Harry was standing in Malfoy's bedroom; which was strange, because the wards had failed and the Dungeons were underwater, silent and empty as an ocean liner sunk years ago to the bottom of the sea.
The force of the water's influx had broken and twisted the windows, so that they hung from their hinges in a contorted wreckage of metal and glass. Outside in the lake, something was shining like a rotating searchlight, illuminating the bedroom in a cold white light and then plunging it into darkness for a breath too long before sweeping across the room again, trailing shadows behind it. The room was colorless in its light, a dull monochromatic blue-grey with only hints remaining of the rich greens and browns and the scarlet of Malfoy's Quidditch robes. Harry's movements were slowed and heavy, pushing against the resistance of the water as he turned to look around the room; his hair floated into his eyes, and the curtains of Malfoy's bed stirred a little at his movement.
Too late, manchild, came a voice that he heard more with his mind than with his ears, and he looked up to see a merman floating just outside the window, staring at him with cold, pitiless eyes. Too late. It all happened so long ago.
But that wasn't true, was it, because he'd seen Angie Bulstrode in the hall - fresh-drowned, pale and empty-eyed, drifting halfway between floor and ceiling. She'd spun slowly in the current of his passing, robes billowing out around her like blood in the water.
It was all years ago, years ago, the merman said, and the light swept past them, leaving only suffocating blackness.
No, Harry said. No, it wasn't it was just yesterday just now it can't be too late. He closed his eyes against the dark and the numbing fear, and when light bloomed against his eyelids again he opened them to see that the curtains on Malfoy's bed were rotting; that seaweed and a thin film of green covered everything, hung from the canopy, twined around the posts, hung from the desk, moving slowly in some current that did not touch Harry at all.
Too late, the merman said, and swam away.
Minerva, he had to find Minerva. She had a time-turner, the one she'd lent Hermione in their third year. If he could find her he could turn it until the seaweed grew back into itself, until the rot reversed itself, until the water poured back out the windows and the glass leaped back into the panes to be made whole again; until Angie touched the ground and looked up at the fish in the lightwells instead of staring blankly into the thick darkness, until he could catch Malfoy with his hand on the latch and tell him not to open the windows. Oh, God, please, I'll find Minerva, just let him wait, just let me get there before he opens the fucking windows, please just let me have this one thing.
The light swept past and went out.
The pressure of the dark and the cold water on his skin was suffocating, paralyzing. Harry closed his eyes and swallowed against the terror that rose in his throat like bile. You're not fifteen anymore, he told himself, trying for calm while his heart raced wildly in his chest. You won't choose wrong this time. One thing at a time, find the windows first, oh God please let me be in time…
Blind, he stumbled past the bed, outstretched hands touching slimed surfaces for guidance; then he was at the wall, running his hands along slick, clammy stone until he found the window. He planted a foot on the sill and shoved himself up and out, cutting his hands on the shards of glass, and hoped to God that he was swimming toward the surface because there was only just enough light now for him to see a hand's breadth in front of his face. If he could just get to the surface - before the grindylows caught him, before Minerva left the castle and took the time-turner with her, before the exhaustion dragging at him pulled him down to the bottom, before it was too late and he wouldn't be able to go back far enough to yank Malfoy's hand away from that damn window latch, please, let him be pissed off, let him think I've lost my mind, I don't care, just don't let it be too late -
"Harry! Wake up! Potter! "
Harry jolted awake and up onto his elbow. Dim predawn light filled the room, enough for him to see a vague female-shaped blur sitting on the side of his bed. He groped on the bedside table for his glasses and shoved them on, squinting at the blur. It was Minerva, hair falling over her shoulder in a long iron-gray braid, wearing a scarlet and gold dressing gown and looking ten years older than she had looked the night before.
"Minerva? What's wrong?"
"The Dark Mark appeared late last night over St. Mary Boniface," she said, and her voice wavered with an old woman's tremor.
"Jesus," Harry said. "Jesus. Hermione."
Over Minerva's shoulder, he saw Ron standing white-faced in the doorway.
The mediwizard at St. Mungo's was a hundred years old if he was a day, with a face like a dried apple under a fluffy shock of white hair, and would have looked frail if not for the clear shrewdness of his eyes. He met Ron and Harry in the lobby, carrying a case file.
"How is she?" Ron asked without preamble.
"We've done all we can for her physical injuries," the mediwizard said. "She's still frail. The rest… well, we've done all we can for now. Any more will have to wait a few days until she's had a chance to rest and we've had a chance to see how the treatment is taking effect. We've given her breakfast and moved her to another ward."
"But she'll be all right?" Harry asked apprehensively.
"Sorry," Ron said absently. "Harry, this is Dr. O'Connell. Dr. O'Connell, this is -"
"Harry Potter, of course," the mediwizard said. "You have your mother's eyes, though I expect you must get extraordinarily tired of hearing people say that." His gaze made no move toward Harry's scar, and Harry found it in himself to be grateful for that small kindness.
"Please to meet you," he said automatically. "Hermione, can we see her?"
"She just finished breakfast not long ago, and she's resting right now. Perhaps the two of you could come to my office for a few minutes and then go have some breakfast yourselves, and when she wakes up again I'll call a nurse to take you to her."
"We can't sit in her room?" Ron asked. "We won't -"
Dr. O'Connell was shaking his head. "I don't think that's advisable, Mr. Weasley. Please, come with me."
Trading a frustrated glance, Harry and Ron followed the mediwizard down a series of winding corridors to a small, cozy office. There was a fire burning merrily behind a screen in the fireplace, taking a bit of the chill from the institutional white of the décor, and the windows let in the morning sun. Dr. O'Connell settled behind his desk.
"You are her next of kin, Mr. Weasley, aren't you, and have the power to make decisions about her medical treatment?" he asked, opening the file.
"Yes," Ron answered tersely. "What happened to her?"
"Well, that we're still working on. She was brought in with fairly serious internal injuries - lesions in her lungs, a ruptured appendix and spleen, a good deal of internal bleeding from a number of sources - and her fingers were broken."
Harry took a deep breath and choked down the urge to empty his stomach onto the floor.
"Was that all?" Ron asked tightly.
Dr. O'Connell rubbed a hand across his forehead. "No," he said quietly. "We repaired those injuries fairly quickly, though as I said she's still frail. She's suffering from the aftereffects of a number of hexes - a repeated administration of the Cruciatus curse or something very like it, and several others that we won't be able to untangle until her condition has stabilized. When she's awake she seems… disconnected, I suppose is one way to put it, so you should be prepared for that. She knows her name but seems unsure of her surroundings; she can carry on conversations, after a fashion, but she's not always lucid in her speech."
"Will she get better?" Harry asked.
"Mr. Potter, I don't know," O'Connell said simply. "We can hold out hope for an improvement over her present state but she may never be well."
Harry closed his eyes. After all these years, he'd lulled himself into believing that the people he loved were safe. He'd half convinced himself that Voldemort was gone for good, convinced himself that if the Death Eaters came back there'd be plenty of warning for anyone with eyes to see, and he'd then gone where the warning couldn't reach him in time.
"Make her as well as you can, then," Ron said. "Call in any specialists you need. Even if you only make her well enough to leave the hospital. I'll see to it that she's taken care of."
"We'll see what we can do, Mr. Weasley," O'Connell said, and did not look optimistic.
The hospital tea was execrable. Harry wondered briefly if it was meant to take visitors' minds off the condition of their loved ones. If so, it wasn't working.
"The Goyles are gone," Ron said abruptly, and Harry's attention snapped back to him with an almost painful jolt.
