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Elizabeth woke up neither bound nor gagged, but her headache was the subject of legends. The room she was in was opulent—or had been, a long time ago. She rubbed the back of her neck and pushed herself up onto her elbows, looking around carefully. The room was bedecked in ragged green and silver, over the cold stone and hard wood—it was a bedroom, she grasped from the fact she awoke in a bed. Dim sunlight streamed in through the large windows to her left.
She slid out from beneath the sheets and frowned, looking down at herself. Not that there was anything wrong with silk or nightgowns but they weren’t, generally, her idea of a good time. It also begged the question of who put her in said silk gown, and that was a question she didn’t want to be presented with.
The windows, she found, did not open. They looked out onto rolling green countryside—the village in the distance didn’t look like the small towns she was used to in America. That didn’t bode well; none of this did. On top of all that, it was cold. She wasn't sure why, in the middle of summer.
Just as she was trying the door—locked—there came a knock. She started back, which was a good thing, because it opened before she had time to process or answer. The man who greeted her was tall, thin and some many years her senior. He’d been handsome once, but he was haggard now, behind the thin veneer of what looked like an attempt at high society. “Ah,” he began, with insincere warmth, his sharp gaze taking her in, “Miss Riddle. I see you’ve joined us among the waking.” His grip on her shoulders was unexpectedly strong as he steered her back into the room and towards the table.
“I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else—" she began, trying to wriggle free of him. He ignored her struggling and pushed her down into a chair and remained standing, looming over her. It was a cheap attempt at intimidation and she was more irritated with it than anything—though that was mostly because she didn’t yet know anything about the situation she’d found herself in.
“I have not.” His tone was pleasant, if nothing else. “You are welcome to take the name your father chose for himself, of course. The Dark Lady has a delightful ring to it, I think, that will really stir the masses.” The man’s lips twisted into something that might’ve been similar to a smile once upon a time.
“My father is dead.” She thought of her stepfather’s pocket watch, the tears her mother never shed—and set her jaw. Being the captive of some madman wasn’t top of her list of ways to spend her time on Earth… She drew her thoughts away from the bizarre speech she was being given and tried to think of who knew where she was, and who was expecting her to be somewhere else when.
“You’re correct.” He patted her hand as though she were a child who had demonstrated a clever trick. “And it’s been difficult without him, but his cause did not die with him. We soldier on, Miss Riddle, and you—you are the key to our success.” He brushed his fingertips through a curl of her hair and smiled—the genuine joy of the smile was more unnerving than anything else had been so far.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her tone was flat, as she jerked her head away from his hand. “The consequences you’ll face for taking me—“
“Do you truly believe muggles can stand against the Knights of Walpurgis—I always liked that name better, you know. Knights. Bella would object, of course.” His expression was regretful, for a moment, and then he smiled again. “She’d have loved to be here to see you. She would have been a better mother for you—far better than the mudblood weakling—“
“How dare you—" Elizabeth began to move, only to find herself bound to her seat with a lazy flick of—was that a wand? She thought of Peter but none of this was anything like the things he’d told her before he died.
“If you cannot be cooperative, you will be silent and still.” When she opened her mouth to speak, she found she couldn’t. Alarmed, she began to struggle, but it served no purpose other than to entertain him. When she stopped, he brushed his knuckles over the curve of her cheekbone and sat down. “Dear. This must all be a shock to you. Your mother kept you from your rightful place—you should have been by your father’s side, learning all that you could. We need you, now, you know. Someone to lead us.”
The intensity in his eyes was starting to frighten her, layers of civility peeled back in them to reveal something ugly. He believed what he was saying, and Elizabeth had learned the danger of a true believer. He smiled at her, distantly, and went on with his story telling. “Your father, Miss Riddle, was a truly great leader—a revolutionary. I served him loyally, my brother and his wife by my side. We were the faithful. They are gone, now, but I remain. And I found you.”
He rose again, leaning over her to press a fatherly kiss to her forehead. “Rest, little princess. You have a busy time ahead of you.” When he left the room, whatever was confining her released, and she gasped, leaning forward. The door was still locked when she tried it again, and the windows still wouldn’t open. Her attempt to smash them only succeeded in the chair ricocheting back away from the unmarked glass and knocking her off balance.
