In which Evil faces an insurrection, Good faces an unexpected betrayal, and Harry means to find out which side Draco is on. H/D, R.

October, 2005

There was a beautifully clever tongue against his own, drawing long-forgotten sigils in his mouth.

Harry sighed and shifted a little, spreading his legs to pull narrow hips closer between them, denim sliding softly against denim and the pressure of an answering hardness against his own making him moan into that lovely mouth. Quiet laughter wound between the two of them, and Harry ran his hands back upward, sliding one into whisper-soft hair and tracing the shimmer of magic with the other. A lean, strong body shivered against his own; the mouth moved to do things behind his ear that made Harry gasp and arch, and a hand drifted slowly down the front of his shirt to rest on his hip.

"Up, Potter," Draco whispered, and nipped at Harry's earlobe. "Lunch at Granger's, remember?"

That was wrong, and Harry couldn't remember why and didn't care. "There's time," he murmured, and nudged Draco's chin up with his nose, stretching up a little to lick his way down toward the hollow at the base of Draco's throat. Draco purred and moved against him, beautifully responsive, so very willing to teach Harry where to touch and how. Harry sighed with contentment, tightened his arms, and rolled them over, finally opening his eyes; between soft, teasing kisses, he worked a hand free to smooth ice-white hair out of smug grey eyes. Draco ran his fingers down Harry's cheek and moved lazily under him, suddenly-endearing arrogance silently saying Look how beautiful I am, look how much you want me, and Harry's answer was Yes, God, yes. He dipped his head and tasted salt on Draco's collarbone, let his mouth drift slowly down to tease one nipple into fascinating stiffness, and oh, how he wanted Draco; but they had all the time in the world and it felt so good to have those long, deft hands in his hair, cupping his face, stroking gently as Harry nuzzled against Draco's stomach and caressed that thin line of hair with lips and breath. Draco was wearing jeans, of all things, and Harry might have teased him about wearing Muggle clothes but he didn't fancy being kicked out of bed, so he kept his amusement to himself and worked the buttons loose with his teeth, one after the other –

– it was cold, Draco was gone, and Harry's skin was crawling with the feeling of something so horribly wrong that it wrapped around him like a suffocating miasma. Pain stabbed through his scar and he raised a hand to it reflexively, blinking his vision clear.

He was standing in a forest; instinctively he glanced up to check the position of the stars. He was somewhere in England still, that much was clear, and there was a buzzing noise nagging at the edges of his hearing. Something darted past his face and Harry caught it automatically, then frowned and angled his hand toward the light.

Flies. Harry glanced up to see them swarming through a break in the trees. With a grim twist of his mouth – he had no pleasant memories of following crawly things into forests, that was for damned sure – he wiped his hand on his robes and followed them. He hadn't gone far before a moonlit clearing came into view; the sound of the flies was louder here, and a horrible rotting smell hit his nose, making him queasy. What the hell, he thought – and suddenly his scar was searing him like a brand, knocking him onto his hands and knees. Cold washed over him in a sudden wind, cold and sick despair, and dimly he could hear screaming.

Dementors, and close, and Voldemort was with them.

Harry tried to take deep breaths and push the pain away, and choked on the stench. For a moment his head and stomach both spun. Sudden fear stabbed through him – this wasn't the way the dreams were supposed to go, and he hadn't had one in so many years – and he choked that back too. One thing at a time, he thought, pushed himself back to his feet, and followed the flies, keeping to the shadows. Fuck, I wish Draco were here. I could use the backup.

The wind picked up suddenly and a Dementor floated past him, floated through him, flash-freezing his shoulder and leaving his arm hanging uselessly at his side. Harry bit back a hiss of pain and brought up his wand, ready to cast a Patronus; but the Dementor flew on, not sensing him. Well, the Dementors might not sense him but Voldemort bloody well would if he got too close. Harry remembered his Occlumency lessons, emptied his mind, and went to ground in the shadow of a large tree.

He'd barely settled in when a series of cracks of displaced air echoed like gunshots and a score of Death Eaters appeared, huddling together in the center of the clearing and staring in barely-concealed fear and hatred at the Dementors swirling through the air around them. Gradually, the Dementors descended and clustered at the far end of the clearing, away from the wizards. As Harry watched, Voldemort stepped out of the shadows, followed by Peter Pettigrew, and the pain in Harry's scar nearly blinded him.

This was not an improvement over being two buttons away from having Draco Malfoy's cock in his mouth.

Suddenly it was silent in the clearing, so oppressive that the buzzing of the flies and the wind in the leaves were nerve-wrackingly loud. "Welcome," Voldemort said, and the word fell into the silence like the door of a trap clanging shut.

The Death Eaters nearly fell on each other in their haste to kneel. One by one they crawled forward to kiss the hem of Voldemort's robes and then crept backward into the circle. "You called us, my Lord, and we've come," one said, and Harry's eyes narrowed – that was a zealot's voice, not a cowering half-hearted opportunist but a man who believed himself to be on holy ground. Harry wished he recognized the voice.

"How may we serve, Lord?" another one asked, and that one sounded like he hoped the answer was going to involve a pub and a good stout far away from here. Harry wondered if Voldemort could tell the difference anymore, or cared.

"By bearing witness," Voldemort said, and gave a cruel, swift smile. Harry watched him in strange, disconnected fascination – he hadn't seen Voldemort for years, had stopped seeing him even in his dreams, and seeing him now felt like standing in a pensieve watching sepia-tinted memories from someone else's life.

Not Harry, not Harry, his mother cried in the back of his mind. Harry leaned against the tree and swallowed hard against nausea, wiping cold sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and then rubbing his palms against his robes.

"Bearing witness to what, my Lord?" one of the Death Eaters asked dutifully.

"To the opening of a door," Voldemort said, moving forward into the clearing. The moonlight turned his skin a bloated, sickly white that made Harry think of dead things, and emptied the sockets of his eyes.

In Harry's head, so strong a memory that it overlaid his vision, Sirius fell through the veil again and again.

"I will show you power greater than death," Voldemort said, and Harry raised his head and blinked his eyes clear, dizzy and ill with the sodden, cloying heat.

Not Harry, his mother cried, and Harry thought, I have to wake up.

"I will bring you visions," Voldemort said to Harry, smiling with blood-edged teeth.

Harry's head snapped up, and suddenly the world was sharp-edged and real again; Voldemort wasn't looking at him, showed no sign that he had ever realized Harry was there, and Harry was drenched in sweat and shivering in the cold night air.

Pettigrew was leading someone out of the shadows; someone who moved with a strange, loose-jointed, shuffling gait. It was a man about Remus' age, a stranger to Harry; his features were slack, mouth hanging open and a thin slick of drool running down his chin, and there was mud clotted in his dishwater hair. There was a shadow on the inside of his arm that might have been the Dark Mark.

"That's Blake!" one of the Death Eaters blurted in a thin, strained voice.

"It was Blake," Voldemort said, almost kindly. "Now it's… whatever is left after the Dementor's Kiss."

Sirius fell through the veil, over and over, and some part of Harry was tied to a gravestone and screaming under the rending pain of the Cruciatus curse.

Wormtail left Blake in the center of the clearing and hurried back to Voldemort's side. Voldemort raised his wand and began an incantation; Harry tried to focus on it, wanting to remember, but all he could hear was a deep-toned bell tolling in the distance. A circle began to glow around Blake, licking upward in sickly yellow-green flames, more powerful and tightly cast than any Harry had ever seen. As he watched, the flames whipped wildly as though in some wind that didn't touch Harry; the ground at Blake's feet split open in a dozen places, roots soaring out of the rifts, winding around Blake, pushing skyward until they had woven something like a wicker man around him.

No, Harry thought dimly, and the smell of rot nearly made him vomit.

"Incendio!" Voldemort cried, and the roots caught fire and burned like kindling.

For a moment there was shocked silence from the Death Eaters; the Dementors stirred, coursing closer, feral and hungry. Then Blake began to scream, a horrible, bovine cry that went on and on, battering at Harry's ears and drowning out his mother's voice. Harry lifted his hands to his ears and watched, unable to look away, unable to catch his breath, unable to do anything but struggle to keep the bile in his throat from rising. God, it went on, he'd had no idea it took a man so long to burn to death, and the smell of charred meat mingled with the screams and the smell of rot until finally Harry braced himself on one shaking arm and emptied his stomach onto the grass.

I have to wake up, he thought, closing his eyes and pushing frantically toward the reality he could dimly sense. It didn't work, and finally he opened his eyes and looked back toward the clearing just as the fire abruptly died. The silence was deafening.

"Now," Voldemort said softly. "Stand back."

He signalled to the Dementors, who swooped in to surround the wicker man like carrion birds, mindless in their feeding. They were…

Harry frowned and crawled a little closer, as far as he could move on arms that still seemed to have no strength. The Dementors weren't taking anything in – they were breathing something out, a foul black fog that crumbled the wicker man to ash under its weight. Voldemort was chanting low incantations again, shaping and containing the fog, driving it downward to where Blake's charred remains lay with limbs drawn up, knees to his chest and arms cocked like a boxer's in front of him. The fog settled onto the remains, covering them; Voldemort shouted something in a language Harry didn't recognize, the Dementors fled to the other side of the clearing, and the circle sprang into life again, streaked with deep crimson this time.

Something shifted. Harry didn't know what, or how, but it felt as if the door to some foul-aired room had opened and then closed. When it was done, there was a moment more of silence – and then Blake began to move.

Jesus, he can't be alive, Harry thought, horrified.

One of the Death Eaters fainted dead away; the others were breathing too fast, sweating over pale, clammy skin. With an audible creak of tendons, the thing that had been Blake stood slowly, ash and charred skin flaking away to reveal new skin underneath.

"My Lord," it said in a voice like flaking rust, and underneath the obsequious fawning tone was something that sounded like mindless, malicious glee.