"Gone? "
"Gone. All three of them. They didn't just vanish, though - Goyle senior put in for a three-week holiday a good six months ago. Two problems with that, though." Ron took a drink of the tea and made a face. "First is the timing. On one hand, it's bloody suspicious; on the other hand, even if Lucius had been sure from day one that he could get Percy to help him escape, I don't see how he could have called it to the week that long ago. Second problem is that no one seems to know where they are. Goyle's supervisor thinks he mentioned Dover, but we've been over the wizarding communities with a fine-toothed comb and no trace of them."
"What about the Muggle communities?" Harry asked.
Ron shook his head. "The Goyles aren't just dumb as a box of rocks, Harry; they're purebloods, and anti-Muggle purebloods at that. They couldn't pass for Muggles if it meant the Kiss. No, they aren't going to stray outside of the wizarding world, and the Ministry has people looking for them. If we haven't tracked them down in a few days, that'll say something, right there."
"Ron, how did Percy get Lucius out of Azkaban?" Harry asked quietly.
Sighing, Ron stood and moved to look out the window. The sunlight traced out the beginnings of lines on his face, and Harry felt a sudden stab of inexplicable fear.
"If you're not an Auror you have to check your wand when you go in," Ron said, looking down into his tea. "And Percy did, but he'd been there so many times that they just waved him through and didn't check to see if he had another one. Which he did - he had an old wand of Lucius', not the one that was broken after his trial but a different one."
"Why doesn't it surprise me that he had more than one?" Harry said wearily.
"He's probably got a whole bloody stockpile. It seems like such a basic precaution to take, doesn't it, having a spare? But we never seem to think to keep one. It'd be like keeping a spare leg in the wardrobe for emergencies."
"But where did Percy get it?"
Ron shrugged. "That we don't know. Narcissa probably sent it to him, or Draco did."
Harry looked away.
"Anyway, they didn't check. It was early and the guards were just getting the day started, and Percy had Lucius' wand and two vials of polyjuice. He sat in the visitation room with Lucius for an hour; and then when the Auror came to tell him that the time was up, Lucius hit him with an Imperius - hit the Auror, I mean, not Percy." Ron laughed shortly. "Percy obviously didn't need it.
"Well, they polyjuiced the Auror into Malfoy and Malfoy into the Auror, changed robes, and the Auror went docilely back to Malfoy's cell while Percy and Malfoy walked right out of the prison. Percy flashed his credentials and gave his 'top secret Ministry business' look to everyone who looked like they might be about to ask questions, and by the time the polyjuice wore off they were across to the mainland and long gone."
"God almighty," Harry said. "Didn't the guards learn anything from Barty Crouch?"
"Oh, they did. But Percy was a familiar face with no apparent connections to the Malfoys beyond the distant family ties, the Auror wasn't someone who would willingly have traded places with Malfoy, and as far as they knew neither Lucius nor Percy had a wand. One or two of them thought something was a bit off but didn't like to say anything about it, but the rest were busy with their duties and didn't look past what was right in front of them."
Ron rubbed at his temples, looking worn out. "And, you know… people underestimate Percy, I think. God knows his own family did, apparently. He looks like there's nothing to him but hot air and his own self-importance, but that's not really true. He sees more than you think he does and he has a nasty habit of turning out to be right when you least want him to be."
Unsettled, Harry got up and refilled his cup from the tea urn.
"Harry… You said you and Hermione met for tea yesterday. Who knew you met with her?"
"Oh, God." Harry took a drink and thought. "Neville. The waitress at the tea shop. Pansy Parkinson and Draco. Anyone who walked by the window, really, we were sitting right next to it. Rosmerta might have overheard me talking to Neville, after. That's all I can think of."
"Pansy and Draco?"
Harry felt irritation flare in him again and pushed it down. "They came into the tea shop while we were there."
"What were you talking about when they did?"
"God, Ron, I don't remember. I know Hermione shushed me a few seconds before they came in, but I don't know how they could have overheard anything with bloody Pansy prattling on about receptions and her barmy uncle."
"You remember what they were talking about but not what you were talking about?"
"I didn't bloody know they were engaged, all right, and it surprised me, of course I remember it," Harry snapped, then closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying for control. "Look, Ron, I'm sorry. I don't mean to be an ass. I just… I don't want to be interrogated right now, all right?"
Silence hung uncomfortably between them for a minute before Ron nodded, abashed. "Sorry, I'm - I just need to be doing something, that's all. You know how it is."
Harry laughed shortly. "Don't I, though," he answered, and the frustration in his voice sounded strange and overdone in his own ears.
They tried to talk about other things until the nurse came to get them.
"We've moved her off the open ward," said the nurse over her shoulder. She looked a little like Terry Boot; Harry wondered if they were related. "We have a secure ward for patients who might be in danger, or who might be a danger to themselves or others. The only way in or out is past one of two nursing stations equipped with surveillance and alarm equipment. She'll be safer here than she would be in most places."
They'd taken the lift as far down as it went and were going now down a flight of broad stairs. Small spell-contained torches burned like foxfire near the ceiling, lighting the staircase and the hall beyond in an eerily steady bluish glow. Ron looked washed-out and ill in their light.
"How is she?" he asked. "Is she doing any better?"
They reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped out into a dim hallway. Across it, about thirty yards down, a nurse's station stretched like a bulwark, casting a spill of brighter light into the hall on either side. The nurse did not look back at Ron.
"She's awake and out of bed," she answered, and didn't say any more.
Well beyond the nursing station was a row of doorways spilling faint sunlight onto the hall's tile floor. As they neared the station doors a man's voice rose from the doorways in a shrill ululation full of words that Harry could almost understand, sparking echoes from the stone and soaring suddenly upward into a shriek that died with an abrupt choking sound. One of the men in the station slipped out the door and hurried down the hall toward the sound.
"Wait!" Harry stopped, heart hammering in his throat, and demanded, "Where are we? What's wrong with Hermione?"
The nurse picked up a key from the heavy ring hanging at her waist and fit it into the lock on the door of the nursing station. "You've discussed her case with Dr. O'Connell, Mr. Potter," she said, not unkindly. Harry didn't remember having given her his name. "There's nothing more I can tell you about it."
"You can bloody well tell us where we are," Ron snapped, looking as shaken as Harry felt.
The door to the station swung open. "We're on the Secure Ward, Mr. Weasley, as I said before," the nurse answered patiently, holding the door open so that they could pass through.
With a short, helpless glance at each other, Harry and Ron followed her through the station and out into the hallway on the other side.
"She's just here," the nurse said, indicating a door a few yards down the hall. "Please don't let her tire herself out. I can't let you into the room, but you can speak to her through the door."
Oh, Jesus, Hermione, Harry thought, and wondered in despair if this was some sort of unpleasantly realistic continuation of his nightmare.
"Visitors, Miss Granger," the nurse said cheerily. Because he couldn't do anything else, Harry moved to stand behind her.
Hermione's cell - oh, God, it was, it was a bloody cell, not a room, not a ward - was a high, small space with a window set far up in the wall and bars across the front. The walls and floor were padded, but the bars were far enough apart that she could reach through them if she wanted. Harry thought about Sirius slipping through the bars in dog form and wondered -
A fly buzzed in front of the bars, darted between them, and was incinerated in a silent flash. Magic coruscated dimly around the spot for a moment, and then was still again.
Hermione was standing in the pool of light spilling in from the window, muttering under her breath as she counted something off on her fingers, over and over. She was dressed in a plain cotton hospital gown, barefoot, and her hair fell in witchy snarls around her face. She didn't notice when they stopped in front of her cell.
"Try not to upset her," the nurse said kindly. "I'll be in the nurse's station if you should need me, or if she should." She turned and left, brisk and professional, rubber soles squeaking a little against the shiny tiles.
"Oh, God," Ron whispered, and Harry didn't dare look at him. "Oh, Hermione."
