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

"He won't hear," Percy reported, and remembered when he would have been crushed by it.

Something flickered in Lucius' face - bitterness, disappointment, quickly covered, and Percy realized with a start that Lucius had been hoping for better news. "It would have been terribly out of character if he had, I suppose. And the rest of the Ministry?"

Percy looked down, twirling his quill absently in his fingers. The cap was still on his inkwell. "People are afraid. They want it to be something besides Voldemort coming back. Some people, more every day, say that it's disloyal and divisive to question the Minister. That when people talk about Voldemort, they're only giving the malcontents ideas, giving them attention they shouldn't have. That if we stand strong and ignore them, refuse to be cowed, refuse to give in, the people supposedly pretending to be Death Eaters will go away. Slinking off under the crushing weight of our silent scorn, I suppose."

"An admirable sentiment, perhaps, under other circumstances," said Lucius, who quite plainly did not believe it to be an admirable sentiment under any circumstances.

"Yesterday morning," Percy said, then paused for a long moment before he was ready to go on. "Yesterday morning we found Arliss Spencer and his wife and son - I don't know if you remember him, he was a junior clerk when you were at the Ministry last, Muggle-born but a good clerk and a good man. Hikers found them really. They were… they were standing in Kielder Forest, a dozen or so miles outside of Kielder Lay, nearly outside the Muggle-repelling charms. Just standing. The Dementors had been at them, and they were…"

Blank-eyed, swaying a little on unmoving feet, chins slick with drool. They'd been able to walk on their own if they were pushed first, following the Unspeakables and Percy with a strange, clumsy gait.

"Fudge said the Dementors who attacked them must have been rogues, gone feral after Voldemort fell. He's offered a reward now, you know, for Dementor heads, like a lord of the manor offering a bounty on wolf skins. So far no one's been fool enough to try to take him up on it. But that sort of thing will be harder to blame on poorly-raised teenagers than the Dark Mark in the sky, won't it?"

"Dementors," Lucius said in an odd tone. Percy looked up, stricken, ready to apologize for having brought back unpleasant memories. But Lucius' attention hadn't drifted off into the past; it was right there, focused with frightening intensity on Percy's words, and his face was as white as his hair.

"Sir?" Percy asked, puzzled and worried.

"Is this the first time the Dementors have committed an open assault like this?" Lucius asked. "The first time in recent years, I mean."

Percy frowned. "We believe so, yes. There were rumors, but… there are always rumors."

"What rumors, exactly?"

"That they're still allied with Voldemort. That he breeds them like hounds. That he fed them his followers to keep them happy for a while and then had to start letting them out to hunt during the new moon - the Quibbler carried that story. They printed another one, too, about infants withering and dying in their cribs." Percy shrugged a little, uneasy in spite of himself. "I didn't think Dementors could actually kill anything - not that what they do do isn't worse. Why do you ask?"

Lucius, tranquility sitting oddly with his sudden pallor, rose unhurriedly and went to the window to look out. He clasped his hands absently behind his back, and suddenly Percy saw him again as he'd seen him for the first time in this room.

"Let me tell you a story, child," he said.

 

November, 2005

"Fucking Gryffindor wanker, the whole lot of you are too stupid to -"

"Go suck that snake on your banner, you -"

" - even breed properly, can't get a real witch so you have to fuck animals and mudbloods -"

"Densaugeo!"

"Apneo!"

"Expelliarmus!" Harry shouted, casting over the heads of a crowd of children and putting a twist into the spell to deflect both curses. The curses shattered harmlessly against his shield as wands flew at him to land neatly in his grasp. The students went silent, parting prudently to let him through, and Harry grabbed two boys by the scruffs of the necks just as they were getting ready to slink away and lose themselves in the crowd. "Right, where do the two of you think you're going?"

Brown eyes and blue stared sullenly up at him - or across, in Aldis Ketteridge's case. It was an odd sort of feeling, looking at them - less déjà vu than a hole where déjà vu ought to be; it was the Slytherin who was dark-haired this time, and the Gryffindor slight and pale.

"Clear off, you lot," Harry said over his shoulder, not taking his eyes away from the two boys. "Ketteridge, Mason, what was all that about?"

They looked away, not at each other, stubbornly silent.

"Right, well, you know what, I don't really care," Harry said bluntly. "Mason, five points from Gryffindor and detention on Saturday. Get to class. Ketteridge, come with me."

Sour, cynical resentment twisted Ketteridge's face; but he followed Harry anyway, half a pace behind him all the way to Harry's office. Harry pushed him inside and went to stand behind the desk. The door swung shut behind Ketteridge with a bang that made the boy start almost imperceptibly.

"Where the fuck did you learn that spell, Ketteridge?" Harry asked, tossing him his wand.

Ketteridge caught his wand out of the air and tilted his head, eyes widening just a little in a look with which Harry was quite familiar - a Slytherin openly evaluating a situation with which he was, unexpectedly, not entirely displeased. "Professor Flitwick cast Anapneo on Jason Natter once. The idiot was trying to sneak chocolate frogs in class and one of them jumped down his throat the wrong way. I reversed it, that's all."

"Do you know the countercurse?"

Ketteridge frowned a little, puzzled. "I assumed a Finite Incantatem -"

"You assumed wrong," Harry told him. "The reason countercurses exist to begin with is that Finite Incantatem doesn't work on every spell there is. How fast would you have been able to get help when you found out it didn't? Before Mason died, or got brain damage?"

A moment's careful thought, and then Ketteridge, cautiously, let the answer show in his face: he wouldn't have tried, or wouldn't have tried very hard.

Harry sighed and rubbed a hand over his forehead. "Why, Ketteridge? Over stupid bloody House rivalries?"

"House rivalries were important enough to you in your time. Sir."

"That's because I was an idiot, like ninety percent of teenage boys on this Earth. I'd have pegged you for one of the other ten."

There was another silence as Ketteridge chewed on his lip, thinking. "No, sir," he said finally. "Not because of House rivalries."

"What, then? You don't risk killing someone because he nicked your girlfriend or something."

Ketteridge looked deeply affronted at the idea that any girlfriend of his could be lured away by Mason. "They watch us," he said. "All the bloody time. They make a show of it, watching to make sure the evil, sneaky Slytherins aren't letting in the Dementors at the gates. It's a bit rich, isn't it, Peter Pettigrew's House setting themselves up as the castle's first line of defense against treachery? And Mason's the worst. He's lucky it was me who heard him this time instead of Professor Malfoy. I might have suffocated him out of ignorance but at least I wouldn't have turned him into a cockroach and accidentally trod on him."

Harry found himself choking back a wildly inappropriate snort of laughter. "Look, I'll talk to Professor McGonagall about it. In the meantime, five points from Slytherin and detention Saturday and Sunday -"

"But sir, it's Quidditch this weekend," Ketteridge wailed, mortally hard-done-by.

Harry closed his eyes. The little blighters were a judgment on him, he knew it. "I know the Quidditch schedule, Ketteridge, thank you. You were about to use a potentially fatal dark hex on another student. You're lucky I don't have you up before the Headmaster, and don't think I won't next time. If you have to duel in the bloody halls, stick to jelly-legs curses. Now go on about your business."

Ketteridge left trailing clouds of gloom behind him. Harry sighed and shifted to sit half on his desk, yawning hugely. Lack of sleep was starting to catch up with him.

Classes were over for the day, and it was hours yet until curfew. He'd told Remus, Goyle, and the twins to meet him in the courtyard at half ten, told Goyle to pass the message on to Draco, and now all he had to do was wait. And the couch in his office was suddenly looking very, very inviting indeed.

He could afford a couple of hours' sleep. Setting his alarm, he stretched out on the couch, lit a fire in the fireplace with a flick of his wand, and pulled off his glasses.

 

The sky over their heads was churning with fast-racing scarlet clouds, edged in black, dark lightning flickering just beyond.

"It only grows in Sinai, in the deep desert," Voldemort said, resting fingers like ivory fansticks against the petals of a loose, wide, midnight-blue flower. Petals shrivelled under his touch as though melting away from a glass-blower's flame.

"How do you get it to grow here?" Harry asked, thinking he'd tell Neville. His scar was twinging, just a little, a not-quite-uncomfortable tingling under his skin.

"I feed it hen's tears," Voldemort answered.

"But hen's tears are -" Wet, Harry started to say, then remembered a long-forgotten bit of potions trivia. "The base for a desiccation potion."

"Because one can't use water," Voldemort said, approving, patient. "Touch it. The leaves have remarkable curative powers."

Harry tugged off his milk-soft black leather gloves and stretched out a hand to brush his fingertips across the petals. They were warm, moving under his hand in the wind, humming with magic that made his skin tingle. The sleeve of his robes fell away from the Dark Mark on his left arm.

"It seems inevitable, doesn't it, that something so lovely should be born of such desolation? And equally inevitable that the desolation should reclaim it in the end. At least here, in this garden, the flowers are safe from the predation of locusts, and from sandstorms that can wipe away whole cities from the face of the earth. I wonder sometimes, though, if it pines." Voldemort glanced at him and smiled, sharp teeth reddened by the strange sky. "But come. Let's talk of something else. Do tell me how young Draco is doing at school. Coming along as befits a Malfoy, I trust?"

Harry looked slowly up at him, and the wind blew his long hair into his face, veiling his vision with white.

 

His scar was burning like fire. Harry fought his way toward consciousness, grasping at the scaldingly painful feeling of the couch underneath his back. Then there was a sudden pressure on his chest, and he sank back down.

 

He was low to the ground, heavy with drowsiness, and Hermione was singing in the kitchen. The part of him that was still Harry wanted to get up and go to her, but the part of him currently in control was warm and comfortable in front of the fire and disinclined to move for anything less compelling than fresh turkey giblets. It didn't matter, anyway - within moments she'd come back into the living room carrying a steaming mug and a plate with a sandwich and biscuits. She plopped down onto the couch beside a thick book and a pile of knitting, set down the plate, turned on the wireless with a wave of her wand, and poked him gently in the stomach with a toe covered in a thick winter sock.

"Boys are ridiculous, Crookshanks. Yes, you too," she told him, then appeared to reconsider. "Well, maybe people are ridiculous and not cats. Yes, I think I like that better. Lord knows someone has to be sensible, and it might as well be you."

He flicked his ears and batted lazily at her foot with a paw.

Hermione took a bite of a biscuit and chewed meditatively, staring at the half of the biscuit left in her hand. "I think I'm going to go into London tomorrow. Flourish and Blotts will have just got in that -"

The wireless died suddenly and every lamp in the room sputtered out, leaving them in silence and firelight. Her eyes suddenly wide and wary in the dimness, Hermione set her cup and plate down silently and quickly and stood, gripping her wand tightly. Backing toward the fire, she scooped him up as she passed and used her wand to fling a handful of Floo powder into the fireplace. "Hogwarts," she said, her voice high and not entirely steady.

The fire guttered and cracked, flaring bilious red instead of green, and heat flared from it with an intensity that drove her back toward the couch. "Apparate!" she cried, not sounding hopeful, and struck the anti-Apparition shield she must have known was there. For just a moment, she buried her face in his fur.

Hermione gave him a squeeze, set him down quickly and turned to face the door. Blackness welled outside the windows, and he could feel something gathering outside the door, pushing against it like thick fog. Slowly, stealthily, the doorknob began to turn.

"Crookshanks," Hermione said, white-faced. "Run."

He hesitated for a moment, ears flat back on his head, but the smell of rot and the feel of Dementors sparked panic deep in his gut and he raced underneath the couch. Hermione cast just as something slammed against the door wards, nearly breaching them. The part of him that was still Harry recognized the wards she was casting, ones meant not to protect houses but to protect castles; she cast again, and again, transfiguring the wood of her porch into Devil's Snare, sending a Patronus through the door, turning her door into a welded iron bulkhead.

