HPSlashFics - 11 The Hostility of Dreams

Young men late in the night
Toss on their beds,
Their pillows do not comfort
Their uneasy heads,
The lot that decides their fate
Is cast to-morrow,
One must depart and face
Danger and sorrow.

Look in your heart and see
There lies the answer,
Though the heart like a clever
Conjuror or dancer,
Deceive you with many
A curious sleight,
And motives like stowaways
Are found too late.

He shall again his peace
Feel his heart harden,
Envy the heavy birds
At home in the garden,
For walk he must the empty
Selfish journey,
Between the needless risk
And the endless safety.

Clouds and lions stand
Before him dangerous,
And the hostility of dreams.
Then let him honor us,
Lets he should be ashamed
In the hour of crisis:
In the valley of corrosion
Tarnish his brightness.

Oh, it was strange to be alive again, and in possession of all those accoutrements of physical existence -- eyes and mouth and limbs that moved, a heart that beat and veins that coursed with blood. When he first tried to stand up, amid the torn bits of paper, the smell of electrical energy as strong in the room as smoke after a fire, his legs buckled under him. The second time, however, they worked fine. He stood up, and went over to the mirror.

Tom saw himself, and was pleased. He had not expected the opportunity to take this body, but when it had presented itself his decision had been immediate. He did not regret it now. It was a fine body, in excellent shape, well made and elegantly put together. It would do for as long as he needed it.

He glanced around the room curiously. The diary was ruined. This did not bother him. Having been released from it, he had no more use for it. Blood and tears had brought him out of its ruined pages. Blood and tears and something else. He faintly remembered a voice, whispering to him, I hate you Tom, I hate you, I hate you.

Tom did not mind being hated. Hatred was a useful emotion, as strong as love in its way, and as powerful a force.

Tom looked more closely at himself in the mirror. A slender, strong body, not unlike the body he'd had himself at seventeen. Arms lightly downed with gold, wheat-flax hair, a choirboy face, blue eyes like bits torn out of a midsummer sky. Something glittered around his throat -- Seamus' skin was pale from winter, but in the summer it would tan, a shade only slightly paler gold than his hair, although if he was not careful it would burn.

Tom knew this, and his mouth curled: he could not have said how he knew it, but he did. It was not his own memory, not organic to himself. It was Seamus'. He knew it the way he knew that Seamus Finnigan was seventeen years old, that he came from a small Irish town called Glyn Caryn, that he loved his parents, that he was a Gryffindor seventh year student with a sweet open nature and an uncomplicated mind. Tom loathed him immediately. Riffling through his thoughts was like wading through syrup. Boring syrup. Seamus liked Quidditch. He was fond of Herbology class. He kept a stack of comic books on the table next to his bed. He didn't like lending them out, unless it was to Harry, who always took good care of things...

Tom saw his own eyes flash in the mirror. Now this was interesting. He tapped harder at Seamus' memories, trying to pull up what he knew of Harry Potter. Tom's own memories were incomplete, confusing. He remembered a small boy with tangled black hair facing him over Ginny Weasley's crumpled body. He remembered his basilisk's hiss and the same boy covered in blood, crumpled and dying at the foot of the Chamber wall. And Tom knew that the boy had not died after all, and that he hated him, but not precisely why.

Tom turned away from the mirror, still concentrating. Seamus' thoughts were like a stack of randomly arranged photographs that fluttered by quickly -- images would appear and disappear, with no apparent importance attached to their order or progress.

Tom left the room, and stood for a moment in the hallway outside, looking it up and down. It was not unfamiliar. He knew Gryffindor Tower well, it seemed. One of the paintings on the wall was chittering at him. He ignored it, following the curve of the hall around to the dormitories. Each had a brass number on the door, but even had they not been marked, he would have known which one was Seamus'. He pushed the door open and went in.

He stood for a moment, blinking at the light that streamed in across the vermilion rugs thrown over the floor, and there were the four-poster beds with their scarlet hangings like bloated red flowers. Typical of Gryffindors to be so attached to their colors of blood and fire. How Tom loathed red.

Unsurprisingly, a swift search yielded nothing interesting, as Seamus owned nothing interesting. The trunk was packed, as if Seamus were preparing to leave. Tom dropped a folded jumper back on the bed and turned, and the glint of light reflecting off something gold caught his eye.

He paused and stared; the source of the flash of light was the bed opposite him. According to Seamus, it was Harry Potter's bed.

Tom went quickly across the room. His hands were shaking with some suppressed excitement: suppressed because he did not quite understand its source yet. He knew there was some strong emotion attached to the name Harry Potter. He knew he disliked this person intensely (although Seamus, apparently, was perfectly friendly with him). He was not, however, sure exactly why. His hands pushed the coverlet down, the pillows back, and there on the bed were two folded pieces of paper under what looked like a gold charm on a slender chain.

He looked briefly at the necklace and pushed it aside, uninterested in what looked like ordinary jewelry, and cheap-looking jewelry at that. His gaze went next to the letters. He picked them up, sharply curious -- why was Harry Potter leaving letters addressed to friends on his own bed? He combed through Seamus' murky memories, but could find nothing that lent any comprehension to the situation.

The first letter was addressed to Hermione. This name meant nothing whatsoever to Tom. It meant something to Seamus, but nothing terribly interesting. The name across the top of the second letter, however, was Draco Malfoy, the full name, written out, and that meant something to Tom.

A burst of searing hate exploded through Tom's chest. Not his hatred, but Seamus'. A metallic emotion, in equal parts resentment, loathing, and fear. There was something else there, too, threaded in with the other emotions. Tom could not identify it, although someone who was not Tom would have been able to recognize it as pity.

With a swift nail, Tom slit open the first letter, the one to Hermione, and read it through. His heart began to pound. There was his own name -- not his birth name, but the name he had given himself -- woven through the letter -- there was a history here, a history between himself and Harry Potter -- In fact, if Potter could be believed...but no, that wasn't possible, was it? Surely there was some mistake. He reached for Seamus' memories, but so great was his agitation that they slipped away from him like murky water.

With a bitter oath, Tom crumpled the parchment in his fist and flung it into the fire. It caught and went up at once, bursting into ashes.

He took a moment, then, to breathe. To force calm on himself. Very slowly, he opened the second letter, and read it over. This time he took note of the handwriting, the looping, childish script that seemed to spill over itself as if the writer could barely contain everything he had to say.

Draco -- It feels weird to be writing you a letter, I've never written a letter to you before. You always know what I'm thinking so there never seemed to be any point. But you're asleep now and I think I should do this before you wake up. I know Snape has found an antidote for you -- I heard him say so to Dumbledore -- and I know what I promised -- I meant it, too. There are other things I thought you should know, things I've never told you, not properly anyway--

There was an ink blotch there, as if the writer of the letter had pressed down so hard with his quill that it had snapped. Tom's eyes narrowed as he scanned the rest of the letter quickly. What was this about? Here, again, Seamus was no help. Through his rage and confusion, Tom could dimly access thoughts of a friendship between the two boys -- Lucius' son and one of my enemies? -- and some wild intensity of emotion, but he could not separate out the threads of Seamus' hatred of Lucius' son from his thoughts about Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy grouped together. Tom's hand closed on the letter, meaning to crush it --

His fury urged him to destroy this letter, in which Harry Potter mocked him, mocked Voldemort, swore vengeance against him, and seemed to think that he himself, a mere child, a foolish boy --

Tom took a shuddering breath. He wanted to rip the letter in half. But was it the wisest course? The letters had obviously been written with passion and care, and they were alive with a certain vivid pain that Tom could appreciate, being something of an artist in the area of inflicting pain himself. He had no part of emotion, wanted no part of it, but his very distance from it made him a useful student of human behavior. Destroying this letter would hurt the sender, that was true, but there were better ways to assure that Harry Potter's friends did not receive this last message. That they would not follow him where he had gone, on his quest of vengeance. This would cause chaos and confusion, and chaos and confusion were useful allies.

He read the letter again. It would, he decided, not be difficult at all to mimic Harry Potter's voice: the vividness of the letter came from its simplicity and the blunt sincerity of the statements. Tom could see that it was quite a moving letter, really, or would certainly be considered so by the recipient if the tone of the letter was any indication. This was good: an emotional letter was so much easier to twist and alter.

He passed a hand over the surface of the letter. A surge of magical energy rocketed up his arm and through his hand, almost painful in its intensity. It had been so long...

He whispered a word, and the paper trembled in his grasp. Slowly the ink on the page began to writhe as if the letters were tiny slithering snakes. They curled and uncurled, wound around each other and formed new words. New sentences. Draco, it feels weird to be writing you a letter, but I thought if I didn't there'd be more of a chance that you would follow me, and I don't want you to follow me. I know you'll want to and you always think you can help me, but you can't help me now. I know I said that I would wait but I think that it's better if I don't wait -- I know what I promised, but there are things you don't know...things you won't understand...

The letter went on for several paragraphs. Tom gave it a last scan, and felt proud of himself. It was a cruel letter, without being overtly so at all. The cruelty lay mainly in its subtlety, and in what it did not say, Tom having removed much of the original text. He greatly regretting having destroyed the first letter, the one to Potter's girlfriend. He could have created quite a work of art out of that one. Ah, well. No use grieving over lost opportunities. He placed the letter, folded, back on Harry's bed, with the gold charm necklace on top of it. Then he straightened up.

He was still angry. Long ago Tom had taught himself to focus his rage, to channel it. To wait for a time and place in which he could spend it. And now, lost and bewildered and furious, he stood and tried to make sense of the chaotic whirl of thoughts and memories that vied for attention inside his overcrowded brain. Names and faces came and went behind his eyes -- Black-haired Harry Potter, whom he hated. Draco Malfoy, who looked like a more perfect version of his father in childhood, a miniature done in ivory and silver gilt. And Ginny Weasley, her rosy sunflower face crowned by all that brash, bright hair -- oh, Ginny he remembered. Ginny he knew. Ginny who he recollected by the crack of her bones beneath his gripping hand, her body squirming under his as she tried to get away from him, the scent of salty tears and her own terror.

Even more interestingly, Seamus loved her, it seemed. Tom felt the sickly adoration as a pain beneath his ribs and grinned at it, a wolf grin that split his angel face in half. Oh, yes, Seamus loved her. Loved her oh so very much that he had given her a charm bracelet so that he would never lose her. So that he could find her wherever she was and race instantly to her side. How he must have loved her, to have done something like that.

Still grinning, Tom reached down into his shirt, and drew out the small gold arrow charm on its chain. He knew by the tingle of it beneath his fingertips that she was nearby; she was not far away. Still grinning, he closed his hand around the charm.

Draco had always told her that if she had been born a boy she would have been just like him and if he had been a girl he would have been exactly like her.

Blaise suspected that this, like most things Draco had said to her, seemed true because she wanted it to be true.

Still. If Draco had been at Pansy's Christmas party -- which she had gone to because she'd hoped he'd be there, but he had not come -- he would, just as she had, have spent three hours getting ready despite not really wanting to go. Hours spent knotting small silver flowers into her apricot hair, charming the circles out from under her eyes. Selecting just the right dress. Green, with pale embroidery along the hem. Now, perched on the sink in Pansy's bathroom, she made several minute and delicate adjustments to her cosmetic charms, and looked at herself in the mirror. Like everything else in the Parkinson home, the sink was immensely tacky, with bronze spigots in the shape of spitting dolphins.

Draco had once scornfully called the Parkinsons the kind of family that bought their own furniture.

This had struck Blaise as both amusing and accurate, although it said more about Draco than it did about Pansy.

She wished, again, with a dull sort of anxiety, that he had come. He had been invited, of course. Most of the Slytherins were here, even some of those who had graduated -- and, in the case of Goyle and Crabbe, even those deemed not bright enough to graduate. It was the party of the season, especially since Pansy's parents were at a days-long Ministry summit and essentially they could do whatever they wanted. And Draco had always loved parties.