The movement of Hermione's fingers stopped suddenly and she turned her head a little, peering at them through dark tangles - and no, this wasn't Hermione, it couldn't be, not this pinched creature with a sly, cruel smile whose eyes glinted in the shadow.
They've made a mistake, Harry thought numbly. I should go and tell the nurse. They've made a mistake.
"Hello, Harry," she said suddenly, sharply, and she sounded fifteen years old again, a too-serious little girl with deliberately flawless diction.
Harry tried to speak, swallowed hard, and tried again. "Hello. How… how do you feel?"
"I feel, I feel," she said, then appeared to lose her train of thought and peered back down at her fingers. "Sentio, sentsissem, sensisses, sensisset, sensissimus. It's important to know. I'm the only one who ever knows."
"Hermione," Ron said in a strangled voice.
"Oh, do go away, Ron," Hermione said absently. "We're done with you, you know."
Harry took a desperate step forward and said "Hermione! Look at us, love, we're here to -"
Hermione tilted her head and rolled it back, giving a high, sweet hum like a kitten's mewl, smiling into the sunlight.
Harry took a deep breath and set his hand against the bars. The magic of the barrier glowed warningly against his skin. "Hermione. Hermione, sweet, what in God's name happened to you?"
"My parents know the loveliest church," she said dreamily; then in a flash her expression changed and she gave him a sidelong, crafty look. "You think no one knows, Harry. Sometimes I think you don't even know. You're quite stupid, of course. But he knows."
"Who knows, Hermione?" Ron asked helplessly. "Knows what?"
"Shhhhh…" Hermione lifted a finger to her lips and peered up at the window, then whispered with exaggerated care, "He Who Must Not Be Named."
"Vold -" Harry began, and stopped abruptly when Hermione gave a piercing keen and lifted her hands to her ears.
"Don't name him," she cried. "Don't name him."
Ron closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the wall. "I never wanted you to understand," he said miserably. "Not like this."
"Oh, do shut up, Ron!" Hermione snapped.
Harry couldn't stand this. The dark in the hall was suffocating him, and he had to get out. "Hermione, we have to -"
"And you shut up too, Harry. He," she said carefully, picking at her thumbnail with great concentration, "knows."
"Knows what?" Harry asked despairingly.
Through the strands of her hair he saw Hermione's face twist in an expression of hate so ugly that he almost took a step back. "That you and Lucius Malfoy have the same weakness. He knows what he could destroy that would destroy both of you. He isn't stupid." Her thumbnail snapped with a crack like a gunshot, splitting halfway back in the nailbed.
"I'm going for the nurse," Ron said hoarsely, taking a step back.
Harry glanced toward him, and in the second that his attention was divided Hermione slammed into the bars in front of him, palms hitting the metal with a ringing slap. The tile wall behind him hit the back of his head with a painful crack before he even realized that he'd shot back away from the cell; his vision dimmed for a moment, and for the first time since Sirius' death he came very close to bursting into tears of grief and shame.
"You stay where you are, Ronald Weasley," Hermione snapped. "You stay and hear this, because Harry doesn't want you either." There was a smear of blood at the corner of her mouth.
"Hermione, you're upset, I'm going to go get the nurse and -" Ron was near tears.
Hermione's mocking giggle scraped up and down the scale, up and down Harry's spine, digging in with a thousand tiny claws. "I told you to stay where you are. And you'll do it, won't you, because you used to love me and now you feel guilty. And you don't want me, and I don't want you, and Harry doesn't want either of us. But I told about him, Harry." She looked back at him with pale, set defiance, and Harry remembered her leading Professor McGonagall into the Gryffindor common room to confiscate the broom that Sirius sent. "I told. I did it to keep you safe."
"You told -" Harry began, lost; and then sudden realization hit him so hard that it knocked him into a thick, cold fog, and he heard himself saying "Oh, God. Hermione, what did you tell?"
"You don't know what he did, Harry," she answered; and for just a moment she was his best friend again, frightened and in pain, and Harry almost took a step forward before sullen anger darkened her face. "You don't know. You weren't there. But I kept my head. I knew I could, and I did. I kept my wits about me just like when Umbridge was trying to kill us, and you weren't such great friends with that Slytherin whoremonger then, were you -"
"Hermione, for Christ's sake what did you tell him -"
"Harry, really, I can't believe you haven't figured it out," she answered, and once her tone would have been annoyingly superior but now it was vicious. "I told him to remove the only weakness you have left. I said, 'Please don't kill Draco Malfoy, Mr. Dark Lord sir, you'll hurt Harry ever so much, it wouldn't be Ron now at the bottom of the lake and it was never me but -'"
"What have you done?" Harry whispered harshly.
"Harry, for fuck's sake, she was being tortured, don't you dare blame her for -"
"It's all right, Harry," Hermione said in a distorted echo of her old superior tone. "Someone would have killed Malfoy anyway, and better to do it now before you've really realized just how much of a weakness he is. It's doing you a favor, really." There was an odd, frightening gleam in her eyes, as if something cold and hungry were looking out of them, and he found himself thinking again, This isn't Hermione.
But it was. It was Hermione, and he knew it, just as he knew that there was something she was lying about, or simply not telling him.
Hermione turned and looked back into her cell. "I think you should go away now," she said casually. "Someone will bring me lunch soon. They're so careful not to give me anything that I could hurt anyone with. I think they think I'm mad, Harry, which is nonsense, of course. If you don't watch out they might think that you're mad too, and then where will you be?"
"If you want us to go we will," Ron answered. "We'll come back, though. We'll come and see you until you're well again, just like you used to come see us in the hospital wing, remember?"
Hermione drifted away from the bars and spun into the shaft of sunlight, her hands with one ruined thumbnail floating out to her sides. "London Bridge is falling down, falling down…" she sang softly.
"Hermione," Harry called; hating himself, but he had to ask. "Did… What did he say? You Know Who, I mean."
She paused in mid-turn and glanced back over her shoulder at him; caught in mid-motion, she was as graceful as a dancer, and he'd never seen it before. "He said…" Hermione was silent for a moment, thoughtful, and then that spiteful, crafty smile spread across her face again. "He said everything would be all right."
Harry hit the ward doors at a run, praying that he could get out of St. Mungo's and into the air before he was ill.
"Bloody hell," Ron said shakily, sinking down onto a bench in the small courtyard at the side of the hospital.
Harry was still gulping air. "Ron, oh God, I'm so sorry."
"Someone's going to have their balls twisted off for this, and I damn well know where to start, once I find the bastard." Ron rose from the bench again, pacing angrily, unable to keep still.
"But it was Voldemort, not -"
"Harry." Ron stopped and faced him with an expression so grim and set that every day since they'd been at school together seemed to stretch between them like a chasm. "Let me lay this out for you. Damn few people know where Hermione lives, but Voldemort found out. Now, it could be that one of us is a traitor, and it could also be that one of us lives with bloody hundreds of other people and has the son of a Death Eater in his rooms twice a week where correspondence or photos might be lying around."
"Jesus, Ron, you can't think that Draco would be channelling information to Voldemort now. Even if he were sending information anywhere, he'd send it to his father -"
"And who says he hasn't, Harry? When did we find out for sure that Lucius Malfoy isn't still serving the Dark Lord? How do we know that the Malfoys, every last sodding one of them, aren't playing both sides against the middle and hoping that you and Voldemort kill each other and leave the field open for them?"