She paced.
“What do you mean, she’s not there?”
Teyla looked up at John, her expression drawn. His face showed two emotions his team had become familiar with from him—anger, and hinted at underneath that, fear. Rodney went to answer but she began speaking before he could. “There was no sign of a struggle.”
Her simple pronouncement had a profound effect on the others in the room. She knew there’d been some hope that this was all a misunderstanding, that Elizabeth had just…wandered off and not let them know. It had, however, been two days and there was no indication of her anywhere. She wasn’t answering her phone—which Teyla knew was because she didn’t have it. She’d found it on Elizabeth’s nightstand, beeping with missed calls. The doctor wasn’t in her office, or in any of the other places they’d thought to check.
She just wasn’t there.
“What was there?” John demanded, beginning to pace.
“There was a—“ Teyla hesitated, not sure how to describe what she’d seen. “There was a green image above her home. It began to dissipate when we arrived.”
“Image? Of what?”
“It was a skull, large, with a snake protruding from it’s mouth.”
John and Rodney stared at her.
“Who’ve we pissed off lately?” Ronon asked. Teyla wondered when he’d drawn that knife, and what he planned to do with it.
“People in Pegasus,” Rodney shot back at him. “Who, therefore, couldn’t have kidnapped Elizabeth from Earth. Try again.”
John stepped between the two men when Ronon surged forward, shaking his head. “Guys. Focus.”
“What about Earth’s enemies?” Rodney suggested, snapping his fingers impatiently. “What have we got there? And why aren’t we up to date on it?”
Rabastan was as good as his word. She had no desire to indulge him but he gave her texts on magic to read and a wand that felt as right as it felt sickeningly wrong. When he began testing her on the knowledge gained—and found it lacking—she expected some kind of punishment. What she didn’t expect was the sadly disappointed look in his eyes or the way he sat down with her after meals (not drugged, much to her surprise) and insisted on reading through the aging books with her.
Despite herself, she began to learn. After the first few times, the demonstrations he performed of what she was reading about stopped being so shocking—it was a little like working with the science team.
Except it wasn’t, at all.
“Why is this important?” she burst out, slamming a book away from her. “What do you want from me?” she searched his face, frustrated and desperate for some hint that there was hope for freedom yet.
“I want you to learn.” His face was impassive as he replaced the book in front of her. “You need a basic working knowledge of your abilities before I can go any further.” He probably didn't mean to chill her—or perhaps he did. “Preparation is the key, Miss Riddle.” He wouldn’t call her Dr Weir, no matter how many times she insisted.
“Preparation for what?” The way he was looking at her made her skin crawl. It wasn’t sexual—she thought, incorrectly, that that would be easier to deal with. She wasn’t sure what it was, but she was sure that it didn’t mean anything good for her. She’d been there for more than a week and there was no hint of a rescue yet. She didn’t even know where she was.
“Your formal introduction to the wizarding world, of course.” He gave her a chiding look, as if she should have known that already. “You didn’t think you were going to sit in this drafty old manor for the rest of your life, did you?”
No. No, she had thought that John and his team would be bursting in through those doors any minute and that would be the end of that. She remained hopeful, her expression set in stone. “I suppose I didn’t.” Humour him. Humour him until the cavalry arrived and maybe she’d get out of this mess unscathed.
“Good girl.” He tapped the book in front of her. “Back to this, now, princess. Focus that intellect of yours. Your father would be so proud of you.”
She looked down at the page just to get away from the look on his face.
“Did you see the Daily Prophet?”
Harry looked up, giving Hermione a wryly-affectionate smile. “Hi, Hermione. I’m fine, how are you?”
She pushed the paper at him impatiently. “Front page.”
He stared down at the headline.
DARK MARK SEEN ABOVE AMERICAN DIPLOMAT’S HOME IN COLORADO
From what Harry could gather from the article, nobody knew anything. There was speculation about surviving Death Eaters making trouble overseas but no hard evidence of anything beyond the Mark above this Dr Weir woman’s house. His heart sank as he read that she was missing.
“He can’t be back, can he?” There was an edge of hysteria to Hermione’s voice that he could tell she was fighting to control.