But then, that had been the old Draco. The one Blaise had grown up with. Not this new version of Draco, whom she felt she did not know.

She remembered the night in August when he had come to her house. It had been a humid summer night, the kind of night where even blinking made you sweat. When the charms had rung she'd come reluctantly to get the door, trailed by a score of tiny levitating fans, all spinning madly in a vain attempt to cool the air. Opening the door to find Draco Malfoy on her doorstep had left her speechless.

How many Hogwarts girls had dreamed of this exact circumstance? There was Draco Malfoy on her front steps, in jeans and a white cotton t-shirt that clung to his slenderly muscled torso, the moonlight striking sparks from his pale silver eyes. On top of that, he was holding a bunch of flowers tied with ribbon. Roses, with pale yellow petals, the color of new Galleons.

Blaise pushed her damp hair back behind her ears, and stared. A number of potential witticisms spun through her head. She picked one at random. "If you were looking for Goyle's house, it's farther down the road. Second after the turn."

He smiled at her. That smile that was like a punch to the stomach, half angelic wickedness and half carnal mischief. A smile that promised unspeakable things involving silk scarves and toffee and long sweaty nights.

He held out the flowers, and she took them. Instantly the petals dropped from them, a shower of gold -- and it was gold. When they hit the floor, they turned into Galleons, which rolled around her feet.

Blaise held the denuded flower stems delicately between her fingers. "What's this about, Draco?"

She stood aside to let him pass into the foyer. He brushed by her as he went, unnecessarily. One inside, he made an amused face and looked down at his shirt, gone half-transparent with sweat. Blaise blessed the hot evening but said nothing. "It's a little warm in here," he observed.

"Well," said Draco, his mouth curled into a cat's smile. "That shouldn't be a problem for you from now on."

He had seemed very much himself that night, provoking her and enjoying it. They had gossiped wickedly about the other Slytherins, mocked the Gryffindors, sealed their bargain with a handshake. Later he had kissed her in the front garden, among the dead rose bushes. She had stored it away as an important memory. Kisses from Draco Malfoy did not come along every day.

In fact, in no part of their agreement was it stipulated that he had to kiss her at all. He did, sometimes, anyway. Once the school term started, they spent long hours in his room together to make things look "convincing." Mostly he did schoolwork and she watched him. He was an apt, absorbed, careful student, filling sheets of parchment with exquisitely lovely handwriting, doing extra research he didn't need to do simply because it interested him. Generally he didn't seem to notice she was there, but when he did notice, he was coolly agreeable towards her, if never very affectionate. She would stretch out along his bed and watch him as he wrote or looked out the window or ordered clothes from shops in Diagon Alley. Sometimes he would try on the clothes and she would tell him what looked good and what didn't. Very little didn't look good on him, and the small task filled her with satisfaction; it seemed intimate in a way and surely he wouldn't take her advice if her opinion didn't matter to him.

It was a little while before she realized that he never actually did take her advice. He kept what he liked and sent back what he didn't and he smiled at her suggestions but did not in fact listen to them.

Sometimes they did do other things. Long hours in his room, just the two of them, something was bound to happen, and sometimes things did. He was cooperative, if not overly enthusiastic. She grew to know the lines and curves of his body, memorized the pale skin flawed in such a few places by its scars -- one under his eye, like a crescent moon, the jagged bolt along his left palm, the slightly silvery sheen along his forearm as if something had been burned there. She knew the graceful planes of his collarbones, his temples where the feathery hair drifted, the vulnerable spots on the insides of his wrists. She knew how the pulse in his throat beat when he kissed her, and that when his eyelashes fluttered shut over closing eyes it meant he liked whatever she was doing to him. Sometimes while she was doing it he would put his hand over his face, fingers splayed to cover his eyes, and then she would stop, and say, Look at me, Draco, and he would take his hand away and sit up and that would be the end of that, usually.

He never pushed her for any kind of physical favors and when she stopped giving them he did not seem to notice that either. She had a feeling that he was slightly relieved that she had never really offered herself to him entirely as it would have been awkward for him to turn her down and Draco hated awkwardness. And it bewildered her, because it was not as if he didn't like girls -- his body seemed to like her just fine, reacted instantly when she put her hands on him, like any seventeen-year-old boy; it was his mind that was, always, elsewhere.

And that was it. He was elsewhere. Always elsewhere. It was around this time that she began to really notice the difference in him, that it was constant and ongoing. The other Slytherins had noticed it as well, but she, with more time to study him, noticed it more sharply. He had changed. He was still arrogant, as he always had been, still charming and quick-witted and beautifully malicious, but that malice had lost some of its bite and edge, his wit was less brittle. He was less a glass dagger, and more a silver knife.

It was another few weeks before she was able to tie this change in him to its cause.

In October, Draco had been given detention. By Flitwick, if she recollected correctly, for casting an illicit Vestatum Transparens charm on Neville Longbottom during class. Everyone had seen a great deal more of Longbottom than was necessary. Draco had been given a week's detention and assigned to cleaning the blackboards in the classroom during dinner hour.

She had thought that it would be a good idea for her to sneak him some food. It would be the act of a concerned girlfriend. It would assist their deception. Or so she told herself, as she wrapped some sandwiches in a napkin and headed upstairs to the second floor classroom where Charms was held.

She never knew what made her pause and glance through the grilled window set in the door before she went in. Perhaps simply her knowledge that Draco did not appreciate surprises in general, and surprises from her in particular. But it was Blaise who was surprised.

Draco was in the classroom, and he was indeed cleaning one of the blackboards -- in a bored, lazy, methodical manner, standing well away as if he did not want to get chalk dust on his expensive green shirt. But he was not alone. Harry Potter was sitting on one of the desks behind him. He was talking, gesticulating, his face animated and lively, and as he gestured he was smiling. It was bizarre. Blaise barely had to think in confusion that she didn't remember Flitwick giving Potter detention as well, when he leaped off the desk, went around Draco, and poked him in the chest with his index finger.

It was not a hostile gesture. It was, very plainly, a teasing gesture that said, You're not paying attention to me.

Draco brushed the hand away, but with a shrug and a smile that nearly buckled Blaise's knees. It was a smile without any edge of malice or cruelty or secret amusement. She would not have thought Draco Malfoy had a smile like that in him. Then he'd lifted the rag he'd been using to clean the boards, and threw it at Harry's head.

Blaise tore herself away after a few more minutes of silent staring, and crept, shattered, back to the Slytherin dorms. She was the daughter of Death Eaters. In her sixteen years of life, she had seen many disturbing things. But nothing had disturbed her as much as the fact that she had just watched Harry Potter write Kiss Me, I'm Rich on the back of Draco Malfoy's brand new green shirt with a piece of chalk and that Draco, when he had noticed, had not shoved his wand through Potter's throat, but instead had laughed as if he thought this behavior was genuinely funny.

As far as Blaise was concerned, this could mean only one thing. They had to be having sex with each other.

Blaise was a worldly girl. She had read books. She Knew Things. This would certainly explain why Draco, the most-wanted boy in school, would pay a girl to pretend to date him. She supposed it would also explain why Harry Potter was seeing a girl everyone had long supposed to be Just His Friend. It was all a ruse to cover up their passionate affair.

After lying stunned on her bed for several hours, Blaise decided that out of all possible outcomes, this was hardly the worst. After all, this was an amazing piece of scurrilous gossip. Nobody had heard gossip like this since Headmaster Dippet had been removed from his position by the Ministry after rumors flew that he was carrying on an illicit affair with the giant squid in the lake. The squid had been allowed to keep its job; nobody wanted to fire a fifty-foot squid.

But this was even better. Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy! And, she supposed, it made some sort of sense: Potter was an idiot, a revolting Gryffindor Mudblood-lover, but he wasn't exactly ugly. He had all that tousled dark hair and that wiry-slim body and those lynx-colored eyes that could shoot cold green glances or blaze up like leaves burning when he was angry. The corduroy trousers he'd worn to play Quidditch in for the past two years were worn to parchment thinness and had holes in all sorts of interesting places. They did a great deal to keep the interest of the female population of the school riveted during especially dull games.

Of course, she had always thought Harry Potter looked like someone who'd never had sex in his life, but then appearances were deceiving.

After that, Blaise borrowed Pansy's Invisibility Cloak and began following Draco around in earnest. A terrible perverse curiosity had seized her. Draco would kill her if he knew she was following him, of course, but in her feverish state that hardly mattered; she had to know, to be sure. She crept after him when he went down to Quidditch practice, when he studied in the library at night, when he climbed to the top of the Astronomy Tower --

For that was the most peculiar part. Her spying was not entirely fruitless -- there was definitely something going on between Draco and Potter. They met up with each other whenever they seemed to have any spare moments. They studied together. They practiced fencing. When Draco got a hundred and ten percent on his Potions exam, he showed the results to Harry, looking superior. Harry said something snarky. Draco kicked him in the shin. When Harry got his broom upgraded, he went and showed it to Draco. Draco said something snarky. Harry took a handful of the packaging paper that had come with the broom and shoved it into Draco's shirt pocket. Whereupon Draco had taken the broom and thrown it out the window. It had fallen several stories and landed on Mrs. Norris, who had set up a plaintive yowl. Draco had burst out laughing and Harry had dragged him away from the window.

It was at this point that Blaise learned that Harry Potter was also in possession of an Invisibility Cloak.

But they never touched each other. At least, not in any significant way. They were easy around each other, comfortable in a way Blaise had noted boys rarely were. When Harry fell asleep in the library one night while studying, Draco had taken his quill and, with a look of fiendish glee, had scribbled small obscene messages up and down Harry's forearm. When Harry wanted Draco to be quiet, he'd clap a hand over his mouth. So yes, they touched each other. They pushed each other, tugged on the back of each other's shirts, stole each other's notes, ate off the same plate. But as for behavior that could contribute to some kind of scurrilous gossip, there was none.

This was upsetting to Blaise. If she could not categorize their relationship, she could not understand it. If she could not understand it, then she could not understand Draco. If he had been sleeping with Harry Potter, that would have been one thing. Weird, perhaps, but understandable: Harry was gorgeous, and boys were stupid and largely driven by their hormones. But since that did not appear to be what was going on, then there was more to it. And if there was more to it, it stopped looking like some foolish mistake on Draco's part and a great deal more like a calculated decision.

In her obsession, now, to understand what was going on, Blaise began watching both boys even in public. Their social faces were almost unshakable: they were single-minded in their brutality towards each other. It seemed odd to her, this public hostility, a travesty of some kind, like watching someone scribble ugly graffiti on a beautiful painting. She wondered how they could stand to keep it up.

One afternoon she had glanced at Draco in Potions class and had seen him suddenly smile down at his desk, as if he had thought of something amusing. Driven by habit now, she looked immediately at Harry, seated all the way across the room. And she had seen him smile, too, at the same instant, the exact same way. Neither Draco nor Harry was looking at each other and there was no obvious cause for their mirth. Over the next few days she caught this happening more and more. They would react, simultaneously, to some invisible stimulus, and if she had not known it was impossible she would have thought that somehow they could read each other's minds.

She began to wonder if she was losing her own mind. It was hard to be the solitary custodian of such an enormous secret. Perhaps she ought to tell Draco she knew. Of course, he might well break her neck for her troubles. Nevertheless, she had nearly made up her mind to tell him when she realized in fact that she was not the only one who knew, after all.

Charms class had just begun, and everyone was filing into the classroom and taking their seats. In the confusion, Colin Creevey had slipped into the room, and had announced in a loud whisper to Professor Flitwick that Harry Potter would not be coming to class that day because he had been injured during Quidditch practice and was in the infirmary.

Two things immediately happened. First, Blaise's gaze flew to Draco. Sprawled behind his desk, he hardly moved, only she saw him whiten, and he brought his hand down hard on the point of his quill, so that it dug into his palm. Secondly, she saw that someone else had turned to look where she did -- Ron Weasley had whipped around in his seat to stare at Draco. Draco shot him a furious glare, and shook his head almost imperceptibly, and Ron turned back to face the front of the room, biting his lip.