"Now you're damn well making things up as you go, Ron," Harry accused, heating with a hard flush of anger. "Christ, I know you hate the color of Malfoy's insides, I know you always have, but -"
"You think that's what this is? Bugger the fact that Malfoy has access to your rooms and could have been eavesdropping on your conversation with Hermione for God knows how long, bugger the fact that his whole family's been serving You-Know-Who since Tom Riddle was head boy, bugger the fact that he's made it completely clear that his first loyalty is to his father, and by all means let's completely leave out the fact that he was an apologist for the Dark Lord -"
"When he was fifteen years old, Ron!" Harry shouted. "You and I were idiots at fifteen too and don't tell me we weren't because I was damn well there! "
"- and I'm sure it doesn't mean a goddamned thing that Malfoy suddenly became unavailable for questioning on the night Hermione was attacked," Ron overrode him, raising his voice over Harry's. "I'm just making things up as I bloody go, because I'm too immature to get over a schoolboy grudge. Well, that all makes things much clearer, doesn't it?"
"Ron, don't make me take his side when I want to be on yours!"
"I don't care what side you're on, Harry," Ron said flatly. "Not anymore. I can't afford to. My sister is dead, my ex-wife's been tortured and twisted until I don't even recognize her, my brother is a criminal, and if this doesn't stop there'll be nothing left."
"Ron, please. Please, just give me -"
"Give you what, Harry? A head start?"
Harry stared at Ron, speechless. "So you're going to be hunting Malfoy down too," he said finally. "You and Voldemort."
"Draco Malfoy is wanted for questioning," Ron told him. "Officially. As of now. Unofficially, he'd better fucking hope that he's safe with Daddy. And that Voldemort finds him before I do."
"I have to get back," Harry said tightly. "Minerva's covering my grounds duty."
Ron's voice stopped him as he turned to leave. "Harry…"
Harry stopped, unable to look back.
"Don't do this," Ron said wearily. "Don't be bloody stubborn. Don't charge off to be the hero convinced that you know better than everyone else when you know bugger-all about anything. You said you didn't want to be twelve years old anymore, well, maybe this is a good place to start. It's your job to take Voldemort down, we've always known that. Leave the Malfoys to the rest of us."
"You're my best friend, Ron," Harry said around the tightness in his throat.
There was silence behind him for a minute, and then Ron sighed. "You're mine too, you know."
Harry nodded. Then he took two steps, Apparated, and hit the ground headed for Snape's office.
"Potter, what exactly is it that you're asking me to let you do?" Snape asked dubiously. "Besides rush off half-cocked and equipped only with a bloody-minded intention to save the day, I mean."
Harry shook his head impatiently, pacing across the floor of the Headmaster's office. "That isn't what this is about. Look, whether he left of his own accord or not, Draco's a Hogwarts professor and he's in a hell of a lot of danger. He may or may not be with his father, and if he is then he may or may not be safe; Ron's hell-bent on hunting him down and throwing him in Azkaban for the rest of his life, and now Voldemort's been set on his trail like a damn Gabriel hound -"
" - unless Draco actually is with Voldemort -"
" - which you said was unlikely -"
" - but I didn't say it was impossible, Potter," Snape said, exasperated. "I don't think you really understand that there are a number of things that the Dark Lord once stood for that Draco believes in very strongly. If he and his father have decided between them to help Voldemort to victory and then topple the crown and the head underneath it from the Dark Lord's shoulders at the victory celebration, Voldemort would have very little chance of standing against them - and, to be frank, neither would the rest of us. I don't know what the wizarding world would be under a Malfoy regime, but I strongly suspect that we are in very grave danger of finding out."
"I don't understand," Harry said, frustrated, and wanted to shout it. "You've been talking like he didn't leave of his own volition and now you're talking like he did."
Snape rubbed his fingertips across his forehead. "Really, I must talk to Minerva about what she teaches her children. You spoke to Weasley of five possibilities; I could lay out another half a dozen at least, and while my own instinct is to believe that he neither left nor stays away of his own accord, I cannot rule out a scenario like the one I just mentioned."
"That's all the more reason to bring him back," Harry said stubbornly. "You're right, he's a powerful wizard and he's Dark Arts-trained, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let him walk away to be on someone else's side and not ours. We can't afford to."
"And how exactly will you stop him?" Snape asked bluntly.
"Malfoy's a Slytherin!" Harry heard his own voice rising, shrill with desperation. "He might have forgotten where his own best interests lie, but he can bloody well be reminded!"
His words fell into a smothering silence. For long moments there was only the drip of the water clock, grating on Harry's nerves; placidly shaving seconds off his life, off Draco's life.
Finally Snape said, very quietly, "I shall tell you a great secret, Potter. Even in Slytherin House there are things that are valued above self-interest."
Harry knew that he should have been hot with shame. He wasn't. "I'm going," he said between his teeth.
"Yes, of course you are," Snape said astringently, and visibly restrained himself from saying something snide. In a more level tone, he went on, "But not this second. You'll have to wait until dark."
"Why?"
Snape closed his eyes with the why-hast-thou-forsaken-me expression that could still freeze Neville in his tracks like a rabbit. "You have nothing packed nor prepared. Your leaving in broad daylight will be noticed immediately if anyone is keeping watch on the school, and whoever might be looking for Draco would do worse than to wait for you to leave and follow as you do their work for them. And, more pertinently, may I point out that you have no idea where you're going?"
Harry's face heated. "You're right. I don't."
"Go and see Sybill Trelawney. See if she can help."
"Professor Trelawney," Harry echoed, puzzled. "But she…"
Snape made a minute adjustment to the position of the blotter on his desk. "Divination is a difficult subject to teach, Mr. Potter," he said quietly. "One must teach children to look but one cannot teach them to see, and one must pad the curriculum with the sort of showy gypsy fortune-telling that will keep most students entertained while earning the contempt of others. One must struggle constantly to retain credibility among faculty colleagues who expect successful prophecies to fall like clockwork from one's lips, not understanding that by nature the gift of divination is, must be, erratic and unstable. Sybill's value is not in the great and grand prophecies she makes but does not remember making; they are in the things she says softly in passing, the things she knows without being told, the visions that she herself is too apt to dismiss as an overactive imagination or a simple daydream. Like most subtle things, these qualities in her were overlooked by the previous Headmaster. They have not been overlooked by me, which is why she is still a member of this faculty."
"I never thought about it like that," Harry confessed.
He expected Snape to say something cutting, but the Headmaster merely shrugged. "You met her as a child, Potter; children form dislikes violently, for any reason or none at all, and then consider the matter settled forever. And Sybill has a way of not putting her best foot forward. If you go now, you won't interrupt her lunch."
Harry took the hint and turned to leave. At the door he turned back, one hand on the knob. "Professor… thank you."
"Recover Malfoy and bring him back here," Snape said, not looking up from a pile of correspondence. "I require no more thanks, and no less."
The ladder to the divination room, Harry discovered, was more easy to navigate for a child or a light woman than for a grown man. He wondered if this was on purpose, and also wondered how Trelawney got down it in those skirts of hers without breaking her neck. It wasn't until he got up into the room that it occurred to him to wonder why the ladder had been down on a Sunday in the first place.
The heavy velvet curtains were drawn, casting the tea tables into gloom broken only by the occasional slim, dust-filled sunbeam escaping from the tops of the curtains or their interstices. The shelves of teacups were still where they had been, half-shadowed. Harry couldn't remember which color Neville had broken. Nervously, he cleared his throat.
"Professor Trelawney?" he called, and his voice fell flat into the dusty silence.
"You must learn to call me Sybill, my dear," her voice floated back to him. Harry turned, searching, unable to pinpoint its source. "The door to your left. Mind the chairs."
He'd missed the door entirely, shadowed as it was and set back into a niche in the wall. He couldn't recall ever having seen it before, and wondered if it had been there the whole time. Cautiously, he picked his way through the chairs and tea tables and turned the heavy glass doorknob, swinging the door silently open.