It came through anyway, whatever was outside that door, as Harry had known it would, shearing through wood and metal with an explosion that knocked Hermione off her feet.

Things slid and shifted around him, and with the disorienting suddenness of dreams he found himself watching from underneath the couch, both halves of him half-mad with rage and helpless horror, as Hermione fell to the floor beside the couch like a broken, bloody doll. The Dementors pressed in, a bewildering obscenity in this comfortable living room, hovering near, their hunger palpable. Ragged hems swirled over her outstretched hand, her skin smearing blood onto a Dementor's robe.

"You're dying, you know," Voldemort said almost kindly. Hermione moved her head, struggling to focus blank eyes on him, wherever he was.

"No, be silent," he chided as her lips parted. "You've said quite enough for the moment. I'm going to give you a gift, girl. You don't deserve it, but I have my reasons for giving it to you."

The suffocating presence of the dementors drew closer. Crookshanks flattened himself against the floor, and somewhere in the back of Harry's head Sirius fell through the veil.

"Once upon a time, I had a servant," Voldemort said.

Darkness pressed in, smothering, turning the firelight a dark livid purple.

"Not the luckiest of my servants, perhaps - but powerful, certainly the most loyal, and the most zealous in my cause."

A low, nerve-scraping hum built at the edges of Harry's hearing. Hermione convulsed, freezing with her back locked in an arch off the floor.

"But of course the Ministry got hold of him. And after what they did to him… well, he wasn't quite the same when I finally got him back."

A pale, opalescent mist lifted out of Hermione like ectoplasm, twisting above her, a ghostly echo of her body writhing in agony.

"This wouldn't do, of course. I needed him. And even I, girl, repay loyalty, and service where it's given."

The hum was louder now, foul and hungry. The Dementors, all but invisible from where he crouched under the sofa, swirled closer, starving, straining against Voldemort's will, straining to inhale Hermione's soul and tear it to pieces among them like wolves with a deer. The mist rose away from her, twisting, struggling to return to her body against some inexorable tide.

"And then, quite by chance, I found that Dementors can do something… terribly useful."

A black, oily fog surrounded Hermione, stinking of dark magic and necromancy, nearly crushing out the last of the light. For a moment it swirled around her body, seeking a way in - and then it shot upward, surrounding Hermione's translucent doppelganger with the speed and brutality of a spider seizing prey. Voldemort was chanting softly, words that nagged at the edges of Harry's memory. Hermione's spirit resisted the fog for long seconds, magic dancing at the boundaries of that struggle like lightning; then, with a crack and the sudden smell of burning skin, the fog invaded that dim mist, merging with it, turning it a churning silver-streaked black. Its weight, and Voldemort's incantation, forced it back down to seep into Hermione's body through her mouth, her eyes, her nose, her skin.

"Of course, the procedure isn't yet perfect," Voldemort said regretfully, and when Hermione opened her eyes, they were glowing like coals with sly, quicksilver madness.

 

"Harry!"

Harry woke with an agonizing jolt, one hand clamped so tightly against his forehead that his nails were tearing skin, gasping for breath in harsh, racking pants through his teeth. Light spilled into his eyes, making him blink hard and sending hot, painful tears trailing down the sides of his face. Between the blazing light and lack of his glasses, he couldn't see anything but a bright blur.

"Harry, it's all right," someone said. "Here, one of you take the cat."

Cat? Harry rubbed hard at his eyes and squinted through the pain and brightness to see Minerva sitting on the couch beside him.

"Are you awake?" she asked him.

Harry swallowed convulsively. His scar still felt like it was on fire. "Yeah," he said hoarsely. The light was less dazzling now, fading back into ordinary candlelight, and he could see Minerva's blurry form well enough to see that she was worried.

Beyond her, there was a glimmer of white like moonlight on snow, blending into black and a blotch of furry orange at about chest level. Harry blinked harder, still panting, trying to make out Draco's features across the distance between his couch and the desk against which Draco was leaning. He couldn't, but that didn't stop him trying.

"We won't ask if you're all right," Snape's dry tones came from a little behind Harry's head.

"How did you know?" Harry asked Snape and Minerva, still looking at Draco. The blur of white shifted as Draco looked away.

"Never you mind," Minerva said briskly. "What happened, Harry?"

Harry closed his eyes again, wondering what had become of his glasses. "I… there was a flower. It was blue. And…"

"And?" Minerva prodded.

For a moment everything was still foggy. Then memory returned in a flood and he sat bolt upright, his glasses flying into his hand from wherever they'd got to. He fumbled them onto his face and watched the three of them spring into focus - Minerva next to him, Snape behind her, Draco leaning on the desk holding Crookshanks and absently scratching the cat behind the ears. "What time is it?"

"Half five," Minerva told him. "Harry -"

He raked his fingers through his hair and stood, catching up his robes. He'd gone to sleep with them spread over him, and now they were full of cat fur. Crookshanks must have been lying right on his chest. "I have to see Hermione."

"What?" the others asked more or less in unison.

"Hermione, I have to see Hermione. If I leave now I can still get the ward nurses to let me in."

"Potter, are you sure that's wise?" Snape asked.

"No," Harry said; clearly surprising them, but it was true. "I'm not. But I have to see her anyway."

"You can't go alone," Draco said, setting Crookshanks down on the desk.

Harry pulled on his robes and tucked in his shirt. "You can't go with me. She won't talk to me if you're there."

"I can't go?" Draco asked. "Or she can't see me?"

Harry's hands stilled on his tie. It was stupid, something disastrous was going to come of it, but he wanted Draco there. He wanted another set of eyes, of senses. "Right," he said finally. "Accio invisibility cloak."

"Might one ask what precisely this is about?" Snape asked pointedly.

"I can't explain it right now. Ask me again when we get back," Harry told him. "It's… look, what happened to Hermione, it's related to the dream I had at the safehouse. Voldemort did the same thing to her as he did to that bloke, except that he didn't kill her first. I have to find out…"

What she is now. If there's anything left of Hermione, and if I can get it back if there is.

"…I have to find out why he's doing what he's doing with those fucking Dementors, and how to stop it."

"Potter, I would be very surprised if her condition were curable," Snape said, and Harry remembered that even Slytherins could be kind in their own strange way.

"Whatever Voldemort's planning, this thing with the Dementors is the key," Harry said. "He thinks it's going to win the war for him. I can't overlook it. God damn it, I can't believe I didn't make the connection before now."

Draco gave an elegant snort. "Between one of your friends going mad from being tortured and Voldemort char-broiling a victim of the Dementor's Kiss and bringing him back to life? Yes, Potter, the connection is quite obvious. We were all just waiting for you to catch up."

"Potter. What is this about?" Snape asked insistently.

Harry hesitated, looking up. "Voldemort and the Dementors did this to Hermione. They did something to her. There's something here I'm missing but I don't know what, it's right in the back of my head, and I'm afraid if I poke too hard at it I'll lose it. Just… wait until I get back, please."

The door whisked open and Harry's invisibility cloak flew into the room. He caught it out of the air and tossed it to Draco. "Malfoy…"

"What?"

Harry shook his head. "Later. Professor Snape, we won't be gone long."

"See that you aren't," Snape sighed, giving in or washing his hands of the whole thing, one or the other. "And do try to return without having called down disaster on your heads."

"Right," Draco said sardonically, swinging Harry's cloak around himself and vanishing into thin air.

Ten minutes and a brief argument about the merits of Flooing from Snape's office later, the two of them paused at a side door, looked warily around for students, and headed toward the gates when the coast was clear. Harry was Disillusioned and Draco still wearing the cloak, but there was no sense taking chances.

"What did you want to ask, Potter? Before, I mean," Draco said when they were out of earshot of the walls.

Harry glanced in Draco's direction, or what he hoped was his direction, anyway. "Do you remember running into me and Hermione in Madam Puddifoot's the day Hermione was attacked?"

"Yes. Why?"

Harry paused, trying to figure out a way to ask that wouldn't bring out Draco's rather frightening protective streak. "After you left, Hermione said that Pansy felt sorry for her. Does she? Because I don't know why she would, and Hermione wouldn't say."

There was a rather long silence before Draco's voice came again, sounding odd and strained. "I'd tell you to ask Pansy, but I think that might be a bit awkward."

Suddenly very glad they were both invisible, Harry cleared his throat. "Do you know, though?"

"Not as such, no."

"Draco, it's important," Harry said desperately.

There was a sigh from beside him. "Potter, it's not. Pansy gets strange ideas sometimes. Let it go."

"How long has she been holding on to this particular strange idea? Whatever it is."

"God, Potter, I don't know! Since our second or third year at school. It's nothing it'll help you to know. Leave it alone."

Draco was starting to sound distinctly annoyed. Annoyed himself, Harry backed off for the moment, and they were silent the rest of the way to the gates.

 

The white-haired, apple-faced doctor wasn't on duty this time. In his place was a harried-looking apprentice Harry vaguely remembered as a Ravenclaw who'd been a year or two ahead of him at Hogwarts.

"You can see her if you'd like," the apprentice said in that tone that always brought out the worst in Harry, the one that was half unctuous deference to his scar and half wariness that Harry would prove to be seriously unstable if balked. This one would take the same tone with Voldemort, Harry thought, if Voldemort were to show up at St. Mungo's demanding to see an ill friend. "You have to understand, though, she isn't any better. In some ways she's worse."

"In what ways?" Harry asked.

The apprentice frowned, ruffling the vane of his quill with a quick, nervous gesture. "It's hard to explain," he said slowly, his attention distracted from Harry by the problem with his patient. "She's not as easily upset as she was, but she's no more lucid either. She's unresponsive more and more often. It's as if she's waiting for something."

"What the hell could she be waiting for?" Harry demanded, feeling his throat tighten with something that was part distress and part fear. Someone passed too close behind them and Draco was suddenly pressed against Harry's back, melting against him and out of the other person's way, his hands resting lightly on the backs of Harry's shoulders for balance. Harry could almost feel Draco's feathers ruffling - he probably thought people ought to keep well out of a Malfoy's way whether the Malfoy in question was invisible at the moment or not.

"We don't know, Mr. Potter," the apprentice said. "We're rather hoping you'll be able to tell us."

"Can I see her now?" Harry asked, and the apprentice nodded.

 

"We're picking up an echo in the wards," the nurse said, giving Harry an odd look.

"I'm wearing a pretty strong protective amulet," he lied. "It plays hob with alarm equipment sometimes. I can take it off, but I'd rather -"

"No, no, that's all right," the apprentice said. "Look, the Sneakoscope's quiet."

"It's pouting," the nurse told him. "Cartwright had to recalibrate it. It was picking up the candy stripers borrowing sticking plasters up in Haematology."

"You can go through, Mr. Potter," the apprentice told him. "Do you remember the way, or shall I -"

"No, I remember it," Harry said. "Thanks."

He opened the door wide enough that Draco could slip past him, took a breath to steady himself, and went out into the hall. The lights were dim and oddly blue-cast, no sunlight coming in this time to alleviate the gloom.

"Is there another exit?" Draco whispered.

"Straight ahead and up some stairs," Harry answered under his breath. "You can't get in through it even with someone holding it open, but you can get out."

Draco fell silent, even his footsteps blending seamlessly with Harry's. It was an uncomfortable feeling, as if he'd truly disappeared and left Harry alone in this cold hallway with its echoing tile floors. There were privacy charms up over most of the barred doorways, white and not quite opaque; shadows moved slowly behind some of them, or didn't move at all.

The privacy charm in front of Hermione's cell was down. She was sitting on the narrow bed, legs curled underneath her, facing a little away from the door. Her hospital gown hung loose on her, exposing sharp bones under her skin, and she was tapping her fingers against each other as if she were spelling something out into her hands.

"The primary ingredient in a will-sapping potion," she said, "is the intraocular fluid of a blue-eyed virgin. The market for such ingredients in dark and highly illegal potions has led to a number of measures, both formal and informal, for protecting the bodies of the wizarding dead from resurrectionists. One such measure, cremation, gained in popularity during the first rise of He Who Must Not Be Named -"

"Hermione," Harry said.

Hermione's head snapped around so fast that he thought her neck was going to crack. For just a moment, her face was lit with a wild, unsettling, feral joy; then the expression vanished and she smiled at him, rising stiffly to come over to the bars. "Harry," she said. "You came back."

"I told you I would." Harry lifted his hand and set his palm against the bars, ignoring the warning tingle and dim red flare of the wards. "How do you feel?"

"I feel…" Hermione set her hand on the bars, mirroring Harry's, humming lightly in contentment. "Better now. All better, Harry. Nothing hurts anymore, nothing at all."

"That's good to hear," Harry said, and meant it.

Hermione's eyes flicked up to his, suddenly sharp and uncomfortably knowing. "It's Malfoy, isn't it?" she asked. "He's gone, or he's dead."

Harry blinked, feeling as if he'd had cold water dumped over him. "What - Hermione - "

There was a sudden, insistent pressure at the small of his back, warning him to silence.

Hermione leaned forward, making the wards heat in warning and cast a red glow into her face where it wasn't shadowed by her hair. "It's a simple question, really. What would bring my Harry here alone at this hour, to this ghastly place, looking like the fall of the House of Usher? Malfoy. Something's happened to him, and you think I know what it is. So which is it, Harry? Is he dead or just missing?"

"I… that's not what I came to talk to you about."

"Good," Hermione said sharply. "I think I've had quite enough of talking to you about Malfoy."

Harry looked away, feeling vaguely ashamed and not quite understanding why. "Hermione, will you answer me something?"

"Of course, Harry. Don't I always?"

"Do you feel different now than you did before? Is there anything you can do now you couldn't before, or could do before that you can't do now?"

Her smile was quick and unpleasant, a nastier version of that faintly superior contempt he remembered seeing in her face from time to time when they were younger. "Well, according to the doctors here, I'm quite mad."

"Are you?" he whispered.

The contempt drained out of her face, leaving her ashen-faced and frightened, and for the first time that night what looked out of her eyes seemed entirely Hermione. "I… don't know," she said with difficulty. "I have visions now, Harry. I see things. Horrible things, most of them. Harry, listen to me, for God's sake. If he comes back, if Malfoy comes back to Hogwarts - cut off his head, fill his mouth with wild roses, and bury him at the crossroads. Don't think you can bring him back."

She stepped back away from the bars, edging back into the shadows, her movements tense and restless. "You don't want them to come back. You might think you do, but you don't. You don't. Oh, Harry, you don't know what I've seen…"

Harry couldn't stop his hand from edging out and just brushing Draco's through the invisibility cloak. "Hermione," he said, trying for a soothing tone and failing badly. "Come back, sweet."

"You can't bring them back!" she screamed in a voice that wasn't entirely her own. There were startled cries from the cells around them, and down the hall someone began to sob.

"Hermione!" Desperate, Harry pressed as close to the wards as he dared. "You're safe now, I promise. Come here and talk to me, all right? Please."

A long, tense minute passed before she came back to the doorway and raised her hands to rest them on the bars across from Harry's. She leaned her head on the bars as well, her face inches from his. She smelled of institutional soap, not of rot or necromancy. "Harry, when can I go home?" she whispered thinly.

"When you're well again," he whispered back.

"I miss Crookshanks."

Harry closed his eyes and gave a small, forced laugh. "I know. He's with Remus and the twins. Remus lets him eat scrambled eggs off the breakfast tray and chase the creamer." He looked back up at her, taking a steadying breath. "Can you tell me how else you feel different now?"

Her brow furrowed in concentration. "Do you know, it's the funniest thing, but - sometimes I don't feel like my body's really mine. It only happens sometimes, but I get clumsy. It's as if my body's died and I just haven't realized it or quite left. But don't worry, I still have a pulse," she added with a dour laugh. "It's only for a minute or two when it happens, but I don't like it."

"No, it sounds pretty unpleasant," Harry agreed.

"I don't know how to explain it, Harry. I'm just… not quite myself. I don't have my wand, you know, and there are dampening spells that keep me from doing wandless magic, and sometimes it feels like if I could just have my wand back for one minute I could blow out the walls of this hospital, like there's some sort of awful magic in me that wants to be born and there's no midwife to help it come."

Harry swallowed hard. "Hermione, I need to ask you something else. Can you talk about… about what happened without getting too upset?"

"Well, if I couldn't, you'd have put your foot in it now, wouldn't you?" she asked sharply, and Harry moved uneasily back away from the bars - but not too far.

"Did Vol - did You-Know-Who ever say why he did what he did? Did he say what all this was in aid of?"

"No," Hermione said slowly, visibly searching her memory. "He didn't. And he didn't say anything that would give me enough to guess. All he said was something about getting a servant back."

"Damn," Harry said.

"I can't sleep," Hermione whispered. "It's all under my skin, the magic, like my whole body's electrified. You remember electricity, Harry?"

"I remember," he answered. "Once in a while I still catch myself looking for the light switch when I walk into a room. Hermione, the doctors said it seemed like you were waiting for something. What are you waiting for?"

She gave him a sweet smile and spread her hand against his, separated by the red glow of the ward. "Nothing, Harry. Nothing at all."

Uncomfortably convinced that she was lying, Harry drew back. "Listen, I have to go. I'll come back soon, all right?"

Hermione drew herself up and away from the bars, looking sullen and resentful. "Well, at least you're not racing out of here looking like you're in desperate need of a potted plant to vomit in this time. It's an improvement."

Next to Harry, there was a rather suspicious, strangled sound. He cleared his throat loudly to cover it up. "I'm sorry for that."

"Harry…" She drew close to the bars again, warmed in the red glow. "You've forgot how powerful he is, after all these years. You've forgot what it's like to face him. You have to be strong, Harry, you can't afford mistakes."

"I know," Harry answered.

"So it's for the best, you know, about Malfoy. You can't afford luxuries like keeping someone close to you who you know is going to betray you the first time his father calls him to heel. Whatever's happened to him, let him go." For just a moment, her face wore that crafty, malevolent expression that so unnerved him, gone quickly enough that it might just have been a trick of his imagination.

"I have to go," he said again. "Good night, Hermione."

Hermione gave a soft, happy purr. "Good night, Harry," she said dreamily, and he heard her singing behind him as he left.

Out in the small courtyard he paused, depressed and unsettled, watching his breath plume in front of him in thin clouds. "I'd say I'm sorry and she didn't mean it, but…" he said finally.

There was a stir in the air next to him and Draco's head appeared, accompanied by a thin strip of the front of his body. "But she did," he finished with a caustic smile. "I've heard worse, Potter."

Harry sighed and ran a hand through his hair.

"Did you find out what you wanted to?" Draco asked, a little more gently.

"No," Harry answered. "Well… not exactly, I mean. You know, I was hoping Voldemort had spilled the whole bloody plan to her. It'd be just like him."

"He didn't intend to kill her," Draco said.

Harry gave a harsh laugh. "Right. Not a good idea to tell all your tactics to an enemy and then set them loose, even if you've - if you've -" He stuttered to a stop, his throat closing painfully, and turned away.

There was a long silence before hands slid onto his shoulders from behind, nearly making him jump out of his skin. "Shh," Draco whispered, closer than he'd expected. "I'm sorry, Potter. She… didn't deserve this."

Harry had to smile. "You're cute when you're insincere."

There was a quiet sigh from behind him, stirring the hair at the back of his neck. "I don't know what else to say."

Harry brought up his hand and laced his fingers lightly, tentatively, into Draco's. "I know," he answered. "I don't either."

"So we'll just stand here and be inarticulate, then. We're blokes, I think that'll work for us."

"It works for me," Harry breathed, closing his eyes as his fingers and Draco's wound around each other.

"She's right, you know," Draco whispered into his hair. "You can't afford to trust me."

"I can afford a hell of a lot, Draco," Harry answered. "Even you, as expensive a luxury as you are."

"Potter, I'm serious."

"I don't want to talk about this right now," Harry said, wanting desperately to lean back against the warm comfort of Draco's body and not daring. "I need to think for a while about what Hermione said. And don't you dare tell me not to hurt myself, either."

"Wouldn't dream of it," Draco muttered.

"There's something I'm not seeing," Harry said. "Something that when I finally do see it is going to make me feel like a real idiot for missing it before. Draco, why hasn't your father made a move against Voldemort?"

Draco was silent for a minute. "Well, to begin with, we don't know that he hasn't," he pointed out. "We only know that he hasn't drawn him into open battle - which is a thing it's extremely difficult to get Slytherins to do anyway. We prefer sneak attacks and poison in the wine. In the second place, my father won't move openly until he either has no choice or is positive he can win - or until you make a move, and my father has a chance to strike while Voldemort is weakened."

"That figures," Harry muttered.

"Potter…" Draco hesitated for a moment, his thumb stroking absently over the insides of Harry's fingers. "When I go back to my father, I'll send you what information I can, for as long as I can. Nothing that will hurt him, but as much as I can that'll help."

Harry shook his head, trying to ignore the sharp ache in his gut. "Your father and I aren't on the same side, Draco. Remember what Snape said? The enemy of my enemy isn't necessarily my friend."

"Nor is my friend necessarily the enemy of my enemy," Draco said. "But it's certainly nice when he is, isn't it?"

"I need more time, Draco," Harry said softly. "I'll find a way to break the charm. If you still want to go back after that I won't stand in your way, but at least let me make it so that it's you making the decision and not some damned spell making it for you."

"I don't have much time left, Harry," Draco answered, just as quietly.

"I know. Just… don't go tonight."

Draco's breath was warm on the nape of Harry's neck, and so very close. "I won't," he whispered, then drew back. "We should go."

Harry closed his eyes and let Draco's fingers slip out of his. "Right," he said. "Half ten, on the front steps."

"I'll be there," Draco promised, and Apparated away.

Harry rubbed his eyes, his thoughts torn between Draco and Hermione. He was beginning to wonder if she wasn't right about Draco being a distraction he could ill afford.

It didn't matter. Not at the moment, and maybe not ever. And in the meantime, he had plenty of other things to worry about, and he was just going to have to take them one at a time. Mentally reviewing his plans, he Apparated back to Hogwarts, wishing that he could get rid of the small, niggling feeling that he'd forgot something terribly important.

 

The first thing he saw when he came out onto the front steps at half ten was Draco and Pansy standing in a taut, Imperturbed huddle in the courtyard, arms folded tightly over their chests, anger crackling almost visibly between them as they argued in surrealistic silence. With the Imperturbable charm up, their actions were all he had to interpret - Draco shifting his stance to tower pointedly over Pansy, Pansy gesturing sharply toward the Forest, Draco shifting again to block her gesture as though he meant to stand between the Forest and her. They were both tight-lipped and livid; and when Draco glanced up to meet Harry's eyes, Pansy grabbed hold of his jaw and turned his face back toward her, then gave Harry a poisonous glare. Harry shifted his grip on his broom and looked away, uncomfortable and ashamed.

"What are they fighting about?" Neville asked from behind him.

Harry turned to glance at him. "I don't know. I just got here."

"We tried to roll in an Extendable Ear," George said around a mouthful of puff pastry from where he perched cross-legged on a wide stone banister. "Malfoy saw it coming and turned it into a five-foot acromantula."

"Not bloody on," Fred said crossly, glaring at the back of Draco's head. From across the staircase, Goyle gave Fred a hard look.

"Good thing Ron wasn't here. We'd still be trying to get him down off the Astronomy Tower," George noted.

"Gave us a bit of a turn, I'm afraid," Remus said ruefully.

"Right," Harry said. "Well, look, someone's got to go call them off. We're not going to stand here all night waiting for them to settle whatever it is."

"Severus, go and give Draco a ding 'round the ear," Minerva said, and Harry turned in surprise to see her pulling on her gloves with brisk, determined gestures, her broom trailing obediently behind her. She saw him staring and raised an eyebrow. "Really, Harry. You didn't think you'd got something past us, did you?"

"Well," Harry began.

"Never mind, Minerva," Snape said over his shoulder as he brushed by them on the way down to Draco and Pansy. "It'll do him good to be reminded that other people are possessed of functional brains."

Harry scowled after him. Snape pulled his wand out of his sleeve and waved it sharply, and the Imperturbable spell fell apart.

" - not fucking around, Parkinson, and if anything happened to you I'd never forgive either of us," Draco was shouting. He stopped abruptly as he realized that his voice was echoing through the courtyard and stepped back, looking chagrined.

"If the two of you are quite finished making a spectacle of yourselves," Snape said repressively, and Draco reddened as if he'd been slapped.

"Yes, we are," Pansy snapped. "Draco is quite finished with his display of manly protectiveness of the delicate womenfolk, and we are all quite ready to spend half the bloody night tromping through the forest on a fool's errand."

"Pansy, I don't think he meant -" Neville began nervously.

"You shut up, Longbottom," Draco ground out. "I hardly think Pansy requires you to translate from the Malfoy for her."

"Pansy, Draco, that's enough," Remus said kindly. "Harry, here we are. What's the plan?"

The plan. Right. Harry started down the steps. "We're going to start at the portal in the forest - whoever he is, we know he's been there. From there we'll work outward in a circle and see if we can pick up any tracks or magic traces. If we do, we'll follow; if not, we'll start back at the edge of the forest, split up into groups of three about two hundred yards apart, and work our way inward for half an hour. If we don't find anything in that time we'll come back, move over, and try again. If you find anything or need help, send up red sparks. There must be tracks at the edge somewhere - he's come out of the forest at least a couple of times, and he might be able to fly but he can't Apparate on school grounds. Headmaster, since you're here, can you send word to the centaurs? If you can convince them that it's in their best interests to have our uninvited guest out of the forest, they might be a lot of help."

Snape nodded.

Harry hesitated for a minute, looking around. "And listen, all of you - if you find him, or even if you find a trail, don't do anything until I get there. That goes for all of you, no matter what your gender, and yes, Malfoy, that means you too."

"Don't need to tell us twice," George muttered. Draco was bristling, but a beady glare from Snape kept him silent.

"Right. Let's be on our way, then," Harry said.

With one last glower at Pansy, Draco turned, brought his broom to him with a snap of his fingers, and swung up onto it in a flawless Diatkova sidemount. "Showoff," Harry muttered - but he had to smile, and also had to spend a minute thinking about Hagrid in a g-string before the cushioning charms on his own broom really did him any good.

Draco spiralled upward to take point, fading to a small silver-lit point of motion against the moon. Harry ached to join him, to shear through wind and stars with his broom and take on the forest at bristle-igniting speed, and ground his teeth at the slow pace he was forced to in order to stay with the others. With just Draco and himself, or the two of them and Minerva, they could have reached the portal in half the time.

"So that's it, huh?" Goyle asked when they finally did reach it, thumping gracelessly down onto the ground well away from the cobweb of magic-soaked ligature and the corpse hanging in the middle of it. "Nasty bit of work, innit?"

Minerva cast into her hand, blew on her palm, and tossed a storm of glimmering sparks into the air. They hung in the air just below the branches, lighting the area around the portal with a glow like unnaturally bright moonlight. "Dear God," she said.

"It isn't decent," Pansy said tightly. "Leaving her hanging there like that."

Draco gave her an odd look. "Pansy," he began in the tones of someone about to explain something to a well-loved but rather dim child.

"You shut up, Draco Malfoy," she snapped. "Don't come all 'It's just a skeleton, Pansy' over me or I'll tell everyone what happened the first time you had to -"

"Darling, let's save that story for the common room, shall we?" Draco said in a rather strangled voice.

"It isn't safe to take it down," Harry told Pansy, rubbing his fingertips over his forehead. He was getting a headache. "We don't know what it does or how to defuse it. Unless you've come up with something, Malfoy."

Reluctantly, Draco shook his head. "I've found things that are almost like it, but nothing that's similar enough for me to feel comfortable using the same dispelling techniques."

"It's poisoning the ground around it," Neville said quietly. "Look, the plants have all died."

"One thing at a time," Harry said. He knelt and cast the tracking spell Hagrid had taught him, stretching it out into the forest around them.

Nothing. Not even forest animals, not as far back in time as Harry could push the spell.

"Well, right," he muttered. "Of course it couldn't be that easy. Listen, can all of you cast a Patronus?"

"Not very well," Goyle admitted.

"Anyone who can't, stick with someone who can. The rest of you, we're going to cast a modification. Expecto patronum, investigandum. The wand movements are the same, but the Patronus will track for you, like a hunting dog - except that it tracks by magical signature and not by scent."

"That's a damned useful modification," Remus said.

Harry flashed him a smile. "Wait until we see if it works. I've only done it once or twice before. The drawback is that it doesn't work over long distances, and it can't follow a trail through Apparition or portkey use; also, you have to cast it near something that actively carries the signature of whoever you're tracking, and that's harder to come by than you might think. We'll see if the portal will do."

He cast and watched his stag leap out of bright aether to coalesce in the middle of the clearing, shying away from the portal. It tossed its head and snorted, prancing a step to the side, greeting Draco's gyrfalcon with obvious pleasure.

Stupid bloody Patronuses.

More of them materialized in the clearing, full-formed animals down to formless blobs of ectoplasm like will-o'-the-wisps. For a moment they only milled about, darting away from the portal, and Harry wondered if casting so many of them had set up too much magical interference to allow any of them to track from the portal's signature. Then Draco's banked to the side with a piercing cry and soared into the woods, flying straight through the trees in pursuit of its target, and in a flash Draco was speeding after it.

"Draco!" Pansy shouted after him.

"Malfoy!" Furious, Harry jumped onto his broom and shot after Draco, darting around a tree to cut across his path, making Draco yank his broom up into a tight 360-degree spin to avoid a collision. Harry pulled to a stop in front of him, blocking his way into the forest. "What the fuck, Malfoy? Did you not listen to a bloody word I said?"

"Do I ever listen to a word you say, Potter?" Draco retorted.

"Well, now would be a good fucking time to start!" Harry shouted. Draco glared at him and began to fly past him, pulling up with a jolt when Harry grabbed a handful of his shirt and yanked; the movement pulled them both off-balance, sending them spinning around each other like binary stars. "For Christ's sake, Malfoy, this isn't a game. Stop acting like a second-year trying to be the first one to the Christmas pudding and stay with Goyle at least."

"Potter, look," Draco said between his teeth. "Do you really think I can't handle whatever's out there?"

Draco's whole body was nearly vibrating with suppressed energy and adrenaline. His eyes kept darting past Harry to follow his Patronus through the trees; he was as eager for the hunt as a foxhound, chafing at being balked, pushing the hair impatiently out of his face where the rising wind blew it in. Harry wanted to knock him off his broom, pin him to the ground, and fuck him until he screamed.

Clearly, he thought in despair, his hormones had nothing better to do than point to Malfoy north at completely inappropriate moments.

He'd hesitated too long, and now Draco was incandescently pissed off. "Well, fuck you, Potter, do you want to find whatever's out here or do you want us all to wait while you go 'round to each of us in turn and make sure we all agree that you've got the biggest metaphorical dick here? Right, fine, consider yourself humored, we'll all agree the bloody Chosen One is -"

"Oh, leave that shit the fuck out, Malfoy! The size of my dick, metaphorical or otherwise, has nothing to do with you being bloody stupid and -"

"Harry," Remus said warningly.

Rather large hands reached between them and patiently pried Draco's shirt out of Harry's fingers and Draco's fingers off Harry's forearm. "That's enough out of both of you," Goyle rumbled. "If you wanted to warn him we were coming, you've done a fine job of it now."

A swirl of wind carried the dim scent of some expensive perfume on it and then Pansy was hovering by Draco, glaring daggers at Harry. "This was all about you not wanting him to go off alone, wasn't it?" she said coldly. "Well, right, here Greg and I are. Come along, Draco, and don't you dare lose us."

"Wouldn't dream of it, darling," Draco said, eyes locked with Harry's.

"Red sparks if there's trouble, wasn't it?" Goyle asked rhetorically. "See you later, Potter."

Harry let himself drift back, watching as the three of them soared off into the forest. Shit, he thought.

The twins drifted over to clap him companionably on the shoulder. They'd dismounted from their brooms, and shimmering foxes tumbled around their feet in a translucent tangle. "Steady on, Harry," George said. "Malfoy's having a trying enough night without you trying to climb on his broomstick."

Harry gave him a filthy glare, then glanced back. His stag was waiting a little way into the woods, trotting impatiently back and forth, set on another trail. "Right. Nev, you're with me."

"All right," Neville said, sounding a bit less enthusiastic than Harry's already-bruised ego would have liked.

"Minerva and I will work outward and see if we can pick up another trail," Snape said. "Lupin, I suggest you take the Messrs. Weasley and do the same."

Harry hesitated, looking around at his colleagues, before finally nodding. "Right. Everyone be careful. Whoever he is, don't bloody engage him."

"Stop lecturing us and go, Harry," Fred said sternly. "You don't want the Slytherins beating you to the snitch, do you?"

"I don't want the Slytherins finding the snitch at all," Harry muttered, and headed into the forest after his Patronus with Neville trailing behind him.

For a while everything was quiet, even the small noises of the forest silenced except for the wind through the branches. His Patronus was moving quickly through the trees, followed gamely by Neville's. Harry hoped to God they were on the right trail. If he could reach their uninvited guest before anyone else did…

"Harry," Neville said in his "I am going to stop you losing us any more House points if I have to close my eyes and swing my fist really hard in your direction" voice.

Harry squeezed his eyes closed and cursed silently. "Nev, I'm -"

"I know. I just wanted to point out to you that you got into a shouting match over the size of your dick with Draco Malfoy right in front of his fiancée."

"That was not what it was about!"

"Excuse me, I distinctly remember dick size being referenced repeatedly."

Oh, Lord. When Neville started sounding like Hermione, Harry was really in disgrace. He fought the urge to say He started it like an indignant first-year. "Look, I know, all right? I'm not exactly proud of it. But do you really think this is the time to discuss this?"

"We aren't discussing it. We're agreeing that you're going to keep a better hold on your tongue around Pansy, because she doesn't deserve to have it rubbed in her face that you and your dick of whatever size could take Draco away from her forever with a word."

Harry gave a sharp, miserable laugh. "Right. I could do that. And he'd never resent me for it. Or leave me anyway in a few years when he remembers about the whole bit where he has to produce an heir." Fuck, how much farther into the forest was this stupid trail going to lead? They were getting farther and farther in, and Harry had few good memories of this place to begin with.

"Harry…" Neville sighed, sounding less like Hermione and more like himself. "Look, just… don't crowd Pansy. Let her handle this the way she needs to handle it. Otherwise she'll never… well, just keep back a bit, right?"

Harry rubbed a hand over his forehead. "I'm trying, Nev. I'll try harder, all right?" he said, and hoped that would be the end of it.

God, it was close in these trees. He couldn't think.

"Lucius' whelp," Neville said. "Does he love you more than he loves his father?"

It was too fucking hot in the forest. Harry pulled restlessly at his tie. "Christ, Nev, no, of course he bloody doesn't."

"Lucius was beautiful too at that age," Neville said. "Or so I'm told. I'm told he still is. It isn't really fair, is it? Treachery should be ugly. It should mark you on the outside like it marks you on the inside."

There was a distant buzzing in Harry's ears like a particularly annoying gnat. He shook his head, trying to get rid of it. The sound was making it too damned hard to think. "What - why are we talking about Lucius Malfoy?"

"Where is he?" Neville asked. "You have to know."

"You know," Harry said, "Neville Longbottom never asked anyone to betray a confidence in his entire fucking life."

There was a distant roaring and the feel of a stifling fog being ripped away. Harry swung around on his broom, wand out, and looked around. He was in a clearing, moonlight silvering the edges of trees; his Patronus was nowhere in sight, and neither was Neville.

Shit, he thought, shaken, as he floated back into the shadows. That had been a damn powerful Confundus charm, unless he missed his guess - he could still feel it tugging at the edges of his brain. The trees looked bent and misshapen, branches grasping in the breeze like the Erl-king's fingers, and Harry had no idea where he was. Not that it mattered - if all else failed he could recast his Patronus, send it to Remus, and follow it through the forest - but it was unsettling nonetheless. He hoped Neville was all right.

Come on, you bastard, he thought. You were right there beside me. Where the hell did you go?

That almost-smell was back, rank in his nostrils, the stink of rot and dark magic; the same thing he'd smelled in the library, fading a little as if it were moving away, or learning to disguise itself. He couldn't pinpoint it. A hundred yards or so away something moved through the forest, large, not human, lumbering slowly and heavily, crushing branches as it went - an old acromantula, maybe, or God only knew what else. Harry stayed still for a dozen breaths, waiting for it to pass, then floated up a little and coursed silently, carefully, around the perimeter of the clearing, every sense straining to locate the source of that sense of foulness. He could feel the dark magic, curling along the ground in smokelike tendrils, calling an uneasy resonance from the tattoo at his hip.

Neville was right. It was poisoning the ground. The plants were dying, shrivelled and black as if they'd got too close to fire. Harry blinked and rubbed at his eyes, trying to fight off bone-deep, disorienting lassitude; "Finite Incantatem," he whispered, and the fog cleared, just a little, not enough. There were dim images dancing at the edges of his vision like a dream intruding into waking: Voldemort touching a flower; Ginny drowning in green light; Albus Dumbledore smiling like a shark. Hermione spinning in her cell, saying I have visions now.

He felt the Cruciatus coming the moment before it hit him.

 

"Did you hear that?" Remus asked uneasily.

"I can't hear anything but the wind in the leaves," George said. "And I can't see anything either."

"The forest feels off," Fred muttered. "More off than usual, I mean. I keep feeling like we've lost our way."

"Did we know where we were going to begin with? Ow!" George stumbled, then glared back at the root he'd tripped over.

Remus stopped and held up a hand. "All right, hold up. We've been walking for I don't know how long and our Patroni haven't found anything. Let's go back and see if we can pick up a trail from the clearing."

Fred turned and looked back past Remus. "If we can find our way back," he said. "Shit. None of that looks familiar."

"We've still got our Patroni," Remus reminded him. "As long as they know where Hogwarts is, there's a limit to how lost we can get even in the Forest."

"Right," George said hollowly, clearly trying to believe Remus and not succeeding very well. Well, that was all right - Remus wasn't convincing himself very well either. Anywhere else on the school grounds he would have been right, but the Forest…

The Forest didn't like people. If it ever had, if it had been welcoming when the Founders built here, something had soured it long ago.

"Well, let's turn around," he said. "If we - Fred?"

Fred was swaying a little on his feet, and even in the dim light he looked white as a sheet. George darted to catch him, wrapping his arms around Fred's waist to steady him.

"What the hell, Fred?" George demanded.

Fred turned his head to nudge into the curve of George's neck, silently demanding comfort. "I don't know," he said hoarsely.

Frowning, Remus moved forward and put a hand on Fred's forehead. It felt cold and clammy. "Are you ill?"

"No, I just…" Fred shifted restlessly in George's arms. "I don't know what it was. Catherine wheels, I saw catherine wheels, that was all. It was like one of those dreams where you're terrified by a field of fluffy rabbits or something."

"You saw them?" Remus asked.

"Just for a second."

"Remus, let's go back," George said uneasily. "It's this stupid bloody forest. You hear things, you see things, it's got dead bodies hanging from spider webs - let Harry take care of it. He lives for this shit."

Remus made a note to take up the issue of what Harry probably did and did not live for later and turned to his Patronus. "Find Poppy Pomfrey," he told it, and watched it dart off into the forest. "Come on, you two."

By the time a few minutes had passed, though - or what he thought was a few minutes; it was becoming disturbingly difficult to tell - he was very close to convinced that they were hopelessly lost. Their Patroni seemed for all the world to know where they were going, but nothing looked familiar and nothing smelled familiar. If not for the Patroni, he would have bet a considerable amount that they hadn't come this way.

When the trees opened before them to reveal a large clearing, Patroni be damned, he was sure of it.

"Oh, fuck, you're joking," Fred groaned. "This is not happening."

"I'm afraid it is," Remus said grimly. "Improbably enough."

Cold moonlight gleamed from marble and rusted iron gates, stretching out before them for a good twenty-five yards. In the center of the clearing, a marble angel stood with her head bowed and half of one arm pointing up toward the sky; the other half of her arm, and the lantern still clutched in her hand, were in the tall grass at her feet, visible only because of the strange greenish witchlight flitting like a swarm of fireflies inside lantern panels that seemed to be simultaneously marble and glass. The gravestones around her were age-darkened and crumbling, most of them, leaning at a precarious angle, their carvings nearly obliterated with moss and age.

"I thought that was just a story, about there being a graveyard on Hogwarts grounds," George whispered.

"No, it's the truth," Remus said grimly, and probably unnecessarily. "It just… moves around."

"How the hell?" Fred asked. "Does it take the bodies with it?"

There was a rustling in the grass and the twins' Patroni streaked past them, darting through gravestones as if they were hunting hounds and not foxes, heading toward a shadowy mass that loomed behind the angel on the other side of the clearing. Remus' Patronus was already there, prowling back out to meet the foxes and returning to the shadows with them in a phosphorescent swirl.

"God almighty," Fred said. "This is a hell of a time for the stupid things to do as they're told."

"Well, they brought us here," Remus said quietly. "Let's take a look. Can't leave all the excitement to Harry, can we?"

"I don't see why not," George grumbled under his breath, but he followed Remus through the crumbling gate.

It was a mausoleum their Patroni were sniffing in front of. Between the moonlight and the light of their wands, Remus could see that the iron doors were partly open, sagging on their hinges as if they'd taken the weight of some crushing blow. Above the doors, a robed figure with a Dementor's skeletal hands held a book and a scythe. Something smelled foul, fresh death or necromancy or both.

"Bloody hell," Fred said. "Look at that."

His wandlight was pointing away from the mausoleum. Glad enough of the excuse to let the mausoleum wait a minute, Remus glanced in the direction Fred was indicating - and found that possibly he wasn't so glad after all. The earth was disturbed in front of a weatherbeaten gravestone, churned up for half the grave's length. Carefully, Remus went to crouch beside the grave, shining his own wand down at the dirt and then up to the gravestone. Euridyce was all he could make out, that and part of the inscription: Beloved daughter… into dark waters… O Lord art my deliverance…

"Look at the sod," George said. "It's all bent upward. Remus, something dug out of this grave."

I'm too bloody old for this, Remus thought, and - carefully, carefully, after casting enough wards in front of himself to block a charging elephant - leaned over and shone his light into the grave.

Dirt shaft walls, crushed and compacted outward, thick with torn grass roots for the first few inches and then bare, and at the bottom antique satin gleamed dully underneath splintered wood. Long hairs still lay on the stained pillow in tangled clumps. It was too old to smell of embalming fluid and decay, but the smell lingered anyway, foul and bitter whether it was his imagination or not. Remus sat back and rubbed a hand over his mouth, brushing sweat off his upper lip.

"The thing about the dead," he said, "is that they don't come when you call. Not like this. Not even with necromancy. It's a damned good thing for all of us that they don't, too."

"Well, Euridyce, Beloved Daughter, sure as buggery seems to have," George observed.

"Wonder if she knew she'd wind up strung up in the forest like wind chimes," Fred said.

Remus stood stiffly and brushed off the knees of his trousers. Their Patroni were still hovering around the door to the mausoleum. "Right. Let's see what the Patroni have found."

"Think we should send up the signal first?" George asked.

"Yes, actually," Remus said, and sent red sparks flying into the air. "Come on, then."

"God, what's that smell?" Fred wondered as they drew closer. "It smells like a fucking abattoir."

"Do you even know what an abattoir is?" George whispered.

"It's either a slaughterhouse or a whorehouse. I forget. I meant the first one, though."

It did smell like a slaughterhouse - and, underneath, like rotting starch. Remus stopped on the slick marble steps and shone his light down onto them. A thin, dark rivulet had dried onto it, branching like a river; maggots squirmed on it, bloated and sluggish. Swallowing hard against nausea, Remus shone his light into the mausoleum.

It wasn't large, bigger by a bit than the room he'd slept in at Grimmauld Place, saved from being impenetrably black on the inside by the stained-glass window that grudgingly let in a few stray moonbeams through a thick coating of dust. Every one of the caskets had been turned neatly upside-down and replaced on the shelves.

"Didn't people used to do that with vampires?" Fred whispered. "Turn their coffins upside-down, I mean, so when they tried to dig out they'd never reach the surface."

Remus had a werewolf's instinctive dislike of vampires, but when it came to things like digging one's way out of a grave he had to admit to his sympathies lying more with the bury-ee than the burier. "Yes," he said. "Not that it would make much difference if one were on a shelf, I'd think."

"Right," George said. "So. Are we going to discuss the rest of it, or are we going to back away and pretend we didn't see it?"

Privately inclined to vote for the second option, Remus angled his light downward. The corpses of birds littered the floor, necks wrung where the heads hadn't been simply ripped off. Most of them bore signs of having been gnawed on. Blood smeared the walls and floor, splattered in the telltale jitter of arterial spurts, pooling in the cracks between the flagstones.

"Vol -" Fred began. "You-Know-Who, I mean. He made Ginny kill birds. She used to dream about it and then she wouldn't sleep again for days after."

"This isn't Ginny," Remus said.

"Right, because the dead don't come when you call," George said in a voice that was a little too unsteady for Remus' tastes.

"More to the point, the dead don't need to eat, birds or otherwise," Remus pointed out. He lifted his wand, shining the light over glinting bronze casket handles and stone shelves carved with faded names. Squinting, he studied the stained-glass window. It was an hourglass, tilted, the last grains of sand falling into the bottom.

Above the window, BECOMING was written in blood, dripping gory streaks down the stone.

"Right. Let's see what else we can find," Remus said, and hoped that someone else would get there soon.

 

You must understand necessity, Harry, Albus said from behind his desk, and in the candlelight his eyes glittered like a shark's.

Harry was almost frozen with terror and not too far gone to use it, to build that terror into a wall of ice that hid every fleeting thought in his head. Albus' "necessity" had cost him Hannah's life; he was damned if it was going to cost him Draco's. He emptied his mind and counted breaths, in and out.

You sound like a child in the dark, telling the minutes until morning, Albus said with the smile that Harry had thought was kindly when he was young. Don't be afraid. Watch.

The room plunged into a darkness so abrupt and complete that Harry reflexively flung out his hands, looking for something to orient himself.

I will teach you to see, Albus whispered in his ear. All you have to do is give me your eyes.

Harry came out of the dark gasping like a half-drowned swimmer, his eyes flying open and his whole body as tense as a bowstring - except his legs. Those were shaking and cold, feeling nightmarishly waterlogged, and he recognized the jelly-legs hex on them just before he realized that his arms were bound to the tree trunk above his head. His wand was nowhere to be seen, and his entire body was still raw with the aftereffects of the Cruciatus. There was a suffocating layer of curses on him, thin but expertly placed, making the world tilt precariously around him and keeping him from getting his bearings.

God damn it, he thought, then nearly vomited as a wave of dizzying nausea hit him. The clearing spun around him and he closed his eyes desperately, trying to fight through the hexes and get control of himself. His shoulders were taking the weight his legs couldn't, which was going to get very, very painful very, very soon.

"Look at you," someone said from behind the tree, a hoarse voice Harry didn't recognize. "Little Harry Potter. You've grown a bit, haven't you? And here I thought you'd be a runt your whole life."

"Who the hell are you?" Harry croaked around the nausea that threatened to choke him.

"Something more than I used to be," said the voice, and a dim form moved out from behind the tree to stand in front of Harry. Moonlight brightened the clearing for just a moment before it faded behind clouds again, but it was time enough to see a rail-thin man with a sharp face and dirty blond hair, clothes ragged and worn and stained with something dark.

He was no one Harry knew.

"Don't recognize me?" he asked with an almost Malfoy-like smirk. "I'm hurt, Potter. I thought I was your favorite teacher."

My favorite - For a second he was lost; then realization dawned, and with it the stark cold of fear. "You - but the Dementors, I -"

I've seen them. I've seen them put something back. Oh, fuck.

"Barty Crouch, Junior, at your service," Crouch said. "Though I suppose I don't have to tack on the 'Junior' anymore, after my father's untimely passing. It's a wonderful thing, isn't it, to be out of your father's shadow? Not that you'd know about that, of course."

"You put up that portal," Harry said, more to keep Crouch talking than for any other reason.

Crouch brought up his hands and clapped slowly, still smirking. "I see that your grasp of the blindingly obvious has got a little better. Not much, of course, or you'd have figured it out as soon as you saw what had happened to your precious Hermione. I never could stand that little bitch, you know. Couldn't keep her mouth shut if you paid her. Typical Gryffindor, isn't that right, Mister Malfoy?"

Whirling, Crouch whipped out his wand and sent a wall of flame roaring toward the trees. It snapped apart as it reached them and Draco came through in a fast roll, landing in a crouch with his wand out. He was already casting, sending red sparks flying into the air before he aimed his wand in an Expelliarmus. Crouch dodged it and moved quickly back to shove his own wand against Harry's temple.

"Temper, temper," he snapped. "Don't make me turn you into a ferret again."

"So that's you, is it?" Draco drawled contemptuously. "I think I owe you one for that."

"And I think you're going to tell me where your father is before I count ten or young Potter here is going to find his brains decorating this tree."

"Why should I care?" Draco snapped.

Accio wand, Harry thought, trying to think past nausea, pain, and crippling weakness. Accio wand, accio wand.

"Oh, I don't know. Because you did what passes in Slytherin for charging to his rescue. Because there's something on his body that reeks of dark magic, and somehow I don't think he dabbles in it. Because he had a very interesting conversation with someone he thought was Neville Longbottom. Potter, kindly stop trying to summon your wand or those brains are going to come out your nose sooner than you might like."

"Well, well," Draco said thoughtfully. "You're not stupid. Who knew?"

"I'd like to return the compliment, but you don't seem to be telling me where your father is. I hope you're not waiting for someone to come and rescue you. I've laid Confundus charms around this clearing so thick that anyone who comes after you -"

"Why Potter?" Draco interrupted.

Because he's going to kill both of us, Harry thought, closing his eyes. Slowly and carefully, he turned his attention inward, stilling his mind. The spells around him glowed behind his eyelids like luminescent spider webs.

"Because if he's here he can hardly come up on my flank, can he?" Crouch said. "I'm tired of this. One."

"Why does no one ever believe me when I tell them I don't know where my father is?" Draco snapped testily. "I'm not the man's keeper."

"No," Crouch snarled. "You're his pretty little toy, and that's all you'll ever be. He keeps you close in case he needs a mindless puppet to run his errands and parrot the Malfoy party line when its string is pulled. Tell me where he is."

"Move your wand away from Potter and we'll discuss it."

"Two."

Harry touched the nausea spell with a breath-light brush of magic and it unravelled, vanishing. Not subtly enough; the next thing he felt was Cruciatus ripping through him like knives - and then vanishing as the oily reek of dark magic exploded into the clearing. He forced his eyes open and blinked them clear, watching as dark curses met and tore into each other in the middle of the clearing, one on top of the other. The ground opened under Draco, flames roaring up from the crack and immolating the leaves above him; Draco rolled out of the way just in time and sent a bladeward spinning like a tornado at Crouch. Accio wand, Harry thought, and felt a stir this time.

"Three!" Crouch shouted, and sent a curse at Draco that would have flayed off his skin if Draco hadn't blocked it at the last moment.

Working faster, Harry sent a knife-sharp sliver of magic against the hex that was keeping him too dizzy to see straight. It unravelled with a snap, and this time his Accio brought his wand slapping solidly into his hand. Harry sheared through the rope holding him to the tree, banished the jelly-legs curse with a Finite Incantatem as he fell, and rolled out of the way of the curse that slammed into the ground where he'd been with enough force to dent the earth in a six-foot radius. He sent a bone-shattering hex at Crouch, who saw it coming and dodged - straight into another of Draco's bladewards. It caught him in the arm like a buzz-saw, nearly severing his arm and sending a spray of a foul black substance that wasn't quite blood onto the grass. Crouch threw an Avada Kedavra at Draco and ran, making for the trees while Draco was still blinded by the green flare.

Harry hit him in a flying tackle before he reached them. It was like trying to pin a half-rotted corpse - Crouch's muscles moved like maggot clusters under clammy, slipping skin, and the stench of necromancy was so strong that it made Harry gag. Grimly, he kneed Crouch hard in the kidney and shoved, trying to twist his arms behind him. The arm Draco had nearly severed wrenched almost free of Crouch's shoulder with a horrible tearing sound, sending a spray of black, oily blood straight into Harry's face. He spluttered, spitting and heaving, not letting go of Crouch.

Draco shouted something in Hungarian and Crouch went stiff, back arched and twisted off the ground. Harry went for his wand and cast, bringing up tree roots that slithered around Crouch's body and pinned him as tightly as Devil's Snare. He'd barely finished casting when Draco grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and hauled him to his feet.

"Wizard, Potter," Draco said. "You are a wizard, not a bloody rugby player. Have some pride. Scourgify."

Harry's mouth was abruptly clean, but he spat anyway, trying to get rid of even the memory of that foul, brackish taste. "He wasn't expecting it, was he? Wizards never seem to. What did you do to him?"

"It's a sort of body bind," Draco said, looking a bit evasive.

"Right," Harry said, and wiped his mouth. "Accio wand. Take the bind off enough for him to talk."

The bind drew back from Crouch's head. His face distorted in a strange rictus and he began to laugh, harshly, his voice thick with some unpleasant catarrh.

"A sort of body bind," he mocked. "Do you know what your little pet's done to me, Potter?"

"No, and I don't much care," Harry said. "But if you'll tell me how to safely take down that portal I'll consider asking him to undo it."

"Bloody ferret," Crouch spat. "I should have killed you when I had the chance. Just another minute or two, just a slip of the wand at just the right angle and your skull would have shattered all over the stone and dumped out your brains for Filch to swab off the floor -"

Harry raised his wand. "I don't think you want to go on with that," he said quietly, and Crouch fell silent, watching him.

"Now. You were about to tell me about the portal."

Crouch grinned. "There's no way to take it down. And there's no way to fix what he did."

"I'm sure there is. Draco and I have already had the talk about not killing things before I can question them."

"Doesn't mind very well, does he?" Crouch laughed, trailing off into a hacking cough. "Give it a fucking rest, Potter. I was hexing blowfly maggots into widows' eyes when you were still at your mum's tit. I know what curse he used. I know lots of things you don't."

"Crouch." Harry knelt in the grass, not too close, keeping his wand aimed at Crouch's head. "I don't know what he did to you, but I promise you I can do worse. What the hell do you think you're doing, stalling until reinforcements get here? You're alone here and you know it. If you tell me how to take down the portal, maybe I can arrange things so that you get back to Voldemort alive."

"Don't say his name," Crouch said evenly. "You aren't worthy to say his name. I'll tell you a secret, Potter - my death will give my Lord more power than I am worthy to give."

"How?" Harry demanded.

"Sorry, you'll have to find that out for yourself. By the way, have you talked to Granger lately?"

Sometimes it feels like if I could just have my wand back for one minute I could blow out the walls of this hospital, like there's some sort of awful magic in me that wants to be born and there's no midwife to help it come, Hermione said in the back of Harry's mind.

"Yes, I've talked to her," he said.

"Death is a Power," Crouch whispered harshly. "You of all people should know that. Death has given you power all your life, and it might just give you more before you're done. Sacrifice, Potter, it's a powerful thing - even when it's done out of stupidity, by stepping between the two things most important to you at just the wrong moment and getting blown apart like a Founding Day firecracker. Shame it won't be enough."

"The portal, Crouch," Harry said between his teeth.

"Ah, yes. The portal. Yes, I think it's time," Crouch said, gave one last harsh laugh, and began to convulse, choking on his tongue, his face darkening alarmingly in the moonlight.

Harry swore and started toward him, but Draco yanked him back.

"Stay back, Potter," he snapped, brought a long branch flying toward him with a flick of his wand, and Transfigured it in the air. It landed in his hand a gleaming scythe, as tall as he was, with a long, wicked blade that almost hummed as the breeze sliced against it.

"Do you even know how to use that?" Harry demanded.

"It's long and it's got a fucking sharp blade, I think I can figure it out as I go," Draco said, his eyes on Crouch.

"Well, don't," Harry snapped, trying desperately to remember how to stop seizures, if he'd ever known. "Whatever you did to him, take it off -"

"That's not me. Potter, for fuck's sake get back -"

Roots snapped and sheared away, not because Crouch was breaking the charm but because he was expanding, bloating, his mouth stretching wide enough to dislocate his jaw and going on after that; a horrible lowing sound began deep in his chest and grew louder, forcing its way through his throat in a visible distortion until suddenly something exploded from his mouth, a black geysering flood that wasn't quite liquid and wasn't quite magic, reaching taller than Harry and spreading outward in a reeking fountain. Draco shoved Harry aside, sending him sprawling onto the grass, and darted forward, bringing the scythe down in a gleaming arc and severing Crouch's head in one slice. The head rolled away, but the black flood went on, bursting out from between Crouch's ribs, tearing clothes and skin to ribbons.

It caught Draco like a moth in flame and held him in midair, surging and battering against him. The scythe landed blade-first in the ground a foot from Harry's face.

Harry sent a frantic shield at Draco, but it skimmed off the blackness and vanished. Hermione's words clicked suddenly in his head and, thanking God for Neville, he cast at Crouch's head. Wild roses, blackish-red as funeral flowers, sprouted in Crouch's distended mouth, sinking roots into his tongue, and the blackness vanished with a sound like a sucking chest wound.

Nearly retching, Harry scrambled over to where Draco had fallen and cast Scourgify again and again until the slimy coating was off him. "Draco? Jesus, Draco, answer me. Are you all right?"

Draco was shaking, curled around himself on the grass, but he nodded. "Ouch," he said. "That was bloody foul."

"What the fuck was it?"

"I haven't the foggiest idea, which I'm not happy about, actually. It felt… it felt like it was looking for a way in."

Harry let out a shaky breath and eased Draco onto his back, smoothing hair back out of his face. Draco let him, which in and of itself was worrisome. "Are you sure you're all right? And what the hell did he mean about the portal?"

