"I've a list of questions I'm meant to ask you," Percy said, staring down at the neatly lettered parchment in front of him. His voice sounded odd in his own ears, and his face burned with remembered resentment.
Lucius tilted his head, regarding Percy steadily through eyes turned colorless as glass by the morning sun. "I was at school with Cornelius Fudge," he said thoughtfully. "Nature never meant him for a fool, not really; but when one is cursed with a spectacular lack of imagination and a certain rigidity of thought, it would take a stronger man than Cornelius to avoid becoming one. What does he want to know?"
"First, he wants to know if you've had any communications from other Death Eaters recently."
"Oh, really." Lucius looked pained, and Percy looked back down at the parchment, hiding the color stinging his cheeks. "He knows the answer to that, or can find it out easily enough. What's the next question?"
Percy took a moment before he spoke, forcing down the image of Fudge's patronizing face and sharp, wary eyes as he handed Percy the list; forcing down the urge to slip the parchment back into his briefcase and tell the Ministry that he'd lost it. "The second question has to do with Igor Karkaroff. He's never been found. The Minister wants to know if you have any information that might indicate his whereabouts."
Lucius frowned, tapping his steepled index fingers against his mouth. "Mr. Weasley, the Minister cannot possibly expect me, after ten years, to be able to help him find a man I barely knew," he said, sounding genuinely puzzled. "It's as much as I can do sometimes to keep track of my own son."
"I understand that, sir; I think the Minister wants…" Percy didn't know what the Minister wanted.
"May I see that list?" Lucius asked, and Percy handed it over. Lucius was silent for a minute or so as he studied the questions and then looked thoughtfully out the window. Percy, who could think of nothing else to do, waited.
Finally Lucius turned back to him, returning his thoughts to the small room and Percy. "Cornelius very much wanted to be Head Boy, did you know that?" he asked, setting the list down in front of him and making minute adjustments to its position, aligning it exactly with the edge of the table.
"No, I didn't," Percy answered, interested in spite of himself and honest enough to recognize that small, ugly flare of spite. He still had his own Head Boy badge, laid carefully away.
"He was the sort of Prefect who was always overstepping his authority – I think, you know, that he never really had a good feel for how wide a power base a given position could be expected to buy him, or where the boundaries were beyond which the justified exercise of power begins to look weak and grasping. In any use of political power, rather like summoning demons, there is a circle one must not break. Cornelius, as a Prefect, broke that circle rather often, I fear."
"The Minister for Magic must have a very large circle," Percy commented.
Lucius hummed doubtfully. "Not as large as one might think. Cornelius is answerable to a great many people, both officially and through favors owed. Power is never as unconstrained as it appears from the outside. Even Voldemort isn't entirely free to do as he pleases, though he'd like to be and pretends he is."
Percy blinked rapidly, having considerable difficulty imagining constraints on Voldemort's power now that he was once again fully corporeal. On the other hand, there must be some or the wizarding world would have been laid waste years ago; Percy's imagination merely came up short when it came to envisioning what those constraints might be.
"The Head Boy in Cornelius' year was a boy named Elridge Corner – Ravenclaw, good family, very popular and possessed of more common sense than many bright people are. He married a Bulstrode, I think. Cornelius was furious with him for being Head Boy. He spent weeks trying to perfect a charm to hex Corner's broom out from under him during a Quidditch match, but then he never used it." Lucius shook his head, visibly setting aside reminiscences. "Well. Let's see what can be made of these questions, if anything."
"You needn't answer any you don't want to," Percy felt obliged to say.
"You say that as if I had something better to do," Lucius remarked dryly. "Some of them I can't answer, and I do mean can't and not won't. The one about Karkaroff, and… may I borrow your quill for a moment?"
Percy handed it to him and Lucius read down the list, making the occasional tick as he went. When he handed it back, four of the nine questions were marked out with an austere diagonal slash of ink. "The questions that are marked out are ones that I don't have enough information to answer. I see no reason to spend time on a question that Cornelius could answer himself by sending a memo moth down the hall to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. That leaves us with four questions to work with."
Percy glanced down at the list. The questions that were marked out were ones that no one who'd spent the last ten years in Azkaban would reasonably have been able to answer; ones he'd tried to argue against, and failed.
"He doesn't really expect you to bring back answers, you know," Lucius said gently. "I'm afraid that the purpose of these questions is probably to make it clear to me that I've long outlived my usefulness – to the Ministry, to Voldemort, or to anyone else."
Surprised, Percy looked up; but Lucius only looked thoroughly amused, and Percy was struck again by that sense of quiet, contained power that Lucius wore like a second skin. If the Minister honestly thought that Lucius Malfoy was no longer of any value to anyone, then the Minister was… the Minister had misjudged, Percy thought, and didn't let himself think He's a fool.
But if he did think Lucius was no longer useful, what did it say that Percy was still being sent to talk to him? No, there must be something useful hidden in the facile questions, something important enough to risk jeopardizing his rapport with Lucius with a trivial interview script. That was the only thing that made sense.
He still had nightmares about Bellatrix. And he had nightmares now about the Death Eater vandalism and destruction that the Ministry refused to publicize or even acknowledge, of corpses posed in a cemetery and a burnt-out house with how I loathe you written in blood on what was left of the walls. Percy needed things to make sense.
"Be that as it may, you'll have to take something back with you, and I think it would be amusing to send him some answers in spite of his expectations," Lucius was saying. "Indulge me, child. We’ve plenty of time."
Percy glanced out the window; the light on the water was still golden, and the air still smelled like morning. "All right. First, then – the Minister would like to know how Death Eaters are recruited."
"The obvious answer is through word of mouth," Lucius answered idly. "One could hardly expect him to take out an ad in the Prophet."
Percy wrote down the answer, knowing Lucius was watching him do it and unable to help wishing that he'd look away. Percy had spent seven years of his life looking like a parish boy in front of the Malfoys, and another year looking like an inconsequential Ministry underling; he'd hoped never to look like either in front of anyone again, and he didn't know if he could make up the ground he was afraid he was losing.
"That, as I said, is the obvious answer," Lucius said when Percy had finished writing and looked back up, ready to move on to the next question. "Like all obvious answers, it's greatly reductionist and not a very good reflection of a much more complicated situation."
His attention caught, Percy frowned. "Complicated how?"
"Recruitment of Death Eaters is done by other Death Eaters." Lucius spread his hands in a small, precise gesture. "If you were going to recruit someone to Voldemort's cause, who would you choose? Who would you confide in, who would you sound out first?"
Percy opened his mouth, then closed it again slowly.
Lucius smiled. "Do you see? One is tempted, of course to say one's family – but one's family's attitudes can surprise one, sometimes unpleasantly. Just ask the Blacks. One's friends? Peter Pettigrew wasn't the only person to betray friends to their deaths during Voldemort's first rising, and many of his compatriots slept quite soundly in the virtuous conviction that they had done their job to rid the world of Evil – forgetting, of course, that Evil had given toys to their children at Christmas, been the maid of honor at their wedding, helped them scrape through Charms with a passing grade. One's co-workers? Not in a place like the Ministry, which during that time was a frantic scramble of terrified men and women all too aware that the easiest way to ensure that they never came under suspicion themselves was to cast suspicion on everyone else. Have you never wondered why competence, real competence, seems so rare at the Ministry?"
"Sometimes," Percy agreed warily.
"It's because competence attracts suspicion. People who can't find their way to a meeting without three reminders and a talking map aren't likely to be suspected of being spies or nefarious masterminds, are they? And so what begins as camouflage becomes habit; mediocrity is safer than competence and also better-rewarded, which serves the additional purpose of making it difficult for someone of a mind to recruit to decide whom to approach. Is the Auror in the next cubicle really as incompetent as he seems? Does the department secretary talk so incessantly because she can't keep a secret or because she can and doesn't want anyone to know? Recruiting someone who ends up a liability to the Death Eaters is as sure a death sentence as trying to recruit an Auror in disguise, and yet a Dark Lord must have followers."
"So if you can't recruit your family, friends, or co-workers…" Percy said.
"Then there comes a time when one must cast one's lot, choose someone to trust, and have faith," Lucius answered.
"In the middle of all that suspicion, and with one's life on the line?"
"Yes," Lucius said simply. "Faith, you see, is not the sole property of one side or the other. At some point, one must believe."
Percy looked down at the parchment before him, not really seeing it, and the cry of a gull outside filled the silence between them.
"But 'word of mouth' is, I think, answer enough for that question," Lucius said briskly, and Percy glanced back up. "What was the next one?"