“No.” He shook his head firmly. “No, he’s gone. I don’t know what’s going on here but we’re going to find out.” Harry didn’t want to do this—he thought he’d closed this chapter of his life a decade ago. That didn’t change the fact that an innocent woman had been dragged into his mess, by people he had failed to put away.
It shouldn’t have been his responsibility, but it was, and Harry had learned that that wasn’t something he could just walk away from.
“I thought the exact same thing,” Hermione agreed, sitting down across from him. “I’ve called Ron and he’s ready to leave when we are.”
Harry was startled for a moment but then he realised he really shouldn’t have been. “What would I do without you, ‘Mione?”
“Let’s never find out. I’m going to see what I can dig up on this Dr Weir person—you should coordinate our travel plans with Ron. Magical means are probably going to be faster and we really shouldn’t be wasting any time.”
It didn’t occur to either of them to leave the investigation up to the Ministry or the Americans. It wouldn’t, would it?
“So what do we know about this lady?” Ron asked.
Hermione was sitting between the boys—men now, but always boys—with her laptop in front of her, the notes she’d made on what she could find out about Dr Elizabeth Weir on the screen. “Not enough,” she said, grudgingly. “There are gaps in the information. But…I think I can speculate as to why she was targeted.”
“By all means.” Harry gestured.
“Well—here. This is a picture of Ann Weir, her mother.” She brought up the image. “I thought she looked familiar, so I went and had a look at some old Hogwarts student photographs—Ann Weir is Ann Scott-Lewis, a muggleborn witch. She attended Hogwarts in the forties, as a Slytherin. In 1972, she was one of those who left England to get away from the war.”
Harry nodded, slowly. “You think this is about her?”
“Maybe.” Hermione pursed her lips. “It’s quite a coincidence if it isn’t and—well, Dr Weir isn’t on record at any of the major wizarding schools, at least not that I could find. What else could Death Eaters want with a witch’s muggle daughter? There’s a connection here, we’re just not seeing it yet.”
“So we’ll find it.” Ron said it very matter of factly. “And by ‘we’, I mean you, ‘Mione.”
“One of these days, I’m going to teach you how to use the internet, Ronald Weasley.”
“You tried. It didn’t take.” Harry sounded distracted, staring intently at the picture of Ann Weir on the laptop. “What would Death Eaters want with a muggleborn in the first place? Why didn’t they just kill her?”
“I’m hoping that something at Dr Weir’s house can give us more to go on.” Hermione didn’t say that they didn’t know the woman wasn’t dead. It hung in the air regardless. “And speaking of that, we should really go now. We don’t all fit under the Invisibility Cloak any more and we need to do this when it’s unlikely anyone will notice.”
There was little conversation in the ride to the address Hermione had hunted down. The house was unremarkable, small and secluded. They were long past the days of wondering whether or not they should do things like this and Ron began picking the lock on the back door as soon as they found it. Hermione stood ready with her wand to disable whatever security system Dr Weir had in place—and discovered there wasn’t one.
“That’s odd.” She moved further into the darkened house. “Lumos,” she whispered, her wand lighting up. “Let’s see if we can find where she was taken from—check for any kind of magical signature.”
“Who died and put you in charge of this?” Ron grumbled but Harry looked grateful for the opportunity to take orders—good orders. Both men lit up their wands and began to search the house for…well. Hopefully they’d know what they were looking for when they found it.
Hopefully.
Harry and Hermione were poking around Dr Weir’s bedroom—the bed was still unmade and the woman’s clothes lay haphazardly on the floor—when they heard movement downstairs. He froze, killing the light on his wand immediately. Hermione followed suit, straining her ears.
Movement was followed by voices—men and a woman. “You’re sure you saw someone, Rodney?”
“Of course I’m sure!”
“Ronon, Teyla, check upstairs. Rodney, stick close.”
“Ron, we’ve got company,” Harry hissed down the hall, and heard the steps pause on the stairs. Shit. Ron poked his head into the bedroom.
“Make a break for—Merlin’s balls!”
An enormous man with long hair gripped Ron by the back of the neck. Hermione and Harry looked from Ron’s wide eyes to his stone face. “Colonel wants to talk to you.”
“You’re wasting precious time.” Harry stared defiantly up at the military man opposite the table. “People are in danger.”