It was brighter in Sybill's sitting room, making him blink, but still not quite sunlit; sheer curtains in deep, rich jewel tones fluttered in front of the open windows, belling inward with the changing breeze. The air was soaked with some sort of incense, lighter and clearer than the heavy fog that had always put him in present danger of falling asleep in her class. There were things everywhere - crystal balls, a collection of silver-framed photographs, antique perfume bottles and small carved boxes, bowls of dried rose petals sharing small tables with old books. Sybill was sitting in one of a set of overstuffed matching armchairs in front of the fireplace, a tea table set for two before her and some sort of complicated-looking needlework resting on the arm of her chair.
"Come in, my dear," she said, blinking owlishly at him through her glasses. "Sit down."
Harry obeyed, sinking into the chair to a rather alarming extent. "Professor Snape told me to come and see you. He said you might be able to help me -"
"Mm," she hummed in agreement, pouring out tea into both cups, the bangles at her wrists chiming softly with the movement. "Draco Malfoy has disappeared, and you want to rescue him but you don't know where to look. It doesn't take the Inner Eye to see that."
"Yes," Harry said. "Can you… can you help?"
She was silent for a long moment, stirring sugar into her tea. "I was surprised, you know, when I saw that you would come," she commented finally. "I never thought you placed any great trust in the Art and yet here you are, before you've even finished searching his rooms."
Harry opened his mouth, then remembered what Snape had said and closed it again slowly.
"So I'll tell you quite an odd thing: Draco has passed beyond my Sight. Crystal shows me nothing, fire illuminates nothing, tea leaves huddle at the bottom of the cup. This is quite unusual. Sometimes the messages from beyond the mundane are unclear, sometimes they are riddles or simply muddled and one must make sense of them as best one can, but there is almost never simply nothing." Sybill frowned thoughtfully and took a sip of her tea.
Harry was prepared to believe that most of the "messages from beyond the mundane" were a product of Sybill's imagination, but her news unsettled him a little anyway. At least she didn't see a Grim, he thought sardonically. "So what does that mean?"
"Well," she said slowly, "it could mean any number of things. The most obvious, of course - oh, prepare yourself, my dear - the most obvious is that Draco is dead."
"He's not," Harry said tightly. "He's not dead. What else could it mean?"
"It could mean that wherever he is is so heavily shielded and warded that not even the Sight can penetrate the veil. It could mean that he has closed himself off to divination, but that would take someone much more powerful in the Art than Draco. If I recall correctly, the boy could barely read tea leaves. Do drink your tea, Harry dear."
Harry took an obedient sip; then, pleasantly surprised, took a larger drink. This certainly wasn't the lackluster tea she'd served them in class - it was full of herbs and sweet fruit and tasted like spring. "This tea is wonderful."
Sybill beamed. "Isn't it? I find that it clears the Inner Eye."
"But not enough to see Draco."
"He left you word, you know," she said suddenly, then looked a little startled.
Harry set his cup clattering down into the saucer. "Where?"
"I…" Her eyes grew distant behind her thick lenses, and Harry felt a momentary pang of unease that was almost awe. Silent, he waited for her to go on.
"I don't know exactly. But I sense that its element is air."
Air, and he hadn't finished searching Malfoy's rooms. If he managed to find some message from Draco, he was never going to make fun of divination again as long as he lived. "Thank you, Prof - Sybill. I have to go."
Sybill looked a bit perplexed. "But why would he have left word for you, I wonder? Don't the two of you hate each other?"
"We aren't children anymore," Harry answered. "I have to go. I won't forget this."
"Good luck," she said as he rose and headed for the door.
The room beyond was a quick shock of darkness once Sybill's door closed. Hoping he could find his way to the trap door without falling down it and breaking his neck, Harry made his way through the tea tables.
"Mind the chairs, dear," Sybill's voice floated out to him half a second before he tangled a foot in one and narrowly avoided breaking the chair, his leg, and probably his nose.
Draco's bedroom was shimmering with sunlight; Harry paused on the doorstep, unnerved, remembering his dream. It was a bloody good thing Sybill hadn't said the message was writ in water, because under no circumstances was he going to open those windows.
A message. Where hadn't they looked? And where would Draco have been likely to leave a message where Harry would find it?
Air. He cast every revealing spell he could think of on Draco's Quidditch gear, then tore the room apart looking for a snitch. All it earned him was a number of bruises and a splinter in his left hand. Discouraged, Harry sat down on the bed, buried his face in his hands, and tried to think. Oh, God, Malfoy, don't do this, don't be too subtle for me…
Malfoy wouldn't have been subtle. He wouldn't have trusted Harry to catch any message that didn't hit him in the head with the force of a well-aimed brick. But he couldn't have been that obvious either, could he, not if he had someone watching him who wouldn't have wanted him to leave a message. What would those eyes have missed? Draco, arguing maybe (or bleeding, some inconvenient part of Harry insisted on pointing out), leaving a message that didn't look like he was leaving a message, a message that he believed Harry would recognize, doing something that wouldn't attract attention because he did it all the time -
Harry lifted his head and swore long and imaginatively, because it was that or start laughing, and if he laughed he might well cry. Beautiful, it was beautiful, the same sort of mind that would hide a stolen letter in a letter-rack; so subtle and so obvious that in the end he'd nearly been too subtle for them after all.
He grabbed the crane parchment with its smear of blood from the desk and came back to sit on the bed with it, studying it intently.
None of the revealing charms worked on it either, but he didn't expect them to. Malfoy might or might not have known about the Marauders' Map, which Harry had given back to Remus as a keepsake after the end of his seventh year; but he would have known about Tom Riddle's diary, and known that Ginny had been on Harry's mind. Just in case, he tapped his wand on the parchment and worked his way through a large number of words from Quidditch to Defence against the Dark Arts to Potter stinks, but the page remained silent. He took it over to the desk and sat down, reached for a quill and ink, and carefully let a drop of ink fall onto the corner of the parchment.
It sat, staining the parchment, unabsorbed, and Harry felt a stab of fear.
"This has to be it," he whispered, and wrote: Draco?
Nothing appeared on the parchment, and his writing stayed where it was, a defacing scrawl across the elegant sheet. Harry swallowed hard and tried again.
This is Harry.
My name is Harry Potter.
Draco, are you there?
Malfoy, you bastard, answer me!
Silence. Well, there was one option left. Harry turned the page over, wincing at the smear of blood, and rummaged in the desk for a quill-trimmer. He found one right away - thank God Malfoy was so organized, if Harry ever disappeared it would take a full-scale archaeological expedition and excavating equipment to unearth anything from his desk - nicked the tip of his finger, and let a heavy drop of blood fall onto the parchment. It hit the parchment with a tiny splash, flared outward into a miniature sunburst, and then vanished, sucked down into the weave of the paper. Harry held his breath, watching.
Words appeared in a thin, spidery line, cut off at the front by the jagged edge where the crane's head had been torn off: a mark that might or might not have been another letter, and then here we bury our sins.
Harry stared at the parchment in dismay. "Bury our… Jesus Christ, Malfoy, what the fuck? "
"What did you expect it to say, Potter? 'Go ten paces from the old tree at midnight and dig, X marks the spot'?"
Harry jumped half out of his skin and turned to see Pansy leaning against the doorway. "You knew about this?" he demanded.
"No, but I'm not surprised by it. Knowing Draco, he probably prepared notes like this to cover every contingency the day he found out that Lucius had broken out of Azkaban. And of course it wouldn't be a clear message; setting aside the fact that that would hardly be sporting -"
Harry wanted to say something, he really did, and it would have been cutting and cynical and witty and melted Pansy where she stood out of the sheer shame of being Slytherin and thinking in terms of sporting when you were talking about letting other people know you were in danger, but all he could manage was a sort of choking sound.