"Are any of the Malfoy family assets currently going to support Death Eater activity?" Percy winced a bit. Money had been a touchy subject when he was growing up, and he still disliked discussing it.
"No, nor have they for many years," Lucius answered. "After I was sent to Azkaban, my wife cut off that cash flow. She sent our son to the Continent the day he left Hogwarts, and put the family's money and influence between him and the Death Eaters in a way that made me realize how narrowly I must have escaped death when I tried to talk her into sending Draco to Durmstrang. And of course we have very little else that would be of use to Voldemort; after more than twenty years of Ministry attentions, it's a wonder we still have my great-grandmother's silver, let alone any other… shall we say, heirlooms handed down from the days when the Ministry's control over the possessions of its constituents was not quite so absolute." His voice wasn't so cynical that Percy didn't catch the tone underneath it – sadness, weariness, faintly echoing, as though the things he had been forced to sell or hide from the Aurors had mattered to him.
Percy had spent his whole childhood listening to his father talk about going on raids, about confiscating Dark Magic and Muggle artefacts from people's homes, and it had never occurred to him that the things his father confiscated might be family heirlooms – unsavory ones, to be sure, but heirlooms all the same. He wasn't quite sure how he felt about that, or ought to feel; but thinking of his father's collection in the potting shed suddenly dredged a familiar, long-buried feeling of shame out of the pit of his stomach, making it sharp and new again.
"In retrospect, however, I suppose it's just as well. You've no idea how difficult it is to keep Dark Magic artefacts hidden from an inquisitive six-year-old who can sense security spells from two rooms away and rules the house elves with an iron fist. Even in Malfoy Manor we were running out of places to hide things." Lucius smiled ruefully, good humor apparently restored. "The answer, at any rate, is no – the Death Eaters have had no form of support from us for many years. I'm not sure how that answer will help Cornelius, since he can hardly have expected me to say anything different, but there it is. What's next on the list?"
Two more questions. Percy wanted to ask them and get it over with. The answers to these were making him more uneasy than they should, and he was going to have to be careful not to let his own (disillusionment) annoyance with the Minister color his interpretation of them. He was tired, that was all. "Was Alfred Marchbanks killed by the Death Eaters?"
"Yes," Lucius said quietly.
Percy glanced up from the parchment. "Who was he?"
Lucius raised an eyebrow. "Cornelius didn't tell you?"
"I didn't ask."
"Marchbanks was an Auror. One of the best the Ministry has ever seen, and the recruiters for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement aren't slackers. He was assigned to help prevent the Potters' assassination." Lucius paused, looking down at the table, seeing something else instead. "He was… a good man. And a worthwhile adversary. His son must be nearly your age now."
Percy tried to remember if he'd known a Marchbanks at school, and couldn't. "At least his son will know, now."
"His family has known what happened to him for twenty-four years. He had cousins and a sister in Voldemort's service."
Frustration flared in Percy with unsettling suddenness and power – why in God's name was he here if only to ask questions that everyone knew the answers to? "One more question, sir."
"Good," Lucius said decisively. "I confess that I'm finding Cornelius' questions a bit tiresome. They seem to be a clumsy attempt to do something, but I can't quite figure out what. I wonder if, after all, he's only testing me to see if I'm in the habit of lying like a boomslang salesman to the Ministry's representatives."
Or, Percy thought, if he's testing to see that I'm sending back the information accurately.
"One more, then, and it'll be done and we can move on to less irksome things," Lucius prompted in a firm but indulgent tone that brought a vision flashing into Percy's head of the elder Malfoy dealing with a small, stubborn, spoiled little boy who would have walked off a cliff without a wand if his father told him to.
He smoothed out the parchment on the table and looked down at the last question. "In your opinion, do recent Death Eater activities represent an immediate threat to the government and people of wizarding England?"
"No," Lucius answered, and Percy's head shot up in astonishment.
"But you've said –"
Lucius held up a forefinger in a forestalling gesture, gracefully unstacking it from the fingers laced loosely together in front of his chin. "Pay attention, Mr. Weasley, and think like a politician. The Minister isn't asking if he should be preparing for eventual war. He's asking if the Death Eaters are going to disrupt the holiday shopping season. He wants to know if he can put off dealing with Voldemort's threat for another few months, or another fiscal year. And my answer to that is: yes, I believe that he still has time. Not much time, certainly not until the next budget is passed, but some."
"But an answer like that will only lull him into a false sense of security," Percy argued.
Lucius pursed his lips thoughtfully. "You must understand – one thing Cornelius has always been good at is surrounding himself with people brighter and more competent than he. You yourself, if I recall correctly, were promoted over other aides with greater seniority. Cornelius might be lulled into believing that he can ignore the Death Eater activity, but that answer, coming from me, will raise red flags in the minds of more people than just you. Questions will be asked, and asked out of Cornelius' earshot where he can't put a stop to them – it would probably be wise, in fact, for you to include your own doubts in your report for today. So, you see, my answer is a half-truth, but one that will bring about better and more immediate results than the whole truth, which might not be listened to."
Percy hesitated, looking down at the parchment.
"Make no mistake, I owe the Ministry nothing, neither cooperation nor answers," Lucius said softly. "But I do owe Voldemort something. I owe him for ten years of my life spent in prison for a fool's errand. I owe him for holding the lives of my wife and son over my head for much longer than that. I would gladly call him to account for that myself, if I were in a position to do so; from a prison cell, all I can do is try to prod the Ministry into remembering that it has teeth in spite of its Minister."
Percy was silent for a long moment, thinking – about rules and procedures, about the increasing lack of detail in his reports when he began to believe that no one was reading them, about a lack of faith he'd done nothing to deserve.
"Never mind what I've said, if it makes you uncomfortable," Lucius said, gentle and forgiving, and treading alarmingly close to dismissive. "I forget sometimes that Gryffindors take a bit different a view of the truth than Slytherins do. Put down 'yes,' then, and let's have done with it."
"But that wasn't your answer," Percy said stubbornly.
"No, it wasn't. But I've been away from the Ministry for ten years, and you're a better judge of what they'll listen to than I am. You know my real answer; tell me what truth to speak that the Ministry will hear."
Percy had done nothing to deserve the lack of confidence this list of questions represented. He didn't want to start deserving it now.
There had been a half-burned doll on the floor of that house, a heat-twisted birdcage with a tiny lump of ash and bone at the bottom, blood and hatred inscribed on the wall in a neat, clear bookhand. Cornelius hadn't gone in because he'd been dressed for a business lunch with the London Board of Commerce. Percy had gone in, and had smelled sour ash on his robes for the rest of the day. He was angry and resentful, and suddenly realized that he was horribly afraid.
Next to the question, he wrote down No. He'd say in his report that he didn't believe it was entirely truthful. He had no lever long enough to move the Ministry on its axis from where he stood, but he could do his job to the best of his ability and hope.
He reached for his wand to dry the parchment, remembered that he didn't have it, and pushed the paper aside. There was still a good hour left in his time, and he meant to make use of it. What he really wanted to do was go home; but he had responsibilities, and being upset, confused, and angry wasn't the same as being ill.
"It isn't always easy, is it?" Lucius commented. "One wants to do the right thing, but too often it isn't clear what that is. Especially in a place like the Ministry."
"That's true," Percy said, and remembered that Lucius had had an infant son when he was Percy's age. He tried to imagine Lucius younger and uncertain, still awed and unnerved by this small life entirely dependent upon him and Narcissa, and couldn't.
"But one does one's best. And most of the time one's best is good enough. Yours, I think, will be good enough this time as well."
It shouldn't matter to him, what Lucius said. It mattered anyway. It was hard, in his presence, not to let it matter; not to believe that when Lucius Malfoy decreed that everything would be all right, the universe would gracefully rearrange itself to his will. Percy didn't want to be comforted, and was anyway, and thought that maybe that was all right as long as he remembered who and what they both were.
"Do you play chess, Mr. Weasley?"
Percy blinked. "Yes, I do."
Lucius smiled. "Pawn to king's bishop two."
An imaginary chessboard materialized in Percy's head; outside a gull was crying, and the breeze through the window passed through Lucius' pale hair to brush soothingly across Percy's face.
"Pawn to queen three," he said, and felt something cold and poisonous lift from his bones and vanish in the sun.
Harry poured himself some more tea, tried to rub away his burgeoning headache, and squinted down at the essay in front of him. A storm off the coast had cast the room into heavy darkness, forcing him to mark essays by candlelight, and that bloody pink ink that Stacey Mundgood was always using wasn't doing his eyes any favors. Disheartened, he dipped his quill into the bottle of red ink in the middle of the table, drew a line through three sentences, and wrote corrections on the side of the parchment.
