The sudden explosion of tearful shrieks, of which Angie's was the loudest but not the only one, snapped his head around and his body followed. Kicking his Firebolt into high speed, he sheared around and into a dive, and was kneeling on the pitch beside his injured student before the others had managed to land their brooms.
"All right, Angie, you'll be all right," he told her, trying not to panic - in four years of teaching he'd never had a student injured in class, and having a first-year injured during routine broom lessons was disconcertingly different from having a seventh-year hurt during a match. "Here, let me - "
Harry pulled out his wand and cast a local anesthetic spell on her leg. Unnervingly, she cried harder. "Adam, stay on your broom, go and fetch Madam Pomfrey. The rest of you come down here and - Jason, hoy, get back here!"
Jason was already out of earshot, heading for the castle on a different trajectory from Adam's. Gritting his teeth over a word he'd as soon not say in front of children, Harry slipped an arm around Angie's shoulders and tried to make the sort of shushing noises that Madam Hooch had always made when one of them had a fall. They didn't work; Angie was too upset and too frightened (and too bloody Slytherin, some unpleasant part of his brain tried to add) to be comforted that easily. Harry imagined Madam Hooch tutting soothingly at the burly Chudley players currently under her care, and had to bite his tongue on a rather hysterical laugh.
"She'll be all right once Madam Pomfrey gets here," he told the other students, raising his voice over Angie's wails. They were clustered around, on the ground or hovering on their brooms, Gryffindor and Slytherin sigils alike resting below ashen, frightened faces. They were eleven years old, and Harry refused to believe that he had ever been that young. "Listen, it's almost the end of class anyway. Get to the shed and put your brooms away - don't leave them lying all over like you did last time. Todd, put the quaffle in the box, would you? Go on, now, the lot of you."
There seemed to be no end to the amount of tears that could be produced by an eleven-year-old girl. "Come on, now, Angie, you'll be just fine," he said desperately. "Here, sit up a little more - it's a clean break, Madam Pomfrey'll have it fixed in no time, you'll see."
Angie said something that was impossible to decipher through her sobs; and probably just as well, from the tone. Harry gave up and settled for making occasional shushing noises and staring desperately back over his shoulder toward the medical wing.
A soft, blessedly cool rush of air stirred his hair and Draco Malfoy swept in for a light landing next to him, the stocky first-year Slytherin boy who had gone to fetch him riding pillion on the broom behind him, coming in from an angle Harry hadn't been watching and making him start. "That'll be enough, Miss Bulstrode," Malfoy said coolly, eyes sweeping over Harry and the child with infuriating indifference.
Harry opened his mouth, and was on the verge of making a comment that would very probably have been unbefitting a teacher in the presence of students when he realized that Angie's tears had stopped as suddenly as though someone had switched them off at the main. Blinking in bemusement, he watched Malfoy kneel beside his student, robes floating back like a raven's wing away from high leather boots that looked dazzlingly expensive and reminded Harry vaguely of Quidditch gear. Malfoy reached out and twitched Angie's robes back away from her leg.
"It's broken, all right," he said carelessly. "Someone's gone to fetch Madame Pomfrey. She'll soon have you fixed up. Get to class, Jason."
Angie frowned. "I don't want Madame Pomfrey," she said, making a heroic and unsuccessful attempt to keep her voice from shaking. "I want you to fix it."
Malfoy raised an eyebrow at her. "I'm not very good at healing spells, Miss Bulstrode," he said repressively.
"Madame Pomfrey is, though," Harry said encouragingly, tightening his arm a little around her shoulders. "She'll have you set right in just a few minutes, you won't even miss class."
Two pairs of eyes turned to him with identically Slytherin looks of disdain before Angie turned back to Malfoy as if Harry hadn't spoken. "If you don't fix it I'll tell Aunt Millie that you made me go to Madame Pomfrey, and you know what she says about her."
"I'm afraid your Aunt Millie holds no terrors for me," Malfoy commented dryly.
