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.

August, 2005

"I wondered when you'd ask," Lucius said, sounding caught between weariness, amusement, and resignation.

Percy looked down at his parchment, pressing down the corner where the sea breeze ruffled it into quiet susurration. "If you'd rather not answer -"

"I didn't say that." But Lucius was silent for a minute anyway, looking thoughtfully at Percy. "I'll answer because I daresay someone should tell you."

Percy looked up, frowning a little, not quite understanding.

Lucius made a small gesture, asking patience, and Percy caught back the question he'd been about to ask. "The short answer to your question is this: killing was… unpleasant, when I was called upon to do it, which is why I was careful to arrange things so that I rarely had to. Not because of any great moral qualms, I'll grant you - but then, everyone has their own lines to draw on that count. You'll be surprised, from time to time, where the people who consider themselves part of the Forces of Good draw that line. You've probably already been surprised a time or two, and not pleasantly; it will be worse if the conflict with Voldemort comes to open war."

He was right. God knew Percy had heard things about Alastor Moody that made him glad he himself wasn't in the Order anymore, and still remembered the things he'd heard about what Albus Dumbledore had said and done. They'd frightened him, enraged him; and it was partly that fear and anger that had taken him to the storefront flat of two brothers he hadn't spoken to in years, at half twelve at night in the pouring rain, taking Hedwig and Harry's unsigned note with him so that the twins wouldn't slam the door in his face.

When he'd watched Harry - shaking, blushing, stammering, looking more like the twelve-year-old that Ron and the twins had rescued from the Muggles than like a twenty-year-old Defence and sports master - testify before the Wizengamot, Percy had thought it a brilliant day for the wizarding world, that they'd managed to excise a Devil's Snare that was strangling the life out of families just like Percy's all over the country. He still thought it a victory; but he'd come to see that Dumbledore had only been the most deadly weed in the garden, not the only weed.

Lucius had risen and gone to the window, and was standing with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, looking out at the ocean. "One would think, wouldn't one, that Avada Kedavra would be a clean death," he said. "And it is, as deaths go. Two words and a flash of light, and the victim falls to the ground. But the truth is that no death is really clean. No death is dignified. There's no one who will not grovel for their lives given sufficient provocation, or for someone else's if they won't grovel for their own."

His voice was full of weary, bitter distaste, and Percy didn't know what to say.

"There are many reasons for killing - in battle, out of the necessity of the moment, mercy killings - but the kind of torture and murder that Voldemort's followers engage in is… tedious. Degrading. Embarrassing and undignified for everyone involved." He turned back to Percy, mouth quirking in a grim smile. "Remember that when the Department of Magical Law Enforcement tells you how very necessary it is to put Death Eaters under Cruciatus to extract information, or to poison them with ten times the therapeutic dose of Veritaserum until they choke on their own vomit."

Percy cleared his throat. "What if they have information that's desperately needed to save lives?"

"An organization with a good intelligence structure should already have all the information flow they need. Voldemort knows every step of the caretaker's rounds at Hogwarts and most of what goes on at the Ministry. My son, while he was at school there, sent me more information in his letters home than I could have tortured out of one of the professors in a month. That's why the Fidelius charm was invented - there are too few of us to keep secrets for long."

"There seem to be a lot of Voldemort's followers who don't feel the way you do," Percy said quietly, remembering the Abberleys hung from the trees. "Bellatrix Lestrange - when I spoke to her, she made it sound as if pain and death were something… holy."

"Yes, well, Bellatrix is also as mad as a box of frogs," Lucius said absently, and Percy bit hard into his lip against the sudden urge to snicker. "Shall I tell you something about how the Death Eaters got their name?"

"Yes, please," Percy answered, curious.

Lucius came back to sit at the table. "They were originally called the Knights of Walpurgis, which I can only assume is a dreadful pun on Walpurgisnacht; Walpurgis, St. Walburga, was a nun who led an uneventful life and died in her sleep at the age of seventy, whose main achievement seems to have been clinging to the mast of a ship and praying loudly for calm waters until the storm besetting the ship finally passed. Not, one would think, the type of saint to require knights, even metaphorical ones. At any rate, either Voldemort - or Tom Riddle, as he still was then - changed his mind or saner heads prevailed; but that left his organization without a name, until eventually someone suggested that they call themselves Sin Eaters. Do you know what a sin eater is?"

Percy nodded.

"A rather elegant name, and reflective of the fact that the reason there was so little resistance to the Death Eaters in the very early days of their rising was that they said nothing more than rather extreme versions of what others already thought - that Muggle-borns are a danger to us, that they never quite let go of their own world, that they never master magic in the way that pureblood wizards do. That they are, in fact, a liability in many ways, outlanders in a community that relies desperately upon secrecy and solidarity for its protection. Voldemort was able to become so powerful because there were so many people who silently agreed with him."

"Then why did it change?" Percy asked.

"Because Voldemort's followers are, in the end, a death cult. The causing of it, the transcending of it - that's what truly drives Voldemort and his more passionate followers like Bellatrix and Bartemius Crouch's son. In the midst of life, we are in death," Lucius said, and Percy felt uncomfortably as though someone were walking over his own grave. "So the name changed to Death Eaters, which has its roots in an even older custom - the idea that by devouring the dead, one acquires their power. That by eating the brain of an enemy, one can absorb his cunning; by eating a seer's eyes, one can acquire the Sight. Not that the Death Eaters ever engaged in cannibalism - or, dear God, not in my presence, anyway - but the idea is the same, more or less: that death is a Power, that it has magic of its own unlike anything we are accustomed to using, that there is something released at the moment of death that can be caught and used. That there is power to be gained in keeping one foot on either side of the grave."

"You're talking about necromancy."

"Yes and no. Voldemort is a powerful necromancer, as far as that field goes, but he's always found it restricting. It seems to him to miss the point a bit. He's always been convinced that death, if it can be truly harnessed and not merely tapped into, is the key to unstoppable power; he's just never quite been able to put his finger on what form the key takes or exactly what door it unlocks."

"What if he figures it out?" Percy asked.

"Then we will all find out what power there is in death, and most of us too late to make use of it," Lucius said simply.

 

November, 2005

There was a false window in Harry's bathroom that was charmed, like the ceiling of the Great Hall, to mimic the sky outside. He could have activated the charm and sent the first rays of morning light spilling into the room; instead he waved his hand and lit the bathroom with two small wall-hung firepots and a dozen candles set into various nooks and alcoves in the dark stone walls.

Muscles protesting wearily, he pulled off his pajama bottoms and left them in a heap on the floor, then pulled his glasses off and set them on the sink counter; the candles dissolved instantly into wide, soft blurs of light, retaining their halos as he squinted to bring them back into something like focus. Sighing and rubbing absently at the back of his neck, Harry stepped into the low basin of the shower and spelled a water-repelling ward into place to keep the water from splashing out onto the floor.

The water came on at a word, hot and soothing, jetting from the pursed mouths of small stone gargoyles set into the walls and cascading like a cloudburst from the squared grimace of the lion's head carved into the ceiling. Harry ducked his head into the flow for a long minute and then pulled it back out, shaking his head like a dog and sending water droplets splattering against the walls and the shielding charm; thoroughly wetted down, he reached into the arched niche in the wall for the shampoo. "Six," he murmured, and the water jets from the gargoyles increased in intensity, battering muscles that ached from a night spent mostly tossing and turning. Steam was filling the bathroom quickly, turning the candles into bright points in swirling mist. From the corner, the mirror made a pained, pointed throat-clearing noise; Harry really needed to move it somewhere else and get a new bathroom mirror that didn't mind getting fogged up.

It had taken Harry years to get used to so many things in the wizarding world having at least the appearance of sentience. As far as he knew, the Creevey brothers, nervous as small squeaking gerbils anyway, never had got used to it - until the day Harry left Hogwarts every time the mirror spoke to them, every time spindly-legged creamers trotting toward their teacups, every time the portraits wandered in and out of each other's frames, they chirped with wide-eyed, febrile fascination and elbowed each other in their enthusiasm. What strange, brittle material to make a Death Eater from, someone who never grew accustomed even to small household charms.

Harry thought he could date his own final integration into the wizarding world to the summer before his sixth year, when - having been tersely ordered to make dinner - he found himself standing in the middle of a kitchen full of appliances that didn't move, that wouldn't answer him, that wouldn't do things simply because he asked it, and he felt a sudden cold panic clawing up his throat. Everything around him was dead, nothing heard him or knew he was there, and in that silence the Dursleys' voices and the hammering of his own heart in his ears had been disorienting and frightening.

Stupid to have a panic attack because the toaster ignored him. But then again, Harry hadn't been quite himself that summer.

He stepped into the firelight-splintered column of water flowing from the ceiling and tilted his head forward, ruffling the shampoo out of his hair. It felt nice to have his own shower again. The one at the safehouse had been almost Muggle-like, a single showerhead that was slow to change both temperature and strength; the first couple of times he'd used it, Harry, impatient, had found himself muttering "Heat, heat, heat" under his breath and suddenly being hit with a scalding blast of water when the shower finally got around to doing as it was told. From the occasional pained yelp behind the closed door, he gathered that Malfoy had found the shower something of a trial too.

Malfoy. Fuck. Harry bent his head against the water flow and felt the slow shimmer of Draco's tattoo against his tongue, one hand sliding down to his hip to stroke over the small dragon that he hadn't yet been able to bring himself to remove.

It felt like Draco. Not only because Draco had cast the spell, either; his magic was wound into it, secured inside the dragon as if it were caught in amber, necessary if the spells were going to function as they were meant to but uncomfortable nonetheless. Some part of Draco had slid itself like a splinter under Harry's skin, and not only metaphorically.

He wondered if the marks he'd left on Draco's skin had already been charmed away.

Draco, meeting him thrust for thrust, demanding more and harder; fucking like he flew, like he fought, like he hated, with everything in him and then some -

"Oh, Christ," Harry whispered miserably, trying to push away the memory of Draco's hands on his body. Much like Draco himself, the memory refused to cooperate.

Harry ran a hand through his hair, rubbing away the last of the shampoo, shaking his head a little in reflexive annoyance as waterlogged strands clung to his hand and his face. His fingers trailed down to his forehead and paused for a moment before he traced the rough line of his scar with one fingertip, thoughtful. He couldn't remember anyone else ever touching his scar; his other lovers had avoided it as assiduously as if it would call Voldemort's attention to them, and maybe they were right. God knew no one had ever climbed on top of him and licked it before. He found himself wishing that someone had, that there was someone else who hadn't been afraid.

His fingertip drifted down his face and into his mouth, tasting of water and nothing else, not the warm and entirely addictive taste of Draco's skin; but with his eyes closed against the water he could pretend, and remember sucking Draco's fingers as Draco rode him.

The rough stone of the shower wall was chill and sharp against his back when he leaned against it. Harry barely noticed. One soapy hand was already running down his stomach, over the tattoo and inward to wrap tightly around his cock and stroke in slow tandem with the movement of his tongue against his fingertip. Water streamed down his face as two of the gargoyles on the wall craned their necks to follow him, at awkward angles and with limited success; streamed over his finger and dripped into his mouth, hot and tasteless, and Harry whimpered involuntarily at the memory of Draco's cock in his mouth. Fantasies he'd thought he'd forgot tumbled past him in a vivid blur of imagery - Draco, under him on the moonlit grass of the Quidditch pitch, sucking him off against the wall of the Room of Requirement, fucking him over the arm of the couch in the Gryffindor common room while their yearmates slept upstairs -

His arm brushed the tattoo and a different image flared into his head, cold and vivid, sweeping the others aside: Draco resting on his stomach with his head pillowed on his hands, dark grey track bottoms riding low on his hips, golden sunlight and blue water through the windows making shimmering patterns on his skin; watching silently, unhappily, as Pansy slept next to him. Her hair was rumpled for once, falling in a tumble into her face, and she looked paler than usual against the dark, cool cotton of a shirt that Harry recognized as Draco's.

Harry's eyes flew open and he found himself choking on shower water, brought abruptly and unpleasantly back to himself, caught between painful confusion and equally painful arousal. The arousal won. He closed his eyes again, shoved the vision away, and ran a hand up the wall to grip around one of the gargoyle shower heads, stroking harder and faster, seeing, feeling, Draco pulled back against him, his head falling back against Harry's shoulder, baring his throat to Harry's mouth, his tattoo tingling against bare skin as Harry fucked him. Panting into the steamy air, Harry twisted his wrist so that his thumb scraped over the head of his cock, whispering Mine, you're mine as he had against the line of Draco's jaw just before he'd felt Draco stiffen and arch in his arms and oh God he was coming, sobbing out Draco's name as he spilled into his hand and the rushing water.

For longer than he probably should have, Harry leaned back against the wall with his eyes closed, letting hot water sluice over his shoulders and chest to trail down over his stomach, feeling boneless, shaky, and thoroughly dissatisfied. "Shit," he muttered finally, reached for the soap, and stepped under the overhead spray to scrub himself down again. Having one off at the wrist might have its uses, but it was a piss-poor substitute for Draco Malfoy - a sentiment Malfoy himself would probably consider to be damning with faint praise. Of course, at this point there was nothing on earth, up to and including a full-blooded Veela Playwizard centerfold with a degree in physics and a beach house in the Mediterranean, that wouldn't be a piss-poor substitute for Draco, he reflected gloomily as he pushed dripping hair out of his eyes and watched sudsy water spiral down the drain.