“I got that,” ‘Colonel Sheppard’ replied, pushing off the wall to rest his hands on the table and lean down. “But how about we start with what three British tourists are doing in Dr Weir’s house in the dead of night?”
Harry was tightlipped but he wasn’t a headstrong teenage boy any more. Keeping secrets for the sake of keeping secrets…whoever this man was, he wanted Dr Weir safe even more than Harry did. To Harry, she was the representation of an idea—to Colonel Sheppard, she was a friend. He expelled a harsh breath and focused. “Do you believe in magic?”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s a yes or no question, Colonel. Do you believe in magic?” They didn’t really have time for this but nothing else had got him anywhere so far.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” But the frown on Sheppard’s face was thoughtful, his gaze on Harry turning to something less dangerous and more assessing. Harry wasn’t relaxing, by any stretch of the imagination, but it was something. Maybe they could help each other.
“Your Dr Weir has been caught up in a war that was supposed to be over ten years ago. Almost exactly ten years.”
“War. And this has what, exactly, to do with whether or not I believe in fairies?” The older man cocked his eyebrow, sardonic.
“Give me my wand back and I can show you.”
Elizabeth stirred but by the time she was awake she was alone again. Breakfast was on the table next to her and all the books Rabastan had brought her were gone. Green and black robes were laid out on the end of the bed. She wasn’t really one for high fashion but they looked as though they cost someone a lot of money and with good reason.
She ate little, washed quickly, and, not knowing what the robes meant, didn’t put them on. She waited by the window, trying to test at what she by now knew were magical barriers on the glass and wood.
Without the wand that Rabastan only allowed her under his supervision, and so new to the use of her magic, she didn’t get far (or anywhere, if she was honest with herself) but it kept her occupied until the door opened and he swept in. He looked crestfallen when he saw the clothes he’d left out for her untouched. “I was hoping you’d be ready.”
“Ready for what?” She’d take a step back if it weren’t for the fact she was already against the window. He moved forward—he was so much faster than he looked like he could be—two wands gripped in his hands.
“To take your place, of course. Ten years ago today, on July 10th 1998, your father was murdered. From his ashes you will rise—no longer the little princess but truly a dark queen, with his blood in your veins and my guidance at your side.” His right hand shook as he lifted his own wand, pointing it at her. “Forgive me, my Elizabeth.”
“For—“
“Imperio!”
Elizabeth’s mind emptied for a long moment and when she regained herself she was no longer in control. She watched through her own eyes, mildly confused, as she carefully buttoned herself into the slim-fitting dark robes. Rabastan smiled at her, encouragingly, taking her hands in his own and pressing the second wand into them.
“We’re going to London, Miss Riddle,” he said, having apparently recovered from his brief crisis of conscience. She gazed up at him, blankly obedient. “It’s high time the wizarding world knew your name.” His knuckles brushed over her cheek and he kissed her forehead, closing his eyes and holding her against his chest. “You will bring them to their knees.”
He pushed her back, hands on her shoulders. “Elizabeth, you must believe me, I do this all for you. Do you see? You can be so much more than what your mother limited you to. I’ll show you—and you’ll show the world.”
Inside herself, Elizabeth felt sick. The Death Eaters that remained—and remained loyal—were behind her, with Rabastan standing at her side, his face obscured by a white mask, a dark cloak hiding most of the rest of him. They wanted her, however, to be seen. They’d coiffed her hair and painted her lips, lining her eyes with black, and Rabastan had whispered beautiful, in the softly reverent voice that was so nauseating.
She felt herself smile at him as they strode forward, bold and sure. Dark creatures padded the ranks where wizards once stood, their presence making her skin crawl almost more than the way Rabastan was looking at her.
Her arm raised and her mouth shaped words she’d never heard before. That was when the screaming began. ‘Her’ loyal followers spread into the crowd, working on the element of surprise, and she watched in captive horror as men and women fell before them. A little girl knocked into her knees, trying to rush past and escape.
Her hand shot out—ohgodno—and caught the child by her throat. “Are you going somewhere?” she asked, pleasantly. The girl stared up at her, silenced by fear and still for the same reason. “We can’t have that.” She held out her hand—what’s happening—and Rabastan pressed a knife into it, pride in his eyes.