"Yes, I'm sure. I'm just… going to sit here for a minute."

"Lie there, you mean." Harry looked up at Crouch's corpse. It was blackened, shriveling in on itself. "Christ. We have to get rid of that."

"Burn it," Draco said. "But not the head. The head has to be buried."

"What was with the roses?"

Draco shook his head. "Old magic. I don't think anyone still remembers. It was a bloody good thing Granger did."

Harry swallowed around a sudden tightness in his throat. "That's Hermione. Always coming up with the answers." He flicked his wand at the corpse, lighting it on fire and setting up a shield to contain the smell and the flames, then opened the earth underneath the head and closed it back up when the head had fallen deep.

"The Confundus charms are gone," he noted, probing for them outward from the clearing. "I think -"

He stopped abruptly as something tugged at his awareness. Draco sat up, eyes unfocused, his head tilted as if he were listening.

"Oh, shit," Harry said.

"So that's not my febrile imagination," Draco said tightly.

"Son of a bitch. The grounds wards!" Harry scrambled to his feet.

"Accio brooms," Draco snapped. "Well, we've found out what he meant, haven't we?"

Too distracted to answer, Harry swung up onto his broom and sped into the trees with Draco right behind him.

 

"Why does it say that?" Greg Goyle asked, serenely unsurprised that it said something, only questioning the wording choice. Sometimes, Remus reflected, Greg was smarter than he looked. "Becoming, I mean. Becoming what?"

"I think we can safely say it's nothing good," said Pansy, who had retreated at the first glimpse of the dead birds and was standing nearby, carefully between graves.

"And who's becoming something? Or what?" Neville wondered, shining the light from his wand over the stained-glass window.

"I think we should go try to find Harry and Malfoy," George said, fidgeting. "It's been long enough. If they'd seen the flare and been able to answer they'd have been here by now."

"Severus and Minerva haven't got here yet either," Remus said, but he peered into the woods anyway, frowning. He didn't like the fact that Harry and Draco weren't there yet either; he liked it still less given that Neville had lost Harry in a Confundus fog and Draco had shot away like a bat out of Hell less than a minute after Neville had found the Slytherins, without a word to anyone about where he was going or why. "We'll give them a few more minutes."

The trees were thick overhead here, and Remus wasn't entirely convinced that he knew where they were in relation to where they'd started out. If a flare had gone up and none of them had seen it…

The sound of snapping branches caught his attention and he turned to see Minerva coursing into the cemetery. She dismounted neatly, caught up her broom, and looked around. "Dear God," she said. "This does turn up when it's least wanted, doesn't it?"

George opened his mouth, doubtless to explore that particular issue further, but Minerva held up a hand. "No time," she said shortly. "Back to the castle, all of you."

"What about Draco?" Pansy demanded.

"The grounds wards are under attack," Minerva told her. "I don't know where Harry and Draco are, but I've no doubt they're on their way to help Severus. There's no time for explanations -"

"But we can help," Fred began.

"Mister Weasley. You can help best by staying out of their way - and also by being ready to shore up the defenses of the castle itself in case they fail."

There didn't seem to be any argument to that, no matter how much Remus might want to make one. Reluctantly, he summoned his broom.

 

Harry passed through the ripped edges of the anti-Apparition ward first, feeling shredded magic and the foul taint of the portal's spells crawl over his skin like something falling apart with rot. He Apparated and came out into blinding, leprous white light before the portal, with Draco a moment behind him. The sigils on the portal were glowing; inside, where the skeleton should have been, was a black seething mass that reminded Harry for a sickening moment of the Veil. Raw magic was spilling out of it, channelled from somewhere else, sucking in the protective spells from the Hogwarts grounds and spitting them back out twisted and poisoned.

Snape was casting at the portal, trying to contain the spells pouring out of it like black fog; but he was only containing them along one front, and they were slowly but surely pushing his own spells back. Minerva was nowhere to be seen. Harry could feel the portal's magic reaching out to the outer wards, decaying them where it touched. He wasn't at all sure that he had enough power to shield the portal, dismantle it somehow, and keep the outer wards from failing at the same time.

"Contain the portal, Potter," Draco said, swinging down from his broom. "I'll take care of the portal itself."

"We can't just reinforce the outer wards, they're too far gone," Snape said, his face showing the strain of trying to maintain spells on too many fronts at once. "They'll have to be cleaned or the damage it's already done will spread and bring them down."

Harry cast and reinforced Snape's spell, extending it. "Draco, I can't cast a shield strong enough to contain this and still let you cast through it."

"Then you'll have to close me inside it, won't you?" Draco said, starting toward the portal.

"Inside the - Draco, wait!"

Draco turned to look at him, grey eyes meeting Harry's. "Potter, we don't have time to argue. I'm not strong enough to shield the portal and clean the wards at the same time, and I can take more damage than Severus. Shut up and cast."

Harry hesitated for a moment more, then nodded and cast the strongest shield he could manage in a bubble around the portal, closing Draco inside with it. The light flared until he could barely see, battering against the edges of his shield; maintaining it with half his attention, he cast out toward the grounds wards, fighting to contain the damage there and spell them back into place; at this distance, he was operating on guesswork and blind luck, and he didn't know how long he'd be able to maintain the shield.

"I'll go out to the main gate and repair the wards there," Snape said, reaching for his broom.

"And if Voldemort's got something nasty out there waiting?" Harry pointed out.

"Then you'll know when you don't feel the gate wards healing,won't you?"

Harry ground his teeth and cast again as Snape flew off, trying to slow the progression of the portal's spells along a dozen points at once. In this light, he couldn't see what Draco was doing, could barely see Draco at all, but the flood of dark magic wavered suddenly.

He didn't want to think about how fast the dark magic would be building up inside the shield, spells shattering against the inside of it and leaving a stomach-turning taint behind them.

"Come on, Draco," he muttered as something swelled inside his shield, gathering strength for a retaliatory attack. Forcing himself to focus, he closed his eyes and sent spells toward the outer wards, ones Bill had taught him to contain the effects of a curse; they held, more or less, until Harry could feel Snape wiping the gate wards clean and weaving them back together.

The contamination on the wards began to relent, little by little. The pressure inside the shield was building, battering wildly against his spell, and he could already taste blood in his mouth.

The explosion caught him off-guard, slamming against his shield and knocking him back onto the grass. Dark magic billowed out into the clearing and then imploded back into the portal; a loud drone began, climbed quickly in pitch and volume, and reached an abrupt shrieking crescendo as the skeleton in the middle of the portal shattered with a concussion wave that threw Draco out to land beside Harry. Harry rolled instinctively to shield Draco's head as razor-sharp pieces of bone rained down on them - and then, abruptly, it was silent, only a lingering sense of dark magic left of the portal. Harry waited anyway, hand in a white-knuckled grip on his wand, keeping Draco down with a hand on the back of his shoulder until he was sure it was safe.

"I," Draco said, "have had enough bloody excitement for one night."

Harry gave a hoarse laugh and rolled onto his back, wiping his face with his hand and then wiping off the blood on his robes. "Think Snape can get the wards repaired?"

"He'd better be able to, or what's the point of being Headmaster?" Draco rolled over and sat stiffly up. "They'll heal better for him than they will for us, now that that feedback has stopped. We caught the portal before it had done much damage, I think."

"What did you do?" Harry looked up, squinting into the moonlight, at the portal. It was twisted and charred, blown apart from the inside.

Draco looked thoughtfully at the portal. "You know, I've never seen anything do something like that. I wouldn't have thought it could be done. It was actually sucking in bits of the wards and throwing them back out contaminated." He turned the thoughtful glance on Harry and reached out to trace over the scar on his forehead, making Harry shiver.

"Then again, maybe I have seen something rather like it," Draco said quietly. "At any rate, I recast the runes on it so that it was sucking back its own spells. It overloaded the portal. When in doubt, blow things up, I suppose."

"Jesus, Draco. Did you ever stop to think that the backlash could have killed you?"

"Well, we weren't exactly spoilt for choice, or time either, for that matter," Draco pointed out.

Harry sat up and rubbed at his temples, fighting the urge to say all sorts of protective and inappropriate things. In an attempt to not say them, he wound up saying, tentatively, "Where's Pansy?"

Draco looked away, guilt and unhappiness clear in his face even in the dim light. "I left her with Goyle and Longbottom."

"You found Neville?"

"He found us, or rather his Patronus did. He'd lost you and was coming to get help." Draco looked back at Harry and flashed a brief, cynical smile. "If it were anyone but Longbottom I'd congratulate him on a situation well-turned to his advantage."

"Well, it is Neville," Harry answered sharply, reaching out to brush the hair off Draco's forehead and examining the cut that ran down from his hairline across his eyebrow. He fumbled for his wand and aimed a gentle cleansing spell at it, clearing away the blood.

"I know, Potter," Draco sighed. "I've done this to myself. If Pansy doesn't give me the bird after I left her in the middle of the Forbidden Forest to rush off to your rescue, then I don't deserve her anyway."

Harry didn't trust himself to comment. He healed the cut quickly and efficiently, then turned Draco's face to the side, looking for more injuries. "That was very Gryffindor of you," he said finally.

Draco gave him a filthy look and brushed a stray leaf out of the curve of Harry's neck. "I'll thank you to keep this discussion civil. A Gryffindor would have rushed straight into the clearing without sending for reinforcements and been hit with an Avada Kedavra before they'd got within twenty feet of you."

Harry decided not to mention the fact that the reinforcements had clearly been an afterthought. "I suppose it's a good thing I hadn't got 'round to taking off that tattoo."

Draco's hand moved just a little, as if he were going to reach out and touch Harry's hip, before he pulled it back. "So it seems."

"Crouch… he must have been the first," Harry said. "The first one Voldemort did that to, I mean. I can't see how a Dementor would have been able to regurgitate a soul after ten years; it had to have happened soon after Crouch got the Kiss. But then where the hell has he been for ten years?"

"Wherever he was, he didn't look as if he was holding up very well after this long - physically, I mean; God knows his magic was quite strong enough. Maybe… maybe the soul doesn't quite take when you try to put it back," Draco said a little hesitantly.

"I hope to hell Voldemort's improved his technique since then," Harry said tightly.

"Granger doesn't smell of necromancy," Draco pointed out. "He didn't have to kill her first. Good for her; bad, maybe, for the rest of us."

"We should get back," Harry whispered.

"We should," Draco said, then turned to look at the charred, blackened wreck of the portal. "You know, that portal was quite the piece of work. It's a shame we had to destroy it."

Harry paused in the act of brushing grass off the shoulder of Draco's cloak.

Draco turned to look at him, then raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"You know I was raised by Muggles, right?"

"Well, I suppose when one can't get wolves -"

"Muggles have this thing called a telly. It's sort of like wizarding pictures with sound and on a much longer loop."

"I'm sure I'll be fascinated when I find out why you're telling me this."

"They have programmes like the wireless does, and sometimes I used to sneak out to the parlor when everyone else was asleep to watch them. There were all these shows where someone would find a monster stuck in the ice or something, and every time some bollocks-brained scientist with more education than sense would say 'We have to keep it alive to study it!' And every bloody time the monster would escape and kill everyone."

"Potter. Are you implying that I've no more brains than a Muggle?" Draco snorted, reaching out to pluck another leaf out of Harry's hair. "Do keep up. I only said that it was a shame we had to destroy it, not that we shouldn't have."

"Well, you still sounded like one of those scientists there for a minute."

Draco's hand softened for just a moment, tangling in Harry's hair, before he pulled it back. "You were never theirs, you know," he said quietly. "You were ours. Dumbledore should never have sent you to them."

"I know," Harry answered just as softly, holding Draco's gaze. "But I'm here now."

Right here. I'm right fucking here, Draco.

