Disclaimer: If you recognise it, I don't own it.

AN: Thanks to everyone who has read or reviewed this story. It has an ending and sadly, we're approaching it. I've had the entire story planned since I began writing it, with a few shuffles and rewrites each time a new book came out. THESE VOICES WONT SHUT UP: When I started writing this fic, no one knew anything about Blaise Zabini other than his name and year. Lots of people assumed he was a girl and I had already written a female Blaise when HBP came out. So enjoy the ride everyone, and as always: if in doubt, review.

I Will Repay

Livia waited in the Zodiac room's antechamber, crouched behind a sheet-draped escritoire. No one had noticed her slipping away earlier than the others, and no one knew she was here now, staring in an absent way at a deep gouge in the wooden table leg before her. She wondered who had caused it. Had Draco done it as a child? Had he been sent to his room when the desk was sent down here, or had Lucius had a more severe punishment in mind? Not that it mattered now. Or maybe it did, if the story behind this damage were Draco and Lucius's relationship in microcosm. Livia cursed herself again. If she'd been able to circumvent the charm Narcissa Malfoy had put on her last letter she would know all sorts of things now – but it didn't matter really. Not now. She breathed slowly, tamping down the rising anticipation. Not long now. Surely.

"How is she?"

Blaise sighed. "I don't get it. Her and… I don't know. I really don't know."

"Her loyalties, my little love."

"She's loyal. No doubt."

"How can you be sure?"

Their voices were as clear as if they were beside her. The door was open a crack and she could catch a glimpse of Blaise, seated at Lucius's feet. Livia smiled.

Secrets were fun.

She could hear Blaise get up and pace. "She doesn't want to, I don't think, but I actually believe she'll obey him. She doesn't believe in the Cause, but she believes in him. I mean she really believes. How did she seem to you?"

Lucius was silent for a moment. Then, "I think you're right," he said, grudgingly. He hated her, and now she seemed more firmly attached to the Dark Lord than ever. That had to sting.

Livia could hear the door to the hallway open. "Busy?" A familiar voice inquired.

"Not at all. I was just off," Blaise said. After a moment, Livia heard the door close behind Blaise.

Finally.

"Father."

"Draco. I see you received your letter."

"I did. Did you read it?"

"No. Your mother charmed it to open only for you."

There was a long pause.

"She thinks I've misjudged you," Draco said, without inflection.

Lucius said, "Perhaps we have misjudged each other."

There was another sound, a chair being pushed back. Then a bottle clinked and liquid poured into one – no, two glasses. Livia risked a peek. Draco faced his father and it seemed for a moment that he wouldn't take the glass Lucius offered him. And then he did.

She knew she should retreat. But she couldn't take her eyes off Draco's face. He looked down into the whiskey, then looked back at Lucius with cold defiance. "Did she know?"

"About what?"

"The women. The nannies, the housekeepers. Your whores. Did my mother know about your whores, Father?"

Lucius sat down. Perhaps he was being patient with his son. Livia, acknowledging her own cynicism, decided that he was probably reminding himself that Draco was currently considerably higher in the Dark Lord's favour than himself.

"Yes. Narcissa knew."

Draco nodded to himself. His mouth twitched in a bitter smile. Then he took a seat, watching Lucius with hooded eyes. "Did she know you were fucking your son's girlfriend?"

Livia couldn't see Lucius. Draco drank Firewhiskey insouciantly, doing a near-perfect job of hiding his apprehension.

"Narcissa knew about Blaise." Lucius said in measured tones.

Draco relaxed. He was pushing, Livia realised. But there was only so far he could go on the Dark Lord's capricious indulgence, and she knew Draco knew it. But still he pushed.

"I'll have to be more careful in future." He drank again and pretended indifference. "How many Zabinis have you fucked?"

"Two."

Draco said nothing. Lucius waited a moment before dispelling his doubts. "Blaise and Astrid."

Livia held her breath. Her mother? Lucius Malfoy and her mother? Slowly she let out her breath and inhaled slowly, deliberately. This was important. Everything else could wait. She was aware of having missed something Draco said. And again, Livia listened close.

Draco laughed, barely. "Astrid Zabini. God, I hope that was before Blaise's time. Poor bitch."