" - there's always the danger that someone else might come across it and get it to work. Those spells aren't foolproof, you know; Draco might have set it up to respond to blood but it needn't have been your blood, only someone's besides his." Pansy came to look over his shoulder. "Hm. I think that's a w, see? Where we bury our sins. "
"So where's that?" Harry asked between his teeth. "And who's we?"
"My guess would be that the we is the Malfoys, because if there's a communal Slytherin sin-burying place I've never heard of it. Then again, I've never heard of the Malfoys burying their sins anywhere in particular either. I'm not even sure how one would bury a sin."
"How the hell do I find out what he meant, then?"
Pansy shook her head slowly. "Unless you know someone in the family to ask, I believe Draco might have outsmarted himself this time."
"Someone in the -" Harry sighed and leaned back in the chair. "That's torn it, then. I can hardly ask Narcissa."
"No, you can't," Pansy said. "Nor can I - I don't know how far I can trust her, but my guess would be that it isn't quite this far."
Harry looked up at her, frowning. Pansy looked stricken; the slow dawning realization hit Harry that she had lost the man she loved, and shame flooded him in a hot wash. "Are you all right?" he asked; and it was hard to ask, hard not to stuff her back into the box marked Slytherin and close it with the strongest sealing charm he could think of, and he asked anyway.
Pansy turned away. "Maybe he left something clearer somewhere else. Open that trunk again."
Pulling out his wand, Harry pointed it at the trunk and said, "Snitch!" The wards glowed for a moment and then faded.
"Oh, Potter, really," Pansy said, pained. "Is that your idea of a secret password?"
"Well, no one would think that it was Draco's idea of one, would they?" Oh, God, he wanted her to go away. He didn't think he could deal with other people in general right now, let alone Pansy Parkinson. She disrupted the sense of the room; there was nothing of Draco in it when she was there, or what there was of him eluded Harry's grasp. Unsettled, Harry looked out the window and watched a chameleon eel glide through the water, transparent as blue glass, trailing the illusion of the gillyweed plant it passed along its body.
Pansy reached into the trunk and carefully lifted out the potions texts. "I'll take these," she said briskly. "You look over the photographs."
"What am I looking for?" Harry asked, going to lift the stack of pictures out of the trunk.
"Figure that one out for yourself," Pansy answered as he sat down on the bed, carefully away from her, and spread out the photographs. "I've enough to do trying to figure out what I'm looking for. I suppose it's too much to ask that Bury-Our-Sins might be a very old name for a flower that grows only in a one square mile area of the highlands, but one never knows."
"And you think the answers might be in here?"
Pansy looked pointedly around the room, which was rather less tidy after Harry had searched it than it had been before. "You've looked everywhere else."
That was true enough that Harry didn't bother responding to it, so he spread the pictures out on the bed and began to look through them instead.
Draco grew and changed in front of him, from the small, sober child he'd first seen in Madam Malkin's - and God, Draco hadn't looked that small to him then, that impossibly young - to an adolescent who somehow managed to escape the adolescent gawkiness that had so pained Harry, nearly matching his parents in height; Lucius disappeared from the pictures just as Draco shot up to almost look his mother in the eye. Where the subjects of other pictures waved at the camera, laughed for it, swept by it in some dim imitation of awareness, the Malfoys ignored it, existing sedately in a small captured moment that did not reach out to the world outside the photograph - they played chess, read before the fire, had wine and cold chicken on a fine linen sheet in the middle of a field, with a poise and grace that did not invite the viewer closer. Harry found it hard to even imagine one or the other of them doing something as mundane as stepping away to take a snapshot, and watched Narcissa reach out to secure a trailing strand of Draco's hair behind his ear. Unguarded, her expression was soft with affection and quiet pride, and Harry felt like a voyeur.
He'd always imagined, as a child, that the Malfoys were cold even to each other. He'd associated love with the loud, boisterous, volubly affectionate Weasleys. Now he remembered Draco sitting between his parents at the World Cup, and remembered firework flowers glittering in the twilight, and wondered if he would ever understand anything.
He was halfway through the pictures and had found nothing helpful yet.
Moving aside a picture of Lucius and a very small Draco with their heads bent over a very large book, Harry found a picture of two children having a tea party in a garden, on a lawn covered with star-shaped cobalt flowers. Draco's face was turned away from the camera for the moment, but the white of his hair was unmistakable, and so were Pansy's small puglike features. They seemed more interested in the plate of chocolate biscuits than in the tea.
"This…" Looking up from the potions texts, Pansy reached out to lay a fingertip on the edge of the photograph. The children took no notice. "I remember this. We used to tell each other stories, Draco and I, about how we were going to run away to Cathay and live in a jungle by the sea, where the air was as clear as forever, warm and full of strange spices. Draco would tell me all about how he was going to be a rajah and wear a turban and ride an elephant; and I'd wear beautiful silk robes and necklaces made from wrought gold and silver and have a dot in the middle of my forehead, and everyone would have to bow to us and do just what they were told. We'd stay up as late as we wanted and eat raspberry trifle at every meal, and our parents could live with us but they'd have to live in their own little house at the bottom of the garden and send an old ayah with a message when they wanted a royal audience. There'd be palm trees, and it would never be cold."
Harry ran his finger down the side of the photo, his throat closing with miserable, aching grief that he didn't care to examine too closely. "Had quite an imagination as a child, didn't he?"
Pansy rose and moved restlessly away from the bed, passing out of Harry's field of vision. In the photograph, the children had apparently decided to bury the tea set in the flower bed.
"After Hagrid let that bloody hippogriff slice Draco's arm open -"
Harry winced at the venom in her voice.
" - I snuck in to see him that night. He'd been sleeping and his arm hurt horribly… but he charmed the bedsheets into sails, full of the trade winds and running ahead of a sirocco over the open sea. The holds were full of oranges and spices and miles of silk like jewels made water, woven with gold thread in designs of elephants and peacocks and Hindu goddesses. I stayed there until almost morning, and by that time we'd gone round the Cape of Good Hope in a terrible storm, and outfought privateers on the Spanish Main, and stolen a ruby shaped like a frozen stream of blood from the hand of an idol, and Draco had fought a duel with the prince of Araby for love of me."
Pansy gave a short breath of laughter. "I think that story bored him a bit. But he owed me. I'd listened to him go on forever in enthusiastically gory detail about eviscerating privateers and hanging them from the mizzenmast, and how one of them -" She stopped abruptly.
" - was too heavy and almost broke the mast and fell into the ocean," Harry whispered, staring out into the blue water. "But the other three were small and light and the mast held them just fine."
"Oh, there were more than three, Potter, I assure you," Pansy said dryly. "That poor mizzenmast, whatever a mizzenmast might be, would have been creaking under the strain regardless."
Harry suddenly realized that his face was wet, and tried to unobtrusively dry it off with his sleeve. "I'll bring him back. Whether he wants to come or not."
"See that you do," Pansy said shortly, moving to look out the window. "He's my best friend. He's always been my best friend."
"I didn't know that," Harry said. "I didn't know any of this."
"That would be because we hated you, Potter," Pansy said as if she were explaining something to a small child of the genus Crabbe.
Harry reddened. "Oh. Yes. Well, that's a good reason, I suppose." Then, not wanting to say it but needing to: "But he's more than that now, isn't he? You're engaged. He's your fiancé."
"The Parkinson and Malfoy fortunes are engaged. Draco and I are simply along for the ride."
"So you don't want to marry him?"
For a minute he really thought Pansy was going to stamp her foot. "Oh, Potter, really! Are you this dense naturally or does it require a stupidity consultant and hours of practice in front of the mirror? Yes, I want to marry Draco! We'll live in Malfoy Manor and have soirees and cocktail parties, and we'll travel and go to the theatre and to galleries, and eventually we'll have an heir, though I don't like to think too closely about the mechanics of that and I don't think Draco does either -"
"But -" Harry flailed his arms in helpless exasperation. "Marriage is more than playing house and having tea parties!"
