't complained yet about my abandoning you to your own devices," I said.

Perhaps Weasley was just as bored as I, or perhaps he'd decided that we were sufficiently safe for the moment, but at least he answered somewhat civilly. "Why would I?"

I shrugged. "It seems like something you'd do."

"Malfoy, I'm the one who told you to beat it, remember?" He snorted. "If you'd stuck around, you would've been in the way."

This was also slander. "I would not have!" I informed. "I'll have you know I once defeated a trained hitwizard in a duel."

He snorted again. "You defeated a ninety-year-old retired hitwizard with one arm, and that's why you got deported from South Africa."

"How do you know that?"

Weasley paused to peer up at the street signs, shielding his eyes with the hand not still pressed against his ribs. "It was all over the papers back home. Aurors were bloody furious that you got away from them again."

"Yes, well, perhaps if they weren't so eager to inflict major bodily harm on me, I might be willing to compromise with them."

"They're not going to hurt you," he said. "You're not even charged with anything, they just want to interrogate you."

"Weasley, did you see what the Aurors did to Theodore Nott?"

"No..."

"Neither did I, it was a closed-casket funeral."

Weasley's brows knit, but wisely he said nothing further.

Another block, though, and something else occurred to me. "As I recall, Weasley, you were all gung-ho to join the Aurors yourself when we left school."

"I was," he said after a pause.

"Don't tell me they rejected you..."

"They didn't," he said vehemently.

"Then how'd you end up working for your acronomic friends? The Ess Whatever?"

"None of your business," Weasley snapped, and picked up the pace. And here I'd only been trying to make conversation....

My legs were threatening to fall off entirely by the time Weasley came to a stop. He peered at the front of a dark, ivy-cased building for several minutes, nodded to himself, and walked around the side. "Is this it?" I demanded. "Plan C?"

"Yes."

"Finally."

I followed him around to the back of the building, where rusty iron balconies clung to the wall like some sort of exotic fungus, connected by a zigzag of creaking stairs. Weasley hauled himself up the first two steps, then put his wand hand out to stop me. "Wait here."

"Wait? What?" I peered up into the shadows. "Is it dangerous?"

"One of us needs to keep watch, and I'm the one with the password."

I snorted. "I thought you said I'd be in the way in a fight."

"If there's a fight now, we're both dead anyway, trust me."

I watched him struggle up the stairs and quietly grumbled. It was fairly obvious that this had nothing to do with keeping any sort of watch; he just didn't want me to see what he was doing up there. Which did not bode well for my chances of getting any further information out of him. I squished around the miserable little patch of grass at the base of the steps and tried to work out a method of getting Weasley to talk. Truth serums, I didn't have, and torture would be more effort than it was worth...he clearly wasn't going to just tell me anything out of the goodness of his heart, and I wasn't interested in debasing myself on the off chance that it would generate some pity. Seduction...

I will admit this only because it is not, for rather obvious reasons, common knowledge, and it will be rather important to your comprehension of later events. I had spent my last few years of school in possession of a highly inappropriate lust for Ronald Weasley. It wasn't any sort of sticky schoolgirl crush, so put that out of your mind immediately—there was no sighing, no hearts and doodles, and no love poetry. Unless one included "Weasley Is Our King," a rather amusing little song I wrote in honor of his Quidditch debut, but I digress. It was simple physical attraction brought on by puberty and proximity, and if I hadn't disliked him so intensely I might've bedded him right away and put the whole thing past me. As it was, I wanked just about every night for two solid years imagining him, usually in some deliciously embarrassing position, but then the war ended and the Aurors arrived and I developed urgent business in South Africa. Weasley was entirely forgotten.

Mostly.

But the thought to trying to use sex to nudge Weasley into conversation brought back all those ridiculous fantasies, which, like most aspects of adolescence, had not lost any of their power to perturb or embarrass. I refused to risk shaming myself in front of him by reverting to an overeager teenager in the middle of something important. Besides, he was probably straight.

