The Fallout by EveryThursday (reposted)

Twenty-Six

Day: 1453; Hour: 17

Draco is standing in the lobby, hands shoved in his pockets, his eyes glazed over, but firm on the staircase. His pants are a little too tight and a little too high on his ankles, his shirt painted onto his shoulders and just reaching the top of his pants. He looks ridiculous, but the clothes look expensive and she knows they are from a world he left behind.

She knows what he's thinking, because it's not hard to guess. He grew up in this house that had been a home, that is now used as the "other side's" headquarters. He probably spent his first night of life here, had his first cut, learned how to fly and practiced spells before Hogwarts. He celebrated holidays, had family dinners and birthday parties, spent school holidays here. It had been his home the same as she had hers, in a different place, in another world. She knows he is thinking of this, of his past, of memories only the walls and him can remember.

"Do you know when they are bringing our trunks back from the safe house?" he asks suddenly, his face shuttering, and his eyes dropping toward his socks, one black and the other blue.

She jumps and tries to play it off like she just saw him. "Oh. Um...I think someone just left to get them, actually."

"Hm."

"What happened to the clothes you were wearing before?"

He looks up at her then, blowing the fringe off his eyes. She tries to see the boy who lived here standing in front of her, but she can't anymore. "I burned them. I couldn't get the blood out."

Day: 1454; Hour: 6

"We were able to get at some of them because they were fractured - there was no leader, they were lost. They are reorganizing now, and it's not going to be so easy anymore. They know their hideouts and safe havens have been compromised from the Death Eaters we have captured, so they are forming new ones." Auror Wright throws a packet down on the table and steps back as Lupin steps forward.

"There have been some recent Death Eater captures that have given us new locations, but they have formed a new circle of leaders that are the only ones to know all the new places they have taken over. Some of the locations you'll be going to are old, likely abandoned, but the Dark are known to leave their captures behind if they aren't of use anymore."

"Will we be acting on the old or the new locations first?" Ginny asks. She hasn't looked at Hermione once since she entered the room, though Hermione kept finding her own eyes staring at the redhead.

"Both - the old locations and the new ones that seem temporary. They could leave the short-term hideouts at any time, and any prisoners left in the old ones can die at any time, so speed is vital. You'll work from the information we have on time schedules. First, you'll go to the places that have been abandoned the longest, and the locations that they have taken residence in for too long not to be moving on soon."

"What about the new locations that they have--"

"We don't know the location of their new headquarters, or where they have taken up root. That is someone else's mission - this is yours." Wright interrupted Lavender and slides two large packets to Draco and a man she doesn't know. "Malfoy and Rogers will be planning the mission executions. Malfoy, Rogers, and Potter are in charge of this team. Those are your orders."

Lupin passes out a sheet of parchment to each one of them, covering what was already said in the meeting but in more technical wording. Hermione signs the bottom without reading it and passes it back. In the beginning she had read each one she was handed, but it only took her four months to break the habit. She wonders how thick her folder is with those sheets of parchment.