Blood stained her hands and robes and the image of the little girl’s eyes turning sightless would stay with her long after the stains had been soaked away. When Rabastan lifted the spell and left her alone, she sobbed for a child whose name she’d never know.
***
John stared at the images on the front of the newspaper that the Granger woman had handed him. Elizabeth’s face gazed back up at him, the steady calm of her expression as atrocities were committed around her left him speechless.
“We were looking in the wrong fucking place.” Potter slammed his hand into the wall.
“What has happened to her?” Teyla looked from the photograph on the page to John. He growled in frustration.
“Why don’t you ask Mr Magician here? Apparently he’s got all the answers.” John ignored the reproving look he got from Teyla for his temper, itching to shoot something. “I have to talk to the General. We’re headed for London.”
“That is where she is?”
“It’s where she was,” Potter clarified, carefully looking at Teyla and not John. “If we coordinate with the Ministry, we’ve got a good shot at finding your friend and taking down whoever did this to her.”
“I still don’t understand why they took Elizabeth.” Rodney frowned, tapping his fingertips against the table by the paper. “Who looks at Elizabeth and thinks to himself, ‘wow, she’d make a good evil handpuppet’? Don’t you have women in England?”
“I’m not positive—yet—but I think it has something to do with her mother.” Granger pursed her lips. “Ann Scott-Lewis was one of Tom Riddle’s housemates during his Hogwarts years—"
“Translate that from the British, Miss Granger,” Rodney hurried her, impatiently.
The young woman gave him an irritated look. “Mrs Weir went to school with the Dark Lord. There may be a connection that the Death Eaters are trying to exploit through her daughter.”
Weasley looked around the room and then sighed. John got the impression it wasn’t an unfamiliar position for the man. “So why are we sitting here stropping at each other when we could be tracking down this Scott-Lewis woman and asking her what she knows about the Dark Lord?”
There was a long silence.
“I’ve got to talk to the General,” John repeated. “Someone get a hold of Elizabeth’s mom.”
Ann Weir, it seemed, lived in a modest house in London—which was where they wanted to be, anyway, and it saved them making two trips.
Hermione knew the area, having family there, and volunteered to go with Teyla to speak to the elderly woman. Teyla wasn’t entirely sure what to make of the young witch, and the curiosity seemed to be mutual. For all that the wizarding aspects of Britain had come under the SGC’s scrutiny, they’d been less forthcoming.
‘Classified’ was a concept that Teyla hadn’t had much trouble getting used to but in this instance it seemed…well, there were other, more pressing concerns. She knocked at the door.
“You seem to anticipate something,” she murmured to her companion, while they waited.
“I’m not sure what to anticipate,” Hermione confessed, wide and curious eyes examining their surroundings. “The Death Eaters are presenting your friend as the heir of Voldemort—" she cut herself off and Teyla looked back at the closed door, not sure what to say.
Mrs Weir saved her having to think of something. The older woman held the door open, examining the two women on her doorstep with suspicion. “Yes? What do you want?”
“My name is Teyla Emmagen and this is Hermione Granger,” she began, smoothly. “We have news of your daughter—and many questions.”
“Can we please take this inside, Mrs Weir?” Hermione put in, glancing down the street behind her.
“…yes. Yes, come in.” She seemed to subside a little, stepping back to allow them room to pass. Teyla got the impression that Ann had heard something already and, of course, why wouldn’t she have? Living in London—Elizabeth’s appearances had been very public, if brief. It was, she mused, impressive that whoever was behind it all had managed to make it so far.
When they were settled—Ann had insisted on fetching them tea, more to give her a chance to gather herself than out of good manners, or so Teyla suspected—she cleared her throat and glanced from Hermione to Elizabeth’s mother. “Before we begin, am I correct in assuming that you have heard the news?”
“Yes.” Ann looked quickly at them both and then down into her cup. “I tried so hard—to protect her. To keep her out of all of this. I did everything I could. If you’ve come to ask how—or—I don’t know. They were never supposed to touch her.”
“So she is his heir?” Hermione asked, gazing intently at the out-of-practise witch in front of them. Teyla didn’t like the way she said that but she held her tongue on the matter, instead focusing on Ann to see how she would respond.