Blaise barely had time to wonder what that meant when the classroom door opened and Hermione Granger came in. She said something a low voice to Professor Binns, and then moved to take her seat next to Ron. As she went, she passed Draco. Her bookbag struck against the side of his desk and knocked his Charms book to the floor.

Hermione glared at him. "Inbred moron," she said, retrieved the book, and hurled it on his desk with a loud thump. She walked away, tossing her hair. Only someone who had been observing this interaction very closely would have noticed, as Blaise did, that when Hermione dropped the book back on Draco's desk there was a folded bit of parchment stuck between the pages that had not been there before.

Later she would go into Draco's bookbag and find the note. It said, Harry's all right, he just broke his wrist doing silly stunts. Don't go by the infirmary, there are too many people there. And you were wrong about page eleven in the DaDA textbook, it was page fourteen. You owe me a butterbeer. --Love, Hermione

It was at this point that Blaise's confusion turned into a seething bitterness. Watching Draco and Hermione now, she saw how they looked at each other, and even how he looked at that repellent Weasley boy's little sister, and she realized that this was much more than she had imagined, it was an awful, gigantic Gryffindor conspiracy. As if it wasn't enough that they had to win the House Cup six years running, they had somehow conspired to steal Draco Malfoy away from his house. Draco, the best of all of them, the brightest and the most beautiful, who gave Slytherin something to be proud of even though they were always losing the bloody Quidditch Cup to Gryffindor. It was hateful, it was beyond bearing. And, curled on her bed alone at night, she realized it was more than the disgrace to the House, more than her terror of what would happen to Draco when the other Slytherins found out. More than outraged Death Eater loyalty.

It was the gentleness that had come to Draco in these past months, that would not have been gentleness in anyone else but that was a dulling of his cutting edge truly startling to anyone who really knew him. It was the faint dreaming distance behind his eyes and the cruelty that had gone from his smile and the blade that had gone from his voice. It was that he loved them. Draco Malfoy, who had never loved anything, person or place or object, and now he did, and it was not her. It had been one thing when she had been able to tell herself that he was incapable of love. But now she knew he was not. They had flawed him with their own humanity, her beautiful ice prince, and now he was just like them and just like everyone else. And still he did not want her and it didn't matter because she had lost her faith in him and in her House and in everything that had ever been important.

The foundations of her beliefs crumbled around her and blew away like dust, and in her mind the dust was pale green, the color of Potter's eyes.

Blaise half-closed her own eyes, remembering, but her reverie did not last. Someone was banging on the bathroom door and yelling. She stood up straight, tucked her hair behind her ears, and yanked the door open.

Millicent Bulstrode, clad in a hula skirt and a coconut bra and clutching an empty bottle of Archenland wine, collapsed through the door. "Blaise," she moaned, rolling over on the cold marble floor. "I think I'm going to be sick."

Blaise thinned her glossed lips into a cool sneer. "Go ahead, Millicent," she said. "It could only improve the décor in this ghastly bathroom."

And with that, she stepped over the other girl and went out to the party to rejoin the other Slytherins.

"Ginny," Seamus said at last, and she shivered again at the sound of his voice: so familiar, so caressing with its soft Irish lilt, and yet suddenly not familiar at all. "Ginny, it's good to see you again..."

Instinctively, Ginny drew back, her hand rising to nervously touch the charm bracelet at her other wrist. "Seamus, you saw me this afternoon."

"Did I?" The edged smile widened with a deadly sort of amusement. "It feels like fifty years."

He began to walk across the room towards her. Ginny stared at him, her mind awhirl. Was he angry at her? Was he drunk? She couldn't imagine Seamus drunk. "I thought you said you were going to go home tonight...won't you have missed your train?"

"Anxious to get rid of me?" He was standing directly in front of her now; she craned her head to look up at him, but with an alarming suddenness, he had dropped to his knees and was kneeling opposite her, their eyes on a level. "Not that it matters much now."

"Seamus...?" She heard the uncertainty in her own voice. The fine hairs along her arms and the back of her neck were prickling sharply.

"It's all right," he said. There was an odd tenderness in his voice -- it was like tenderness, but then again not quite. There was a familiarity about that tone that she couldn't place. He reached out and lightly touched the edge of her hair, just at her temple.

At the light touch, her skin exploded into goosebumps. She felt her eyes fly wide with astonishment -- she never reacted like this when Seamus touched her. Never.

"It's all right," he said again, in the same odd tone. And at the same time that he touched her, she saw the corner of his mouth curl in a disdainful smirk. "I just wanted to say goodbye. You wouldn't grudge me a goodbye, would you, Ginny?"

His hand was cool against the side of her face. "Why," she said, "do you keep saying my name?"

He dropped his hand from her face, skated his fingers along the edge of her shoulder. "Perhaps, Ginny darling," he said gently, "perhaps you haven't been as sensible as you should have been." His fingers encircled her arm. "Come here," he said, and pulled her sharply towards him.

The suddenness of the movement caught her off guard and she half-fell against him. He seemed to expect this, taking her weight easily, his arms sliding around her. They were wrapped together now like passionate lovers, but there was no passion in his voice when he spoke, only a cold and deadly certainty. "You came looking for me," he said against her ear. "All those years I remembered you. You got away from me. You were the only one who ever did." He jerked her hard against him and nipped at the corner of her mouth -- not a kiss but a bite, and it hurt. Ginny tasted a metallic tang in her mouth. But she didn't pull away. "I swore to myself I'd spill your blood and know what it tasted like," he hissed into her ear, licking her blood off his own mouth. "Your pure, wizarding blood."

Ginny still didn't move. There was a humming in her ears like static electricity and part of her wanted to faint. Part of her was terrified. But that part seemed closed away behind a glass wall and there was only this here, this moment, and his hard grip on her shoulders and his heartbeat against her. "Tom," she said. "You're Tom."

"And who else would I be?" he said, and it almost made sense, never mind the insanity of the situation.

"Are you going to kill me," she said. There wasn't enough emotion in her voice for it to be a question.

For a moment he did not move. He felt like Seamus against her, the same lightly muscled shoulders and arms, the same cornsilk hair that smelled like soap and boy. But the voice, under the accent and the softness, was Tom's voice, and his eyes were Tom's eyes. Eyes that opened onto a mind like a cauldron of writhing snakes. "Yes," he said. "You wouldn't deny me that, would you, not when I've waited so long?"

She felt him smile against her cheek. "Good," he said, and, gripping her wrist, bent her back until she was lying on the floor and he was crouching over her and the floor was hard under her slim body cushioned only by the material of her thin nightgown. He had her left wrist gripped in his hand, the charms on her bracelet cutting painfully into her skin. He was left-handed. Seamus had not been. And, looking up at him, it was as if she could see through Seamus' face to Tom's : eyes like blue ink, narrow mouth like a razor cut. And the mind behind those ink-blue eyes was Tom's mind, that clever brain fermenting into poison, a consciousness as slippery as a wall of black glass, and that one chink in it, that one weakness, which was his arrogance. His willingness to believe that she would lie down and die for him because he asked her to, because he was Tom, and everyone always did whatever he wanted.

"You won't mind it for very long," he said, and smiled with Seamus' mouth. The gold hair fell into his eyes as he leaned over her. He brushed the knuckles of his right hand along her collarbone, along the edge of the neck of her gown. The way he might admiringly stroke a glass figurine he was about to smash. "You're quite cooperative," he said. "I might kill you a little quicker, for that."

"You brought me back," he murmured, hands stroking her possessively. "Your tears, my blood. Sympathetic magic, you remember? You heard me talk about it when you spied on me all those years ago. You must have missed me badly, Ginny. You must have wanted me back," and as he spoke his hand slid down into the bodice of her nightgown and Ginny fought down the violent urge to jerk herself away, fought it down so hard that she bit her lip savagely. "Didn't you?" he hissed.

"You used to tell me you'd never kissed a boy," he said, a lazy smile coursing across his face. "Is that still true?"

But he was leaning forward, his mouth brushing over her cheek, her jaw, her lips. Like the brush of a burning butterfly's wing, his touch was light, and scorched her. When his mouth touched hers she tasted her own blood on his lips. She arched up against him, her shoulders dropping back, her throat bared, and he seemed to recognize this as a gesture of submission, because his eyes went heavy and dark with amusement.

He drew back, releasing her wrist, moving his hand to her shoulder to pull her into a better position, and as he did, she threw out her arm, thrusting her hand into the center of the blazing fire, and the pain coursed up her arm like a shriek but it didn't matter because what mattered was that the charm bracelet around her wrist had caught on fire and every charm on it was activating all at once.

It was like an explosion. Like several explosions. The force of so many powerful spells activating simultaneously knocked them both sideways, knocked Tom off of her, and Ginny rolled to the side and curled herself into a ball. Brightly hued lights burst out of the fire, lighting the room in carnival colors. Jangling, discordant music poured into the room, half-deafening her, and then the air was full of flying objects -- birds and silver arrows and dinner plates and furniture and through the teeming air Ginny saw Tom trying to struggle to his feet, and she tried to scramble away but the pain in her hand was too bad and then something dark came hurtling at her out of the fireplace and there was a bright pain behind her eyes and then there was blackness.

"It smells like mud," said Draco, looking glumly down at the glass of murky fluid Madam Pomfrey had set on his bedside table. The morning sunlight poured through the half-open window like a benediction and laid a sheer gilded varnish over his bright hair and light eyes and even made the glass on the table sparkle, although anything would have looked good to Hermione on this particular morning.

She yawned and scrubbed the back of her hand across her eyes. "That's too bad. Drink it."

Draco took the glass and sighed. "I suppose it would be a bit much to hope for an antidote that tastes like a 1982 Chateau Haute Brion."

"You are so spoiled," said Hermione succinctly, "that it is either a thing of wonder or a thing of horror. I am not entirely sure which."

"You know," said Draco, raising his eyes from the glass, "I think Madam Pomfrey has designs on me."

"Yes, indeed. She keeps offering to bandage me up in places that don't need bandaging. The poor woman is mad with lust. Not that one could blame her..."

"But it tastes bad," he said in a small, pitiful voice, hunching his shoulders inside his pajamas.

Hermione got to her feet. "Draco Malfoy," she said, in a dangerously quiet voice. "I have been up since three o'clock this morning with Professor Snape, talking about your antidote. I know exactly how often you have to take it, and exactly what will happen to you if you don't. I am also extremely tired and irritable. And if you do not take your antidote right now, I will SNEAK UP BEHIND YOU WITH A RAZOR BLADE AND SHAVE OFF ALL OF YOUR HAIR. AND I MEAN IT!"

To her great annoyance, Draco was laughing at her. "You're cute when you're hacked off."

"Flirt with me, Malfoy, and I'll pour a bottle of Skele-Gro on your head. Let's see how cute you think you are when your head's swelled up to the size of a beach ball."

"There are many who would say my head is swollen already," Draco pointed out, lifting the glass to his mouth.

Hermione felt a smile building behind her eyes. She quashed it. "Be quiet," she said. "And drink your antidote - now, please."

To her surprise, he drank it, then dropped the glass with a shudder and pressed his hands to his stomach. "Ugh," he groaned.

Hermione leaned forward to retrieve the glass, and gave his hair a sympathetic gentle tug as she did so. It was so fine and silky, it clung to her fingers. She drew her hand back and picked up the glass. "Was it awful?"

He straightened up, wincing. His mouth was drawn as in pain, but his voice was light when he replied. "Tasted a bit like cinnamon and sugar. If you took cinnamon and sugar and sprinkled them on an old shoe, then dumped a vat of Bubotuber pus on it. How often do I have to take this stuff?"

