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

"Narcissa and I sheltered Draco more than we should have," Lucius said, drawing his fingertips meditatively through the candle's flame. "Like so many parents, we found almost too late that what we thought of as protecting him was really leaving him vulnerable. All we knew was that he left for his fourth year the same child he'd always been and came back a zealot in Voldemort's cause, on fire with the passion children that age can bring to the most unfortunate social and political movements. He wanted to take the Mark right then. He would have, and would have made Voldemort a powerful and valuable lieutenant, if his mother and I hadn't put our feet down and refused to present him."

"How did you keep him from joining after you went to Azkaban?" Percy asked. "The way Harry tells it, that only made Draco want to join Voldemort more."

Lucius' mouth quirked in a wry smile. "That was Narcissa's doing. Draco is a true Slytherin, and he finds power very attractive. Narcissa slipped a lever underneath his love of power and his intellectual curiosity and pried him right out of England and to Budapest to study with the Árnyék Király - who mightily respect Voldemort's power and understanding, but also think that he's a rabid madman who should be put down for the good of wizards everywhere. By the time they and Narcissa were done with him, he was convinced that a career in Quidditch was a much better choice all around than a career as Voldemort's new right-hand man."

"Do you know that he doesn't still want to join Voldemort?" Percy asked curiously.

"Know? No. I'm as sure as one ever is about someone else's heart, though. And you must understand, his mother lives by that child's lightest word, and he knows it. He might or might not go against my wishes - sons sometimes do, after all, for good or ill - but I believe that as long as Narcissa is alive, Draco will not join Voldemort no matter what his own feelings in the matter might be. And in any case, Draco is a grown man now; if we all spent our entire lives wedded to the causes we espoused at fourteen or fifteen, the world would be in much more dire shape than it is."

The world, Percy thought, was in pretty bloody dire shape as it was.

"I spoke to the Minister," he said, looking down at his hands. "Or I tried to, anyway. I assembled all the information I could, and laid out the arguments as persuasively as I could manage. It took me hours, laying everything out just so. He barely let me talk for thirty seconds. He was furious, accused me of undermining his authority and spreading fearmongering rumors. He said that if he found that I'd spoken to anyone else about 'this ridiculous canard about Voldemort's supposed return,' he'd know what to do about it."

Lucius sighed. "So you either keep silent or sacrifice your career."

Percy gave a short laugh. "My career. Such as it is. I worked for years for a man who couldn't remember my name. My parents are convinced that every promotion I've ever had was handed to me just to spite them - because they're just that important to the Ministry, you know, my mother the housewife and my father the bloke who hunts down hexed teakettles. I poured blood, sweat, and time I didn't have into reports about bloody cauldron bottoms so the reports could rot in some bureaucrat's in-box. And now when there's something really important that needs to be done - desperately needs to be done, because people are dying and more will die yet - I don't have the power to make anyone listen, and now I've been forbidden to even try."

"There is still strength in this world, child," Lucius said.

Percy looked back up at him. "Not in the Ministry."

 

November, 2005

Harry's thoughts were already racing when he woke, tumbling joylessly along endless loops of Does Voldemort know Crouch is dead? Was that meant to be an attack or a distraction? Is he really strong enough to attack Hogwarts already or did Crouch only set off the portal because he was dying? Sighing, he shifted onto his back and scrubbed his hands across his face, blinking up at the blurry darkness. "Tempus," he said, and from the bedside table his wand spat out red letters large enough to see without his glasses: 5:15.

Too early to get up, too late to go back to sleep. Harry swung his feet over the side of the bed, sat up, rubbed at his eyes, and then glared at the candle on the bedside table until it lit. He couldn't even remember what day it was. He only hoped it wasn't Wednesday, because Wednesday meant Quidditch all day, and as exhausted as he was, Harry wasn't prepared to bet that he could sit a broom without falling off. It was a shame, too, because he could have used the exercise, the chance to push his body and balance until his thoughts stopped dragging him around in a circle.

There was a squiggle of motion going on in the corner of his vision. Harry squinted down to see Crookshanks wriggling out from under the bed and hopping up onto the mattress. Smiling a little, Harry scratched between the cat's ears. "I'm not Remus, you know," he told Crookshanks. "You can't have my scrambled eggs."

Crookshanks gave an inattentive yawn.

Harry had just opened his mouth to go further into the matter of cat breakfasts versus human breakfasts when there was a soft tap at the outer door to his rooms, made by someone who didn't set off the warning spells. Frowning, he grabbed his robes and shrugged them on over bare chest and track bottoms, made his way into the sitting room - nearly tripping over Crookshanks and breaking his neck every other step - lit the candles in the wall sconces, and pulled the door open.

Draco opened his mouth, then closed it again and raised an eyebrow. "Did I wake you?" he asked, not sounding particularly sorry if he had.

Harry frowned and raked a hand through his hair, trying fruitlessly to straighten it out. "God, Malfoy, it hasn't even gone half five yet. I think I woke up five minutes ago. Is something wrong?"

Draco rolled his eyes and brushed past Harry. "Close the door," he tossed back over his shoulder.

Harry did as he was told and turned to face Draco - who was already dressed in crisp trousers and a black shirt that looked as if it had never seen a wrinkle; he was, in short, looking offensively put-together for this hour of the morning. Or was as far as Harry could see without his glasses, anyway; once Draco got more than three steps into the room he looked a bit like the white-tipped tail of a fluffy black cat.

"How soon can you get us back into the Chamber?" Draco asked.

Harry stared blankly at him, trying to figure out if he'd missed some crucial part of the conversation. "How soon - what?"

"Oh, for -" Draco tapped his wand on the table and a tea set sprang into existence in the center, steaming teakettle and fat, fluffy scones making Harry abruptly realize that he was hungry. "Accio Potter's glasses. Here, put these on. I'll pour."

Harry fumbled his glasses on, wishing heartily that whatever this was could have waited until he was a bit more awake. Just because he'd woken up and couldn't get back to sleep didn't mean that he was up to dealing with cryptic Malfoys. "Look, it's bloody early. Did I miss something?"

Draco gave him an even look and held out a cup of tea. "Probably."

Reflexively, Harry took the teacup, then yelped and let go of it as it burned his fingers. Sucking at his fingertip, he went over to investigate the scones, his teacup trailing obediently in midair behind him. "So are you going to tell me what I've missed or do I have to guess?"

"You are cranky in the morning," Draco observed, amused.

When I don't wake up all tangled up in gorgeous, snide blonds, I am, Harry thought, then wished he hadn't. "I didn't sleep very well last night," he said, more sullenly than he'd meant to. "Come on, Malfoy, you can relish the triumph of Slytherin subtlety over Gryffindor dimwittedness after breakfast. Just tell me."

"I… can't," Draco said reluctantly.

"Malfoy -"

"No, I mean it. I can't. I can show you, or so I assume - or take you along with me on my fact-finding tour of the depths of Hogwarts - but I can't tell you."

Harry looked at him, considering, and reached out to pluck his teacup out of the air. It was cool enough now to drink, more or less. "Charmed not to?" he asked, leaning back against the table.

Draco spread his hands, looking chagrined. "We… are fond of our secrets, I suppose. Apparently we come by it honestly."

"Salazar?" Harry guessed. The look in Draco's eyes was his only answer.

"Right," Harry said, lifting his glasses with one hand to rub at his eyes. "And it won't wait until we can get Bill back here?"

"I'd really rather not," Draco said.

"What's today?"

"Wednesday."

"Oh, fuck me," Harry groaned. "Friday, then. Can it wait until then? If I don't get a decent night's sleep at some point I'm going to be useless."

"I suppose it'll have to," Draco said reluctantly. "There are other things I should tend to between now and then anyway."

Looking closer, Harry could see the faint bruise-blue shadows under Draco's eyes. "You look tired." Come to bed.

Draco looked mildly affronted. "No, I don't."

"No, of course not, what was I thinking?" Harry said dryly. "You're as immaculate as ever. At a quarter past five in the bloody morning."

God, how he wanted to take Draco to bed, wanted to bundle him under a pile of blankets where they could touch each other in a slow, drowsy, warm haze and to hell with tea, classes, morning, fiancées, and everything else. And something of it must have shown in his face, because Draco looked away, coloring a little.

"I'd better go down and make sure my supplies are in order," he said. "The sixth-years are starting on polyjuice potion this week."

"Christ, Malfoy, I wish you wouldn't give them that stuff," Harry groaned. "You know it takes it a bloody hour to wear off, and don't think they don't take full advantage of it to wreak havoc in their next class. One of these days you should try refereeing a Flooball game when your fly-half's suddenly turned into a big burly bloke squashed into a size-two girl's uniform and your prop forward's lost four stone in mid-tackle."

"Stop whinging, Potter. It can't be any worse than when that Ravenclaw girl tried to circumvent the yardage failsafes and Flooed herself to Brighton. We found her within a day or two, didn't we?" Draco swallowed the last of his tea and set the cup down on the table.

"Yeah, and then I spent three days patching the field network and tuning the firepits so it wouldn't happen again," Harry grumbled.

"Friday, then?" Draco asked quietly.

Harry looked at him for a minute, then sighed. "Isn't there any way I can find out what this is about? Writing? Charades?"

Draco shook his head.

"Bloody Slytherins. Friday after curfew, then. You come here."

"I'll see you then," Draco answered, and let himself out while Harry was still trying to figure out what else to say.

It was cold in his room. Drawing his robes tighter around himself, Harry went to start the shower.

 

"Pro-FESS-or POTTerrrrrr!"

Chas Fletcher, whom Harry suspected of being related in some way to the late and unlamented Mundungus, was waving his hand in the air, wriggling on his broom in a way that suggested that he either had a very important question or was dying for the loo. I like kids, Harry reminded himself with a sigh. Really.

"Yes, Fletcher?"

"Chedwick hexed me!"

"Did not!" Chedwick protested hotly.

"Did too!"

"Chedwick, hand your wand here," Harry said shortly. "Priori Incantatem."

A tiny white cloud of magic puffed out of the tip. Wingardium Leviosa, the wand whispered, a silvery, bone-dry voice in Harry's head. "Were you trying to knock him off his broom?" Harry asked Chedwick.

"No, sir," Chedwick said sullenly.

"Then what did you use the spell for last?" Harry asked. Chedwick stayed stubbornly silent; his friends snickered.

"He doesn't want to say because he was trying to lift up Emily's skirt," Isobelle Parker sniffed.

I like kids. I do. And I don't at all mind having a talk with their Head of House about things like third-years being a bit precocious in unfortunate areas. "Look, you lot, don't make me give out detentions," he said, handing Chedwick's wand back. "If I catch anyone hexing anyone else, it'll be cleaning off the trophies with Mr. Filch, and you don't want to do that because my friend Ron puked slugs all over one of them in our second year and I'm not going to tell you which one. Now get back in formation and keep your wands to yourselves."

"He's in a mood," one of the girls whispered behind Harry.

Well, too fucking right he was. Not enough sleep would do that to a man. That and having to wank in the shower instead of being able to push Malfoy down on the table, rip his clothes off, and lick champagne off strategic parts of his body. Harry was fairly sure that in some cultures it was perfectly normal to have champagne at half five in the morning.

A dozen children staring suddenly off to the side made him turn to see Hedwig flying toward him. He held out an arm and she landed gracefully on it, wings fluttering for balance. There were two parchments, rolled up and sealed, tied to her leg. Harry pulled them off, nudged Hedwig into the air and back on her way, and glared meaningfully at the students. "Back to it, all of you. Parker, you're up. Through the course and back to the end of the field, and mind your head this time."

Parker made a face and flew to the start of the obstacle course, padded poles that ran the length of the Quidditch pitch, floating horizontally and vertically across the course path. One eye on her, Harry unrolled the first parchment.

Harry - Adela Vane's going to be late next period. I caught her sneaking belladonna seeds. I don't think I want to know what she wanted them for. I'm going to have a talk with her and then hand her off to Malfoy. -N

Harry did like kids. He did. Even ones who seemed to be angling for a career as a Borgia pope. He was just… glad he wasn't a Head of House. He wiped the note clean with a tap of his wand, stuck the parchment in his pocket, and unrolled the next one, still keeping an eye on Parker, who was halfway through the obstacle course and flying as if she thought one of the obstacles was going to leap out and bite her. Lucky for her that Harry and Draco had got back before Remus had a chance to pull his obstacle course out of mothballs.

Potter, the note started out, and Harry fought down a mortifyingly adolescent jolt when he saw Draco's spiky, elegant scrawl. I do know what Vane wanted the belladonna seeds for. Don't expect her in class next period. I'm taking her to have a talk with Severus.

Look south, if you haven't already.

- DM

Parker finished the obstacle course and coursed back to her friends, pouting. Chedwick got into position to go next, pausing when Harry held up a hand and signalled to him to wait. Harry stuffed the parchment into his pocket and sheared upward in a steep, fast climb, levelling out to hover when he was high enough to look south with nothing in his way.

His first thought was that something was burning, and his second was of Lucius Malfoy, watching flowers shrivel to ash under Voldemort's hands.

There was a low, heavy bank of clouds sitting on the horizon to the south, lit along the lower edges with scarlet light. The light looked too faint and unsteady to be from a fire, and too deep a color. As Harry watched, a flash of reddish-black shot through the clouds like some strange lightning, answered a moment later by another bolt. He kept watching, a small voice in the back of his mind counting off seconds until the thunder as he had when he was a child; but the thunder never came, and neither did another flare of lightning.

"Shit," he said quietly.

"What's that, then?" Fletcher called up from below him. Harry looked back and down to see that his class had flown up as high as they dared and were hovering uncertainly, looking south. Harry flew back down to them.

"I don't know," he said honestly. "But whatever it is, it's a long way off. Chedwick, you're up next. Go on, then."

He could always tell the wizarding children from the Muggleborns, even in the absence of strange names and unlikely hair color. It was in the blithe unconcern with which the wizarding children accepted the most wildly unlikely events; Harry supposed that when you lived from birth in a world where the wave of a wand could turn you invisible and your brother's tantrum could make your teddy bear turn into a spider in the blink of an eye, you came early to a certain equanimity in your relationship with the universe. For the Muggleborns it was all still new, still magic, something to be watched warily out of the corners of their eyes in case it turned out to be dangerous after all. Some of them never got over that. Hermione had, in a way. The Creeveys hadn't.

The Muggleborn children spent the rest of the hour sneaking nervous looks southward. The wizarding children, seeing only that Harry wasn't sending them inside, seemed to quickly forget the clouds. Harry wasn't Muggleborn himself, but he'd been the next closest thing, and he spent the rest of the hour trying not to watch the sky.

 

"How far does this tunnel go, exactly? I don't remember this one, other than remembering that it exists." Remus had to ask, because from the looks of the packs slung on the twins' backs it might well go to China.

"Now?" Fred asked absently, adjusting one of George's straps. "About halfway out to Hagrid's hut, we think - sorry, Professor Grubbly-Plank's hut. It's the only one besides the one behind the humpbacked witch that isn't blocked up inside the castle somewhere."

"But it's got to be taken care of anyway, because if you know where it is and were careful about it you could probably dig down into it without it collapsing on you," George said.

"Fortunately, we are geniuses -"

"You mean fortunately there's a whacking great mirror in front of the passage -"

" - fortunately there's a whacking great mirror and we are geniuses, and by the time we're done no one will be getting in this way," Fred said smugly.

"Only some of the spells are a bit tricky," George told Remus. "That's where you come in. We think some of them could use a bit of Defence magic woven into them."

"And some of them just need the magical equivalent of a finger on the knot."

"I'll help in any way I can, of course," Remus said, privately hoping that this wasn't all going to end in him being turned into a chicken.

"Good man," Fred said cheerfully, pulled out his wand, and turned to the mirror. His pack rustled a little. Squinting, Remus could just make out a squashed orange face peering out at him from the gap between the flap and the side of the pack.

"You brought Crookshanks?"

"We didn't have Pigwidgeon," George explained cryptically.

"We did the mirror last night," Fred told him. "No one who doesn't know the trick can get in or out now - in other words, no one but us, and you in a bit. We'll tell Harry too, when we've got everything set up."

"We should probably tell Malfoy too," George said a little reluctantly. "And Snape. I mean, we sort of have to tell Snape, and he'll probably tell Malfoy anyway."

"You don't trust him," Remus observed.

"Did he stop being Lucius' son when we weren't looking?" Fred asked rhetorically.

"It's not that we dislike him, particularly," George said. "Strange bloke, desperately needs to get laid, but Harry'll take care of that if Malfoy lets his guard down for five seconds. It's just... he is Lucius' son, you know? Family's family."

"I know," Remus said, and thought of what it had cost Ron and the twins to nearly break with their parents over Albus Dumbledore. For the first time, he wondered what it had cost Percy.

Fred had been running his wand over the mirror while George spoke; not tapping it as Remus had half expected, but drawing precise, invisible lines and curves that almost, almost, came together as an image in Remus' brain. Satisfied, Fred stepped back, and the door swung open with a creak. "Lumos," he said. "Ready, Forge?"

"Wait, I thought you were Forge," George told him.

"No, it's Wednesday. Gird up, everyone, off we go."

Remus pulled out his wand, lit it, and followed the twins into the passage. The mirror swung shut behind them, leaving them in wandlight and the pressing dark.

Strangely enough, the tunnel reminded him of Grimmauld Place; or at least of old houses, smelling of mildew and stale air, built by people who seemed to have no concept of elbow room. It was far too narrow, not much wider than Remus' shoulders, and the tunnel roof was only a couple of inches above the twins' heads. The floor tilted downward for a few yards and then vanished suddenly into a vertiginous stairway carved into the stone, stretching down into the darkness.

"Coward," Sirius sneered.

"Am not!" Peter snapped back.

"Then quit being such a nancy boy and go down the stupid stairs!"

"Shut the fuck up, both of you," James snapped, rubbing sweat off his forehead. "It's too bloody close in here, don't make me listen to you wankers too. I'll go first."

Oh, yes, Remus remembered this tunnel. And he didn't like it any better now than he had then. Possibly rather less, given that he'd grown a bit since he was thirteen.

"We'll start at the bottom and backtrack," Fred said over his shoulder as he started down the stairs. "There's less to do up here anyway - it's in the castle and all stone, so there's no need to reinforce the tunnel roof so no one can come in that way."

"Once we get beyond the walls, we'll have to set traps all around," George noted. "Otherwise you could dig in from the sides or up from underneath too, and if you spelled down tree roots or something you could come along the tunnel roof and never set foot on the floor until you were in the castle."

Remus did not as a rule think of himself as a fanciful man, but he rather wished that his brain hadn't chosen to that moment bring up the conversation they'd had before about Voldemort sending things that could see in the dark and didn't need to breathe. "Do you think Voldemort will think of that? Or his followers?"

Fred and George glanced back at him, eyes dark and unreadable in the light from their wands. "We thought of it," George said.

"And of course we'd be flattered to think that no one on Voldemort's side is as smart as we are -"

" - but if you want to avoid having the lot of us murdered in our beds, that's certainly not the way to bet."

"The problem, of course, is that Voldemort's mad as a cockatrice," Fred said glumly. "We can defend against someone who thinks the way normal people would think, but Voldemort? There's no telling, is there? He could bypass every one of these tunnels and drop down onto Hogwarts out of a Muggle airplane for all we know. There are too bloody many factors you have to keep track of all at once. It's like playing chess in four dimensions."

And therein, Remus thought, lay another problem. The Weasley family's chess player was not on their side.

The stairs kept going, down into the dark.

 

He had to say this for the twins, Remus thought hours later as he stepped back and dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief - when they set out to booby-trap something, they meant not to have to do it twice. They'd made their way nearly back to the staircase from the fall of rock and tree roots that blocked the tunnel, and every inch of the tunnel was covered in unpleasant surprises - sets of false teeth buried face- up that would take off a leg faster and surer than a bear trap; a sleeper spell wrought to trigger when a body was half in and half out of the tunnel and turn the walls and ceiling into sheets of knife-sharp metal in a flash; thin webs of magic cast to enshroud and suffocate; tripwire spells that looked like mushrooms and released a cloud of gas that turned anyone breathing it into a mouse - from the outside in. Remus hoped devoutly that they'd really managed to set up the mirror so that no students would accidentally find their way in here.

"We're going to have to check this one from the outside," George said, levitating a paintbrush to smear viscous black liquid in a careful line across the tunnel ceiling. "I don't know how far below ground we are, and it'll do no good to advertise the tunnel by killing the roots of the grass right above it."

"We should be far enough down," Fred said. "But just to be sure."

Remus glanced back over his shoulder. In the shadows he could just see the stairs, and Crookshanks sitting on them waiting patiently for them to be finished.

"Remus, go back to the stairs, would you?" George asked. "We'll need you to bound this spell at the end of the tunnel. Plus it'll be a bit of no good if you get caught in it."

A bit apprehensive, Remus retreated to stand on the bottom stair. "What is it?"

A flourish of George's wand and the black-stained line blossomed outward, spreading in dark patches along all four sides of the tunnel, dripping down the walls like the shadow of water. Remus watched uneasily as it crept toward him. "It's partly a ward against dark creatures," George said. "But mostly it's a protection from necromancy."

Fred moved past his brother, aiming carefully with his wand, shooting silver-green sigils that glowed against the stain and then were absorbed into it. "The bound is the same as that one you taught us to use against vampires, so just cast that when it gets close enough and it'll contain the spell," he told Remus. "That's the black goopy part. It doesn't look it, but it's really an amalgam of a lot of things dark creatures are allergic to - plus the amalgam's made in a way that'll cause an allergic reaction severe enough to look like fast and mortal anaphylactic shock."

"You know, like when you eat shrimp and your head blows up," George said helpfully. "So don't touch. You do have to touch, though, so as long as you stay on the stairs and cast the bounding spell you'll be fine."

Remus eyed the approaching black goop, but held his spell. He could cast, but it was too soon; it would weaken the charm toward the stair end.

"The part with the charms is the ward against necromancy - or, more like, against things created with necromancy," Fred said. "If something moves more than a few feet into the area at more or less constant velocity - or slows down and speeds back up, or generally moves in any way that doesn't indicate that it's moving by inertia like a falling rock or something would - and it doesn't have a heartbeat, all of the black stuff will ignite like gunpowder. Anything caught in the tunnel will burn."

The black substance was getting close now; close enough to make Crookshanks nervous, apparently, because he whacked Remus in the leg and hissed. "All right, all right," Remus muttered, and cast the bounding spell, etching it into the walls around the foot of the stairs. The first patches of shadow touched it within seconds, subsiding against the barrier with a sound like hot metal thrust into oil.

"Nicely done, boys," he said appreciatively.

George stepped up onto the stairs and clapped Remus on the shoulder. "You haven't seen anything yet," he said smugly. "Wait until we get back upstairs."

The climb back up was even less enjoyable than it had been when he was thirteen, and by halfway up Remus had begun cursing himself for not bringing his cane. By the time they'd gotten all the way up, Remus was rather wishing it was a bit closer to the full moon; at least his arthritis went away in the few days before.

"Right, now watch," Fred said when they got back to the mirror, fidgeting with excitement. "Open the mirror."

Curiously, Remus reached out and pushed the mirror open - and stepped out past it, staring around him in awe. "Boys, this is wonderful!"

"We knew you'd like it," George crowed - or a George, anyway.

Remus was standing in a labyrinth of soft, glowing white and mirror images, apparently seamless, his own image reflected back at him countless times with twice-countless twins flowing around him in a dizzying eddy of merging and mitotic images. Delighted, he reached out to touch his fingertips to one of his images; his fingertips and the image's passed right through each other.

"None of it's real," Fred whispered in his ear. "You think you're moving around, but you're really caught in the spell. Even if you think you're walking around in it, you can't find your way out; you'll just walk forever, in all these mirrors."

"It's a variant of the Patented Daydream Charm," George said, nestling against Remus' shoulder and draping his forearm over Remus' collar. "Much stronger, though. You can't break it even if you know what it is. If no one who knows the trick lets you out, eventually you'll starve."

"Means we have to seal this room off," Fred said pragmatically. "But it's a good trick, don't you think? Even if you're blind you can't get through - it just helps if you can see. Helps the charm, I mean, not the poor sod trapped in it."

"It's wonderful," Remus said.

"We like it," George said with modesty that would have been becoming if it weren't so patently false. "Watch, now, this is the trick to getting out."

He moved a little away and drew a glowing circle on the floor around his own feet, turning in place until he was facing Remus again. "Crack!" he said, snapping his fingers; a sheet of bluish luminescence flared up in a column around him, and when it died down, George was gone.

"Deceptively simple," Fred said approvingly. "Once you know what to do, I mean. But it's not the sort of thing you'd be able to figure out on your own. It works because the spell has to be broken from the inside out; there has to be a limited channel of communication between what's going on inside your mind and the spell outside it. Like any failsafe, it's a weakness in the spell if you know how to exploit it, but as far as I know only George and I do. We invented it, after all. Go on, then, break the spell."

Remus took a step away and imitated George's actions. Cold blue flame flared around him like some strange version of a floo, and when it faded he was standing in the mirror room, with George grinning at him. He'd almost expected Fred to be nowhere in sight - but there he was, staring blankly into space, clearly elsewhere until suddenly he shook like a dog coming out of water and smiled brightly at Remus. His pack squirmed and muttered crankily.

"Poor Crookshanks," George crooned, peering into Fred's pack. "Were the humans being stupid? It doesn't seem to work on animals," he told Remus. "Even kneazles."

"That means we don't know if it'll work on animagi," Fred said grimly. "Not yet. First order of business is to ask Professor McGonagall to test it out for us."

"Second order of business," George reminded him. "First is to go out and make sure we haven't left any marks above ground."

"Right, let's get that done, then," Fred said. "I'm getting hungry. Lunch must almost be over."

"Kitchens later, work now," George admonished, herding Fred and Remus out the door.

It was surreal, in a way, coming out of a dark tunnel full of lethal magic into a brilliant white mind-trap and then out again into a bustling school full of students. The children flowed around them, strolling or running, chatting or distracted, alone or in groups, with nothing more than the occasional curious glance at Remus and the twins. The sense of unreality was weirdly uncomfortable, and Remus was glad to get out to the relatively empty stretch between the castle and the gamekeeper's hut.

"You know, this sounded better in theory," George said, sounding a bit disheartened at the stretch of ground they had to cover. "I hope to God we don't miss anything."

Remus tapped his wand against his lips for a moment, then cast on a rectangular patch of grass wide enough to cover half again the tunnel's width to either side. A frozen image of the patch snapped into being, expanded to twice its size, and tilted upward, hovering in midair. "There," he said mildly. "Magnifying things always helps a bit, I find."

The twins blinked at him, appreciative. "I wouldn't have thought of that," George told him.

"That's because your eyes aren't as old as mine," Remus said dryly. "I don't see anything out of the ordinary, do you?"

Fred and George squinted at the magnified pane for a minute before shaking their heads. "Next!" Fred said.

Slowly but surely, they worked their way down to the point where the tunnel was caved in - and a bit past it, just to be sure. There was no sign on the surface of the traps they'd set in place in the tunnel itself. "Good," Fred sighed. "Now we can go to -"

"Shh!" George held up a hand, cocking his head toward a large pile of rock. Quieting, Remus listened, until a shift in the wind brought Draco's voice to him. He was on the other side of the rocks, probably in the trees down past the slope, and from the sound of it Greg Goyle was with him.

Fred and George were frantically patting the pockets of their robes, and managed to excavate three Extendable Ears. "Do you think this'll work?" Fred whispered. "He noticed last time."

"We were standing right there, it was hard to miss," George whispered back.

"Boys -" Remus began uneasily.

Fred shot him a Look. "Remus, he's Lucius' son," he said quietly. "I'm not saying it makes him a bad person, just that it would be safer to know a bit more about what he's up to than we do, right?"

Remus wanted to argue, and found himself unable to. So, distinctly against his better judgment, he found himself pressed up against the rocks, peering between them down the slope.

Draco was sitting at the base of a tree, doing something to it that appeared to involve extracting things from the bark. Pansy Parkinson was leaning against his back, eyes closed, looking if not contented then at least momentarily still. Greg Goyle sat near them, idly plucking up grass blades and shredding them.

"Yes, they certainly look like they're plotting world domination," Remus muttered, a bit disgruntled.

George pushed an Extendable Ear into his hand. "Five minutes, Remus," he said. "If they don't say anything enlightening by then we'll go back inside and leave them alone."

"But let's give it five minutes," Fred said, "because it'd be stupid to have spent hours this morning warding that tunnel against enemies and overlook the possibility that they won't have to use it because someone will just open the gates."

Remus sighed. Unpleasant though it was, the twins were right. He stuffed one end of the Extendable Ear into his ear and sent the other slithering through the rocks, through the grass and down the slope toward the Slytherins.

" - causes quite high fevers," Draco was saying. "They can't be avoided, but the willow-bark is a palliative."

"How dreadful," Pansy said.

"It has its uses," Draco commented absently. A strand of hair fell into his face; he brushed it away with the back of his hand and it promptly fell back into his face again. Pansy sat up, resettled herself facing him, and smoothed his hair back, toying with it idly.

"Parkinson, if you even consider braiding my hair -"

Pansy laughed and gave his hair a tug. "Don't be ridiculous. You'd look like Hannah the Littlest Windwitch in drag."

"I really will smite you where you stand one of these days," Draco told her.

George yawned ostentatiously.

The Slytherins were quiet for a minute; Draco kept on with whatever it was he was doing, Pansy leaned sleepily against his back again, and Goyle plucked aimlessly at the grass. Remus had just begun to consider reeling his Extendable Ear back in when Goyle glanced up and said, "So what now, Draco?"

"Now?" Draco answered, clearly distracted. "We wait. Mostly wait."

Remus and the twins exchanged glances. The twins probably looked more vindicated than was really called for, but Remus would give it to them for the moment.

"You want me to call Vince back?"

"No. I don't want to tip that hand quite yet," Draco answered. "I'll need you to cover for me this evening, though, Pansy, in case anyone comes looking for me."

Pansy frowned. "Why? Where are you going?"

"Budapest," Draco said, and Pansy jolted upright with a barely-contained screech.

"Pardon me, oh future father of my children, but I could have bloody sworn you just said that you were going to Budapest," she said in an icy voice. "Where, assuming you can get off the grounds of Hogwarts without being thrown into Azkaban, you will probably walk straight into an entire cadre of Hungarian Aurors. You remember, the ones who are moving heaven and earth to wipe that secret society of yours right off the face of the planet in a rain of blood and ash?"

"I'll pick up milk while I'm out," Draco said mildly.

"You'll - Draco!"

"Pansy, I can be there and back in the time it takes to get through dinner. I'll be back before anyone notices I've gone."

"Anyone but Potter, you mean, who tries so hard not to look at you that -"

"That's enough, Pansy." Draco's voice was calm enough but there was solid steel underneath it, the blade of a knife that was not well hidden.

"He'll know," she said stubbornly. "Don't ask me how, but he will. And I would stand between you and an entrail-expelling hex if I had to, Draco darling, but if you think I'm going to face Potter's wrath when he finds out I've let you Apparate thousands of miles away into the middle of a Dark Arts pogrom with 'I'm a Malfoy, bring me down like a dog in the street' written all over you -"

"He won't ask questions. Not of you, and no one else will know."

"He still doesn't understand, does he?"

Draco sighed and rubbed the back of his hand wearily across his forehead. "No. But one or the other of them is fucking well going to, because half a dozen of us can't keep solid ground under the houses of Malfoy and Potter both at the same time."

Remus and the twins frowned at each other, and Fred whispered, "Half a dozen?"

"Crabbe, that's four," George said. "Who else? Zabini?"

Remus didn't care to guess. He was more concerned with which side Draco was going to let fall if he had to choose. He suspected that it wouldn't be his father's.

"I could go with you, y'know," Goyle said, lagging a step or two behind the conversation. "To Budapest, I mean."

Draco hesitated, considering, running the tip of his forefinger back and forth across his lower lip. "No," he said finally. "You stay here. I have other things I need you to do."

"Why are you going?" Pansy demanded. "Assuming you are, a thing you'd do better not to count on."

Draco shifted to face her. "Remember that book I found in the Chamber?"

"The one you won't let me read or the one I can't read?"

"The one I won't let you read. There are parts of it I can't make out, because they're damaged or too archaic or in a language that's not English or Latin. This is the only place I know to go to where someone will be able to tell me what it says and will keep silent about it around anyone else."

"And the parts that are damaged?"

"The thing about books is that there's rarely only one copy," Draco said. "In this case… after what happened in the forest, I'm starting to suspect that there are multiple copies of this one as well, but I don't know enough to confirm that by myself. I have to talk to someone else."

"And what will their price be for helping you?" Pansy asked quietly.

Draco snorted a bit caustically. "Not more than I can afford to pay, I'm quite sure."

"Draco, those people even frighten me, and I don't frighten easily."

"Darling, after watching you face off against my mother on the subject of china patterns, I'm prepared to believe that you fear nothing on this earth," Draco told her. "But… trust me, if you don't trust them."

Unwillingly, Pansy nodded.

George sat up with a low whistle and took the endpiece of the Extendable Ear out of his ear. "So," he said. "Do we tell Harry?"

"Are you joking?" Fred asked incredulously. "Of course we do. If he finds out we knew about this and didn't tell him - I mean, I don't agree with Pansy Parkinson very often, but on the subject of Harry and entrail-expelling curses I think she speaks for all of us."

Remus held up a hand. "Wait a minute," he said reluctantly. "Harry's going to be angry, all right, but it sounds like Malfoy's on to something important. Do we really want to sacrifice our chance to get information because Harry wants to keep closer tabs on Draco than he really has a right to?"

"You're assuming Malfoy's going to share that information," Fred pointed out. "There seems to be an awful lot the ferretty git isn't telling us, starting with this thing with Crabbe and working up."

"Yes, but -" Remus began, then paused, gesturing for silence and turning his attention back to the Extendable Ear.

" - a few days, maybe a couple of weeks at most," Draco was saying.

"I can't believe you're doing this," Pansy said in a harsh, brittle voice. "I can't believe you're going back to him after what he did."

"What he did, Pansy, was lose his temper, a thing that God knows I've been known to do myself on occasion," Draco snapped.

"Oh, for -"

"I have to, you know," Draco said, more gently this time. "Really have to, I mean, in the life-or-death sense."

"But not that soon!" Pansy protested. "You said over the holidays, you said you'd give your notice after the wedding!"

"I thought I could hold out that long," Draco sighed. "I'm… tired, Pans. I don't feel well. As a matter of fact, I feel fucking awful. And my place isn't here anyway, when it comes down to it."

"What about Hogwarts?" Goyle asked, troubled. "Who are you gonna leave here to do things after we're gone?"

"That's one of the things I'm hoping to settle tonight," Draco said, rising to his feet and bending to dust off the knees of his trousers.

Remus removed the Extendable Ear and watched as the Slytherins made their way back toward the castle. "So that's it, then," he said regretfully. "He's made his choice."

"You sound like you expected better of him," George snorted.

"Well, I wouldn't say better, or that I expected it. I suppose I was hoping, that's all."

Fred started winding up his Extendable Ear. "Look, I think I've changed my mind," he said. "I'm not telling Harry about this. Because you know that thing that he does where he loses his temper and the fire shoots halfway up the chimney and vases explode? One of these days it'll be someone's head instead of a vase, and this might just be what it takes."

"I mean, it's not like we don't love Harry like he was the eighth Weasley offspring, but bugger me if I want to be around Bill when he loses his rag either, you know? And Harry in a Malfoy snit makes Bill look like a Hufflepuff on cheering charms," George said apologetically.

"I think," Remus decided, "that this is something Draco had better tell Harry himself. Maybe we should tell Severus instead."

It was thoroughly cowardly and he knew it. It was also, he was very nearly convinced, the right thing to do. And, possibly more to the point, while Remus could talk himself blue in the face and never come close to convincing a Malfoy to switch allegiances away from his own family, it was just possible that Harry Potter in a towering rage could accomplish that heretofore unheard-of feat.

Unsettled and unhappy, Remus rose stiffly to his feet and herded the twins back inside.

 

It was in no sunny mood that Harry finally came back into the castle. It was past curfew, his fingers were chapped and frozen even through his flying gloves, and he'd missed dinner because one of Minerva's seventh-years had managed to accidentally warp the braking charms on an entire closet full of Quidditch brooms in the process of trying to hex one of her classmates over something Harry hadn't even been willing to listen to. He'd given her a week's detention. What he'd actually wanted to do was expel her, but even he realized that that was probably an overreaction.

Too long a day with nervous students and an unnatural storm brewing to the south. He wasn't sure if he'd been relieved or even more unnerved when the clouds had vanished in a five-minute space between one glance and the next.

It had to be Voldemort. Lucius might be a damn dangerous enemy, but Harry didn't think he had that kind of raw power. Voldemort had to be feeling his power, to be stretching his wings and getting ready to strike… and yet Harry had only felt the pain in his scar once, and hadn't had more than a handful of cryptic and disturbing dreams. He'd thought he'd have more warning, and it disturbed him that he hadn't. He had no idea if it was a new skill of Voldemort's or something wrong in himself, some sense that had atrophied for lack of use while he'd tried to pretend that he was leading a normal life, and he wasn't sure which one would be preferable.

Dreams. I can give you visions. I can teach you to see. I have visions now, Harry. Harry's own strange near-blindness where he'd never been blind before. There was something he was missing.

"We should tell Potter," Goyle's voice said suddenly from around the corner, and Harry stopped in his tracks.

"We're not telling Potter," Pansy said furiously, sounding close to tears.

"But -"

"No, Greg! This is Slytherin business, our business, and he'll never forgive us for panicking at the first sign of trouble and hauling Potter into it."

Remus' voice floated softly to his ears from another hallway behind him, discussing something or other with the twins; then there was a pause, and a single set of footsteps drew nearer.

"I think we should tell Potter anyway," Goyle said, mild but unwilling to budge.

Harry walked around the corner. "Tell Potter what?"

Goyle's head snapped around to look at him; Pansy jumped half out of her skin, but in a second had composed her face into a cold sneer. The torchlight was glimmering in her eyes. "Mind your own business," she snapped.

"Tell me what?" Harry asked again, and was not in the mood to take no for an answer.

A hand slid onto his shoulder from behind. "Draco isn't back yet?" Remus asked calmly.

Goyle shook his head. Pansy glared at Remus, furious.

"We'll discuss how you knew he was gone later," she hissed. "Right now, both of you go away. We're busy."

Harry took a step forward, feeling his throat tighten. "Pansy, where is he?"

"Leave us alone!" Pansy cried shrilly.

"Budapest," Goyle said.

"He's…" Harry could barely hear his own voice over the sudden pounding in his ears, but he heard well enough when it started to rise. "You let him go to fucking Budapest? Were the two of you totally unaware that the Hungarian Ministry -"

"We know what's going on better than you do, Potter!" Pansy snapped.

Harry raked his hands into his hair and closed his eyes, thinking. There was a floo in Snape's office, for emergencies only but by Christ if this didn't qualify as one Harry didn't know what did. "Budapest is a big place. You're going to have to give me more to go on than that. Where can I floo to that'll be close to where he was going?"

"Nowhere," Pansy said.

"There's a pub," Goyle said. "I'll go with you."

"Harry, Budapest is a large city," Remus said. "If you go off looking for him we're likely to misplace you too."

"So what else am I supposed to do, call the Hungarian Aurors?" Harry demanded. "Goyle, come with me. There's a floo in the Headmaster's office. We can be in Budapest in ten minutes."

"Greg!" Pansy cried.

Goyle patted her awkwardly on the shoulder. "Better for him to be mad than in trouble," he said. "We'll bring him back. Potter can come along on Slytherin business this once."

"Come on, Goyle," Harry said, starting for the stairs, wanting badly to find Draco and also to be out of range before Pansy started crying or whatever she was about to do.

"Will Snape let us use the floo?" Goyle asked, falling into step beside Harry.

"He bloody well will or he'll explain why in great detail," Harry said grimly. "But not until after we've brought Draco back."

"He's probably fine," Goyle said, sounding uncertain. "It's just that Budapest isn't a good place for people like Draco right now, like you said."

"How long has he been gone?"

"He left right after his last class, I think."

Hours ago. Harry swore and picked up the pace.

Snape met them in his office, looking annoyed but unsurprised. "What can I do for you gentlemen?" he asked rather ungraciously.

"We need to borrow the floo," Harry said. "Draco's gone to Budapest."

Snape closed his eyes with the expression of a man beset on all sides. "And you're going to fetch him back, I suppose, instead of waiting for him to come back on his own."

"He's been gone a long time," Goyle said, looking a bit mulish. "Longer than he said he'd be."

"He went to see his contacts in the Árnyék Király about something, I suppose," Snape said.

"I think so," Goyle said. "He told us he had to see them about a book, because he thought there was more than one copy and there was something he had to ask them about. I don't know who else he'd have been going to see."

Harry went to the fireplace and took down the small porcelain box of floo powder. "Where are we going, Goyle?"

"Csiga. It's a bar in the wizarding quarter. Sort of like the Leaky Cauldron but dodgier." Goyle came to stand beside Harry and dug a handful of floo powder out of the box. "Better let me go first."

That dodgy. Lovely. "Right, go on, then."

Goyle vanished into the floo network; Harry gave him a minute, then stepped into the fireplace.

"Potter," Snape said. "For god's sake, try not to cause any disasters."

"I think I can handle it," Harry snapped. "Csiga."

Floo flame burst up around him. Harry still hated traveling by floo. As taxing as Apparition could be, he much preferred it; he could barely keep his balance coming out of the floo, and traveling internationally was time-consuming and vaguely nauseating. Bloody Malfoy, he'd better not give me any grief over this or I'll…

He had no idea what he'd do, actually. But Malfoy wouldn't enjoy it, whatever it was.

The pub was dark, small lamps glowing like amber but not shedding much light, and Harry nearly tripped over the hearthrug on the way out of the fireplace. Hungarian rose in a low murmur of voices around him, incomprehensible; Goyle was waiting patiently for him a few paces into the room. A few heads turned at their entrance, but nothing more.

"Does the bartender speak English?" Harry asked, possibly rather belatedly.

Goyle shrugged. "I only came here a couple of times. Draco always did the talking."

"Do you know any Hungarian in case he doesn't?"

Frowning, Goyle pondered. "Draco taught me how to say 'Get out of the way or I'll stomp you' once. Don't think that'll do us much good."

Harry bit back laughter and rubbed his eyes. "How do you say it?"

Goyle rattled off a string of Hungarian in what wasn't quite Draco's voice, flowing in what sounded to Harry's ears like a pretty bloody flawless accent. He raised an eyebrow, rather impressed.

"Right. Well… let's go ask." Harry headed over to the bar, catching the bartender's eye. After a few unhurried rounds of glass-polishing, the bartender made his way over, sizing Harry and Goyle up with a quick, professional glance.

"Angol," he said.

"Do you speak English?" Harry asked. The bartender shook his head incomprehendingly. Harry bit his lip in frustration and turned back to Goyle. "Does he go by his own name here?"

"Far as I know."

Harry turned back to the bartender. "Draco Malfoy," he said.

The bartender's eyes went shuttered and thoughtful; silent, he glanced up at Goyle as if trying to place him.

Harry rummaged in his pocket and slipped ten galleons onto the bar. "Draco Malfoy," he repeated.

After a moment's thought, the bartender swept the galleons off the bar and nodded toward the fireplace. "Santa Lucrezia."

Harry glanced back at Goyle.

"Genoa," Goyle said. "It's Blaise's house. Blaise Zabini."

"Za -" Harry's face grew hot at roughly the same rate that his temper did. "Right. Let's go."

"What's wrong?" Goyle asked, trailing behind Harry as he stalked back to the fireplace.

"Nothing," Harry said between his teeth, dropping a sickle into the Floo powder dispenser and tossing another sickle back to Goyle.

After another seemingly endless spin, the floo dumped him out onto immaculate and slippery tile, nearly knocking his feet out from under him. Moving out of the way so Goyle didn't land on him, he surveyed his surroundings. He was in a high, airy entrance hall, not palatial but still managing somehow to convey the impression that the owners hadn't seen the floor of their bank vault since the Renaissance. Torchlight lit the whitewashed walls with a warm glow, some small housekeeping spell witching the smoke away from the paint. To one side of him, a hallway led back into the house; to the other, an open wall let in the sound and smell of the surf, and long, broad stairs led downward to the unsettlingly black sea. The fireplace flared behind him and Goyle stepped out, sliding a little on the tiles himself.

"Are we in the right place?" Harry asked.

"Yeah," Goyle said simply.

Harry had just opened his mouth to demand a bit more information when a house elf appeared in front of him with a small pop. Harry hoped it spoke English.

"Who is calling?" it - she, Harry thought - inquired politely.

"I'm Harry Potter and this is Greg Goyle. We're here to see Draco Malfoy. Is he here?"

"Dimby is asking, sir," she answered, and popped off.

"How many people live here?" Harry asked after a minute or so filled with the unsettlingly constant sound of the waves. He had no idea what the rest of the house looked like, but judging from the entrance hall it must be quite a respectable size.

Goyle shrugged. "Blaise and his mum. Whatever friends they've got staying. His design assistants, sometimes, but they're mostly in Milan."

The house elf popped back into existence in front of them. "Dimby is asked to say that Draco Malfoy is going to kill Harry Potter with his bare hands, and also that Draco Malfoy and Master Blaise are in the library."

Harry ground his teeth. "Well, sorry if I bloody interrupted something," he snapped, then reined in his temper. "Will you show us to the library, please?"

"Yes, sirs," Dimby said.

"Uh, Potter," Goyle said quietly from behind him as they followed Dimby into the house. "Are you sure you don't want to know what the deal is with Draco and -"

"I know all I bloody need to," Harry snapped.

Goyle sighed, but didn't say anything else - whether through prudence or lack of interest Harry didn't know, but he was starting to think that there was something after all in this business of having minions instead of friends. At least they didn't push.

The library turned out to be broad and comfortable, firelit and filled with overstuffed furniture and the faint smell of old books. Draco was standing by the fireplace with an elbow on the mantel, clutching a tumbler of scotch and looking livid; Zabini was stretched out in a wide, fluffy chair that looked like there was more than enough room for Draco to straddle him and -

Harry swallowed hard. "Zabini. Malfoy."

"Potter." Zabini tilted his head. "Long time, no see."

"Not bloody long enough," Draco snapped. "Potter, what the hell are you doing here?"

He was, Harry noticed, wearing new clothes, or at least ones Harry had never seen before - low-slung, tailored grey trousers that fit weirdly like jeans, a lightweight black v-necked jumper with sleeves pushed up to his elbows, robes tossed over the back of a nearby chair and shimmering in the firelight with the watery glow of heavy silk. Very new clothes, very well-tailored, very clearly expensive. Designer clothes, in point of fact.

"Potter," Draco said dangerously.

"Pansy's worried, Draco," Goyle said, rescuing Harry and giving him a bit more time to fight down the urge to grab Draco and plant a bloody huge hickey on his neck right in front of Zabini. "You said you'd be back hours ago."

"Pansy sent you?" Draco asked skeptically.

"I thought something might have happened to you," Goyle said stubbornly.

Zabini chuckled. "You'd never have made a good spy, Draco. Not with Greg showing up in the middle of a Death Eater meeting to fetch you home."

"Go home, both of you," Draco ordered. "I'll be here a while longer. Severus is minding the Slytherins while I'm gone."

"I'll never get used to that, you know," Zabini said, rising with a catlike stretch. He wandered over to the fireplace and propped a possessive elbow on Draco's shoulder, leaning close. "You in charge of Slytherin House, I mean. Fancy Draco Malfoy a mother hen."

Draco gave him a dubious look. "Is that what you thought of Severus while we were at school?"

"Good lord, no. I spent my entire first year convinced that he'd castrate me if I set foot out of line." Zabini leaned in and blew a stray strand of hair off Draco's neck. "And what a shame that would have been."

Harry thought for a brief moment that he'd cracked a molar. "Malfoy, it's late. If you don't mind?"

Draco's expression was distinctly unfriendly, and Harry caught himself just as an urn beside him threatened to explode. "Potter, I'm assuming you came looking for me to find out if I was all right. I am, clearly, and Blaise and I have things to discuss. Go back to Hogwarts. I'll be back by morning."

If you think you're spending the night here, Malfoy, you've been hit with four stupidity hexes and a miscast memory charm, Harry thought grimly.

"What should I tell Pansy?" Goyle asked dubiously.

"Tell her I'm staying here tonight," Draco said.

"And that I'll send him home with clothes," Blaise put in. "His, hers, and makes no difference. I want her to preview my spring line."

Draco smirked. "You mean you want her to wear it where the Prophet's fashion photographer can see her."

Blaise patted Draco. "Of course. And if you were with her - wearing, for instance, those trousers - so much the better. Though it'd be better still if you'd let me make them tighter."

"If they get any tighter there'll be no point to my marrying Pansy."

"Malfoy," Harry said. "I'd like to speak to you for a minute."

"You've -"

"Not here." Harry turned and stalked back out into the hallway, not quite slamming the door behind himself.

There was no sound from the room behind him, and it was so quiet in the hallway that if he listened hard he could hear the faint, rhythmic surge of the sea. After a minute, the door to the library opened and closed quietly behind him.

"Well?" Draco asked.

"What the hell are you doing, Malfoy?" Harry asked without turning around. "You run off to bloody Budapest, of all the idiotic places to go -"

"I had business there," Draco said impatiently. "It couldn't wait."

"And then you come here so bloody Zabini can dress you up like a doll, and what the hell you're doing here I don't even think I want to know. What are you up to?"

He could almost hear Draco's smirk. "Potter, you're jealous."

Harry turned. "Yeah," he said simply. "Among other things. Among a lot of other things."

Draco regarded him in silence for a minute, then sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "Do you remember those books we found in the tunnels?"

"The - Malfoy. Tell me now that those books didn't have anything in them about Hogwarts' defenses."

Draco's hands moved in a quick, impatient gesture. "Potter, for God's sake, no, the one I took to Budapest didn't. Even I don't trust the Árnyék Király that far. But there were other things in them - spells, mostly. A couple of which, from what I could tell, bore a striking similarity in execution and underlying theory to that portal in the forest. Except that that portal was child's play compared to the spells in the book, and there's more than one copy. Two at least - the librarian thinks there were three more made, five all told. One was lost in the seventeenth century when a ship carrying colonists went down off the Cape of Good Hope. One was lost hundreds of years earlier when a Benedictine monastery at Holyhead burned to the ground. I have one, the Árnyék Király have one."

"And Voldemort has the fifth," Harry said. "Draco, what the hell is in that book?"

Draco spread his hands. "Dark magic, obviously. But dark magic on a theme."

"Let me guess: how to transcend death while doing horrible things to your enemies, in six easy lessons."

"Surprisingly enough, no." Draco blew out an exasperated breath and stuffed his hands into his pockets. "Potter, shut up for a few minutes and let me organize my thoughts. There's a lot to tell and I don't want to stand out here in the hall all night."

"Then come back to -"

"Potter!"

Harry shut up as requested.

"The theme of the book, in essence, is transformation. Not transfiguration, but… becoming. Making boundaries permeable. Using them to change a thing's composition, to corrupt or purify, in rather the same way that the portal used the wards' own energies against them. Some boundaries… the price for crossing them is very high, whether you pay it yourself or arrange for someone else to pay it for you. Sometimes you can't come back without bringing something along with you for the ride. Have you ever wondered, Potter, where souls go after the Dementors eat them?"

"I… can't say that ever occurred to me."

Draco snorted in a way that indicated that he was highly unsurprised.

"But look, Malfoy, how the hell would Voldemort have got his hands on this? Only three left in the world and the one in the Chamber was past where he could have got to, what are the odds?"

Draco opened his mouth, tried to answer, then swore in frustration. "He might not have one. He might only think he does. That's why we have to go back down into the Chamber."

Harry rubbed a hand over his eyes. "Those two rooms. A library, with a forged duplicate or an incomplete one?"

Draco tilted his head in a silent, ambiguous gesture.

"You know," Harry said, "it seems really stupid to spend immortality fighting tooth and nail to bypass death. That's like spending Sunday at your desk making up excuses not to finish marking essays."

"Well, if the consequence of finishing your marking is death, Potter, it becomes a bit more understandable, don't you think? Anyway, there are other boundaries than life and death. Boundaries around powers, between minds, between past, present and future -"

"Hermione said she has visions now," Harry said through a suddenly dry mouth. "So did Crouch. "

"We may all come to have them, if Voldemort gets his way," Draco said. "We just might not have them for very long."

"I… used to," Harry said. "When Voldemort was feeling some strong emotion, sometimes I'd have dreams of what he was seeing. I haven't been having them the way I used to when I was a child."

"That could be him, or it could be you," Draco told him. "Either way, it isn't a terribly hopeful sign."

Harry sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "I need to get back. I've got a lot to think about, it sounds like. Look, will you come back to Hogwarts with us? Please?"

Draco made an exasperated sound. "Potter, I have business here. It really cannot wait much longer."

Harry felt himself redden and looked away. "Right. Business. I take it Pansy doesn't know about this business."

"Potter, will you -" Draco was in front of him in two strides, grabbing his arm and yanking Harry back around to face him. "Shut up and listen to me or I'll hex you," he snapped. "Blaise and I spent one night together back at school. It was good, but it was enough. We haven't touched each other since."

Harry blinked at him, first at a loss and then with a sharp spike of anger. "Then what the hell was -"

"That was Blaise winding you up, idiot. You can't have expected him to do anything else, not with you standing there vibrating with lust, jealousy, and rage." Draco shook his head, apparently washing his hands of the whole thing. "I don't know what the bloody Hat was thinking, trying to put you in Slytherin. I don't even want to think what you'd have been like. You have your role in this, God knows, but you can't do everything yourself. Let the people who have a vested interest in helping you do what they need to do and don't ask too many questions."

Harry stared at him for a long moment, thinking, then sighed. Things had been so much easier when he was fifteen years old and thought the conflict was between him and Voldemort, one on one, when he couldn't see and didn't care what anyone else was doing. "Go," he whispered, stepping away from Draco's grip on his arm. "I'll cover for you. Just be back by morning."

Draco hesitated. "Harry -"

Harry closed his eyes. "Let me rephrase that, Malfoy. Go before I stop being willing to let you."

A brief silence, and then Draco's footsteps, moving away from him.

"Malfoy."

The footsteps paused. Harry opened his eyes and looked down the hall in the other direction. There was a large stained-glass window at the end of it, bleeding blue onto the carpet in shafts of moonlight.

"I let you go so you could go back to Pansy," he said, watching the moonlight. "If you're not hers, you're mine. Zabini doesn't get to jump the fucking queue."

"Don't I get a say in that?" Draco asked a bit caustically.

Harry turned to look at him. "Do you want one?"

At this distance and in this light, he couldn't see the look on Draco's face. He saw clearly enough, though, when Draco turned and disappeared back into the library without a word, shutting the door a little harder than was probably necessary.

 

"You're awake late," said the Grey Lady, floating in the chair across from Harry. "You weren't this studious as a child."

Harry rubbed his hands across dry, aching eyes and looked across the library table at her, blinking in the candlelight. "I wasn't a lot of things as a child," he answered. It was the hour of the morning when things like that were either incredibly stupid or deeply profound.

"You should go to bed," she said gently. "You've classes to teach tomorrow."

"I know," Harry said a little curtly. He'd spent all night trying to convince himself that he wasn't waiting for the tiny eddy in the wards that would tell him that Draco was back, and frankly he was getting on his own last nerve. "Hey - you've been here a long time, haven't you?"

"A very long time," she said, amused and a little sad.

Frowning, Harry rubbed his fingertips between his eyes and tried to chase his thoughts down. "You knew Voldemort as a student, and Lucius Malfoy."

The Grey Lady spread her hands. "I knew everyone as a student. Tom Riddle, Lucius Malfoy, Albus Dumbledore. Micah Grindelwald was in my House, did you know?"

A little taken aback, Harry blinked. "No. I suppose I thought he was Slytherin."

She made a small, disapproving moue. "It would have explained many things on Albus Dumbledore's part, perhaps. No, he was Ravenclaw. A brilliant child, but so cold. He had the most remarkable eyes…"

Trailing off, she glanced shrewdly back up at Harry. "You know, in every generation someone comes to ask us about someone who came before. They all think they're the first to do it, but someone always asks. Albus about Micah. Tom about Albus. Lucius about Tom."

"And me about Lucius," Harry finished. "I don't think I like being the next link up in that chain."

"There was a time when Albus Dumbledore was a good man," she said. "Before your time. Maybe before your parents' time. But he was, once, before he became something that even Lord Voldemort feared. Tom and Micah had something missing in them somewhere inside - something you have, and Lucius has, and even Albus had before it was warped beyond recognition. I don't know what to call it. A soul, maybe. Seven years Micah lived in this castle…"

She shook her head a little, visibly pulling herself back to the present. "But you were going to ask about someone else. Lucius, or Tom? The Bloody Baron would know both better than I, but he won't speak to you."

"Lucius. You said he asked about Voldemort."

"No," she said slowly. "One would think he would have, wouldn't one? But he asked about Tom Riddle."

Harry sat back in his chair, rubbing a hand meditatively over his mouth. "So he knew who Voldemort was. Do you know what he wanted to know?"

"No, not exactly. The Bloody Baron is no great prattler even among other ghosts. But Lucius was a Slytherin, and a Malfoy - he was looking for weaknesses, chinks in Tom's armor. Places he could apply leverage, should he ever need to."

"Did the Baron give him any?"

She folded her hands thoughtfully on the table, long fingers interlaced. "The Baron told him only one thing: that as a child, Tom loved clockwork things, the more intricate the better. When he was in his fourth year he built, with his hands and magic both, a filigree clock tower about three feet tall. All up and down it were doors and windows that opened and closed with the hour, tiny figures that danced or laughed or kissed with the chimes, tiny carillons that sang like church bells at evensong. Then he tired of it. And when he did, all of those small figures, harlequins and peasants and kings, began to hemorrhage in a great choking red tide. The blood spilled everywhere, like a fountain - out the windows, down the side of the clock, and all over the table in the Slytherin common room. When it stopped, the clockwork figures were 'dead,' frozen in horrible contorted poses as if they'd died in seizures. I'm told that if you look carefully at the table you can still see the blood in the cracks."

Harry scrubbed his hands over his face. "That's what the Baron told him?"

The Grey Lady nodded.

"Jesus Christ. Bloody Slytherins. What did it mean?"

"I don't know. I think, given where he's been for the last ten years, Lucius never quite managed to figure it out either."

"It can't just have been that Voldemort is a sadistic bastard. God, even Lucius had to have known that from day one."

The Grey Lady tilted her head. "Draco is following a long tradition, you know, teaching Machiavelli to the Slytherin children. Perhaps you're looking for the answer in the wrong place. Perhaps the point of the story was not what happened after Tom got bored with the clock."

Harry stared at her, his mind flashing back to Draco by the lake, surrounded by Slytherin children. "The clockwork. He can build but he can't maintain, is that it? He'll be most vulnerable after he's already won?"

"I don't know. Slytherins are patient." Her lips quirked a little. "And cryptic."

Possibly it wasn't Merope Gaunt Harry was going to go back in time and strangle in the cradle. Possibly it was Salazar Slytherin. He'd just need a really, really big time-turner. And antivenin. "I don't really think I can afford to let him win to find out."

"No. You can't," she said, looking faintly troubled. "There are many things that you can't afford. I would have told you this when you were a child, but you weren't ready to hear it: one doesn't have to act out of evil intent to cause evil. If you learn nothing else from Lucius and your friend Percy, remember that. Things that are done out of great love can work just as much evil in the end as things done out of anger or hatred."

"Snape said that," Harry remembered. "Or something like it."

"We ghosts see more clearly now than we ever have," she said. "Somewhere a veil is lifting. Harry, be very careful what you do out of love, as careful as you are about what you do out of anger. I never had the Sight in life, but this I can see: you're traveling blind, and the road is narrow. Stray off this path and it will cost you more than you know. Already some of your friends are growing translucent to our eyes. Hogwarts has enough ghosts."

Harry swallowed hard. "You don't believe in softening the blow, do you?"

She smiled and reached out to touch his hand, her touch no more than a brief chill against his skin. "Go to bed, Harry. Come and talk to me again if you'd like." Gathering shimmering skirts, she floated upward and drifted toward the nearest wall.

"Wait," Harry said. "What's your name?"

She glanced back, still smiling, and for a moment Harry saw night-dark eyes in a living face. Quietly, as if imparting a great secret, she told him.

 

He had to go and talk to Hermione again. But first he wanted some answers. Maybe more Slytherin had rubbed off on him than he'd thought.

He let himself put it off until after classes were over and Draco was occupied in the Dungeons supervising detentions. A Slytherin, he thought grimly as he tidied the Defence classroom, would have found a different way to get the information. But Harry, when all was said and done, was a Gryffindor, the House of charging screaming into battle clad only in wode and bloody-mindedness, and he wasn't going to be routed by a woman half his size. Not even if the woman was his erstwhile lover's wife-to-be and could tongue-tie him with shame and resentment as effectively as a well-aimed Silencio.

"God, I hate my life," he muttered, and set out for the greenhouses. Pansy had been spending a lot of time there lately, and if she wasn't there, maybe Neville would know where she was.

It was getting bloody cold, unseasonably warm temperatures falling to unseasonably cold ones with unnerving speed. The greenhouses, always warm and damp inside, were fogged to opacity; Harry wasn't two steps in before his glasses fogged up completely. He took them off, rubbing them on the sleeves of his robe, and squinted around for anything that looked like it might be a Neville-shaped blur.

"Potter," Pansy said from somewhere to his left, not sounding particularly welcoming. "Neville's going to be a bit. One of his seventh-years needs help with a project."

There was a smear of fuschia standing out from the green, too large to be even one of Neville's flowers. Harry slipped his glasses on and watched it resolve into Pansy. "That's all right," he said. "I was looking for you anyway."

Pansy's face closed instantly, only a raised eyebrow indicating that she'd heard him. "About what?"

"I have to ask you something," he said. Her eyes narrowed warily and he added hastily, "About Hermione."

Pansy's forehead wrinkled slightly. "Granger? What on earth could I tell you about her?"

"Remember that day we met you and Draco in Madam Puddifoot's?" At her nod, he went on. "When you left, Hermione… she said you felt sorry for her. Really sorry, not in a sort of gloating way. Why did you feel sorry for her?" What did you see that I didn't?

Pansy smiled wryly and sat down on the side of a raised bed of sparkling hydrangeas. "Oh, Potter. You are dim, aren't you?" she said kindly. "I thought gay men were supposed to be good at emotional issues."

"I'm bisexual. I'm good at Quidditch," Harry told her.

Pansy laughed, then sobered, turning a leaf thoughtfully on her fingertip. "I'm not quite sure where to start."

"I just asked why you felt sorry for Hermione. How complicated a question can it be?"

"There's a short answer and a long answer, that's all. I think you need the long answer, because you're not going to like either of them."

"Try me." Harry leaned against a workbench and stuffed his hands into his pockets.

"All right." Pansy looked down and brushed invisible dust off the skirts of her robes, smoothing them down fastidiously, a little more willing to talk now that the immediate issue between them was put off for a while longer. "You know, given that she was your best friend, there were a surprising number of things about her that you didn't know. Sometimes I wondered if you paid attention to her at all."

"Meaning?" Harry asked, stung.

"When we were in our fourth year, I realized something about Granger: she watched you. A lot. Well, not so much watched you, I suppose, as… looked at you, rested her eyes on you, like you were home to her and she'd been too long away. By our sixth year every look you gave her, every time you smiled at her, got shut away somewhere inside her so that she could take them out and go over them at night, to see if you'd been just a little warmer that day, a little more affectionate, if you'd listened to her a little more intently and held her eyes for a little bit longer. Oh, we all knew. She spent all her time with you and Weasley growing up - she didn't know how to hide things from girls. She might have cleaned up prettily enough for the Yule Ball but she was clumsy in so many ways."

Harry's mouth felt dry. "Are you saying she had a crush on me? Even if she had, she got over it, didn't she? She married Ron -"

"Potter, she married Weasley because he courted her and you didn't," Pansy said. "I'm not saying she didn't love him. Just that… that when you need light and you can't have the sun, you learn to love the moon."

Oh, God, Harry thought wretchedly, and rubbed his hands over his face. "Are you sure about this? Did Ron know?"

"Yes, and I don't know but I don't think so. I'd never really felt sorry for anyone before, you know," she said thoughtfully. "But… I had Draco. I might not have loved him the way she loved you, but he was mine, and I'd never really wanted anyone else. I didn't have to wonder, or pine, or try to read his feelings from the number of times he looked at me during dinner. Everything was settled. We were best friends, we loved each other, and we were going to get married."

There was a hot lump in Harry's throat. He tried to swallow around it and nearly failed.

"I hadn't thought of her in years, you know, before we saw the two of you in the tea shop," Pansy went on. "I had a vague idea that she and Weasley had got divorced, but I thought it was ages ago. And then…"

"Then?" Harry asked when she paused.

Pansy looked away, running a finger over the nearest hydrangea, watching the flower sparkle and shimmer under her touch. "You didn't know Draco and I were engaged," she said quietly. "And it hurt you so badly when you found out. First you couldn't look at Draco, then you couldn't look away, and you looked as if you couldn't breathe. And there sat Granger, watching your heart break into a thousand pieces over the man who used to call her a mudblood, watching you look at Draco the way you'd never looked at her… I think that somewhere in the back of her mind she was thinking that now that she and Weasley were divorced she could try to make things right with you, and suddenly Draco walked right in between the two of you and took you away from her without even realizing it. Yes, I felt sorry for her. It was bloody cringe-inducing, actually, watching her realize that not only had she lost you, she'd never really had any chance to have you at all."

Harry felt ill. "I - I didn't know," he said, and suddenly found himself wondering if it was true.

"Better for her that you didn't," Pansy said. "That was probably the only comfort she took in the whole thing - that at least you didn't know."

And now he did, and he didn't see how this could help anyone. He didn't even remember, now, what he'd expected Pansy to say. Not this. He wondered if anyone in the world ever got what they wanted.

"Right," he said. "Thanks. That was all I wanted to know. Tell Nev I'll catch him later, would you?" Not looking at her, he turned to leave.

"Potter."

Harry paused with a hand on the doorjamb and looked back.

"Do you love Draco?" she asked quietly, looking down at a small purple flower she was twirling between her fingers.

Harry closed his eyes and swallowed. He'd hoped never to have this conversation, but he couldn't lie to her either, so he kept silent.

"Silence, Potter, is not an acceptable answer to that question," Pansy said.

"Look, what do you want me to say?" Harry snapped. "He doesn't want me. He wants you and the nice comfortable marriage he's always been promised and… and a son. I'm not exactly equipped to give him an heir. You are. End of story."

"I want to know that this isn't just another bloody game of catch-the-snitch to you. Because honestly, Potter, I wouldn't put it past you to get him to turn his back on his family, his values, his future, everything he's been raised to take pride in, and then dump him when he turned out to be… inconvenient, or unacceptable to your precious friends, or just too bloody Slytherin and not willing to turn himself into some sort of ersatz Gryffindor just to get into your good graces -"

"Jesus Christ, Pansy!"

"No? Then how about keeping him around as a trophy, to show the world how generous and open-minded St. Potter is, condescending to allow Draco to remain as much a Malfoy as he ever was, provided that he's a tame Malfoy, that he toes the line and never -"

"Stop it!" Harry shouted, slamming his fist into the doorjamb. Panting as if he'd run a mile, he closed his eyes, leaned his forehead on his fist, and tried to wrest control of himself back.

"Look," he said finally. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for what I did. It was wrong and I knew it, and I can't say I didn't care but I cared less than I wanted him. You take what you want and you pay for it, right? No matter what you have to pay."

"Or what anyone else does?" Pansy asked tightly. "I can't decide if that's terribly Slytherin of you or terribly Gryffindor. Maybe we should just call it selfish and leave it at that."

"Christ," Harry muttered. "Pansy, what the fuck do you want me to say? Yes, I'm selfish. Yes, I'm an arsehole. I tried to let him go, I swear to God I did. I'm still trying. I hate what this has done to you, and what it's done to him, and I'm none too bloody wild about what it's done to me. And the worst of it is that I can't say I wouldn't do it again. I would. All he has to do is ask. As if he would, as if he'd give up everything he's been raised to love and need for me, even if all I were was a - a halfblood Gryffindor sports master with no uterus and clothes that have never so much as hung on the rack next to anything from Milan."

He couldn't make himself stop. It was like he'd burst open something poisonous and couldn't figure out how to staunch the flow.

Pansy's smile was sharp and malicious. "Whereas our fair Blaise has a penis and a fashion sense that would guarantee him a hero's welcome at any Malfoy family gathering? Poor Potter, you just can't win on any front, can you?"

Bitch, Harry thought wearily, closing his eyes. "How many times do you want to hear me say that you won? He wants you. I want him to be happy. End of story."

"Conveniently."

Harry's eyes snapped open and he turned to look narrowly at Pansy, who was examining her fingernails. "If this is the part where you tell me that I must not want him very much if I'm not willing to fight for him -"

"Hm, no, not exactly. This is the part where I wonder if you'd rather lose him and mope and be secretly relieved that you've avoided dealing with thorny issues like loyalty and duty."

"Let me know when we get to the part where you clue me in on what the hell you're talking about."

Pansy sighed. "God, Potter. Don't you ever get tired of being a bull in a china shop? What will you do when Draco goes back to his father?"

For a moment, Harry could only stare at her. "I… don't know. I suppose I'm still hoping he won't."

"Will you join forces with Lucius like Draco wants you to?"

"No," he said simply.

"Good," Pansy said, rather unexpectedly.

"Good? I'd have thought -"

"Lucius doesn't want to defeat the Dark Lord just for vengeance, Potter, though he wouldn't turn down the chance to Crucio the bastard until he bleeds from the eyeballs. He wants control of the wizarding world. To do that, he needs to be a war hero. He needs to be the war hero. He needs you for the final battle, wherever it might take place, but he can't afford to let you live beyond it. He'll kill you, and that will kill Draco." The flower she'd been twirling fell from her fingers, shredded. "Draco doesn't realize that, any of it. He worships the ground his father walks on. But Lucius is… he's not what the media think he is. He's not what you think he is. But in a lot of ways he's worse."

There were about a dozen questions Harry wanted to ask. He settled for, "In what ways?"

She gave him an unreadable look and brushed the flower petals off the skirts of her robes. "If we ever find ourselves on the same side, Potter, I might tell you more than I already have. Until then, you'll have to excuse me for leaving you to figure it out for yourself. For better or worse, I'm on Draco's side, and he's going to have to cast his lot soon. You probably won't like it when he does, but that might turn out for the best anyway."

"It's getting late," Harry said tightly. "I have to go or I'll miss visiting hours."

Pansy frowned a little. "You're going to see Granger."

"Yes."

"And what do you want from her?"

"Maybe I want her to teach me to see again," Harry said, and went back out into the cold.

 

It was the Ravenclaw doctor again, the young one whom Harry vaguely remembered from Hogwarts. There was a line between his brows that Harry didn't think had been there before, and his hands made small, restless movements on his quill. "Yes, of course you can see her," he said absently. "But… Mr. Potter, this is not a good time, for her or for any of them. The ward has its days when everyone is unsettled. This evening is worse than most. The change in the weather, maybe. Mrs. Weasley…"

"She's getting worse," Harry said dully.

"She's had a bad few days," the doctor said. "Her speech is often disorganized, and her reality contact seems poor. We've increased the dosage of her medication as much as we could without compromising what functioning she's managed to maintain, but she isn't doing well. It doesn't mean there's no hope, only that we're having to re-evaluate what we're doing for her."

"If she…" Harry hesitated, then soldiered on. "If she doesn't get better, will she have to stay down here?"

"Mr. Potter, I know this seems like a terrible place to you," the doctor said gently. "But sometimes the kindest thing we can do for our patients is to give them a place where there's nothing that's loud or colorful or that moves quickly. Sometimes their own minds are more stimulation than they can tolerate. We give them all the peace we can."

Harry rubbed his eyes. "Right. Is there anything else I should know?"

"Just… don't upset her. Everything is unsettled today. Even the staff," he said with an abortive attempt at a laugh. "It's one of those evenings."

One of those evenings. The sounds from the cells were muted by the privacy wards, but Harry could still just hear them as he went down the hall, low sobs and nervous muttering running together into an unnerving sussuration in the background. The light from the setting sun spilled out of Hermione's cell in a bar-crossed pool on the stone floor, glowing like embers. He could hear her singing quietly: London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down…

His throat tightening unpleasantly, Harry stopped in front of her cell, already half resolved to stay for a few minutes, do what he could for her, and come back another day to ask the things he needed to ask.

She was in the middle of the cell, face tilted upward to the sun, clutching her elbows, hair falling in long snarls down her back. Her eyes were closed and she was swaying a little, an odd, side-to-side movement that reminded Harry of something he couldn't quite place. "Hello, Harry," she said.

"Hi, Hermione," he said softly. "How do you feel?"

Hermione tilted her head a little, a look of strange bliss washing over her face. "Oh, Harry," she whispered. "We all fall down. All, all fall down. Oh, the end is so close, I can feel its wings on my face, I can see."

God, she sounded like she was having visions, sounded like she was witnessing something holy and was lost in the wonder and joy of it. "Hermione," he said helplessly. "What end? What do you see?"

The setting sun caught in her hair, surrounded her like a nimbus. She looked like she was on fire. "I see everything coming undone. Everything laid bare. I don't mind dying, you know, if the moment before I die I can see everything."

"You're not going to die," he said desperately.

Hermione's eyes snapped open to lock on his, and he realized suddenly that she did look like she was on fire. It wasn't just the sunlight. Something was rippling between them like heat waves, barely visible, billowing upward. "Harry, listen to me," she said sharply, her eyes frightened and sane. "No, don't call the doctor, for God's sake, it's far too late. Listen. Death is a Power. It took Voldemort sixty years to really understand that, but now he does. I don't know what he's done to me, but I know that if I die of it, it will make him more powerful. It will help him become whatever he's becoming. You have to stop him, Harry, you have to, before he can make more things like me."

"Then we'll just have to keep you from dying of it, won't we?" Harry said, thinking, No. No. Hermione...

Whatever was billowing around her surged like the updraft from a building fire, lifting her hair. "There's no time," she said steadily.

Harry took a step back and shouted down the hall for the doctor. Somewhere, alarm bells began to ring.

"Harry," Hermione said. "You don't understand. You don't know what I'm turning into. I hope you never do understand, because I'd rather have you hate me for this than know."

"Hermione, what are you -" Harry said desperately. The doctor and a nurse skidded to a stop beside him.

"This is mine. Not his," she said clearly, tilting her head to the side and drawing up her hand in a spiraling pantomime. The shimmering waves were thick between them, distorting her face.

"Mrs. Weasley," the doctor began, drawing his wand.

Harry whirled on him. He could almost hear flames now, crackling like old bone. "Take those fucking wards -"

"Goodbye, Harry," Hermione said, and snapped her fingers. Power flared outward from the cell, sick and beslimed with dark magic; Hermione's knees buckled, her body sagged, and the sound of her neck breaking fell like an axe in the sudden stillness.

"Hermione!" Harry screamed, blasting through wards and bars both with a single wordless spell. He caught her around the waist, lifting her where she still dangled from some invisible rope, sheared through her spell and landed on the stone floor with her in his arms.

Someone shoved him away, sending him skidding across the floor. He rolled upright and blinked sweat out of his eyes to see the doctor kneeling over Hermione, casting charm after charm, repositioning her head and neck. In moments another team of hospital personnel was crowded into the cell, levitating her onto a stretcher and rushing her out. Their voices, sharp and urgent, receded down the hall until the door to the nursing station cut them abruptly off.

Shaking, Harry pulled himself up to sit against the wall with his head in his hands. After a while, the light in the cell faded and turned to watery moonlight, pooling silently on the floor at his feet.

He was still sitting in the same position when the doctor came back in, grim-faced, and touched him on the shoulder.

 

 

 

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