"But…" One of the Death Eaters, the one who had sounded less than enthusiastic about the summons, stepped nervously backward. "He was dead, my Lord! And he'd got the Kiss before!"

Blake gave a high, scraping giggle that reminded Harry too much of Hermione in her cell.

"Yes," Voldemort said simply.

"What is it?" one of the others asked, the voice of someone well accustomed to getting answers to his questions.

"It is victory," Voldemort said.

Oh, God, I've seen enough, Harry thought. Closing his eyes, he gave a mental wrench, trying to wake himself up like he would from a nightmare – and found himself suffocating, trapped in a smothering dark between sleep and waking. There was a muted burning in his scar and he couldn't get his bearings, couldn't wake up, couldn't breathe.

Harry heard himself whimpering and fought toward the sound, clawing toward wakefulness – but wakefulness meant increasing pain, searing in his scar that spread across his entire forehead.

"Potter!"

He heard the voice but didn't recognize it. Fighting, he slipped back a little, and felt himself hyperventilating.

"Potter, shh. Harry. You're safe now."

Soft and smooth, that voice, comfort washing over him. Delicate fingertips traced over his scar, and the touch that should have been intolerable was cool and soothing instead, washing blessed relief through him and easing the panic.

"Hurts," he heard himself gasp. "Don't stop, it burns…"

A whispered incantation above him, words he didn't quite catch; the tip of a tongue smoothed across his forehead, leaving a chill in its wake that forced the burning back into a dull throb. Cool dampness on his forehead, soothing touch following the line of his scar, and slowly his breathing came back under control.

Not opening his eyes, he reached up and threaded his fingers into soft hair. "Draco," he whispered. The room was warm around him, cool sheets against his skin and the fire glowing dim red through his closed eyelids.

"Shh," Draco answered. He stroked Harry's forehead with a gentle hand, and Harry made a soft sound of protest at the loss of that cool, wonderful mouth.

"Don't," Draco breathed, his hand moving down to cover Harry's eyes just as they'd been about to open. "Don't wake up. Shh, it's late. Sleep."

Harry was sinking again already. "Stay," he murmured, sliding his hand down over the smooth plane of Draco's back.

A moment of hesitation, then a sigh, and the mattress dipped beside him. Nearly asleep again, Harry curled against Draco, twining their legs together and leaning his aching forehead against the comparatively cool skin of Draco's shoulder. Draco's arm eased around him, and he slept.

 

When it registered with him that his outstretched arm was touching only the sheets, Harry woke, feeling uncomfortably bereft. Lifting his head a little, he squinted at the empty bed and beyond it to the sitting room. Draco was gone, and Harry's stomach gave an unpleasant lurch before he realized that the smell of food was floating in from the kitchen and he could hear a cupboard being opened and closed. He pulled on his trousers with hands still clumsy from sleep, slung his robes on over his bare shoulders, and made his way into the kitchen.

Blurred, Draco was all pale hair and leisurely motion and impossibly long legs; he was humming something slow and sweet, and Harry wondered for a minute if he was a morning person before deciding that he was less a morning person than a person who knew he wasn't going to be able to go back to sleep anyway and might as well make the best of it. He was facing mostly away from Harry and hadn't noticed him coming in, or at least made no sign that he realized Harry was there. Harry leaned on the doorframe and bit his lip against the urge to go over and slide his arms around Draco, bury his face in that luminous hair, ask how he'd slept in between soft kisses to the nape of his neck. He wanted Draco's body against his - even fully clothed, even just resting against him - so badly that every inch of the space between them was a physical pain.

Having someone do amazing things to you with their tongue, Harry reflected gloomily, tended to make denial difficult to maintain.

"Are you just going to stand there or are you going to eat?"

Draco's voice was cool and indifferent, giving Harry a pang; he turned toward Harry, paused for a long moment, and then headed over to the table, and Harry was rather glad that he couldn't quite see the expression on Draco's face.

"How did you sleep?" he asked softly, and winced a little at the husky catch in his own voice.

"Dobby brought kippers," Draco commented, ignoring the question altogether. "I must have done something to offend him."

"You don't like kippers?" Harry asked, amused, running a hand through his hair in a probably-futile effort to tame it.

"Potter. They're fish. In the morning."

Harry shrugged. "Works for me," he answered, and padded over to the table. A moment's squinting scrutiny located what were in all probability kippers, and he picked one up and took a bite.

"You are disgusting," Draco informed him with no small amount of emotion.

Harry laughed and poured himself a glass of pumpkin juice, then pulled out a chair and sat down. "Definitely not a morning person."

"Was the issue up for debate?"

"I wondered, that's all." At this distance, Harry could see that Draco was looking rather sleepy and rumpled, collar askew and shirt unbuttoned farther than it normally was. Harry studiously avoided thinking about Draco's tattoo. Or his collarbone. Or the curve of his neck. Or, fuck it, any part of Draco's body at all. Possibly if he closed his eyes he could convince himself that Draco was merely a disembodied voice.

"Are you all right, Potter?"

Harry shook his head quickly. "I'm fine. Still haven't woken up yet, I guess."

"I'll make coffee," Draco said, and headed over to the coffee pot on the counter.

Harry was silent for a moment, buttering toast and arguing with himself. Draco seemed determined to ignore the previous night altogether; which was fine, there was nothing to talk about, but Harry really wanted Draco's opinion on what he'd seen, and there seemed to be no way to bring it up without also bringing up the resulting conjunction of Draco's mouth and Harry's skin.

Harry dropped the toast onto his plate and buried his face in his hands, wishing heartily that he'd thought to pull his robes over his lap when he sat down. Well, might as well broach the subject so they could be uncomfortable together.

"That… what you did with my scar," he said finally, tentatively, and watched Draco go still for a moment before he poured the beans into the coffee pot. "I've never run into that kind of magic before."

"Haven't you?" Draco asked neutrally, not looking at him. "I confess I'm a bit surprised by that."

"Why? What is it? Something you learned in Budapest?"

"No, something I learned in Paris," Draco said, reaching up into the cabinet for mugs.

Harry waited, but eventually it became clear that no more information was forthcoming. "It's… interesting. You clearly weren't using your wand as a conduit –"

Draco turned away from Harry and sneezed several times in rapid succession.

" – bless you – but you didn't seem to have any trouble focusing the effect."

"Mm-hm," Draco said vaguely, poured the coffee, came back to the table, and pushed a mug into Harry's hands.

"I get the feeling you don't want to discuss this," Harry said dryly. "Should I wait and ask Severus or Minerva when we get back?"

Draco sat down and propped his feet up on a chair. "Only if you let me watch," he said with a small smile, looking up at Harry over the rim of his mug.

The phrase and Draco's sudden sneezing fit abruptly clicked together in Harry's mind, and he felt himself go a bit weak in the knees. "Ah," he said softly. "It was –"

"Effective, and I was at a bit of a loss at the moment," Draco interrupted, no longer looking at Harry. "It won't happen again."

Harry couldn't quite decide whether that was an apology or a pre-emptive rebuff. He did know, however, that sex magic was rare and difficult and only worked in the presence of, oh God, mutual desire. He didn't want to think about what that meant, and still less did he want to think about where Draco had learned it; sex magic also took a lot of practice, with rather a lot of sex in various forms involved along the way, and Harry really didn't want to wake the small, irrational part of himself that looked at Draco and thought Mine.

What if I want it to happen again? hovered on the tip of his tongue, and if it hadn't been for Pansy he would have said it. If it hadn't been for Pansy, he would bloody well have said a lot of things, starting with You. Mine. On the bed, right now, and working his way up to words with more than one syllable, like Draco and harder and ohgodpleasefuckyes. He might even have said it if Draco had been engaged to the Pansy Parkinson Harry remembered from school, instead of a woman for whom Harry had unwillingly developed a hell of a lot of respect.

Oh, God, he needed a shower. A very, very cold one.

"Why now, do you think?" Draco was saying thoughtfully, and Harry blinked at him, train of thought mercifully derailed.

"Your scar, I mean," Draco elaborated. "If my father's right, Voldemort's been active again for some time. Why hasn't your scar hurt before this?"

"Probably because one or the other of us has got better at Occlumency," Harry said, reaching for the bacon. "I mean, if I were him I wouldn't want the other side having an advance warning system every time I made a move, you know?"

There was silence from across the table. Harry looked up and narrowed his eyes to see Draco trying to hide a grin and for once being notably unsuccessful. "What?"

"Oh, I was just wondering if anything of his twinged when you were getting up to something you shouldn't," Draco answered. "Must have been a real annoyance, if so. 'Oh, bugger, my wand hand is twinging again, the little bastard must be sneaking around after hours in that invisibility cloak of his.'"

Harry nearly snorted coffee across the table.

"Really, though, Potter, how good are you at Occlumency?"

Harry sobered. "Very good," he said quietly, looking down at his plate.

"Hm," Draco said in the tones of someone crafting a complicated potion in his head, and Harry frowned at him. "Oh, for – Accio Potter's glasses!"

Movement flashed in the corner of Harry's eye and he grabbed his glasses out of the air as they passed him.

"Showoff," Draco said austerely. "Put them on. You're either staring straight through me or peering at me like you're trying to see through my clothes, and it's unnerving."

Harry fumbled his glasses onto his face, feeling himself blush and cursing Malfoy inwardly.

"But that doesn't do anything to answer the question," Draco mused, examining a strip of bacon critically. "If anything, it makes it more complicated – why now, and how?"

Harry picked up his fork and poked absently at the sausages, thinking. "When it used to happen before, when I was growing up, it was usually when he was feeling some really strong emotion. Or… or when he wanted me to see something."

Draco frowned a little. "Which do you think it was this time?"

"I'm not sure it was either," Harry answered thoughtfully. "I think… I think it might have been that he was expending a huge amount of power, more than he has since he got a body back in our fourth year, and maybe he didn't have enough energy and concentration to spare toward blocking me out – or it could have been that he was trying to pull power from me."

"Did he succeed?"