Across the table, Malfoy blew out a hard sigh of frustration, scrawled a quick "0" at the top of an essay, and shoved it to the side.
"Did you even read that one?" Harry asked curiously.
"No. Emily Ratchett, Hufflepuff, thinks she should have been in Ravenclaw. I assigned my second-years eighteen inches on the use of cat fur as a thickening reagent and she gave me thirty-six. I'm in no mood to humor either her inability to present information in a concise form or her lack of consideration for the fact that I have a mountain of essays to mark."
"Where do you get cat fur, have them shave their cats?"
"Hm? No, Mrs. Norris gives it to me. She's quite fond of being brushed."
Harry dipped his head to hide a grin at the image of Draco sitting in front of the fire with a purring Mrs. Norris ensconced in his lap, patiently brushing out potions ingredients. His smile faded a bit as he remembered Hermione's first essay in Adrienne Vector's class, which had similarly returned with no marks when Adrienne had asked for a foot-long essay and Hermione had given her four feet. Hermione had cried for hours, and there'd been no living with her for weeks; Draco, who had received full marks on his own essay, had been absolutely insufferable. Chewing his lip, Harry returned his attention to his own marking.
The Confundus charm fools people into thinking they are having fun. It is Dark Magic because if people aren't having fun it isn't okay to make them think they are. Imagine you were at a party and it was a really bad party but someone used the Confundus charm on you anyway and you went around telling everyone how much fun you had. It would make you look really stupid. The Confundus charm can be blocked by the Protego charm or you can get out of it's way if you see someone casting it at you.
Harry sighed and dipped his quill into the red ink again.
"God. I can't do any more of these without a good stiff drink." Draco locked his fingers together over his head and stretched stiffly. "Want one, Potter?"
"Um," Harry said, tearing his eyes away from the play of muscles underneath Draco's shirt. "What do we have?"
Draco rose from the table and went over to the glass-front cabinet. "Ogden's, brandy, cabernet sauvignon, Johannesburg Riesling, gin, vermouth, sherry, Duckwort's Irish Cream – good lord, Dobby's certainly done us proud, hasn't he?"
"He must have looked at these essays," Harry commented dryly.
"How about Ogden's and Irish Cream in coffee? It's a bit early in the afternoon to start really making inroads into the liquor supply, and I could use some caffeine."
Harry set his quill down and pushed back his chair, rolling his shoulders. "I'll make the coffee."
He went to the counter, filled the pot, dumped the beans into it, and tapped it with his wand. There was a gurgle and a pop, a black cloud like squid ink exploded in the water, and within seconds the pot was full of gently steaming coffee. Harry pulled two mugs out of the cabinet, filled them, and returned to the table, where Draco was opening the alcohol.
"That smells good," Draco observed. "Good enough, I hope, to make me a little better able to face Albion Sedgewick's assertion that gillyweed is the fifth ingredient in invigoration potions."
Harry blinked and set down the mugs. "Don't nasty things happen when you mix gillyweed with salamander blood in any sort of concentration?"
"Nasty in the sense of releasing a toxic and potentially lethal vapor cloud, yes," Draco answered, carefully pouring Ogden's into the mugs in fairly generous proportions. "I hope for his sake he got gillyweed confused with jimsonweed, which isn't the right ingredient either but at least is inert when combined with the correct ones."
Settling himself back into the chair, Harry waited until Draco pushed a mug at him and then took a careful sip. "Damn, that's good. Trust a Potions master to make brilliant drinks."
Draco laughed. "Get Severus to mix you an Absinthe Suissesse sometime. Just don't plan on going anywhere for a good long while afterward." He took a drink and looked up, then frowned. "Something wrong, Potter?"
Harry smiled, bemused, and shook his head. "No, just… it's strange, that's all. A minute ago I was thinking about Hermione when we were at school, and now I'm grading papers with you and talking about Snape's drink-mixing skills. I think I'm having a little trouble making the pieces fit."
Silence stretched for long seconds as Draco regarded Harry thoughtfully through the steam of his coffee. Finally, he said, "Will you tell me something?"
If I can, Harry almost said, and instead said, "Sure."
"Why did you leave Auror training? If you don't mind my asking."
Harry smiled wryly. "I don't mind. I just wish I had an answer that didn't make me sound like quite such a pillock."
"Yes, what a devastating blow it would be to me, having to think of you as a pillock," Draco commented. Harry glanced sharply up at him, but there was no real mockery in his voice, only a sort of dry humor. Harry wondered if the words were some kind of subtle warning, a way of saying I might be sitting here drinking with you, Potter, but I'm still Draco Malfoy – and then decided that he'd better tell Draco, and remind himself, why he left Auror training after all.
"I told Ron part of it," he said. "I told him that I was tired of having people who'd been Aurors for twenty years acting like a seventeen-year-old boy fresh out of his bloody school uniform should just be able to step into the department and take it over. I got sick of being deferred to before I did anything to deserve it, sick of being afraid to ask questions because I was supposed to just magically know everything already, sick of people who'd been dealing with the Death Eaters longer than I've been alive either treating me like I was the expert on the subject or resenting me because they thought they were supposed to treat me like the expert. Mostly the resentment," Harry added, and took a large swallow of coffee. "There was a lot of that, and I didn't handle it very well."
"This isn't sounding very pillock-ish," Draco complained.
Harry had to laugh. "Well, I said that was only part of it. I think I could have dealt with all that – hell, I did deal with it, for two years – but what really did me in was Mad-Eye Moody."
Draco's nose wrinkled in fastidious distaste, but he kept silent.
"The last Christmas I was there, there was a department Christmas party. It was a nice one, too – plenty of food, some wine, a nice tree – no one got too tipsy, no one wound up in the broom closet with anyone they'd be horrified by later, everyone was enjoying themselves. Everyone but Mad-Eye. He kept stomping around accusing people of letting their vigilance lapse, telling stories about horribly booby-trapped Christmas crackers, warning us – God, warning us that if word had got back to the Death Eaters about the party they'd likely see it as an excellent chance to get the drop on us and slaughter us all in a surprise attack."
"In the middle of the Ministry building, in broad daylight," Draco said flatly.
"Well, to be fair to Mad-Eye, the party was at Tonks' flat. But my God, as if the Death Eaters didn't have anything better to do on Christmas Eve – well, all right, Voldemort probably didn't, but –"
Draco snickered.
"So I was watching him, and I was annoyed with him but then I realized that I'd been watching the entrances all evening, and…" Harry took another drink, and suddenly realized that his hands were shaking. "And it just sort of hit me. I'd been fighting the Forces of Evil my whole bloody life, and I didn't know anything else. I did it when I was a child because I had to, and then as soon as I'd grown up I walked right out of Hogwarts to do it full-time. I didn't know how to do anything else, I didn't know any way to live except walking around with a target on my back and my wand at the ready, and all of a sudden I realized that I was twenty years and a gouged-out eye away from being Mad-Eye the Second."
"Ouch," Draco commented.
"Yeah, ouch," Harry said. "And the thing is, and this is where the pillock part comes in – I didn't want to be Mad-Eye. I was nineteen years old, and I wanted a life. I wanted to go to Quidditch matches and go to the bloody park on Sundays. I wanted a girlfriend. Or even a boyfriend. I wanted to go out to clubs and drink too much, and invite my friends over to play poker, and get my tongue pierced –"
"Did you?"
"No."
"Oh." Draco sounded vaguely disappointed.
"For months I had the same nightmare, over and over," Harry said quietly, listening to the sounds of the storm. "I'm standing in front of Voldemort, wand out, ready to kill him, and he starts laughing – not the sort of maniacal evil-overlord laugh, but like he's really pleased about something. And then he says: Everything you are, you are because of me. You are my creation. You could have been nothing more than Lily and James Potter's son, but I made you the Boy Who Lived, and then I made you a soldier, and now I'm going to make you a god. And my left arm starts burning, really horrible pain, like a Cruciatus, and I pull my sleeve back to see that…" Harry took a gulp of his drink and pushed on. "That there's been a Dark Mark there all along."
Draco was silent for a moment, thoughtful, then said, "So you went back to Hogwarts."
Harry shifted uneasily. "Alb – Dumbledore offered me a job, and I was at loose ends. Then I found out that I like teaching. Well, I mostly like it," he added gloomily, eyeing the pile of unmarked essays.
Draco laughed. "Pansy says teaching would be much easier if instead of assigning essays I administered poison and had the students brew the antidote themselves. Sheer attrition would raise the performance level of the class within weeks."
"Malfoy!"