“No—no. She was never—he wasn’t her father. My husband was her father, do you understand? He loved her. He raised her. That man has no claim on my child—none at all, Miss Granger. He was—I was young, and ambitious, and I made a stupid mistake. My daughter is paying for it now.”
“Miss Granger’s friends believe that Elizabeth has been ‘cursed’,” Teyla said, before Hermione could interrogate the woman about the choices she’d made in the past. “With—"
“The Imperius.” Ann finished for her, nodding. “She’d never do these things herself. She’s better than that.” There was a tense silence—Teyla didn’t look at Hermione—and then she asked, quietly, “Are you going to stop them? That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You wanted to know what you’re facing.”
“That is so.” Teyla put her teacup down and reached out to clasp Ann’s hand in her own. “Elizabeth is our family. If there is anything you can tell us that will help to bring her home…”
Ann took a deep breath. “I can try.”
She’d begun to get used to the fog in her mind, keeping her from self-control. That was the worst part, she thought—that it was something she could become accustomed to. It was a long way from being normal, though, and for that she was grateful. Still—she didn’t know why the spell had been left intact after Rabastan locked the door behind himself.
The outings were draining, physically and emotionally, and she needed the time he permitted her control in order to—well, she wasn’t coping, but she was surviving, and she’d continue to, until she figured a way out of this mess. She just needed that time and he wasn’t giving it to her today.
She didn’t understand why, and couldn’t ask.
When the door clicked open, she didn’t react, but the insinuation of his commands guided her as he approached, kneeling down before her. Her hands reached to him without her permission, and he clasped them in his own. “You’re doing so well,” he whispered, laying his head gently in her lap.
“Am I?” she heard herself ask. The hopeful lilt of the question was quite a demonstration of the wizard’s willingness to lie to himself.
“You are.” He closed his eyes, settled at her feet. She would have expected the position to be awkward for him but he seemed oddly content. “You’re everything I hoped for.”
Her fingers stroked gently through his thoroughly grey hair. “I’m honoured,” she murmured. “Your loyal service will be rewarded, Rabastan—when we come to power.” The cold sincerity of the words slipping out of her mouth at his prompting made her feel filthy.
“We honour their memory.” He was quiet for a time after that, apparently happy to stay at her feet, her hands in his hair and his head resting against her thigh. Then, he said, “I’m not going to lose you like I lost them. You’re too strong.”
He stayed there until he fell asleep. In the morning, he lifted the curse as she’d expected him to the night before, and left without a word, without looking her in the eye.
She threw up.
“Damn it.” Harry threw his pen down and scrubbed his hands over his face, tired. “If I were a crazy Death Eater, where the hell would I be?”
“Let’s try to think like them,” Hermione suggested, pursing her lips to the side. “If you were a Death Eater, and you were in control of Voldemort’s heir, where would you take her?”
“Somewhere that meant something.” He frowned, looking down at the maps in front of him. “Somewhere important to Voldemort.”
“Azkaban,” Ron offered.
Hermione and Harry looked at him, then suddenly at each other. They said at once—“Little Hangleton!”
“You’re sure about this, Harry?” Shacklebolt looked scrutinisingly at the young hero.
“He said he was sure,” John interrupted before Harry could answer, folding his arms. “So how about we get going and rescue Elizabeth before this Lestrange guy gets any more bright ideas?”
“Colonel, you’re asking the Ministry to commit the resources of a full scale Auror attack—based on—"
“Based on my word.” Harry stepped up next to the American, setting his jaw. “Sheppard’s right. We don’t have time to waste on bureaucracy. Will we have the Aurors or not?”
“I don’t know about Potter but I’ve faced worse odds than this without a bunch of guys in dresses.” The tension in John belied his casual statement but nobody acknowledged it—not aloud, anyway.
Shacklebolt regarded the two men steadily and then he nodded. “Coordinate with Tonks.”
Harry shook his hand. “Thank you,” he said, sincerely. “The sooner we end this…”
John just walked away.
Elizabeth heard the explosion at the same time Rabastan did—as she rushed to her feet, the next thing she heard was that familiar curse. Her movement slowed and she drew her wand.
“We have company, my Lady,” Rabastan said, pleasantly, his wand at the ready. “Let’s make them feel welcome, shall we?”