Draco moaned, and sprawled tragically backward onto the pillows. Hermione decidedly did not notice that when he leaned back, his shirt rode up, showing the smooth pale skin of his torso, the elegant curve of his ribs. He had lost weight, and his pajama bottoms were loose around his narrow hipbones. She hoped that the antidote, temporary though it might be, would keep him from losing any more weight after this, at least until a more permanent antidote was found.

"It burns," he said, fretfully, and looked at her, wide-eyed. "I have a very low pain threshold, really. Hardly a threshold at all. More like a small but tastefully decorated foyer."

Hermione, knowing this to be patently untrue, made a face at him. "If it makes you feel better to writhe about and complain, then writhe about and complain. But if I catch you not taking your antidote, I'll kill you."

Draco rolled over onto his stomach and grinned up at her disarmingly. "That reasoning represents a logical fallacy," he said.

"I can live with that," she said. "And stop batting your eyelashes at me. That pitiful-puppy business might work on Harry, but it will not work on me. Snape says you should get up, and get up you shall. On your feet, Malfoy."

"I thought you were here to lend a bit of delicate feminine presence to the proceedings," Draco complained woefully. "Soothing my fevered brow, patting me with damp washcloths..."

"Snape said the antidote will work faster if you move about a bit and get the blood going through your veins," Hermione pointed out. "So either get up, Draco, or my delicate feminine boot will make contact with your --"

"Squabbling as usual, I see," said Snape, appearing suddenly and almost noiselessly at the foot of the bed. "Miss Granger, has he taken his antidote?"

"Yes," said Hermione, wondering momentarily at the bizarreness of a situation which found her allied with Snape. "He complained a lot, but he took it."

Looking mildly surprised, Draco sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Hermione looked closely at him -- did he look any better? She was forced to admit to herself that she could see no real difference, except perhaps a bit more color in his cheeks, but that could be a number of things.

Snape peered down at Draco as if he were staring at something growing in a petrie dish. Then he folded his arms, apparently satisfied. "There will be side effects," he announced.

"I don't suppose these are side effects along the lines of 'fortuitous ability to conduct a light opera in French'?" Draco asked, somewhat wistfully.

"No," said Snape flatly. Hermione wondered why Draco bothered. Snape had less of a sense of humor than Voldemort, who at least, according to reports, was prone to cackling evilly. "You must be cautious, Draco. While I encourage you to take part in physical activity, you must be very careful with your psychic strength. Please keep your performance of magic to a minimum. This antidote will interfere with your abilities, especially your Magid gifts. I would prefer if you avoided wandless magic entirely; your telepathy --"

At that, Draco's head snapped up. "I couldn't reach Harry last night," he said. "I was trying..."

"Well, stop trying," said Snape, but something flickered behind his eyes, and Hermione, for no reason she could explain, felt a sudden twinge of cold panic. "I see no reason for you to waste your energy attempting to contact Potter, who is doubtless still asleep in his dormitory. You should concentrate on conserving your energy."

Both Hermione and Draco stared at him. Hermione had never heard Snape use the word "pleasant" before. She wondered if something was going on with him. He seemed to be trying to distract Draco, although from what, she couldn't imagine.

"Hmph," said Snape, interrupting her pondering, and left in a swirl of dark robes.

Draco was on his feet. "Pull the curtains shut, will you?" he requested, shrugging off his pajama top.

"Oh!" said Hermione, and stepped outside the curtains, hastily tugging them shut behind her, although not before the image of Draco, shirtless, unknotting the tie at the waistband of his pajama bottoms, branded itself against the back of her eyes. He was ill, she reminded herself sharply. Doubtless this was just her concern and the urge to take care of him mixing itself up in her brain and sending her all the wrong sorts of signals.

Draco emerged from behind the curtains, tugging a long-sleeved white cotton jumper down over charcoal trousers. "I need my hairbrush," he muttered. "I can't find it."

Hermione stuck out her tongue. "I think your hair looks nice," she said. It did look nice, she thought, it was too fine to tangle properly and so simply looked slightly ruffled. She was sure its disarray was driving Draco to distraction. "Do you want to tell Harry, or should I? He'll be so happy."

"About the antidote, idiot!" Hermione squeezed her hands together. "Or did you, you know..." She tapped the side of her head. "Tell him already?"

"No." Draco shook his head, faint concern wavering behind his eyes. "I haven't been able to find him since I woke up...I guess maybe he's asleep. I thought I remembered him being here last night. Did you see him?"

"Maybe I dreamed it." Draco shrugged. "Anyway. Yeah. I guess he'd want to know, so we should tell him." He smiled then, almost as if he couldn't not smile, a real, genuine smile that flickered fast across his face and was gone as soon as he could hide it. "He'll be happy, right?"

Later, Hermione would remember that smile, and wonder if she would ever see him smile like that again.

Outside the train window, the scenery slid by peacefully. Mountains had given way to hills, hills to flat country dotted with trees and small towns. The snow had melted away, though ice still sparkled in nets against the windows of passing houses and between the branches of trees.

Harry sat and looked out the window of the express train from Hogsmeade and tried not to think.

He was surprised he had managed to stay awake so long. He had lain down on the stiffly padded seats, his bag under his head, and tried to sleep, but had found himself, after a time, drawn to staring out the window instead. Perhaps it was that it was so cold in the compartment, and the scar on his hand was bothering him. It was raw with pain as if it had been newly made. He almost expected, when he glanced down, to see blood on his palm, but his bare hand was pink and clean and looked as it always had. The silvery scar bisecting the familiar whorls and scrolls ... too bad he had never paid attention to Palmistry during Divination class...

The door to his compartment slid open. Harry looked up, expecting the conductor or the snack cart witch, but it was Ron .

Ron slid the door shut and came to sit across from Harry. He sat down and they looked at each other, as boys do, somewhat guardedly. He was as Harry had remembered him. A little thinner, perhaps. His blue eyes had blue shadows under them. He wore a gray cableknit crewneck jumper and corduroy trousers. He said, "I was just thinking that you've never taken a train without me before. Have you?"

Harry looked back out the window. The sky outside was darkening and the window gave him back his own reflection. Pale skin, green eyes, hair like tangled black thread. No scar. No glasses -- he'd spelled his eyes back at the train station in Hogsmeade. "It's lonely," he said.

"It's funny," Ron said, conversationally. "I never thought about you as being lonely. You always seemed to have everything so well in hand. Everyone always wanting to be with you. Everyone always watching you. I didn't see how you could be lonely, with all that attention. I mean, heroes don't get lonely. Or if they do, you never hear about it."

"I think it doesn't make for good stories," said Harry. "But I do get lonely. That time you stopped speaking to me fourth year, half the time I was so lonely I wished I could die. The rest of the time I wished I could kill you. But nobody wants to hear about that. Reporters don't ask about that. They want to know about my dead parents and who I'm dating and where I get my clothes and how I plan on offing Voldemort --"

Ron leaned back against the seat. His hands were open on his knees. In reality, perhaps, they would have been full of Chocolate Frogs, Exploding Snap cards, half a bag of sherbet lemons, and the other half spilled out over Harry's lap. Now they were empty. "It's because of Malfoy," he said. "Ironic that he turned out to be the one to teach you what you really are."

Harry remembered Draco up on the tower, saying This is a hero's choice. Your friends, or everything else. And he had not argued or denied it. "Ron," he said. "Why are you here? Not that I'm not glad to see you. I mean, I miss you. But if I'm dreaming you up there must be some reason beyond that. Especially since we're not really friends right now."

"Maybe your mind thought you'd be likely to listen to me," Ron said. "I don't know why. You never listen to anyone. You don't think you need anyone, Harry, that's your trouble, because you don't trust anyone, not really. Remember the Second Task? You thought you had to save everyone under that lake because you couldn't even trust that Dumbledore wouldn't let a load of students drown during a school event. I said you were thick, but it's more than that. You're not thick. You just don't trust anyone."

"You never trusted me. And you never trusted Hermione, either, not really. Look how you shut her out. I thought you trusted Malfoy, but I guess you don't. Not that I much care. It'll half-kill him, what you've done, and I say just as well. Hermione's strong. She can take it. But not Malfoy."

Harry narrowed his eyes. "So now you're my guilty conscience," he said. "I didn't know my conscience was so...Victorian-sounding. Look, I know I did the right thing. That doesn't mean I don't have doubts. Everyone questions the things they've done...but they'll both be fine without me."

Ron shook his head. "Haven't you ever wondered how you've managed to make yourself so necessary to so many people?"

Harry rubbed the back of his hand wearily across his eyes. "No," he said. "No, I haven't wondered that."

Ron smiled. It was a bright and cheeky smile, so familiar and so very much like Ron. He leaned forward and tugged on a lock of Harry's hair -- an oddly gentle gesture. "Just remember," he said. "You were mine first."

"I'm doing this for you," Harry said in a half-whisper, but Ron had already begun to fade, the seat back becoming visible through his face and hair, and then it all began to dissolve -- the compartment, the darkening sky, the window, Ron himself -- like parchment burning up in a fire. There was a loud shrieking noise in Harry's ears and as he blinked himself awake, struggling into a sitting position, he realized that it was the Sounding Charms announcing the train's arrival at King's Cross Station.

Nothing could have prepared Hermione for the sight that greeted her and Draco when they stepped through the portrait hole and into the Gryffindor common room that morning.

It was in shambles. The furniture was knocked over. The floor was covered with a bizarre array of objects, from decorative ornaments to shattered dinner plates to pulverized glass. The floor was covered in black ash. And the east window was smashed open. The air in the room was freezing cold.

And by the fireplace, sprawled in a crumpled heap, was Ginny. She lay on a bed of her own torn clothes, her arms flung wide, her bright hair over her face.

But Draco had already gone across the room and was kneeling down next to Ginny. With a surprising sudden gentleness he brushed the hair out of her face, touched his fingers to her throat. "She's breathing," he said, still looking down at her. "We'd better get her to the infirmary. Come help me lift her, Hermione --"

But Ginny's eyelids were fluttering. She coughed and her eyes flew wide. "No," she whispered. "No infirmary..."

Hermione took a few steps closer. She could see that Ginny's hair was matted with blood at her temple. "She's injured," she said. "Ginny -- what happened?"

Draco glanced up at the broken window, his expression frankly puzzled. "Did someone get in here? How?"

Ginny reached out a hand and caught at his sleeve. "Not Seamus," she said. "Tom."

Draco's eyes met Hermione's over Ginny's head. He looked as puzzled as she felt. "What?"

"Tom," said Ginny, and coughed again. "My hand hurts," she said almost inaudibly. "I burned it --"

"She's delirious," Hermione said to Draco, quickly. "Probably concussed. Let's get her to Madam Pomfrey as fast as we can."

Draco nodded. "I'm going to carry you," he said to Ginny. "Can you hold on to me?"

"I can hold on to you," she said, and closed her eyes. She put her arms around his neck and let him lift her up, only crying out a little in pain from her burned hand. "But Tom," she whispered, "what about Tom --"

"Ginny," Draco said, with a rather astonishing amount of patience (it astonished Hermione, anyway) "there's no one else in here."

"Oh," Ginny said, and there was a world of despair in that one word. She shut her eyes, and did not say another word until the three of them reached the infirmary.

It was well into the morning and Pansy's party was showing no signs of stopping. Blaise wandered listlessly through the cavernous solarium, looking for Pansy. Most of the students were gathered around the gigantic silver vats of Dementor's Kiss, the most powerful cocktail in wizarding creation. It was a turquoise-orange color, and smoked. Blaise thought it smelled like mountain troll and tasted worse.

Malcolm Baddock detached himself from the rest of the crowd and began to make his way towards her, shooting seductive glances from beneath lowered eyelashes. Blaise fought down an exasperated sigh. Any interest she'd ever had in Malcolm had evaporated when she realized that her liason with him was not annoying Draco the way she had hoped it would. "Blaise, darling," he said, and handed her a glass of smoking turquoisish fluid. "Pansy was looking for you."

"Was she?" Blaise took the glass, but did not attempt to drink the contents. "Did she say what she wanted?"