"I don't think so. I don't feel drained or weakened, like you do after a really powerful spell."

"But it wasn't just his shields lapsing," Draco pointed out. "He would have had to get through yours as well."

"I know," Harry said grimly. Suddenly not hungry, he pushed his plate away and sat back with his mug clutched in both hands.

"Are you all right?" Draco asked softly.

Harry opened his mouth to say that he was fine, and what came out instead was, "It's Halloween today. Twenty-four years ago tonight my parents were killed, and here we sit, with Voldemort after both of us, in a house in the middle of nowhere protected by the Fidelius charm."

Draco was silent for a moment before he answered. "You know, we could brave Severus' wrath and go back to Hogwarts. Or we could go somewhere else."

"Somewhere like where?"

"Malfoy Manor," Draco answered, and Harry nearly choked on his coffee.

"Have you lost your mind?" he asked bluntly. "Isn't that the first place anyone looking for you would go?"

"Which would mean that they'd already been there," Draco pointed out. "And it might be the first place someone would look for me but it'd be the last place anyone would look for you, or for the two of us together."

"Ron'll have the place staked out –"

"His last name, you will note, is not Malfoy. There are ways in and out that only the family know. You'd have to trust me to use a memory charm on you afterward, but I could take you with me. And you could have one of the guest rooms instead of sleeping on a transfigured couch."

"Speaking of which, it's your turn to sleep on the couch tonight," Harry informed him. "Let's give it another day. We're as safe here as we'd be anywhere else. In the meantime, I'd like to hear what you think about what I saw last night."

Draco raised an eyebrow. "What you saw?"

"Well – what I dreamed, I mean," Harry answered, and felt his face heat a little. Much as he might like to discuss Draco's opinion on a productive working relationship between his cock and Harry's never-ending urge to put things in his mouth, he thought he'd probably do better to leave that part of the dream out of it. "The thing is, when my scar hurts like that, sometimes I… well, see things, or have dreams that come from Voldemort, whether he means to send them or not."

"I've never heard of curse scars causing visions," Draco said thoughtfully. "Though, of course, if any curse scar was going to, it would be yours."

"Thanks," Harry said dryly, fully aware that he was being snarked at.

Draco speared a sausage with his fork and waved it vaguely in Harry's direction. "Let's hear it, then."

Harry settled back to describe his dream in as much detail as he could, with Draco interrupting with questions every now and then and looking more and more grave as the narrative went on. When it was over they sat in silence for a few minutes, Harry waiting for Draco to say something, Draco sipping his coffee and staring absently at the pumpkin juice, lost in thought.

"Well," Draco said finally. "It's certainly no surprise that the Dark Lord is practicing necromancy."

"No," Harry agreed. "But this… I've never heard of anything like it."

Draco lifted an eyebrow. "How much do you know about necromancy, Potter?"

"A lot," Harry answered, looking down into his mug. "For a while I thought it would be the key to defeating Voldemort. I was wrong about that, but I read a hell of a lot of books on the subject anyway. None of them mentioned the smell," he added, wrinkling his nose.

"No, they don't," Draco agreed, echoing Harry's expression. "I suppose they think you'll find out soon enough if you start dabbling in it. Did you do the research or did you ask Granger?" His voice was carefully neutral, leaving Harry with no idea whether he was being made fun of or not. Harry decided to answer anyway.

"I did. Hermione… it wasn't a good time for her. I did it myself."

Draco turned a piece of bacon in his fingers, evaluating it critically. "Be a bit of bad news if he were trying to bring Grindelwald back, wouldn't it?"

"Jesus," Harry said, not fooled by Draco's light tone. "That'd be…"

"Insane?" Draco asked with dry humor, and set the bacon down on his plate. "It's what I'd do."

"If you were a Dark Lord?"

"You're a force to be reckoned with, Potter. So is my father, and Voldemort has no way of knowing whose loyalties are with the Morsmordre and whose are with the Malfoys. And most of his followers are Slytherin – he may never know whose loyalties lie where, and if he steps too hard they're likely to shift out from underneath him. Voldemort knows as well as anyone else that he's caught between a rock and a hard place. If he can restore Grindelwald, magic at least mostly intact but under Voldemort's control…" Draco made an impatient sound and drained his coffee mug. "This isn't helping. Grindelwald died far too long ago for his body to be recovered in usable form."

"Dumbledore might not have," Harry said quietly, and Draco glanced sharply at him.

"Is he dead, then?"

"Snape says so. And if I were Voldemort, I'd think it was bloody rich, to bring back Dumbledore and turn him on Hogwarts and the Muggle-borns, have him tearing down the wizarding world's defenses at my command like he was some sort of zombie."

"God almighty, Potter, remind me to make myself indispensable to you just in case you ever do crack and become a Dark Lord."

Harry smiled humorlessly. "Would you really want to be that close to me?"

"Honestly?" Draco said softly. "Yes. I would. Because if you wanted to rule the world, Harry, you'd bloody well rule it. You wouldn't get sidetracked by over-elaborate plans and adolescent boys. You wouldn't hide your power behind sweets and feigned dottiness. You'd just… burn the wizarding world to the ground and rebuild it in your image. Yes, I'd want to be that close to you, and I might not even care which of us had the power."

"Malfoy," Harry said carefully, "there are not words for how horrified I am right now."

Draco's peals of laughter nearly startled Harry into dropping his mug. "I'm not surprised. You should see your face. Come on, Potter, I was only joking. Take it like a man and let's get back to the topic at hand."

"I keep trying to forget why I hated you at school and you keep reminding me," Harry said, not nearly as sternly as he probably should have.

"It's because you were jealous of me," Draco said placidly. "Really, though, I'm not sure I'm prepared to guess about what all this means. We don't know if he's set on bringing someone in particular back, or people in general. If it's people in general, I'm not sure what the advantage is unless you can somehow arrange for the process to start premortem – so that, for instance, if someone falls on the battlefield they can get right back up, presumably immune to any curse that didn't tear them limb from limb. That would be a damned powerful means of psychological warfare, if you can get your armies to agree to it."

"But it's not… not quite them," Harry said thoughtfully. "There's – it's like there's something else in there with them. They come back changed."

"They might always do," Draco said. "I don't know. It's so rare that anyone manages to bring anyone else back, and we've no idea what the Dementors were doing. All I know is that no one who's been brought back has ever stayed back for long."

Harry sighed in frustration. "So we're stuck."

"We are. Severus might know something we don't. Failing that, I might be able to find something in my father's library."

Harry couldn't quite help the brief, unhappy smile that flickered over his face. "I'll look in mine too, when we get back. Maybe there's something I've overlooked."

"Do you think you'll have any more dreams?" Draco asked in a carefully neutral voice, and drained his coffee.

"I don't know."

"Well, tell me if you do and we'll see what we can make of them," Draco ordered.

Harry agreed, and turned the conversation to other topics; but Draco was still looking thoughtful and none too happy, and it was a long time before he looked at Harry again.

 

You, Remus told himself, too exhausted and in pain to turn his head so the pillow was no longer half smothering him, are an idiot, and things do not ever turn out well when you stick your nose into them.

It wasn't only the transformation, or the lack of sleep, though the transformation was debilitating enough and the lack of sleep didn't help. The sudden drain of the crackling buildup of magic from the days before the full moon left him feeling gutted and leaden, too weak to do the simplest charms without effort. What in God's name had led him to believe he could take over for Harry not only in the Defence course but in preparing and fortifying the castle's defenses Remus had no idea. He would have looked on the whole venture with a sort of distant chagrin if he weren't too tired to pay attention to anything but the throbbing pain that started at his scalp and pounded through every inch of his body down to the toe he had apparently stubbed at some point. He was, he decided, just going to lie here for a couple of days, by which time Harry and Draco would be back and Remus could go back to minding his own bloody business.

Something jostled the bed beside him, sending a shooting pain from his temples down to his neck. Remus cracked an eye and found a flat orange face an inch from his own, sniffing curiously. Too exhausted to converse with cats, Remus closed his eyes again. After a moment Crookshanks sneezed in his face and then hopped up to settle in the small of his back, kneading the covers industriously.

It should have hurt but it didn't. If anything, the low rumbling purr soothed his back muscles. Well, all right, Remus thought dimly, and sank like a stone into sleep.

It wasn't even noon when he woke again, feeling surprisingly not as though he'd been sat on by a mountain troll in studded leather shorts. Crookshanks was dozing peacefully at the foot of the bed in a puffy riot of orange fur, there was a pot of tea steaming gently on a folding table beside the bed, and there was enough cloud cover that the sunlight wasn't causing stabbing pains in Remus' head; it was, all things considered, one of his better post-Transformation mornings, despite the fact that he was still too tired and sore to actually move.

For a long time he lay drifting in and out of a light doze, waiting for the soreness to ebb and floating just under the surface of the exhaustion that was more nagging now than crushing; by midafternoon he'd recovered enough to pour himself some tea, and found that he could manage to pull on a pair of pajama bottoms, though he had to rest again afterward. Which was just as well – not long afterward, there was a soft tap on the door to his rooms. Severus wanting to see how the potion had worked, Remus thought, and called "Come in," in a hoarse, ragged voice.

The head that poked around the bedroom door, however, was disturbingly red. "You look rough, Remus," one of the twins informed him in a voice rather more suited to the pub than the sickroom. Remus smiled anyway and pulled on his dressing gown.

"Come in," he said, settling back against the pillows. "You'll have to excuse me for not getting up."

"Is that tea?" the boy asked hopefully, bouncing into the room with his brother trailing behind. "Can we have some?"

"Help yourselves," Remus invited.

The one who hadn't spoken rummaged in his pockets, pulled out a pair of what looked like Skiving Snackboxes, and transfigured them into teacups. "I'm Fred, by the way," he offered. "I thought I'd say, since George was born in a barn."

George cuffed his brother amiably and appropriated one of the teacups. "Fred's just jealous because hinkypunks brought him in the night."