He let her lead the way down the stairs as Aurors rushed into the house. The sounds of battle reached them and Elizabeth prayed—she’d never been religious before but Atlantis had changed a lot of things and this experience was changing them even more.
“Elizabeth!”
She reeled around at the familiar voice. Rabastan threw a curse in the direction of the group in front of them and ducked behind a wall—he left her where she was and she assumed (correctly) that he knew perfectly well that they weren’t going to risk hurting her. For the agonising moments as her father’s wand raised in her hand, she wished they would.
Her mouth began to open, but Rabastan never got the chance. A bespectacled man that Elizabeth didn’t recognise shoved John out of her way with a snarled, “Get down, Sheppard,” and then he cried out:
“Finite Incantatem!”
Elizabeth didn’t even think about it. As soon as her body was her own, she gripped Voldemort’s wand in both hands and snapped it over her knee. Silence reigned in the foyer of the decrepit house and she sank down, dropping the broken wand and scrambling back away from it.
Rabastan shook as he walked towards her, heedless of the guns and wands trained on his every movement, his eyes wide with the grief and madness that had driven all of this. The sounds of the other rooms suggested that the Aurors were carrying the day but nobody here was listening to that. All eyes were on the aging Death Eater.
“Lestrange,” the man who had ended the spell growled the name.
John’s P90 pointed directly at him. “That’s close enough.”
Rabastan ignored all of them. He dropped to his knees in front of Elizabeth, an aching loneliness in his eyes, as he didn’t, for once, reach to her. “Please,” he whispered. “Please, don’t turn your back on me.”
“I—"
He didn’t let her finish, his hands wringing as he sat back on his heels. “Elizabeth—your father—my family—I lost them all. I can’t—you can’t leave me, princess, you’re all I have. You can’t do this. I know you’ll understand if you just—please—"
Sickened and oddly pitying, she found herself lacking the words to even begin to respond. She turned her face away and closed her eyes.
“So be it,” he whispered, and his own spell reached his heart long before John’s bullet finished the job.
John scooped Elizabeth up into his arms—he expected protest and wasn’t sure how he felt when she just looped her own arms around his neck and refused to otherwise respond. They’d been clearing out the manor and Rabastan’s body was gone, as well as the other casualties and the Death Eaters who would be taken to Azkaban…but his blood remained spattered across Elizabeth’s robes and skin.
“We’re done here.”
Harry nodded, slowly, his eyes fixed on the slim woman in John’s arms. “She’s going to be okay.” It seemed like he was reassuring himself as much as anyone else.
“Yeah.” John looked down at her. “Yeah, she is.” He wasn’t accepting any other alternative. He knew no one else on his team would either. Hopefully Elizabeth would feel the same way.
“For now,” Teyla said, gently, “Let us take her away from here and let her rest. It has been a long ordeal.”
“I want to go home.” Elizabeth breathed against John’s neck. He tightened his grip on her protectively.
“We’ll take you home,” he promised. “Everybody’s missed you.”
She closed her eyes.
John slid a cup of coffee across the table in the Daedalus’ mess, watching Elizabeth closely. She’d been quiet since—since she got back, saying little but initially reluctant to be alone. That reluctance had passed but she still wasn’t saying much. He knew she’d agreed to have sessions with Kate when they got back and wondered if she would’ve agreed so easily if they hadn’t stressed how much her job security was riding on it.
“So…I heard Ms Granger was very offended on your behalf.” He cocked his eyebrow at her.
“Oh?” Elizabeth sipped the coffee, not looking up from the reports she was still catching up on. Their world didn’t stop for the one they’d just left behind.
“Them not letting you have your own wand didn’t sit too good.”
Elizabeth snorted. “If I never touch another wand again in my life, it’ll be too soon.” John got the feeling he’d just lost all of the arguments they were ever going to have about her carrying a weapon offworld.
“Yeah.” He tapped his fingers against his coffee mug, and then nudged her foot under the table with his own. “I’m sorry we didn’t get there sooner.”
“I know. Teyla’s been telling me all about the rescue efforts—you did get there. That’s what’s important.” Too late, though, her hollow eyes said. He told himself that they could get through this. That she could get through this.
He believed it.