"Finite," Harry murmured, and the water stopped abruptly, leaving a ringing silence in the steam-thick bathroom. A wave of his hand brought the water-repelling shield down. Another would have brought a towel to him but he reached for one instead, guided more by memory than attention to the arched niche that held a stack of fluffy white cotton. In Gryffindor Tower the towels were red and gold, like everything else; though he would have cut out his tongue before admitting it, there had been times when Harry had got damned tired of that color combination. It might have been worse, though - Hufflepuff's yellow and black must have been like living in a beehive.

He was trying to distract himself, and it wasn't working.

Harry had no idea if that brief oracular flash had been real; if so, it would be one of the very few he'd ever had that wasn't connected directly to Voldemort. He didn't see any way of finding out, either - somehow asking So, Malfoy, sleep with your fiancée last night? And what happened to the bit where you're gay, anyway? at breakfast didn't sound terribly appealing.

"I'm not going to do this," he muttered, securing the towel around his waist with sharp, annoyed movements. "I brought him back. It's done. Christ knows I've got other things to worry about."

"Is that why you look so dreadful?" the mirror asked crossly, and Harry glared at it.

"I'm bloody replacing you with a Muggle mirror," he snapped, rather glad to have something to take out his frustrations on. "You can go sit in the Prefects' bathroom and listen to spotty teenagers moan about their Potions marks."

The mirror was silent, cowed. Harry doused the candles and stalked back out into the bedroom, trying to convince himself that just because the mirror could be fixed with a simple Reparo spell didn't mean it was all right to shatter it in a fit of pique… and trying to forget that brief vision of Pansy wearing Draco's shirt, asleep in Draco's bed, where she belonged and Harry didn't.

Towel still wrapped around his hips, Harry sat down on the bed next to his robes and propped his chin on his hands and his elbows on his knees, rubbing absently at the bridge of his nose. His breathing was off somehow, he noted dispassionately, but that was all right. As long as that gnawing emptiness stayed where it belonged, stayed a ragged physical discomfort in his chest instead of touching his emotions, he'd be fine. As long as that containment didn't break and bleed until he found himself crying like a homesick first-year over Draco fucking Malfoy, because there were so very many reasons he couldn't afford to do that. Still less could he afford to think about the fact that a week ago he'd been having tea with Hermione in Madam Puddifoot's, and now she was… gone. He'd lost her that quickly, taken his eyes off her for one bloody minute and lost her for good.

He was all right. Harry stood, tossed his towel onto the floor, dressed and reached for his robes, mentally reviewing his schedule for the morning. He should go fetch breakfast, bring it back to his room, and finish planning out the Quidditch schedule for the year. Slytherin was going to reach the Cup match barring some catastrophe but the competition among the other three Houses was much tighter, and he was going to have to shuffle things a bit to allow for unforeseen ties and rematches -

Harry paused in the middle of putting on his robes, frowning as something struck him. With a quick glance at the clock, he went to his desk, pulled a parchment and quill, scribbled a note, and whistled for Hedwig. She fluttered from her perch to the desk and stuck out her leg. "Take this to Ron," he told her, sealing the parchment together. "Try not to let anyone see you, all right?"

Hedwig hooted reassuringly and soared out the window when he opened it for her.

Harry turned back to leave and realized that he was still holding the quill, smearing ink across his fingers. For a moment he only stared blankly at it, twirling it slowly back and forth, carefully pushing away the image of Draco bending over his arm in the firelight; then he snapped the shaft with a quick flex of his fingers, set it down on the desk, and left without looking back.

 

It was nearly lunchtime, the Quidditch schedule long since finished and set aside and the sun vanished behind ominous-looking storm clouds, when Hedwig returned. She fluttered in through the bedroom window and into the sitting room, came to rest on the table in front of Harry, and stuck out her leg, hooting at him in a rather aggrieved fashion.

Harry closed the text on blade spells he'd been reading, laughed, and stroked her head. "Poor Hedwig, did you have to wait for Ron to get up? Did he give you any treats?"

Hedwig squawked wrathfully.

"You can have the rest of my bacon. It's cold, but I suppose no one who eats raw field mice is all that picky anyway. Here, let's see what he said." Harry untied the letter from Hedwig's leg and broke the seal as she fluttered across the table to start in on the bacon.

The parchment was blank, as he'd expected. Harry reached for his wand, tapped the parchment, and said, "I solemnly swear I am up to no good." Ink lines appeared out of nowhere and spread across the page in Ron's sloppy scrawl.

Harry,

Your not going to like this mate but it looks like that present you sent went astray. I've asked around and nobody saw it. I'd ask if your sure you addressed it right but I know you wouldn't muck up something like that. We'll keep a sharp eye out on this end but you better do the same in case it comes back to you.

"Shit!" Harry whispered. Where the hell could Rosier have gone, and how? He couldn't have just wandered off, not under an Imperius command to turn himself over to Ron.

There was more to the note. Harry raked his fingers through his hair, wished that it wasn't too early in the day for a good stiff drink, and kept reading.

Look, about what we were talking about before. You know I want to do what you asked. Thing is though I have more people to answer to than just you and if somebody asks why I let up on him I have to have a better answer than because he's fucking my best friend. I have to be sure too, cause it's not just you that will have to live with it if your wrong.

Hermione's not doing any better. The doctors can't figure out just what curses they used on her. All they know is it was powerful dark magic. I think I could have told them that.

-R

Harry crumpled the paper in his hand, smaller and smaller until it crumbled to ash.

Somewhere out there was a Death Eater - Harry didn't even know his first name - who was carrying a message from Harry to Ron that Harry no longer even remembered word for word, among other pieces of information. He wondered absently if someone had been able to break his Imperius.

It should have mattered more than it did. But all he could think of was Hermione, twirling in a patch of sunlight, blood on her mouth, singing Muggle nursery rhymes, shattered so suddenly that he was still reeling from it; now maybe shattered beyond repair. She'd been so miserable when they'd had tea together, so hurt and unhappy, and somehow he'd only managed to make it worse.

London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down…

Bloody hell, now that damned song was going to be going through his head all day, and in Hermione's voice. He couldn't remember ever having heard her sing before. Surely she must have, when they were growing up.

Harry blinked and realized that he was staring into large golden eyes - Hedwig, standing on his book and peering worriedly at him. Trying to smile, Harry stroked the downy feathers of her back. "It's all right, Hedwig," he told her. "I've been cooped up in my room too long, that's all. I need to go get some air."

Hedwig hooted encouragingly at him. Harry laughed and stood, reaching for his cloak; then he paused, wavered for a moment, and then went to get his invisibility cloak out of his trunk.

When he was a child, wandering through the halls at night in his invisibility cloak had carried the frisson of danger - he was out after curfew, after all, and the cloak might put off most observers but it wouldn't fool Dumbledore's keen eyes or Mrs. Norris' even keener sense of smell. Now there wasn't much point. Snape himself could have stepped right on Harry and accidentally yanked off the cloak at two in the morning in the girls' locker room without more than momentary embarrassment and a few awkward questions as a result. He'd found instead that there was a certain challenge to be found in using the cloak during the day, when the halls were littered with students - it took considerable exercise of attention and skill to get outside and to the gardens or the Forest without being tripped over, heard, or tracked by small disturbances in his surroundings.

It wasn't the same. He missed the darkness, the silence, the sense of having stolen the castle out from under everyone else's noses. But it was something, and at the moment Harry needed all the distraction he could get.

He slipped out into the hallway, disappeared under his cloak, and set out toward the gardens, keeping to the walls and timing his footsteps to blend in with the sounds around him. One near-miss with a corridor-filling gaggle of Gryffindor girls aside - all it had taken was a gentle repelling charm to make the closest ones veer around him - he reached the castle doors without incident and moved off to the side, clutching his cloak tighter around him against the chill in the air as he surveyed the grounds between the doors and the gardens. There were only a few students outside: a group of Hufflepuffs playing catch on brooms with an elderly quaffle, two Ravenclaw boys with an Exploding Snap deck playing some complicated-looking game that seemed to involve Arithmancy and creative bending of the laws of physics, a Gryffindor couple wandering hand in hand in the general direction of the lake. There were no Slytherins outside that Harry could see, and for the first time he noticed that he almost never saw mixed-House groups of children who weren't related by blood as the Patil twins were. So much for the inter-House unity the Sorting Hat had insisted on in Harry's fifth year, he thought sardonically.

It was starting to look like rain. Harry was suddenly cold and tired and wanted a good strong cup of tea, preferably with a healthy dollop of brandy in it. Abandoning the idea of going out to the gardens, he turned to head back through the doors, and was nearly run down in his tracks by Draco.

Harry stopped short, heart thudding painfully and annoyingly in his throat, hoping he hadn't made any noise. Draco paused on the steps, one step down and less than a foot away from Harry, levelling a displeased glance at the sky and pulling his green and silver scarf closer around his neck with a quick, impatient gesture that in anyone else would have looked like restless fidgeting. He was close enough for Harry to smell soap and cauldron fires on his skin.

Draco rubbed a hand over his forehead and muttered "Fuck," quietly but with considerable feeling. Before Harry was ready for it Draco moved, flowing down the steps with his robes flaring out around him in a more restrained version of Snape's melodramatic swirl. Harry found himself following, cursing himself every step of the way, torn between turning around and going back in and following Draco until he got to somewhere secluded.

He just wanted to talk. About what he didn't know, but he just wanted to talk. Not to run his hands into Draco's hair, not to push him back against a tree and kiss him until everything changed.

You're bloody following Draco Malfoy around, you pathetic tosser, a small voice said despairingly in the back of his mind. Harry ignored it and focused on staying unnoticed - a riskier proposition with Draco than with the students, and one that required him to stay far enough back that he nearly lost Draco inside the gardens. He found him again at the top of a short flight of steps leading down to a fountain, a marble witch in a flowing gown forever pouring water from the urn on her shoulder down into a lily-bedecked pool.

"There you are," Pansy observed, untangling her legs and setting down a leather-bound book.

"Am I late?" Draco asked. "I was brewing sleeping draughts for Poppy."

"No, you're not late," Pansy said. "I've only been here for a few minutes."

I'm not going to stand here and bloody spy on Draco and his fiancée, Harry thought, knowing it was a lie.

He sat down on the steps and watched as Draco went to sit on the side of the fountain beside Pansy, smiling tentatively at her. She smiled back, scooted away a little, and patted her thighs; Draco obediently rearranged himself so that he was lying on the marble with one ankle crossed over his knee and his head in Pansy's lap. His hand dipped into the fountain and returned with a water lily, and for a few minutes they were both silent, Pansy stroking Draco's hair and Draco twirling the lily in his fingers.

"I've bollixed everything up, haven't I?" he asked finally, so quietly that Harry could barely hear him.

"Yes, sweeting, you have," Pansy said gently.

"I didn't mean to, you know," Draco said, sounding so miserable that Harry's throat grew tight. "I'm sorry, Pans."

Pansy sighed. "You know, I can't believe a day has come when I have to say this, but it's not me you should apologize to. It's Potter."

"Potter?" Draco echoed in a voice just short of snapping.

Pansy tugged reprovingly at his hair, cutting him off. "Yes, Potter," she said firmly. "I think you broke him, my own. And now you're going to have to find a way to fix him again, because none of our plans have a contingency for broken Potters."

"I haven't -"

"The Dark Lord will be horribly jealous when he hears, you know," she went on, talking blithely over him. "It's a good thing you really aren't in his service or the repercussions would be horrific. He tried for years to break Potter, and you did it by batting your eyelashes and dropping your trousers."

"Pansy, that's not true."

"Well, no. I suppose it was pulling your trousers back up that really did for him."

"It's not funny," Draco said sternly, and Harry wholeheartedly agreed.

"All right, I suppose it's not. But you're still going to have to make things right, and quickly. We haven't much time."

Harry frowned, suddenly aware that the conversation had one foot in mystifying and rather ominous-sounding territory.

"It won't take much time," Draco answered, subdued. "In a week he'll have come round to blaming me for all his guilt and anger. He'll hate the sight of me more than ever but he won't be broken; and after all, it won't exactly be a change from the last fourteen years."

I told you it wouldn't be like that, Harry thought, rubbing his hands over his face. I promised you.

Pansy made a frustrated noise. "Draco Lucius Malfoy, if there were a way to Imperio sense into someone's head I would hit you with an Unforgivable every day of your life!"

Draco dropped the flower and reached up to take Pansy's hand, twining their fingers together and bringing their clasped hands to rest on his chest. Harry swallowed hard and forced himself not to turn away. "Don't be mad at me, Pansy," Draco said. "Not you too."

"Ohhh…" Pansy looked torn between exploding and melting, and compromised by slapping Draco lightly on the head. "You really are miserable, aren't you? My poor love, you really should have kept your pants on."

"Then I'd be miserable and climbing the walls. You can't expect a man to be cooped up for three days in a tiny, isolated house with Potter and not be reduced to a vibrating mess of hormones."