"Well, I haven't taken her advice so far," Draco pointed out. "Sometimes I think I deserve the Order of Merlin for it, too, if they give the Order of Merlin for failure to slaughter schoolchildren even under extreme provocation."
He didn't want to ask, and couldn't help it. "So is Pansy going to come live at Hogwarts after the holidays? I don't think any of our teachers were married, so I don't know how that works."
Draco blinked in surprise. "We haven't really discussed it. I assume she'll stay at the Manor."
"The whole school year?" Harry asked, surprised himself and a little discomfited. "Why wouldn't you want her there with you, or at least in… God, I'm sorry, that's none of my business."
"I love Pansy madly, but I don't want her underfoot all the time," Draco laughed. "And I don't think she'd be happy with a cramped room in the Dungeons when she could have her own suite at the Manor."
Harry opened his mouth, then closed it again; and at the look on his face, slow understanding dawned in Draco's eyes.
"Ah," he said quietly. "You thought… No. Pansy's my best friend and we've been looking forward to getting married for a long time, but I'm gay and she's –" He hesitated, changed his mind about what he was going to say, and finished, "– well aware of that fact."
Harry swallowed hard and felt his brain shut down and his mouth keep going, never the best of ideas. "But why do the two of you want to get married if –" he began, then bit his lip and made himself shut up.
Draco looked annoyed. "I do bring other things to the table besides the Malfoy looks, Potter. And I need to produce an heir at some point, and I don't swing so far off-center that I can't give her children."
"Sorry," Harry said, wearily cursing his big mouth. She loves him, he thought, and wondered where this morbid urge to poke his wounds with a salt stick had come from. Whatever kind of love it is, she loves him, and he loves her. "It's none of my –"
A dim surge of magic tugged at the edges of his awareness, cutting him off. Across from him, Draco went still, listening. The wards at the edge of the house, on the cliff side, had activated – not far, not enough to trap anything in them, but they'd activated, and Harry was damn glad he'd listened to Draco and helped shore up the house's defenses. He waved a hand over the lamp, silently extinguishing both it and the candles and leaving the room lit only by the gloomy half-light from the window. Draco was already standing, quiet as a cat, magic surging around him before he even brought up his wand; Harry pushed his chair carefully back and stood. In the rational part of his brain he knew that there was no need to stay quiet and in the shadows with the house protected by a Secret Keeper; but instinct was a hard thing to overcome, and Harry had very little faith in the Fidelius charm. He slipped his robes on over his shirt and headed for the short hallway to the mudroom and the garden door.
Draco's footsteps were just loud enough to let Harry know that he was following; and suddenly there was an arm in front of Harry's stomach, blocking his way. He knew full well it was Draco's arm, and started anyway.
"Does Percy know about this safehouse?" Draco whispered.
"I don't know," Harry answered. "Would your father –"
"No. But it's not my father I'm worried about."
"Who, then?"
Draco made a soft sound of exasperation. "One of my father's people, at least one, will be selling information to Voldemort, just as his people sell it to us. One way or another, both my father and Voldemort will have found out by now that we're not back at Hogwarts, and Percy doesn't have to be able to reveal the exact location of the house to tell my father that there's one on the Cornish coast. If anyone heard him…"
"Fuck," Harry whispered. "Stay here."
The arm tightened around his waist, and to his extreme annoyance Harry felt the tip of a wand resting lightly against his back. "Nice try, Gryffindor, but only one of us is expendable and it isn't you."
"It isn't bloody you either, Draco, so stop talking like the surplus private in a bad war movie –"
"God, Potter, you are such a Muggle –"
" – and move your arm."
"It's stupid to break cover right now," Draco said. "Wait until the ward has stopped reacting, and then we'll both go."
"No," Harry said, gently catching hold of Draco's wrist to move his arm out of the way. "I need to go now while there's still a chance to see what it is."
He cast a Disillusionment charm over himself and headed for the door. Behind him, he heard another Disillusionment charm sandwiched into an imaginative stream of profanity; Harry rolled his eyes but didn't stop to argue.
Rain smacked into his face as soon as he opened the door, coming down in sheets, making him very thankful for the spells that made his glasses water-repellent, fog-proof, and unlikely to fall off. Not bothering to pull up his hood, Harry knelt and poked his head carefully around the doorjamb; the rain limited his visibility, but there was nothing in their immediate vicinity that he could see. In this weather, even an invisibility cloak would cause a distortion in the air for anyone who knew what to look for.
Draco was suddenly pressed against him all along the side of his body, then just as quickly gone. "Sorry, you're hard to see," he breathed. "About fifty yards from the house, would be my guess."
"Mine too. Ready?"
"This is a very stupid idea, Potter. It's probably a stray sheep."
"I'll take that as a yes."
Without waiting for an answer, Harry slipped out the door and moved toward the corner of the house, wand at the ready. If he focused hard he could see Draco beside him, walking almost backward to cover the area behind him, and maybe later Harry would contemplate the sheer weirdness of being glad that Draco Malfoy was covering his back but at the moment he was more occupied searching for tracks on the muddy ground. He didn't find any; feeling unpleasantly exposed on the open ground, he made his way out toward the edge of the wards' sensing capabilities.
"Stopping," he noted over his shoulder, then knelt down on the wet grass. He spun his wand in a complicated motion, stuck it point-first into the mud, and said, "Track."
A dim circle of phosphorescent silver shot out of the wand and expanded rapidly, skimming over the grass and leaving a momentary glow in its wake. "What the hell is that?" Draco asked.
"It finds tracks on the ground within about a thirty-yard radius and forms an image of the animal that left them, if the tracks are clear enough and less than about twelve hours old – look there are fox tracks over there." Harry pointed at a small fox-shaped wisp of smoke headed over the field toward the cliff edge. "Hagrid taught it to Ron and me when he took us camping once."
"Oh," Draco said, sounding faintly horrified – whether at camping, Hagrid, Ron, or the conjunction of the three, Harry didn't know. "Potter, that spell's not turning up anything big enough to trigger the wards – good God, is that a murtlap?"
Harry squinted into the rain. "Hard to tell at this distance. With old tracks, the image is fainter. But you're right, there's nothing in the spell's radius that would have activated the wards." He pulled his wand out of the mud, cleaned it off, repeated the spell, and stuck his wand in the mud point-up. Barely-visible silver mist shot upward like a geyser, hit an invisible barrier about thirty feet into the air, and spread over that barrier just as it had spread over the ground. Smoky images of birds sprang up in its wake, criss-crossing the field and flying blithely through one another – and at the halfway mark of the spell's range a much larger shape formed, a winged serpent with a body thicker around than Harry's and half again as long, flying ahead of the wind with long undulating motions like a ripple of silk. It soared over the house, reached the edge of the tracking spell, and vanished.
"Shit," Harry said.
"Lindwurm," Draco observed.
"Here?"
"The Dark Lord does a good trade in the import-export business," Draco said dryly. "I wonder if it picked up your trail over the Channel."
Harry shook his head. "Not after this long, not unless it's got a damn keen nose."
"At least we know whoever sent it doesn't know where we are, or they'd have sent Gabriel hounds. You send a lindwurm when you're hunting for a needle in a hundred-mile haystack."
Harry shaded his eyes against the rain and searched the clouds. "Fuck. Where is it? It won't have gone far, not with those wards being the only magical signature for miles, and that track is fresh."
"Potter, if it's already carrying word back to its owner –"
"We'll just have to bring it back," Harry said grimly, pulling his wand back out of the mud. "Expecto patronum!"
"Good-sized magic surge, but too landbound," Draco commented as the stag sprang into being in front of them. "Expecto patronum."
A silver gyrfalcon coalesced in the air, wheeling on a wingtip with a piercing cry.
"Two Patronus charms, that fucking well better bring it back or we're going to have to do something that'll advertise our whereabouts from here to Brighton and then it'll be a moot point anyway," Harry commented, still scanning the sky. "If it –"
With a hiss like a steam engine, the lindwurm plunged out of the clouds toward them, wings as long as the span of Harry's arms beating against the wind. Draco's Patronus wheeled and flew for it, screaming, and dissolved into a fine silvery mist as the lindwurm plowed through it.
"Bring it down alive," Harry shouted. "Petrificus Totalus!"
The lindwurm stiffened for a moment before it absorbed the magic, sending a wave of color shimmering down its scales; Harry was about to aim a stronger binding spell at it when Draco hit it with a curse that made it drop like a stone nearly on top of them, thrashing and curling around its center. Another charm as it hit the ground, and it lay quiet, slowly blinking at them with faceted eyes.
"You have about five minutes," Draco said. "Probably. If the fall didn't damage it more."
God, but Harry hated killing magical creatures. He didn't even want to know what Draco had done to it. He moved to crouch near it, close enough to be heard but well out of its striking range.
"Can you hear me?" he asked, and felt Draco's gaze snap back to him. Harry was better at using Parseltongue now than he had been when he faced the basilisk, and he could hear himself speaking it now like a sibilant echo behind the words he meant to say.
I hear, the lindwurm answered. I smell the Master on you, little nestling.
Harry swallowed convulsively, and after a long moment he answered, "The Master shared some of his power with me. Tell me why he sent you here."
The lindwurm's inner eyelids dipped in something that looked bizarrely like a shrug. The Master says, find magic. The Master says, follow the cliff.
"Have you followed the cliff a long way?"
Many lengths.
"What the fuck does that mean?" Harry muttered in English, then switched back to Parseltongue. "Were you the only one of your kind the Master sent?"
No. A clutch of nestmates flew with me.
"Where is the Master?"
Flights and rests. Cool and damp and stone. No more…
The lindwurm's eyes dimmed, and Harry rubbed a hand wearily across his forehead. "Incendio," he murmured, and watched the lindwurm implode in a flurry of sparks and ash.
"What did it say?" Draco asked.
Harry looked up and noticed that his Patronus had vanished. "Voldemort. He's a long way away – the lindwurm said he was somewhere cool and damp, with stone."
"Oh, that's helpful," Draco said in exasperation.
Even in his water-repellent robes, Harry was getting soaked to the skin. "Well, not all snakes are good at carrying on conversations. Let's go back in."
Draco, heard more than seen, cast a quick charm to cover their tracks and kept pace with him. "I suppose Gryffindorness is occasionally of some use after all," he said grudgingly. "As much of a risk as it was to kill it, letting it get back to Voldemort might have brought a fair amount of unpleasantness down on our heads."
"I just want to know how the hell he found out about the safehouse so fast."
"If he did, and didn't just make a lucky guess," Draco pointed out. "We've been here for a day and a half – that's enough time for him to find out that I'm no longer with my father, and to find out that we're not back to Hogwarts yet –"
"Do you think he has spies at Hogwarts?"
"God, Potter, he doesn't need them. He has hundreds of schoolchildren sending letters to their parents. At any rate, we're not there and we have to be somewhere, and he may well know enough to realize that neither of us were in a condition to go far."
Harry was silent the rest of the way back to the house, thinking. "Damn," he said finally as he shucked off his wet robes in the mudroom. "I wish we could go back."
"So do I," Draco said, sounding petulant. "What the hell is Severus doing that takes so long?"
"Damned if I know," Harry said, lighting the candles and lamp in the kitchen with a wave of his hand and realizing as the light sprang up that he'd forgotten to end the Disillusionment charm. "Finite Incantatem."
"Finite Incantatem," Draco echoed, and Harry bit his lip to keep back a smile. Draco came out of the spell looking like a soaked, bedraggled, pissed-off cat – shivering, clothes clinging to his body, wet strands of hair falling into his face, with an expression that said clearly that a major sulk was going to be forthcoming if those conditions were not remedied in short order. Harry tried hard not to notice the way that white shirt was plastered against Draco's skin, and fought the urge to take a hands-on approach to the problem of those wet clothes.
"Go change into something dry," he ordered. "I'll make some more coffee, and maybe some food."
Draco eyed him mistrustfully and dripped on the floor. "Can you cook?"
"Very well, actually."
"Have at it, then. And do a good job or it'll mean clothes." Draco stalked out of the kitchen and into the hall, toward the bedroom and the wardrobe that Dobby had filled with what looked like every article of clothing Harry owned and enough of Draco's to last him through a season in Cannes.
He'd just found potatoes, leeks, and stock to make soup and carried them back out into the kitchen – Dobby had apparently stocked the pantry with the idea that Harry and Draco might want to invite the Chudley Cannons in for a four-course meal between lunch and dinner – when the shower started running. Harry groaned and tried hard to focus on peeling the potatoes instead of on the images that sound called up, and hoped he'd succeed in taking his mind off Draco better than he had that morning, when he'd wound up racing the clock to bring himself off before the shower shut off. Fortunately, Draco took long showers.
Fuck, I can't keep doing this.
The shower stopped just as the soup had come to a simmer. Harry added salt and pepper and waited, and in a few minutes Draco was back in the kitchen, rolling up his sleeves and tossing damp hair out of his eyes. "Your turn," he said. "I'll take over here."
Harry cocked a dubious eyebrow at him. "Can you cook?"
"Well, no," Draco admitted. "But I think I can stir for a few minutes without causing some sort of soup-related apocalypse."
Harry snorted, handed him the spoon, and headed for the hallway. "You don't have to stir it the whole time."
"Potter…"
One hand on the doorjamb, Harry paused and looked back into the kitchen. Draco was leaning against the counter, arms and legs crossed, the spoon dangling rather incongruously from one hand; and for just a second Harry saw him in the light of an electric bulb over a stove, insubstantial and out of place in a world not lit by fire. "What?"
"You know, if you can't even stomach sending me into harm's way so that you don't risk your neck unnecessarily, you might as well hand the war over to Voldemort and my father and let the fate of the wizarding world be hashed out by people ruthless enough to shape it."
"Even you?" Harry asked softly, then looked away, his face heating. That was more than he'd wanted to say, more than he wanted to think, and he didn't want to see the look in Draco's eyes. "I'll be right back. Just stir for a bit."
Between Pansy, Draco, Snape, and Goyle, he was starting to feel like Slytherin House's sixth-year Herbology project. He just hoped he wasn't going to wind up diced for potions ingredients.
It began, always, with a sudden burst of painful pins-and-needles sensations all over his body, like the smell of ozone in the air before a storm. This time the pain was muted to a dull, itchy discomfort, and Remus just had time to shove down the sudden spark of hope when the transformation began in earnest.
The sheer sound of it was awful, skin tearing, bone cracking and malforming. He'd never realized before, never heard it, because he'd always been screaming.
It hurt. But the pain was bearable now – for the first time he could feel the wolf's mind and instincts rising to the surface before they surged up around him like water flooding an airtight compartment; for the first time he wasn't terrified that he would drown, because the pain wasn't enough to drag him under, and it wasn't enough to make some part of him want the drowning so the pain would stop. Fascinated, he watched his body reform, watched a silver-grey pelt burst through his skin as his fingers cracked and shrank; his teeth grew and thickened and reformed, shoving each other painfully around in his mouth and making him wish he had something to bite on. There was a moment of almost-panic as flaring pain in his back and hips forced him down onto all fours – but he came down on paws, in a quadruped's body.
That quickly, it was over. It had always seemed to last forever, before.
Remus lay on the floor for a while, panting and thinking that he was going to owe Severus his firstborn child in the unlikely event that he should ever actually have one. Outside the window, the sky dimmed from scarlet to purple; Remus waited until the light on the stones was silver before he lifted his head and looked pointedly at the wall. The wall shimmered and reformed with an opening to a low hallway. Hoisting himself to his feet – and ouch, yes, that hip still gave him trouble even in wolf form – Remus headed purposefully outside. He'd left the matter of those Aurors long enough, and also intended to sniff out the exit to the tunnel out of the Chamber of Secrets if he could. Severus wouldn't say anything more about the Aurors than that the situation was being taken care of, and ill-accustomed as he was to acting in someone else's interests, Remus found that he wasn't willing to let the matter lie. He'd been too bored for too long… and he found that he was tired of spending his life facing the consequences of not acting when he should have.
Harry was a good man, a talented man, and would be an excellent leader if he ever got himself together and raised a banner; but he was also a very young man, and if he didn't come back from this ill-advised venture with more on his mind than he could afford to have and still prepare to fight a Dark Lord and a would-be Dark Lord at the same time, Remus would eat his cane. Again.
The tunnel came out in the courtyard, by the fountain, and an almost-familiar human scent carried to his nose. A young woman with short, dark, fashionably-cut hair was sitting on the side of the fountain; she was small enough to pass for a student but a little too old, and the robes she was wearing were far too big for her and smelled of someone else. She was crying almost soundlessly, rubbing at her nose with the back of her hand; Pansy Parkinson, Remus guessed, and had begun to move around behind her back toward the exit to the grounds when his ears caught footsteps from a different direction.
"Pansy?" Neville asked awkwardly, smelling nervous and unhappy, and came out into the moonlight. Remus hesitated, then inched backward, giving a soft whuff of impatience. He was very fond of Neville, but the boy had terribly inconvenient timing.
Pansy straightened, somehow managing to wipe the tears off her face while looking like she was merely pushing the hair out of her eyes. "Hullo, Longbottom," she said in a steady voice.
Neville came uncertainly forward and sat on the side of the fountain, facing her. Remus could have got around one of them unseen but not around both, and he was still too irritable from the transformation to want to deal with awkward meetings. Repressing a growl, he settled himself into the deep shadow of a stone arch and waited.
"Hi," Neville said awkwardly.
"Hullo," Pansy said again, and sniffled, pushing up the sleeve of her oversized robes.
For a minute there was strained silence. Then Neville trailed his fingertips through the water of the fountain, looked away, and looked back up at Pansy. "Draco and I started teaching here at the same time, did you know?"
Pansy looked curiously up at him. "I think I remember him saying so."
"It was hard to come back, in a way." Neville gave a self-conscious laugh. "I loved having the Greenhouses to myself, and I liked the students… but Professor Snape, you know, all the professors really but especially him – he still makes me feel like a chubby, useless eleven-year-old whose socks don't match and who can't do the simplest charms without mucking them up. It was good to have Harry here, but I spent weeks half wishing I'd stayed away. I just… I didn't like being reminded of that eleven-year-old boy, you know?"
"Didn't you?" Pansy asked, and Remus' ears twitched curiously at the note of sympathy in her voice.
"No. But then one day I was outside of Greenhouse Three planting some singing arborosa – do you know what that is?"
Pansy shook her head.
"It's a bushy vine with a thick central stem, grows to be about as high as my waist, same family as the venomous tentacula – it's actually distantly related to lemon verbena, of all things – except that it doesn't go after food as large as people. The vines pack close in to the stem so from more than a few feet away it looks like a shrub. It emits a sort of high singing sound, not very loud but it attracts things like garden gnomes and then… well, eats them."
"Good lord," Pansy said, sounding unwillingly fascinated.
"I'd planted some under my window too, because they really do make a very nice and soothing sound, especially when the wind is in their leaves. But I was planting these because I had gnomes getting into the greenhouse and wreaking havoc, and I can't exactly just sling them over the garden wall and didn't really want to leave poison out for them. So I was planting them, and Draco wandered by and asked me what they were. I don't know why he wasn't at dinner," Neville added, nervously picking at a rough edge on his thumbnail. "I wasn't because I'd just had to meet with the Headmaster and I didn't think my nerves were up to having to sit at the same table with him too. But anyway, Draco asked what they were, and stood there watching me with that sort of appalled look he gets –"
"It's probably because you were doing manual labor," Pansy offered, patting Neville's hand. "Draco doesn't want to do anything more intensive with his hands than breaking another Seeker's nose."
Neville reddened. "I know. And then I felt eleven years old, like my socks didn't match, and like my robes were dirty and my nose was running. But then, you know, he started asking me questions about the arborosa – hard questions, about what they were related to and what the properties of the leaves and sap were, and how they could be used in potions. And he asked like he was sure I'd be able to tell him – not in that sort of hearty, encouraging 'Go on, Neville, I'm sure you'll be able to do it if you just try' way but like he just wanted information and it never occurred to him that I might not know the answers. It was nerve-wracking at the time, but then I realized I felt better after he left."
"Yes, he does have that effect on people sometimes," Pansy said dryly.
Neville looked quickly up at her, horrified. "Oh, no, I didn't mean –"
"No, I know. I was making a joke, that's all. Go on."
"Well… I just thought, you know, even Draco Malfoy can't be arsed to remember what a Squib I was at school. I'm not sure that should have made me feel better, but it did." He shifted uncomfortably, looked as though he would have liked to reach out and touch Pansy's hand, and thought better of it. "Harry'll bring him back. You'll see. They'll be home soon and everything will be all right."
Pansy gave a weak and rather damp but heartfelt laugh and sniffled again. "Thank you, Longbottom. You're sweet." She leaned over and kissed him lightly on the cheek, then stood and straightened her robes, hiking them up in her fists like a little girl with too-long skirts. "I'm going inside. Good night."
"Good night," Neville called after her. When she was gone, he sighed and swirled his fingers unhappily around in the waters of the fountain, staring down at the ripples.
Remus saw his chance and took it, slipping silently past Neville's back and out of the courtyard onto the grounds.
It was a good run out to the gates, letting him work off the stiffness in his hip. When he'd stopped by to see her earlier, Myrtle had described a fair-sized stand of trees between the lake shore and the gates, a stand familiar to Remus; he, James, Sirius, and Peter had been there dozens of times and never found anything like a secret entrance. And if it had been findable, they would have found it – as eleven-year-olds playing at being pirates, as fourteen-year-olds looking for an out-of-the-way place to tipple the cooking sherry Sirius had tried to pass off as fine liqueur, as sixteen-year-olds trying desperately to get past (or even to) the hand-holding stage with some girl or other. Remus himself had spent a considerable amount of time in said grove torn between frantic, hormonal desire to get his hand up Clytie Fletcher's shirt and nagging worry that it was possible to turn someone into a werewolf with an overenthusiastic hickey.
Sometimes Remus thought that one of the great virtues of growing older was that every day of one's life carried one farther away from being sixteen years old.
At any rate, he didn't really expect to find anything, even knowing what he was looking for, and he didn't. If there was an exit from the Chamber there, it was either hidden beyond Remus' capacity to detect in this form or it had simply fallen in and been filled and overgrown hundreds of years ago. Remus couldn't decide if that was good or bad, and was sorely tempted to mark a tree out of sheer annoyance. Human instincts prevailed over the wolf's, though, and he set the problem of the tunnel aside and turned to the problem of the Aurors.
Keeping to the shadows, he slipped out of the grounds and up the small hillock that Myrtle had mentioned. Soon enough, he found a trail; but it didn't smell fresh, or not fresher than that morning at any rate, and there was nothing fresher. Remus poked around a bit more and found a well-concealed campsite – there had been someone there, all right, a woman, and also…
There. Ron Weasley had been there, and he'd been so furious that his scent was still saturated with it. Remus sat down and pondered, then finally decided to make a circuit of the perimeter of the grounds. He had a fair idea of the places he'd hide if he were an Auror, and might as well check them while he still had a form well suited to doing so. He got to his feet, sniffed the air to get a feel for the lateness of the hour, and set off back toward the gates.
A rabbit broke cover right under his feet and the wolf's body reacted before Remus could put a stop to it, pelting after prey with a low snarl. They'd gone a dozen yards before Remus finally managed to wrest back control and skidded to a stop, a little shaken – he didn't often lose control like that and it wasn't something he wanted to make a habit out of. A side effect of the new potion, perhaps; he'd have to remember to tell Severus –
Remus stilled abruptly and sniffed. An almost-familiar scent drifted on the breeze, just barely noticeable even to his senses. He gave a low whine in the back of his throat, the wolf's equivalent of a frown, and crept toward the scent, keeping carefully downwind.
It wasn't human. It smelled of cat, but wasn't Minerva-smell. And it wasn't long before Remus spotted the source of it – a large lump of fur lying in the shadow of a bush, bandy-legged and flat-faced and smelling of exhaustion and resolve.
Remus trotted toward it, whining louder to get its attention. The lump twitched its ears and lifted its head, and recognition stirred in Remus: Crookshanks, Hermione's cat. He wondered how in God's name the cat had got to Hogwarts from St. Mary Boniface; no bloody wonder it was exhausted.
There were courtesies to be observed even though Crookshanks was not quite a cat and Remus was not, strictly speaking, a wolf. After they had touched noses and acquainted themselves with each other's scent, Crookshanks laid his head back down and blinked tiredly in the moonlight; and an image formed suddenly in Remus' head, not as rich in scent as the world was to the wolf but sharper in vision: Harry, sprawled on Hermione's couch with his robes open over jeans and a t-shirt, all soap and beer and sweet-sharp Harry-scent, patiently suffering Crookshanks to curl up in his lap and shed all over his robes.
In answer, Remus sent back an image of an empty room and a scent that had faded to a whisper like a silent ghost. Crookshanks looked up sharply, then closed his eyes again in annoyance.
For a minute Remus stood still, pondering; then he plopped down on his belly beside Crookshanks and rooted pointedly under the cat's side with his nose, sending an image of Minerva and the impression of a scent like a mother cat's. Crookshanks spat, but more out of tired irritation than anger; Remus pushed at him again and Crookshanks got unsteadily to his feet and clambered onto Remus' back. Sharp claws sank into Remus' undercoat and snagged skin, making him wince.
Balancing carefully so as not to tip the cat off his back, Remus got up and made for the castle.
It took him an annoyingly long time, staying out of sight and keeping to the shadows, to make his way to Minerva's rooms in the Tower. By the time he got there his sides were starting to sting, and a too-close brush against a suit of armor had earned him an irate full-clawed cuff to the ear; but there was a light under Minerva's door, and voices drifting indistinctly out into the hall. Remus paused long enough to ascertain that Severus was with her and probably no one else; then, abandoning his dignity with a resigned sigh, he went up to the door and yipped as loudly as he dared.
The voices stopped abruptly. After a moment the door swung open and Minerva stood in the doorway looking down at him with the expression of a woman wondering if whatever she'd been drinking was stronger than she'd thought. Remus brushed past her and into the sitting room to flop down on the hearthrug and tip Crookshanks off him.
"Bringing home strays, Lupin?" Severus asked dryly, and Remus thought wistfully of biting him on the leg. He was a werewolf, he couldn't be blamed for doing things like that.
There was a soft rustle of cloth and a tabby cat with squarish eye markings came up to sniff at Crookshanks' nose. After a while spent conducting some inscrutable cat business, Minerva stepped back and returned to human form. "That's Hermione Granger's cat," she said in mild puzzlement. "And he wants Harry."
"Whatever for?" Severus asked, sounding rather annoyed.
Minerva shook her head. "He wouldn't say. I think he knows that Hermione isn't coming back," she said quietly.
"So he came here instead of finding Weasley?"
"Good heavens, Severus, I don't know. Maybe he just likes Harry. And he lived in the castle for years, don't forget." Minerva settled herself back into her seat and picked up a glass of sherry, looking thoughtfully at Crookshanks. Crookshanks bit fiercely at the pads of his front paw for a minute, then came over and settled between Remus and the fire, pressing his back against Remus' side with the pointed, heavy pressure of a cat whose space is being inconsiderately occupied by someone else. Remus sighed and got up.
"Not leaving, Remus?" Minerva asked, picking up a bundle of knitting. It spilled over her lap like a scarlet cobweb, thread-thin yarn woven into shapes and patterns Remus couldn't quite make out. He hesitated for a long moment, considering; but if Remus wasn't getting any younger, neither was the wolf, and neither of them really fancied going back out into the cold tonight. He might have demurred to keep the peace with Severus, but aside from a quick, reflexive flash of fear when Remus entered the room, Severus hadn't smelled like anything worse than mild nervousness. Remus would have to consider asking about that tomorrow when he was back in human form.
He sat back down in front of the fire, watching curiously as tiny needles flashed in Minerva's hands, fingers large-knuckled with arthritis engaged in a complex dance that seemed to involve far more than wrapping thread around sticks. He wondered why she didn't use a spell, as he'd seen Molly do; Severus, clearly having resolved this particular mystery to his satisfaction long ago, topped off his sherry and pulled a thick potions text onto his lap.
Well, it was a bit ignominious to doze on the hearthrug with the other household pets, but at least it was warm, and Remus had borne worse with good grace. And anyway, he rather thought he'd got enough things to consider for one night without prowling around looking for more. He rested his muzzle on his paws, put his thoughts in order, and settled in for a good long nap.
"Wasn't Villanova back on second string that year?" Harry stretched out his legs toward the fire, leaning back against the couch, just enough brandy in him to make him feel warm and content.
"Mm, no, that was before his shoulder injury," Draco answered from where he was sprawled on the couch behind Harry, one leg propped up on the back, robes bunched around his hips and falling away from beautifully tailored trousers with Zabini Milan stamped discreetly on the side. "It was the year Nimbus put out the Rainmaker, because we'd just got them in for our team. Those brooms are like thoroughbreds, streamlined for speed and high aerial maneuvers but likely to have a fit and throw you if you hit another player or take a bludger too hard – good Seeker brooms, for the right Seeker –"
The "right Seeker," Harry reflected, had probably not been Malfoy. Even at the pro level he'd played dirty, fearless when it came to slamming into another Seeker at speed, and for years it had been the sworn mission of every Beater in the Quidditch-playing world to kill Draco Malfoy before the snitch reappeared.
" – and then on the basis of one bloody match with Spain, Laurent, the General Manager, decided that heavy lower-tier maneuvers were the wave of the future and made us all drill in tight formations and blockades that didn't give the brooms enough room to fly sure. Bastard kept us out of the Quarterfinals that year." Draco still sounded pissed off about that, and no wonder.
"I remember Aerosnitch did a spread on that," Harry said. "Not very flattering to either your GM or your coach. Your lower-tier team was boxed in by maneuvers they were too shaky on. It looked from the pictures like you were having to carry the Chasers because you were the only one with room to maneuver, and it brought you too far down into the field."
"Yes, exactly. Well, he fucking well listened to us the next season, didn't he?" Draco glanced curiously down at him. "I didn't know you kept tabs on my career, Potter."
Harry looked away, coloring a little. "Malfoy, you carried the French team for a good two seasons and took them to the World Cup in spite of themselves. Your career was a bit difficult to avoid. Especially for the entire month of June, 2003."
Draco winced. "I remember that photo shoot. It was bloody uncomfortable. Sand everywhere, and I got sunburnt everywhere my robes didn't cover."
He hadn't looked uncomfortable in the picture, Harry remembered. He'd looked utterly poised and at home standing knee-deep in rolling surf on the coast of the south of France, in full Quidditch gear, wind tossing his hair into his face and sea water swirling the lower part of his robes in a rhythmic tumult around his legs. Ginny had taken one look at the calendar and screamed Why didn't I have sex with him while we were at school?, and Ron had nearly had apoplexy.
Harry had really, really liked June of 2003.
"Why did you leave Quidditch, anyway?" he asked.
"Maybe I'll tell you someday," Draco answered carelessly.
"Hey, I told you why I left Auror training."
"True, but your reason only made you look like a pillock, and not much of one at that. I'm not actually sure the statute of limitations has run out on my reason yet." Draco's voice was light enough that Harry had no idea if he was joking or not, and suddenly wasn't sure he wanted to know.
"I'm glad you didn't join Voldemort," he said instead, quietly. "That would have been a fucking waste."
There was a long silence behind him before Draco finally said, "You ever tell Weasley I said this and I'll hex ground glass into your balls."
Harry drew up his knees in instinctive self-defense and turned a little to look at Malfoy, propping one elbow on the couch. "I won't tell him."
Draco was silent for a minute more, eyes on the glass of brandy that glowed amber in his hand. "When I came home the summer after our fourth year, after Diggory was killed, I went to my father and told him that I wanted to be given the Mark as soon as it could be arranged. He told me that no fifteen-year-old boy who couldn't even manage to win a game of Quidditch would possibly be of use to the Dark Lord."
Harry tried hard to be understanding, even while thrown for a loop by the overwhelming sense of a disaster narrowly averted by Lucius bloody Malfoy, of all people. "That must have made you feel pretty bad."
Draco gave him an annoyed look. "No, Potter, it made me feel bewildered, because I knew full well that my father thought better of me than that. Do you really think he would have moved heaven and earth, or at least the Ministry of Magic, to have that bloody hippogriff put down for putting a slice in a son he thought was worthless? And anyway, he hates Quidditch."
Harry wondered if he was ever going to be right about anything again. "Um... I suppose I thought he was just trying to make trouble for Hagrid."
Draco rolled his eyes. "Yes, of course, Potter. Hagrid was just that important to my father. Of all the things the head of the Malfoy family and the Dark Lord's lieutenant could possibly have been devoting his attention to –"
"Okay, okay, I get it. I was thirteen years old, I still thought the world revolved around Hogwarts. But… why?"
"Partly because of you," Draco said honestly, and Harry winced. "But partly because I was too young and too sheltered to understand what Voldemort had become. To me the Dark Mark meant my father – it meant strength, safety, kindred spirits. And power, the power to make the world whatever I wanted it to be."
"I never thought of it like that," Harry said. "I guess I never thought much about what the Death Eaters looked like from the inside."
Draco's eyes met his over the rim of the glass. "You never thought about it when you were a child," he said softly. "I suspect you've thought about it quite a bit since. Know your enemy and know yourself, Potter. You're no fool, you know that as well as anyone else."
Harry was silent, not entirely willing to begin that discussion.
Draco looked thoughtfully at him for a minute, then rose silently and went over to the desk. He returned with ink and a quill and sat down on the floor beside Harry, close enough that their robes pooled together on the hearthrug. "Give me your arm," he ordered.
Frowning, Harry stretched out his arm. Draco turned it so that the back of Harry's forearm was resting on his knee and slipped the tip of the feather end of the quill between his lips, spinning it slowly around. His jaw shifted in a way that suggested that he was shaping the tip, winding his tongue around it, smoothing the feathers down against the shaft.
Harry swallowed convulsively. "What are you doing?" he asked hoarsely.
Draco gave him an inscrutable look and took the quill out of his mouth, examining the tip; it was pointed now like a small calligraphy brush. Without letting go of Harry's arm, he removed the top from the inkwell and dipped in the quill feather-end first. He examined it critically to be sure that the feathers were holding their shape; apparently satisfied, he bent over Harry's arm, hair falling into his face and shadowing it in the firelight.
"You've wondered, Potter," he said, not asking. The quill touched the inside of Harry's forearm, tickling maddeningly, making Harry hiss a quick indrawn breath between his teeth to avoid flinching. "Don't move. You've wondered what it would be like, to give in, to take the Mark. You've wondered what it would feel like to stand at Voldemort's right hand, and to use his strength to strike. You've never been tempted to do it, but you've wondered."
Harry swallowed again and closed his eyes; and possibly that was a bad choice, because it made the feel of the feather against his skin that much more vivid, so light a touch that it was almost pain, leaving a thin trail of fire behind it as it drifted over his arm with a deliberation that made him clench his teeth. Malfoy's other hand was warm on his wrist, steadying, holding him in place.
"You know, there's no such thing as Evil," Draco said softly, and God but his voice was beautiful, low and smooth, blending into the warmth of the fire on Harry's arm and the slow, incessant track of the feather that was raising goosebumps on his skin, drawing, caressing. "There's only –"
"Power and people who are too weak to use it, yeah, so I've heard," Harry grated. He should open his eyes, he should look at what Draco was doing – but he thought he knew and didn't want to see, and the soft burning touch of the quill on his arm was rapidly rendering him helpless to do anything but follow the sensation as it glided over his skin, swirling and stroking, lifting for just a moment and then coming back down where he hadn't been prepared for it and making him jump at the sudden stab of sensation.
"No, Potter," Draco said, and the sharp hollow end of the quill scraped over Harry's skin in a quick slash, a reprimand. "There's only desire and necessity. Desire for peace, desire for power, desire for mastery or to be mastered; what you think is necessary to achieve those desires, and whether you're willing to pay their price."
Harry tried to breathe normally, but that feather was suddenly connected to every part of his body, sending aching stabs of something through him with every movement it made, and every inch of his skin was screamingly sensitized and the skin on his forearm burned under it. That bloody touch, so light, too much and not enough…
If Malfoy scraped the sharp end of that quill over his arm again he was going to come hard enough to see God, right there on the hearthrug and fully dressed. Harry bit his lip and tried hard to think about something else.
"When we," he began, and his voice sounded strange and hoarse in his own ears so he cleared his throat. "When we were in fifth year, Umbridge had a quill – it was, um, it was black and whatever you wrote with it it would slice into your skin. It didn't use ink, it used your own blood."
The quill paused for a moment, flooding Harry with an overpowering wave of relief and frustration in equal measure. Then Draco's finger was on his skin, barely touching, correcting the flow of some line with fastidious precision. "I've heard of those," he commented. "I don't think I ever heard of her making anyone else use it. Cleverly done on her part, to have used it only on the one person who would be too proud and stubborn to tell anyone."
Harry began to protest but the feather settled onto his skin again, swirling in a small, careful circle. He swore inwardly instead; thinking about Umbridge should have been the equivalent of four cold showers and a bludger to the crotch, but God, now he was wondering if that black quill had a white counterpart, and what it would be like to alternate one with the other and possibly headboards and school ties could be involved in this, and Harry was never, ever going to be able to write again as long as he lived.
"Open your eyes, Harry," Draco said softly.
Harry blinked his eyes slowly open, dazzled by the firelight. Draco was looking thoughtfully down at his forearm, and a strand of white-blond hair slipped into his face. Without thinking, Harry reached across with his other hand to tuck the hair behind Draco's ear. Draco glanced up at him, then nodded down at his arm. Reluctantly, Harry looked down.
The Dark Mark glistened on his forearm, skull and serpent, black against the pallor of his skin.
"Jesus," Harry said tightly. "That's horrible."
Draco shifted a little and carefully settled his left forearm down along the length of Harry's, pressing down against his skin, palms nearly touching and his fingers so close to Harry's that Harry could feel their warmth. It would have taken more self-control than Harry possessed at the moment to not lift up just a little, meaning to weave his fingers through Draco's; but at the moment he moved Draco's arm lifted, and his fingers slid through Harry's grasp like air. There was another Mark now on Draco's forearm, a little lighter than Harry's. Draco traced around it with a fingertip; Harry wondered what that touch felt like on Draco's skin.
"Isn't it?" Draco mused, and Harry had to think for a second to remember what he was answering. "Tattooing your followers, what a ridiculous thing to do. And really, a skull and a snake? You might as well make it a huge red heart with 'I love Mum and the Dark Lord' in a banner across it. My father has always been mortified by his."
Harry stared at Malfoy and gave a short, incredulous laugh.
Draco frowned. "What?"
"Mother of God. Trust the fucking Malfoys to hate the Dark Mark because it's tacky."
"Well, that's hardly an invalid reason," Draco answered, looking a bit miffed.
Harry looked at him for a moment, then reached out his arm to lay it across Draco's, staring down in horrified fascination at the twin Marks; wondering if there could have been some universe in which they would be real, if he'd taken Malfoy's hand instead of Ron's on the train, if his parents had really died in a car crash…
"It's rather compelling, isn't it?" Draco asked quietly. "Not the Mark itself, but what you would have to become to take it. What part of yourself would have to be let out of the Pit. What you'd be able to do then that you can't do now. What you'd be forced to do that you'd never want to. Tell me, Potter, if you stood before your Lord, fresh from the victory with your robes soaked in blood, what would you ask him for when he told you to name your reward?"
Harry's eyes flew up to Malfoy's and found them curiously unshuttered, watching him. Firelight lent a soft blush of color to that pale hair and flowed downward to glimmer in the hollow of his throat; Harry found his gaze drifting hungrily over fire-warmed skin and dragged it back up to Malfoy's face. "I don't think I want to answer that."
"You don't have to tell me. But you should find the answer for yourself." Malfoy picked up his wand and whispered a quick cleansing charm, and the Marks vanished from their arms. "Know your enemy, and know yourself. The two are related more often than one might think."
Harry drew his fingertips over the unmarked skin of Draco's forearm, then slid his palm flat against it, feeling ridiculously as if he were checking to be sure that there was no actual mark there. "I always thought you'd take the Mark. I always looked for it on you but I never saw it. It just about drove me mad in winter, what with long-sleeved robes and jumpers under them and I could never see your arm…"
"You should have asked."
"Would you have let me see?" Harry asked dubiously.
Draco laughed. "No. But I would have enjoyed watching you get annoyed and frustrated when I told you to bugger off."
"Malfoy!"
"Yes, just like that. You shouldn't be so much fun to irritate, Potter, it's like waving a red flag in front of a bull." Malfoy was still smirking, annoyingly, and Harry rubbed his thumb over the soft skin of Malfoy's forearm restlessly, just to be sure. Then he realized what he was doing and drew his hand back, shifting uncomfortably and trying hard to think about anything but quills and Malfoy's skin. Malfoy reached out to stopper the ink and picked up the quill, twirling it absently in his fingers; the ink was too dry now to splatter. Harry looked at it and gulped.
"We should go to bed," he managed, then mentally kicked himself. That wasn't what he had meant.
"Should we?" Draco's tone was just a little different suddenly, dark and silk-smooth, so carefully devoid of inflection that there was no end to the things Harry could read into it. Harry didn't want to read things into it. The price was higher than he was prepared yet to pay.
There were two paths in front of him. Harry ignored the clamoring in his body and chose the one he desperately wanted not to take. "It's getting close to dawn. I don't know about you, but I'm knackered."
"Mm, so am I," Draco commented. He locked his fingers together and reached his hands up over his head, palms up, stretching like a cat, the lines of his body fluid with casual sensuality. Harry summoned Pansy's image as a talisman and could have cried from the sheer unfairness of it all. "Good night, Potter."
"Good night," Harry said, and didn't realize until Malfoy had vanished into the bedroom that he'd left Harry the choice of either transfiguring the couch into a bed for the second night in a row or crawling into bed with Draco and risking being knocked back out on his arse. Or worse, risking not being knocked back out on his arse.
Harry swore long and imaginatively, put out the candles, and resigned himself to an uncomfortable six or eight hours on the couch.