"It's true," Fred said solemnly. "Mum used to yell at me for luring people into the loo and leaving them stranded."

Teacup filled, George glanced around for a chair. Apparently deciding that the ones in front of the fire were too far away, he kicked off his shoes and climbed onto the bed, causing Remus to blink at him a bit. Fred followed shortly thereafter, hauling a sleepily snorting Crookshanks up to settle between him and George.

"What can I do for you, boys?" Remus asked as briskly as he could. He was very fond of the twins, but they'd managed to make him tired within five minutes.

"We covered three of the tunnels this morning," Fred answered, and blew softly into his tea to cool it.

"We started with the blocked-up ones," George put in, scratching Crookshanks between the ears. Crookshanks bit him placidly, gnawing on George's thumb with small, sharp teeth. "The one near the Charms corridor and the one by the kitchens have been walled up and we don't think anyone could get through them. The one down in the Dungeons, the one that goes under the lake – that one's flooded once you've gone down more than about twenty feet, and you can see that it's caved in farther along but we don't know if it's blocked solid."

"George thinks it is."

"Fred thinks it isn't."

"So we'll have to wait until we can get some gillyweed from Neville, just in case, and take a closer look," Fred said, picking up the conversational baton. "Once we've finished with that one –"

"Wait, wait," Remus said, frowning. "You're going to go underwater to look at it, instead of standing on dry land and using a charm?"

The twins looked at him quizzically. "Yes," they said in unison, and Fred went on to say, "We don't know any good charms to help us find out if it's completely blocked. Well, at least, we know a good half a dozen, but they all want more light or get distorted by the water. We tried already."

"I don't like that. If that tunnel comes down with you in it –"

"It won't," George reassured him. "Those rocks have been down for ages."

"It's completely safe," Fred put in.

"Perfectly safe."

"Mostly safe."

"We'll be careful."

Remus sighed. "Damn. I'd suggest sending house elves but they'd probably just bring back the answer they thought we wanted to hear."

"House elves won't go down there," Fred told him.

"House elves won't go down in the Dungeons at all if they can help it," George added. "I think they go in mortal fear that the Slytherins are going to give them clothes for a lark."

"We owled Bill, too," Fred said, pointed his wand down at the coverlet, and conjured a small purple mouse. Crookshanks felled it with a single blow of his paw, then looked a bit offended when it disappeared in a puff of smoke. "He says to name the day and he'll come out to look at the Chamber of Secrets with us."

"Ginny," George began, then trailed off, looking troubled. He pointed his wand at the table, set the tea things scurrying into life, and brought a fresh cup of tea and a saucer over to hover in front of Remus, who murmured thanks and waited for them to go on.

"Ginny told us once," Fred went on. "About what it was like. What she remembered, I mean."

"She didn't remember much."

"But she said the air was musty –"

" – like she was going to choke on it –"

" – and there were places she was afraid to step –"

" – because the ground looked like the stone was almost worn through–"

" – and she was afraid of what was underneath it –"

" – so Harry had Fawkes carry her, even when they were walking back to where Ron and Lockhart were."

When the twins were upset or overexcited about something, listening to them talk was like listening to someone with tremendous breath control and a predilection for run-on sentences. It must have driven Molly mad when they were toddlers. "You know I wouldn't ask if it weren't important," Remus said gently.

"We know," George said. "It's just…"

"Being back here," Fred said with a helpless gesture at the walls. "It's strange, you know? Because it feels like nothing ought to have changed, and everything has."

"Why does Hogwarts feel like that?" George asked Remus. "The Burrow doesn't."

"I think –" Remus began, then trailed off, struck with a sudden thought. "Fred, George – you said that Ron was asking about the things that had gone missing from your father's collection. Do you remember what exactly they were?"

The twins looked at each other with an identical grimace. "Have you ever seen Dad's collection?" Fred asked.

"Looks like a gimcrack factory exploded," George told Remus. "That lot's been piling up since before Bill was born. Dad always says he knows where stuff is but I don't think he does. Things are stacked everywhere – shelves, workbenches, on the floor, you can just barely walk in there."

"So Dad says he knows where things are but I don't think he's sure what all went missing." Fred said. "I do remember one thing he said was gone, though, because we'd all played with it once or twice." He paused, frowning.

"You know," George said slowly, "I don't think Gin ever went back in Dad's workshop after her first year or two in school. If she was scared to, she didn't say –"

Well, she would hardly have told Fred and George if she were, Remus thought but didn't say. And in the perpetual madhouse that was the Weasley household, she might not have told her parents either.

But she might have told Percy. Percy, who would have been kind and superior, who would have told her she was imagining things. Percy, who might have remembered, and would have known that Ginny would remember as soon as Arthur realized what was missing.

" – she just didn't go in anymore," Fred finished.

"What went missing?" Remus prodded.

"It was a Muggle toy, a music box. About this big," Fred answered, holding his hands about fifteen inches apart.

"It had five or six cylinders with –" George made vague motions in the air. " – thorny things on them. The thorny things poked metal strips to make it play, and you could change the cylinders."

"There was one that we could never get to work," Fred mused. "It was the same as the others, but the thorny things must not have reached far enough; all it ever did was make this sort of dull plunking noise that didn't make a tune at all. George and I used to try to enchant it to make it work better, and when that didn't work we tried to transfigure it into a set of tin soldiers – Remus?"

Remus took a drink of his tea and set the cup back down in the saucer, causing a rattling noise like vigorously wielded castanets. "Nothing," he said. "I'm… glad it didn't work, that's all." Rather unfairly, he wished pox and pilgarlick on Arthur Weasley for leaving something like that down where it could be got at by two children powerful enough to transfigure their brother's teddy bear into a spider, wandlessly, at the age of five.

"The lid had a castle on it," George said, staring thoughtfully into space. "I'd forgot about that. Beautiful detail, too – it almost looked like you could open the windows and see inside."

"It's another thing like Ginny's diary, isn't it?" Fred asked quietly. "That's why Percy wanted it. We just didn't know the right spell to make the other cylinder work."

Remus shook his head. "I don't know. It could be that; it could be half a dozen things."

"Half a dozen things worth killing his own sister for?" George asked.

"Oh, yes," Remus answered. "If he and Lucius Malfoy between them were resourceful enough, and sufficiently determined to either bring down Voldemort or put him on a throne that Harry Potter and the wrath of God couldn't dislodge him from."

"Cor," Fred said, sounding a little awed. "We had bits of the Dark Lord in Dad's workshop and Peter Pettigrew in Ron's room. Our house was Death Eater Central. You'd think someone would have known."

"You'd think," Remus said, and kept his thoughts to himself. He was starting to flag, balancing precariously on the edge of sleep.

"You're tired, Remus," George said, and Remus hadn't noticed him reaching out but suddenly there were hands brushing against his, plucking the teacup and saucer out of his rapidly loosening grip.

"We're going to go down after dinner and look at that tunnel again," Fred told him. "Have to go see if we can talk Neville into giving us some gillyweed."

"I'm sure he'll let you have some," Remus said.

Fred and George looked sheepishly at each other. "Well, he might want a bit of buttering up first," Fred said.

"We charmed all his mandrake roots to sing 'The Wizard's Wand Chooses the Witch,'" George confessed.

"How were we meant to know that he had a class full of first-years first thing in the morning?"

"Damn fine harmony they had, though. The mandrake roots, I mean, not the first-years."

Remus sighed and rubbed a hand over his eyes, and tried hard not to smile.

 

By midafternoon it became clear to Harry that he wasn't doing any too well in the dealing-with-boredom department himself.

He wasn't quite reduced to making knick-knacks dance, but it was a near thing. All his marking was done, he'd looked through every drawer and cupboard in the house except for the ones occupied by Draco's clothes, he was too restless to read a book, and even the Quidditch magazine he was half-heartedly paging through couldn't hold his attention. Sprawled on the couch with his feet propped up on the back, he watched the Keeper for the Chudley Cannons make a rather spectacular save four times before he realized that the image had begun repeating itself. If he were back at Hogwarts he'd have spent the afternoon taking third-years through their paces on the Quidditch pitch while Draco started the section on NEWTs-level wards with the seventh-year Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs. He'd bemoaned his lack of free time often enough; possibly this was an object lesson in being careful what one wished for.

Well, God knew he hadn't got much sleep the night before – not until he was entangled in Draco, some annoying part of his brain pointed out helpfully – so possibly some more was in order. Harry settled back onto the couch pillow, dropped the magazine onto his chest, and tried, without much hope of success, to go back to sleep.

He was just starting to doze off when he realized two things in rapid succession: someone was singing, and there was a good-sized and half-familiar expenditure of magical energy coming from the kitchen.

Frowning, Harry shook his head to clear it and opened his eyes. The sky was still overcast, splattering rain on the windows, and the kitchen was full of candlelight. For a minute or two he stayed on the couch, debating with himself over whether an interruption was likely to bring down Draco's wrath on his head. Finally he decided that it wouldn't, or not for long, at any rate; and anyway, Harry rather wanted some tea. He untangled himself from the couch cushions and made for the kitchen – then paused in the doorway, blinking in surprise and wondering if he should have left well enough alone until he was a bit more awake.

Draco was standing in front of the kitchen window, robes tossed carelessly onto a chair and shirtsleeves rolled up, singing a sweet, lilting tune in what Harry assumed was Hungarian. He was whirling his wand through the air in front of him, smooth wood glowing amber in the candlelight as he guided it through complicated forms and set it spinning between his fingers, his other hand braced on his bicep for support; he'd been doing this for a while, then.

Harry leaned against the doorway and watched, knowing he should make his presence known or leave and unable to do either.

Draco's body was swaying very slightly with the music, and his voice was rich with a sort of lazy pleasure in whatever it was that he was doing. Harry could sense the magic filling the air around him, surrounding him like sunlight, but couldn't quite tell what spell Draco was casting. Then a familiar gesture caught his eye and his smile faded as he watched more intently, sobering with sudden realization: Draco was singing a bladeward into existence, one that made the ones at the mansion look like blunt butter knives.

Harry tracked the movements of Draco's wand, able to make more sense of them now that he knew what the spell was. Bloody advanced magic, and God, it was savage – intertwined blades of magic darting through and around each other, cast to seek vital organs and shear through them in the blink of an eye, leaving skin and bone untouched. Anyone who walked into that ward would be dead long seconds before they would have started to bleed from every orifice.

Draco's voice was a soft, fair tenor, slurring and eliding, purring contentment as he wove a particularly nasty variety of death into the air; and Harry thought about how things could be beautiful because they were deadly and not in spite of it.

He narrowed his eyes and watched more closely. There were certain modifications to the normal base structure that had to be maintained – most wards were meant to stop intruders, redirect them, at most disable them, not slice their insides into ribbons, and the intent of the spell made a difference. The modifications Draco had made were good, but they could be better – lines of magic more tightly woven there, a binding spell like the ones used to knot ropes there… Harry drew his wand and reinforced the weak spots, his own magic blending seamlessly with Draco's, within and around. Draco's posture shifted minutely, acknowledging Harry's presence, and Harry turned his attention to the blades.

No fault there that he could find. Each of the blades was keyed to a vital organ except the one designed to sever the brainstem; they were fast, sharp, and unstoppable, cast to shear through a Protego spell without even slowing. Harry thought he might be able to live through tripping one – but only barely, not without immediate medical help and a damn long stay in St. Mungo's afterward, because he'd have to sacrifice an internal organ or two to protect his heart and brainstem, and he'd only be able to protect himself at all because he knew the way Draco flew. He looked at the structure, watched Draco's wand movements closely as he cast, and filed as much as he could away for future reference. It wasn't until he lowered his wand that he realized that his hands were shaking, and he stuffed them into his pockets to still them.

The bladeward came together, flared, and became invisible, and Draco's voice went still. He stretched lazily and turned toward Harry. "Dark magic, Potter? My, the Champion of Light and Goodness is slipping a bit, isn't he?"

Harry gave him a two-fingered salute and ambled into the kitchen. "The Champion of Light and Goodness is fucking bored and wants to make tea."

Draco tilted his head curiously. "No, really, though. I thought you were all for drawing moral lines between yourself and the enemy."

Harry picked up the teakettle, filled it, and shut off the water. "You aren't the enemy," he said quietly. "And I have my reasons."

"Which you aren't going to tell me."

"You're right."

"Ever?"

Harry had to laugh at how petulant Draco sounded. "Maybe someday."

There was a very pointed, meaningful silence from behind him.

Harry wasn't sure he could live in a small house with a sulky Draco Malfoy. "Look. I gave up a long time ago thinking that I was going to get the best of Voldemort with the purity of my soul and the power of love. Being a good person didn't save Cedric Diggory, and it's not going to save me either. So whatever it takes, I'll use it – dark magic, light magic, a board with nails in if that's the first thing that comes to hand. Whatever I can do without losing myself in the process and turning into something worse than Voldemort. Your bladeward is a beautiful piece of spellcasting but I don't think it qualifies as Things Man Was Not Meant to Meddle In, do you?"

"An admirable sentiment," Draco said in a voice so carefully toneless that Harry shot a glance back over his shoulder – and turned away just as quickly, because the last bloke who had looked at him with that kind of single-minded, shadowed focus had made it quite clear soon afterward that he very much wanted to pin Harry against the wall and fuck him senseless. From Adam it had been a mild annoyance, easily deflected; from Draco it was incredibly unnerving – the more so because Harry couldn't be sure that it meant the same thing. And somehow he didn't think actually saying Hey, Malfoy, you look like you want to cheat on your fiancée, risk destroying a lifelong friendship, break my heart, and make your job hellishly uncomfortable for the next fifteen years or so, fancy a shag? would go over well.

"Want some of this tea?"

"Yes, please," Draco answered, his voice so completely restored to its usual careless drawl that Harry felt like cursing.

He sent a teacup floating toward Draco and turned, leaning against the counter. "We're missing the staff meeting."

"I am distraught," Draco announced, and blew on his tea.

Harry laughed. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but it'd be something to do, at any rate."

"Yes, listening to Severus trying to mediate disputes over who took how many House points, listening to Vivienne trying to reschedule the NEWTs to suit her holiday time, trying to scavenge enough funds to restock the Potions cabinets before I'm reduced to having my students make voodoo dolls with spit and tallow… I'd rather be under Cruciatus."

"You've never actually been under Cruciatus, have you?" Harry asked more sharply than he'd meant to, then wearily cursed himself. Draco had only been joking.

"Yes, actually. Often," Draco told him, swinging a leg gracefully over a kitchen chair to sit straddling the back. "Any number of times before I started school, then over every school holiday and several times each summer."

"What – Malfoy, God, that's not really something to joke about. "

"I'm not joking." Draco set his cup down on the table and examined his fingernails. "You see, there's something about the Cruciatus curse that not many people know, for understandable reasons: after a while, one builds up a tolerance to it. You could Crucio the Longbottoms from now until Christmas and they'd never feel it; the tolerance came too late to save them, of course, but the same effect can be achieved through smaller doses over long periods of time. It's like eating arsenic, in a way."

"Like eating what? Rat poison, that kind of arsenic?"

"Yes. People used to eat small doses of it to give their complexions a fashionable pallor – what it actually did, of course, was make them look deathly ill, but it also caused them to build up a tolerance to arsenic ingestion, making them very difficult to poison with that particular substance. It's much the same thing with Cruciatus. So every few months my father would cast it on my mother for a minute or so, have her cast it on him, and then cast it on me. I quite looked forward to those days, after a while," he said thoughtfully. "I always got ice cream, and usually a new toy."

"Your family," Harry said, "is fucking insane, Draco. And I don't just mean the garden-variety 'This is Uncle George, he's a bit off his feed today, don't let him too near the tea cozy' type of insane, I mean insanity of really operatic proportions."

"Possibly, but we're also immune to the Cruciatus curse. I consider it a good tradeoff."

"And he did this to you when you were… Jesus Christ, it's a wonder you weren't scarred for life!"

"It was my father doing it, Potter," Draco explained patiently. "He wouldn't hurt me."

Harry really felt like something in his head was going to explode. "Malfoy, those words keep coming out of your mouth and I really don't think –"

Draco rolled his eyes. "All right, he wouldn't hurt me without good reason, is that better?"

"So what was his reason for doing it this time?" Harry pressed on, insistent, when Draco looked away. "You said it was because of me, because everyone knows me better than you do. What did you mean?"

Draco was silent for a long time, running his fingertips absently over the scrollwork on the back of the chair. "You've put me in the rather strange position of having to explain you to yourself," he said finally. "And maybe I was wrong; maybe it was because he doesn't know you as well as I do, and due to the general perverseness of the universe, that meant that he was right after all and I was wrong."

Harry blinked. "Did that make sense before it got to your mouth?"

"I meant… you were the Boy Who Lived, messiah of the wizarding world. Your job was to go around saving people, and for many years you did just that. I suppose it was a comfort to a lot of people – no matter what, you could be counted on to save the day."

Harry's throat was suddenly dry, and he swallowed hard. "That's not how it was. Not at all."

"No, it wasn't," Draco agreed unexpectedly. "But that's how it looked. Harry Potter saves the day, that's what he does. It took a certain amount of familiarity with you to understand that you're actually very selective about whose day you save. You'd have no problem trying to figure out who you'd save from a burning building and in what order – your friends and supporters first, Gryffindors in general second, Slytherins not at all, Malfoys and other people who had pissed you off at one point or another would get shoved down into the cellar and have the door barred behind them –"

"Jesus Christ, that's not fucking true!" Harry exploded.

"Oh, I'm not saying you'd actually kill anyone. I'm saying that you'd have no problem letting them die." Something tight and unhappy was simmering under Draco's words, and he wasn't looking at Harry.

"You thought I'd have no problem letting you die?"

"Yes," Draco said simply, turning back to look Harry in the eye.

"Then why did you leave me that note?" Harry raked his hands miserably through his hair, unable to believe the turn this conversation had taken. It was a sign of something or other, God knew what, that he'd rather go back to talking about the Cruciatus curse.

"I don't know," Draco said wearily. "I shouldn't have. Next time I'll know better."

"Next time? You'll… I can't believe you're saying this. I can't believe you thought I'd let you die. I can't believe we've worked together for a fucking year and you still think I'm the same person I was when I was fifteen bloody years old. I can't believe you think there's going to be a next time because you think I'll stand back and let you go back to the man who gave you the kind of injuries I had to heal." Harry heard his voice rising, tried to calm down, and then decided that being calm was highly overrated.

"Potter –"

"Go on, then," Harry interrupted him. "How does this all come out to your father beating the living shit out of you?"

"Think about what happened for a minute. He beat the hell out of me, you came and rescued me, the two of us left the estate in a blaze of triggered wards and dead guard creatures, and when word gets back to Voldemort, my father will have one weakness fewer in his eyes. He didn't know, of course, that Granger had already set Voldemort on to me. If that hadn't happened, he would have removed my value as a target, so that if I wasn't with him I would at least be safe – a disinherited Malfoy is no one and nothing, certainly nothing worth taking a risk to protect, and Voldemort knows that. My father is furious with me, make no mistake, but he doesn't want me dead."

Harry was already shaking his head, stunned. "Jesus Christ, even you can't possibly believe that."

Draco's face hardened. "I was stupid enough to tell him I'd left you a note. He knew damn well what that meant, even when I didn't see it, even when I told him you'd cut off your own balls before you'd throw me a rope if I were drowning –"

"Are you fucking insane?"

"I thought it was true, Potter, how the fuck was I supposed to know better?" Draco demanded, and Harry flinched.

"Harry," he said between his teeth.

Draco stared at him. "What?"