Pansy snickered, making Harry really, really wish that he understood what was going on.

"Let's not talk about Potter anymore. How did you get on with Longbottom while I was gone?"

"He was very kind to me," Pansy said quietly. "He showed me around the greenhouses, and brought me dinner when I didn't want to eat in the Great Hall, and told me stories about how horrible you are to him."

"Poaching on my fiancée, is he?" Draco grumbled, and Harry realized with a stunningly painful pang that he wasn't entirely joking.

"Quiet," Pansy ordered. "If I can be polite to Potter in spite of the fact that he spent a good twelve hours sucking my fiancé's -"

"Pansy!"

" - neck and leaving rather noticeable hickeys, you can be polite about Longbottom bringing me dinner and talking to me while I ate."

"Yes, but darling, I really don't want to be thrown over for Longbottom," Draco said plaintively. "I'd never hear the end of it from Blaise. He'd owl me three times a day just to laugh at me."

"Yes, well, I don't want to be thrown over for the man who won Teen Witch's Dreamiest Dream Date award three years running either, but we all have our crosses to bear. Do you suppose he'd have won if they'd known that his idea of a dream date is shagging the son of the Dark Lord's second in command?"

"Parkinson, I really will murder you one of these days."

Pansy relented, stroking his hair. "Don't sulk, sweet, I'm sorry. I'm still a bit annoyed with you, that's all."

Draco sighed and rubbed his head against her arm. "I love you, you know," he said softly. Harry looked away, throat tight and eyes stinging.

Pansy smiled gently down at him. "I know you do," she said, a little sadly. "And you love your mum and dad, and Vince and Greg, and that terrible great-aunt of yours who hexed her third husband into a permanent carpet stain -"

"He deserved it."

" - and you loved that awful stuffed boggart you had when we were five years old, the one that used to turn into a clown and frighten your second cousins into screaming hysterics."

"Well, it liked me too. It used to turn into a puffskein when no one else was around. And I don't see your point."

"No, you don't, do you? Well, never mind. That's why you need me around to take care of you."

Draco laughed, stroking her arm with his fingertips. "I do, though, you know. Love you, I mean. As well as I know how. If you were only a man I'd have nothing else to ask for in the entire world, and we could just… just settle down somewhere and buy a dog -"

"You know I hate dogs."

"All right, then, let's have a baby."

Harry buried his head in his hands. Fuck, he thought miserably. Fuck, fuck.

"Let's have a what? Draco Malfoy, are you seriously asking me to get pregnant just because you're angry with Harry Potter?"

"Hm, well, it doesn't sound like such a good idea when you put it like that, does it?"

"No. And anyway, you know the rules around conceiving the Malfoy heir. It wouldn't do us a bit of good to have to do it all over again because it didn't take the first time." Pansy picked up Draco's discarded lily and stroked his cheek with it. "You don't want a family right now, anyway. You're just hurt and sulky and feeling like no one loves you."

"You love me."

Pansy ruffled Draco's hair, rather making Harry admire her bravery. "Of course I do, my baby, you know that. And now you've pouted long enough. Pull yourself together, you've a remedial Potions session to teach in a few minutes."

Draco sat up, ran a hand through his hair, and smiled wanly at her. "All right. I'm fine now."

Pansy examined him critically. "No, you're not. Come on, shoulders straight, and do something about your expression. Do your imitation of your father for a bit if you have to."

Draco rose gracefully to his feet, robes spilling around him with the heavy weight of thick silk. Somewhere between sitting and standing, as smoothly as a shifting metamorphmagus, the Draco who had so badly wanted reassurance vanished; in his place was the Draco Harry was more accustomed to seeing, cold and arrogant, utterly unrevealing, every inch a Malfoy. "Have dinner with me tonight?" he asked idly, straightening his cuffs.

Pansy smiled. "Much better, and yes, of course. It's a shame we can't go to the Three Broomsticks," she added wistfully. "Or that little café in Milan, the one with the excellent coffee."

"Hm, yes, I wish we could," Draco said. "But I've a House full of children still hexing their own shadows - it'll be a while before I can leave them alone." He bent and tilted Pansy's chin up, dropping a kiss on her mouth that, if not exactly passionate, was a bit farther from platonic than Harry would have liked.

He should have left long ago, he suddenly realized. Depressed and a little ashamed, he rose and began heading quietly back toward the castle.

"Are you going to tell him?" Pansy asked from behind him, halting him in his tracks.

"Tell who what?" Draco asked in a tone of voice that suggested that he knew very well what she was talking about.

"Tell Potter about the Hereditus charm. Or are you just going to let him think you've defected on a whim in the middle of a war?"

"Potter's going to think what he wants to think no matter what I say," Draco said quietly.

"So you aren't going to tell him."

"There's neither need nor point. I won't leave until the holidays, anyway; I'll just… tender my resignation after the wedding."

Harry bit his lip. Fuck, that's not enough time.

"I hope you know what you're doing," Pansy said bluntly.

"Yes, I do," Draco told her. "I'm going to try to drum some sort of competence at potions into a class full of intolerably dense students who are still digesting lunch. Wish me luck."

"Draco." Pansy's voice was as cold and sharp as a whiplash, the sound of one Draco Malfoy being called unequivocally to heel. "Potter isn't fifteen anymore and neither are you. Either let go of all that, stop reminding yourself that you hate him, and trust him with your heart and your life, or say the word and we'll go back to your father. You might be fighting on a side that you think is wrong but at least you'll have made the decision, instead of pissing about with a dozen people's lives while you try to decide whether this - this emotional suicide bombing is worth the price you're paying for it."

"That isn't what I'm doing, Pansy!"

"It might as bloody well be," she said bluntly, and Harry couldn't listen anymore. Focusing very carefully on keeping quiet, he started back toward the castle.

"You broke this, Draco, and your father can't fix it for you this time," he heard Pansy say from behind him. "Fix it or shatter it once and for all, but do one or the other and do it soon."

Harry was concentrating too hard on being completely silent to hear Draco's reply.

 

There was a meeting of the Defence Club that afternoon and it was his turn to cover it, Harry realized as he sat at his desk and flipped absently through his calendar. He could let Remus take it and rest like Poppy had told him to, but Remus would still be feeling weak from the full moon and there was nothing wrong with Harry that an industrial-strength Obliviate wouldn't cure.

Harry liked teaching, but his enthusiasm for it tended to falter a bit when it came to Saturday clubs. There was something a bit disturbing about teenagers voluntarily giving up a weekend afternoon to come and listen to Harry talk about the Dark Arts. At least the Slytherins wouldn't be there, small consolation though that was; the students seemed to have worked out an informal schedule where the Slytherins came when Draco taught, the Gryffindors and occasional stray Hufflepuff came when Harry taught, and the Ravenclaws, who feared nothing on this earth but ignorance and red ink, came to both classes.

He flipped over the page to Sunday, half his mind on what he was going to cover at the Defence Club meeting. Quidditch tomorrow morning, Ravenclaw versus Hufflepuff, and then after lunch…

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Harry stared down at the brief scrawl by 2pm and wished that he knew a few stronger curse words. Or, as long as he was wishing, a whole lot of stronger curse words, and if they lit something on fire so much the better. He'd completely forgotten that he and Draco had agreed - rather reluctantly, on both sides, but the students had, no, whinged was not the right word, the word he was looking for was suggested, and Snape had for God knew what reason thought it was a good idea - to do a demonstration duel to illustrate what the defense techniques they'd been learning looked like when applied in actual combat.

Well, that was just bloody lovely. What a wonderful idea it would be to cram Harry Potter, Draco Malfoy, and all their baggage of hurt feelings, balls-to-the-wall competitiveness, sexual frustration, and fourteen years of scores to settle into a confined space and then tell them to throw hexes at each other. Harry just hoped someone had told Poppy to be there.

A throat-clearing behind him made him jump half out of his chair, knuckles white around his wand. Dobby was standing between his desk and his bed, clutching his hands together in front of him and giving Harry the woebegone look that could encompass anything from a soufflé falling to the Dark Lord rising. "What is it, Dobby?" he asked, reining in his temper; it wasn't Dobby's fault he hadn't been paying attention.

"Dobby has a message from Master Draco," Dobby said, and Harry's heart nearly stopped.

He swallowed hard and tried for calm. "What is it?"

Dobby came closer and held out his hand. "Master Draco says that this belongs to Harry Potter. He is asking Dobby to return it."

Harry stared at Dobby's hand for far too long before he reached out and picked up the small golden dragonfly. It stirred into life at his touch, wings fluttering against his palm. "Thank you, Dobby," he said quietly.

Dobby gave him a mournful look and vanished.

Harry braced his elbows on his knees, closed his hands around the dragonfly, and leaned his forehead against them, letting the faint, lingering feeling of his mother wash over him. Fix it or shatter it once and for all, but do one or the other and do it soon, he heard Pansy say.

He should have felt shattered. All he felt was emptiness. That and the tiny break inside him as that last, slender thread of hope snapped.

 

"Us too?" Fred asked hopefully.

"We'll behave," George told Remus, sprawled across Remus' bed with his head pillowed on his brother's stomach and Crookshanks dozing on his chest.

Remus finished knotting his tie and reached for his brush, casting an amused glance at the twins in the mirror. He hadn't seen them at all the whole morning until they'd come by his rooms, conveniently just in time for tea, looking secretive and pleased with themselves. To his surprise, he'd rather missed them. "Doing grounds duty around the Forest isn't a privilege, boys, it's a punishment. Only for Minerva would I cover it."

"Where is Professor McGonagall, anyway?" Fred asked, stroking George's hair with absent fondness.

"And why's the Forest a punishment?" George wanted to know. "We like it."

"Minerva's in London, at the Ministry - doing what, precisely, I'm not sure, but she and Severus have decided that it's time for the Order to come back together. She's probably slipping Cornelius Fudge an emetic in his tea and rifling through his desk when he makes a dash for the loo."

Fred jolted up onto his elbows, nearly dislodging George; both of them looked like they'd found their grandmother mopping the table with a snooker shark. "Would she do that?" Fred asked.

"There's a lot you don't know about Minerva if you think she wouldn't, but I don't know that things have come to quite that pass yet. And in answer to George's question, the two of you like the forest because you've never had to tromp around in it rescuing squalling first-years from a pit of Devil's Snare, or telling blushing seventh-years to put their clothes back on and go have a talk with Madam Pomfrey, or being cornered by some centaur who wants to tell you all about the occult significance of Jupiter passing through the Eighth House ten years from Sunday." Remus pulled his robes off the chair and shrugged them on, feeling his shoulders settle a bit as soon as the well-worn material slid over them. It was amazing how comforting things could be, when one had owned them forever.

"It's a long way around the edge of the Forest," George said, yawning. "Let's raid Harry's broom shed and take some of the school brooms."

"Lazy bugger," Fred said amiably.

"Belt up, you pillock, you know you don't want to walk all the way 'round the edge of the forest either. There might be spiders."

Fred shuddered. "Blimey, I forgot about those. Ron told us about the acromantulas," he said to Remus. "Filthy things."

"Fred turned Ron's teddy bear into a spider when we were five, did you know?" George asked. "He didn't do it on purpose; he was that pissed off at Ron, it just sort of happened, and it scared Fred almost as bad as it scared Ron."

Fred whacked his brother in the head. "Shut up. It did not."

"Anyway, we should get brooms," George said, blithely ignoring Fred.

Remus wondered if he should be annoyed, and couldn't seem to make it past exasperated and amused. "When is Bill supposed to be here?"

"Half nine," Fred answered. "We're meeting Harry in Myrtle's toilet at ten."

"Loads of time yet," George said pointedly, and they both gave him hopeful looks.

God, I'll be taking in strays next, Remus thought in resignation. As though in answer, Crookshanks gave a loud snort and rolled onto his back in a fluffy mass of belly fur.

Remus wondered briefly if he'd have accepted Severus' invitation if he'd known it would mean acquiring two boisterous Weasleys, one pillow-hogging cat, one traumatized Harry, and a partridge in a pear tree. The sad thing was that he probably would have, he thought, and couldn't help but laugh. Well, he'd meant to borrow one of the school brooms anyway, might as well let the twins do it for him. "All right, then. Fetch brooms for the three of us and meet me in the courtyard."

"That's the spirit," the twins said placidly.

 

Forty-five minutes later Remus was coasting through the treeline of the Forest, Fred and George close behind him, flying low enough to avoid the branches overhead. He'd never understood James' passion for flying, but he had to admit that brooms were damned convenient from time to time - when one had grounds duty and couldn't walk more than a quarter mile without getting exhausted and dizzy, for example.

The threat of rain that had been looming over the castle all day had never quite materialized, but the air was chill and soggy, uncomfortably dense, like wet wool. Remus spared a sympathetic thought for Harry, having to teach flying to first-years and Quidditch to older students in weather like this - it was a wonder the boy didn't have a chronic case of pneumonia - and winced at the twinge in his own joints. The twins were chasing each other through the trees, playing some tag-like game the rules of which appeared to be made up as they went along. Remus didn't think he'd ever been that energetic, even at their age, not unless it was close to the full moon; but that, after all, was a bit different.

He certainly didn't have that energy now. He was only halfway through his route, maybe less, and already worn out. Drifting to the left a little, Remus ducked under a low-hanging branch and hoped that the wretched weather would mean that he wouldn't have to haul many students out of the Forest - or deal with much of anything else, come to that.

Fred appeared beside him suddenly, making him start and drawing him out of his musings. "Remus, whose idea was it to let all these bloody dangerous things take up residence right next to a school?"

Remus smiled. "I don't know, Fred. Maybe they were here first. What's the matter?"

Fred coasted to a stop, tugging on the bristles of Remus' broom to stop him as well. "Listen."

Remus stopped, floating in midair, and listened for a long minute. The silence weighed as heavily as the thick air.

"A lot of the birds will be gone for the winter," he pointed out. "And the air's thick enough to muffle sound like a good heavy fog would."

Fred muttered something under his breath that sounded like it involved the word spiders.

"Not this close to the edge," Remus laughed. "You know, the forest has… moods, I suppose one might call them. Sometimes it's welcoming, sometimes it's not. We might just have caught it on one of its less sociable days."

"Fred! Remus!"

Remus turned to see George about ten yards behind them, staring into the trees with an uneasy expression on his face. From this angle, Remus couldn't quite see what he was looking at. "What is it, George?"

"I can't tell at this distance, but it's - well, come look."

Remus flew back to hover beside George and found himself looking down a long, uneven row of trees. It was hard to tell with the obscuring foliage - but there was something strung between two thick-trunked trees about five hundred yards away, winding and criss-crossing with the deliberate precision of a spider web. Between the trees something about the size of a woman or a small man was strung, suspended in midair. As Remus watched, it danced a little in the rain-scented wind, and something somewhere sounded like the chiming of bones rattling against each other.

"Boys, go back to the castle," Remus said. "Fred, fetch Harry - and Draco too, if you can find him. George, go and get Severus."

"But -" George began.

"Do as I say."

There was a moment's silence behind him; then a protective charm caught him in the small of the back, a tracking charm hit him in the back of the head, and the twins sheared around to race back to Hogwarts, skimming low over the ground. Remus shook his head, amused.

Staying on his broom, he cast until the ground between him and the web was thick with magic - tracking charms, Priori Incantatem variants, tests for dark magic and magical signature. None of them told him anything; or rather, they told him a good deal too much, with the background level of magic in the Forest obscuring any sort of trace detection. One thing stood out loud and clear from his test, though: the web was saturated with dark magic, so much that the whole area glowed from the detection spell. Keeping his wand out, Remus headed toward the web, stopping when he was close enough to see clearly.

The web itself was fantastically complicated, neither rope nor spider silk but some substance Remus couldn't quite place. There were runes bound into it, formed with knotted strands; ones Remus had never seen, that made his eyes sting and water. The center of the web was itself wrought into a rune composed of what must have been hundreds of smaller ones, layer over layer until looking at them too long made Remus dizzy. Rubbing his vision clear, he blinked at what was hung in the middle of the web.

There was rumored to be a graveyard on Hogwarts grounds. When Edmund Twytchell took a drunken fall from a broom into the courtyard during Remus' first year and caught his head on the fountain, breaking his neck and crushing his skull beyond repair, the older students told the younger ones that he'd been buried there - less out of any desire to be informative or even factually accurate, Remus suspected, than to frighten the wits out of the younger students with the insinuation that if they got lost on the way to Herbology they'd stumble upon the graveyard and on Edmund's shambling, unquiet remains. God knew if anyone was the type to come back from the dead as a mindless first-year-eating revenant, it was Edmund. As Remus and his friends grew older and explored more of the grounds, though, Remus had begun to doubt the graveyard's existence; but maybe it existed after all, and if it did, someone clearly knew better than Remus where it was.

The body hanging in the center of the web had clearly been somewhere else for a very long time before it found its way to the Forbidden Forest. It was all but completely skeletonized, wisps of long Weasley-red hair still clinging to its scalp, bones still held together by tenacious ligaments. The robes draping it were gnawed and rotted, water-stained, tailored in a strangely antique cut that could have been fifty years old or five hundred; Remus, no follower of fashion, had no idea.

The skeleton's jaw hung open in a grotesque parody of laughter, and the whole area stank of rotting starch.

"Dear God," someone said from behind him. Remus turned just as Draco swept in for a landing and slipped lightly off his broom.

"That was quick," Remus observed.

"One of the Weasel littermates caught me coming through the Great Hall," Draco said absently, pushed his hair back out of his eyes, and cast some spell that made the web flare and reek of sulfur.

"Do you know what it is?" Remus asked.

Draco moved forward, eyes tracing the web. "Yes. And I'd have bet money I was the only person on the Hogwarts grounds who did. Unless Potter knows," he added grudgingly.

He sounded decidedly miffed at the encroachment on his intellectual territory, and Remus turned away to hide a smile. Time, tide, and the Malfoy ego - thank God for things that never changed.

"You know, it feels…" Remus began, then trailed off, frowning. "This is going to sound bizarre, but it feels almost like a portkey."

Draco threw him the same raised-eyebrow look that he would probably have given the proverbial chimpanzee who'd managed to produce an Arithmancy textbook. "Well spotted, Lupin. It's a portal - or can be used for one, at any rate."

"A portal to where?" Harry asked, stopping on a knut beside Remus with Fred right behind him. The look he gave Draco was none too friendly and all too recognizable - Harry was upset about something and had worked himself around to being furious about it. Remus sighed.

And Draco was apparently very familiar with that look too. "I don't know, do I?" he asked curtly. "I don't know that that's exactly what it's being used for."

"What else would it be used for?" Remus asked.

"A sinkhole, an energy drain," Harry answered. "A sort of vertical summoning circle, maybe."

Draco snorted and crouched a few feet away from the web, tracing out a glowing charm on the ground. "Bit of trouble to go to just to summon the grindylows out of the lake." The charm he'd cast fizzled and died, and he frowned, looking back up at the web.

With another rush of air, Severus flew up, followed by George, and dismounted with brisk efficiency. "Can you tell who cast it?" he asked.

Draco cast another testing spell of some sort; it met one of Harry's coming across from the other side, crackled for a moment, then blended seamlessly with Harry's spell. "Patience, Severus. I'm still trying to find out exactly what it's being used for."

"It's too complicated for one of the students, surely," Remus said.

"And for most of the faculty," Harry agreed. "Even in terms of sheer power there are only a few of us who could put something like this together, and this wasn't cast by any of those people."

"Are you going to take it down?" George asked. "Bit of a blot on the landscape, isn't it?"

"Not until I know what it's doing," Harry told him. "It could have some sort of nasty anti-tampering wards woven into it."

"Who is it, do you think?" Fred asked quietly. Everyone looked at him, then at the skeleton.

"Those robes are a woman's," Draco noted. "The cut's a hundred years old if it's a day. The turn of the century if her family was reasonably well-off, ten or fifteen years later if she was a poor relation. They're grave clothes. We needn't look for anyone who's gone missing recently."

"Malfoy, you are as gay as a tree full of pixies," George informed him. "I only mention this in case it hasn't yet come to your attention."

"Really?" Draco murmured absently, tracing a rune in fire in the air; it hung in front of him, emitting a barely-audible, crystalline hum, seeking an answer from the web. "You'd better tell my fiancée that, hadn't you, in case she missed the memo as well."

Every ounce of color drained out of Harry's face.

"What exactly are all those runes?" Remus asked before Harry had a chance to work himself into an even worse temper. "I don't think I recognize more than half of them."

Harry ran a hand through his hair and took a deep breath, visibly getting himself back under control. "They're necromancy runes, which you already knew from the smell. Some of them are very old, runes that won't have been in any textbook put out since the Ministry placed suffocating restrictions on the practice of necromancy a good two hundred years ago. They're Scandinavian in form but Anglo-Saxon in usage. Those ones along the top arch are binding something -"

"They're binding whatever power is being channelled through here," Draco put in. "This isn't meant to transport people, as a portkey is. Something far less substantial has to come through, and that corpse is the conduit."

Harry nodded grudgingly at him, and Remus spared an exasperated thought for how good a team Harry and Draco would make if they'd let go of fourteen years of schoolboy taunts and wounded pride.

"But if someone's using it as a power source, why put it here?" Severus asked. "It's too close to the edge of the Forest, too easy to find."

Harry looked back at him. "Well, the obvious answer is that whatever needed to come through already has, and whoever cast this wants us to know that."

Severus frowned a little. Remus wondered if he was thinking of the reports of Death Eater activity. Voldemort had always had a habit of thumbing his nose at people, and his followers were no better.

"That spiral in the center is an interchange," Harry went on. "Something comes in, something else has to go back - blood, usually, in quantities it's not really safe for anyone smaller than Ron to lose. If nothing's given in exchange, the door won't open. When… when Voldemort came back, Peter Pettigrew opened a sort of door that brought through a tremendous burst of magic, enough to physically rebuild Voldemort, but it cost him his hand."

"Brought through from where?" George asked.

"Well, you can key it to draw power from a specific geographical location, but that location has to be saturated with magic and the draw won't last very long," Draco said. "Other than that… no one knows. We only know there's something there, like reaching into a room in the dark. Sometimes what you bring out is benign, sometimes it isn't. Hence the warding spells along this leg of the main rune." He gestured with his wand.

"This one, though, is drawing from somewhere specific," Harry said, pointing along the lower arch of the main rune. "Some of those runes are spelling out the direction - the rest of them are obscuring the others so the source can't be tracked."

"But why?" Fred asked, perplexed. "I mean, someone had to have cast this, right? And dug up a body to bring here from God knows where? What did they need the power for? Nothing's happened, no attack on the school or anything else."

"Well, that's the sticky part, isn't it?" Harry noted grimly. "It doesn't look like this was cast to serve as a battery -"

"A what?" Draco asked, frowning a little.

"A battery. A power source. It's a Muggle thing," Harry answered, apparently forgetting for the moment that he and Draco weren't on civil terms. "It's a gateway between here and somewhere else. We don't know what's on the other end. It could be a natural source of magic. It could be another portal. You can't bring a person through this, in either direction, and if you look closely you can see that it doesn't quite have the kind of spell structure it would need to tap into a magic source and amplify the magic someone has to begin with like Pettigrew amplified and used Voldemort's power - very similar, but not the same."

"So something less substantial than a person has come through but you don't know what or why," Severus said.

Draco made a sound like a frustrated cat. "That's about right, yes."

The wind picked up, snapping their robes and filling the air with the sound of bones rattling like wind chimes.

"I can narrow it down a bit, though," Draco went on. "This magic - it isn't just dark, it's… well, foul. Half these runes are for bloodshed, pain, dismemberment, rot, madness. That section there is a spell configuration that's more commonly used to draw back the dead and trap them in a perpetual state of vindictive rage. Whoever was in proximity to this when the gate opened isn't going to be quite sane anymore, if they were to begin with, and their magic is going to feel contaminated when they try to perform anything more complex than simple charms. Not, in other words, someone who's likely to be taking their meals in the dining hall."

"Even if it were actually sending something the other way?" Severus asked.

"Probably," Harry said. "Headmaster, it's going to take time and a bit of looking things up before I can be sure what's come or gone through here. In the meantime, I can take a chance on dismantling it, or I can set up wards that'll misdirect everyone but whoever cast it and then set surveillance wards so we'll know if the caster comes back."

Draco was frowning at the web, running a fingertip back and forth across his lower lip, looking for all the world like the thirteen-year-old boy Remus remembered: sulky and impatient with his lessons and eager to get to Quidditch practice. "Something's wrong with this structure," he said.

"Besides it being evil death magic that'll drive anyone in its vicinity insane?" Fred asked dryly.

Draco shot him an irritated look. "I said wrong, Weasley, not inconvenient."

"Inconvenient?" Harry snorted, and Draco turned the irritated look on him.

"Put wards around it," Severus said. "Notify me immediately when you've found out what it's for."

Harry and Draco looked coolly at each other, whatever small détente had existed between them now clearly at an end. The smell of hostility saturated the air between them, nearly overpowering the smell of imminent rain - hostility and, underneath, hurt and loneliness.

Remus sighed and turned back to the twins. "Let's go and leave them room to work," he said quietly. "It's going to rain."

He urged his broom into motion and back toward the castle, the twins keeping pace beside him. "Well, that was strange," George commented.

"It'll get a lot stranger if we run into whoever cast that spell," Fred said.

"If we were an insane dark wizard hiding on the grounds of Hogwarts, where would we be?" George wondered.

"You're assuming that whoever cast it is still here," Remus pointed out.

"Why would they cast it and then leave?" Fred asked.

"I can think of half a dozen reasons. Whoever cast it needn't have been on the receiving end of whatever came through. What concerns me is how obviously we were meant to find it."

"Or how easily whoever cast it got past the school's wards," George said. "Damn, those don't do much good, do they? Let Death Eaters in left and right."

"We might as well just hang up 'Secret Entrance Here' signs over all those tunnels," Fred agreed. "Except that we started preparing one today and it was great fun."

"It turns out you can make the Poultry Peppermints airborne," George told Remus. "Then their legs are skinny, right, because chickens and ducks and whatnot have skinny legs, and if the floor's dirt instead of stone you can bury Chomping Choppers in them teeth-up and set them to be activated if someone steps on them, with the magic powering them adjusted so that -"

Remus spent the rest of the flight back to the castle being rather glad Fred and George were on his side.

 

There was a foul headache brewing behind Harry's eyes like one of the potions Snape used to assign them just to see how long it would take Neville to turn green and have to be excused. There always seemed to be one of those headaches rattling around in his skull lately. Maybe he should have Poppy check the prescription on his glasses. Or maybe he should just make a point, in the future, of avoiding spending most of the afternoon warding a grotesque Dark Arts portal of unknown provenance, in the cold and wet, under Snape's critical gaze, with bloody Draco "Yes, I do have the hottest arse in the northern hemisphere, thanks for noticing, hope you didn't think my letting you drill me through the mattress meant anything" Malfoy.

He'd been damn glad to come in out of that one and into a hot shower and a glass of firewhiskey. Fortunately for him, his hormones had been a bit more under control the second time.

The end of the hallway occupied by Myrtle's bathroom had been shabby with age and disuse when Harry was a student here, or as shabby as the house elves let anything become, at any rate; it was shabbier now, musty-smelling and dulled, and Harry half expected his feet to stir up dust from the floor but they didn't. Rubbing morosely at his forehead with his fingertips, he reached for the bathroom door and pushed it open, wincing a bit as he went from dim moonlight to lit torches.

"Here's Harry," Fred announced cheerfully.

"Sorry I'm late," Harry said with a small smile that felt like the first genuine one he'd given all day. "Bill, it's good to see you. Thanks for coming up to help."

Bill glanced up from the pack he was rummaging through and smiled brightly at Harry. His hair, freed from its usual ponytail, fell around his face and half-obscured his earring; it made him look younger, and changed the shape of his face a little. It suited him, Harry decided. "You don't think I'd pass up a chance to go poking around the Chamber of Secrets, do you?"

"Bill's been mad to take a look down there for years," George said indulgently. "Harry, Snape sent -"

"Harry!" Myrtle swooped down to hover in front of him, smiling shyly. "Hullo."

"Hello, Myrtle," Harry said. "Remus says you're going to show us around the Chamber."

Myrtle stood - or rather floated - a little straighter, looking proud and very serious, and with a surprisingly painful pang Harry thought of Percy. "I told him I would. You're to keep close, though. It'd be easy to lose you in the dark and I can't keep track of all five of you at once."

Harry frowned, doing a quick headcount and wondering if he'd managed to misplace a Weasley - then noticed where Fred and George were looking, past him toward the row of stalls he was facing away from. Suddenly dead certain of what he was going to find, Harry turned.

Draco was leaning against the wall, watching him, robes and tie apparently left behind in his room; wearing trousers and a shirt that must have been the oldest clothes he owned and still managed to look better than most of what was in Harry's wardrobe - looked, in fact, like they'd been worn and washed so many times that they'd be softer than warm butter, soft enough to snag on the faint broomstick calluses on Harry's hands. "Malfoy," Harry said, proud of the evenness of his voice.

Draco inclined his head a little, his expression frustratingly unreadable. "Potter," he said neutrally. "The Headmaster's asked me to go with the lot of you."

"Slytherin business?"

"So to speak."

Well, fuck him. Let him be cryptic, then.

"Does your scar hurt, Harry?" Bill looked a little worried, and Harry realized that he was rubbing his fingertips across his forehead again.

"No, just a headache," Harry answered, turning away from Draco. "Are we ready to go? Have everything we need?"

"Here." Fred tossed him a small, stubby metal cylinder. Harry caught it out of the air and looked curiously at it.

"New sideline product from Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes," George told him. "They were Charlie's idea. They're party favors really, but we made some special ones."

"There's a contained Lumos spell built into them," Fred said.

"And a few other spells too," George put in.

"Tap it once with your finger to turn it on."

"Tap it again to turn it off."

"But the best part is that it sticks to any part of your body. Just put it where you want it and say 'Stay put' and it'll stick until you pull it off," Fred told him. "This way, if you have to use your wand you won't be stuck without light right when you need it the most."

"Brilliant." Harry considered sticking the tube to his temple, realized that he probably didn't actually want to advertise where his attention was oriented quite that clearly, and stuck it to the back of his wand hand instead. "Bill, you're getting us back out, right? Or do I need to go fetch brooms from the Quidditch shed?"

"I've a rope and grappling hook. They'll get us back even if one of us is injured," Bill answered. "I've also got lanterns, a couple of curse reference texts, food, water, sleeping bags, flares, bandages, and Pigwidgeon."

Harry's eyebrow shot up and he peered into Bill's backpack. Sure enough, Pigwidgeon was dozing in the front pocket, uncrowded by the layer upon layer of shrunken-down supplies in the pack itself. "Ron lent you Pig?"

Bill nodded. "Pig's tiny. If we're all disabled, he can get back out through very small openings and go for help - if he can settle down long enough to get anyone to follow him back."

"You are bloody well-prepared, aren't you?"

"That chamber's, what, a thousand years old, or close to it?" Bill observed. "I'm guessing you only saw part of it, Harry - there's not room to comfortably house a basilisk in the space you described. We'll be going over a lot more of it tonight, and God only knows what shape it's in. Malfoy, come over here and listen to this."

Draco, looking none too pleased at taking orders from a Weasley, came over to them anyway, folding his arms and leaning against the sinks.

"We're going to go slowly," Bill said as Harry knelt in front of him, getting more comfortable. "We'll sweep for wards and curses as we go, but that's not the only thing we have to be careful of. First, keep an eye on the floor. Don't put your weight on anything that's cracked, rusty, or brittle-looking. Keep an eye on the ceiling too - it might drop without warning and fetch you a nasty crack on the head. If we find ourselves somewhere with a lot of turnings and lose our bearings, keep the wall at your left shoulder at all times."

"Cor, Bill, who knew your job was this complicated?" George said, sounding a bit awed.

Bill shot him a look of amused exasperation. "We're going to leave signs on the walls every hundred feet, like this." He pulled out his wand and traced a spiral in fire that hung in the air in front of him until he waved his wand to erase it. "If we have to open any doors, we're going to do it from at least a dozen feet back - the air's probably bad. If we come across an area with fallen rocks, do not under any circumstances touch them until I've had a chance to look at them. If there's water, do not under any circumstances touch it and for the love of Chudley don't fall in. Don't knock anything into it either."

"Right," Fred said. "Leave water alone, leave rocks alone, leave air alone, leave the floor alone and also the ceiling."

"And keep to the left," Bill reminded him. "And watch out for spiders. And rats. Don't light a fire if the air smells off at all, or strike sparks from anything. And Fred, George - Don't. Touch. Anything."

"Why are you telling us?" George asked indignantly.

"Because Harry has sense, and I assume Malfoy does, and it shouldn't matter if Myrtle touches anything."

"Shouldn't?" Myrtle asked nervously, hovering so close to Harry that he could feel the chill against his skin.

"It's all right, Myrtle," Bill reassured her. "If you were able to set off any traps you'd probably have done it by now. Harry, you've been down there before - open it up and you go first, for this first bit."

Harry stood, not quite looking at Draco. "You're going to have to move, Malfoy," he said quietly.

Draco raised an eyebrow but moved obediently out of the way.

The last time he'd opened the Chamber, Harry had needed the tiny image of the snake on the faucet. He had better control this time, and only needed a good visualization. He started to tell the portal to open - and then, out of the corner of his eye, caught sight of Draco, watching him intently from a few feet away.

So you don't want me, he said instead, gliding sibilants and harsh glottal sounds echoing in the silent bathroom. Fine. But Parselmouths aren't exactly thick on the ground, are they, my dragon? So unless you're planning to take the Mark after all, say goodbye to that particular kink, you cold bastard. Open.

"My God, Harry, did you have to argue with it or something?" Fred asked as the row of sinks parted slowly.

"You know, Parseltongue's disturbingly hot," George commented.

"So I'm told," Harry answered, still not looking at Draco. "Here we go, then."

He stepped forward and into the pipe, rank-smelling darkness closing around him.

It dumped him out onto damp stone and a dark so complete that he couldn't see his hand in front of his face. With neither footing nor purchase, he landed on his back, arranging himself efficiently to cushion his fall before two more bodies slammed into him. "Oof," he complained.

"Sorry, Harry," Fred said, trying to help Harry wriggle his way out of a pile of Weasleys and only succeeding in entangling them further.

There was another thud and the sharp twist of someone tripping over the pile. "Ow!" Bill grumbled. "Get out of the way, you lot!"

"Can't," Fred said. "George is on my leg."

"And Harry's right between mine, and if he moves wrong I'm going to lose something important," George added, sounding aggrieved.

There was a high, sharp giggle and Myrtle floated into Harry's field of vision, glowing softly, shoulders shaking and her hands clasped over her mouth. "You lot are funny," she told them.

Harry blew out a mouthful of red hair. "Where the hell is Malfoy?" he asked, trying to move backward.

"Um, Harry? That rather counts as moving wrong," George told him.

"lumos," Bill said, and bright light flared in Harry's eyes suddenly, making him squeeze them reflexively shut. "Where is Malfoy, Myrtle?"

"He said he'd be along in a minute after you'd had a chance to sort yourselves out," she answered.

Harry muttered under his breath and untangled the twins' legs, pushed them off, and climbed out of the pile. No sooner had he moved than Draco skimmed out of the pipe, arced upward to hover upside-down for a moment near Myrtle, then folded himself like a diver and straightened with his feet more or less on the floor. "Finite Incantatem," Draco murmured, wand pointed at himself, and settled his weight back down onto his feet. "And also, scourgify. Ugh."

Harry was disconcerted, slimy, and bruised from the floor and Weasleys, and this time he really was going to kill Malfoy where he stood. He flicked a hand down his robes, cleaning them with a brief, irritable flare of wandless magic.

"If you two are done fluffing your plumage for each other," Bill said in his ear, then grinned, completely unfazed by Harry's glare. More loudly, he said, "Everyone clean and ready to go? Harry and I'll lead until we get to the Chamber and then we'll let Myrtle take over, so everyone stay close and remember what I said."

"Right-o," the twins said, and lit up their wands and the lumos-tubes they'd stuck just above the outside of their right wrists. Harry followed suit and turned toward the tunnel, uneasy for reasons he couldn't quite put his finger on. The tunnel looked strange and unwelcoming, slick stone walls lit in stroboscopic flashes by moving wands and lumos-tubes that shifted with restless gestures. Beyond the reach of their lights the floor was swallowed by shadow, and somewhere in the distance water was falling, drop by drop, onto stone.

Harry tilted his wand toward his eyes and murmured the charm that would allow him to see wards, hearing it echoed four times behind him in a smooth whispered flow of spellcasting. "Let's go," he said, and started into the tunnel.

At twelve years old, Harry had been little and scrawny, slow to grow and slow to develop; when they'd left school he'd still been just about at eye level with Draco's collarbone, a fact that had annoyed him fiercely until an unexpected growth spurt at nineteen had brought him up to Draco's height. The last time he'd been through these tunnels, he'd been four foot ten at best and six stone soaking wet.

They were much smaller now, closing in around him in a damp press of darkness and mold, making him grip his wand tighter against the first stirrings of claustrophobia.

"Keep breathing, you lot," Bill said quietly from beside him. "Present company excepted, of course, Myrtle."

"Well, this is exciting," Fred said from a few feet back, in a loud stage whisper. Harry couldn't quite tell if he was joking or not.

"Quiet," George told him. "I think we're listening."

"What are we listening for?"

"Er… monsters?"

"We're listening for rats, sprung traps, and the sounds of imminent tunnel collapse," Bill said nonchalantly over his shoulder.

There was suddenly dead silence behind Harry.

It lasted for all of three minutes before one of the twins stepped on something that cracked sharply underfoot. "Yeah, there are bones all over the floor here," Harry said, remembering. "Watch out for those."

"That'd be a problem if anyone had to come through here barefoot," Draco said, not mocking but thoughtful.

"There's no way out, or not that we know of," Harry told him, though he'd thought the same thing - as long as Harry himself was there to open it, the Chamber could be used as a sort of bomb shelter in case of a full-out attack against the castle. The only problem was that if anything happened to him, whoever was down here would be trapped.

"Did that conversation make sense inside your heads?" George wondered.

Harry locked eyes with Draco for just a moment before Draco looked away. "Yeah," Harry said quietly, and turned back to the tunnel. The front line of wavering light fell on a mass of boulders strewn across the ground, and on the rough edge of the crack where the tunnel ceiling vanished abruptly into darkness. "This is where the tunnel came down on us, when Lockhart tried to cast an Obliviate with Ron's broken wand."

"Stop here for a minute," Bill ordered, moving cautiously ahead. Harry stopped obediently and watched as Bill made his way carefully through the rocks, keeping to the tunnel walls, skirting the huge cracks in the ceiling, aiming the light of his wand carefully upward into the cracks and peering into them. When he was past the rockfall he stopped and crouched, tapped his wand on the ground, and made a series of quick, angular passes in the air with it as he murmured incantations. Filmy golden streamers spilled from the end of his wand, snaking outward and latching onto the rock, climbing up it in rapidly branching rivulets until the walls of the tunnel looked veined with seams of bright gold. The lines of magic met in the middle of the tunnel ceiling, tarnishing to dull silver at the edges of two of the cracks.

"All right, go ahead and come through," Bill said, standing up to dust off his knees. "Don't get under the silver bits, they're unstable."

"Wow," Myrtle said, sounding awestruck.

"There's something behind you, Bill," Fred said, stretching out his arm to extend the edge of wandlight into the dark.

"It's a snakeskin," Harry said. "Well… a basilisk skin."

Bill turned and shone his wand over the skin as the rest of them came up behind him. It gleamed dully in the light, latticed and translucent white, coiled shin-deep on the floor of the tunnel. "God almighty, Harry, you killed that?"

"It damn near returned the favor," Harry said shortly. Looking at the skin was making his arm twinge, a dull stab of phantom pain that throbbed arthritically in the damp of the tunnel.

Ginny, he'd come down here to save Ginny. He'd only bought her another thirteen years. She was dead now, and the snakeskin covered in dust.

The tattoo on his hip heated sharply, pulling him back to the here and now, and he realized that he was clutching his arm just above the elbow. He shot a glare at Draco, who wasn't looking at him, and headed past the snakeskin into the dark. The stab of heat flared and diffused; for just a moment it radiated a soft, comforting warmth that felt like a dim echo of waking in Draco's arms.

Harry sighed. The universe could stop hating him any time now, really.

"Still bloody impressive," George observed as they passed the skin. "Especially for a twelve-year-old."

"Do we need basilisk skin for anything, George?" Fred asked thoughtfully.

"Shouldn't think so, but -"

"You're not bloody taking all of it, if that's what you're thinking," Draco said, sounding well and truly annoyed.

"Shut up, you lot," Bill hissed back at them. "If you wake Pig up I'm going to make you take care of him."

That shut the twins up even more effectively than before. Harry was a little impressed.

They went on in silence, past twists and turns where the dark pooled too close to their lights. Myrtle kept close to Harry and Bill, seeming unsure of which of them she wanted to crowd up next to. "We're almost to the door," she said after a while. "How did you get through it the first time? I couldn't see how to open it."

"It responds to Parseltongue," Harry told her, then turned forward again to hide a small, grim smile. The thought of thoroughly frustrating Draco was a welcome distraction from the stone pressing in on him - and the space would open up soon enough.

The sudden feeling of air and room over his head was the first indication that they'd reached the end of the tunnel. Their lights fell on emeralds first, half the size of Harry's head, four of them glowing eerily out of the darkness. "We're at the doors," he said, and moved forward to shine his light over the intertwined snakes, half again his own height, carved into the stone.

"Cor," George said, impressed.

"How's the air inside, Harry?" Bill asked.

Harry shook his head. "Stale, last time I was here, but breathable. It must be getting in from somewhere."

"Go on, then, open them up," Fred ordered.

Harry stepped forward, playing the light of his wand over the doors. Are you listening? he said, not to the doors. Open.

There was a faint answering flicker from the depths of those smooth emeralds and a crack appeared in the wall, swallowing their lights for a moment before the doors moved back. God, how terrified he'd been the last time he was here. He could still feel it in the air, soaked into the stones. "This way," he said, and led them inside.

"Mind what I said about the water," Bill said, shining his wand on the rectangular pools framing the central aisle and the pillars, covered in carved stone snakes, that sank down into the still water and rose into darkness. The light reflected oddly here, coming back out of the darkness with a greenish tinge, bouncing off the water to cast strange wavering shadows onto the pillars. In that light, it was too easy to become convinced that the stone snakes on the pillars were moving, watching. Maybe they were. Harry preferred to think it was a trick of the light.

Bill paused and aimed his wand back. "Malfoy," he said.

Draco ambled forward, one hand hooked into the strap of a backpack that Harry had somehow failed to notice before.

"Right, give over," Bill ordered. "What the hell was the Chamber supposed to be used for? Even with magic and a good construction crew this space would have taken years to excavate and build. You don't put this much energy into something just so you can have somewhere to come and sulk after the faculty meetings."

"I wouldn't be too sure of that," Harry muttered, and thought he heard Draco give a soft snort of agreement.

"You know the story, Weasley," Draco said. "Salazar Slytherin built it to house his monster, so that when the Heir returned -"

"I know the story," Bill said. "I didn't ask for fairy tales."

"Hardly a fairy tale," Draco returned dryly, tilting his head toward Myrtle.

"Stop pissing about, Malfoy. If we run into something potentially lethal because you Slytherins have known for a thousand years what went on in this chamber and you can't be arsed to tell us, I'm going to let Fred and George beat the fuck out of you."

Cold fury flashed in Draco's face. "They can fucking well try," he said, very quietly, and at the moment Harry wouldn't have envied the twins the attempt. "Fine, you want to make sure I'm not hiding some bloody Chamber of Secrets tourist map under my pillow? I'll go first."

Harry caught Draco's arm as he stalked past them. Draco froze, not looking at him.

"Don't," Harry said softly. "Please. This is hard enough."

The line of Draco's throat moved smoothly as he swallowed. "Just… keep your eyes open," he said just as softly, still not looking at Harry.

Harry glanced back at four curious pairs of eyes and pulled Draco far enough down the aisle to be out of earshot. "We need to know, Draco," he said.

Draco crossed his arms tightly over his chest and glared at Harry, tense and annoyed. "I'm not here to make sure you lot don't steal anything, Potter," he snapped. "I'm here because I'm the Head of Slytherin House. There might well be things down here that will leave you alone if I'm with you, or wards that are bound to my House, like that sword that only Gryffindors are supposed to be able to use. Severus sent me down here to make sure that you don't get killed by anything that would have let you live if you'd been sorted into Slytherin."

"That's not the whole truth, is it?"

"You don't need the whole truth. You need enough of the truth to keep you alive, and I've given it to you. Now can we bloody get on with this? I'm on breakfast duty in the morning, and I'd like to get at least a little sleep tonight."

"I miss you," Harry said, and then wondered why in God's name no one had ever invented a spell that would actually allow the earth to open up and swallow someone. Probably an Obliviate would do just as well, he thought, and gripped his wand.

"Harry!" Bill called, saving either of them from having to say anything, and Harry was going to have to remember to do something very, very nice for him, possibly involving sex or organ transplants. "Let's not take all night, mate."

Harry turned back to Draco, who had turned his head away and closed his eyes, and let his eyes travel the salt-sweet skin of Draco's throat. "Look, just… help us, all right? Don't leave us in the dark. Please."

"I know less about the Chamber than you do, Potter. I'm the Head of Salazar's House, for whatever grace that grants me. I'll shield you if I can. That's all I can do."

Oh, God, how Harry wanted him. Right bloody here, right now, and he didn't care how many people were watching. He took a deep breath and tried to rein in his hormones. "Thank you," he whispered, and turned back to Bill.

"There's a statue of Salazar right up ahead. I've never been past it."

Bill nodded and motioned his brothers and Myrtle forward. "Myrtle, it's down to you now. Can you show us where the tunnels are?"

Myrtle nodded, but now that they were down in the Chamber she looked a little worried. "They're through doors and things, though," she said. "I don't know if the doors are locked. I didn't think about them before because I can just go straight through, but it might be harder for you."

"Don't worry about that," Fred said, patting the pockets of his robes. Harry hoped that whatever he was patting wasn't explosive.

"We'll get through one way or another," George added.

"All right, then. Follow me," she said with a distinct undertone of On your head be it, and floated past Harry and Draco toward the statue.

Salazar Slytherin's stone likeness loomed out of the darkness like a ship's figurehead appearing out of the fog, rather unnerving all of them. "Ugly bastard, wasn't he?" George said, but he said it very quietly.

"Tacky robes," Fred murmured back.

Myrtle turned and hovered in front of them, glowing softly in the dimness. "This is just the front of the Chamber, really," she said. "There's more, halls and tunnels. But the way to get to them is behind the statue's head, so I'm glad you brought that grappling hook, Bill, because you're going to need it."

"Well, bollocks," Bill grumbled, tilting his head back to look up to where the statue's head brushed the shadow-covered ceiling.

Harry closed his eyes and shut out their voices, letting himself drift back, seeing a tall, dark-haired boy with Slytherin robes and eyes like the suffocating dark. Speak to me, Slytherin, greatest of the Hogwarts Four, the boy said with Harry's voice, sibilant Parseltongue twining in thin echoes around the pillars. Overhead, he heard stone grinding against stone as the statue's mouth opened.

"We're going to have to go through that one at a time," Bill observed.

"I'll go first," Draco said.

Bill looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. He slid his backpack carefully off, checked in the front pouch to be sure that Pig was still asleep - he was, unsurprisingly; once Harry had had a nightmare at the Burrow that bid fair to bring the roof down, and Pig had slept straight through it if no one else in the house had - pulled out a shrunken grappling hook and rope, and spelled them back to full size. He tossed the hook upward and it soared up to catch in the statue's mouth. It was a good thirty feet up - not a backbreaking climb, but not one Harry was looking forward to making.

Bill handed the rope to Draco. "Don't go in if the air smells strange. Look at the floor before you move out of the statue's mouth. If there's a rock near you, anything heavy, toss it out onto the floor before you move and listen to see if the floor sounds thin or cracked or hollow. Pay attention to the feel of the air against your skin. If the air pressure changes even just a little, or if there's a sudden draft like something moving near you and pushing the air in front of it, get down and get out as fast as you can."

"Bill? Mum doesn't know exactly what it is you do, does she?" George asked.

Bill flashed him a grin. "No, and I'll thank you not to tell her."

Fred snorted. "Think we want to be there when she finds out?"

"Well, I do a bit," George admitted. "But only if I'm invisible. And behind good sturdy cover."

Draco pulled on the rope, testing it, then planted a foot on the statue and scaled it quickly, hand over hand on the rope and finding footholds with ease in the carved drapery of the statue's robes. Harry watched, uneasy, as he hoisted himself over the ledge and disappeared into the statue's mouth.

Water was still dripping somewhere, echoing in the silence. Harry found himself counting seconds in his head, bit his lip, and tried to stop.

A minute passed, then another, then another, until Harry couldn't stand it anymore. "Malfoy!" he shouted as loudly as he dared, wincing as his voice shattered into a dozen flying echoes against the stone.

There was no answer, and Harry went cold.

"Fuck," Bill said softly. He yanked his wand out of his pocket and stuck it in his teeth, hit the statue at a run, and began climbing without much of a loss in speed.

When he was halfway up, Draco's voice drifted back out to them. "The mouth opens onto stairs leading down. I can't see where they end."

Bill paused, and even Fred and George looked a little relieved. Harry rather felt like he needed to sit down for a minute.

Winding one hand around the rope, Bill pulled his wand out of his mouth with the other. "Don't go down them," he called up. "Move a bit out of the doorway and wait for the rest of us. Myrtle, you come up with me and I'll send you back down for the others when I've found out if it's safe."

"All right," Myrtle said, drifting up to hover near him. Harry watched them disappear into the statue's mouth and resigned himself to waiting again.

It wasn't long, though - certainly not as long as they'd waited for Draco - before Myrtle flew out of the statue and back down to them. "Bill says it's safe to come up," she reported.

"Thanks, Myrtle," Harry said, stepping up to take hold of the rope. It was a damn good thing he taught Quidditch; the broomstick calluses were going to save him a few rope burns. Planting a foot on the hem of Salazar's robes, he began hauling himself up.

The ledge widened almost immediately into the top of a huge flight of stairs. The stairs themselves were a good twenty feet across; pillars anchored to the sides supported the ceiling and plunged down into darkness. Draco was sitting a few steps down, hands folded neatly around one knee, watching as Bill moved cautiously down into the darkness.

Harry shot a glance backward and went to sit next to Draco. "I owled Ron today," he said softly. "Rosier never made it there, or at least not to him."

Draco looked sharply at him, frowning. "Are you sure the Imperius took?"

"Yeah. You can feel it when someone throws it off. Maybe not from a long way away, I don't know - but he was pretty far under when I sent him to the Ministry. If he threw it off from that deep, he's a damn sight better at it than I am."

"Damn." Draco ran a fingertip over his lower lip in an absent-minded gesture that Harry recognized with a pang. "Someone must have intercepted him at the Ministry."

"And sent him back to Voldemort, probably," Harry agreed. "So now Voldemort knows you and I are on the same side."

A brief flash of something unhappy passed over Draco's face. "He knows we were in Cornwall together," he said neutrally, and could have been either agreeing or contradicting. "And that you and the Ministry are at odds."

There was a soft scrape behind him and Harry turned to see Fred hoisting himself up onto the ledge. "I'll tell you if I hear anything else," he said quickly. Draco nodded.

"Damn, but these stairs go down a long way," Bill said, sounding a bit disgruntled as he turned to climb back up to them. "Going to be twelve kinds of pain in the arse getting back up them."

