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

October, 2005

Percy's hands were shaking, splattering ink across the parchment. They'd been shaking since three in the morning when he was called out of bed by Minister Fudge himself. Something was caked under his fingernails; he was afraid to wash it out, for fear of what color the water would run.

"When was the last time you had any interaction with Augustus Rookwood?" he read mechanically.

There was a long silence, filled with the sound of waves and the cries of the gulls. "I don't know," Lucius said finally, in an oddly gentle voice. "I think it must have been the year Narcissa and I -"

"I don't know what to do," Percy said.

There was silence from across the table, not affronted but patient.

"People are dying," he said. "They aren't going to stop dying just because Cornelius Fudge tells them to. But, you know, he's not actually doing anything wrong. He can send those deaths to the Unspeakables instead of telling the Department of Magical Law Enforcement about them. He can have witnesses to crimes Obliviated if it best serves the interests of national security. Under the Blakely Act, the Minister for Magic has the authority to do those sorts of things. The Blakely Act was passed for a reason. It was passed to place clear boundaries on the Minister's powers to prevent abuses. It's a fair and rational act that provides good, sensible structure that balances the scope of power required for the Minister to effectively serve the interests of wizarding England with the constraints on power required so that no one man is ever the whole of the voice of the law. Minister Fudge hasn't done a single thing that would have caused Herodotus Blakely to lose an hour's sleep."

"And yet people are dying," Lucius said quietly, and in his voice was a strange fatalistic note like the one that had been in Percy's father's voice when he had explained to a very young Percy that pets didn't live as long as humans. Percy had reacted with anguished denial then, and he felt it well in him now.

"But they shouldn't be! That isn't what the law is meant to do! It's meant to be not following the rules that hurts people, not following them!" Percy's words rang hollow in his own ears, and something shifted unpleasantly in him as he wondered just how long ago he'd stopped believing them.

Lucius reached across the table, slid the parchment gently out from under Percy's hand, folded one edge of it to meet the other, and then opened it back up. "It's meant to be the Devil who cites Scripture for his own purposes, isn't it? And yet, God wrote them for His."

Percy looked up at him, blinking a little in the morning light.

Lucius folded the parchment again, then folded it diagonally, long fingers moving with the same absent deftness with which Percy had seen his brothers weave Jacob's Ladder between their fingers. "We talked about faith once, do you remember?"

"I remember."

The parchment folded and unfolded, folded and unfolded, wings unfurling from it like the wings of a snitch. "There comes a point when one must simply close one's eyes and step out into the dark. One must have faith that the dark is only a shadow, and that a handful of steps will bring one through to the light again."

"But I don't even know what direction to walk," Percy said, forcing words out through a throat that wanted to close. "I always thought I was standing in the only light there was. If it goes out…"

Lucius blew softly on the parchment and it took flight, an elegant paper crane that swirled upward on the breeze from the ocean and fluttered out the window. "There is never only one light. We tend to think there is, but we're so often proven wrong."

"Does it work the other way around? Is there never only one dark?"

"There's never only one dark," Lucius agreed, then smiled wryly and stacked his fingers in front of him. "Pretty platitudes, but I'm not sure they're helping, so let me speak more plainly. You have a fine mind, Mr. Weasley, and a good heart, and I speak as one who's spent far too much of my life around people who have neither. Let them guide each other. More importantly, let them guide Cornelius, if he'll hear you. You're quite right - Voldemort will not be stopped by petty bureaucrats with one eye on the next election. Someone must make Cornelius listen, and soon, before the fear and the death grow too deep to be uprooted."

Percy rubbed a hand across his eyes. His head was aching the way it had ached with the aftermath of tears when he was a child. "And if he won't hear me?"

"When you're playing chess and your opponent blocks your gambit, you move to another one. If Cornelius won't hear you, find someone who will, who's powerful enough to hurt Voldemort and not caught up in toadying to his superiors and his constituents. Remember that the queen is the most powerful piece on the board but not necessarily the one who wins the game, and that the Ministry has a habit of shunting valuable allies into dead-end positions." v Percy nodded, his thoughts already racing to who in the Ministry he could turn to, and in the back of his mind was a small, uncomfortable awareness of the games he had won by sacrificing his queen.

"There is always a way, child," Lucius said. "If you believe nothing else, believe that."

"I will," Percy answered.

He'd been afraid for too long. Time to remember that he was a Gryffindor.

 

November, 2005

"You're a right prat, mate, you know that?" someone said somewhere in the labyrinth of mist that surrounded Harry.

He pried his eyes open and blinked up at the ceiling, wincing as it swayed a little. There were odd, commingled shadows on it cast by lamps and the setting sun, dark interspersed with fading amber. "Yeah, I knew that," he croaked.

"Here," the voice said. Harry turned his head, squinting, to see Ron holding out a glass of water. "There's nothing in it. Madam Pomfrey said it wasn't time to give you another dose of whatever's had you knocked out all day."

Harry shifted unsteadily up onto his elbow and took a drink, then cleared his throat. "You here just to give me a get-well card?"

Ron snorted. "You and your ego wish," he said good-naturedly. "No, I've got things to tell you that I didn't want to trust to an owl."

Harry frowned and sat up, swinging his legs off the bed. His clothes were sticking uncomfortably to his skin, making him wince and squirm. "What's going on?"

Ron glanced back toward the ward doors. Poppy had put Harry in the far bed of a small six-bed isolation chamber, clearly too close to the main ward to suit Ron's purposes. A brief wave of Ron's wand settled a soundproofing charm over the door, and he turned back to Harry.

"First off, we can't find any trace of Will Rosier - we think that's the Rosier you sent back to the Ministry. And that worries me, because I've never seen you cast an Unforgivable before but I'd imagine that when you put someone under Imperius they bloody well stay put. It's not like he could have changed his mind and gone somewhere else, but I can't even find where in the Ministry grounds he might have Apparated to. It's like he hit a ward and disintegrated or something."

Harry reached for his glasses and fumbled them on, watching Ron spring into focus. "Could he have?"

"Not that anyone's been able to find, and if one of those wards had turned him into a red mist it'd be awfully hard to hide. I've talked to Kingsley and Mad-Eye and the only thing we can think of is that someone at the Ministry intercepted him and undercut your Imperius somehow." Ron picked up a spare glass from the bedside table and poured himself some water, frowning at it. "That or killed him and did some smooth shifting with the body, or changed him into a ferret and walked out with him in their pocket."

Harry rubbed a hand over his eyes. "Do you know who Voldemort's people at the Ministry are?"

Ron shook his head. "Not all of them. It was a damn sight easier right after the First War when everyone knew who to keep an eye on. Now… it's been a long time. Things have changed. People have changed, and mostly not for the better. It's too damn hard to keep track of whose loyalties are where even when you're just talking about Voldemort and the Ministry, and we don't know where or who Lucius Malfoy's people are at all. Well, most of them, anyway."

Harry snapped his head up to glare at Ron, then wished he hadn't as the room tilted a little around him.

Ron held up a hand. "Listen, mate, I didn't come here to get into that argument again. But there's something you should know about, and I swear this isn't anything against Malfoy - your Malfoy, I mean - it's just something you should know. Mad-Eye and Kingsley would have me on permanent administrative leave so fast it'd make my head spin if they knew I'd told you, too, so keep shut about it."

Harry frowned. "I will."

Ron looked down and picked at the knee of his trousers. "Right. Well, let me back up for a minute first, because I think you left Auror training before we got to this part. Stop me if this is all stuff you know, all right?"

"Ron," Harry said patiently.

"Right," Ron sighed. "You know, Harry, the thing about sex magic is that it's not really benign, not always. It's not like a bit of messing about with the things Fred and George sell from that sideline catalogue they don't dare tell Mum about. In the first place, it's a lot closer to Imperius than a lot of people are comfortable with."

Harry looked away, coloring at the thought of how whole-heartedly he could vouch for that. He'd been under Imperius and he'd been buried balls-deep inside Draco when that magic activated, and he knew full well which one would have got him to do anything Draco wanted.

"In the second place, no matter how much else there is to sex magic, at the end of the day you're learning how to stimulate nerve endings for maximum effect. If you're really good at it, you also learn how to stimulate them so there's as much pain mixed in with the pleasure as your partner wants to feel - Harry. Stay with me, mate."

Harry glared at him. "I am," he said, not entirely truthfully.

"But the point is that you can take that training and stimulate all those nerve endings for maximum effect in the wrong direction. It's not really sex magic anymore, just like you can sharpen a Protego and use it to shear through another spell and it's not quite a shield anymore; but if you're about to be tortured and you have your choice between someone trained in the Dark Arts and someone trained in sex magic, be told and choose the bloke with the Durmstrang education. Sex magic proper might only work if you and the caster have the hots for each other, but if it isn't quite sex magic anymore…"

"And Draco's trained in sex magic and Dark Arts both," Harry observed, not entirely sure that he liked the direction the conversation was taking.

"Right, so you really don't want him on the other side of the wand aimed at you. Well, any more than you already have been, I mean."

"But he didn't use it against me this afternoon."

"Did you throw everything you had at him?" Ron asked.

Harry shook his head. "No. But I threw enough of it at him that that doesn't make me feel much better."

"Besides, I'm told he did use it on you, or something like it."

Sliding his glasses up, Harry rubbed at his eyes. "That wasn't sex magic, Ron, that was Malfoyness. He knows how fucking beautiful he is, he knows how much I want him, and I hate him for using it but I understand why he did."

"So do I," Ron said unexpectedly. Harry glared indignantly at him, and he shrugged. "Hey, mate. Boy Who Lived, Chosen One, fucker-up of Dark Lords since 1981. You're scary when you're pissed off. If I thought spreading my legs for you would stop you ripping my guts out through my nose, I'd do it too."

Clearly Ron had been talking to Fred and George. Harry sighed and leaned back against the wall at the head of the bed. "What's all this in aid of, Ron? You said it wasn't anything against Draco, so what is it?"

"There are rumors starting to trickle down to the rank and file, things Percy must have known about months ago, and I've been doing some digging around myself. The first thing I found out is that the Department of Magical Law Enforcement doesn't hear a bloody tithe of what we should about Death Eater activity, even the killings. Someone in Fudge's office has done a damn efficient job of covering them up, routing the investigation to the Unspeakables instead of to the Aurors and keeping witnesses quiet with bribes and well-placed memory charms. I get more information from the Order by a long shot than I do through official channels in the Ministry."

"What the fuck?" Harry said, helpless and frustrated. "Why is he -"

"You know he never wanted to admit that You-Know-Who was back. Then after a while it started looking like he was right, didn't it? Especially after what happened with Dumbledore. You remember what a bloody field day the press had with that."

Oh, God, did he. The front pages had been full of Dumbledore's pictures and his own, Dumbledore painted as the next Grindelwald, Harry as the noble but misguided youth heroically overcoming a lifetime of manipulation and thought control to speak up for justice and righteousness. He'd been snowed under with congratulatory mail for months; the Aurors on protective detail at the twins' flat had seen to most of it, and Harry had burned what was left - and every copy of the Prophet he could come by. Overnight, it seemed that the entire wizarding world had known all along that the Second Rising of Voldemort was a ploy, a bogeyman meant to buy Dumbledore power through fear. "I remember," he said harshly.

"And you know what Fudge is like. I think he really believes that everything that's happening can be chalked up to a score of teenagers and Knockturn Alley discontents playing dress-up with robes and masks, and if it really were just that, the Unspeakables probably would be able to handle it themselves. But it's more than that. A lot more. You just have to know where to listen."

Harry shook his head. "I've lost the connection with sex magic, here, mate."

"Well, you'll get it back in a minute, and then you'll wish you hadn't," Ron said grimly. "Well, or else I'll wish you hadn't. Somebody somewhere is going to be damn sorry for it, at any rate -"

"Ron!"

"A family of Muggle-borns was killed in Hightower this afternoon," Ron told him, transfiguring his own water to a stiff cup of steaming tea with a tap of his wand. "Elderly couple and a grown son and daughter. Both parents were Muggle-born and the son was a Squib. From all accounts it was a bloody mess, literally - the inside of the house was almost destroyed, and someone had blasted a sort of shallow crater in the floor of the living room and dumped body parts into it, four people in about thirty pieces. The parents' wands and the daughter's were lined up at the edge of the crater. When the Unspeakables did a Priori Incantatem it turned out that the daughter's wand had been used to… well, to do what was done to the parents and the brother."

"Jesus," Harry said, reaching for his water with a hand that wasn't as steady as he would have liked.

"By all accounts the daughter wouldn't have been able to use dark magic that advanced if you'd set her down with a My First Grimoire and the Floo address of a patient Death Eater. But her wand was used on her family, her mother's wand was used on her, and her father's wand was used to cast a variant of an advanced sex magic charm that causes the person it's used on a mild amount of pain if they don't do exactly as they're told. This variant would have caused a degree of pain right below Cruciatus," Ron said, and took a gulp of his tea when his voice cracked a bit. "See, the disadvantage of Cruciatus is that it's hard to get anyone to do anything, or even to listen to you, if they're writhing on the ground screaming. With this spell, they can still move - for a while, at any rate - and they can take away some of the pain by doing as they're told. They don't know who it was cast on exactly - the most logical choice is the daughter, but like I said, she couldn't have cast the curses - but we do know that whoever cast it was highly knowledgeable about sex magic and dark magic both. Now, who do we know that fits that description?"