Malcolm shrugged. "No. I think she got distracted when Crabbe and Goyle started pole-dancing round the pillars."

Blaise had already noticed this. It was not an attractive sight. "Well, where is she now?" she asked, and surreptitiously poured her Dementor's Kiss into the pot of a nearby fern. It promptly curled up and died.

"No idea," said Malcolm. "Say, Blaise, I was thinking that maybe you and I could go somewhere and have some sex."

Blaise frowned. "What is this, laziness?" she demanded. "Whatever happened to the clever double entendre? That wasn't even a single entendre. It was a half entendre. You might as well stand in the middle of the room and shout 'Shag me, I'm desperate' at the top of your lungs."

Malcolm did not answer because at that moment Terence Higgs shot through the room at amazing speed, flailing his arms and shrieking at the top of his lungs, "Somebody stop me! For the love of God and all things holy, somebody stop me!"

He vanished through the French doors at the end of the hall as swiftly as he had come, pursued by a house-elf.

Across the room, Adrian Pucey had turned into a badger. The other students shoved him into a pink silk pillowcase.

Inside the pillowcase, Adrian had reverted to his normal shape. The pillowcase bulged and ripped. Bits of pink silk flew everywhere. Adrian staggered to his feet and was sick into a punch bowl.

"You're just upset that Malfoy didn't show," said Malcolm, a sudden razor edge to his voice. He lowered his dark eyes and glanced meditatively at his drink as he sipped it. "As if he would. He's got better things to do than hang around with us, apparently."

"That was before I knew he was a smarmy Gryffindor-lover." Malcolm's nostrils flared. "Apparently he's as cowardly as he is arrogant. I'm not surprised he didn't come tonight -- he knows he'll be up against the wall with the other traitors soon enough."

"Malcolm, I find your fascist tendencies deeply erotic," said Blaise. "I hope you know that."

Malcolm looked as if he had no idea how to respond to this. "Well, he isn't anything special," he insisted.

"I mean, just because someone has wavy white-blond hair and sculpted cheekbones this really cute way of sucking on a quill when they're bored, doesn't mean that they're entitled to special treatment," Malcolm sulked.

Blaise raised her right eyebrow a fraction. "You know, this casts your desire to see Draco up against a wall into an entirely new light."

"Don't finish that sentence, Malcolm, you'll regret it. Look-- I'm off to find Pansy. Have a nice evening. Oh, and if you're really lonely you can go knock Millicent's coconuts together in the bathroom."

Draco was tight-lipped, leaning back against the corridor wall outside the infirmary from Madam Pomfrey had banished them both. Hermione looked at him wearily. There was blood on his white shirt where Ginny's head had rested against his shoulder.

Draco looked at her in utter disbelief, as if she'd announced that she couldn't see why everyone was so bothered about Voldemort as he seemed a nice enough fellow to her. "Because of his world-famous recipe for raspberry trifle," he said. "What do you think we need him for? Look, there's obviously something going on here. I don't believe what Ginny said to Pomfrey at all."

Hermione sighed. Once in the infirmary, Ginny had revived enough to tell Madam Pomfrey that she'd dropped her charm bracelet into the fireplace and had burned herself trying to retrieve it. The destruction of the room, she'd claimed, was due to the charms on the bracelet all activating at once. She had not repeated her claims against Seamus, and she had not, thankfully, mentioned Tom.

"I don't believe her, either," she said. "I just don't know what you expect Harry to do about it."

"Maybe he can...I don't know, talk to her. I don't think she'll talk to me, especially not after yesterday."

"That's your interpretation," shrugged Draco. "I assure you that I am never pointlessly cruel."

"Are you scoffing at me?" Draco was grinning at her, that crooked, disarming grin that made her forget what it was she had wanted to say. "I'm impressed. It's hard to work up a good scoff these days."

Draco raised an eyebrow, splashed his cool ice-water gaze over her, and then shrugged. "This is all very unfair," he remarked. "We hardly need another crisis. I feel that my crisis schedule is already full."

"I'm not sure that Ginny would talk to Harry, anyway," Hermione said. "Yesterday she called him an oblivious moron pig."

Draco burst out laughing. "Did she? Oh, that's rich. I'm sorry I missed it. I would have liked to have seen his face." He glanced down then at his watch. Hermione tried not to notice that the band was slightly loose around his wrist. "Look, he has to be up by now. Is there some reason you don't want me to go and get him?"

"No. Well. Maybe. I don't know..." Hermione drew upon her mastery of the English language and found herself at a loss for words. There was no way to explain the sourceless foreboding that had gripped her earlier when Snape had been in the infirmary. Not that she felt as if something had happened to Harry -- she didn't. It was something else entirely. Something that had to do with Draco. Somehow, she felt that if she let him go away from her now, she would never see him again. Probably it was just panic over his health. Intellectually, she knew that. Not that it helped.

He looked at her, silver eyes lit to a curious opacity. Harry's eyes were always the same color, but Draco's eyes were a changeable gray, like ice and sleet and frost and all cold and mutable things. They could be as bright as the glancing blow of sunlight striking against an icicle, as dark as clouds weighted with snow. Right now they gave away little, but she knew enough to read his posture -- it was politely hesitant. He was waiting for her to tell him to go to Harry, but if she did not give the word, he would go anyway.

"I'll be right back." He touched her shoulder, lightly, and turned to go. She watched him walk away. As he receded into the distance, she felt the sudden urge to call after him -- that feeling that if she let him go now, she'd never get him back again had returned, stronger than ever.

As it turned out later, the feeling was not entirely unjustified. But Hermione did not know that. She did, however, look away so that she would not see him round the corner at the end of the corridor. When she turned back at last, he was gone.

Ron had slept, on the floor, surrounded by smashed chess pieces, and now it was another day, and the Dark Lord did not want to play chess. He wanted to play with dice. Ron did not want to play dice. It was a stalemate.

"No," said Ron, sitting with his back against the empty fireplace under the carved angels with their hidden eyes. There was a stained glass window above him, and the sunlight came down through it. The red panes of the window bled on him, and the blue panes wept, and the green panes bathed everything in a poisonous light. "No. I won't play."

"Then I will break all your fingers," said Voldemort. "I will flay the skin from your hands and your feet and you will crawl to me on your knees."

"That is irrelevant," said the Dark Lord. He held a pair of amethyst dice in his bone-white hand. The dots upon it were small black rayed suns. "I wish to see what numbers you throw."

"I want to go outside," said Ron. "It's been days, I haven't seen the sun. Let me go out."

Rhysenn, in her gold cage, chuckled and hit the bars with the flat of her hand. She was naked again. Ron tried not to look at her. "The boy wants to go out," she giggled. "He actually wants to go out."

Voldemort, in a thoughtful manner, licked one of the dice with a narrow blackish tongue.

The double doors at the end of the room opened. Lucius came in. Ron was not surprised to see him. Whenever anyone came in, it was either Lucius or Wormtail. Lucius was wearing a long dark green travelling cloak fastened with what looked like a long pin made of bone. "Master," he said, and bowed to Voldemort. He turned his pewter gaze on Ron next, and smiled a thin smile. "And you, boy," he said. "How are you finding your accommodations?"

"Despite all the gambling and the widespread nudity," said Ron, "I'm fairly bored. Thanks for asking."

"Lucius," said Voldemort. He had looked up from the dice in his hand. "What is this I hear you have been doing behind my back?"

Lucius blushed -- his version of a blush, a bloodless rush of further pallor. "My Lord. What do you mean?"

"Your son." Voldemort set the die down on the table and stood. He was a head taller than Lucius, who was not a small man. "You poisoned him, I hear. I don't recollect telling you to do that."

Ron pricked up his ears. He had not known anything about this. Draco, poisoned? Harry would be beside himself, so would the rest of them. He was not sure how he felt about it himself.

"Yes," said Voldemort. "That. Must I remind you, Lucius, that boy is mine and not yours. I did not make him to be spoiled with toxins."

"It was a regrettable accident, my Lord," said Lucius. "He smashed the vial of antidote I provided. A most unforeseen outcome."

"I would have foreseen it," replied Voldemort coldly. "He hates you and wants nothing of yours. You must come at people through what they love and not what they hate. I have told you that many times, Lucius."

"Harry Potter has left Hogwarts," said Lucius, apropos of nothing, or so it seemed to Ron.

"Can you?" Voldemort's voice was lazy, curious. "Such a powerful poison you used, so rare and ancient. I am the assassin against whom no lock can hold." He chuckled dryly. "You must be very afraid of your son."

Lucius ignored this. "The antidote is simple. Save for one ingredient, which presents something of a conundrum."

For a bare fraction of a second, Lucius hesitated. "Because it doesn't exist," he said, at last.

Voldemort's scarlet eyes narrowed. He turned, and looked at Ron over his shoulder. "I do not think I want the boy listening to this," he said. He looked at Rhysenn, in her cage. "Take the boy upstairs," he said to her. "Take him to the roof."

Voldemort smiled at him, a lipless smile that chilled Ron to the core. "You wanted to see the outside of this place," he said. "Now you will see it. And may you enjoy the sight."

It had probably been only a little more than thirty minutes, but it felt to Hermione that she had been waiting in the corridor outside the infirmary for hours before the door finally opened, and Madam Pomfrey came out.

"She needs to be left alone," said Madam Pomfrey firmly. She stood like a bulwark in front of the infirmary door, her arm stretched across it, keeping Hermione out. "She was badly burned. The skin on her hand needs to be regrown, and the process is painful. It is best if she remains unconscious through it." She narrowed her eyes at Hermione. "She also has bruises on her shoulders and a cut across her scalp. Do you know anything else about what happened to her -- is there anything you can tell me?"

"That charm bracelet must have been important to her," observed Madam Pomfrey, rather dryly.

Madam Pomfrey gave her a long look. "Ah, yes. Mister Finnigan. And where is he?"

Silently, she prayed that this was true. What Ginny had said while reviving had been troubling. But then, people with head injuries often said things that made no sense. And Seamus has told Hermione yesterday that he was packing to leave. And Ginny had been babbling about Tom, and there was only one Tom that Hermione could think of that she might have meant...and that made no sense at all.

She glanced anxiously down the corridor. Where was Draco? If Harry had been in his dormitory room, they should both have been back already. And if he hadn't been there, Draco ought to have come back to tell her that. Maybe Harry had faffed off to the Owlery to send a letter to Sirius or something. Either way, Draco ought to have returned by now.

"Madam Pomfrey," Hermione said. "The charm bracelet made a mess of the Gryffindor common room. I really ought to go and clean it up. If you could come and tell me when Ginny wakes up...I think she'd be a lot happier if one of us could come and be with her..."

Madam Pomfrey nodded, tight-lipped, as Hermione made her excuses. Hermione knew perfectly well that the older witch suspected that there was more to what was going on, but had decided not to make an issue of it. For which Hermione was profoundly grateful. She told herself she would thank Madam Pomfrey at a later date, and set off, half at a run, for Gryffindor Tower.

The common room was still a disaster. It looked as if Draco had cleared something of a path through the smashed plates and scattered flowers on his way upstairs, but had not exactly stopped to tidy up. Hermione paused at the foot of the boys' staircase, pricking her ears up, wondering if Harry and Draco were up there talking.

Her uneasiness was growing inside her chest. The sense that something terrible had happened, was about to happen, seemed suddenly stifling, as if all the air had been sucked out of the room. Hermione half-closed her eyes. Harry, she thought. Harry...please let nothing have happened to him, please.

But surely she would know if something had. It was what she had dreaded every moment of every day, somewhere in the back of her mind, since she was eleven years old and he had sent her away, back through the fire, sent her back to safety and gone forward on his own. And she had known that it would always be like that, for as long as she loved him, this would be her life: a long series of corridors taking her away from him while he went forward towards a danger she could neither see nor protect him from.