"How would you know?" she asked scornfully. "Asked Granger and Weasley, did you?"
"Low, Parkinson," Harry said between his teeth.
"And it doesn't matter anyway, because none of this is any of your business and I don't know why I'm even telling you. I don't care about the wedding, and I don't care about the Malfoy fortune. I want my friend back, and I want him back safe and whole, because I don't know what I'd -" She stopped abruptly and turned to the window, closing her eyes, drawing in on herself the way he'd seen Draco do. She wasn't as good at it as he was; her struggle for control was obvious, un-Slytherin.
When she opened her eyes and looked back at him over her shoulder, though, her gaze was as cool and indifferent as if they'd been discussing the proper ingredients for a Polyjuice potion. "There are some things you need to know," she told him.
Harry spread his hands. "I'm listening."
"If Draco is with Lucius, he won't come back with you of his own accord. He'll stay there even if it means his own death and walk into an Avada Kedavra of his own free will before he makes an open move against his father. And he hasn't forgiven you for putting his father in Azkaban, and seeing Lucius will remind him that he hasn't forgiven you." She gave him a long, measuring look. "Tell me something, Potter. There's a rumor that the Sorting Hat wanted to put you in Slytherin. Is it true?"
"It said I'd do well there," Harry answered slowly. "I'm not sure that's the same thing."
"Be sure," she said, and he could shake off an Imperius but Pansy's gaze trapped him where he sat like a snake bending its will against a bird's.
"Yes," he whispered. "It wanted to put me in Slytherin."
"Why didn't it?"
"Because I asked it not to. I'd heard -"
"I know what you'd heard. And now you're going to have to choose, Potter, for yourself and with your eyes open, because if you walk into this thinking like a Gryffindor, all fire and strong-arm tactics and wands blazing, it will cost Draco's life and yours both. Either you leave Gryffindor House behind you for as long as it needs to be left and walk out of this room a Slytherin to the mind and heart and bone, or everything will be lost. You won't outwit Lucius, you won't evade the Dark Lord, you won't convince Draco to come back, you'll do nothing but get yourself killed."
Harry rose and went over to the other window, looking out into the lake. A school of silver fish darted through a sunbeam, glowing, turn and turn about on some ineffable fish business. The light was failing already. How strange it would be, he thought, to always see sunlight through water.
After a while he said, "I don't understand Slytherin House. I've never understood it," and trusted Pansy to hear his decision in his voice.
She smiled a little, but there was no humor in it. "I can't give you advice and aphorisms and teach you how to be Slytherin in an hour, Potter. All I can tell you is this: there are some ends that justify any means. Any at all. You have to decide for yourself which ends those are, and you'd better have more than one path to every one."
"In other words, come home with Draco or don't come home at all."
"No. It isn't that simple." Pansy lifted a hand to trace the windowpane with her fingertip. "What if you find that in order to stop Lucius Malfoy, you have to let go of Draco, even if it means watching him die? What if you find that in order to stop the Dark Lord you have to let both of them go? Have you thought about what you'll do then?"
"I'll bring him back, Pansy. And I'll stop both of them." Then, as she shot him a hard, despairing look, "I'll find a way. There are always ways. And right now I don't care which one I have to take."
"That sounds a bit better," she said with a small smile.
"Katie Bell said something once. I didn't really listen at the time, or understand. She said: Take what you want and pay for it, says God."
"Why, Potter," Pansy said with a wry show of surprise. "Maybe I have nothing to teach you after all."
Teach me not to care, Harry thought numbly. Teach me how to see you without seeing Draco in you, or seeing you in him.
Enough, that was enough. Harry turned and looked blindly back out at the water.
"There's another possibility, you know," Pansy said softly, and oh God, Harry didn't want to hear any more possibilities. There were too many of them already and none of them mattered.
"What's that?" he asked anyway.
"Draco doesn't want Lucius to rule the Wizarding World. Partly because he's Slytherin through and through and wants to be the power behind the crown, not the crown prince with a target painted on his back; and partly because he knows what Lucius wants the power to do, and it frightens him. One can love a dog that's become rabid and still understand that it needs to be put down."
"But you said -"
" - that he wouldn't make an open move against his father, Potter, for the love of God do try to listen!" The tension in Pansy's voice was nearing the breaking point now, and Harry stayed quiet. "If what I just said is true, then what I said before is even more true: he won't leave, he'll be in horrible danger because he won't leave, and you'll be in danger if you try to balk him."
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?" Harry asked, remembering something Hermione had once told him.
"And the needs of Slytherins outweigh the needs of the many," Pansy informed him. "Remember that too."
Harry went back to sit on the bed and ruffled half-heartedly through the pictures. "There's nothing here," he told her, watching Lucius and Draco read carefully through the large tome in their laps. Draco was holding a wand that seemed ridiculously large for him.
"I don't think there's anything in the potions texts either," Pansy said, and for a moment her shoulders slumped in defeat. "There has to be another - Potter? Did you find something?"
"No," Harry said slowly, touching a hand to the edge of the picture. "But I've thought of someone I can ask."
Beside his fingertips, Lucius put his hand over Draco's and guided the child's wand through a simple movement. Draco spoke a silent incantation, and firework flowers blossomed in the air.
"Go and ask, then," Pansy ordered. "It'll be dark enough in a few hours."
He didn't want to leave her here. He wanted a few more minutes in this room, with its calm, liquid light. Maybe he'd ask Malfoy to switch rooms with him when they got back, as if Harry would ever be able to sleep with those windows looming over him. But he ceded the field to her anyway, gathered up the pictures and put them back into the chest, and headed for the door.
"Do you remember Umbridge, in our fifth year?" Pansy asked him just as he reached it.
Harry's hand was still scarred. The words were illegible now, only faint, razor-thin lines in his own handwriting, but the scars were there. "I remember."
"You were stupid then, Potter. Don't be stupid now. You can't afford to be."
It had all been a game to Draco, that whole business. He had laughed and taken House points and mocked Umbridge, untouched, secure in the knowledge that when Harry and Umbridge had torn each other to pieces he and Slytherin House would still be standing. From a Slytherin standpoint the whole thing must have looked fantastically ridiculous, Umbridge and her constant rules that couldn't touch the golden children of the rising Power, and Gryffindor and their railing against the immovable like a poorly-acted burlesque of Lear on the heath. There was a certain black humor to it after all, if Harry looked at it from just the right direction.
I will not tell lies, scarred into his hand.
"I'm not fifteen anymore," Harry said.
It didn't take him long to pack. A change of clothes and his invisibility cloak stuffed into the bottom of a bookbag, and that was all he was going to need. Outside the air was beginning to grow deep and still, and time still wasn't passing quickly enough. He'd decided not to leave until midnight, Snape's words about watchers echoing in his ears, but every second crawled over his skin and made him itch to be gone.
He needed air. Impatient and irritable, he headed down through the castle and out toward the gardens, passing laughing knots of children in the halls and trying to muster a smile when they called out to him. There were too many of them, too distracting, and he was glad to reach the relative concealment of the bowers with their cool green air. He'd taken Parvati here once and kissed her, rather reluctantly; it had been his first kiss after the disastrous one with Cho, and secretly he'd been terrified that this one would also be wet and vaguely unpleasant and involve crying on one or the other of their parts. It hadn't been. It had gone very nicely indeed, and if the fingers he laced tentatively into her hair had shied away from the unexpected touch of coarse tresses on his skin, longer than some part of him had expected, it had only been for a moment.
Harry sat down on a bench and buried his face in his hands. An annoying part of his brain took relentless stock of his situation, telling catastrophes like the nine tailors - friends dead: one; friends twisted almost beyond recognition: one; friends now on the opposite side of a battle with too many sides: two counting Percy; childhood sins come back to bite Harry James Potter in the arse: innumerable. Adrenaline coruscated like foxfire under his skin, and at this rate the bloody waiting was going to kill him far more quickly and surely than Voldemort and Lucius Malfoy combined possibly could.
"Harry?"
"Jesus Christ!" Harry pressed a hand to his chest and tried to calm his breathing. "Filius, you scared the piss out of me."
"Not literally, I hope," Professor Flitwick said, hoisting himself onto the bench beside Harry. "Is it true, what Severus says?"
Harry nodded, not wanting to speak more plainly in the open.
"Such a shame about Hermione Granger," Filius said woefully. "I remember she was the first one in your year to get her feather to fly. That's the trick, you know, mastering that first charm. After that the children get confident and think they can do anything. For some of them, it's the first successful spell they've ever done, and the looks on their faces when the feather starts to rise…"
Harry smiled, watching the happy glow on Filius' face.
"But that's a bit of what I wanted to talk to you about. Charms, I mean. Harry, do you have anything of your mother's?"
"My… no, why?" Harry asked, puzzled.
Filius looked down, swinging his feet like an absent-minded child. "It's always hard, you know, knowing that the world is dangerous for your students and only being able to do so much to prepare them for it. I always worried about you and your friends - and young Malfoy too, of course, though for different reasons. But, of course, then we all thought that the storm would break soon; we never dreamed that Voldemort would vanish again. One day he was gathering armies of giants and dementors, and the next… well, and the next, and the next, and here we are. And you're a grown man now, Harry, and in many ways you're less well equipped to face Voldemort than you were when you were a child. The magic tying you to your aunt is gone; and whatever Albus Dumbledore did later, whatever he became or was in danger of becoming, he was a powerful shield for you."
With a wry smile, Filius glanced up at Harry. "In a way perhaps he was the first casualty of this new war, do you think? Or the first casualty of an unexpected peace."
"Maybe," Harry whispered.
"I'm not Albus, and I can't protect you as he did; but I can help you protect yourself, if you'll let me." Filius pulled a parchment out of his robes and handed it to Harry.
Harry unrolled it and examined the writing. It was a charm he didn't recognize, words and wand movements. "What's this?"
"It's a protective charm I've developed. Far more powerful even than the ones we teach the NEWT students. This one is a bit like carrying a protective circle around with you, but it has to be cast on an object. And not just any object, but something very dear to you, something that you associate powerfully with love and safety. That's why I asked if you had something of your mother's. If you don't, if there's any way you can get something of hers I strongly urge you to do it. You'll need all the help you can get if you're going to outrun the Dark Lord, the Ministry, and Lucius Malfoy."
"Can't argue with that," Harry agreed.
Filius frowned, looking out into the lowering twilight. "I taught Lucius, you know. He was the most arrogant child I ever met - worse than Draco, and not as fond of laughter. The only class he ever paid attention in was Defence Against the Dark Arts, and in that one he hung on every word. Used to make Professor Oggins that nervous. Oggins always said that he had the impression that Lucius was listening to things he hadn't meant to say - and not only listening, but taking careful notes. In that one area he was as hungry for knowledge as any Ravenclaw." He looked worriedly up at Harry. "Harry, be careful. You're good at Defence but you haven't devoted your life to the Dark Arts the way Lucius has. There's no knowing what he's called up to help him - and he'll need something, won't he, if he hasn't gone to rejoin his former master, because he hasn't had the giants and the dementors on his side for years the way You-Know-Who has. Find something of your mother's and make the charm."
"I will," Harry said softly. "Thank you, Filius."
Filius sighed, then brightened and patted Harry on the knee. "Well. Enough gloom for one night. Come in for dinner. Wherever you're going, there's no sense doing it on an empty stomach."
Harry abruptly realized that he hadn't eaten since the previous evening. He didn't particularly want to, but there was no telling when he'd have regular meals again. "That sounds like a good idea. Shall we?"
"After you," Filius said cheerfully, hopping down from the bench.
It was nearly dark.
The tower clock had just finished chiming midnight when Harry slipped into the Astronomy Tower. He glanced quickly around to be sure that it was deserted, settled his pack more securely on his shoulders, and made for the wall -
"Potter."
- and he wasn't going to live long enough to be killed by Lucius Malfoy because his own faculty colleagues were going to finish the job. "Yes, Headmaster?" he asked a bit weakly, clutching his broom closer.
A piece of shadow detached itself from the wall and resolved into Snape. "If you were a child, Potter, I would set you to polishing trophies until your fingers bled, so that you would have neither the time nor the energy for heroic foolishness. As it no longer lies within my power to give you detention, I will give you this instead."
Harry took the small velvet pouch that Snape held out and peered inside it, angling it toward the bright moonlight. Inside was a small gold-colored pocketwatch, of the variety sold at seaside bazaars across the country, ticking erratically. He looked quizzically up at Snape.
"It's a portkey, keyed to my office. It will bring two people back, you and whomever you are in physical contact with. Use it wisely." He reached into his robes again and pulled out another bag, tossing it lightly to Harry.
Harry opened it and upended it onto his palm. A small golden snake fell into his hand, lustrous and sinewy in the moonlight, with Slytherin-green eyes that sparkled like a distant starfield. "Now, this looks like a portkey."
Snape clasped his hands behind his back and looked out over the Forest. "Whatever else you do, Potter, do not ever make the mistake of believing Lucius Malfoy to be a fool. He has many followers, however, who were... shall we say, not among the brightest students of their year. It is also unwise to underestimate the power of sheer malevolent stupidity, but it is sometimes easier to work with."
Harry's hand closed around the snake. "I'll find Draco. And I'll bring him back."
"See that you do," Snape replied curtly. "I shall have to cover Potions and Defence myself while the two of you are gone. And here's something else."
Harry reached out and took the small piece of parchment Snape handed him. It bore directions and the description of a house. "What is it?"
"One of the Order's safehouses, in Cornwall. If you and the portkey become separated, or if you choose to keep it in reserve for some reason, you can hide there. The house is Unplottable and heavily warded. I became the Secret Keeper for this particular property after Albus Dumbledore died."
Harry touched the parchment with a fingertip. "He's really dead, then," he said quietly. "I never knew."
"There were many reasons to keep that fact from becoming common knowledge," Snape said. "There is no reason now to keep it from you."
"Thank you," Harry said. "Will you reassemble the Order?"
"Strictly speaking, it was never disassembled. But yes, if I can. If I can find someone who will serve as a rallying point."
"A figurehead."
Snape inclined his head silently.
"If I don't come back, Headmaster, you'll need to try again. Draco is too valuable to lose." It should have felt like nothing, saying that, discussing Draco as a commodity. It tasted like ash in his mouth. He glanced down at his robes, Slytherin green, a reminder of the two very different worlds he was struggling to keep a foothold in.
"We'll worry about that when the time comes, Potter. Go now, and be careful." Snape turned and left; Harry stood listening to his fading footsteps until they were gone.
Time to go. Harry cast a Disillusionment charm on himself, wincing at the feeling of something dribbling down the back of his neck. Shaking his head quickly against the sensation, he gripped his broom and climbed up onto the wall.
The moonlight was brighter than he would have liked, silvering the tops of trees, filling the ground with hard-edged shadows; too easy to be seen, and no cloud cover. He'd have to travel high and fast and trust to the Disillusionment charm.
"Take what you want and pay for it, says God," Harry whispered, and stepped off the top of the Astronomy Tower.