Harry felt himself pale. "Ron, Draco's been -"

" - having the crap beat out of him by you, then flat on his back in the hospital wing, drugged to the gills, out on the main ward where Poppy's had to look at him every time she's had to examine some malingering first-year who's been into the Skiving Snackboxes so he can go back and tell his friends how banged up the two of you are," Ron finished. "Yeah, I've seen him too. At this point I think you're more likely to have been able to get out of bed, Apparate to Hightower, and kill a family of Muggle-borns than he is, and I have to tell you, Harry, that's saying something right now."

Harry frowned. "You saw him? What did he say?"

Ron snickered. "You should give him that stuff all the time. He was too drugged to be nasty. He asked after you," he added, grudgingly.

Not knowing what to say, Harry looked away. "Did he say anything else?"

"Pass on his undying love, you mean? No, he just said 'Oh, God, not you. Tell me if Potter's all right and then go away.'"

Harry's face heated. "No, did he say anything about - "

"Ah, Professor Potter, I see you're feeling better. Mr. Weasley, good evening."

Harry looked up to see Gerald Price skirting fastidiously around a stray sunbeam on the floor, flicking his robes out of the light in a way that Harry had heretofore only seen Draco manage without looking like an utter girl. Ron ground his teeth.

"Price," he said shortly, shifting in his chair to look back at the solicitor. "What can I do for you?"

Price gave a brief, wintry smile and stopped in a pool of shadow. There was a wide beam of failing amber light shining through the window between him and Ron, separating them like a pane of glass. "I've been informed that you wish to question Professors Potter and Malfoy."

"I'm visiting a friend in hospital, Price," Ron ground out.

Price tilted his head like a curious cat. "And which friend would that be, Mr. Weasley? Professor Potter or Professor Malfoy?"

Ron rubbed a hand over his eyes. "Look, I tried to talk to Malfoy, all right? He's too bloody drugged to make sense. Don't worry, I'm not here to haul him off to Azkaban."

"No, you're not," Price agreed almost absently, annoying Ron fiercely. "And, of course, there are as yet no restrictions on your contact with Professor Potter -"

"As yet?" Ron exploded, shoving himself to his feet.

" - but I really must ask that all future contact with Professor Malfoy be in the presence of counsel. His counsel."

"Price, I said ten bloody words to him on the way in to visit Harry -"

"And passed considerably more words than that with Madam Pomfrey, I'm given to understand," Price said. "Again, without benefit of counsel."

"I didn't know I had to have a bloody lawyer present to ask Madam Pomfrey two or three questions."

"Yes, you did," Price told him quietly. "Mr. Weasley, you must understand - however honorable your intentions may be, and I believe that you are an honorable man, the fact is that the Ministry of Magic has a long and inglorious history of taking a mile if given an inch. If I recall correctly, Professor Potter's own godfather spent a dozen years in prison without so much as being questioned under Veritaserum, let alone a trial by the Wizengamot, and Rubeus Hagrid was sent back to Azkaban on the suspicion of being under suspicion. If the Ministry should choose to follow this same course of action with Professor Malfoy, you yourself may find that your authority over this investigation is nowhere near as extensive as you believe. I do not intend to give the Ministry, or you, the inch it would require to send Professor Malfoy to prison for nothing at all."

There was a long silence before Ron rubbed at his eyes and turned back to Harry. "I have to get back to London, mate. But listen - I've been thinking about what you said, and thinking about what Hermione said, and it seems pretty clear I'm not the only person who's thinking along those lines. The Ministry throwing Malfoy in Azkaban is a long way from being your only worry."

Harry fought down an instinctive surge of fury that wasn't directed at Ron. "I haven't forgot either," he said. "Thanks, Ron."

Poppy came in as Ron was going out, looking rather surprised to see Price there. "You can go, Harry," she said briskly. "Unless something still hurts?"

"No," Harry said as Price murmured something polite and left. "I'm a bit dizzy still but that'll pass. What about Draco?"

Poppy paused in the middle of running her wand in front of his chest and gave him a sharp look. "Draco will spend another day in bed sleeping off the after-effects of what you did to him."

"Can I see him before I leave?"

"No. He's so full of healing and soporific potions that if you cut him he'd bleed chartreuse, not to mention that he doesn't seem to have slept more than three hours a night since the two of you got back. He's out like a candle and you're not to wake him." She moved back so that he could get off the bed and slide into his shoes. "You know, Mr. Potter, just for future reference, the time to be solicitous of someone is before you've put ligature burns on his lungs, not afterward."

Harry winced. "I know," he muttered, trying fruitlessly to straighten and de-wrinkle his shirt. "Poppy… when you were examining him, could you tell if the Hereditus charm has started affecting him? Only you said it'd take a few weeks, but he didn't eat dinner last night, and he…"

Poppy folded her arms and looked at him, and he wondered if the sharp pity in her eyes was for him or Draco. "I also said that the charm was for use on heirs who had to be dragged kicking and screaming back to the family seat," she reminded him. "Not on a confused and unhappy young man caught between the parents he adores and a persuasive lover, facing a dozen equally necessary and mutually exclusive ways of doing the right thing."

Harry sat down hard on the bed, weak and shaky from the after-effects of Poppy's - Draco's - potions. "Fuck. So it has started affecting him."

With a soft sound of exasperation, Poppy waved her hands in the air. "I don't know, Harry. I won't know for a few days at least. Maybe the boy's just tired and under stress. Stop hovering over him and let him breathe - and you can start by going to your rooms and going to bed. I'm not going to make excuses to Severus if you're up all night and too tired to teach in the morning."

Classes. Jesus, he'd somehow managed to forget. It was his day to teach Defence, too. It was surreal and a little unsettling to think of getting up in front of a class and lecturing as if nothing had happened, as if nothing had changed. He really needed to go over his lecture notes. "Right. Thanks, Poppy."

"Let's not let it happen again, shall we?" She fixed him with a beady eye and hovered discreetly close as he stood. He wondered vaguely if she'd be able to catch him if he started to fall on his face.

"Don't worry," he said as he made for the door with Poppy trailing beside him. "I don't think Professor Snape will be in any great hurry to schedule any more demonstration duels."

"Well, this certainly wasn't his fault," Poppy said tartly. "All he did was assume that his Mister Goyle what are you doing?"

Startled, Harry glanced over to see Goyle straightening sharply with guilt written all over his face. He'd been leaning in, deep in some secretive conversation with Draco, who was sitting up precariously, pushing his hair back out of his face, and making a valiant attempt to glower at Poppy and Harry with eyes that wouldn't even come close to focusing.

"Sorry," Goyle said, giving Harry a none-too-friendly look. "Draco told me to -"

"If Potter can have his friends visit, so can I," Draco slurred. He looked awful, dark circles under his eyes that were nearly black against the pallor of his skin.

"Harry's in better shape than you are," Poppy told him tartly, suffering a filthy glare for it. "Lie back down this instant. And you, Gregory, if you're going to sit with him you will be silent and not let him talk either."

"Okay," Goyle said agreeably. He bent over, vanishing behind the bed for a moment, and straightened bearing a stack of what looked like Quidditch magazines. Tossing one to Draco, he shifted comfortably in his chair and began to read with every appearance of a man settling in for the night.

Harry opened his mouth to say something, anything, to Draco. Come to that, it was awfully tempting just to crawl into bed with him. Before he could do either, though, Poppy cleared her throat loudly and meaningfully. "Right," he said instead. "Good night, Poppy."

"Good night, Harry," she answered kindly, and he left without a backward glance.

The sky was turning deep lavender outside windows that sparkled with reflected firelight. Harry paused outside the hospital wing for a moment, considering, and then headed in the direction of his rooms. The corridors were mostly deserted, but he passed the occasional wide-eyed cluster of children who stared at him in unabashed fascination. Should have bloody Disillusioned myself, he thought in annoyance, and for an unpleasant minute wondered if they were staring at him because of the duel or because he had Yes, I've been doing Professor Malfoy branded on his forehead right across his scar.

He was very, very glad to reach his rooms. And even gladder that Dobby had restocked his liquor cabinet.

 

Remus settled comfortably into the couch and watched two flame-colored heads tilt together before the fire, poring over, of all things, the oldest version of Hogwarts: A History the twins had been able to charm out of Irma Pince. Fred frowned suddenly and set his fingertip on the page; George tilted his head, considering, and then nudged Fred's hand away. Apparently unconvinced, Fred grabbed George's hand and slapped it back down onto the book where his own had been before.

George wriggled his hand free and cuffed Fred in the side of the head. "You know we're back-ordered."

"Bladderwrack -"

" - isn't a stable substitute at extreme temperatures -"

" - which is why you -"

" - can't, because of the kelp."

"We'll ask Malfoy," Fred said with the air of someone a long way from giving up the argument.

"Find something, boys?" Remus asked over the top of his own book.

The twins rolled onto their sides and propped their heads on their hands, looking thoughtfully at him. "Remus, when Hogwarts: A History gets revised, who decides what ought to go in it?" Fred asked.

Remus lifted an eyebrow and thought for a minute. "Do you know, I've no idea. The Headmaster, I should imagine."

"Dumbledore then, last time," George said with a subtle and rather frightening edge to his voice. The twins, Remus knew, had gone to the Wizengamot with Harry, watched him testify, watched him fight to keep from breaking down, and were as implacable in their hatred of Albus Dumbledore as ever Molly and Arthur had been in their loyalty to him.

"Why? Was something important left out?"

George sat up and crossed his legs, leaning his elbows on his knees. Fred stayed where he was, spilling red-gold hair onto antique parchment. "We know of two places where Voldemort's used some sort of necromancy recently," George said in an easy, lecturing tone that made Remus hide a smile at the thought of the twins teaching. "The first is the Chamber of Secrets; the advantage there is obvious. The second was in the Dungeons. Why?"

"The obvious answer there," Fred noted, blithely taking over the lecture, "is that the Dungeons are isolated a bit from the rest of the castle, and there's four-score Slytherin kids and only one of Draco to stand in the way of an attack. Draco would sell himself and those students damned dearly, but even in the unlikely event that he didn't get stabbed in the back by Death-Eaters-in-training amongst the older kids, if he tried to stand and fight he'd be taken down by sheer weight of numbers within minutes."

"But Slytherins don't stand and fight unless they absolutely have to," George said. "If it were me, I'd have a secret passage from my chambers into the Slytherin common room, and in that passage I'd have enough gillyweed to keep a hundred children breathing through gills for days. If the need arose, I'd barricade the common room door, stuff gillyweed down those kids' throats, and shove them out into the lake, and then when I was sure they were out of reach I'd tear down the wards around the windows and flood the Dungeons floor to ceiling with freezing cold lake water."

"And if George has thought of that, you can be sure Draco has, and if Draco's thought of it then Voldemort probably has," Fred noted. "So what do you do when your opponent can use water for a weapon?"

"You send in things that can see in the dark and don't need to breathe. Things that can take an incredible amount of damage and still keep moving, just in case Draco does stand and fight. Things that can get past the wards and through the shadows to the Slytherin dormitories, and into Draco's rooms, before anyone's the wiser."

"But if you do have advance warning, what you do is rig a sleeper spell, right into the walls of the Dungeons, that can be triggered from a distance. You calculate how long it'll take the Dungeons to flood completely, and when that much time has passed, you trip the spell and freeze the water, instantly. All of Slytherin House, the Potions classroom, everything in the halls and on the stairs from about the Great Hall down would be encased in ice."

"And nothing reanimated by necromancy will have enough body heat to melt it and get free."

"The Dungeons are an obvious point of entry," Fred said. "If enough of the Slytherins are on your side, they open the gates and you establish a base within Hogwarts without a drop of blood shed. If they aren't on your side - well, Slytherin's too far away from the other dorms for anyone to hear screams, and if you kill the Head of House you've done for the staff member least likely to fight clean and most likely to turn in your grip and strike at your balls when you least expect it. But one way or another you have to get past the Head of House, and you have to get past the lake."

"And how do you do that?" George asked rhetorically.

"You do it by booby-trapping the wards or the sleeper spell or both," Fred said. "Making sure that if the Head of House tries to disable the window wards or trigger the spell, they'll blow up in his face. Lethally."

"Dear God," Remus said. "Have you told Harry and Draco about this?"

"Well, we've rather been making this up as we go," George said with a grin. "But what made us think of it was a story here that as best we can remember isn't in the current version." He flipped back a couple of pages. "In 1418 there was a huge brawl in the Dungeons - it was Slytherins against Ravenclaws back then, with Gryffindor and Hufflepuff off in the wings placing bets on the outcome. Somehow, no one's quite sure how, some combination of spells managed to put a slow leak in the window wards. The Slytherins woke up the next morning to half an inch of ice on the floor. They were all zipping through the dungeons on skates, and a class full of Hufflepuffs on their way down to their Potions O.W.L.s came a purler coming off the stairs and had to sit their exams from the hospital wing."

"But we sit O.W.L.s the first week in June," Fred pointed out. "Even in a cold summer it's not cold enough in the Dungeons to freeze half an inch of water on the floor, not without some sort of magical intervention; the book says the Slytherins were as surprised by it as anyone else, and their Head of House doesn't sound like the type to do something like that as a joke. It's possible that whatever put a leak in the wards activated the sleeper spell too."

"Or that the leak itself did, and the water didn't freeze on the spot because the spell was waiting until a complete breach would have filled the Dungeons."

"So we're pretty sure the sleeper spell is there; the first step is to see if it or the ward has been tampered with -"

" - and the second is to make it so they can't be tampered with -"

" - and the only question is how to do it," Fred finished. "Can we tie them to Slytherin's Head of House, assuming they aren't already? No, because if Malfoy dies in the first attack no one else will be able to trigger them."

"I bet Harry'd be able to," George said gloomily. "I bet if Malfoy's killed Harry's going to be able to open a tunnel to Hell and dump every living Death Eater down it in a thick red sludge."

Remus winced. "Let's hope it doesn't come to that, shall we? But you're right. There might be a way to set up dummy wards so that any saboteur would wind up tampering with the wrong ones."

"Right, and if -" Fred began, but was cut off by a tap at the window. Frowning, Remus got up and opened it so that the owl outside could flutter in. He'd half expected the note to be addressed to the twins, but it wasn't.

"Now, who would be owling me?" Remus wondered aloud, sliding a finger between parchment folds and popping open the seal.

Dear Remus, the letter read, and almost before he'd consciously identified the handwriting Remus had thrown the letter down onto the table and slapped a containment spell around it so strong that the letter glowed with a faint green light. His heart pounding in a way that was certainly unpleasant and at his age quite possibly unhealthy, Remus stepped back.

The twins bolted up from the hearthrug and came to stand beside him, pinning him between them, drawing their wands and staring apprehensively at the letter. "Remus? Who's it from?" Fred asked.

"Peter," Remus said shortly.

"What?" the twins yelped in unison.

"Peter or someone who can imitate his handwriting very well. Now be still for a minute and let me look at this letter."

Fred and George fell obediently silent as Remus ran a series of detection tests on the letter, first for dark magic and then for contact-poison potions. None of the tests were positive, but he still had no intention of touching it again until Harry had looked at it. Holding it open on the table with a quick charm, he leaned as far over it as he dared and started reading.

Dear Remus,

I have an idea that you'd rather I didn't call you that, but it was true once, you know. Sadly, to everything there is a season, and friendships fade like everything else, no matter how much we might wish otherwise.

You don't need to worry that I've written to try to recruit you to the Dark Lord's side. There are others who are far better at arguing his cause than I am - talk to young Draco about Muggleborns sometime, he's very passionate and quite persuasive on the topic - and I don't flatter myself that you'd listen to me if I tried. I'm not even proposing that Harry and my Lord set aside their differences long enough to deal with a common enemy; even as good-natured and forgiving a boy as Harry probably has his limits.

I can almost see you there, you know, grinding your teeth and glaring like you'd like to grab my head and beat it against the point. You always did that.

Little personality quirks aside, though, you've always been a fair and decent man, old friend. That's why I spared you when I gave James and Sirius to the Dark Lord, though I'd never dream of invoking a wizard's debt for it. I'm writing now because I think that you and I, just between the two of us, can come to an understanding that would greatly benefit both our sides at no cost to either. A one-time deal, so to speak. My Lord wants to know where Lucius Malfoy is. Our information on the subject has been vague and contradictory, and the one person most likely to know for sure is right there in the castle with you. (Do keep an eye on him, by the way. Rumour has it that it would kill young Harry if he should happen to disappear again, and in spite of everything, I do like knowing there's something left of James in the world.) You find out for us where Lucius is hiding, and we'll take care of him - no questions asked, no further involvement.

We know what he's planning, Remus. So does Draco, mostly, though he doesn't know as much as he thinks he does and I don't imagine he's told you what he does know. If you listen to nothing else I say, for old affection's sake listen to this: if he's allowed to go through with his plans we'll all be sorry, and your side most of all.

A one-time exchange of information, what do you say? Think about it if you'd like. Discuss it with Harry and Severus. I'll even give you some first. Let me see, what can I tell you? How about this: you've got company, Remus. An old acquaintance of Harry's, as a matter of fact. The architect of that fascinating little gift in the Forbidden Forest, and still on the grounds. If you find him - and even for you lot that's going to be no mean feat - kill him, right then, like you would a cobra who'd got into your rooms in the middle of the night. Don't stay your hand for a minute out of misguided mercy or hope of advantage. He isn't quite human anymore.

Such a shame about Percy Weasley, isn't it? You think you know a man and then he does something like this. I don't know how the family will ever show their faces again.

Your friend, still,

Peter

Remus waved his wand, rolled the parchment back up, and stood staring silently at it for a long time, lost in thought and a distinctly bitter swirl of emotion.

"Are you going to show it to Harry?" Fred asked tonelessly.

"In the morning," Remus answered. "I rather think he's had a bad enough day already."

"Percy really loved that bloody rat of his." George's voice was shaking. "Ron too. Ron used to let Scabbers sleep on his pillow."

"How fucking dare he?" Fred said. "How dare he talk like that about us?"

"Peter has a way of making people regret showing him friendship," Remus said. "I wonder if he'll make Voldemort regret it too, one of these days."

"Do you think he was telling the truth?" Fred asked.

"About someone infiltrating the grounds," George added.

Remus shook his head slowly. "I've no idea."

"What are you going to do?" the twins asked in unison.

Remus raised his wand and carefully levitated the letter across the room, through the bedroom door, and into the drawer of his desk, following it to ward the desk like a Gringotts vault. "I'm going to have a drink," he said finally. "And then I'm going to do quite a lot of thinking, in the hopes that when I go to see Severus first thing in the morning I'll have something useful to tell him."

Ice tinkled behind him and he turned to see the twins hopefully holding out their empty glasses. Remus gave them a wry smile and went to the drinks cabinet. There was probably a limit to how much thinking one could get done while sitting on the couch half-buried under furious, disconsolate Weasleys, but whatever that limit might be, Remus intended to stretch it a bit. And it might not hurt, after all, to talk through his thoughts a bit.

"Right, then," he said, settling down onto the soft cushions. "Let me tell you about Peter…"

 

Close on three in the morning, Harry slammed the book in front of him closed with a dull thud that echoed unnervingly in the empty library.

He'd had a lousy day, and now he was having a lousy night. He was drunker than he should be, tired and frustrated, and nothing he'd looked in even came close to telling him how to break the Hereditus charm; in all the library, Restricted and open sections, he hadn't found more than ten books that even discussed it. He'd used every search word he could think of, filled the library with darting, glittering sparks until the place looked like he'd Accio'd every firefly in the three kingdoms, spent two hours yanking likely-looking books out of the shelves whether the searching sparks had tagged them or not, and finally been reduced to pulling books off the shelves at random. Nothing.

"Fuck," he said harshly, and the library caught the word and sent it back to him, chilled with wood and cold stone. "I need Hermione."

Hermione, the library whispered back, and for a moment he could almost see her across from him, bushy hair almost concealing her face as she bent over a book. Strange how, in his head, he almost never saw Hermione as a grown woman - always a schoolgirl, too young to look so serious, engrossed in reading or bent over a parchment scribbling furiously. He needed her help with this. More, he wanted her, wanted her calmness and her acceptance, her unwavering conviction that there was an answer to be found.

Sometimes Harry wondered if he'd just stopped, somehow, at the age of sixteen.

He shoved the book away and rubbed his hands over his face, trying to clear his head. He'd had far too much scotch in an attempt to put himself to sleep, and it wasn't helping now either. Fucking purebloods - they had a stranglehold on the wizarding world, controlling half the finances, controlling the flow of information, and Harry couldn't even find the counterspell to the Hereditus charm because it didn't suit their purposes. That had to be it. There had to be a counterspell, and Harry just couldn't find it because the goddamned pureblood oligarchy didn't want their sons wriggling out of their grasps. He picked up his wand and tilted the point toward himself, considering. He hated sobriety charms - they made his head feel like one of Hagrid's monsters had got trapped in it and was trying to claw its way out - but he had another stack of books to get through. On a different topic this time but probably every bit as uninformative, the books towered on the table in front of him, dust-covered folios stacked haphazardly on top of each other, occasionally muttering in discontent and shifting in a way that threatened to bring the whole stack crashing down. So far, none of them had held anything that seemed even remotely informative about that bloody unnerving portal in the Forest.

No one had come back to it yet. No one had triggered it. Harry was becoming increasingly nervous about just leaving it there, watched and warded or no, but until he had a good solid understanding of what it was, the odds were that it would be more dangerous to tamper with it than to leave it be.

Hereditus charms. Portals. Harry wanted the world's largest time-turner so he could go back and strangle Merope Gaunt in her cradle. Nothing personal against the wretched woman, obviously, but -

Hermione, the darkness whispered to him, and gave a high, rancid giggle.

Harry shot out of his chair, casting twice before he'd even got to his feet - a sobriety charm, flooding his head with pain, and another that slammed every door and window in the room to and shielded them against being opened. Whatever it was that had laughed like that, it was trapped in the library with him now. Moving quickly out of the dim circle of lamplight, Harry Disillusioned himself, cast a silent charm that would augment his hearing, and held still, monitoring the room with every available sense.

For almost a minute, there was nothing; only silence. Then he heard it: a soft, dry, furtive scrape, as if something was moving in the library that couldn't quite work its feet correctly. Harry gripped his wand tighter and listened, trying to pinpoint the source of the sound. It was like trying to locate a sound underwater, with the stone walls and marble floors casting odd echoes around the room.

If that's bloody Peeves, I'm going to…

He hadn't seen Peeves in months.

Keeping to the shadows, Harry began moving, darting a glance around the end of the bookshelves next to him before he slipped into the niche between shelves and glanced upward through the wrought-iron grill of the catwalk six feet above his head. A row of bookshelves ran up the walls from the catwalk toward the ceiling, vanishing into shadow, the air around them still and unmoving.

A sudden rustling sound swept through the library, books shivering like a flock of startled birds taking flight. Harry's head snapped around toward the source of the disturbance, but the wave spread too quickly, parchment all through the library fluttering in distress before falling abruptly silent.

I know you're here, he thought. Whatever you are, you fucking well didn't come here to check out The Pocket Book of Cheering Charms. Grow a pair and show yourself.

He slipped out of the niche and into the next one, ears straining. Something flickered in the corner of his eye, a shadow passing quickly in front of torchlight, and he whirled toward it. There was a large expanse of room between him and that torch, open and dotted with tables and chairs. Harry cast a quick charm, clamped his wand between his teeth, and pushed off the floor, levitating himself up until he could catch hold of the catwalk and slip his fingers through the wrought iron, leaving his robes on the floor behind him. He brought his legs up, cast again, pulled his wand out of his mouth and tucked his loosened tie down his shirt, and carefully began crawling upside-down along the bottom of the catwalk, over the tops of the bookcases, toward where the shadow had been.

He was nearly to the torch by the time he encountered a staircase. Cautiously, he swung himself around the edge of the catwalk and up to crouch at the top of the stairs, surveying the library below him. The lamp at his table was still glowing, and two or three torches, but that was all, subdued points of light in a deep shadow-well.

There was nothing there. Or, more accurately, nothing that Harry could see - even if he could feel it, a presence foul enough that it was almost a physical stench. Harry couldn't see it, he couldn't hear it, he was exhausted and still shaky and in pain, and for a moment he seriously considered letting go of the wardings around the doors and windows and letting whatever was in that library leave under flag of truce.

A soft scrape floated to him as he made his way silently down the stairs, close enough now to be identifiable as a strangely clumsy footstep. Harry paused and listened, watching the shadows.

The sudden clarion shriek of a black-bound folio and a dizzying burst of nausea was the only warning he had before someone smashed into him and sent him flying over the side of the stairs. He landed on a table, skidded backward over it, and slammed hard into a bookshelf, rolling clear as books rained down nearly on top of him. Three of the grimoires, secured to the shelf by thick chains, jolted to a halt inches above the ground and began to scream like sirens, convulsing on the ends of their chains. Scrambling to his feet, Harry flung out a wide-range Stupefy. The light flickered again as something darted between him and it, dodging his spell, and that nerve-grating, high-pitched giggle filled the library again, cutting through even the clamoring of the books. His skin was burning unpleasantly where his invisible opponent had touched him, as if he'd fallen into stinging nettle; cursing silently, Harry dodged away from the shelves and out between the tables, staying low and wishing desperately that Hagrid's tracking spell worked on stone.