There was no reason, now, for her to fear that something had happened to him. They were safe inside Hogwarts. He was safe. He had Draco and as long as Draco was alive, surely Harry would be alive too, because Draco would die to protect him. There was no reason for her to be afraid, but it didn't matter: sudden irrational terror gave her feet wings as she bolted upstairs, down the empty corridor, and flung open the door to the seventh year boys' dormitory.

It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the dimness inside the room. The first thing she saw when the darkness cleared was Draco sitting on Harry's bed. He had something white in his hand. It took her a moment to realize that it was a piece of parchment.

She stepped forward slowly, her heartbeat slowing to normal. If something had happened to Harry, there was no way Draco would be here like this, calmly reading a bit of parchment. Still, something about his posture -- the tenseness in his shoulders, the arms rigid at his sides -- forbade approach. "Draco...?" she whispered. "What's happened? What was that you were reading?"

He raised his head and looked at her. She had always liked torchlight better than Muggle electricity; it seemed to add color to things rather than bleach colors away. Under the torches, Draco looked blond rather than silver-haired and his eyes were the pale gold of coins rubbed to a tarnished sheen. He held the parchment out to her and said in a steady voice, "It's a letter from Harry." His voice was very calm. "Only I don't think he wrote it."

"Because he wouldn't write this. He couldn't possibly have. Here -- read it," he said, and there was something odd in his voice, a slightly childish demanding tone that she'd rarely heard him use before, and then jokingly. She wasn't sure he was joking now. "You'll see what I mean."

She took the parchment from him and sat down on the bed to read it closer to the light. The handwriting leaped out at her first, it was absolutely Harry's, from the crooked t's to the inexpertly dotted i's. The handwriting of a boy who'd grown up writing in the dark, late at night, funny little journal entries he had never let her read, and as she scanned rapidly down the page she felt her mouth dry up and her heart quicken. She read it over again, just to be sure, but the words on the page still said the same thing: Draco, it feels weird to be writing you a letter, but I thought if I didn't there'd be more of a chance that you would follow me, and I don't want you to follow me--

It went on. She finished the letter, feeling stunned, almost breathless with shock. She read it again, then tore her eyes from the page and stared at Draco. He was looking at her, wide-eyed, and there was an unguarded defenselessness in his expression that took her entirely by surprise. "You see what I mean?" he said. "He couldn't have written that. He wouldn't say those things. I think--"

Something flickered behind his eyes. "No," he said, finally. "There was this..." and he took up something that had been lying beside him on the coverlet and held it out to her. The gold chain glittered like liquid fire under the torchlight and she could see the faint marks in the band of the Charm where Lucius had once scored it with his nails. "It was with the letter."

"Oh, God." Hermione heard the breathlessness in her own voice. "Oh, Harry." She reached out and took the Charm from Draco; he let her have it as if it was some casual trinket that didn't matter. "I can't believe he'd leave this behind...but then he said he didn't want to be followed..."

"Leave it behind?" Draco blinked at her. "You don't really think he wrote that letter and left this here on purpose, do you? I mean --"

"If he didn't write this, then who did?" Hermione bit her lip. "There are things in this letter that nobody could possibly know but Harry. This is his handwriting -- the way he crosses things out, even -- his way of wording things --" She broke off. "These are things nobody else could know but you two. I mean, Draco...are they true? Because I never knew that you went to visit his parents' graves. Did you?"

"Yes, we did, but -- but then someone forced him to write it!" Draco stood up suddenly, and paced away from the bed. She could see how thin his wrists were now, underneath the too-large cuffs of his jumper. "And took the Charm --"

Draco whirled and shot her a look of accusatory fury. "Don't even joke about that."

"I'm not joking." Her voice was even. "But I know Harry. And to get that Charm away from him you'd have to kill him. Unless he was willing to take it off voluntarily, it wouldn't come off. It's charmed that way, you know that, Draco."

His hands were clenching and unclenching into fists at his side as if he didn't know quite what to do with them. "You don't understand. Yesterday -- when we were talking -- he promised --"

"I know what he promised. It says it in the letter. Draco --" She yearned to reach out and touch him but held herself back. "People break promises. Even Harry breaks promises. If he thought it was for your good somehow --"

"I know." She looked at the piece of parchment in her lap. For a moment she wondered whether to point out the fact that Harry, apparently, hadn't left her any kind of message at all. But she doubted Draco would be very much moved by that -- better no letter than one like this. Some part of her own mind rebelled against the idea that Harry could have written something so carelessly cruel. "It's a horrible letter. I don't want to think Harry wrote it, either. But the alternatives are worse. Either he wrote this and went off voluntarily or he didn't write this and something awful has happened to him -- I'd rather think he did this than that he's dead --"

"Can you..." She made her voice as soft as possible. "Can you reach him at all?"

Draco shook his head. His mouth was a thin tense line. "No. He's blocking me. But I can feel him. I know he's alive."

"Well, then..." Hermione looked down at the parchment in her lap. For a moment there was only the crackling of the fire. She could feel Draco standing near her, vibrating with tension like a strung wire. She reached into her pocket and drew her wand out and touched the end to the letter, half-whispering the words of the spell, which she'd used before less than a fortnight ago....

The parchment trembled. Then the words on the page rearranged themselves to form a single name: HARRY JAMES POTTER.

Hermione jerked her head up and looked at Draco. She was standing close enough to him that she saw his color go, like flame blown out in a lamp. But other than that, he was expressionless. "Draco..."

"All right, then," he said. His voice was expressionless, too, and careful. "If that's the way it is."

"It's better than if something had happened to him," she said, in a half-whisper.

"I know." He spoke stiffly. "I guess I hadn't thought about it that way. You're right, of course." He pushed a lock of bright hair out of his eyes. Eyes that were wide open but looked shut, the blank eyes of someone who had just died. "You're always right."

Hermione put the letter down. She stood up, reaching her hand out to him. He had turned his face away from her; she could not read his expression. She could see the rapid pulse beating at the base of his throat, where his shirt fell away from the fragile collarbone. There were words she wanted to say. Words she would have said to Harry if it had been some similar situation, love-words and endearments. But they dried up in her throat. She couldn't imagine them as applied to Draco Malfoy, who didn't lie, didn't dance, didn't faint, didn't cry, and didn't, ever, show that he felt anything at all. Not even now.

"I think maybe he wanted you to be angry at him," she said. "So you wouldn't miss him when he was gone..."

"No." Draco's voice was flat. He reached out and took the Charm out of her outstretched hand, and she saw the gold flecks of the firelight reflected in his iron-colored eyes. He closed his fingers around the Charm and said, "He doesn't think like that or tell those kind of lies. He knows me well enough to know that it wouldn't be some kind of favor to me to let me die hating him --"

"You're not going to die!" Hermione exploded. "Don't say that! And you could never hate Harry! It isn't in you --"

"Oh, God," said Draco and there was a terrible almost-mirthful humorlessness in his voice. "Save me from you bloody Gryffindors! You're just like him! I wonder if that's why --" He broke off, shaking his head, and his hair flew around him like colorless starlight. "Don't tell me what I'm capable of," he said, his voice calmer now. "Or what bloody good reason Potter might have had for what he's done. Tell yourself whatever pretty stories you want, but leave me out of it. Understand?"

Hermione felt a prickle of despair at her heart. It had been a long time since Draco had called Harry by his surname when speaking about him. And she did understand, despite herself. Draco came from a line of highborn wizards who would rather throw themselves on the point of the sword than wait for the slow transfixion, and as much as he had defied his father he was still a Malfoy through and through. He did not lie to others unless he had to and telling himself lies would be the worst sin of all.

But he was backing away from her now; he almost knocked into the small table by Seamus' bed and they both stiffened with the surprise -- she could not remember ever having seen Draco walk into anything before. "I should go," he said. "I should..."

"Where are you going?" she interrupted, trying to keep the frantic note out of her voice. "Don't leave me right now -- I need you."

He paused, his back against the door, feeling behind himself for the knob. "No," he said. "You don't," and he pushed the door open and went out, closing it behind him. Hermione sank back onto the bed, hearing his footsteps receding down the corridor outside.

The sky had never burned in Diagon Alley, of course. In Diagon Alley it had been dark all day and dark all night because of the Cloaking Charms the Ministry used to protect themselves against Grindelwald's aerial attacks, but the sky had not burned. Under the canopy of the charms, the still air had been hot and stifling, lit by torchlight; it smelled of smoke and burning things. Shops were shuttered, the windows empty. There was little to sell, with importing curtailed: no dragon's blood from Germany, no phoenix feathers from the East. Potions were trading at three times their cost on the black market, and wands were strictly rationed.

He remembered the smoke, the darkness and the burning. And at the Muggle orphanage it had been no better. He had stood on the roof with the other children and in the distance had seen the cities burn. They had cried around him, saying it was the end of the world. Tom had smiled to himself, pitying them: they knew only one world. He knew more.

Once he had brushed up against a soldier home on leave, in a crowded Muggle street; he had murmured Visificus under his breath and the images of war and death had poured into his mind like water from a broken dam. He saw men dying. They died on the beaches and in holes in the ground and they fell from the air like burst flowers of fire. They died calling for their mothers and more often they died calling for water. They crawled in their own blood and tore at their own skin. And he had known then, with a cold uncompassionate clarity, that this would never happen to him: he would make sure of it. He would never die. Death was interesting to him, in a distant sort of way: the artistry of it, the mechanics, the complex engines of life running down and stopping all in a single instant. But he wanted no part of it. It was too commonplace, too ordinary. Too human.

He looked around him now, at the few people hurrying back and forth along the alley under the bright winter sun. This was a weak generation, he thought. A generation unused to trial or hardship or horror, a generation which idealized as a hero a wisp of a boy whose greatest achievement had apparently been failing to die. They would be easy pickings. A small smile twisted the corner of Tom's mouth.

He turned and went back into the Leaky Cauldron. He paused inside the entryway and looked at himself in the mirror over the door. He wondered how long it would be before that reflected face no longer gave him a moment of startled pause. And what a face it was: tow-blond hair and all, an angel face if ever there was one. He fought down a ripple of mirth.

Inside the Leaky Cauldron, he ordered a mug of hot-spiced butterbeer, asked for and received a quill and parchment, and took a seat by the fireplace, in a shadowed corner, where he would not be seen. He sat with his hood up, looking at the parchment and thinking. As he sat and thought, he wound what looked like a thin thread of copper wire slowly around his forefinger, over and over. He had found it stuck to the blood on his hands, later. Her hair.

He ceased the nervous gesture and began to think in earnest. It was imperative first of all, now that he was inhabiting the body of Seamus Finnegan, that the disguise hold as long as possible. That meant no one should come looking for Seamus. The brats at Hogwarts wouldn't dare, they'd be too keen on saving their own skins, and who would believe them anyway? But there was Seamus' family to contend with. Tom knew from his access to Seamus' memories, which was growing stronger by the moment, that Seamus did indeed have two parents, who loved him. They would be tedious and come looking for him if something wasn't done to forestall them.

He licked the nib of the quill -- he'd always liked the taste of ink, and this was good ink, not the cheap, rationed stuff -- and started writing.

Your son Seamus here. I know I said I'd be home for New Year's, but I'm afraid that just isn't going to happen. I've been in London the last few days, generally living the high life and catching up on my Oscar Wilde short stories (after all, he is one of the greatest authors of our little country, isn't he?) and in short, I've reached a decision. It's time to tell you that I fancy other men. Yes, it's the truth. I can no longer hide my true nature. I expect you will never want to see me again and have resigned myself to that fate. If you decide to disinherit me I'll understand.

Tom surveyed the letter with a critical eye. It sounded idiotic, which seemed appropriate, as in his considered opinion, Seamus was an idiot. If that didn't stymie the senior Finnigans, nothing would. He addressed the letter with a flourish, and went looking for an owl.

The heavy iron door of the Potions dungeon slammed closed behind Hermione. She strode into the center of the room. Snape, at work over his cauldrons, turned and looked at her with an expression of grim inquiry.