"Of course. It was many years ago."

"After Bellatrix?" Draco asked idly.

Lucius was silent. Livia saw Draco run a fingertip around the rim of his glass.

"You don't know that."

"I do now. Did she?"

"Your mother knew. Yes, your mother knew. Do you really want to discuss this?"

Lucius's voice rose, but when Draco raised his eyes to his father he stopped abruptly.

"Just curious," Draco said. "I wanted to know if she knew. If she knew what you'd done and still wrote what she did."

Livia seethed with futile curiosity. That damned letter. What, what did it say?

Lucius stood up and went to refill his glass. His voice was calm, and Livia knew his face would be without expression. "You know nothing of life. Of course you're upset. You know nothing of your mother. And you know nothing of me. How can you? You're a child."

Draco didn't respond directly. He waited until Lucius passed the crack in the door and sat down again. "He spoke to me, you know. Told me why we were fighting. She told me too. I blamed you for Badon because I didn't think… but she had her reasons. It was her own choice."

His voice was bleak. Lucius's tone matched it. "Yes. It was."

The two men sat there in silence. After a long moment Draco stood up and set his glass down. He looked at his father, then left.

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Her skeleton will lie in the chamber forever.

Angry words. Words she'd made him write – words he'd made her write, red paint dripping down her sleeves.

I forced his hand – or you did.

The way he had looked at Harry in the Chamber of Secrets, and the edge in his voice when he'd reassured Harry that little Ginny wasn't going to wake up. Ever.

It wasn't meant, any of it… he was so angry… he only spoke to me twice after that. In the Chamber.

Harry couldn't stop going over and over it in his head. Things Tom Riddle had said five years ago, things Ginny Weasley had said last week. And he remembered the way Riddle had stood over Ginny's body, and he remembered the fury and contempt for the both of them, Harry and Ginny, the ones who'd forced his hand. Even having set his basilisk to kill Harry, Riddle had stood over Ginny's body and watched her die. And now Harry knew why he had stared so intently at the little body. He saw Tom Riddle's cold face again and thought he read in it things a twelve-year-old boy couldn't have begun to guess at.

Exhausted, disgusted, Harry tried to focus on Hermione's familiar face. He didn't want to see pale fingers interlacing or to breathe Ginny's sweet, ice-cream perfume. Ron was upstairs being briefed with the others about what had happened at the meeting. His sword and knife were hidden under Hermione's mattress. Mrs Weasley had a tendency, after all, to hug her children tight.
Her skeleton will lie in the chamber forever, Harry thought. Part of her soul will die here, in the Chamber. The memory of a terrible pain in his arm was achingly real. Basilisk venom; Harry's blood; Ginny's soul: the diary drank without discrimination. The diary drank everything and then the diary bled ink.
Ron came very quietly into the room. Very quietly, he sat down next to Harry. And extremely quietly, his voice tight, he told Harry that the Map was blocked. Delayed. That Dumbledore and McGonagall and all the other teachers were doing all they could, but that the teachers were lying bastards and that – but Ron stopped talking and twisted his fingers tightly together in a gesture heart-breaking similar to his sister's. And Harry stared into thin air and thought absolutely nothing. Nothing.
They sat in silence.

Ron took Hermione's hand and held it very gently, very carefully, as though she were made of fine hollow china. Or as though the slightest increase in pressure would turn his grip hard enough to crush bone.

Harry felt the rock at the centre of him glow white-hot. He didn't move. Didn't flinch, even though the heat felt like it must be burning him to ash, cremating him from the inside out. He breathed. Slow and regular. It was dark outside and he thought how good it would be to take the sword of Gryffindor and walk into the dark and the cold. He thought how good it would be to freeze his skin in the blackness, to walk into the dark and become part of it, to walk unafraid into the Forest and dare the night to come for him. A serpent stirred, roused by the warmth, and Harry thought how good it might be to let the snake look out through his eyes and to speak through his mouth.
You got Parseltongue, I got the echo of a pack-a-day habit. Harry thought he smelled smoke and ice-cream. And sat still, not daring to hope, as the thought slithered through his mind and followed him into the dark. You got – I got – yes. Harry knew what he'd got. He had seen through the snake's eyes. He'd seen lies. He'd looked at Dumbledore and hated the old man. There is no corresponding soul fragment in you, the old man had said, but hadn't he also said that the situation was unique? I don't know what Ginny is.
Harry sat with his eyes closed and searched for the place that could speak the language of snakes. Find her, he said in his mind, and heard a discordant hiss in his words. He imagined he moved through pipes. He imagined a snake that came when it was called, that went where it was told. Find Ginny. He tried to find Ginny. He tried to find her reflection, even – in mirrors, in water, through ghosts. Tried at last, desperately, to find her even through a pair of cold black eyes.

Ron looked at him and the serpent looked back. But then Harry shuddered and was himself again, his own ordinary self, his own useless self. Ron looked back down at the hand he held so lightly.

"You tried it, then."

"Yes."

"Nothing."

"Yes."

Suddenly Ron sat up straight in his chair and fumbled in his robes, drawing out a blank scrap of parchment. He stared at it for a second, then drew the curtains around Hermione's bed and cast a silencing charm on them.

"This bit of paper – Malfoy shoved it into my robes when he pushed me. I didn't know what it was." Ron looked at it again, turning it over. Both sides were blank. "I still don't know what it is."

Hope rose in Harry. He thought of a voice, and a hooded woman that smelled like ice-cream, and the eyes behind her mask. And he thought of eyes flashing open in the Chamber of Secrets, and firelight flickering on the Ravenclaw girl's little corpse. He took the parchment from Ron.

She loves me. She doesn't love Tom; she loves me. Her own words. And held to that, hoping, knowing all the while that Ginny's own words were only occasionally to be trusted. Harry looked at the blank surface and wanted to tear its secrets out of it. "Quill."

Ron fished a freshly sharpened quill out of Hermione's bag. Harry held it over the paper and slowly, very slowly, a drop of black ink splashed onto the pale surface.

And stayed there.

The droplet broke at some infinitesimal movement and a thin line of ink trickled down the page. But there would be a way in, wouldn't there? The scuffle had been planned – planned by Ginny, Harry hoped and prayed – but planned in any case, and who would risk all that to plant a piece of blank parchment on Ron?

Ron was wise enough not to take the parchment from Harry when he took out his wand. "It's got to be like the Marauders' Map. There's got to be a password."
Hope born of desperation was still hope. Harry and Ron tried every password they could think of: in-jokes; titles and characters and actors of Muggle movies they knew Ginny had liked; names and middle names and surnames of parents and brothers and uncles and grandparents and classmates and enemies and, finally, the names of everyone who had ever played for the Holyrood Harpies. But the parchment stayed blank. The thin black trickle made it to the bottom of the page and a tiny speck of ink fell into Hermione's white sheet. Ron tried to rub the stain away but only succeeded in grinding it further into the weave. Harry clutched the parchment and bowed his head. We need you, he told Hermione silently, and when he looked at Ron he knew Ron was thinking the same thing.

Ron took the parchment, leaving a grey smudgy fingerprint on it. Harry let him. "Maybe it's not like the Marauder's Map," Harry said dully. "When you got it wrong there was always an insult, or… something. Something. Not just this."

But Ron sat up straight and his mouth hung open. He shut it to say, "Don't get your hopes up, mate, but - "

He tapped the parchment with his wand and said, "I solemnly swear I am up to no good."

Words blossomed onto the paper in bright red ink. Words in Ginny's untidy, backward-leaning hand.

Malfoy Manor, underground. Ask Dobby.

And for a signature, a crude drawing of a flower. Five words and a flower. But Harry's pulse raced with excitement at the sight, and Ron stared, and, unbelievably, laughed. "Oh, Ginny," he said, with a catch in his voice, and ducked his head so Harry wouldn't be able to see his face. "Ginny."

"Ron," Harry warned, hating that he had to do it, "We can't be sure this is really from Ginny. Riddle would know her handwriting, and who knows whose side Malfoy's really on?"

Ron shook his head, and looked back at Harry. "You see that?" he pointed.

"It's a flower."

"No – I mean yeah it's a flower, but it's not – it's a pimpernel. A scarlet pimpernel. You ever read it?"

"The Scarlet Pimpernel? No. Isn't that the one about the French Revolution?" Harry couldn't see where Ron was going with this, but his blue eyes were glowing and a smile was tugging persistently at his mouth.

"We did. There was this old copy on the shelf, dunno whose it was, and we read it the year before I went to Hogwarts. Dunno how much of it we understood, but we got the gist. Sir Percy Blakeney," he said, his eyes miles away, "Stupid toff by day, reckless vigilante genius by night. He could disguise himself as anything, and he rescued French aristocrats from the guillotine right under the noses of the Jacobins. We played Scarlet Pimpernel all year, me and Ginny. We'd pull off daring rescues and have swordfights and stuff – until Mum finally figured out we'd been climbing out the windows and messing about in the attic and – you know. A lot of stuff we weren't strictly meant to be doing."

Ron was somewhere else, and Harry wanted to be there too.

"She was so good at the voices – Ginny, I mean. Not Mum. We had a lot of fights over who got to be the Pimpernel, but she was better at the acting. She had this, this . . . 'lazy drawl' thing, just like in the book, it was amazing."

Slowly, Ron's eyes refocussed on the here and now. "She's playing him," he said, wonderingly. He looked at Harry. "She's playing You-Know-Who!"

Equal parts pride and dismay as he realised the likely consequences.

"You were right," Harry said to Hermione. He looked up at Ron. "She knew, all along. The Scarlet Pimpernel."

Something Ginny was before Tom Riddle had found her – a laughing, cunning, daring heroine, a little girl who climbed in and out of the windows of a house with eight stories, a master of disguise who fearlessly evaded evil Jacobins in the heart of Revolutionary France.

"The Scarlet Pimpernel," Ron affirmed.

Harry pulled the sword out from under the mattress, jostling Hermione, who wouldn't know or care. And it didn't matter, not now, nothing mattered now. His heart raced as he strapped the sword belt under his robes. Ron hadn't moved. "Go."

"Right. Dumbledore - "

"No." Harry had forgotten the knife. He reached in again and tugged it impatiently free. "Now. We go now."

"We have to get the Order – wait!"

But Harry was down the Infirmary and breaking into a run. He couldn't Apparate here, it would have to be Hogsmeade – but of course, Dobby, yes, Dobby would take him. "Dobby," he hissed under his breath. Students scattered as he ran by. He felt someone at his side and saw a flash of red. "This way," he said, grabbing Ron's wrist and dragging him around the corner. No students. No Dobby, either.

And no Ron. It was Percy who'd caught up with him. "What are you doing?"

Harry looked him up and down. White face, messy hair, crumpled clothes. But his eyes had a keen light in them and his expression was avid. "What are you doing?" Percy asked again. "Is it – Ginny?"

Percy had torn through Hogsmeade screaming death, Harry remembered suddenly, and he made a snap decision. "I know where she is. I'm going now. The Order can catch me up but I am going now, Percy."

Ron caught up. He took in the situation at a glance. "We're taking him?"

"Yes." Percy said. His white cheeks burned red now. He looked alive. He looked sane. But most of all, Percy Weasley looked dangerous. "Where is she?"

Harry called Dobby again. The house-elf appeared with a crack and made him a low bow. Harry cut in before Dobby could say anything. "Malfoy Manor, underground. You'll take us there."

"No!" Dobby squealed.

Harry saw red. "No?"

"Stop. Slow down, mate. Stop." Harry didn't know why he'd stopped, why he couldn't move, and realised Ron was holding his arms and staring him down. "Get a grip. Come on. It's not you."

Isn't it?

No. No, Harry would never… Ron's grip was strong and his eyes were icy blue. "No," Harry said hoarsely. Ron nodded. Let him go. And turned to Dobby.

"It's my sister. You-Know-Who's got her. They're there, and we need to go there to kill him and get her back. Please, Dobby."

"It is too dangerous! Professor Dumbledore must go! Harry Potter will be killed!"

"I've sent word to Dumbledore. But we're going now," Ron said firmly. "He'll be right behind us. I swear."

Dobby looked dubiously at the three of them. I would never, Harry thought. I never would have. He felt wretched, sickened. Dobby's eyes met his and shame scoured Harry's soul. Not for her. Not for anyone.

Slowly, Dobby nodded.

And held out his hands.