The grimoires fell abruptly silent, cut off in mid-cry, leaving a silence behind them so thick that Harry's breathing was loud and harsh in his own ears and the soft rustle of his clothes against his skin was unnerving and distracting as he moved. He crept forward in the direction that he thought his attacker had taken, chafing at his own pace and uncomfortably aware that he'd got the crap kicked out of him twelve hours earlier and now was running on adrenaline and bloody-mindedness. Where are you, you bastard, come on…

A high, bright ting sound rang in the silence, the sound of something small and metal dropping onto the marble floor. Harry turned partly toward it - but only partly, and so he caught the sudden stirring in the air out of the corner of his eye and whirled back to see the Dark Mark forming out of mist at the end of the row of tables, glowing sickly green and sparkling with bladewards spinning in its depths.

"Shit," Harry said, and the snake lashed out of the skull's mouth, flying toward him, sending tables spinning through the air to crash into the bookshelves. Harry ducked and levitated a table into its path. The snake sheared through it, hailing splinters and wood chunks down onto Harry; but the table slowed it down, and just as it struck at Harry's torso, jaws gaping wide around bladeward fangs, Harry blasted it with a Finite Incantatem cast strong enough to bring down an Unforgivable. The Mark burst apart with a high shriek of strained magic - but in the moment that it had distracted him, something had torn through the hold he'd put on the main library doors, and the slamming of wood on stone echoed with a boom as the doors were flung wide. Harry scrambled to his feet and raced out the door after the presence he could dimly sense receding.

Coming out the doors, he tripped over the prone form of Irma Pince, nearly came down with his full weight on Argus Filch just behind her, and caught himself with his hands on the corridor wall just in time to keep from smashing into it glasses-first.

Regaining his balance, he glanced quickly up and down the long corridor. It was empty, and he couldn't feel any trace of that foul, unsettling presence. Cursing between his teeth, he bent to see if Irma and Filch were all right. A quick pass with his wand told him they were only unconscious. He straightened again, biting his lip and trying to figure out which way his attacker had gone. To the left, if it was trying to get out of the castle.

If it was trying to get out of the castle.

"Draco," he said, and ran.

 

Harry slammed the door open and skidded onto the ward, sliding on the polished stone.

The candle on the table beside Draco's bed was the only light on the ward stronger than the moonlight. In its glow Harry could see Draco curled onto his side under the sheets, pale hair falling in a tumble over his face and the pillow, breathing slowly and evenly. Goyle was still in the chair beside the bed; he'd transfigured it into a large puffy armchair, or Draco had, and he was twisted into it in an uncomfortable-looking huddle, snoring softly. There was no other sound in the entire ward, and no sign that anything had been disturbed.

Harry raked a hand through his hair, swore under his breath, and went cautiously over to Draco's bed. A quick pass with his wand told him that the only curses, hexes, or dark magic in the area bore Harry's own residual signature. He bit his lip, cautiously relieved.

When he looked up, Goyle was watching him, eyes dark and still in the candlelight, and Harry almost jumped out of his skin.

"Jesus Christ, Goyle," was all he could manage. His heart, which had just started to slow down, was back to trying to leap through his rib cage.

"Something wrong?" Goyle asked, his eyes flicking warily down to Harry's wand.

"Have you been in here all night?" Harry whispered. Goyle nodded. "And nothing's come in or out?"

"Just you," Goyle said. "And Madam Pomfrey, a couple of times. Why?"

"There was something in the library just now," Harry said. "Or someone, I don't know. It got past me and I thought it might be on its way up here."

Goyle frowned and reached into his sleeve, toying with the hilt of his wand. "Something bad?"

"Something bad," Harry confirmed.

Goyle eyed him thoughtfully for a minute, then gave a soft hrmph sound. "You better stay here for the rest of the night, then. We can wake Madam Pomfrey up and send her to tell Professor Snape."

Harry was already moving backward toward the door. "I can't. I have to get something from Remus Lupin. Listen, though - send Poppy to the Headmaster anyway. Just don't leave Draco alone, not even for a minute."

"Potter, you're not safe either," Goyle pointed out. "And Draco couldn't float a feather without blowing something up right now even if he were awake, and I won't be much help against something sent to kill one or the other of you."

"I know," Harry said tightly. "I'll be back soon. I don't have time to argue right now."

Goyle nodded reluctantly and reached for the bell-pull beside Draco's bed.

 

Remus opened the door almost before Harry had finished knocking, in pajamas and bathrobe but not looking particularly sleepy. "Harry? What is it?"

Harry brushed past him into the sitting room. "I need the Marauder's Map, Remus."

Remus raised an eyebrow and vanished into the bedroom with a commendable turn of speed, returning a moment later with the Map in one hand and Crookshanks in the other. He set the map on the table and the cat on the floor. "Run and get Fred and George," he told Crookshanks. "Quick, now."

"Aren't they here?" Harry asked without thinking as he bent over the map. "I solemnly swear I am up to no good."

"They do have a room of their own, you know," Remus answered dryly, moving a lamp onto the table. "What are we looking for?"

"It's probably gone by now," Harry said. "Damn it. We're looking for someone or something that snuck into the library and almost gutted me like a sturgeon."

Remus glanced sharply at him. "How long ago?"

"I don't know. After it got past me I ran up to the infirmary, was there about two minutes, and then ran down here. Remus, is there some way to circumvent the Marauder's Map? To make it so you don't show up on it?"

Remus shook his head. "The detection magic was your father's doing. There might be a way, but you'd have to know something about the map and its magic. Hell, you'd have to know that it exists, and how many people do?"

"Peter Pettigrew," Harry answered. "Snape, and Voldemort might have scavenged it out of his head when Snape was still spying. I don't know who else. God damn it, I don't see anything!"

"Harry?"

"Remus?"

"Fred, George, get over here," Harry said without looking up. "See if you see anything on the map that looks like it might have turned itself invisible and been lurking in the library."

The twins came to lean over the table, instantly awake, the shoulders of identical bathrobes pressed together. "Hard to use the map for this," George muttered.

"Too right it is," Remus agreed. "It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. The dorms alone -"

Harry glanced at the infirmary. Poppy was gone, ascending the stairs toward Snape's office, and Draco and Goyle were alone on the ward. "Damn it. If there's anyone here who's not a student or staff, they're not showing up on the map."

"Did whoever it was say anything?"

"Only once, but I didn't recognize the voice," Harry told Remus. "It… it said Hermione's name."

The twins looked at each other, troubled. "Hermione's? Why?" Fred asked.

Harry swallowed and shook his head. "I said her name before, out loud, that I wish she'd been there to help me. I thought it was an echo, until it said her name again. Shit. There's nothing on the map and nothing's gone in or out of the wards. I would have felt it."

"How?" George asked.

"There's a monitoring charm that tells me. It's cast on the Headmaster when he takes office, but when Snape became Headmaster he cast it on me too. Maybe Draco as well, I don't know." Harry was itching to scour the damned building himself, turn it upside down and roust every student and staff member out of bed if he had to. "Listen, the three of you stay here and keep an eye on the map. Come tell me if anything shows up. I'm going to -"

An icy breeze touched the back of his neck, making him shiver, and he spun to see the Grey Lady hovering behind him. Weightless, her waist-length hair floated around her face like drifting lake-grass, and eyes that had been dark in the year of the Great Fire met Harry's with quiet, unnerving amusement. "I've a message for you from Severus," she said in her low, oddly-accented voice. "He says you're to stay where you are and let us find whatever attacked you."

"Us?" Harry asked.

"The ghosts and the portraits."

Harry was already shaking his head. "Whatever attacked me, it was well and truly Disillusioned."

"Not wearing an invisibility cloak?" Remus asked.

"No. It would have come off or come open."

"That will hide it from the portraits if it's very clever, but not from us." The Grey Lady lifted a hand and passed it across his forehead a few inches from his skin, stroking his hair back out of his eyes with an unnerving, invisible touch. "We have long memories, Harry Potter, and for hundreds of years we've had nothing but time. You'd be surprised at what we've had time to learn."

"Wait!" Harry blurted as she began to thin like smoke on the breeze. "Do you know what happened to Peeves?"

She solidified a little again, enough for him to see a startlingly Malfoy-like smirk on her face. "Severus happened to him. Peeves was… unwise, and Severus has never been indulgent. Stay here for a while. We'll find whatever attacked you, if it's here to be found."

There was a rush of cold and the sudden sense of the room being emptier than it had been before, and she was gone.

"There's nothing in the castle but the students and staff," Remus said quietly.

Harry shook his head, turning to stare down at the map, mentally dividing the Hufflepuff wing into quadrants and systematically examining each in turn. "And I can't believe this was any of them. It felt wrong, Remus, when it got near me I almost wanted to vomit, and that's not the sort of thing you can hide from someone who sees you three or four times a week. It felt like that portal in the forest, almost."

"Are you going to stay here, then?" George asked, sounding as if he already knew the answer.

"What do you think?" Harry answered shortly. "I'll be back as soon as I can. The three of you -"

"Blimey," Fred said. "How did he get here so fast?"

Harry blinked, derailed. "Who?"

The twins gave each other a meaningful look. George tapped on the edge of the map, pulling Harry's gaze back to the infirmary. A large number of very unpleasant emotions all hit Harry at once, with considerable force.

"Unless he was here already," he said grimly, and shot out the door toward the infirmary.

The ward was still dim when he got there. He didn't know what he'd expected, but it probably wasn't Goyle settled into the armchair as if nothing had happened, while Draco…

While Draco nestled back into the arms wrapped securely around him from behind, looking even paler in contrast to Blaise Zabini's dark skin.

Harry ground his teeth. "Goyle, how the hell did he get here?" he hissed.

"He," Zabini said pointedly, not opening his eyes, "got haled out of bed in the middle of the night by his former Head of House because Greg sent up the flare for reinforcements, there apparently being no one at Hogwarts either of them trusts to cover Draco's arse while he can't defend himself. He would now like things to be quiet so that he can get back to sleep."

Harry opened his mouth for what would probably have been an unwise retort and suddenly the temperature in the infirmary plummeted fifty degrees. A thin skim of frost skated over the floor around his feet, cracking and feathering with an almost-imperceptible sound. "What the fuck?" he said instead, his breath clouding in front of him.

Zabini lifted his head, frowning, and bundled Draco more securely in the blankets. "Goyle, fetch me the covers on that bed across the way," he ordered. "Who the hell did this?"

"Severus did," Poppy said from behind Harry. "Everywhere but in the dormitories. Whatever attacked you might have been invisible, but if it wants to hide in the castle, at some point it's going to have to breathe in front of a portrait or a ghost."

"Blow that for a game of soldiers. The damn thing's not here," Zabini retorted, pulled out his wand, and cast a warming charm around the bed and Goyle.

"Has he locked down the main doors?" Harry asked.

"No," Poppy said, chafing her arms with her hands. "There are a thousand places to hide in this castle and a hundred ways in and out, and if the person who attacked you wants to get out of the castle and away from the students Severus certainly isn't going to make it difficult for him."

Harry gave a sigh of exasperation and watched it plume in the air. "Poppy, stay here with Zabini and Malfoy." Better yet, sent Zabini home, he wanted to say and didn't. "Goyle, come with me."

Goyle rose obediently and trailed out the door after Harry. It was very reassuring, Harry thought absently as he headed back toward the library, having a very large and unquestioningly obedient bloke follow one around. Possibly he should look into this minion thing.

"Uh, Potter," Goyle said quietly from behind him. "You know, right, Draco and Blaise -"

"I know, all right?" Harry snapped.

"But the thing is, they -"

"Goyle, I really, really do not want to talk about this."

"But -"

"Goyle, I swear to Jesus I will turn you into a toadstool if you say one more word about Draco and Zabini."

"Okay," Goyle said philosophically.

Irma and Filch were awake again, giving Harry an unpleasant pang of guilt for not sending Poppy down to them. Irma's voice was floating out into the hall from the library, angry and tearful, cut off by Argus' impatient tones. Harry slowed down a little, wanting to find out just what the hell his attacker had been doing in the library to begin with but unwilling to face Irma. Just as he was about to go in, a large hand descended on his shoulder, holding him firmly in place, and Goyle edged out in front of him to peer around the door.

"You made a right mess," he whispered back to Harry, sounding a little awed.

"It wasn't just me," Harry defended himself.

"Madam Pince is furious. Maybe we better come back tomorrow."

"And maybe," Snape said coldly from behind them, "you'd better do as you're told and stay in your rooms."

Harry gritted his teeth and turned to see Snape bundled up in an impressively warm-looking fur cloak. "You've got to be joking. After something bloody attacked me in the library, nearly seriously injured me, and conjured the Dark fucking Mark, Headmaster, right in the middle of the library and in a form that nearly did for me and the library both, I'm supposed to go and sit in my rooms and -"

"Potter," Snape said, cutting him off. "Test the wards."

Puzzled, Harry closed his eyes and tried; but he was too exhausted and too cold, and his mind kept slipping away from them. Needing focus, he blew a gust of misted breath into his hands and watched as it formed into a perfect, ghostly miniature of Hogwarts. Better able to concentrate with something visual in front of him, he probed at the wards and then looked back up at Snape. "Nothing human or human-sized has left the grounds recently. Something's left the castle, though."

Snape lifted a hand and drew skeletal fingers through the miniature of Hogwarts, dispelling it like a puff of smoke. "Whoever attacked you is still here, Potter. I strongly suspect that he - or she, or whoever -"

"He," Harry said, suddenly remembering the shape of the body that had knocked into his and thrown him off the staircase.

" - has been on the grounds for some time and will remain here until he's accomplished whatever he was sent here to do."

"Then we should bloody well be finding him and digging him out -"

"Potter, do you understand nothing?" Snape said sharply, then closed his eyes and appeared to make a brief plea for patience. "Voldemort's greatest weapon is fear. He plays on it, feeds on it, it drains his enemies and gives him more power. Suppose, as is highly likely, we set out now, this minute, with every available staff member, torches lit and dogs baying, to dig him out, as you say - and then fail to find him? Can you imagine the effect that will have on the students, to say nothing of the staff?"

Harry could, too well, but he argued anyway. "So what are you saying? That we should -"

"I sincerely hope you aren't about to ask sarcastically if we should ignore the Dark Lord and hope he goes away, Potter. No, I think the Ministry has that particular tactic quite well under control. We are going to wait, which sometimes takes more courage than storming ahead, and tomorrow we are going to take a rather large number of steps rather than trying to take those steps at four in the morning whilst standing on one foot." Snape peered closely at Harry. "I suggest you return to the hospital wing for tonight. You look dreadful."

"I'm all right," Harry said, but his own voice sounded reedy and thin. The adrenaline that had been sustaining him was ebbing away, leaving him exhausted and sore, and suddenly he found himself swaying on his feet.

"Goyle, take him back to the infirmary," Snape ordered shortly.

"Right. C'mon, then," Goyle said genially but firmly, sounding rather like he was instructing a house elf.

As much as he hated to admit it, Harry thought, Snape had a point - if his attacker was no longer in the castle, sending out hunting parties into the misty cold would probably end badly. And if nothing else, it would be easier for him to keep an eye on Draco from the infirmary. Chewing his thumbnail with sharp, irritated bites, he followed Goyle back toward the stairs, gloomily anticipating a sleepless few hours on a hospital bed, alone, across from Draco, who wasn't.

 

"You're sure it's from him?" Severus asked the next morning, steepling his fingers in front of him and looking thoughtfully at the carefully warded letter on his desk.

"As sure as I can be after this long," Remus answered. "It's his writing. It sounds like him. The sly little digs, the turns of phrase… I don't know that I'd want to stake my life on its authenticity, but I'm as certain as I can be short of that."

"Do you think he really expects you to provide him with information, or could this letter have a different purpose?

Remus had given that question a considerable amount of thought the night before, and hadn't really liked the conclusions he'd drawn. "I'm not sure. I think he must have thought there was at least a chance."

"The idea does have certain merits," Severus mused.

Remus blinked. "You can't be actually considering it."

"From Pettigrew? No. Had the offer come in the other direction, from Lucius Malfoy, things might have been different." Severus picked up his tea and took a thoughtful sip. "And his information about an uninvited guest on the grounds? Do you have a feel for how far we should trust it?"

"How much do you remember about Peter?" Remus asked. "From school, I mean."

Severus raised an eyebrow. "Slytherin House takes a certain interest in the Peter Pettigrews of the world," he said slowly. "The malcontents, the chronically underappreciated, the ones who feel denied their rightful place. The ones who feel they have terribly important things to say, if only someone would listen. Voldemort in particular is very good at exploiting them. He might have got Draco Malfoy that way too, you know, had Narcissa not been very resourceful, very quick off the mark, and fully capable of ruling her son with an iron fist at need. And, I suspect, had Lucius not turned away from Voldemort much sooner than anyone knew."

He rose and went to the tea table to refill his cup. "But Pettigrew. I remember him as a boy all too painfully aware of his own unprepossessing nature, and as a Death Eater who learned too well from James Potter and Sirius Black how to be valuable to people more powerful and dynamic than he. What does that have to do with the letter?"

"You asked if we could trust his information about an infiltrator on the grounds. The answer is that Peter…" Remus took a deep breath. This was coming closer to still-painful subjects than he liked. "Peter liked secrets. He liked knowing them and not telling them - he never told anyone that I'm a werewolf, after all, or that James and Sirius were animagi. He was very good at ferreting them out. So I can well believe that if there's a spy on the Hogwarts grounds, Peter knows exactly who it is and what they're doing. As to whether he's making it all up… when Peter does tell secrets, he tells the truth."

"He knew you'd bring this to me," Severus mused, coming back to sit at his desk and look down at the letter. "And to Potter. How did he know about Potter and Draco, by the way?"

"From what Harry's told me, I'd guess from Hermione Granger, who seems to have known before Harry did," Remus said quietly, wanting to look away and holding his gaze steady instead.

For a brief moment there was something in Severus' face that might have been pity; for Remus or Hermione, Remus had no idea. "He shared a dormitory room with Potter for three years. He must know him well enough to know how Potter would react to thinly veiled threats against someone important to him."

"He knew Harry at thirteen," Remus pointed out. "That was twelve years ago. Even if… well, Harry's older now than James ever lived to be."

"But he might suspect that Potter's loyalty and temper, at the least, haven't changed." Severus frowned, tapping a fingertip on his desk. "Hazard a guess, Lupin, is Pettigrew trying to keep us distracted by something on the grounds and keep our attention away from something going on elsewhere?"

"I don't know," Remus answered. "That might be part of it. Or… well, he offered to do for Lucius Malfoy for us, didn't he? It could be that he wants us to do for whoever's on the grounds for him, in exchange."

Severus' fingertip stilled, and Remus watched, a little unnerved, as a crowd of disconnected thoughts flashed over his face. "I believe," Severus said slowly, "that it's time to call a meeting. Tomorrow night, shall we say?"

"Why not tonight, if it's that important?"

"I need time to gather some information. Or try to, at any rate, though it might be more telling if I can't gather it than if I can. Kindly don't mention the meeting to anyone, Lupin, even Potter and the Weasleys," Severus said, and to Remus' annoyance his words carried the faint tingle of magic behind them, binding Remus to unwilling silence. "I'll send instructions as to the time and place tomorrow evening."

Their discussion was clearly at an end, and none too soon; Remus was hungry and wanted a good strong cup of black coffee, and he was glad enough to leave Peter's letter in someone else's hands. He stood, nodded to Severus, and set his teacup down on the tea table on the way to the door.

He paused just before leaving, one hand on the door, looking back. "Severus… do you think there's only one? One Death Eater, I mean."

"I should be extremely surprised if there were," Severus answered. "But the others are probably students, and relatively easily controlled. Potter should watch his back even so."

"So should Draco, it seems."

"You worry about Potter, Lupin," Severus said, pulling a stack of correspondence to him. "Let Draco's own worry about him."

Remus couldn't help but think that an unsatisfactory answer.

 

It was a bit rich, Harry thought plaintively, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. You could ask a bloke to save the world from an evil, not-quite-undead wizard or you could ask him to deliver a lecture on dark magic detection to a room full of giggling Hufflepuffs and supercilious Ravenclaws, but you couldn't justly ask him to do both.

Sighing, Harry checked the small silver alarm clock on his desk. The hand was nearly pointing to "Class time." He reached out and switched off the alarm - if he let it go off, the clock had a tendency to bounce frantically around the desk, vibrating madly, like Pigwidgeon dipped in confectioner's sugar. He took a last glance at his lecture notes, grabbed a bag off the floor, pushed back his office chair, and headed down the stairs into the Defence classroom.

"Good morning," he said briskly to the assembled students. "Put your books away, we're doing practical today. We're starting detection of dark magic, which is an absolutely necessary skill to have if… you're…"

Twenty-five fourth-years were staring at him as if he'd sprouted wings. He resisted the urge to look behind him or check to see if someone had hexed rabbit ears onto his head.

"Right," he said after a moment. "Detecting dark magic isn't as simple as looking to see if something's got skulls carved into it or looks like something you'd find in the Halloween window display of a second-hand shop in Knockturn Alley. It's - yes, Emmeline?"

A fidgety Hufflepuff girl lowered her hand. "Sir, is Professor Malfoy all right?"

Harry felt an unpleasant pang of guilt and tried not to let it show in his face. "He's fine. He'll be back tomorrow to keep on with dark magic detection, so let's - what is it, Antonia?"

A thin-faced, dark-haired Ravenclaw lowered her hand with a bit more grace. "Where were you and Professor Malfoy last week, sir?"

Harry raised an eyebrow, aiming a repressive look at her. "Never mind where we were. We're back now."

"Well, what were you doing that whole time?" asked Caelum Lowsley, Ravenclaw and pureblood, unpleasantly reminiscent of Zacharias Smith.

I was shagging your Potions master senseless, Lowsley, when he wasn't sucking me off in the shower. Oh, and there were Death Eaters. "What can I possibly say to that?" he answered mildly. "If I was doing something important then I wouldn't be able to tell the whole school about it, and if it was something dull then there'd be no point in telling you."

Caelum narrowed his eyes and opened his mouth, but Isabella Dorkins cut him off with a disdainful sniff. "You're just angry because Professor Lupin made you go the whole class with radishes growing out your ears when you wouldn't move fast enough," she accused.

"Am not!"

"Are so!"

"That's enough," Harry said sharply, and the class quieted. "Where Professor Malfoy and I were and what we were doing is none of your business, and I suggest you not try to get 'round him tomorrow either, unless you fancy being carted around to your classes in a bucket until Madam Pomfrey can put your skeleton back. Understood?"

Chastened, the students nodded.

"Right. Now, let me give you a demonstration of why the ability to detect dark magic is so important." Harry drew his wand, spelled the sack at his feet open, and levitated the object inside to float above the desk. It hung regally in the air, turning slowly, glimmering in the morning sun, a lovely pendant with garnets scattered along a silver chain and a long opal set in a darker metal filigree. There were gasps of awe from the Hufflepuff girls, and even one or two of the Ravenclaws were looking distinctly entranced.

"Lovely, isn't it?" Harry asked. Leaving the pendant hovering in the air, he waved his wand and brought the skeleton on a stand rolling forward out of the back of the classroom. After maneuvering it around in front of the desk, he carefully levitated the pendant, unhooked the clasp with a quick charm, and rehooked it around the skeleton's neck. For all of two or three seconds, nothing happened. Then, with brutal suddenness, the necklace whipped up and twisted like a steel cable snapping under pressure.

The sound of the skeleton's skull bouncing across the floor to land at Lowsley's feet was ear-piercingly sharp in the utter silence.

"There are a number of ways to detect dark magic," Harry began, and this time he wasn't interrupted.

 

By the end of the day, he was hard-pressed to remember why he liked teaching. The seventh-year Slytherins and Gryffindors, busy whispering to each other and shooting fascinated, speculative looks at Harry, had bolloxed their wards so badly that he'd had to send them out into the hall and lock down the Defence classroom while he dispelled the twisted, unstable jumble of magic hovering in the middle of the room and shooting out lightning bolts at anything that moved. The third-year Hufflepuffs had flinched every time he lifted his wand until he'd finally lost his temper and snapped Look, is your name Malfoy, any of you? No? Put your hand down, Harkis, your grandmother doesn't count. And I suppose you aren't grown men fully capable of bringing down a Quidditch team with a second-hand wand and a pocketful of potions ingredients either, are you? Then I'm not going to bloody hex you, so stop with the dramatics before I change my mind. Around about midday he'd finally resorted to starting classes off with Yes, Professor Malfoy is fine, yes, he'll be back tomorrow, and no, neither of us will tell you where we were or what we were doing, just to forestall the inevitable first questions.

Harry hadn't felt this conspicuous since he was at school and it seemed like every year brought another reason for people to stare and whisper about him behind his back. He didn't like it any more now than he had then.

He'd only managed to squeeze in one visit to the infirmary, which he hadn't intended to make at all and hadn't seemed able to stop himself. Poppy had told him with rather unsympathetic abruptness that she'd sent Draco back to his rooms with a sleeping potion and orders to rest, and Harry wasn't to disturb him. Harry had wanted badly to ask if Zabini had gone with him or gone home, and hadn't, because the look Poppy gave him when he opened his mouth made him suddenly sure that he wouldn't like the answer. Adding insult to injury, there was a staff meeting later, and there'd been some sort of dust-up amongst the house elves that resulted in unpleasantly lukewarm roast beef and too-salty runner beans for lunch - probably bloody Kreacher again; Harry had flatly ordered him to stay away from any food intended for anyone else to eat, but he apparently found quite enough ways to antagonize the rest of the house elves without spitting in the tapioca.

He'd taken advantage of his free hour after classes to go flying. That had washed away a bit of his foul mood, but he still found himself wanting company; so the end of the last class period of the day found Harry standing on a hillock, broom resting loosely in the crook of his elbow, watching a stream of chattering second-years come out of Greenhouse Two, peals of laughter and the sound of a sharp squabble merging with the rustle of robes and bookbags into a bright rush of noise. When sound and second-years had both faded into the distance, he went down into the greenhouse, glancing around for Neville.

Neville was at the other end of a long table covered in pots of shrivelfig, pulling off a pair of heavy gloves. He smiled when he saw Harry; but he didn't say anything, and didn't look as if he'd been sleeping well.

"Hullo, Nev," Harry said, wandering around the table and peering into the pots. "Teaching the second-years to prune shrivelfigs?"

"Do you ever think about how much of what we teach will only ever be of use to a handful of students?" Neville asked, tossing the gloves onto a workbench sheltered by some sort of leafy vine. "I spent today teaching shrivelfig pruning to children who'll never grow them. You teach flying to first-years who are going to use Floos or Apparate their whole lives. Malfoy teaches Potions to children who'll pop out to the apothecary whenever they need a hangover remedy. Sybill Trelawney teaches Divination to children who don't have the Sight. I know it's not all useless - if nothing else we're teaching them how to learn and giving them a solid basis for the things they do need to know - but it's… a little disheartening sometimes."

Harry raised an eyebrow. "You've got the real Neville Longbottom hidden in a trunk somewhere, don't you? You can tell me, I won't rat you out."

Neville laughed. "Come out back with me. I've got to prune the barometzes."

"The what?" Harry asked, following Neville into the mud room. He hadn't missed the slight hesitation before Draco's name, and could guess well enough what was bothering Neville.

"Barometzes," Neville said, picking up a delicate-looking pair of pruning shears. "Tartary lambs. I got a shipment in right before school started. They're bloody hard to keep alive the whole growing season because they graze in a limited area and die when the vegetation's gone, but if you can keep them going until the end of autumn their wool - well, I say wool, it's really cotton - turns the most beautiful, deep foliage shades and the house elves can turn it into scarves or jumpers. This is my seed crop, really; next year's will be much better."

Harry's head was starting to swim a bit. "Are these plants or animals?" he asked, setting his broom carefully down in the corner.

"They're plants really," Neville answered, heading for the door. "Don't leave that there and forget it. I don't think it'd like being pressed into service to clean up spilled potting soil."

"No, I think - Jesus Christ, Neville!" Harry said in awe and bewilderment, following his friend outside.

The back garden of the greenhouse had been opened up and pushed back to clear a large swath of sunlit lawn. A dozen thick stalks rose three or four feet into the air, planted well apart from one another; around each stalk, connected to it by a vinelike umbilicus, a small lamb trotted, grazed, slept, or simply stared into space. Their wool, earth tones rich with fall shading, was the only part of them that wasn't green. Even their eyes, he saw as he peered closely at the lamb nearest him, were deep green, without pupil, iris, or whites.

Neville laughed at him, settling down onto his knees beside one of the plants. The lamb attached to it butted playfully at his leg. "They're plants, Harry. Like mandrake roots. They're just cuter. Have a seat while I do this - the stalks have to be kept clean or the lambs will wind their umbilical cords around the leaves and get all tangled up."

Harry sank down into a wrought-iron garden chair and stretched his legs out in front of him, determined to enjoy the sunlight while it lasted. For a while they sat in companionable silence, broken only by the snip of Neville's pruning shears and the occasional small, flutelike baa. "Remember when Dean convinced himself he had a crush on Padma Patil?" Harry asked finally.

Neville snickered. "Only he couldn't tell Padma and Parvati apart and he kept sort of absent-mindedly hitting on Parvati until he realized she was wearing a Gryffindor tie."

"And he kept swearing that it was really Padma he liked until she and Parvati switched places and he didn't realize it for three days."

The snicker became a laugh. "Neither did most of the rest of us. I remember you kept looking at them funny, though. That was before you started dating Parvati, wasn't it?"

"Just before. I think she went out with me because I was the only bloke in Gryffindor who could tell them apart."

"I'm sure that wasn't the only reason," Neville said reassuringly, shifting over to the next plant.

Harry sighed. "Neville, are you feeling as much like a used tissue as I am?"

Neville gave him a melancholy glance and went back to his pruning, silent for a minute. "He's… a bit more than I can compete with, isn't he? He's rich, gorgeous, played pro Quidditch, dresses beautifully, he's been her best friend since they were babies -"

"He's gay, Nev," Harry said. "I can personally vouch for which team he flies for, and let me tell you, if he'd flown for Slytherin with that much enthusiasm and skill they'd hold the House Cup to this day."

"That didn't stop them from getting engaged, did it?" Neville pointed out. "And it won't stop them from getting married, either. Or having a flawless, spoiled, ice-blond little prince to carry on the family tradition."

Harry sighed and shifted restlessly on the hard iron chair, rubbing at the back of his neck in a futile attempt to work some of the stiffness out. "You're right," he said quietly. "It won't."

There was a small pile of clippings growing beside Neville's knee. The lamb attached to the stalk, bright scarlet as a falling oak leaf, wandered over to chew meditatively on them. "She's as loyal to him as if they were swans who mate for life, you know? While you were gone, sometimes it almost seemed like…" He trailed off and gave Harry a pained smile. "But then he came back and there wasn't room in their world for anyone else anymore."

"Yeah," Harry said. "I know."

"It's all right, you know. I think she and I are still friends, and that's… that's probably how it would have turned out in the end anyway." Neville looked away, back to clipping.

"Do you really think they'll make each other happy? I mean, right, sex isn't everything, but… well, there's a reason I didn't date Ginny. How can you go your whole life with those feelings missing?"

"I have to believe they'll make each other happy," Neville answered. "I'll be even more miserable if I don't."

Harry scrubbed his hands over his face, pushing up his glasses. "It's not bloody right, Nev. It's not right for four people to turn their backs on something amazing just so that the fucking Malfoy estate can be handed off to a son of Draco's."

"They love each other, Harry," Neville said, focussing very carefully on the stalk in front of him. "Maybe it's not the way you or I would want to love someone we married, but… look, you won't get upset if I say this, will you?"

"I won't know until you do, will I?" At the look Neville gave him, he relented. "I promise I'll try not to, anyway."

"The thing is, Harry - you never knew your own parents, or even anyone from your father's family; and you're a good man, but you'd have sold the Dursleys for a cold drink on a hot day. You don't know what it's like to have family be everything, or to be terrified right down to the pit of your stomach that you're going to let them down and not even mean to, just because of who you are." Neville grimaced and snipped off a large offshoot. "God, even I know how that feels, and the Longbottoms aren't the kind of purebloods who think that keeping ancestral estates together is more important than loving your husband or wife, like the Malfoys and Parkinsons are. Draco must have been devastated when he realized he was gay - he's the only son and heir, and if he doesn't have a son of his own the Malfoy family line, the main branch, will die out. A thousand years of history, lineage, and family pride, all hanging by a thread because by some fluke of chance Draco prefers men to women."

"You talk like he thinks he's breeding stock."

Neville shrugged. "That's probably exactly what he thinks. Bloody fine breeding stock, thoroughbred, the kind that can name his own price for stud services, but about as much use as a racehorse with a shattered fetlock if he can't produce a son, and he wouldn't understand what's wrong with thinking of himself that way. I can't even think what it must have cost him to come to terms with being gay, and I can't imagine he could have done it without Pansy."

"Jesus," Harry said. "And I thought I had coming-out issues."

Neville snorted. "You were just worried about Ron refusing to change in the same room as you anymore, and all the time he knew before you did. But there, it's not as simple as Draco and Pansy blithely breaking up so they can get together with someone else. They probably thank God every day that they're engaged to each other and not Theodore Nott and Daphne Greengrass. It probably hasn't occurred to Draco that he could refuse to marry and produce an heir any more than it would have occurred to him to walk on the moon, and if it's occurred to Pansy then she knows he'd veto the idea and she loves him too much to let him take his chances with someone he won't love. Even if he's head over heels in love with you, Harry, he's still going to marry someone else."

Harry stood, unable to sit still a moment longer, and raked a hand into his hair. "You know, Nev, Muggles have walked on the moon," he said tightly.

"That's Muggles. I believe you and Hermione when you say they're not awful monsters, but they're not us either." Neville brushed his hair tiredly off his forehead with the back of his hand. "It's easy for me, you know. I'm used to not getting what I want. I'm sorrier for you, because you aren't, not anymore. But you're going to have to. Draco's going to marry Pansy, Harry."

Every pane of glass in the rear of the greenhouse exploded inward.

Harry whirled, staring in horror at the windows. "Oh, God, Neville, I'm sorry, I - Reparo!" He kept casting until the windows were whole again, glass shards melting together and running upward inside the window frames like water flowing backward.

"Harry?" Neville sounded alarmed. "Harry, sit down."

Harry turned to him, breathing unevenly. "I tried to let him go, Nev. I told myself I could let him walk away from me and go back to Pansy. I was wrong. I can't."

"Harry -"

"It's not fucking right, Neville! Not for them, not for any of us! How the fuck can a bunch of land and crumbling houses mean that none of us has the right to be happy?"

"Harry!"

Neville almost never raised his voice. Harry closed his eyes and sank back down onto the chair, burying his face in his hands.

"You're angry," Neville said softly.

Harry gave a short bark of laughter. "I'm fucking furious."

Neville carefully clipped the stalks around a lamb's umbilical cord. "Harry, what happened during that duel?"

"I don't know," Harry said. "I don't know. I was hurt and upset and I just… lost control. Snape's right, we can't go on like that."

"No," Neville said, sounding strangely resigned. "You can't. And…"

Harry lifted his head out of his hands. "And?"

Neville was silent for a minute, then glanced up at Harry and smiled. "I'm almost done here. The rest of the lambs can wait until tomorrow. Want to come in and have a quick drink before the staff meeting? You can tell me how Ron's doing."

Harry smiled back, ruefully accepting the change of subject. "I don't think I deserve you, Nev."

"Good," Neville said briskly. "Then you can mix the drinks."

 

The atrium was one of Remus' favorite parts of the castle. The walls soared two stories above a tiled floor with the Hogwarts crest set into it, arching upward toward a glass ceiling - real glass, not enchanted, letting the sun pour down into the gallery below. There was a huge window at one end, bevelled glass set into scores of diamond panes, casting a latticed shadow onto the tiles. Remus had come the long way to pass through it from the guest rooms to the staff wing that housed most of the professors who weren't Heads of House - the staff meeting was taking place in the meeting room there, and Remus had invited himself to attend out of sheer nostalgia. Sometimes he forgot how much he missed the castle, until something like the atrium reminded him.

Remus paused as he traversed the walkway that ran around the atrium on the second floor, as he always did, looking down. Draco Malfoy was standing at the window, one foot propped up on the window seat, arms folded on his knee, reading a book that lay open by his foot. As Remus watched, he made a small, fluid gesture with one hand and the page flipped over to something that looked from this distance like either a recipe or a potion guide. The light through the window was already turning golden; if Draco was coming to the meeting he bid fair to be late, and Remus wondered if he should say something.

The issue was decided for him when a brief movement caught his eye: Harry, moving silently into the atrium, leaning against a pillar by the entrance with his hands stuffed into his pockets. He didn't speak, didn't come farther into the room - only stood, unmoving, watching Draco with the stillness of utter focus.

All right, Lupin, that'll be enough, Remus told himself sternly, and stayed where he was anyway.

Something alerted Draco and he glanced up, freezing like a startled deer as his eyes met Harry's. Somewhere in the depths of the castle, children's voices rose in laughing chatter and then died away; a flock of birds flew over the ceiling of the atrium, casting a silent, flowing band of shadow-wings onto the floor, and neither Harry nor Draco noticed.

When the silence had nearly become unbearable, Harry pulled his hand out of his pocket and raised it, palm up, fingers pointed toward Draco. He blew softly across his palm, sending something small and golden flitting across the room toward Draco, then turned and walked away without a word, not waiting to see if Draco caught whatever it was. A snitch, was Remus' first thought, until he recognized the dragonfly's fluttering wings and long golden body.

Draco lifted a hand and let the dragonfly settle into it. For a long moment he only looked at the amulet; then his fingers closed slowly, gently, around it.

It was the only thing that saved his life when the window exploded inward with a blast that sent glass shards in a brilliant glittering wave the length of the atrium.

Before Draco could react, before Remus could pull out his wand, the protective charm had flared into life around Draco, filling the air beside him with a bonfire of sparks as glass shards struck the circle and were incinerated. Remus cast a quick lightening spell on himself and vaulted over the railing, stepping down onto the atrium floor with a crunch as Harry burst back into the room at a dead run, skidding on broken glass. Draco was already closing the window frame with a hastily-set ward, trying to cast and find the person who had shattered the window at the same time.

"Are you all right?" Harry demanded, catching hold of Draco's elbow.

"Yes," Draco answered, sounding a little shaken. "Do you see anyone outside?"

Harry leaned against the frame and looked outside. "No," he said after a minute, sounding frustrated.

"Damn it," Draco exclaimed.

Harry looked back at him and raised his fingers to Draco's jaw. They came away red. "You're bleeding."

"Of course I'm bleeding, Potter, a bloody great plate-glass window exploded in my face," Draco said crossly. "I need medical attention and a good long rest."

"Malfoy…" Harry's voice was a little strangled.

"Do you think Lupin would take over my Defence lectures for a few days while I recuperate?"

Closing his eyes, Harry slid his hand around to the back of Draco's neck, grabbed a fistful of hair, and pulled him forward so that their foreheads were resting together. "Draco," he whispered, his voice raw and unsteady.

Hearing alarmed voices heading toward the atrium, Remus cleared his throat and moved forward. Harry and Draco jumped apart, looking startled and guilty. "Let me see," Remus ordered calmly when he reached them, taking hold of Draco's chin and turning his face to the side the way he would have if Draco had still been thirteen years old and been hurt in a scuffle; the difference being, of course, that Draco looked annoyed but allowed the touch, whereas at thirteen years old he would probably have hexed Remus' hand off. There was only the one cut, and a quick hand to Draco's hair found no glass shards caught in it.

"That's a very impressive spell," Remus noted. "Remind me to congratulate Filius."

"Dear God, what happened here?" Minerva demanded, hurrying into the room with Severus and Adrienne Vector close on her heels.

"Someone blew the window in," Harry said tightly. "There are students out on the grounds, one of them must have seen who it was -"

"Unless it was someone they wouldn't think to take notice of," Draco murmured.

"You think one of the students did this?" Minerva asked, looking as if she wished she could be shocked at the very suggestion.

"Some of them are old enough and strong enough to cast a blasting spell that powerful from a fair distance," Draco answered. "And some of them have parents in Voldemort's service. A few of them may already be Marked."

"Shit," Harry said, summing up the situation rather neatly, in Remus' opinion.

"Would it be worth gathering the students in the Great Hall and doing a Priori Incantatem on their wands?" Adrienne asked.

"Probably not," Severus said. "If it was one of the students, they'll have worked through so many other charms by now that the Priori Incantatem won't be able to pull out this spell with any degree of clarity, if they aren't simply carrying an unregistered spare wand."

"Then what are we going to do?" Harry asked with an edge to his voice that suggested that Severus was likely to be very sorry indeed if the answer was Wait.

"I believe that we shall have to cancel the staff meeting," Severus said. "Minerva, Draco, come with me. Adrienne, please alert everyone else to the cancellation. Potter, fix this window."

Harry opened his mouth, nearly crackling with anger. Draco's hand flashed out with a Seeker's speed to clasp around his wrist with a light, warning pressure, accomplishing the not-trivial task of cutting a Harry Potter tirade off at the main.

"Lupin, I may need to detain Minerva for a while. Will you take her dinner duties?"

Remus nodded. Severus' eyes met his and flashed a quick message, and Remus strongly suspected that the Order meeting had just been moved up.

The others filed out of the room, leaving Remus in the unenviable position of being alone with a fuming Harry. With a final glare after Severus, Harry leaned out the window and began casting. "Shit," he said after a minute. "I can't pick out any sort of trail or even track the spell, not with this sort of background interference."

"Could you anyway, from four stories up?" Remus asked.

"Of course I could. And so could whoever managed to pin Draco down while he was standing in a window four stories up." Harry pulled back, waved his wand, and repaired the window. "Shit."

"Harry, Severus has something planned," Remus said. "I won't venture to guess what it is, but there's clearly something, and whatever it is, he's setting it in motion. I'd guess that it won't be very long before you find out what it is."

Harry swung around toward him, his fingers twitching unnervingly on his wand. "That's not good enough, Remus. I spent half my childhood letting Albus Dumbledore keep me in the dark until it was time to shove me out in front of Voldemort once a year, letting people I loved die because I didn't know what was going on, and if Snape thinks for one goddamned minute that I'm going to let him do the same thing to me -"

"Harry," Remus said again, soothingly. "That isn't what I was saying at all. I was only saying that he's not just sitting around waiting for someone to get killed. There's nothing to say that you need to, either."

It was a long, tense moment before Harry deflated and rubbed a hand wearily across his face. "You're right."

Remus made an approving sound.

"I've had the worst bloody day."

"I can believe that," Remus said wryly.

"I almost killed half my students as an example to the other half, then Neville and I had a really discouraging talk, then my… then Draco almost got killed, and now Snape thinks I'm fifteen years old and won't go to my Occlumency lessons."

"Well, you have to admit, you did make a rather lasting impression as a fifteen-year-old refusing to go to his Occlumency lessons," Remus pointed out.

Harry looked back up at Remus. "Get some rest, Remus. I'm going to need you and the twins tomorrow."

"For what?" Remus asked, feeling a small stab of foreboding.

"Whatever's got onto the grounds, it's hiding in the Forest, I know it is. That's the only place it could be. We're going to do a bit of discreet checking."

The small stab of foreboding turned into a larger one. "Harry, the Forest is huge. And with just the four of us -"

"Five, with Draco. Six with Goyle, seven with that goddamned Zabini if he's still here, eight with Bill if he can get here. We're not going to comb over every inch of ground, Remus. We're just going to do a bit of tracking. Something in that forest has to have seen him; and if it has, and it can talk, we're going to find it."

"After curfew, I assume."

"Right."

"Harry, how many hours' sleep have you got in the last couple of days?" Remus asked. "Real sleep, I mean, not a sleeping potion."

Harry's jaw firmed. "Enough."

Remus sighed and rubbed his forehead. The light was failing now, dimming to lavender where it spilled onto the tiles. "All right. But you get some rest too."

"I will," Harry promised, and Remus didn't believe him for a moment.

 

The main difference between the staff bath and the Prefects' bath was the ability to lock the door from the inside and ward it with privacy spells, a thing Harry had been grateful for more than once; while it had made him a bit nervous to think about walking in on Hermione while she was naked, the thought of walking in on any of the other staff in a similar condition terrified him to the bottom of his soul.

Well. Most of the other staff.

The tub was bigger as well, as if the prefects' bathtub had kept pace with Harry as he grew. The taps were a bit different - lighter on the bubbles and things that smelled like candy or fruit, heavier on rich creams and more sophisticated scents. But the main advantage of the staff bathtub, Harry thought as he stripped down and dove head-first into it, was that it was as deep as the bather wanted it to be.

He'd never reached the bottom yet. With gillyweed he might be able to, but that seemed like an unfair advantage in whatever odd game of Harry Versus the Bathtub he was accustomed to playing. He could get down bloody far before he had to turn and swim for the surface, though, far enough that the water turned to shadows around him and the light in the bathroom was a dim circle far above him like the rim of a well. This time, not reaching for the bottom, he floated in the silent dark, twisting lazily, running his hands through his hair and thinking absently of shampooing it.

Distracted, he wondered for a moment if Myrtle were still in the habit of hiding in the pipes and spying on people. He sincerely hoped not, but at the moment, with the dark soothing his senses and water blood-warm against his skin, he couldn't bring himself to care.

When his lungs started to burn he kicked toward the light again, angling to come up beside the shampoo taps. He broke the surface with a gasp, pushed his hair back out of his face, and barely had time to register the dragonhide boots in front of his face before he was shooting reflexively back. Magic coiled and flared in him, seeking a target; Harry squinted, then hissed in exasperation and let it go, treading water.

"Jesus Christ, Malfoy!"

"I wondered if you were ever going to come up," Draco said idly, examining his nails for a moment before his eyes flicked back up to Harry's. Harry wasn't close enough to see the expression in them, for which he was suddenly very grateful. "Severus sent me to fetch you. He's called a meeting of the Order, or however many of the Order he could gather together on short notice."

Harry wasn't quite ready to let go of the whole matter of Draco being in the bathroom to begin with. "You know, there are privacy charms on that door for a reason. And how did you know where I was?"

"Lupin told me." Draco's hand came down to rest on the tap, long fingers idly running over the handle.

No, Harry was definitely not ready to let this go. He stroked over to the side of the tub and folded his arms on the side, right in front of Malfoy's boots, lifting himself a little out of the water. Draco's eyes struggled valiantly to stay on Harry's own, and failed miserably and beautifully.

"What's this meeting about?" he asked softly.

"I'm not in the Order, am I? Do you think Severus would tell me?"

"He told you there was a meeting." A drop of water trickled down from Harry's forehead, past his nose, and down over his chin. He made no move to wipe it away.

"Because he didn't want to come get you himself." Draco's lips quirked. "Just think, Potter, it might have been him looming over you when you popped out of the water, instead of me."

Harry groaned and rubbed a hand over his eyes, trying to shut out that rather horrific vision. "God. It would have been like one of those nightmares where you're fourteen years old and realize you've come to class naked, and Snape not only gives you detention but makes snide comments about your personal attributes while he's at it."

Draco laughed. "Oh, I think we've all had a few of those. Except with me it was Minerva. The woman terrified me."

"When we were sixteen Seamus had a dream that we all showed up to Care of Magical Creatures and Hagrid was naked. Then he spelled all the rest of our clothes off too and said that the course was covering mating habits of magical creatures and we were all going to get some practical experience."

"Dear God."

"Too right. He woke us all up screaming in terror and wouldn't go back to sleep in his own bed."

"Whose bed did he go back to sleep in?"

Harry looked up at Draco through still-wet lashes. "Mine."

Draco's eyebrow shot up. "Really," he said neutrally.

"Really. Saviour of the Wizarding World and all that. But I made him sleep on his own side of the bed." Harry smiled ruefully. "When you're a sixteen-year-old boy trying frantically to convince yourself that you're as straight as an Arithmancy level, the last thing you want is other sixteen-year-old boys climbing on top of you in the middle of the night."

"Gave up on that, did you?"

"A bit." Harry reached out, set the tip of his finger on the ankle of Draco's boot, and trailed it slowly upward, leaving a damp trail on the dragonhide. "These are nice boots."

"They won't be if you get them wet," Draco said hoarsely, and didn't move.

"Yeah, well, walk in on a bloke while he's in the bath and you take a chance on getting a bit wet, don't you think?" Harry's finger reached the top of the boot and ran idly over the top, barely brushing Draco's trousers and pressing them back against the skin underneath.

Draco swallowed hard, and Harry spared a silent curse for the robes that were hiding the rest of his reaction. "Severus is going to start getting pissy if you don't get out of the tub and up to his office."

Harry smirked. "He's always pissy. I'll tell him we were talking about dreams involving him and being naked."

"Do let me watch when you do. I'll be interested to see what he turns you into."

"Something slimy and useful in potions, no doubt," Harry said, sliding his finger around toward the back of Draco's boot. His knuckles brushed lightly over the back of Draco's thigh.

Draco's hand tightened on the tap, trembling. "I've things I need to do and you need to be getting to your meeting." He pulled away and rose, caught up one of the fluffy towels lining the shelves, and tossed it to land, still neatly folded, in front of Harry. "See you later, Potter."

Harry sighed, picked up the towel, and scrubbed off his face. "Are you ever going to come out of the bloody closet, Malfoy?" he asked quietly just before Draco walked out the door.

Draco paused and turned to look back. "Dear God, Potter, you say that as if I were actually in one."

"Aren't you?" Harry leaned an elbow on the towel and turned to face Draco, not needing his glasses to know that Draco's eyes were waging a determined and not terribly successful battle to stay focused on Harry's face. "It's a damn big closet, plenty of guest room, glass walls maybe, but that doesn't mean it's not a closet."

"When it's the size of Malfoy Manor and everything that comes along with it, Potter, it really doesn't make a difference whether you call it a closet, a mansion, or a small sovereign island nation, now does it? You've still got more space than most people ever have. At times like that one does well to count one's blessings and not complain about the occasional coat hanger to the back of the head."

The door closed behind him and Harry sighed, hoisting himself up onto the side of the tub to dry his hair. "Fuck, Neville," he said softly. "Why do you have to be right all the time?"

 

He didn't bother using a drying charm on his hair, both because they made his hair puff out like an irate kitten's and as a sort of oblique protest - if he had to get hauled out of the bath, he might as well make a point of letting everyone know it. Which was valid enough reasoning, Harry felt, but it did mean that water was still dripping down the back of his neck when he got to Snape's office, putting him in an even fouler temper than he already was.

Bloody Malfoy. Him and his tailored clothes and dragonhide boots and long fingers doing unconsciously obscene things to bath taps. Harry would have paid money to go back to the way things had been a month ago, when he'd just wanted desperately to know where Malfoy had learned to conjure firework roses.

"Belladonna in suspension," he snapped, and the door to the staircase opened in front of him. Harry stepped onto it, let it carry him upward, and slipped silently into the Headmaster's office.

It was more crowded than he was accustomed to seeing it. Remus and the twins had settled into the corner nearest the drinks, seated with Fred and George flanking Remus on a comfortable sofa while Crookshanks lounged on the sofa back and occasionally poked George with his paw. Molly was sitting in one of the chairs by the fire, talking earnestly to Tonks while Arthur leaned casually against the chair back. Ron, Mad-Eye, and Kingsley were conspicuous in their absence; Harry wondered if that was pique on Snape's part, or prudence. Neville was sitting stiffly in an out-of-the-way chair looking as if he'd been called up for chewing gum in class. Snape himself was standing behind the desk, deep in conversation with Minerva and - surprisingly - Gerald Price.

"Harry, dear!" Molly exclaimed, catching sight of him where he hovered in the doorway. She rose and came over to him, reaching automatically to tug his collar into shape and resettle his robes against his shoulders. "How have you been? Have you been eating? Fred and George said you've been working awfully hard."

Harry resisted the urge to stick out his tongue at the twins. "Hullo, Molly. I'm fine, thanks. How are you and Arthur?"