"Everything okay?" George asked, coming to sit with Fred on the stairs. "No spikes or falling boulders or lethal curses?"

"Not so far," Bill answered. "The stairs look stable, and so does the ceiling, as far as I can see, so let's move on. Myrtle, what are we walking into?"

Myrtle moved to hover next to him, looking pleased and important. "These stairs are going down into a big room. If you go back along the side of the stairs there are some tunnels but they all curve back around and come out in the room again. There are two doors in the tunnel that even I can't get through, but I'm almost sure they don't go anywhere close to outside."

Draco was listening unnervingly closely to Myrtle.

"If you keep walking straight from the stairs, there are doors up ahead like the ones at the entrance. Past the doors, there's a really long chamber with a sort of raised walkway with water all around it. The water doesn't smell as bad as the water in the outer chamber, so maybe it hasn't been there very long. I haven't…" Myrtle looked down, shamefaced, then lifted her chin defiantly. "I haven't gone down under the water. I'm afraid of that chamber. I go through it as fast as I can. It just feels… bad."

Bill frowned a little. "What scares you the most about it?"

"The water. And the statues. You'll see when you get in there. It's scary and I don't know why anyone would have wanted to be in there."

"You're very brave, Myrtle," Harry said gently. "Go on."

"At the end of the walkway is another door, a regular-sized one. There's a round room in back of it. The tunnels are hidden in the room, hard to find - I wouldn't have found them myself except that I wasn't paying attention to where I was going and suddenly there I was, standing in one. I've been through one of the tunnels. The other one I can't get through, but maybe the living could, if the rocks were moved." Myrtle gave a soft snort and grinned suddenly, an expression so unexpected on her lugubrious face that Harry blinked. "This is a bit exciting, isn't it? I bet Olive Hornby would just spit if she knew."

Harry had to laugh. "If I ever meet Olive I'll tell her myself."

"Would you? That would be awfully nice of you. But then, you are awfully nice. I always said so."

Draco had a coughing spasm so severe that Harry thought he was going to fall down the stairs. "Sorry, dust," he said mildly when he was done.

Harry glared at him - not that he was looking, the snide, arrogant, dazzling bastard - and followed Bill down what remained of the stairs. On the bottom one Bill knelt and peered into the darkness, shining his light as far outward as it would reach.

"I don't see any wards," he said. "Does anyone else?"

"The basilisk probably lived here," Harry said. "That'd be ward enough."

"Well, let's see. Accio stone!" A rock the size of Bill's fist flew out of the darkness; he caught it out of the air and tossed it back, rolling it across the floor. Nothing happened. "All right, let's -"

His backpack gave a sudden flurry of twitches and hoots and Pigwidgeon exploded out of the pouch, flitting excitedly around their heads. Draco's hand shot out and caught him reflexively out of the air, fingers curling around him in a loose cage.

"Pig!" Bill said sternly. "Pig! Back in the pack!"

Pigwidgeon hooted indignantly, fluttering on Draco's palm when he opened his hand.

"Mind, Pig, or I'll tell Ron and there'll be no Every Flavour Beans for a month."

With a scandalized chirp, Pigwidgeon flew back and burrowed industriously into the pouch of Bill's pack.

"Ron feeds that bird Every Flavour Beans?" Harry asked incredulously.

"He likes the mouse-flavoured ones, and peppermint," Bill answered. "You have to cut them up, though, or they make his beak stick shut."

"I cannot believe Ron gives Pigwidgeon treats with sugar in them."

Fred slung an arm around Harry's neck. "You know Ron," he said quietly. "He's stupid sometimes."

"Can't be trusted not to fuck things up," George concurred, sliding his arm around Harry's shoulders from the other direction.

"But he usually sees the error of his ways eventually."

Harry glanced up at the twins, meeting eyes full of affection and rueful apology. "Yeah," he said, and smiled gratefully at them. "I know."

"Is it safe, Weasley?" Draco asked in a voice so rigidly controlled that it sounded like it was about to crack.

"And now we've pissed Malfoy off, batting on his pitch," Fred whispered into Harry's ear. "Do him some good, the prat."

"As far as I can see," Bill answered Draco. "The door might be a different story. We'll have to check it over when we get to it."

"We should check those doors in the tunnels on the way back."

Bill nodded. "Myrtle's probably right and they don't lead anywhere crucial, but just to check. Come on, then you lot - slowly, and be careful. I don't like it that we can't see the ceiling from here."

"I could -" Myrtle began, then looked up into the shadows and visibly gathered her courage. "I could go up there and keep a look out. Then if anything started to fall I could tell you."

"Would you?" Bill asked. "That'd be very helpful."

"Thank you, Myrtle," Harry put in.

Looking as if she was having second thoughts but couldn't bring herself to disappoint Bill and Harry both, Myrtle drifted up toward the ceiling. She faded quickly into the shadows, a dim spark surrounded by blackness.

Harry followed Bill down onto uneven stone lit in scattered beams from their wands. The stairs faded from sight before the door came into view, and for an unpleasant moment Harry felt as if they'd walked into a trap, that they wouldn't be able to find the door or find their way back to the stairs. With faint relief, he saw Bill lower his wand to draw a glowing golden spiral on the floor.

Green eyes lit in the darkness suddenly, a good three feet above Harry's head, and a moment later the shadows moved back away from the doors - not quite duplicates of the ones at the entrance. The snakes wove apart in the center of their bodies instead of together, framing the Slytherin House crest etched in thin, faint lines into the stone.

"Let me go first and check for curses," Bill said. "Then Harry can check for wards we might have missed, and Malfoy can check for… well, Slytherin things, I suppose."

"What do we do?" George asked, sounding a little injured.

"You two stay back and figure out how we're going to get through that door if we can't find a locking mechanism," Bill told them, and moved forward to crouch in front of the doors. He relocated his lumos-tube from his wrist to his temple and began running his wand in slow passes over the doors, working his way painstakingly upward. Every so often he murmured a spell and white sparks spilled from his wand like grains of sand, striking the stone but not sticking to it.

"That's why none of the rest of us have any patience," Fred told Harry when Bill was about halfway up. "Bill used it all up."

Bill shot his brother an amused glance over his shoulder and aimed his wand up toward the lintel above the doors. Something bright shot out of it and drove into the stone with a loud chunk, then spat out a length of rope with a noose on the end. Bill stuck his foot into the noose and tugged on the rope, which pulled him upward until he was at a height to examine the tops of the doors. "No curses," he reported eventually, pulled his foot out of the noose, and dropped to the floor, landing with an athlete's grace. "Your turn, Harry. I'll leave you the rope."

Harry moved toward the doors and tapped off his lumos-tube. "Can you lot move back? I need the dark for a minute."

Wands flickered out and the thin lumos beams moved back, leaving him and the doors in a dense pool of shadow. He turned back toward the stone, giving his eyes a chance to adjust to the dark, then set the tip of his wand against the bottom of the stones and whispered a charm. Glittering blue phosphorescence spread out along the bottoms of the doors and then surged upward, a foot-long band of cobalt glints that would catch on any ward triggered by movement such as a door opening. It reached the top and fizzled out without finding anything. Harry sat for a moment tapping his wand against his lip, thinking; then he ran through another quick series of diagnostics, though he was already reasonably sure that the door was unwarded. When those turned up negative as well, on a whim Harry aimed another charm at the doors, a variant of Alohamora that would tell him the nature of any locks in the spell's range.

The results of that spell made him frown, uncertain and not liking what he found. "All right, you can come back now," he called, lighting his wand.

"Find anything?" Bill asked.

"Yeah," Harry said slowly. "These doors - there's a locking mechanism that's activated from the other side, but activates on this one. The doors can be locked from either side, but they can only be unlocked from this one."

Bill looked thoughtfully at the doors, then swore long and imaginatively in what sounded like about six different languages.

"So what's that mean?" George asked, sounding like he had a fair idea already and was hoping to be told he was wrong.

Harry glanced back at him. "It means that if we trip the locking mechanism on the other side of the doors we'll be locked in, and the only way to unlock them will be from this side."

"Should we split up?" Fred asked dubiously. "Leave someone on the outside of the door?"

"No good," Bill said. "If those doors open to Parseltongue like the doors outside, the only person who'll be able to unlock them is Harry, and he's the wards expert."

"Malfoy's good at them too," Harry pointed out.

"We've at least one more door to get past, though," Bill pointed out. "We don't know what that one'll open to."

"Damn," Harry said softly. "Those outer doors will close when anyone goes back through them. One of the rest of you could go for help but you couldn't get back in."

"The world really needs more Parselmouths," Fred observed.

"There's nothing for it. We'll just have to be damn careful," Bill decided. "Malfoy, come here and look at this door."

"Is there a way to block it open, or take it off the hinges?" Draco asked, moving forward to examine the door.

"I don't even see any hinges," Harry said. "We can try, though."

Draco ran his light over the doors, examining them narrowly. His wand paused in front of the Slytherin crest for a long moment, then down to the stretch of blank stone underneath it. "I wonder…" he said softly. "Potter, tell the doors to open."

"From a distance," Bill reminded them. "Everyone back at least ten feet."

They moved back, and Harry turned to face the doors. Open, he told them.

The doors remained stubbornly closed. "Well, bugger," Harry said. "If they won't open to Parseltongue -"

"Oh, they will," Draco said. "Just not only to Parseltongue. If this is Salazar's inner sanctum, I would hardly have expected differently - and it works in our favor, after all."

"You are at some point going to tell us what you're on about, right?" Fred asked.

Draco moved back toward the doors and aimed his wand at the stone underneath the crest. "Sanguis obscuratum," he said. To Harry's surprise, a glowing smudge appeared in the center of the flat space, radiating lines that looked like finger marks - it looked like dozens of handprints placed over each other, a little offset every time.

"What's that about?" he said.

Reaching into his boot, Draco produced a long and wicked-looking knife. He set the blade against his wrist and before Harry could say anything Draco had quickly and efficiently sliced a deep gash in his own skin.

"Draco, Jesus!"

"Do you want in or not, Potter?" Draco murmured, shifting his hand so that blood streamed down to soak his palm. "At least if this works we'll know that Voldemort never got past this door."

"How so?" Harry asked, staring at Draco's hand as it tilted and angled, quickly becoming covered in a solid sheet of blood.

"He's a half-blood. His blood won't open this door."

"But Voldemort was - is - the Heir of Slytherin."

Malfoy snorted. "Salazar Slytherin was a brilliant man and foresaw many things, Potter, but I seriously doubt that it ever occurred to him that the last of his line would be a Muggle's cast-off by-blow. This kind of lock is keyed to purebloods - Voldemort's blood wouldn't do. Mine will, and the Weasleys'; yours wouldn't. We'll just have to hope that the blood and the Parseltongue don't need to come from the same place." Draco reached out and set his hand against the stone. There was a momentary glow that Harry saw more with his mind than with his eyes, and the faint lines outlining the Slytherin crest darkened. "Tell it to open now."

After a moment's thought, Harry settled his hand on Draco's shoulder - not, carefully, the one with the tattoo - and slipped just the edge of his finger over Draco's collar, touching skin. Draco stiffened and Harry's hand burned where they touched, but if the doors needed to be fooled into thinking that both unlocking components came from the same person then physical contact would help them make that link. Pushing away thoughts of what else he'd like to do with that physical contact, Harry hissed, Open.

This time the slow grating of stone on stone echoed through the room and the doors parted, letting out a flood of damp, stale air.

"Let me…" Harry whispered, reaching for Draco's hand. A couple of brief spells cleaned the wound, closed it, and cleared away the blood. Harry let go of Draco's hand as soon as it was done, not wanting to.

"Thank you," Draco said, eyes fixed on the darkness beyond the doors.

Look at me, Harry wanted to say, and didn't. "Any time."

"Myrtle!" Bill called up toward the ceiling. "You can come back down now. We're getting ready to go into the next room."

"You won't like it," Myrtle said gloomily as she drifted back down to them. "If it can give the wobblies to someone who sits in the u-bend thinking about death for days on end, it's no place for the living."

"There are hinges," Fred told them, aiming the beam from his wand along the doors. "You can barely see them, but they're there."

"Good." Draco slung off his backpack and crouched down to rummage through it. "Weasley, Potter, stand there in the doorway and don't let it close. Weasleys plural, come here."

Fred and George knelt next to Draco and watched as he pulled a shrunken cauldron from his backpack and expanded it to about a pint volume. That done, he pulled out a rolled-up oilskin about as long as Harry's forearm and unrolled it with a quick, professional flourish. A cold gleam sprang up in front of him, lumos-light shining from a long row of surgical steel.

Draco settled himself more comfortably and pulled two drawstring bags out of his pack, tossing one to each of the twins. "The silkworms need to be halved lengthways and eviscerated. We only need two. The hogweed stems need to be diced into quarter-inch segments - don't touch them with your bare hands. Try not to get anything dirty, and be quick about it; I'll need them when I'm done putting in the other ingredients, and it'll only take me a minute." He pulled out a thermos and filled the cauldron with water, then passed a hand over it. The base of the cauldron flared into a red-hot glow and the water burst into a boil.

"Bill, Harry, we'll need more light," George told them. Harry tilted both his lights down toward their hands, and saw Bill do the same.

True to his word, Draco took less than a minute to prepare the other ingredients, knives flying to his hand at a gesture and tucking themselves back into the oilskin when he was done with them. By the time the twins were done with their tasks, the liquid in the cauldron was an unnerving, glowing garnet color, simmering moodily. Draco dumped in the silkworms first, passing his hand over the cauldron with a quiet charm that made the carcasses dissolve like melting butter into the surface of the potion, then repeated the charm with the hogweed. The potion flared and made an ominous gurgling sound, then went abruptly still.

"Light on the hinges," Draco ordered. "Wingardium Leviosa."

The cauldron floated upward, tilted, and with an impressive degree of precision spilled thick red liquid that clung like glue to the hinges of the right-hand door. Draco guided the cauldron back to settle beside his pack, pointed his wand at the hinges, and said, "Get back, all of you. lumos solem." A wide beam of light saturated with ultraviolet rays struck the top hinge; there was a loud hiss and the hinge began to smoke, giving off an eye-wateringly acidic smell. Within seconds the hinge glowed, melted, and ran down the door in a noisy, popping trail of slag.

"God almighty, Malfoy," Bill said, sounding thoroughly impressed.

Draco lifted a hand to his nose to block out the smell and glanced back over his shoulder. "You lot are going to have to steady this door so it doesn't come crashing in on us when I dissolve the other hinges."

Harry lifted his wand and trained it on the door. "I've got it."

The remaining hinges melted and ran onto the floor, pooling with what was left of the upper hinge. Harry caught the door as it tipped, levelled it out, and skimmed it across the floor to rest beside the staircase.

"Remind me never to cross the pair of you when you set your minds to something," George said.

"That's probably wise," Draco said calmly. "Scourgify!"

A few more waves of his wand and everything was cleaned, shrunken back down, and tucked back into his pack. Draco picked the pack up and slung it onto his back.

"That's that taken care of," Bill observed. "Now. Let's see what we're dealing with."

They turned and shone their lights into the shadows, examining what was visible of the room before them. "Well, bugger," George said finally, rather speaking for all of them.

The light came back green and wavering, transmuted to liquid, unsteady patterns on the walls and snake-carved columns, casting the stone faces of twisted statues into sharp relief. The statues rose out of the water between pillars and walls like giants frozen to unnerving stillness, water pooling around bare waists, arms with straining muscles holding shallow basins at chest or shoulder level or in front of blank-eyed faces; light that didn't penetrate the black water was thrown back up in their faces instead, dancing silently in a flickering parody of changing expression. The walkway Harry and the others were on stood between water to either side, a good twenty-five yards away from the walls, and kept going past the point where the room faded back into shadow.

"I told you," Myrtle said with morbid relish.

Harry cleared his throat. "Myrtle, are those firepots the statues are holding?"

"I think so, but they're empty."

"Bill, is it safe to light a fire if we can find something to put in them?"

"Let's see," Bill answered. He drew his wand through the air in a circular motion, distorting the air around it until a clear, silvery sphere about the size of Harry's head hung in the air before him. Bill stuck his wand carefully into the sphere and lit a flame on the end of it; he watched for a minute as the flame burned steadily inside the bubble, and then banished flame and bubble both with a wave of his wand. "It's safe, but wait a minute before we start thinking about lighting them."

Curious, Harry followed as Bill went over to crouch beside the water. "I'd rather none of us had to go down there," Bill said over his shoulder, "but if there's a way in or out under this water…"

Harry nodded. "Shall we draw straws to see who goes in?"

"No one will go in if I can help it," Bill said absently. He stuck his wand into the water and whispered an incantation in some language Harry couldn't place. Silver-blue light streamed out the tip of his wand into the water like ink from a squid, turning the water clear and glowing; an odd image flashed into Harry's head, and it took him a minute to identify it as a lighted swimming pool.

"Well, that's not as deep as I was afraid it would be," Bill mused, staring down into the water. "Twenty feet or so."

"Cor, Bill, that's deep enough," George said.

"Could be worse," Bill told him, peering out to where the light faded into shadow again. "Nothing over here as far as I can see. Let me check the other side."

He repeated the charm on the other side of the walkway, then dried off his wand on his shirt-tail and came back over to the rest of them. "I'll have to do that a few more times - I couldn't see very far back, and no knowing how long this bloody walkway goes. We need light."

"We can blast chips off that door," Harry said, nodding toward the next room. "Transfigure them into wood, and fill the firepots with them."

"Er," Fred said, looking over Harry's shoulder and rubbing his nose dubiously.

Before Harry had time to turn, there was a loud whoosh from behind him and greenish-white light sprang up so suddenly that it made his eyes water. He turned to see the statues lighting, one after the other down a very long way to the end of the room, cold-burning green flames springing up in the firepots and driving the shadows back up toward the ceiling. Draco stood in the middle of the walkway about even with the first statue, one hand in his pocket and the other wound into the strap of his backpack, head cocked as if he were waiting patiently for the Weasleys and Harry to regain their ability to tie their own shoelaces.

"What did you do?" Harry asked him.

"It's called the Chamber of Secrets, you know, not the Chamber of Explaining Things to Potter," Draco told him; and for just a moment he looked like the Draco Harry thought he'd left behind in Cornwall, the one who could joke with Harry, whose teasing didn't always draw blood…

…who slept on his left side and woke with one hand curled against his face to block out the light.

"How about explaining things to Weasleys?" Bill asked a bit shortly, and Harry blinked. "Did you trip some sort of spell?"

"Not in the way you mean," Draco told him. "I thought there must be something along this walkway keyed to respond to Slytherins. I can't imagine that Salazar spent his time hauling firewood down here."

Harry rubbed a hand across his forehead, suddenly uncomfortably aware of just how very many somethings could possibly be set into that stone. "And you were right, just… don't do that again, all right? Stay with the rest of us."

There was enough light now for him to see the sudden flash of anger in Draco's eyes. "Potter, my reason for being down here at fucking arse o'clock at night to begin with is going to have a bit of a crimp put in it if I don't go first and send some of the Chamber's defenses to sleep, don't you think?"

"Some?"

Draco gave a cynical snort. "You can't really think that Salazar Slytherin of all people didn't anticipate the possibility of betrayal by his own House."

He just wanted to keep Draco safe, and the entire bloody universe had set its face against him. Harry wanted to go to bed.

"Cor, look at that ceiling," George said in awe.

Harry looked up to see a broad stone lattice interrupted by ancient-looking carvings, a good twenty feet above their heads. Scattered amongst the lines of the lattice, the heads of hissing snakes snarled down at them, pushing downward from the ceiling as if pushing through the stone, fangs arching back toward the ceiling, surrounded at all four points of the compass by symbols the meaning of which Harry couldn't begin to guess. "Well, this is a cheery place," he said.

"The door is down there," Myrtle told them. "It's a long way, almost as long as the Charms corridor. Why is it so long, do you think, Draco?"

Draco looked momentarily disconcerted at being addressed in that familiar a fashion by the ghost of a teenage girl. "That's a good question. Maybe because it's the first part of the Chamber proper you can reach from the outside." He turned and looked thoughtfully down the long walkway. "There are a thousand ways I could turn this chamber into a deathtrap, and if intruders got caught in the middle of the walkway they wouldn't have time to get to safety."

Harry heard energetic whispering off to the side and turned to see Fred and George with their heads together, gesturing at the firepots.

Bill shrugged his backpack a little more securely onto his shoulders, making a face as it hooted indignantly at him. "Well, let's hope Salazar didn't leave the alarm set. Harry, sweep for wards, would you? I'll check for curses. Up to the second statue, and then we'll check again."

Harry crouched down, whispered a charm, and tapped his wand on the stone, sending a flood of sapphire sparks spilling down the walkway to pool and vanish at Draco's feet. They didn't snag on any wards and there weren't any visible; either what wards there were were very well-hidden or the walkway thus far was unguarded.

Draco knelt, whispered something, and placed his hand flat on the stone. Bright green tendrils like tree roots flew out under his palm, veining the stone like marble, climbing up onto the pillars. Harry watched as Draco lifted his hand, apparently satisfied, and turned back to the rest of them.

"Are we clear?" Harry asked Bill.

"Clear," Bill said. "Let's go."

"It's so hard being alive," Myrtle said in an awed voice as she floated along behind them. "I'd forgot all about that. You can't go wherever you want, and you have to eat every day, and you have to be careful of all sorts of things… I don't mean to sound rude, but are you sure you don't want to just die and get on with it? It's ever so much better. And you could all come visit me whenever you wanted."

"I think we're sure, Myrtle," Harry answered, amused and trying not to show it. "There are advantages to being in a solid physical body, you know."

Draco's eyes flicked up to his, the tattoo on Harry's hip flared with sudden heat, and Harry felt as if he'd walked into a wall. The last time he'd seen that look in Draco's eyes, Draco had been sliding to his knees in front of him, water streaming down his throat and running in rivulets over his chest. It lasted as long as it took Harry to register Draco's expression; then Draco's eyes were veiled again, glancing away. Harry swallowed hard and kept moving, watching for wards as he went.

It took them nearly an hour to traverse the walkway, pausing to check for wards, curses, and whatever arcane things Draco was looking for as they went. By the time they reached the door, Harry felt as though he had a small sandstorm raging under his eyelids; he ached all over and was starting to get itchy from the sheer volume of magic they'd been making their way through. An insistent headache was hammering behind his eyes. Wanting to get finished, he made short but thorough work of the door and handed it over to Draco and Bill.

"What's the lock look like this time?" Fred asked him. He and George had got bored long ago and were playing catch with Pigwidgeon, who tumbled through the air in a puffy, noisy, deliriously excited ball of feathers.

Harry shook his head and ran his hand through his hair, probably making it stand on end and not caring. "Complicated. I can't tell for certain whether it opens to Parseltongue or something else."

"Parseltongue, it looks like," Bill said, rocking back on his heels. "But it's overlain with about six curses. Smetti to render the curse victim mute, Unhat to blister skin like an acid burn, Seres-her to fill the lungs with water. Khesef-at is like a bladeward that opens every artery close to the surface of the skin but without breaking the skin itself. Aapep is another burning curse but this one blisters the internal organs. An-her blinds the victim. Khesef-kemi turns their clothes into a shroud and wraps them around the victim's head and neck until they suffocate - as if you'd live that long anyway. Fuck me, when Salazar set out to curse something he didn't piss about, did he?"

"Why are all the curses on this side?" George asked, stuffing Pigwidgeon into the pocket of his robes.

"Well, that's the problem, isn't it?" Bill said grimly. "They aren't. They're set into the center of the door, so either way you come you'll have to untangle them. There's got to be a command word to dispel all of them at once but I don't dare try to figure out what it is and get it wrong. I'll have to take them down one at a time."

"How long will that take?" Harry asked.

"If I hadn't spent all these years breaking curses, we'd be here until the Yule Ball. As it is… give me a bit to figure out how they all fit together and then it'll only take a few minutes."

"Get on with it, then," Fred ordered good-naturedly. Bill made a face at him and turned back to the door, running the tip of his wand very, very carefully over the stone.

It was a good ten minutes before he gave a quiet, satisfied "Ah!" and began carefully breaking the curses themselves. Harry watched closely, trying to memorize incantations and wand movements, so involved in Bill's movements that it nearly didn't register with him when Bill sat back and wiped a hand over his forehead.

"All right, the curses are gone," he said. "Your go, Harry. Tell it to open."

Harry took a breath and began to open the door, the first soft hiss gliding out of his mouth - and a sudden steel-hard grip on his arm surprised him into silence. He turned to look questioningly at Draco, who looked distinctly unnerved.

"Potter. Find another way."

"I don't think there is one," Bill said curtly.

"Bill," Harry said softly. "Why, Draco?"

"Because every other door in the Chamber seems to open to Parseltongue and none of them were cursed. Because this hall is too long and unlocks from the other side. Hell, call it a gut feeling, I don't care, just don't use Parseltongue on that door."

"Speaks the Head of Slytherin House," George pointed out. Bill gave him an exasperated look.

"You think it's booby-trapped?" Harry asked.

"It's what I'd do," Draco said.

"Leave your best weapon in reserve and strike with it just as they think they've got to the easy part?"

"Or strike first with it and finish the game early, depending on which way your target is going."

Harry chewed on his lip and eyed the door. "Do you have any other ideas? There isn't exactly a doorknob."

"There must be something. Using brute force on it will trigger something nasty."

"Bill?" Harry asked.

Bill was already poking at the door with his wand, whispering incantations under his breath that in turn made parts of the door glow, spark, smoke, and smell weirdly like curry. After a few minutes he sat back on his heels, scowling at the stone. "I don't see another locking mechanism I recognize, magical or otherwise. Harry, if it's not Parseltongue that opens it, I've no idea what it could be."

"Would it open from the other side?" George asked.

"You mean could someone unlock it from there? Probably not," Bill told him.

There was a long, frustrated silence before Fred said philosophically, "Doesn't seem to be anything for it but to try, does there? Maybe if we're well-shielded and standing clear it'll be all right."

"You may be right," Harry said.

"This is a bad idea, Potter," Draco war