He turned away from his worktable and glanced at her. His eyes, under the overgrown black brows, were sharply hooded. He seemed expressionless as his gaze raked her; then he turned entirely towards her, looping his thin hands into the sleeves of his dark robes. "I do not require your assistance," he said.

Snape slowly removed his thin white hands from the sleeves of his robe. "Potter is gone, then," he said. "He's left?"

Snape stood very still for a moment. Hermione looked at him and thought about how much she had hated this man once, the cruel things he had said to her, his viciousness towards Harry. That Dumbledore allowed this behavior had always made her question the Headmaster's judgement, although Harry had maintained that Dumbledore did it to prove the point that evil existed in the universe, however mysteriously permitted, and that one day they would all have to learn to cope with it.

She was not sure she had ever learned to cope with it, but somewhere along the line she had stopped hating Snape. For the past few days she had not even minded working alongside him -- of course she would have thrown in her lot with Satan himself if it would have gotten an antidote for Draco. But she would have minded. Working with Snape had been surprisingly painless. He was, if nothing else, brilliant at his craft, and Hermione respected that.

"I did not know," Snape said finally. "I had hoped that in the end Potter would do the correct and advisable thing -- I suggested it to him -- but I did not know."

Snape blinked his hooded eyes once, slowly. His expression was unreadable. Hermione wondered if he could see the image that her words conjured up so clearly in her mind: Draco on the bed, reading the letter, probably having read it a dozen times, several dozen times, as if somehow closer examination would transform the words on the page or make them mean something other than they did.

"That letter," Hermione said. "Did you also suggest to Harry that he ought to write those things?"

"Certainly not." Snape's tone was brisk. "As if I would interest myself in Potter's sentimental drivel."

Snape shrugged once, briefly. "That is as it may be," he said. "What is significant is that he is gone."

"He has greater worries than Potter's whereabouts. He has his antidote to take and his health should be of primary concern --"

"I've looked all over the castle for him. I can't even find him. I've been looking for him for hours." Her voice trembled. "What good is a bloody antidote when I can't find him to make sure he takes it?"

"His distress will be temporary," said Snape, still in the same brisk tone. "That bond he has with Potter will atrophy. Distance will erode it, just as proximity intensifies it. It is the nature of such an affinity. Its occult origins give it strength, but also they provide the key to breaking it."

"I don´t want it broken," Hermione said, so fiercely that her chest hurt. "And I don´t see why you do, either, or why you care, or why you'd want to meddle, either. I know you hate Harry --"

"This has very little to do with Potter," said Snape icily. "And you might wish to know that when I spoke of side effects to the antidote affecting Draco's Magid powers, I did not tell you all of them. Do keep in mind that as long as that bond between the two is open, as long as their thoughts and feelings and emotions flow unblocked between them, your precious Potter may well be physically vulnerable to both the antidote's side effects, and the corruption of the poison."

Hermione was stunned. It had never occurred to her that the mental bond between the two boys could have a physical effect on either of them. God damn Snape for bringing up Harry's health, the one issue that panicked her more than any other. "You can't be certain," she opined at last, but a great deal of the fervor had gone from her voice.

"No. But are you willing to take the risk? I would imagine that you would agree that Potter will need all his powers intact for what he will soon have to face."

"They can block each other," Hermione said. "They can control it. Draco could be useful to Harry even if they can't read each other's minds --"

"They cannot control it," Snape said. "And you're a fool if you think they can. They have learned to depend upon each other. Unconsciously, each will continue to reach out for the other, unless they are put in a position where neither is willing or able to do that. Imagine I told you that you could no longer use your right hand. You would refrain from using it for as long as you consciously recollected the prohibition. The moment you were distracted, instinct would triumph over instruction. Unless, of course, that hand was broken - impossible to use."

"I hate this," said Hermione intently. "I hate all of it. And you - and Dumbledore --" She swept Snape with a scornful gaze. "I always wondered if you were behind more of this than you've ever admitted to -- that Polyjuice potion --"

"Is this," Snape interrupted, in a low, serpentine voice, "what you meant by needing something to do, Miss Granger? I had thought perhaps that you wished to learn how Draco's antidote is made. But perhaps you would prefer to simply fling voluble, if unfounded, accusations at me. Which is less than interesting. You may continue, but do not expect me to pay attention. I have work that requires doing."

Hermione blinked at him. She had registered little beyond his offer regarding Draco's antidote. "You'd teach me how to make it?"

"There might come a time," he said, "when you might need to make it, and I might not be there. I cannot teach Draco to make it himself. Eventually he will be too ill for that. It would not be a fair expectation."

"No -- of course -- I mean, I want to know how to make it. I very much want to know."

"Are you sure?" The black eyes under the hooded lids held a latent somberness that was disconcerting. "The side effects are not pleasant. Nor is the taking of the potion itself. It can be painful, and will grow more so the more he takes it. It is constructed to burn the poison out of his blood. As the poison grown stronger and its concentration in his blood increases, the process will be more painful. The more he has of that antidote, the more it will hurt him."

"Even then," Hermione said. She hardly recognized her own voice, the flat determination in it. "He needs it."

Hermione raised her chin and looked at him. He was pale, severe-looking, eyes like black hollows in his gauntly tired face. But she knew that tiredness came from all the nights he had spent working to create this antidote, which, imperfect as it was, was all that they had. And she also knew that Snape himself probably expected that she and Draco would go after Harry eventually. That he knew they could not be kept back. And that he was giving her this knowledge, this antidote, so that if they did go, Draco would be as safe as he could be. So he did care about Draco, even if only a little. And they had that in common. She had never had anything in common with Snape before.

Snape nodded, apparently satisfied. Then he walked around the table and picked up a vial of blackish fluid. "Extract of nightshade," he began, "must first be added to the powdered belladonna, in that order, for the combination to be effective. The subsequent addition of the asphodel is a delicate procedure..."

Blaise found herself taking something of a leisurely tour of the Parkinson estate before she finally discovered Pansy, who was dancing partly dressed on top of a long oak table in the solarium.

Blaise stood next to the table and cleared her throat loudly. Pansy, however, appeared not to notice. She had her hands up over her head and was dancing slowly and drunkenly. Her red silk blouse had slipped down over her shoulders and Blaise could see that her girlish over-the-knee stockings had begun to roll down from the tops. She felt what she always felt around Pansy these days -- pity, mixed with exasperation and suspicion.

She heard a chuckle at her elbow. It was Terence Higgs, having apparently rid himself of his roller skates. "Need a hand up on the table there, Blaise?"

She looked at him narrowly. Attracted to his sandy hair and big dark eyes, she had dated Terence briefly in fifth year before she had come to the weary realization that he was like most Quidditch players: far more interested in Bludgers, Quaffles, and squashing the Gryffindor team than he was in anything else.

"Not sure you'll have any luck talking to Pansy," he added conversationally. "She's had five Dementor's Kisses already. If I were you, I'd get her out of here before she passes out and Marcus or Gregory get their hands on her."

Blaise looked where he was indicating and saw Marcus Flint and Gregory Goyle in the doorway, watching Pansy with knowing smiles. "Ugh," she said. "Terence, help me up."

Terence helped himself to a generous feel of her thigh as he assisted her up onto the table. Blaise let him. A favor was a favor, after all. She got her footing, stepped away, and winked down at him.

"Go distract Greg and Marcus, there's a dear," she said to him, in that tone of voice she had learned, in fact, from Draco -- a tone that promised without promising. As she smiled down at Terence, it was Draco she saw suddenly in her mind's eye. The beginning of term, standing in the sunshine outside the Quidditch changing rooms before their first game, waiting for her to come out, and when she did he'd held out his arms to her, his leather wristguards hanging loose and open. "Buckle me," he'd said, and she'd done it, staring into his eyes the entire time. He'd looked back at her, letting her watch him as if this was some gift he was giving her, and she'd stared at him despite her resentment of his arrogance because he was so beautiful: all that pale hair fired with sunlight, gray eyes bright as shards of glass against the lightly tanned skin. He had done no more than smile at her when she was done, drawing his hands back: "Thanks." And she'd wanted to do something to him, she wasn't sure what, kissing him didn't seem like enough, she'd almost wanted to bite the hand she was still holding by its fingers, hurt and startle him and make him jump, at least he'd be reacting to her then. He was so removed, behind that glass wall she could not penetrate, and she suspected that was why she wanted him so much. Because he was un-haveable.

Thinking about him now made her skin prickle. She turned away from Terence and walked across the table to Pansy, her high heels clicking on the polished wood surface. Reaching the other girl, she tapped her on the shoulder. "Pansy, I need to talk to --"

Pansy swung around drunkenly, saw Blaise, and nearly collapsed against her. Blaise struggled to stay upright with Pansy clinging to her like a limpet.

"Blaise....darling...dance with me," Pansy slurred, her little fox paw hands seizing onto Blaise's waist and pulling her close. She smelled of fever and alcohol, like an overheated dish of brandy. "Everyone will watch us...it'll be fun."

"Pansy, you're drunk. And even if you weren't, I've no inclination to put on a show for Goyle and Flint."

Pansy just giggled and continued to cling on. Flint and Goyle watched hopefully from the sidelines.

Blaise rolled her eyes. "You know, down at the Sleazy Weasel, they pay for performances like this."

"Because I don't want to engage in a table-dancing act for a bunch of gaping plebes? Just because you demean yourself, Pansy, doesn't mean I want to." She jerked on Pansy's arm. "Come on. I want to talk to you. Preferably before you ask Goyle to drink tonic water out of your bra and I have to beat him off with a stick."

"I would never ask Goyle to drink tonic water out of my bra." Pansy hiccuped. "Flint is much more fanciable."

"They're both revolting and if you could tell them apart in your state I'd be shocked. Come along, Pansy. Don't make me drag you."

It once again required the assistance of Terence to manhandle Pansy down off the table and set her on her feet. Blaise hopped down after her, not in the mood for more of Terence's pawings. Ignoring his leer, she pushed Pansy ahead of her, past Flint and Goyle, down the hall, and into a small side bedroom.

Closing the door behind them, Blaise took out her wand and pointed it at Pansy. "Sobrietus!"

Pansy collapsed backward onto the bed as if Blaise had pushed her, and covered her face with her hands.

Blaise slid her wand back into the top of her stocking and crossed her arms. "Sit up, Pansy."

Pansy sat up slowly. She was rumpled, her lipstick smeared, her hair in unsightly snarls. She was also, obviously, stone cold sober. "You cow," she said. "You didn't have to do that."

"Oh, but I think I did. I needed to talk to you, and that wasn't going to happen while you were determined to show your knickers to the entire Slytherin seventh year class."

"I don't know, you were getting a bit too hands-on with me there for a while. Not that I blame you. You must be rather lonely, what with your little boyfriend having vanished off the face the earth."

"And there you're so right," Blaise agreed pleasantly. "Considering he wouldn't have laid a finger on you if he'd known who you really were."

Pansy sneered. "As opposed to all the fingers Draco laid on you? Like we didn't all know he was only going out with you so nobody would notice he was trying to get into that horrid Gryffindor's pants --"

Pansy shrugged. "I wouldn't have thought it of Draco, either. He was always so proper. So right about Mudbloods and Muggle-lovers, but I guess that's what some purebloods want, they want to roll around in the mud, they like whatever's dirty and sickening..."

Blaise leaned back against the door. "And what about Ron Weasley? Did he make you sick, was that what that was?"

Pansy raised her chin. "He's a pureblood," she said. "His blood's as blue as Draco's is. The Weasleys are just poor, is all. Which you ought to know about, Blaise."

"Oh, yes. You are." Blaise detached herself from the door and crossed the room to stand by Pansy. She was looking down at the top of the other girl's head now, where her tangled brown hair had escaped its glittering pins. "What did you give him, Pansy?" she asked softly. "There weren't enough protection spells for all of us, and you wouldn't have let him go on unarmed like that, not if you were in love with him. What did you do to protect him?"