A brief shadow flickered over Molly's face, but before she could answer, Snape cleared his throat pointedly. Harry touched Molly's arm briefly, smiled at her, and then went to sit next to Neville. Crookshanks hopped down from the sofa, trotted across the room, and jumped into Harry's lap. Harry blinked hard to hold back the sudden sting in his eyes and scratched the cat's ears.

"Thank you, everyone, for coming on such short notice," Minerva said.

"Raaoor," said Crookshanks, standing on his back legs with his front paws on Harry's shoulders, looking intently into Harry's eyes. Harry couldn't quite tell if the cat was looking for a message or trying to convey one, but it was a bit unsettling either way. He shushed Crookshanks and tugged him down into a crankily squirming bundle of fur that shed all over Harry's lap. When Harry looked back up, Price had vanished, hopefully out of the office.

"Let's come to the point," Snape said, and proceeded to give an admirably succinct precis of the events starting with Lucius Malfoy escaping from Azkaban and ending with a plate-glass window exploding in his son's face. When he was done, there was silence for a long minute before Tonks spoke up.

"Fancy that," she said gloomily. "Two Dark Lords."

"We don't really know that, you know," Neville said quietly.

"Neville, this is Lucius Malfoy," Arthur said. "He's always been a power-hungry, amoral, seditious bastard. The only surprise is how long it took him to start measuring his feet for Voldemort's shoes."

"Why don't we know what he's doing?" Fred asked. "He's got all those people with him, and Tonks says more are disappearing every day - if he's not building an army, what is he doing?"

Snape straightened his blotter, looking grim. "You've put your finger on a rather thorny problem, Mr. Weasley. We have no one in Malfoy's camp to give us information. In this particular area, the Order is entirely blind."

"What do you mean, we've no sources of information?" Molly exploded. "His son is right here in this castle!"

Snape gave her a look cold enough to set even Molly back in her chair. "And what do you suggest we do to get more information out of him than trained Aurors were able to?" he asked evenly. "Torture him in the fine tradition of Dark Lords everywhere? Poison him with Veritaserum until he's too weak from vomiting and heart palpitations to resist the potion? Throw him in Azkaban for the offense of being born to Lucius Malfoy? I can tell you in advance that none of those things will work no matter what Draco knows. Gryffindors may take it lightly when a son betrays his parents, but in Slytherin House we view such matters a bit less leniently."

"That isn't fair!" Arthur said angrily, slipping a hand onto Molly's shoulder. She was as white as a sheet, one hand pressed over her mouth.

"Oh, I do apologize," Snape said. "How foolish of me not to realize that it's perfectly fair to expect anyone whose last name isn't Weasley to betray friends and kin at the lightest request of anyone who thinks they have the right to request it. And undoubtedly to force that information out of them should they be unwilling, for whatever foolish reason, to disclose it."

"This isn't getting us anywhere," Harry said, too loudly and in too strained a voice. "Headmaster, please, surely you can understand why Molly wants information from Lucius' camp so badly. Molly, Professor Snape shouldn't have said what he did but he's right - we can't force the information out of Draco. It isn't right, and if that's not enough then it isn't to our advantage either. Enough bickering. Let's get on with what we came here to discuss."

To his surprise, Snape did not proceed to flay strips out of his hide. He only nodded, conceding and almost deferent, black eyes glinting like obsidian and just as unreadable. It took a moment for Harry to understand; then his face heated like a brand with anger and the knowledge of what he'd just been manipulated into doing.

I'm not a bloody figurehead, Snape, he thought grimly. And you and I are going to be very clear on that fact before we're done.

"So we don't have eyes or ears in Lucius' camp," George said. "Do we in Voldemort's?"

"We do not," Snape answered. "After I… resigned from Voldemort's service, shall we say, other attempts to infiltrate the Death Eaters all failed. Draco, on the other hand, does have sources of information. He has, thus far, not been opposed to sharing the information he receives - which is another reason he cannot be allowed to go back to his father."

"Did you know about that?" Neville whispered to Harry, who shook his head, a little disturbed by that fact.

"Arthur, what about the Ministry?" Minerva asked. "Will we be able to draw from their resources if we need to?"

Arthur shook his head, looking doubtful. "I'm afraid my own use as a source of information has dried up since… since Lucius' escape, and Fudge is deliberately keeping the Department of Magical Law Enforcement in the dark. And he's none too well-disposed toward Hogwarts either, after that article in the Prophet this morning."

"What article?" Harry asked.

There was a sudden, thick silence. Neville gave him a puzzled look, and Remus and the twins looked equally in the dark, but no one else would quite look at him.

"What article?" he asked again, more loudly this time.

Minerva sighed, slid open a drawer in Snape's desk, and handed a copy of the paper to Harry. He held it up, frowning, angling it so that Neville could read over his shoulder.

"Oh, Jesus," he said.

NEW THREAT FACES WIZARDING WORLD! shrieked the headline, and underneath: Boy Who Lived to become Man Who Ruled? Underneath was a picture, taken God knew when by God knew who, of Harry and Draco standing in the main doorway of Hogwarts, clearly deeply involved in some sort of conversation. They'd probably only been talking about grading standards, but given how close they were standing and how serious they both looked, it was easy to imagine that they had in fact been debating how best to take over the wizarding world.

- taught at Hogwarts since leaving Auror training under mysterious circumstances -

"What the hell do they mean, 'mysterious circumstances'?" Harry demanded.

"Probably that you didn't call a press conference," Minerva said dryly.

- increasing entanglement with the Malfoy family, whose patriarch, Lucius Malfoy, has eluded the Ministry since his daring escape from Azkaban Prison, seems to have come to a head with a rumored affair with Draco Malfoy, 25, sole heir to the family fortune and Dark Arts legacy and fiancé of Pansy Parkinson, 25, socialite and patron of the arts -

"Oh, fuck," Harry said, feeling like he'd taken a blow to the solar plexus.

"Yeah," Neville said grimly.

- as to what will come of this sub rosa embroilment with the family rumored to be among You-Know-Who's greatest followers. Is Potter merely being used by the Malfoy family in a clever attempt to restore Lucius Malfoy to the Ministry's good graces? Or has he thrown in his lot with rumored dark wizards in a subtle bid for power? The Prophet will keep its readers informed as to developments.

Harry crumpled the paper into a tight ball, trying to keep his emotions from showing in his face. "Who the hell's been feeding them this bullshit? There are only a handful of people who even know about -"

"Potter," Snape said, and his voice was not unkind. "Every child in this school knew as soon as Draco thought he could distract you from hexing him by spreading his legs like a camp follower - and worse, succeeded."

"And one of them went to the press?" Harry was beginning to feel distinctly ill.

"Not necessarily," Neville said staunchly. "They might just have told their parents. It's not every day you get to see a duel like that, after all."

"So it's true, then?" Molly asked evenly.

Oh, God, Harry thought wretchedly. Molly, loyal to Albus Dumbledore to the bitter end, had nearly cut ties with Harry over his Wizengamot testimony; he still thought that what had brought her around wasn't so much the realization that Harry was telling the truth as the realization that she stood to lose the rest of her sons if she stood with Dumbledore.

"Yes," he said, looking her straight in the eye. "It's true." Yes, I'm having it off with a bloke who might as well be married. Yes, it's Lucius Malfoy's son. No, I don't care about any of that.

Molly's mouth tightened, but when she spoke she sounded only sympathetic and tired. "Well, we'll just have to hope the apple's fallen a good long way from the tree, then, won't we?"

"So it seems we'll have to reckon without the assistance of the Ministry, at least as a governing body," Snape observed. "Well, that's one point cleared out of the way."

"Which brings us to the next," Minerva said.

"Wait," Harry said. "You can't think the entire Ministry is going to refuse to help the Order against Voldemort because the Daily Prophet disapproves of my sex life."

Snape frowned. "Setting aside the fact that Draco no longer has anything to do with your sex life -"

Want to bet? Harry thought, then had the grace to be ashamed of himself - briefly.

" - it's more than that and you know it. Do you think Fudge is the only person at the Ministry, let alone the only person in England, who doesn't want to admit that Voldemort is back? I'm afraid Voldemort has led many, many people to believe that if they ignore him he'll go away. Lucius Malfoy, on the other hand, is a known and quantifiable threat, even if no one's quite discovered what he's up to; the Ministry will focus their attention on him, and to the extent that they believe you to be entangled with his son and therefore more likely to be sympathetic to his cause…" Snape shrugged.

"And in the meantime, Voldemort's gaining power by the day, and the only people willing to face him head-on are us and Malfoy," George said.

"We'd be natural allies, I suppose, if it weren't for things like Peter's letter," Remus said thoughtfully.

"And for the fact that he's Lucius Malfoy, and he clearly didn't get out of Azkaban because he was just dying to serve on the Library Commission," Harry snapped. Malfoy was planning something, of that Harry was sure if he was sure of nothing else - something big enough that Percy had thought it worth his sister's life.

"The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend, convenient though it might be for me if he were," Snape said. "But at the moment alliances are a less immediate issue than the fact that there is apparently a Death Eater hiding on the grounds, who has to date nearly killed Potter and might have been behind a rather serious attempt on Draco's life this afternoon."

"Why Draco?" Tonks asked sharply, her hair flashing to an oddly sullen purple. Harry reflected with some amusement that she seemed to have become rather protective of her cousin since the Veritaserum interrogation.

"Because he's a powerful wizard," he answered her, "well-trained and well-connected, and more to the point, he's a major weakness for Lucius and me both. He'd be of more use to Voldemort as a live hostage, but if Voldemort can't get his hands on a live Draco he'll probably settle for a dead one."

"Because you'd charge to his rescue and Voldemort knows it, wouldn't you, Harry?" Fred teased.

"Too fucking right I would," Harry answered quietly, and for a long moment there was a rather uneasy silence.

Just as he was about to apologize, Minerva spoke up again. "We don't know who he is or where he's hiding. What we do know is that the wards neither kept him out nor triggered when he came through. Which means he knows a good deal about them; so either Voldemort's told him, or he is himself a former staff member or…"

"Say it," Arthur said grimly. "A former Head Boy."

"This wasn't Percy, Arthur," Harry told him. "I'd have known him. It wasn't him."

"But managing to eliminate one person out of who knows how many isn't great progress," Snape said. "Draco has set certain inquiries in motion, but we don't know when we'll get a response back, and in the meantime something must be done both about him and about the portal in the forest."

Neville leaned over as Tonks and Snape began to discuss security measures, and whispered, "All right, Harry?"

Frowning, Harry shook his head a little. "According to that letter from Peter Pettigrew, this is someone I know. But nothing about him rang a bell - not his voice, not his magic, nothing. And I'm pretty good at remembering people," he whispered back.

"Nothing?" Neville murmured thoughtfully. "How was he built?"

"A little bigger than me, I think - he just rammed into me and I was too busy falling off the staircase to take much notice. But that might not be helpful if it's someone we were at school with - I grew a good six inches myself after our seventh year."

Neville grinned. "I know. All of a sudden you weren't pint-sized anymore."

Harry glowered at him, to irksomely little effect.

The meeting turned out, all told, to be less productive than he'd hoped - and, he suspected, less productive than Snape had hoped. Between the two of them and Remus, they dispensed a considerable amount of information, got far and away less in return, and by the time the meeting was adjourned Harry had begun to feel a little ill at how blind and hamstrung the post-Dumbledore Order was. Granted, it wasn't an entire loss - Tonks was still an Auror and still had ears, and also ideas for tracking or at least containing their uninvited guest; Arthur had been assigned to discreetly pick the brains of the Ministry archivists regarding things like the portal - but the current task of the Order seemed fairly definitively to be Gather more intelligence.

Which was fine. Harry needed all the information he could get. But in the meantime, something or someone had tried to kill both him and Draco within the span of twenty-four hours, that portal was a time bomb waiting to go off, and Harry wasn't Slytherin enough to sit about waiting.

Take what you want and pay for it, says God, he thought, and slotted the Order into its proper place in his plans with a smooth click.

 

Fred and George pressed close as the staircase descended. "Remember how mad we were to listen in on Order meetings when we were kids?" George murmured into his ear.

"What were we thinking? They're bloody boring," Fred whispered into the other.

"I can think of more exciting ways to spend an evening, that's for sure," Harry answered. Searching out whoever was on the grounds, for example. Giving another go at dismantling the portal in the forest. Pulling Draco right into the tub, dragonhide boots and all, and -

A hand latched onto his elbow when he got into the hall and pulled him out of the middle of the Weasley twins. Settling him back on his feet, Tonks eyed him in what looked like sympathetic exasperation for a minute, then stood on her toes to kiss him on the cheek. "The Malfoys are dark wizards, Harry," she said without preamble. "Don't piss about with them. And be nice to Draco's Great-Aunt Iphigenia - she's a darling old woman but the house elves never did manage to clean her third husband all the way out of the carpet."

Harry choked. "What?"

"I've no idea what he actually did. All the family will say is that he deserved it. And in that family it must have been something really awful - ripping out his firstborn's heart and eating it raw or wearing black shoes with brown robes or something." Tonks grinned and patted him on the shoulder. "But love conquers all, wot? Keep him happy in b