The crunching of leaves underfoot heralded Snape's return, and Harry drew back a little, glancing into the forest. When he looked back, Draco had stood - steadily enough, if unenthusiastically - and was brushing off his robes.

"I don't know about you, but I think I'm for bed," he said briskly. "You certainly do know how to throw a party, Potter."

"Could have done with less in the way of gate-crashers," Harry observed, climbing to his feet.

"Minerva sent the others back to the castle," Snape said as he drew near them. "I trust the two of you are quite recovered."

Every muscle in Harry's body was twanging. "I'm too old for this shit," he muttered. "Accio Nimbus."

"Can you feel anything else in the wards, Severus?" Draco asked as he summoned his own broom.

Snape shook his head and mounted his broom with an annoyed grimace. "It'll take them a while to recover. We'll have to monitor them carefully for the next few days."

"We need to find out how long it's likely to take Voldemort to realize that Crouch is dead," Harry said. "And whether he can pull things together enough to attack us while we're still more vulnerable than usual."

"If he's watching the wards, he may know already," Snape said. "Let's continue this discussion inside."

Harry nodded and mounted his broom, following Draco and Snape with an uneasy glance back into the forest. On impulse, he pulled out his wand and aimed it back at the remains of the portal, muttering a spell under his breath. The portal dissolved like a swirl of black smoke, ash drifting onto the breeze and then gone. Satisfied, Harry turned back and flew for the castle.

Most of the windows were dark, or at least dim, and Hogwarts loomed rather markedly against the sky. Harry cast a wistful glance up toward his own window and the comfortable bed beyond, then curved around to head for the front courtyard, following the Slytherins. As he got closer he saw that the huge double doors were open, spilling wavering torchlight onto the steps. At this distance, Harry could just make out Pansy and Goyle standing in the doorway, apparently arguing with a student.

"What in buggery?" Draco muttered. "If that's one of mine I'll have him in detention until the Last Trump. It must be three in the bloody morning."

Harry checked his watch. "It's not quite midnight."

Draco rolled his eyes and swept ahead, landing just ahead of Harry and Snape. Catching sight of them, the student hiked up his robes and darted down the steps, and it was indeed one of Draco's, a pinch-faced fifth-year whose family had been Slytherin since the Reformation.

"Walsingham, would you care to explain -" Draco began icily.

The boy cut him off, a thing that must have required a nearly Gryffindor courage. "There are Aurors in the common room, sir. They've been waiting for you all night."

Harry swore virulently enough to make Walsingham look askance at him. "What the fuck now?"

Walsingham ignored him and turned back toward Draco. "We tried to make them go away, sir, but -"

Draco closed his eyes in pain. "Dear God. What did you do?"

"Not what I wanted to do," the boy said sullenly. "It's not as if anyone would have been able to prove anything, but Marjorie said -"

"Have they at least had the sense not to eat or drink anything?"

"Yes, sir. Vane's still sulking."

"Isn't she a second-year?" Harry asked.

"She's quite gifted," Draco said absently.

Harry shook his head and recalled himself sharply to the matter at hand. "I'll go with you."

"We both will," Snape told him, looking murderous. "Walsingham, go and fetch Mr. Price."

"He's there already, sir," Walsingham said. "Marjorie sent Bulstrode down to get him."

Harry was momentarily torn between admiration of the redoubtable Marjorie and wondering where in the world Price was housed that someone had to go down from the Dungeons to fetch him, and why. "Walsingham - is one of the Aurors a tall bloke with red hair?"

"No, sir," Walsingham said. "One of them's a woman about my height, blonde hair, half-blood, puts on a common accent but wasn't born with it; she's knocked over two vases and a table, and I don't think she did it on purpose. The other's a grotty old bloke a bit shorter, blue eyes, looks like he got a bad haircut the day before the First Rising and hasn't been back to the barber since. Has a prosthetic hand and uses it as a distraction."

"Carver," Harry said. "He taught one of the Defence courses at the Academy when I was there. He's an expert on spells like Imperius that affect the mind. Damn it, I think I know why he's here."

"Potter, there'll be time later to discuss your use of language in front of the students," Snape said austerely. "For the moment you'd better tell us what you know, so that we can decide if it would be best for Draco to be unavoidably detained elsewhere."

"May I be excused, sir?" Walsingham asked smoothly - a bit too smoothly for Harry's tastes.

"Go to bed, Walsingham," he said. "Bed. It'll be detention with Filch if I catch you out of it, or anyone else, for that matter."

Walsingham nodded grudgingly and went back inside, brushing past Pansy and Goyle. Harry watched him go, then turned back to Snape and Draco.

"When Ron came to see me after the duel, he told me that a family of Muggle-borns had been killed in Hightower," he told them. "He said what was used to kill them was a combination of dark magic and sex magic - cast by someone who was damn good at both."

"Oh, hell," Draco said wearily.

"Voldemort's people?" Snape wondered.

"Well, it would hardly be my father's, though I don't know that I'd put it past the Ministry," Draco snapped.

Harry held his tongue with considerable effort. "Look, Malfoy can't just disappear again. Ron saw him in the hospital wing, he knows Malfoy wasn't in any condition to go on a killing spree in Hightower -"

"And you think it'll matter what Weasley knows?" Draco snorted.

"It'll matter because he's the last person on earth who'd be likely to give you the benefit of the doubt," Harry told him.

"Which would be to our advantage if the Ministry were interested in the truth," Snape pointed out. "Sadly, they're more often interested in what's expedient."

Harry raked his hands through his hair. "We can't stand out here arguing all night. Let's just go in, find out what they want, and send them away."

Snape and Draco nodded reluctantly, and Harry turned to go back inside, wondering if he should tell the Aurors about Barty Crouch, and wondering even more what all this had done to him that he was seriously considering not telling them.

 

The pandemonium reached their ears halfway down the corridor, raised voices coming sharp and fast through the eerie columns of blue-white waterlight that stretched from floor to ceiling in the darkened hall.

Speeding up, Draco yanked open the door to the Slytherin common room and bolted inside, with Harry and Snape right behind him. Blinking in the sudden bright torchlight after the dark of the hallway, Harry saw a crowd of children in nightclothes or hastily-donned robes, pressing too close to Poppy where she knelt beside a small, crumpled bundle of black cloth. Walsingham was on the floor, convulsing so violently that he nearly threw Poppy off him as she held him down with one hand and pulled out her wand with the other. Blood-tinged froth was gathering at the corners of his mouth. From their vantage point by the hearth, Tonks and Carver looked on uneasily.

Harry didn't know whether to bless Fred and George or curse them, but he hoped to God that Tonks couldn't see Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes written all over Walsingham's sudden collapse as clearly as he could.

"Petrificus Totalus!" Poppy snapped, and Walsingham froze, back arched painfully off the ground. Adela Vane was sitting beside him and keening with convincing fear, tears streaking her face in the firelight.

"What's wrong with him?" Draco asked, kneeling beside Poppy.

She shot him a look. "I'll have to run some tests, Mr. Malfoy. A healthy boy doesn't just go into seizures out of a clear blue sky. Come along."

Carver stepped forward. "I'm afraid we have things we need to discuss with Mr. Malfoy -"

"Well, I'm afraid you'll have to wait," Poppy snapped, bristling like a cat. "This boy is ill, and he needs his Head of House - and so do I, so he can check the child for poisons. And after that, I should imagine that Professor Malfoy will have his hands full with calming down the rest of his students. Here now, you lot, make room, the Headmaster will stay here with you until Professor Malfoy comes back. Professor, come along."

She waved her wand at the fireplace behind the Aurors and it bowed out with the distorted abruptness of India rubber, wavering until it was twice its previous size and several times as deep. Still fussing over Walsingham, she levitated him up to float beside her and bundled him and Draco into the fireplace. A quick rummage in her pocket produced a handful of Floo powder. "The hospital wing," she said clearly, and she, Draco, and the boy vanished.

One of the older girls wrapped an arm around Adela's shoulders and guided her up the stairs, doubtless about as far as the first landing. A rather awkward silence fell - or awkward for Tonks and Carver, anyway, who were on the receiving end of dozens of murderous glowers from ominously quiet Slytherin children. Finally, Snape spoke, making everyone jump a little.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I believe you'll have to come back another time."

"Hogwarts is, of course, perfectly willing to allow interviews with its professors," Gerald Price said, materializing out of the shadows on the other side of the room and nearly startling Harry into hexing him into a small quivering jelly out of sheer nerve-wracked reflex. "Under ordinary circumstances. Sadly, in emergencies…" He made a small, regretful gesture.

"This is very important," Carver said evenly.

Price tilted his head. "Perhaps if you were to tell me what it's is about…"

"It's not something to be discussed in front of the students," Carver answered. Harry remembered him just this way from the Academy - quiet, competent, vaguely unnerving.

"Perhaps we could discuss it elsewhere, then," Price said in the steely tones of a man who intends to have answers or bloody well know the reason why.

Carver studied him for a minute, then nodded. "Headmaster, is there somewhere Mr. Price and I can talk in private?" His eyes flicked to Harry for a moment, the message in them clear: Harry wasn't going to be attending this particular conference.

"Of course," Snape said. "Potter, stay here until I come back. Mr. Price, Mr. Carver, this way, please."

Tonks trailed after Price and Carver, pausing as she passed Harry. She waited until they were out of earshot, then glanced at the assembled Slytherins, put up an Imperturbable spell around herself and Harry, and leaned in toward him. "You know we should take him in, don't you?"

"I don't bloody well know anything of the sort -"

"Harry, listen," Tonks interrupted impatiently. "You and Ron between you might have managed to keep the Ministry off Draco's neck for this long, but if Lucius doesn't come up for air soon you won't be able to for much longer. Fudge is getting snowed under with angry letters - people want Lucius found, they're afraid they've got another Voldemort on their hands -"

"They've got the same Voldemort on their hands," Harry said bluntly.

"You know that, I know that, the whole Order knows it, but Fudge won't hear it," Tonks said. "Telling the wizarding world that Voldemort is back again won't gain him points in the polls, but hauling Lucius Malfoy back in chains will. Christ, Harry, there's not a Malfoy in the three kingdoms who's safe right now, let alone Lucius' only son and the apple of his eye. And it's not like there's not evidence to implicate him in some bloody nasty goings-on."

Harry raked a hand through his hair in weary frustration. "Look, I know, all right? I'm doing everything I can to keep him safe."

"Not everything," Tonks said steadily, looking him dead in the eye.

Harry frowned. "What -"

Tonks sighed and reached up to straighten his collar, probably making it worse. "Look, mate," she said. "Balls if I'd want to get between you and someone you love when you're in rabid-lion-protecting-his-mate-and-cubs mode, but have you ever thought he might be safer in hiding with his father than -"

"You didn't see what his fucking father did to him," Harry said. "He was in so much pain he could barely stand, Tonks. Next time Lucius might kill him. He's not going back."

"It's his choice, Harry," Tonks said sadly, stepping back. "He's a big boy. He'll go back if he wants. And if he does, just you remember that it might not be as bad an idea as you think."

Harry looked away, fuming.

"Draco knows what he's doing," she said. "That's one of the things you love about him, right? You don't get to just think he knows what he's doing until he does something you don't like."

"That's not how it is," Harry protested weakly.

Tonks smiled fondly and shook her head at him. "You tell yourself that, Harry. G'night, sweet. Go crawl into Draco's bed and wait for him, he's tired and probably wants a cuddle."

Harry frowned. "Have you been talking to Bill?"

With a laugh and a wink, Tonks walked off, leaving Harry alone in the common room with a crowd of Slytherins who were ostentatiously Not Trying to Eavesdrop.

"Right," Harry sighed, turning back to the students. "Bed, the lot of you."

Something luminous soared past the huge windows like a floating aurora, rippling. Unsettled, Harry tried to ignore it.

 

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