Sapphire (Lazuli Book #3) - Harry Potter Fan Fiction (Draco Malfoy)

Chapter Nine

Harry, Ron and Hermione spent the next two weeks meticulously planning their mission. For hours everyday, they calculated which entrance would be the best, how much polyjuice potion they would need for the period of time it would take to obtain the locket, and how they were going to get the hairs in the first place.

Despite my protestations on a daily basis, none of them relented and agreed to let me join them. It was always the same muttered apologies, the insistence that I was too unpredictable and if I happened to run into Lucius Malfoy, I wouldn't be able to stop myself cursing him all the way back to Malfoy Manor. Which, to be fair, was probably true.

Still, it hurt me to be left out of their plans, my only involvement in the whole affair being that I was the best at making polyjuice potion. Not even needing the recipe, I sent Kreacher out to fetch the ingredients - lacewing flies, leeches, bicorn hair, knotgrass, fluxweed and boomsland skin - and spent much of my time locked away in the pantry, where the conditions were dark and warm, perfect for brewing such a potion. Thankfully, the lacewing flies had already been stewed for the compulsory twenty-one days, otherwise we would have had to wait and entire month.

It felt good to be making potions again. The calm relaxation it brought me was welcome for relieving the hours of endless boredom, providing an escape from sitting in the corner of the drawing room, unincluded in the others' conversation. When I wasn't in the pantry surrounded by the sweet smoke eminating from the cauldron, I continued to clean and repair the house, now a lot easier with Kreacher and occasionally Dobby there to help. Together, we managed to strip the old, mouldy wallpaper off the walls, fixing the cracks in the walls beneath and painting the walls navy - a brighter alternative to the black that had been everywhere before. With a simple click of his fingers, Kreacher managed to changed every floorboard in the house from dusty and dull to the gleaming mahogany it had been when it was first laid down. We replaced the rugs and curtains, cleaned every piece of furniture in the house until it looked as good as new, removed the jars with the shrunken heads of deceased house elves and made the house habitable once again. The only room I didn't touch was the tapestry room, in which the entire Black family tree still stood. I knew that I could never bring myself to take down what was one of the only links to my ancestors.

By the time the polyjuice potion was done, the house looked better than I expected it ever had. We left windows open a lot of the time, allowing the last of the warm summer air to fill the house and remind us of what the world outside was like. Thanks to the extensive concealment charms placed on 12 Grimmauld Place, nobody even knew we were here. Except of course for the Death Eaters.

For several nights they had been there, standing on the square outside as if they were waiting for something. They couldn't see the house, and there was no way for them to get in. And yet they remained on guard, waiting for us to slip up and accidentally give a sign that we were here. 

Instead, we just increased our guard, taking more care with our actions and sending out Kreacher - who could freely apparate in and out of the house using his house-elf magic - whenever we needed anything. Kreacher was only too happy to oblige to whatever we needed, even having civil conversations with Hermione, who he had always been disgusted at before. And so we survived easily for those two weeks, always having a comfortable bed to sleep in and a hot meal on the table.

Finally and yet suddenly, the day came when the polyjuice potion was ready, and Harry and the others were ready to go. We ate breakfast in silence, my almost volcanic mood enough to dissuade any of them from talking to me. I'd been tempted to sabotage the polyjuice potion, to put a couple of Fred and George's Puking Pastilles in too, just to make their transformations a little bit worse as a punishment for leaving me out, but in the end I had poured three doses of the potion into a vial and stored the rest in case we would need it at a further date. I reluctantly handed it over to Hermione, and sat watching them as they made sure that they had everything they needed.