"Oh, but it does. I remember you asking me for one of my extra barrettes, and how hacked off you were when I wouldn't give it to you. But you know the strictures against giving out our protections to those outside the circle. I'm guessing you made your own. Does Weasley even know what it was you gave him?"

Pansy's lips twitched. She looked as if she were about to break into one of those vindictive sobbing fits she was so prone to. But Blaise took almost no notice: her mind was ticking back, bits and pieces of half-forgotten events clicking into place like bits of a puzzle being fitted together. She remembered Ginny Weasley tumbling precipitately off her broom after flying near her brother during that last Quidditch match, remembered Neville Longbottom trying to enlist the help of the school prefects to find his missing toad. Remembered sitting by Malcolm's bed in the hospital wing as he tried to recollect the last thing he had seen before he'd been knocked out, remembered him telling her he'd been on his way to the prefects' meeting room....

"Bloody hell, Pansy," she said. "That was risky. And at school, too. Did you kill it yourself? How'd you get rid of it?"

Pansy's head jerked up, her lips curling back over her small, pointed teeth. "Shut up, Blaise," she hissed. "You don't know anything --"

"And so do I!" Pansy was on her feet, her small hands gripped into fists at her side. "I notice you're not wearing your barrettes, Blaise darling," she hissed. "I wonder where they are? If I had to guess, I'd say you gave them to Draco, your darling Draco, that traitorous Mudblood-loving rat. You know perfectly well why he wasn't meant to have any. He's not one of us anymore. You talk about me being in love -- I've seen you looking at him when you think he doesn't see you. Maybe he paid you off, but it was real for you, wasn't it, Blaise? Mock me all you want -- at least I got to have Ron -- at least he wanted to be with me --"

"At least what I gave him will protect him!" Pansy raged, her pale little face distended with fury. "You can't protect Draco -- he's not to be let live -- I heard my father say so -- he'll die and there's nothing you can do about it -- and I'm glad! You always got every boy you ever wanted, Blaise, every boy you ever looked at. All you had to do was smile at them and they'd fall over themselves and you never wanted any of them. But you wanted him. And you couldn't have him -- he never wanted you back -- you saw him looking over at the Gryffindor table, just like I did -- and now he'll die, and you'll never have him, and I hope it hurts you, I hope it breaks your heart, if you even have one --"

Gasping, Pansy cut herself off. Tears were pouring down her flushed cheeks. Her hands were still fisted at her sides.

Blaise looked at her. "What do you mean?" she said, in a deadly quiet tone. "About Draco. Is something going to happen to him?"

Pansy raised her damp face. Her small mouth was set in a hard little line. "Don't you get it?" she said. "It's already happened."

"You can't help him," Pansy said. "You can't even help yourself," and with that, she pushed past Blaise, flounced to the door, and stalked out, slamming it hard behind her.

In the ancient days of the wizarding world, and even now sometimes among the upper classes and the more traditional families, one could often tell the content of a letter by the color of the bird chosen to deliver it. A white bird meant a message of peace or friendship, red was for love, black for vengeance, brown for a peace offering, blue meant victory and gray meant death or defeat.

The bird that swooped in the window of the castle that afternoon was a brown barn owl, its throat ringed with a collar of metal. It was pleased to find the inside of the castle warm, and rode the gentle currents of air with slight motions of its wings, sailing down corridors and up staircases until it found the small room with the boy it was looking for inside it.

The boy sat against the wall with his legs drawn up, his pale-blond head on his knees and his slender arms wrapped around himself, and silvery light pooled around him on the floor, or perhaps it was not light at all.

Very slowly, Draco raised his head from his arms and looked at the bird. He had been sitting in this one position for so long that even raising his head sent a shock of pain down through his cramped muscles.

He wondered vaguely at the fact that the bird had managed to find him. He would not have expected anyone to be able to find him where he had gone, but then this was one of his father's owls, bred to his own blood, and besides, they were the best owls money could buy.

What he had been holding in his hand dropped to the ground with a metallic clang as he reached to take the letter strapped to the bird's leg. His hand hurt badly, and it took several tries before he was able to unfasten the letter and open it. Only later did it occur to him that perhaps he should have used his other hand for the task.

The light coming through the narrow window above him had begun to dim. Late afternoon, then. Draco stretched his legs out along the stone floor, ignoring the shrieks of protest from his cramped joints, and read the letter he had spread out on his lap.

He has left you then, as I expected he would. I told you once you were wasting your time to barter your destiny for the friendship of a boy who would never like you; you have gone one better than that, and thrown away your life. You never did know when enough was enough.

That aside, I am not writing to merely to upbraid you. Severus will not find the antidote he seeks for you. I can tell you that with utter honesty. Your only hope for survival, indeed, for salvation, rests with me. I am your father. I gave you life once, and am prepared to do it again. The Dark Lord has vowed to me that he will see it done, and indeed, with the aid of the Worthy Objects, it can be done.

In exchange for my aid to you, I expect a token of your subsequent unswerving loyalty to me. Should you see reason at any point in the future, and I expect that you will, send back to me the seal ring I gave you, the mark of our family. By that token I will know that you have come to your senses, regained your familial pride, and are prepared to once again stand on our side.

Consider quickly, Draco. The time you have for this decision is not much. It should be an easy choice. When last we spoke, it appeared to me that you thought you had discovered something worth dying for. Can you still say the same?

Draco looked down at the letter for several long moments. He scrubbed the back of his bruised and dirty hand across his eyes, and read the letter again. Then he turned it over, Summoned a quill to himself, and wrote across the blank back of the parchment three short sentences in what looked like silvery ink. It was not ink.

The physical act of writing hurt too much for him to want to write anything lengthier. Besides, Draco felt he had little more to say on the subject. He would hear back from his father on this topic, he was quite sure. This letter had been the opening salvo in what promised to be a most unpleasant exchange. Not that Draco cared. In comparison to the other letter he had received that day, the missive from his father seemed as gentle as a pat on the head.

He strapped the letter to the owl's leg, and watched it fly out the open window and into the late afternoon sky beyond.

Once inside King's Cross, Harry debated briefly what to do with his baggage -- he wasn't keen on hefting an enormous bag that held half of his worldly possessions in it through Diagon Alley all day. Especially once he realized that the words GRYFFINDOR SEEKER were still embroidered across the side of the bag in yellow thread. He'd have to do something about that.

Harry remembered Draco telling him, You suck at incognito, Potter, and shrugged wryly to himself.

He wound up storing his bag in a locker, which took the last of his Muggle money. He'd have to walk to the Leaky Cauldron, but he didn't mind much, the exercise would hopefully wake him up. He pulled the wrapper off a Scrumdiddlyumptious bar and nibbled it thoughtfully on his way to the station exit (having conscientiously shoved the wrapper into his pocket, as it wouldn't do to have the Muggle porters encountering the moving pictures on the enchanted plastic.)

The exit escalator took Harry past a bank of mirrors. It took him a moment to recognize himself, and then he stared. The boy looking back at him from the mirror's flat surface, with his Muggle clothes -- jeans and trainers, zip-up blue rain jacket, worn white t-shirt -- his tangled black hair, his face looking strangely naked without his glasses, seemed for a moment a stranger. And the clothes, which he had dug out of the back of his closet, looked so aggressively Muggle. They made him think of his past self, the Harry who lived with the Dursleys, the Harry who ached to belong somewhere, anywhere other than where he was.

Harry, who had found the place where he belonged, and then left it in order to save it.

And that was another thing. More than anything else, he thought to himself, he looked young and defenseless. Without his robes, without a wand in his hand, without his scar or the badge of his House, he looked like any teenage boy. Half gawky adolescent and half defenseless child. A little boy with a chocolate bar in his hand. And he was supposed to save the world.

He wished abruptly that Draco was there, because Draco would tell him that he was being stupid. It wasn't as if he'd wandered arbitrarily into the business of world saving, he'd been born to it, bred to it, was uniquely marked for it. Blood, inheritance and choices had made him what he was. Every choice he had ever made bringing him to this place and to the points beyond it. It didn't matter that he looked like a boy. He was more than that, and he'd have to learn to accept it.

You're being stupid, Potter, he said to himself, as he reached the top of the escalator and tossed the rest of his half-eaten chocolate bar into the nearest bin. All those years poncing around like you're the Chosen One and now you're trying to get out of it? Would it help if I got you a Harry Potter, World Savior nametag you could wear around the house so you don't forget?

The voice in his head had a slight drawling quality to it. Although Harry knew his inner monologue was not nearly as funny as Draco would have been under the same circumstances, he grinned faintly to himself anyway as he walked out of the station. It helped a little, if not by much.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon and Hermione had just finished cleaning up the mess in the common room. Hours had passed since she had finished with Snape in the Potions dungeon. He'd forced her to make the antidote mixture no less than five times until her methodology was perfect. Hermione had almost enjoyed the experience. She had always liked being able to lose herself in the solution to a problem. It was not until she left the dungeon, a box filled with the ingredients needed to make a fortnight's worth of antidote in her arms, that she'd again faced the fact that Draco was still missing.

A second thorough search of the castle had turned up nothing. The Slytherin dungeons were empty and there was no reply when she banged on Draco's door. She'd horribly annoyed Madam Pomfrey by showing up twice at the infirmary door tearfully inquiring if Draco had come by and had scandalized Filch by appearing in his office to beg for his assistance. He'd sent her away smartly. She'd wanted to see Dumbledore, but Filch had grumblingly told her that Dumbledore had been called away to the Ministry.

In despair, she'd set herself to the task of cleaning up the common room. She didn't want to think about what Draco might be doing, and she didn't want to think about Harry. Therefore, she needed something to do. Otherwise, it was too overwhelming.

Cleaning up took less time than she had expected. Having cast the last Reparo charm on a smashed lamp, Hermione rose to her feet --

And almost dropped her wand as the portrait door swung wide open, and Draco stepped into the room.

Hermione stood frozen for a moment, completely unsure what to do. She stared at him. And he looked back at her, hands in his pockets, shoulders canted slightly, an inquiring look on his face. She wasn't sure what she had expected, exactly. Some sign of terrific inner turmoil, whatever that might happen to be. If it had been Harry, whatever he was feeling would have been written all over his face. But it was Draco and his face was unreadable.

He looked...the same. Bright silver-gilt hair perfectly in place, perfectly elegant clothes perfectly clean and perfectly worn. The only odd thing was that there were gloves on his hands. It was warm in the room and she could not imagine why he was wearing gloves indoors. Perhaps he had just come from outside. Perhaps he had taken a walk around the lake to clear his head. Perhaps he hadn't, after all, been down in the cellars setting fire to things and jumping up on and down on anything that reminded him of Harry.

"Thinking," he said. He flung himself into the armchair opposite the fire and stretched his long legs out until his feet rested on the ottoman near the fire. "And I talked to Snape a bit."

Hermione came and sat down opposite him, still staring. "Did you take your antidote?" she demanded, trying to keep the worst of the panicked inquiry from her voice.

He raised one silver eyebrow. "Of course I did. Why wouldn't I?" He stretched his hands out towards the fire, saw her looking at his gloves, and retracted them. "I think we ought to discuss our game plan," he said.

She nodded, unable to speak. She had been prepared for incoherently upset or hysterical Draco. She was not prepared for calm, rational, faintly bored-looking Draco. As if his best friend in the world ran off on him towards certain death every day, leaving behind a letter telling him that every single awful thing he might ever have thought about himself was essentially true. She had seen Draco get more upset than this over a hangnail. In fact, the temper tantrum he had thrown over a bad haircut in sixth year was still a legend. People pointed at the scorch marks on the dungeon wall and spoke of the incident in hushed tones.

"I mean, he doesn't want to be followed. I understand that. And normally I'd say we should just let him go. After all, he seems to have a decent handle on the situation, wouldn't you say? And heroic rescues are awfully embarrassing if you're rescuing someone who isn't actually in danger."

"I mean, you say, 'