He heard Ron's anger before he heard the words that carried it - sharp, hot, an audible struggle not to shout. Harry sighed and stood in the hallway for a moment, listening to Snape's low, cold voice washing briefly over Ron's; and then Ron again:
"I have to talk to him. I'm going to talk to him, if I have to get a bloody warrant from the Ministry and -"
"Mr. Weasley, do at least make an effort," Snape said wearily. "I'm not keeping you from talking to Mr. Malfoy. I'm only informing you that, for reasons of scheduling, you will talk to me first. Your time in which to do that, I might point out, is dwindling rapidly while you stand there railing at me to grant a request that I have in fact already granted."
"To broken stone," Harry whispered, and the staircase swung down in front of him. Gone were the days when the determined intruder could get into the Headmaster's office by standing in front of the door and naming off the entire stock of Honeyduke's; Snape's passwords were obscure, and if there was a common thread in them, Harry had never been able to find it. Sometimes, as with this one, he wondered what he was missing; wondered if those words were the sound of an ocean that Harry knew no more of than the track of its waves on the shore.
Harry was very, very tired of wondering what was going on just beyond his reach.
"And why exactly won't you let me talk to him now? Are you giving him time to -"
"Ron," Harry said as he entered the room, not sharply but firmly; cutting Ron off before he could say something that would get him booted out of Hogwarts on his ear. Ron turned, taking an unconscious step back so that he could look at Harry without losing sight of Snape behind the desk.
Ron looked as awful as Harry had expected, as if he hadn't slept since Ginny's death. His robes were rumpled and askew, his hair tangled and barely pushed back away from his face, his skin marred by dark, hollow circles under his eyes. "Harry," he said blankly, as if Harry's unexpected appearance had thrown him and he was struggling to reorient himself.
"Sit down, Ron," Harry ordered, crossing to the cabinet in the corner. "I'll get you a drink."
"I don't need a drink," Ron snapped. "I need to -"
"Sit down, Ron. You can't talk to Malfoy like this. If you aren't on your form he'll run rings around you and you'll never learn anything from him."
Ron snorted, but sat down obediently in one of the comfortable leather chairs in front of Snape's desk. "Malfoy? The day I can't checkmate that pointy-faced bastard in three moves -"
"He's changed," Harry said quietly, filling a wineglass with blood-rich claret. "We've all changed. Here."
Ignoring Snape's suddenly thoughtful gaze, Harry sank into the chair next to Ron. It was disconcertingly like being a student again.
"I'm given to understand that you have questions for me," Snape said to Ron. "Please feel free to ask them."
Frowning a bit at the unsubtle prodding, Ron took a gulp of his wine. "All right, then. How well do you know Lucius Malfoy?"
Snape lifted an eyebrow and sat back in his chair, steepling his fingertips before him. "Not as well as all that. Our families moved in the same circles, of course, but he was a number of years ahead of me in school and had rather closer access to the Dark Lord than I did. Not well enough to tell you where he's gone or what he intends, if that's what you're asking."
"Not even well enough to guess whether he's gone to help Voldemort come back to power or not?"
There was a long silence while Snape looked contemplatively into the middle distance, disturbed only by Fawkes shaking out his feathers and resettling on his perch. "No," Snape said finally.
"But you could make an argument for one side or the other," Ron persisted.
"Oh, I could make an argument for both. But I don't know, and at this point my conjecture might be less helpful than my silence."
Ron raked his fingers through his hair, clearly holding onto his temper by a hair's breadth. "Professor Snape, you had close ties to the Death Eaters. There's been a recent upswing in Death Eater activity, and now the Dark Lord's right-hand man has escaped from Azkaban. The Ministry doesn't have an explanation for either of those things. If you do, if you even think you do, now's the time to say so."
Snape rose and went over to the drinks cabinet, taking his time about selecting a dark, sweet sherry. "Mr. Weasley, when I took office as the Headmaster of Hogwarts, only two options were open to me," he said as he poured. "To sever all ties with the Death Eaters once and for all, or to open the doors of this school to them and remake Hogwarts in the image of Durmstrang. I chose the former option. Had I done anything less than the latter, my loyalty would have been immediately suspect in any case. As soon as I accepted this position, my use as a source of information for the Ministry came to an end."
"And you made your decision at great risk to your own life, I know that," Ron said tightly. "I'm not asking for what you know for a fact. I'm asking you to give me an opinion, as the only expert we have on the Dark Lord's organization, just like I'd come to you if I'd found some sort of potion and didn't know what it was."
Snape set the sherry decanter back in the cabinet and returned to sit behind the desk. "You want to know why this is all happening now. I will venture a guess, and that's all I can do."
Ron nodded.
"Voldemort made the mistake of attempting to seize power again too early. He was still too weak, too vulnerable, his power base was too scattered and disorganized; and Potter, whom he saw as the greatest threat to his power, was a child under the protection of very strong magic. But he can on occasion be patient, and he can afford to wait until he can attack from a position of strength. Time has been on his side - Dumbledore is gone, Potter no longer has the wards about him that he had as a child, the children of his original Death Eaters have grown up to serve him. If I had to take a guess at what the increased Death Eater activity means, it would be that he believes he has grown strong again."
"So he'll be back," Harry said tonelessly.
"Did you ever doubt it?" Snape asked with a touch of acerbity.
"And Lucius Malfoy?" Ron persisted.
Snape frowned at his sherry. "I believe," he said carefully, "that he chose now to escape from Azkaban because until now the Ministry had not seen fit to send him someone who could be seduced into helping him."
Ron's fingers grew white on the arms of his chair.
"What happened, Ron?" Harry asked quietly. "How did Percy get him out?"
Ron shot him a hard glance, then turned back to Snape. "Do you know where he might have gone?"
"No. The Malfoys own land over the length and breadth of England and Ireland, and much of it is Unplottable. If he has gone to rejoin the Dark Lord, there are safehouses all over Europe to which he could go - or there were years ago, at any rate." Snape spread his hands. "I suggest you resign yourself to the possibility that you will not find Lucius Malfoy before he chooses to break cover."
"Why would he do that?" Harry asked. Off to the side of the room, Fawkes shifted restlessly on his perch, muttering.
"Because he didn't break out of Azkaban just for the change of scenery," Ron snapped. "He's got something planned, and I'd bet my next month's pay that his son knows what it is."
"I believe that you would lose that bet, Mr. Weasley," Snape answered sharply.
"He's the heir to the Malfoy name and fortune, don't bloody tell me -"
"Ron, for God's sake," Harry put in desperately.
"Where was he yesterday morning? At dawn or just after, can you prove he was here?"
"He was with me," Harry snapped, then closed his eyes in pain as Ron's astonished gaze whipped around to his. "Oh, God, that sounded - Ron, Malfoy and I co-teach Defence Against Dark Arts, remember? One of the Gryffindor sixth-years has been really struggling this year and Malfoy's not exactly the least biased of professors -"
"Continuing the tradition, I see," Ron interrupted waspishly.
Snape's glass came down on the desk with a hard, sharp sound. "Mr. Weasley, if there will be nothing else -"
A high, piercing ululation sheared through the air, shocking them all into silence. Unfurling his wings with a quick, frantic movement, Fawkes took flight, soaring up to the high domed ceiling and back down to dart around the perimeter of the room, past a wall full of astonished portraits to land in a flurry of red and gold on Snape's desk.
"Do try not to upset my bird," Phineas Nigellus said dryly. Snape gave him a dour look.
"Fawkes, what is it, boy?" Harry asked, holding out a hand. Fawkes fluttered into the air again and landed on Harry's knee. Cooing mournfully, he nudged his head against Harry's hand. One tear, sparkling in the light, slid down across his beak to fall on the side of Harry's wrist just below the wristbone.
"Have you hurt your wrist, Potter?" Snape asked in an oddly strained voice.
"No, sir, I -"
Fawkes pushed off from Harry's knee and fluttered over to Ron, settling down like a cat in Ron's lap, stretching upward to peer intently into Ron's face, crooning anxiously.
"It's," Ron began, then had to stop and swallow hard. After a moment, he lifted his hand to stroke Fawkes' feathers. "It's all right, Fawkes. It's all right."
"Mr. Weasley, I can tell you nothing else," Snape said quietly. "I wasn't well acquainted with Lucius Malfoy before he spent ten years in Azkaban, and I dare not speculate on how that time might have changed him. If this had all happened fifteen years ago I might have been able to give you more answers; but as Mr. Potter points out, we have all changed."
"I never knew him at all, really," Ron observed, seemingly speaking to Fawkes. "I remember running into him here and there, and I know what my father always said about the Malfoys, but I never really knew him."
He glanced back up at Snape. "Tell me something about him. I don't mean about where he's likely to be, or what his motivations are, or what he's thinking right now. Tell me something about him."
Snape picked up his sherry and sat back, considering. "He has a subtle sense of humor and a great love of irony, and a great love of beautiful things. When one is near him, suddenly all the world becomes ordered and graceful."
Harry thought of Percy and closed his eyes.
"Mr. Malfoy will be available for you to interview later this afternoon, after his last class. I have asked him to wait for you in the Potions classroom."
Ron nodded. "Thank you, Headmaster. I appreciate your cooperation," he answered, and managed to sound only a little wry.
"Mr. Weasley, whether you believe it or not, I am truly sorry that I cannot be of more use. Whether Lucius' escape means that he has gone to join the Dark Lord again or not, I can't imagine that anything good will come of it."
"I know," Ron answered, and sounded a little more sincere this time.
In late afternoon the light that filled the Potions room skimmed first over the lake, taking on the color of burnished gold before the high arched windows carved it into long, slanting beams. The walls glowed with it, cold stone lit to illusory warmth. Harry paused on the threshold just outside the light, forcing Ron to pause with him, and found himself thinking about gillyweed.
Malfoy was standing over a cauldron at the front table, eviscerating some sort of root with a surgeon's quick, deft hands. He hadn't noticed them yet; he was too busy cutting and mixing, speaking soft riffs of Latin into the still air. Setting down the knife, he picked up a beaker and poured in a clear, syrup-thick liquid that glowed in a hundred refracted colors like a spill of diamonds in the light. The cauldron began to rattle on its base; Malfoy passed a hand over it and crooned Tace, tace, and it quieted again.
If he, Harry thought, and was struck by a sudden, heart-stopping sense of loss like a bludger to the head. For a long moment he couldn't think at all, struggling as he was to catch his breath and stop his hands from shaking; then he wondered what in the world he'd been thinking to begin with, and what in God's name was going on.
Looking for grounding, he glanced back at Ron, and was surprised to see his friend eyeing him narrowly. In the face of that look, Harry was struck with the uncomfortable suspicion that he might not know what he was thinking but Ron bloody well did, and thought nothing good of it.
"Let him -" he began to whisper, but Ron brushed past him and into the room, the heels of his boots too loud against the stone.
"Malfoy," he said shortly, and Harry heard him fighting for a professional distance and clinging to it by the skin of his teeth.
When Draco looked up, he looked like an archangel who hadn't slept in a week and had just been assigned to appear unto televangelists. Harry had decided long ago that it would take a direct strike from a nuclear warhead to disarrange a Malfoy's hair, and even then it would probably manage to look attractively dishevelled - but the circles under his eyes were darker than ever, and he looked thinner and more fragile than Harry remembered. It was too easy, in this Draco, to see the thin, pale boy who had been the bane of Ron's childhood existence.
"Hello, Weasley," Draco said in a voice utterly lacking in any sort of enthusiasm.
"I have some questions I need to ask you," Ron told him, coming to lean on one hip against the work table.
"So I'm told," Draco answered absently, his fingers moving in a flickering blur over the cauldron as he dusted a fine, dark powder into the potion. "Ask away, then."
"Where's your father?"
A flicker of dark humor passed, just for a moment, over Malfoy's face; then it faded and he only looked tired. "I don't know."
"Would you tell me if you did?"
Harry moved to stand at the end of the table, facing both of them as they faced each other over the cauldron.
Malfoy picked up a cloth and wiped his fingers with it. "No, of course not," he answered, meeting Ron's gaze blandly. For a moment the two of them watched each other in silence, wary as two unfamiliar cats; then Ron nodded and the tension between them shifted a little, as though a necessary preliminary had been dispensed with and they could now get down to business.
"Why aren't you Marked, Malfoy?" Ron asked abruptly.
Draco raised an eyebrow and reached for a spray of tiny scarlet blooms. "My father wouldn't allow it. He didn't think I was old enough."
"And when he went to Azkaban?"
"Then my mother wouldn't allow it. She was... less than pleased at my father's incarceration, and let it be known that no more of the Malfoy family assets would be diverted into Death Eater activities until he was released." The blooms came apart in his hands, raining down into the cauldron.
"Your mother thinks of you as an asset?" Harry asked dubiously.
"My mother's very fond of me, Potter. She'd hardly be likely to think of me as a liability."
"You know what I mean."
"Harry," Ron said impatiently, then turned back to Malfoy. "How much land do the Malfoys own, exactly?"
Draco tilted his head thoughtfully to the side, most of his concentration clearly on the circular root that he was cutting into a spiral. "I don't know."
"Bollocks. You can't tell me -"
"I don't know because there's a point at which land ownership becomes a bit more complicated than simply buying a plot and slapping down a house on it, Weasley. Some of it we own outright. Some of it is entailed. Some of it is part of a larger holding legally owned by a group - the point is that I couldn't give you a figure without an hour or so with the family solicitor. I'm not even sure my father could." Draco eased the root-spiral carefully into the potion and reached for a glass phial.
"What was -"
"If all this is in aid of asking me if I think my father's gone to ground on his own land, I don't know that either," Draco interrupted, a sharp edge of impatience breaking through his calm. "Weasley, I haven't spoken to my father about anything more important than the condition of the portrait hall in years. Which you bloody well know, because all mail in and out of Azkaban is monitored and so are visits that aren't official Ministry business."
"Why haven't you?"
Malfoy closed his eyes and rubbed the back of his hand wearily across his forehead. It was an oddly human gesture from the preternaturally poised Draco, and Harry wondered at it. "How would my answer to that possibly help you find your brother?"
"It's your father I'm looking for," Ron answered tightly.
"No, it isn't. It's Percy. And you haven't all the time in the world, do you, if you're going to find him before anyone else does."
Harry watched them hold each other's gaze and bit his lip on the urge to ask what the hell was going on.
"That's none of your business, Malfoy," Ron said.
"Of course not," Draco answered, reaching for a small phial of cobalt liquid. "None of this is my business."
Ron's face darkened, and Harry braced for an explosion. But silence stretched for five seconds, ten, while Draco mixed the liquid into the cauldron and reached for a neat stack of plants, and finally Ron took a breath and unclenched his fists. "Draco. Listen."
Draco didn't look up from sorting roots. "Is this the part where you tell me that you'll go easy on me if I cooperate?"
"No. It's the part where I remind you that my father is your mother's cousin."
Draco's hands stilled on the plants. "Distant cousin, Weasley. At least a couple of times removed, as I recall."
"Not as far removed as all that. Not for a family that can name every one of its ancestors back to Salazar Slytherin's day."
"Well, fancy that," Malfoy said softly, apparently addressing his scalpel. "The Weasleys can be just as more-Pureblood-than-thou as the Malfoys when they set their minds to it. We're vile until you need us and then we're family, is that it?"
Suddenly irked past endurance with Malfoy's tinkering, Harry moved around the table and reached for the roots. "Let me -"
"Leave it alone, Potter, I can't explain this to you and deal with Weasley at the same time."
Frustrated and itching to do something, Harry took a step back.
"It's nothing to do with vileness," Ron answered. "It's to do with the fact that your father is in hiding somewhere, and neither you nor your mother are with him but my brother is. What does he need Percy for, now that he's out of Azkaban?"
"If I knew that I would know a great many other things, all of which I've already told you I don't know," Draco answered, sinking the scalpel into a root shaft.
Ron set his hands flat on the table and leaned forward. "Let me tell you a secret, Malfoy. You're right, I don't give a rat's arse about your father. He can dye his hair pink and join the Weird Sisters for all of me. I want to know why my brother killed our sister -"
"I should think that would be obvious," Malfoy said quietly.
There was a long moment of silence before Ron finally said, "Well, explain it to me, then, because it's not obvious from where I'm standing. If she caught him doing something he wasn't supposed to be doing, if she found out why he was at the Burrow with no warning and before dawn, he could have just used a memory charm on her. He could have just bloody explained. He didn't have to kill her."
"Then it looks as if he was afraid she knew something that couldn't be memory-charmed away, doesn't it? Something she put together a little faster than the rest of you when she saw him doing whatever he was doing, and that he thought she'd put together again, memory charms or no, as soon as she heard what happened?"
"Malfoy -"
Draco dumped the roots into the cauldron and spoke a quick incantation. The potion began to hum, a high brittle singing like a fingertip on wet glass. "Far be it from me to tell an Auror his job. But it looks a bit, doesn't it, as if you're interrogating the wrong branch of the family? If you want to find your brother, maybe the place to start is with your own."
After a moment Harry looked away from Malfoy to find that the light had faded to lavender, and the cauldron sang into the silence.
"Do you think he's right?" Harry asked, pouring generous amounts of firewhiskey into two tumblers.
Ron rubbed a hand over his face and reached for the drink when Harry handed it to him. "Yes and no. About Gin and Percy, I mean, maybe. But he bloody well knows where his father is, or can at least give a guess."
Harry sat down at the table across from Ron. "So take him in to the Ministry. Give him Veritaserum."
"I'd need a warrant for that, and without more evidence than a gut feeling I can't get one."
"Since when has the judicial system of the wizarding world cared about due process?" Harry asked bitterly, and was immediately ashamed of himself. "Sorry, Ron. It's just... this has brought up a lot of memories."
"Don't worry about it, mate. I don't know whether I'm coming or going myself, and God only knows what I've said to people and not even thought."
Harry looked down at his drink. "Have you spoken to Hermione?" he asked carefully.
Ron took a gulp of scotch and turned the tumbler around in his hands, watching candlelight dance in amber. "I got in touch with her yesterday, after... after things had settled down a bit. I didn't want her to hear it from someone else."
"How's she doing?"
"As well as can be expected." Ron got up and went to lean against the window, looking out into the darkness.
"And how are you doing?"
Ron smiled grimly. "With Ginny's death, or with the divorce?"
"Either. Both. We haven't talked in so long..." I don't think I know how to reach you anymore, Harry wanted to say and didn't.
"Yes, well, that's my fault, I suppose. I never was very good at that sort of thing." Ron rubbed a hand wearily across his eyes. "It's... I think Hermione and I get along better now. It really wasn't a good thing for either of us, getting married. I think my mother tried to tell me and I didn't listen. I think I thought things would be different, after."
"And they weren't?" Harry asked quietly.
"Not except in the sense of being worse than they were before." Ron blew out a heavy breath and settled himself on the windowsill. "My God, Harry, the constant bickering, over everything... how in buggery did you ever put up with us?"
Harry gave a wry attempt at a smile. "Well, I wasn't always as good at it as I'd have liked to be."
"Maybe you shouldn't have put up with us. Maybe no one should have. Maybe if someone had knocked our bloody heads together a long time ago and told us to act like civilized adults we would have stayed married." Ron tilted his head back and drained the last of his scotch.
"I don't know," he said meditatively. "All I know is that it was worse when there were only two of us, no Harry there to remind us how much we loved each other, and why, and what on earth we'd ever seen in each other to begin with. And it started poisoning everything I thought I loved about her; the things I'd always respected the most about her were exactly the things that started grating on me like fingernails on a chalkboard, and the things that had always annoyed me started feeling like needles under my fingernails - like her never being wrong, no matter what, always knowing better than anyone else or it was the end of the bloody world. Then one day..."
Harry was silent, waiting.
"One day we were at each other about something, I don't even remember what now but I've no doubt it was something incredibly stupid... and I looked her in the eye for what I think was the first time in weeks, and I saw that all the respect and affection that was there when I married her was gone. All that was left was the 'Oh, Ron, honestly,' with every bit as much contempt as she used to pack into it when we were twelve years old and she thought I was being unfair to that damned cat of hers." The tumbler was almost at his lips before he noticed that it was empty. Harry pushed the bottle toward him, and Ron came back to slump into the chair and refill his glass.
"Well, the next day I filed for divorce," he said quietly. "It took something that small, something that had probably happened a hundred times before and I never noticed, but sometimes... sometimes something just clicks and your eyes open and you can't close them again. I still bloody loved her, you know? But it had to stop before I didn't anymore, before I lost everything we'd ever had. I was starting to wonder if maybe I'd talked myself into thinking I was in love with her because she was the only girl I really knew who wasn't related to me."
There was a pause, in which Harry desperately tried to think of something to say, before Ron glanced up at him with an unhappy smile. "You know, out of all our friends you're the only one who never asked what happened."
"I thought you'd tell me when you were ready to."
"Well, it looks like I'm ready now. And a little drunk. What the hell, my sister's dead." Ron raked his fingers wearily through his hair. "Mum found her, you know. She was going out to feed the chickens, and there was Ginny by the pens. Mum said her first thought was Oh, Ginny's fallen asleep out here, like it was a perfectly rational thing to do. She set the chicken feed down, carried Ginny into the house, laid her down on the couch and covered her with a throw, and then woke the whole house screaming."
"Oh, God," Harry said. "Ron, I'm so sorry."
Ron took a shaky breath. "It really brings home, you know, how close we all are to death, every minute. Every wizard on earth carries a wand, and all it takes is some idiot in the street pointing theirs at you and saying two words, and you're gone. Just like that. Especially if they catch you without yours, and why would Ginny have taken her wand outside to talk to her brother?"
Harry had no answer to that, and for a while neither of them spoke.
Finally Ron rose to refill his drink and asked over his shoulder, "So what's it like, then, teaching with Malfoy? Is he as much of a git as he was when we were at school?"
Harry opened his mouth to answer, and then closed it again, remembering April with her flowers dancing in the twilight. "Well, he's a git to me. But the Slytherins love him, and he's good with them." He caught himself twirling his glass restlessly on the table, and made himself stop.
"What I want to know is why in buggery he gave up professional Quidditch to come back here," Ron commented, returning to sit at the table and bringing the bottle with him. "He took France to the World Cup single-handedly. He could have ridden out that scandal with the performance-enhancing spells; he was the only one on the team who hadn't used them."
"He was the only one who didn't need to."
Ron snorted. "That's for sure. You know... I went to that match, and watched him fly against Viktor Krum, and bloody hell if I knew which one to root against. I never noticed before because I only really watched him when he was playing you, but Malfoy's a fucking brilliant Seeker. He could have stayed where he was and had all the fame, glory, and attention he ever wanted. Why come back here to teach?"
"I don't know," Harry said honestly. "All I know is that Snape asked him to come back and he did."
Well, possibly asked wasn't the right word. Just at the point when Harry had begun feeling worn down and run ragged by the demands of teaching both Quidditch and Defense, he'd been called into Snape's office for a meeting about supplies. He'd been early and Snape not yet there when he arrived; so he'd settled down into a chair in front of the desk and immediately noticed a letter tilted at an angle such that (he'd told himself) he really couldn't avoid reading it. Devoid of a salutation, the letter had read: Return to Hogwarts at once, idiot child. I am too old to serve as Headmaster and still teach Potions; the Potter whelp is too inexperienced to teach both Quidditch and Defence Against the Dark Arts; and you are clearly too lacking in sense to live in the world without six house elves and a competent governess. My old rooms in the Dungeons have been cleared out for you, and I shall expect you within three days.
Three days later Malfoy had arrived, lock, stock, and designer suitcases. Looking back, Harry thought he probably should have been more surprised than he was; should have felt something besides the odd notion that somewhere something had clicked into place, the feeling of Now everything's settled; now we can get on with things again.
"He's a bloody biased teacher, but the students learn from him," he went on, pushing Malfoy's arrival out of his head. "And he's a pain in the arse to deal with but his lesson plans always turn out better than mine do. He..."
He teaches the Slytherins Machiavelli before breakfast, and when they get the answer right he glows for just a second. He beats Poppy out to the Quidditch pitch to snark at little girls until they aren't afraid anymore. He almost ripped Hagrid's head off and mounted it on the wall of the Slytherin common room. He acts like I'm someone he just met and doesn't like very much, instead of someone he grew up hating.
God almighty, that firewhiskey was more potent than he'd thought.
"Do you like working with him?" Ron asked without looking at Harry.
"No. It's like beating my head against a wall." Harry drained his tumbler and reached, a little unsteadily, for the bottle. "But I like teaching here."
"No regrets?"
"No regrets." Harry couldn't quite look at Ron either; Ginny's memory hung in the air between them like one of the castle ghosts.
Ron sat back and looked up at the ceiling. "Weird, isn't it? There are other boys up there in our room now. In our beds, except they aren't ours anymore."
Harry smiled sheepishly. "It is weird. Sometimes I catch myself heading up to the dorms when I'm tired, and I have to remind myself that that's not where I sleep anymore."
"Well," Ron said softly. "Listen, have you talked to Remus lately?"
"Not for a few weeks. Why?"
"Ginny's funeral's the day after tomorrow. I'd like him to come, if he can."
Harry's throat closed. "I'll let him know for you, if you want."
"I'll send you the information tomorrow. We can put you up at the Burrow if you'd like."
"I'm not sure I can find someone to cover house duty for me all night on short notice, but I'll try."
"You're a good friend, Harry," Ron told him, and the candlelight glimmered just for a moment in his eyes. "We should get together more."
"You've had a lot to drink," Harry said. "Why don't you stay here tonight? You can have my bed and I'll make up the couch."
"Thanks, mate," Ron answered, rubbing a hand over his eyes. "It's bloody late, isn't it?"
Harry pushed back his chair and stood unsteadily. "It's late and we're both going to feel like the wrath of God in the morning."
"Does Madame Pomfrey still make those hangover remedies?"
"And still dispenses them on the sly to students, I'm sure," Harry replied, stretching.
Ron laughed a little, the first genuine laugh Harry had heard from him since he'd arrived; and for a while it was just like being back at school, arguing over who got to use the bathroom first, sleepy conversation in the dark becoming more and more disconnected until Harry found himself countering Ron's argument about the use of dandelions in mince pies by asserting that house elves have six toes. At that point it seemed best to just let the discussion go; and Harry burrowed further beneath the blankets and listened as Ron's breathing deepened into light snores.
The hangover was already brewing behind his eyes, and he dreamed of Ginny's funeral.
A/N: The password to Snape's office is from Eliot's The Hollow Men. No, I don't know how he would have known the poem, but it seems like the sort of thing he'd like.