"Harry. I want you to call me Harry."

"For God's sake, why?"

"Because I want you to, all right?" Harry shouted. "Because I fucking hate that you think I'm a horrible person and I want to go back to pretending that you might actually think well of me."

"I do think well of you," Draco said bitterly, shoving the chair away and moving to stand at the window. "Why do you think I did such a bloody effective job convincing myself I'd never belong to the golden circle of people you'd be willing to risk your life for?"

"You were wrong," Harry told him flatly.

Draco rubbed his fingertips over his eyes, shoulders slumping, exhaustion written in every line of his body. "So it seems," he said, almost to himself. "And what am I supposed to do now?"

Let me, Harry started to think, then stopped himself. Even if Draco didn't actually hex him into oblivion for offering, it would either tear Pansy and Draco apart or tear Harry apart, and both of those prices were too high to pay.

But he couldn't stop himself from moving forward to stand behind Draco, lifting a tentative hand toward Draco's shoulder. He only meant it for comfort, for companionship; but the magic wound into that tattoo under Draco's shirt pulled at him like a lodestone, drawing his hand closer, making him hurt with the urge not just to touch but to caress, to stroke, to pull down the collar of that immaculately tailored shirt and lick until Draco was hard and wanting –

Harry gulped and wrenched his hand away just before it touched the tattoo, and found his fingertips brushing Draco's hair where it lay against the side of his neck. "I always thought your hair would get darker," he blurted.

Draco turned his head a little, toward Harry's hand, not quite looking back. "What?"

"When… when we first started at Hogwarts, your hair was that light gold color, the color of hair that little kids have and it never stays that way. It looked like it was going to get darker, more of a regular blond. I didn't think it would lighten like this." God, what was he doing? Someone needed to keep him from ever talking again.

Draco did turn at that, not enough to dislodge Harry's hand, looking curiously back at him. "You'd seen my father."

"I…" I didn't think you'd be so much like him, Harry found himself thinking, realizing even as he thought it that it wasn't true. "You look like your mother."

"Who also has hair this color," Draco reminded him patiently. His mouth quirked in a small smile, and he reached up to run a lock of the hair behind Harry's ear through his fingers. "You can blame this on your father, I suppose."

"Yeah," Harry answered, dry-mouthed.

Draco's fingertips settled on his jaw. "Do you have your father's eyes too, or your mother's?" he asked, looking not at Harry's eyes but into them.

Oh, God, he's not, he isn't doing what it seems like he is. And even if he were, it would hurt more than just the two of us. With Pansy's voice clear in his mind, Harry drew his hand back. "My mother's," he managed to say in a voice that only shook a little, taking a step backward. "Malfoy… I wouldn't have let you die."

"You understand, don't you, that there may come a time when you have no choice?"

"Bullshit!" Harry snapped, making Draco blink in surprise. "You fucking Slytherins, you keep saying that and it isn't true. And… and even if it were –"

Draco watched him, an indefinable expression on his face.

"Even if it were, how can you just say it like that?" Harry demanded. "How can you live like that, not believing that no matter what happens, there'll still be a way to make things come out right?"

Draco opened his mouth, then closed it again, pain fleeting over his face so quickly that Harry almost wondered if he'd imagined it. "That's why you need us, Potter," he said gently. "So you can keep believing things like that, knowing that someone will be there to pick up the pieces if you turn out to be wrong."

"I don't think Slytherin should be the House of Picking Up the Pieces."

Slowly enough that Harry could have moved if he'd wanted to, Draco lifted a hand to touch Harry's cheek, slipping his thumb across Harry's lips in a light caress that shut down his brain with stunning efficiency. "But someone has to," Draco whispered. "You Gryffindors spin yourselves such a pretty glass tower, and then you're not careful with it. You forget that the world has sharp edges."

"No, we don't," Harry answered. "We just know that the glass is harder to break than it looks."

That should, Harry thought, have been their cue to kiss, even if they never did anything more than remind each other how agonizingly erotic the slow entwining of two mouths could be; it shouldn't have been Draco's cue to let his hand fall and step back. That was all wrong, and Harry couldn't escape the feeling that Draco had just proved Slytherin House's point in a way that was likely to keep Harry awake at night for the rest of his life.

"Not everything can be fixed, Potter," he said quietly, and moved past Harry and out of the kitchen.

Harry took a step forward and leaned his head against the cool glass of the window, shivering the raindrops clinging to it with a light thump of his fist, still seeing the rain even with his eyes closed.

 

Remus woke in the dark and frowned, groping for the clock on the bedside table. To his relief, he found that it was barely seven-thirty; the Twins would just now be going down to the tunnel, if they'd even started. Wincing, he pulled himself up to sit against the pillows, piling them awkwardly behind him, and reached for his wand.

"Accio Marauders' Map," he said, and the map flew to him from the desk. It was accompanied by the heavy sound of galloping paws, and Crookshanks burst onto the bed in pursuit of the parchment.

"How did you get back in here?" Remus asked, holding the map out of the cat's reach. "Well, never mind. Let's have a bit more light, shall we?"

With a wave of his wand, Remus lit the room's candles and the lamp on the bedside table. "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good," he said with a brief smile that was not entirely happy, and lines of ink began to spider across the parchment. Two dots labelled "Fred Weasley" and "George Weasley" had just started down the hall toward the tunnel; Remus poured himself some tea from the fresh pot on the folding table beside the bed and watched them.

The dots paused in front of the entrance to the tunnel, long enough for one of the Twins to tap the bricks in the correct order. Then the door was open and they were through, and Remus watched the dots make their way down the tunnel. Remus couldn't remember how long ago he'd been in that passageway, but he remembered well enough that even James and Sirius had been a bit unnerved by it. There were still, or had been years ago, torches set along the rough-hewn black-rock walls, torches spelled to light whenever someone passed; but they were set too far apart and stank of age and sour air, and were prone to flaring and spluttering. He could remember the tunnel's smell, slimy, like something decaying in water, and the air had been freezing. The sound of water lapping against stone crept stealthily up from the darkness, barely audible at first underneath the deliberate breathing of four nervous teenage boys – and Sirius, who always talked when he was unsettled, who rattled on about nothing until James had threatened to gag him.

There was dust in the tunnel, thick-layered on the floor, and no cobwebs bedecking the torches. What do you suppose scared the spiders away? Peter asked, and James hissed back Hush, it's nothing, and Remus found himself straining his ears to keep track of the sound of water on stone as if it might get away from him and come back… changed.

Remus shook his head and blinked down at the map, watching Fred and George make their way down the tunnel. "Overactive imaginations," he muttered, and reached out to scratch Crookshanks between the ears.

About fifty yards in, the dots stopped – if Remus recalled correctly, just at the point where the tunnel sloped down into dark water. One of the dots moved back along the tunnel and began moving in a rather bizarre pattern back and forth between the tunnel walls; Remus squinted at the map, bewildered, until suddenly it dawned on him that the dot was spelling out hi Remus. He shook his head, laughing.

"Don't miss a trick, do you, boys?" he murmured. Crookshanks looked up at him, then settled on Remus' lap, watching the dots intently. After a minute, they began to move slowly forward.

"We can't get any farther," Remus said, and knew as soon as he saw the look on James' face that he'd said the wrong thing.

That water was black and freezing, leached from the lake's deep core, scattering torchlight into an oily shimmer on its surface. The dots were far enough down the tunnel now that the Twins would be treading water, close now to the wall of rock that in Remus' day hadn't quite blocked the tunnel.

He couldn't tell what was the water and what was Sirius; his hand hit sodden cloth and he yanked against the hold of the rocks, yanked harder, kicked toward the surface and drew in a great grasp of air and ducked under again, over and over until suddenly there was ground under his feet and he and Sirius were handing James up to where Peter crouched shin-deep in the water, sodden hair hanging in frightened eyes, shivering in his wet clothes. Sirius fumbled his wand out and gasped "Depurgo!" and James convulsed like a gutted grindylow, bringing up lakewater all over the floor and Peter, and Remus had been too busy gasping for air to take any note of the look on Peter's face.

"Damn," Remus said softly, and watched the dots move back and forth on the map.

The Twins were thorough, he gave them that and ungrudgingly; it was close to fifteen minutes before the dots moved backward, paused on the bank, and then headed back out of the tunnel. Remus sighed with relief, poured himself another cup of tea, and slid down a little against the pillows, feeling the weight of exhaustion all through him as if he were waterlogged. He should have stayed out of all this; he was of such limited use, and so sodding tired. It'll pass, he told himself, and waited for it to, one breath at a time, as he did every month. Soon, he'd feel better soon.

"Mischief managed," he sighed, and the map faded into invisibility and folded itself up.

The knock at his door came sooner than he'd expected and the Twins entered hard upon it, making their usual beeline for the tea table and jostling each other mercilessly in their competing quests to empty the sugar bowl as quickly as possible. Their hair was still damp, and Remus thought he could see the faint traces of vestigial gills under their jaws.

"Well?" he asked, interrupting a perfunctory spat over the sugar tongs.

"It's closed up, all right," Fred answered, wresting the tongs away from George. Tea sufficiently sugared, George crawled onto the bed again.

"The tunnel's caved in solid as far back as we could sound it," he told Remus. "Bill taught us a spell to measure how thick things are when you can't see the other side, a long time ago – things like boards and walls. He used it all the time when he was crawling around in tombs breaking curses."

"We mostly used it to tell if anyone was listening outside our door," Fred added, sitting down next to George. "Well, and to look for secret passageways."

"Almost never found any, either," George said sadly.

"Bloody wretched smell down there," Fred commented, wrinkling his nose and pulling out a strand of his still-damp hair to eye it as if he were wondering if he'd brought the smell back with him. "It smells like George's stiller."

"My stiller?" George protested. "It was your idea."

"Was not."

"It was Fred's idea," George explained to Remus. "Dad came home from work one day going on about how Muggles brew alcohol from potatoes with a thing called a stiller."

"He was mad to try it, but Mum put her foot down," Fred said.

"So Fred thought –" George began, at the same time that Fred said "So George thought –"

" – that we should give it a try," George went on, nudging his brother with his foot. "Only we didn't know what a stiller was except it sounded like it kept things quiet, so we thought if we chopped up the potatoes and let them sit in water in a dark place for a few weeks –"

"Wait," Remus said, and the twins looked at him in surprise. "It smelled like rotting potatoes?"

"Like really spectacularly rotting potatoes," Fred answered. "At least, the smell wasn't that powerful, but it was pretty rank."

Remus pushed the covers back, dislodging an indignant Crookshanks. "I need to go take a look inside that tunnel. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask the pair of you to help me get down there and back."

"Pull the other one, Remus, it's got bells on," George said kindly, tucking the covers back around Remus' waist. "You don't look like you could make it to the door without needing a blood transfusion and a two-week holiday."

"Which is why I need you to help," Remus answered, catching hold of George's wrist and gently but firmly disconnecting his hand from the blankets. "It's important, George."

"Too important even to wait until morning?" Fred asked, looking troubled.

Remus closed his eyes and counted to five. When he had a better grip on his patience, he said, "Yes, or I wouldn't ask."

Fred and George looked at each other, then back at Remus, then at Crookshanks as though for some unfathomable reason expecting the cat to help. Finally Fred declared, "Well, you can't walk down there. Here, let me…" He glanced around the room, brightened, and pulled out his wand.

A moment later a large, stunningly garish golden palanquin was sitting where Remus' favorite armchair had been, taking up an astounding amount of the bedroom, bedecked with tasselled purple curtains and hideously baroque decorative carvings. On the roof, facing forward, a figurehead that looked disturbingly like Minerva McGonagall pointed valiantly into the distance, bracing a red-gold wolf's-head standard against the palanquin top with her other hand.

"Brilliant!" George exclaimed.

"No," Remus said patiently.

"Are you sure?" Fred asked wistfully.

"Quite sure."

"Oh, all right," Fred said, not sounding as sulky as he'd undoubtedly meant to. Another wave of his wand undid the transfiguration. "We'll just charm it to hover, then, so we can push you down there in it. That all right?"

"Yes, thank you." Remus started to climb out of bed.

There was a flurry of motion, and before he knew quite what was going on he was ensconced in his chair and the tea table was scurrying on suddenly mobile legs to crouch beside him. George plunked his shoes and socks down onto his lap; as soon as Remus had put them on, Fred tucked a blanket around his waist, pooling it so that it didn't drag on the ground.

"Really, boys, I'm –" Remus began, feeling that he should make some sort of protest.

"Tired," George said.

"And ill," Fred added.

"Don't think we don't know."

"You used to be out for days before, when you taught here."

"And I think you probably don't usually have anyone to take care of you, do you?" George asked quietly, handing Remus a cup of tea.

Remus was a bit touched in spite of his suspicion that too much of the twins' care would send him straight into an early grave. "Thank you, George, Fred. Shall we?"

They must have made a bizarre sight – the twins pushing Remus' armchair down the corridors, letting it glide five or six inches off the ground, with the tea table clattering happily after them and Crookshanks trotting alongside. Fortunately, by accident or design most of the corridors and staircases they traversed were empty so Remus was spared having to converse with students; but he was still feeling the strain a bit when they arrived at the entrance to the tunnel. Rubbing his hand over his eyes and fighting to stay alert, he watched Fred tap out the charm to open the tunnel. Crookshanks jumped up into Remus' lap, watching Fred as if he were memorizing the charm for future use.

Then the door opened and Remus could smell the tunnel air, a faint hint of foulness, of wrongness. He closed his eyes and swore under his breath; Crookshanks spat loudly and crouched back against him, filling the hall and the echoing tunnel with a low-pitched, nerve-wracking howl that went on and on until Remus laid a calming hand on the cat's back.

"What's wrong with him?" George asked, looking thoroughly unnerved.

"I need to go farther into the tunnel," Remus told the twins. "As far as we can get without wading into the water."

Silently, they took hold of his chair and guided it down to the water's edge. Remus closed his eyes and breathed in, making use of senses that were still wolf-sharp; after a moment he opened his eyes again, frowning at the water, unsettled.

"What is it?" Fred asked, moving around to stand at George's side.

"Necromancy leaves a smell like this," Remus said quietly.

Every ounce of color drained out of the twins' faces, and for a moment he really thought they were going to faint. Their hands fluttered, found each other, and held fast, white-knuckled.

Remus reached out to touch George's arm. "Fred. George," he said, and waited until they'd turned back to look at him. "Not Ginny. Whatever it was, it was small and didn't get through, I'm sure of it, or the smell would be stronger. But we're going to have to put wards in, and we'd better do it now. I don't have enough strength to light a candle. You're going to have to help me. Can you do that?"

They nodded, still ghastly white in the dim torchlight. Fred's arms had slid around George's waist from behind, and George was holding tightly to them.

"Good lads. Wands out," he said in the calm, authoritative voice he used to teach frightened children. Fred and George were still young enough to respond to it; they moved a bit away from each other, not far, and pulled out their wands.

He talked them through the wand movements and incantations, grateful that the twins were as powerful as they were, watching their magic blend and intertwine seamlessly. A protective circle first, spreading across the water in a dim silver glow, sealing the surface of the water so that nothing that wasn't alive could come up through it; then a barrier against the face of the rock fall that would allow water and air through but nothing else. Nets of binding spells along the sloping floor of the tunnel, near the edge of the water and just below it; those would let anyone trapped in them move vertically, toward the surface and through it if the seal didn't keep them back, but not horizontally toward the shore. And that was going to have to do for now; even as little effort as he'd made had left Remus shaking with exhaustion.

"You look rough, Remus," Fred said, glancing up from where he crouched by the water's edge. "Is this enough for tonight?"

"One more thing," Remus answered hoarsely, and showed them how to shadow the wards, hiding them in the dark, faint motion of the water. When they were done, George scooped up the still wild-eyed Crookshanks, Fred reanimated the tea table, and they pushed the chair out of the tunnel, looking a bit tired themselves. Remus felt a momentary pang of annoyance at feeling like an octogenarian forty years too soon, then squashed it mercilessly; bitterness and self-pity were expensive luxuries, and he tried not to overindulge in them.

God, but he was tired. He'd overextended himself badly, and it was going to cost him another day in bed at least. Remus sighed in resignation and let his eyes close, just for a moment.

When he opened them again he was staring up at the canopy of his bed, shadowy in the light of a single candle. Crookshanks was a small furry furnace on the pillow beside him, snoring lightly, one hind foot poking into Remus' temple; and Remus' hand had just bumped into another body in his bed, a thing of sufficient novelty to bring him fully awake. Glancing over, he saw that Fred and George were asleep on top of the covers on the other side of the bed, wound around each other under the makeshift blanket of their robes, slow breaths brushing lightly at each other's hair.

Remus tugged a spare bit of robe up over the shoulder of the twin nearest him – they were hard enough to tell apart when they were awake; when they were asleep, it was impossible – rolled over, and tried half-heartedly to prod Crookshanks into sharing a bit more of the pillow. Explanations, he decided, could wait until morning.

 

"But it's a bit unfair, isn't it?" Harry tried again, and was met with the carefully blank expression of a man who has no idea what his companion is talking about and is trying to figure out how best to bluff his way around it. "I mean, none of the other Houses are getting extra coaching from pro Quidditch players."

Draco returned his attention to his book. "Well, there's no rule that says they can't. Why don't you coach Gryffindor, if you're that worried about it?"

"Because I don't have time to coach all three Houses that aren't Slytherin. Unless you want to take Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw."

"Why would I want to do that?"

"Because it's unfair for Slytherin to be the only House being trained by a World Cup champion seeker," Harry explained, his patience wearing a bit thin.

Draco sighed and set his book down in his lap. "Potter. I'm Head of Slytherin House. What's fair to the other Houses is none of my concern. I've enough to do trying to keep seventy spoiled, wilful, madly competitive adolescents from practicing Unforgivables on each other or running off to join their parents in Voldemort's service – a thing, I might add, that the other Houses might do well to keep a closer eye on as well. Slytherin's a long way from being evil's only recruiting ground."

"That was a deft subject change, Malfoy, well done. I think you should stop coaching Slytherin's Quidditch team. It isn't fair to the other students."

"Your opinion is duly noted."

"So you will, then?"

"No."

"Malfoy!" Harry exclaimed in exasperation.

Draco gave him an irritatingly kind look. "Potter. That'll be enough nagging about the Quidditch team. If you want me to pay attention to you, just ask."

Harry went beet-red and spluttered in outrage. Malfoy smirked, linked his fingers above his head, and stretched, not coincidentally raising the hem of his shirt above the top of his trousers, and Harry snapped his mouth closed until he could be sure that he wasn't going to drool.

"Malfoy, does your fiancée know that you flirt with other blokes?"

Draco's smirk vanished instantly, replaced by a look of intense exasperation. "Are you joking? She saves it in a pensieve and sells tickets," he grumbled with the air of a man who was not ever, ever going to let Pansy live that particular episode down.

Harry stretched his feet out toward the fire with a slow grin, congratulating himself on having turned the conversational tables rather neatly. "I remember that. It was your own fault for giving Blaise Zabini a scorching handjob on the couch of the Slytherin common room in the middle of a party. Got a bit carried away with the post-victory celebrating, didn't you?" He'd found out about the pensieve – and the incident it contained – the morning after the match, when he'd come downstairs to find Lavender and Parvati squealing with laughter and pooling their money with obsessive determination.

Every man, woman, and child in House Gryffindor had given Harry a ten-foot berth for a week.

Fortunately for seventeen-year-old Harry's sanity, Draco had never done anything like that again. Harry had thought he'd been straight and just doing a bit of public-school experimentation, but it was always possible that he'd just learned very quickly to confine his activities to places no one was likely to be watching.