"There she is," Harry murmured, glancing back across the field to watch Poppy and Adam coasting in from the direction of the hospital wing. When he turned back, Draco was sitting back on his heels and Angie's hands were clapped over her mouth, eyes huge and round with delight, so clearly a child who had just been handed blackmail material that in spite of himself Harry felt a momentary pang of sympathy for Millicent Bulstrode.
Poppy landed far less gracefully than Malfoy had; handing the broom off to her passenger, she sat down beside Harry and examined Angie's leg. "You've not moved her? Good. Crus emendo! Oh, don't flinch like that, Professor Potter, it wasn't the spell's fault you lost all the bones in your arm."
"I know," Harry muttered sheepishly. "Thank you, Adam. Go on to class."
"Stand up now, Miss Bulstrode, let's see how it's working," Poppy said briskly, rising to her feet.
Angie's eyes darted to Draco and her hand moved just a bit in his direction. He ignored it in favor of brushing a blade of grass off his sleeve. Just as Harry was getting ready to kick him, Angie gave a little sigh that sounded like relief, the last of her tension drained away, and she hopped to her feet.
"It feels fine," she told Draco, who nodded as if he'd expected nothing less. "I have to go to class."
"And I have to get back to the infirmary," Poppy said as she watched Angie pick up her broom and run toward the broom shed. "I'll see you both at the staff meeting, gentlemen."
"Malfoy, wait," Harry blurted as Draco turned wordlessly to leave. "Why didn't you... I mean, you could at least have patted her on the head or something."
Chilly amusement lit Malfoy's eyes. "She's a Bulstrode. She'd have bitten my hand off."
"She's a little girl." Harry had meant to sound angry, meant to be angry; but Angie was fine, and Harry wanted to know what in the world it was that had just gone straight over his head.
Malfoy looked at him for a long moment, clearly debating whether to tell him to mind his own business. "She didn't want coddling, Potter," he said finally. "She wanted reassurance that there wasn't anything seriously wrong with her. I gave it to her. Now if you're quite finished defending my students from me -"
"Malfoy, I was just asking -"
" - I have things that want seeing to before the meeting. Do try not to be late this time. It's rather inconvenient for the rest of us."
Gritting his teeth, Harry watched for a minute as Draco headed back to the castle. Then he turned resolutely away and picked up the brooms Draco and Poppy had used, thinking hard thoughts about Slytherin House in general and Malfoys in particular and wondering who he liked less - the pale, pinch-faced child who had called him "scarhead" and made Potter Stinks! buttons or the cold, poised, distant man who had taken the child's place when Harry wasn't looking. Inconvenient, indeed. Malfoy had probably learned from his father how to use courtesy like a switchblade, if he hadn't learned it from the mother whose soirees could make or break a Death Eater's advancement in less time than it took for the canapes to run low.
But he'd stopped Angie Bulstrode's tears when all of Harry's reassurances had been in vain; and the subtle alliance that had coalesced the minute he landed said quite clearly to the rest of the world and to Harry in particular: This is Slytherin, and you are not, and you will never understand.
Harry brushed off his robes and went calmly into the changing room to make sure that all the brooms had been put away; because he was twenty-five years old, he was a professor at Hogwarts, and Draco Bloody Malfoy was not going to make him scream and punch something.
"...and I believe that unless anyone else would like to put anything on the agenda - yes, Professor Potter?"
Snape had a nasty way of just barely stressing the Professor in Harry's title, as if granting it grudgingly to deadweight left over from the previous administration - The Boy Who Lived diminished to That Bloke Who Teaches Quidditch. That diminishment couldn't be half as welcome to Snape as it was to Harry, but a bit less of the barely-veiled annoyance would have been welcome.
"Headmaster, I'd like to ask for a funds allocation to have the school brooms tuned up. It wasn't done over the summer because the infirmary needed more restocking than usual, and one of them threw Evangeline Bulstrode today and broke her leg."
"She's fine now, of course, but it did give her a fright," Poppy put in.
Snape frowned. "You're sure it was the broom and not some misguided attempt at a Wronsky Feint?"
"I'm sure, sir," Harry answered. In spite of himself, he glanced across the table at Malfoy. Draco's eyes met Harry's for just a moment, unreadable, before his gaze turned back to Snape. Harry wanted to throw something at him and gritted his teeth against the urge, wondering why in the world Malfoy's very existence was so thoroughly getting under his skin today.
"Very well. Contact the broomseller in Hogsmeade and get a written estimate." Another indication that life had it in for Harry Potter: Snape was a more efficient and reasonable Headmaster than Harry had ever imagined he would be, thus depriving Harry of an excuse to be legitimately annoyed with him.
"You'd better see if they can do something about the Gryffindor team's brooms, while you're at it," Malfoy said in an amused voice just barely underlain with maliciousness. "Maybe it's some sort of mass malfunction that's cost them the last twelve games."
"Be still, you horrible boy," Minerva ordered him, with annoyance but no real anger. "Winners should be at least as gracious as losers."
"Well, considering that the last time Slytherin played Gryffindor it ended with your Seeker punching mine in the nose -"
Snape cleared his throat. "If there is nothing else... no? Good. Meeting adjourned."
He was needling Minerva, not me, Harry thought; and then: Fuck this. I'm going flying.
When he was a student, Harry had vaguely imagined that the professors led lives of idleness when they were not actually in class. Well, he'd found out better, all right. On top of the faculty meeting and a full day of Quidditch - thank God it was Malfoy's day to teach Defense against Dark Arts - he had lesson plans that he should have been revising in the hour or so between the staff meeting and dinner, then a meeting with Malfoy at eight to compare notes on this week's classes and confirm the lesson plan for next week. That wouldn't run long, anyway, Malfoy couldn't stand to sit in the same room with Harry now any more than he'd been able to when they were twelve years old. Then finally bed, and if he was lucky and could get to sleep at a reasonable hour he might not be tempted to doze off in the scrambled eggs while presiding over breakfast in the morning. One of these days he was going to apologize to Minerva for assuming that she did nothing but lecture and eat bonbons.
He didn't have much time to fly for the sheer joy of it anymore. Angling upward on a wisp of an air current, he soared out over the Forbidden Forest, wards coruscating invisibly over his skin like St. Elmo's fire. The sun wasn't low enough yet for the air to cool, and even at this height and speed it was warmer than he would have liked. Harry was exhausted and sore and hadn't been able to sleep more than four or five hours a night in months... but those things still, after all these years, fell away from him when he flew, and he couldn't regret skipping out on lecture revision to do it.
Smoke was rising from the chimney of the gamekeeper's cottage; there was a neat garden around it now, filled with the night-blooming flowers that Wilhelmina Grubbly-Plank was fond of. It still gave him a pang to look at, even though he knew Hagrid was as happy at Beauxbatons as he had ever been at Hogwarts. Hagrid had been the first casualty of Snape's reign - and thus far the last, fortunately, though now that Harry thought of it, he hadn't seen Peeves around for a while.
You may stay on at Hogwarts for the present, Snape had told Hagrid at his first staff meeting as Headmaster. However - you will consider yourself to be on probation for the remainder of your undoubtedly-brief term here. One more injured child; one more class where all but a handful of students fail their Care of Magical Creatures OWL for want of preparation - making it, I might add, very difficult for the Headmaster to justify continued allocation of funds and instructional time to the course; one more abuse of your position to illegally obtain and breed restricted creatures; one more incidence of drunkenness on school grounds; in short, Mr. Hagrid, one more toe set out of line, one more lapse below the standards of professionalism expected from a Hogwarts professor, and you will leave this school with your resignation or on it. Do I make myself clear?
