Bellatrix watched Narcissa and Snape apparate away. Once they were gone, she waited for her husband to show himself. Bellatrix felt the warmth of Harry's breath on her neck, marveling again at her reflexive response. Placing his mouth next to her ear, Harry whispered amusedly, "Well, I'll be a ferret's uncle."
Bellatrix turned her head and looked into his eyes. "What?"
"Never mind," Harry laughed. "Let's go."
Harry and Bellatrix double apparated back to their flat in Manchester together. Bellatrix wandered into their bedroom to change into something more comfortable before returning to the kitchen to find Harry holding the fridge door open.
"We can just have something frozen," Bellatrix suggested.
Harry grinned as he shut the fridge, opened the freezer, and selected a pair of frozen dinners. "You've become rather fond of the frozen food aisle at the Muggle grocery store, haven't you?"
"Well, if Kreacher would do some cooking around here," Bellatrix replied somewhat defensively, "maybe I could forego frozen food."
Harry smiled as he used his wand to cast a warming charm on his frozen meal. "Or, you could learn how to cook. I would rather not eat anything Kreacher has prepared."
Bellatrix warmed her own meal and followed Harry to their mahogany dining table. They sat down across from each other, the plastic frozen food trays clashing terribly with the table and the candlesticks Bellatrix had used to decorate it.
Somewhat tired, they focused on eating. However, Bellatrix eventually broke the silence. "I suppose we are going to Albania."
"No," said Harry slowly as he chewed his food, "I think I will go to Albania. It would be best if you stayed here and maintained the ghost of Ashworth's random appearances and did more research on horcruxes."
"You are the one who has been making the ghost appearances," Bellatrix said. "You should continue."
"Have you ever been to Albania?" Harry asked.
"No. Have you?"
"No."
"I guess you had better cook up another argument," Bellatrix parried.
"Peter will likely be disguised in his rat animagus form," Harry said.
"And you are a rat animagus also?"
"No," admitted Harry, "but I speak parseltongue. I can interrogate the snakes in Albania and find out if they've run across any strange rats."
"Rats that they probably ate?" Bellatrix asked, eyebrows raised.
"No," Harry smirked, "rats that strangely were able to elude being eaten."
"Whatever," Bellatrix said, conceding to Harry's proposal to go to Albania while she held down the fort. "I suppose I shall have to prepare some sort of facility where we can hold Peter and Draco prisoner. There is also plenty of horcrux research to do."
"When did we decide to hold Draco prisoner?" Harry asked, setting down his fork and using his wand to banish the fork and the empty dinner tray away.
Bellatrix gave Harry an annoyed look. "Did you really think I would just hand Draco over to my sister? I am going to hold the miserable boy prisoner and milk his mother for all she is worth."
Harry cast his mind back to when Bellatrix had sworn the magical oath. "I guess you did leave yourself quite a bit of room in that oath."
Bellatrix looked at him smugly. "Yes, I did."
"I'm not sure how much Narcissa is worth, though," Harry said.
Bellatrix finished her dinner and summoned an empty glass and a bottle of wine. "Her worth, at the moment, is inestimable," Bellatrix declared. She poured herself a glass of wine and offered the bottle to Harry, who declined by shaking his head. "However," she added, savoring the wine in sips, "that shall be my project alone for the time being."
"Great," Harry said, already dismissing Narcissa's supposed value and beginning to consider just how he would get to Albania. Magical transportation could attract unwanted attention, Harry thought, but I'm not terribly eager to ride a Muggle train, either.
"When will you leave?" Bellatrix asked, emptying her wineglass.
"Tomorrow, I should think," Harry replied.
Setting her empty glass on the tabletop for Kreacher to clean up later- assuming he bothers to appear before the next meal, Bellatrix thought-Bellatrix lifted herself into Harry's arms, again pressing herself into his chest as she kissed him deeply. "Time for bed?" she smiled.
.....
Petunia Dursley was in the process of washing her dishes when the local furniture store's delivery van pulled up to #2 Privet Drive. She paused momentarily, holding a half dried dish in her hand as the workers opened up the back and began to unload various articles of furniture before carrying them into the house next door.
Instinctively, she twisted her head to call out to Vernon that it looked like someone might finally be moving into #2, then remembered that Vernon was at work. She finished up the dishes as she watched the deliverymen carry in couches, tables, and beds. They were still at work when Petunia left the house and made her way to the nearest shop to buy some sort of welcoming gift.
When she came home from the shop, gift in hand, wrapped and ready to be delivered to the new neighbor, the van was just pulling away. Smugly, Petunia calculated that she would be the first in the neighborhood to greet the new residents. It would be she who had the first shot at determining whether these people would be an acceptable addition to the neighborhood. Or not.