My musings were cut short by movement in the alley, and I raised my wand. After a moment's hesitation, however, I chose not to light it—no point in drawing further attention to myself. I could hear Weasley muttering some floors above me and rattling a doorknob, but calling out to him would identify myself. A large pile of bulging garbage bags rattled ominously, and I quickly ran through my inventory of curses, trying to choose one that would buy me enough to time flee for cover—

A door above shrieked open. A square of light fell from the balcony onto the alley. A small grey cat with amber eyes blinked at me, meowed once, and pranced off into the shadows.

"Malfoy, are you coming?"

I glared at the cat, at Weasley, and at the garbage bags before pocketing my wand and hauling myself up the filthy stairs

The inside of the flat to which Weasley had led us was barely less shabby than the outside; it smelled strongly of mothballs. The balcony door led into the kitchen, which was tiny and vaguely yellowing all over. Weasley's wet footprints lead around the corner, out of sight.

"What sort of a place is this?" I called, examining the pantry; it was fully stocked, but when I tried to examine a bunch of bananas more closely my nose hit a powerful preservation charm. With spellwork like that, the food would keep until doomsday.

"It belongs to the S.J.F.," Weasley shouted back. "They keep places like this all over, just in case...that's where we were headed in Kansas City before Dies' goons found us."

I examined the pans hanging above the cooker; most of them were dented in some fashion, and one had a suspicious black crust burnt onto the inside. "Nice to see that your organization spares no expense."

"Could you give me a hand in here?"

The kitchen exited into a small dining area, which flowed seamlessly into a sort of parlor. Weasley was propped up on the couch and dripping; he'd untied the laces of his left boot, but was leaning back and clutching his ribs again. "What's the matter?" I asked warily; I am anything but a mediwizard.

"Can't get the shoe off," he said. "Ankle swelled up too much."

"What do you want me to do about it?"

"Pull it off."

"You just said—"

"One good tug." He looked at me, and raised an eyebrow when I hesitated. "Come on, Malfoy, I'm giving you permission to hurt me. Chance to relive some of those schoolboy fantasies, eh?"

Since it would be counterproductive to explain to Weasley the exact nature of my schoolboy fantasies concerning him, I knelt on the carpet, and tugged, half-heartedly at the shoe. Nothing happened.

"Honestly, is that the best you can do?"

I glared at him, and got a really firm grip on the heel; I could feel how much his ankle had swollen, even with the bindings he'd put on it. I jerked it, and accomplished nothing more that making Weasley hiss in pain.

"Should've known better than to ask a runty little bloke like ahhh mother FUCK!" I handed Weasley his boot and stalked off to investigate the rest of the flat. I have no need to hand around being insulted. "Thank you," he called weakly after me.

The bathroom was as tiny as the kitchen, with a mildewy shower and rust stains on the porcelain. There were three small bedrooms, one of which for some reason had a pair of heavy curtains hanging on an interior wall. Another had two doors, one that opened into a hallway and another that lead back into the living area again. I peeked through the curtains; now that we were inside, the rain was naturally letting up, and I fancied that I saw a bit the waxing moon. Or perhaps it was sunlight; it was getting precariously close to dawn.

"Malfoy, as much as I hate to ask..."

I turned around, and immediately saw why Weasley had been clutching his side all night. He'd peeled off his t-shirt: his chest was splattered with bruises and hex-marks, and a deep cut followed the curve of his ribcage nearly to his spine. A deep, bloody cut. There was, in fact, a great deal of blood, enough that I began to feel light-headed just from looking at it.

Weasley was talking. "There should be bandages and some potions in the bathroom, could you—"

"Excuse me," I said, and ran.

Don't make that face. This has nothing to do with my being unhelpful. Some people simply have deep and irrational horrors of certain harmless things, and mine happens to be of blood. It's nothing I can control and it's certainly not my fault. You don't see me harassing Weasley about his spider obsession, do you? Well, not much.

I threw up in the bathroom, though not for long, because it had been hours since I'd eaten anything, and then banished the entire contents of the cabinet over the sink into the living room. After utilizing one of the assortment of brightly-colored toothbrushes hanging next to the sink, I slipped into the room with the inexplicable curtains and stripped off the wreckage of my robes. Weasley was a big boy and could, I felt, easily take care of himself and his blood without me. I climbed into the bed, slipped under the sheets and fell asleep almost immediately.

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