The blow fell halfway through the previous year, Malfoy's first year teaching at Hogwarts, when a Slytherin third-year fell so badly afoul of a blast-ended skrewt that she nearly had to have skin grafts. Harry sat up with Hagrid all night before the resulting meeting with the Headmaster and the newly-appointed head of Slytherin House, cursing Malfoy's name, sure that it had been a carefully arranged plot to have Hagrid ousted.
Sure, that is, until the meeting began. He'd expected Malfoy triumphant, Malfoy gloating, Malfoy with an aha-my-evil-plans-have-come-to-fruition smirk; what he got was Malfoy in a towering rage. And not the sort of rages Snape used to have, which were really a sort of impotence, nor the tantrums of an eleven-year-old boy - this was six-foot-plus of Seeker-fast, Dark Arts-trained wizard making it very convincingly clear that the only things keeping him from hexing the skin off Hagrid in bloody strips were a lingering sense of propriety and the fact that Snape had taken away his wand the minute he came into the room.
Harry had never expected to be impressed by Malfoy's anger. He certainly hadn't expected to have to admit, by the time Malfoy had shouted himself hoarse, that his old unfriend had a point, or that Draco cared enough about the children under his care that an injury to one of them brought him down like the wrath of God on a half-giant twice his size. And most of all he hadn't expected the sudden flash of helpless, possessive anger, the small, furious voice that said that the only person who ought to be able to get under Malfoy's skin like that was Harry himself.
That night, as Harry and Hagrid worked their way with increasingly drunken determination through the remnants of Hagrid's home-brew, Hagrid inadvertently made things worse by saying Y'know, Harry, I never seen that bleedin' Malfoy get so mad at anyone but you.
Harry, who had been trying to forget that particular aspect of the situation, gave what was probably a lame attempt at a smile. I know. It felt like he was cheating on me, he answered, and immediately shut down that line of conversation and changed the subject.
But it hadn't been over yet; not even the worst of it, because whatever gods had thrown Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy into the world together to begin with were clearly not going to rest until Harry was on a back ward at St. Mungo's playing exploding snap with Gilderoy Lockhart when their lucid moments coincided. Feeling vaguely guilty after Malfoy's tirade, Harry had gone to the infirmary after dinner to see how the girl was doing.
April? Oh, she's doing much better, Poppy told him, barely looking up from stocking the medicine cabinet. Draco was here to see her earlier and brought her her homework. You can look in on her if you'd like.
Harry had just gotten to the ward door when music reached his ears - soft and bright like a music box, glimmering in the dusk. Frowning, he glanced around the corner.
April was sitting up in bed, laughing in quiet delight and trailing her wand through the air. Showers of glittering light followed in its wake, dancing in the air and coalescing into brilliantly colored firework roses that spun gracefully in the air before they dissolved in a whirl of sparks. The music waxed and waned in volume with the number of roses that hovered around the girl, never too loud or too soft.
Harry could have gone in. He could have asked her where she learned the charm, which he knew for a fact was not in the textbook, and which was clearly entrancingly new to her.
He hadn't. He had turned and left the infirmary, and stood in the hallway for a long time feeling absurdly like the thirteen-year-old boy standing on the other side of a shop window from a Firebolt he couldn't afford.
Thoroughly annoyed with himself both then and now, Harry banked and began to head back. He'd been out flying for too long and was going to have to rush to get cleaned and presentable before dinner.
Malfoy was standing on the steps of the castle, arms crossed, drumming his fingertips impatiently on his arm and watching Harry spiral down toward the doors. With a sudden flash of resentment, anger, and exhaustion, Harry opened his mouth to tell Malfoy that he was too tired for taunts about Gryffindor's Quidditch prowess or lack thereof, thank you, and maybe there were Slytherin-type things that needed seeing to elsewhere.
Then he landed, and saw the look on Malfoy's face.
"Here. Have a drink."
Malfoy's rooms were bigger than Harry's, but had no windows except for high narrow lightwells cut into the walls toward the ceiling. Harry didn't come here often - usually they met in the Tower or the staff room when they had to meet at all - and he was always a little surprised at the sitting room's decor. He had never been able to decide whether he expected Malfoy to decorate in a flamboyant, decadent-aristocrat style involving red velvet and lots of pillows, or in a spartan, ultra-modern black-and-white scheme with leather and chrome; but he would have expected either over dark polished wood, understated lighting fixtures that were probably fashionable in the nineteenth century, and an elderly overstuffed couch. The few paintings were gorgeous and subdued, and one of them was, dear God, a Titian, the original of a print on Hermione's living room wall - no moving portraits here, and nothing else to indicate Draco's tastes. What his bedroom might look like was another matter altogether, and Harry abruptly realized that his close examination of the furniture was not doing much to settle the butterflies in his stomach.
Malfoy sloshed scotch into a cut-crystal tumbler and set it down on the table beside Harry - not firewhiskey, but something that smelled like warm glowing amber. Harry picked it up and looked dubiously at it. This was getting stranger by the minute, and he was starting to get worried.
"Malfoy, what in the world is going on?"
The neck of the scotch bottle rattled slightly on another tumbler. Harry didn't think he'd ever seen Malfoy's hands shake before. "Sit down, Potter. The Headmaster delegated this to me, but bugger me if I'm going to say it more than once."
Harry sank slowly into a chair, his heart beating faster, wondering what could possibly have happened that would be bad for him and turn Malfoy white as a sheet. "All right, then say it."
Draco pulled out a chair opposite Harry and sank down into it, blowing a stray lock of hair irritably out of his eyes. He needs to cut that, Harry thought, oddly detached.
"Well, we can start, I believe, with Ginny Weasley. She's dead."
The tumbler slipped out of Harry's hand and clattered onto the table, sloshing scotch onto him. "What? How?"
"Steady on, Potter, it gets worse from there. My father has been... shall we say, prematurely released from Azkaban."
"He - wait, I don't understand -"
"Well, I'm trying to tell you, aren't I?" Draco observed wearily. There was no anger in his voice; and that more than anything convinced Harry that this was not just some sort of sick joke. "Bloody hell, Potter, this is harder than I thought it would be. Kindly don't sit there goggling at me like the catch of the day at the fishmonger's."
Harry took a gulp of the scotch. "All right, what's the connection between... between Ginny and your father?"
"The connection is her brother Percy. Percy broke my father out of Azkaban; Percy killed Ginny."
Harry was already shaking his head. "No. No, I mean, Percy's a horse's arse and he's selfish and ambitious but he'd never -"
"But he has." Draco's voice was quiet and implacable. "No one really knows why at this point. But it looks as if she somehow got wind of what he was doing and tried to stop him; he killed her outside the Burrow, went straight to Azkaban, got my father out, and now they've both disappeared."
"Why would Percy have been at the Burrow? And who says it was him, and how would they know?"
"No one knows why he was there, not yet. As for how they know... for god's sake, Potter, drink some of that. It's expensive and this is bad, and we both need as much of a bracer as we can get."
Harry obediently took a swallow. The scotch slid down his throat with a slow, subtle burn; at any other time he would have loved it, but now it barely registered. "Go on."
"They know because his mother saw him leaving, though she didn't find Ginny until later. She has wards on their house, apparently - not much, not enough to keep anyone out who was determined to get in, but enough to tell her when a member of the family goes in or out. No one else crossed them during the night, she says. She doesn't know when exactly they went off but when she realized they'd been tripped she came downstairs and caught sight of Percy outside just before he apparated away. A quick glance in the moonlight, but she's sure it was him."
"Oh, my god." Harry took off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes with a shaking hand. "Oh, god, what a cock-up. Where did you hear this?"
"From Severus. The Ministry sent him an owl. And there's more news - good for you, maybe, bad for me."
"How so?"
"Your friend Ron will be here tomorrow afternoon, doubtless breathing fire and champing at the bit to put me and Severus both on the rack. Find my father, you see, and they'll find Percy; and I should think Ron would very much like to have a talk with his brother."
"Ron's fair -" Harry began. The calm, level disbelief in Draco's eyes stopped the words in his throat.
"Even if he is as a rule, which I am not at all prepared to grant, he won't be able to be fair about this. I suspect the Ministry's only sending him so that they can keep better track of him than they'd be able to if he went off on his own. I also suspect that Severus and I are both in for a thoroughly miserable afternoon."
"I'll come with you," Harry said tightly. "You and Snape both. He can bloody well live with me being there when he talks to you. I can keep him reined in."
Malfoy's eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "And why would you do that?" he asked, swirling his tumbler lightly in one hand.
Harry swallowed hard. "Because... because I don't want to see Ron do something he'll regret."
"There is nothing Ron Weasley could possibly do to me or Severus that he would ever regret, Potter, and you know it," Malfoy said simply.
In frustration, Harry took a huge gulp of the scotch and then set it down hard, his eyes watering. "All right, then. Because you told me this, and didn't throw it in my face. Because I share a course with you. Because you haven't called me anything unpleasant in weeks. Because I don't want Ron doing something he ought to regret. I'm coming with you, and I'll be sorry if Ron doesn't like it but damned if he's going to tell me no."
Malfoy rubbed his fingers across his eyes, looking more tired than Harry had ever seen him. "Much as I've always wondered what would happen if the much-vaunted Gryffindor nobility ever turned on its own, I'll have to decline your -"
"Malfoy," Harry said between his teeth. "You aren't going to tell me no either."
For a long moment Malfoy only looked at him, grey eyes unwarmed by the lamplight. He'd looked at Harry a few times like that when they were children - that measuring, detached gaze that seemed to strip away fame, scars, and Houses to weigh what was left of Harry in some sort of balance. Before, it had usually been immediately replaced with a sneer; now, Malfoy gave a tiny one-shouldered shrug and finished off his scotch. "Well, I don't see how you could make things worse," he observed with the air of a man who has given up all hope of silver linings and might as well roll with the storm.
"Malfoy..." Harry said slowly. "Your father -"
Draco's eyes flicked back up to Harry's, and that look Harry was very familiar with - it was the one that told him that he was treading on dangerous ground indeed, and if he went a step further he was going to be wearing his kidneys on the outside. There was a time when Harry had viewed that look as the prelude to Malfoy getting hexed into next week. Now that they were both years away from schoolboy brawls, he wouldn't have wanted to bet on which of them would come out on the losing end, and in the years since Sirius died he had learned some hard lessons about rushing in first and thinking after.
"I don't know about you, Potter, but I'm not quite in the mood to go over next week's lesson plan at the moment. Shall we meet on Sunday instead?" Draco asked with a flawless courtesy that should have been at odds with that look and somehow wasn't.
Harry set his tumbler down on the table and stood. "That sounds fine to me. Are you coming to dinner?"
"No," Draco answered, turning his eyes away from Harry's and down into his empty glass. He pushed back his chair and stood, clearly intending to see Harry out. "I'm not terribly hungry, I'm afraid, and Severus has given both of us the evening off."
"All right, then," Harry answered, and stood for a moment feeling as though there was something else he ought to say or do. Finally he nodded and left, hearing the door shut quietly behind him as he headed down the corridor.
Finding that he wasn't terribly hungry either, he turned toward the Tower and his own rooms instead of the dining hall. He fully intended to have another stiff drink, find a good book, pull his bedcurtains closed, and pretend that this entire day had never happened. Suddenly he felt very alone, and for a moment he wanted nothing more than to be eleven years old again himself, with Ron and Hermione there with him, and Hagrid out on the grounds. He could even almost find it in himself to wish Dumbledore back in the Headmaster's office - or, at least, Dumbledore as the eleven-year-old Harry Potter had seen him.
But it was a long time yet until morning, his friends were a long way away, and no one ever talked about Dumbledore anymore.