"At least she took me out to lunch with the proceeds," Draco was saying. "I don't think I ever did convince her of what an affront to the family name it was. Malfoys are not porn stars."

And yes, there went the tables again, overturning right onto Harry's head with a stunning crash. "So you never did do that Playwitch spread you were offered half a million galleons to do?"

Draco stared at him. "Potter, my father would have frozen my trust funds, hauled me back from Paris by the scruff of the neck, and sent me to oversee the family holdings in Bognor Regis. I wouldn't have seen London again until I was forty." He smiled suddenly, a smile Harry wasn't sure he liked the looks of. "And what about you, hm? I hear they offered you a fairly substantial sum too."

Harry's face heated again. "I don't exactly need the money."

"Shame," Draco murmured, turning his attention back to his book. "You'd have outsold Magical Me."

Harry gritted his teeth and counted to ten. "Malfoy, are you bored?"

"What gave me away?"

"Oh, I don't know, the incessant needling?"

"You nag, I needle. I should think we're about tied in the 'annoying git' department, wouldn't you say?"

Harry opened his mouth to say I'll bet my nagging doesn't give you blue balls, then closed it again. Draco really did seem uncomfortably tense, and looked like he was keeping himself from fidgeting by sheer force of will. And suddenly it dawned on Harry that, as bored and jittery as Draco was, it probably wouldn't take more than a hand on his crotch and a tongue in his ear to get him into bed; Harry couldn't keep him but he could have him, and all it would take was…

Take what you want and pay for it, says God. What he wanted was right in front of him, and there was too much of Harry that didn't care what he had to pay.

Shit. He had to get out of this house before he lost his mind. And, more to the point, before having Draco Malfoy in his bed just once, for any reason, started looking like something worth his morality, Draco and Pansy's relationship, and whatever tenuous, fragile almost-friendship he and Draco were beginning to build between them. "I'm going for a walk," he said tightly, shooting out of his chair with a speed that made Draco look up at him in surprise.

"You're what?"

"It's dark," Harry said, pulling on his robes. "I'll stay out of the moonlight and won't go far. It'll be all right."

"Potter, I don't think –"

"I'll be all right." Harry pulled his wand out of his back pocket and slid it into the wand straps in his sleeve.

It promptly fell back out.

Harry frowned, picked it up, and slid it back in. The wand straps were spelled to prevent the wand from coming out of the straps until it was needed, and he could still feel the faint tingle of magic that told him that they were working. As soon as he lowered his arm, the wand fell out again, clattering off a side table and onto the floor. He picked it up again, swearing under his breath, and stuck it into the pocket of his trousers.

It popped back out again, nearly rolling underneath the couch.

Harry took a deep breath. "Dobby," he called with iron patience.

There was a soft whimper and a pair of twitching eartips slowly poked out from the kitchen door, followed irksomely slowly by Dobby's head. "Yes, Harry Potter?" he said nervously.

"Dobby, why don't the wand straps in my robes work?"

Dobby edged into the living room, wringing his hands. "If Master Draco and Harry Potter are bored, Dobby can bring them some more books. Or magazines. Or board games. Dobby only came to see to the pantry, but Harry Potter was planning to go Outside, and Harry Potter and Master Draco must not go Outside."

"Did Snape tell you that?" Harry asked, holding onto his patience with both hands. "Because –"

"The Headmaster is telling Dobby so," Dobby agreed. "But Harry Potter must not go Outside tonight. Harry Potter must stay here with Master Draco. Tomorrow Harry Potter can go for a walk. Not tonight."

"Why not?" Draco asked sharply.

Dobby's ears drooped. "Would Master Draco believe Dobby if Dobby told him that there are lots of hungry, fire-breathing dragons outside?"

"No, I wouldn't," Draco told him. "I really think Potter and I would have noticed them."

"Just as well," Dobby sighed. "Dobby would have had to iron his hands, and tonight is sheet-washing night. Winky is getting very upset when someone else is asking to use the irons on sheet-washing night."

"Dobby, why is it so important that I stay inside tonight?" Harry demanded.

Dobby shifted uncomfortably, made soft, reluctant whining noises deep in his throat, and finally answered, "The Headmaster is saying that there are no other wizards around the safehouse, or any Muggles either. So Dobby wonders why there are other wizards near. Dobby does not think Harry Potter should find out."

Draco was off the couch in a flash, dousing every light in the house with a flick of his wand. Harry stood still for as long as it took his eyes to adjust to the darkness, then moved to the window and looked out. "How many, and where?" he asked over his shoulder.

There was a brief sparkle and Dobby appeared next to him, balancing precariously on the windowsill. "Dobby does not know how many," he said. "Dobby only knows that there are wizards, that way, not enough to clean the Great Hall but maybe more than ten. If Harry Potter waits they are going away, Dobby is sure of it."

Harry turned to see Draco standing right behind him, pulling on his robes. "Well, Gryffindor carried the day last time," Draco said. "Shall we try it again, or be Slytherin this time and stay behind the wards and the Fidelius charm?"

"I'm going to have to go out and see what's going on," Harry told him. "You're staying here this time."

"God, Potter, we aren't going to go through this again, are we?"

"No, because you're staying here." Draco began to move away; Harry reached out and caught hold of his arm, and found that he didn't want to let go. "Malfoy, look. If it's Ron, I can talk to him, or if it's someone else from the Ministry – but only if you're not there. If you're standing right in front of him, no power on Earth is going to keep Ron from hauling you in to Azkaban. That's why I have to intercept him before he gets to the safehouse, in case he does know where it is."

"And if it's not Weasley?"

"If it's your father's people, I can lead them away from the safehouse and then double back, and I'll bet money they can track Malfoys better than they can track Potters. You'd just lead them right back here, and then it won't matter if they can't find the house itself because if your father stands out on the front bloody lawn and orders you outside you'll go and you know it. If it's Death Eaters it might not matter which of us finds them, but that's only one chance in three, in more if we include the fact that it might just be people out camping or something."

"On Halloween, Potter, on a wet, freezing cliff in Cornwall."

"Malfoy. Stop arguing with me."

"We could just Apparate back to Hogwarts, you know, or somewhere else."

"Snape wouldn't have told us to sit tight here for no reason. If we go back to Hogwarts we've got no way of knowing what we'll be walking into, and if we go somewhere else we risk either landing in the middle of a small army of Aurors or leaving Snape no way to get hold of us when the all-clear is blown."

Draco was looking seriously vexed, and also stubborn. Harry sighed and reached up to thread a tendril of Draco's hair through his fingers. "Besides, look at you. You're not meant for night maneuvers. When there's no moon, maybe, but I swear that hair of yours glows in the dark." Harry tugged gently, bringing Draco's rather affronted gaze back to his own, and said softly, "Draco. Stay here."

"Potter, you –"

"Give me an hour. I'll be back by then. My invisibility cloak's in my pack if you need it," Harry said, and headed out the door, hearing Draco curse vehemently behind him and feeling the wards pass over his skin in an unsettling tingle.

It was clear and cold outside, just a hint of mist lying low on the grass; Harry had a solid plain of open ground to cover before he got to the shelter of the trees. He cast a quick Disillusionment charm over himself and made for the treeline, uncomfortably aware that he was leaving tracks in the grass but unwilling to spell them away; Voldemort might not get out much these days but he might well make an exception for this, and it was possible that he'd be able to sense the traces of Harry's magic. If their uninvited guests were Death Eaters, Harry wasn't sure that Voldemort would be able to resist the dramatic potential of history repeating itself like this.

Ron, it's probably Ron. Oh, fuck, let him listen.

Whoever it was, he didn't like how quickly they'd found the safehouse; and for the first time since his return to Hogwarts, he found himself wondering if he could trust Snape.

It was damn cold out, so cold that his breath was misting in front of him. He cupped his hands around his mouth, trying to minimize his visibility, and had very nearly decided that he'd gone far enough when his eyes caught the glimmer of firelight on rock outside the trees, in a broad boulder-littered clear space between the cliff and the trees. Slowly and carefully, he crept closer.

He heard them before he saw them – snappish, irritable, the voices of men who would rather have been just about anywhere other than on a cliff in Cornwall in cold, damp weather. Some of those voices were vaguely familiar, but not familiar enough to be placeable. Wishing for a pair of Extendable Ears, Harry slipped toward them, maneuvering until he could see movement between the stones. Dim torchlight caught on dark cloaks, hoods pulled up to cast faces into shadow – and, underneath one hood that turned toward him for just a moment, expressionless white masks with catlike eyes, gleaming like the blank faces of porcelain dolls.

Death Eaters. Harry knelt in the shadow of a large rock and tried to get a count through the boulders obscuring his vision – a dozen, maybe.

"This is stupid," one of them said suddenly. "We've been over this area half a dozen times. If there's anything here, it's got to be behind a Fidelius charm."

"Our Lord thinks they're here," said another voice, and this one Harry recognized because he'd heard its echo none too long ago – Nott senior. "Do you want to go back to the Presence and tell him we've failed him?"

"But if it's –"

"The trouble with you, Collier, is that you've got no damn imagination," Nott told him. "The Fidelius charm won't save them if we fire the whole cliff side –"

"Oh, right, they won't notice that or anything," Collier said sarcastically.

" – or if we can narrow down their location far enough to put a containment spell over the area and fill it full of Sleeping Viper fumes, and then wait for them to come out of the house to get away from whatever hallucinations are crawling all over them."

Harry had heard enough. They were going to have to risk going back to Hogwarts. God only knew what had brought the Death Eaters here, unless they'd noticed that quickly that they were missing a lindwurm, but he wasn't about to wait around for them to zero in on the safehouse. He eased backward away from the rock and turned to head back toward the safehouse.

A tree branch caught him in the forehead with neck-snapping force, and Harry just had time to wonder if that crack had been the branch or his skull before everything went black.

 

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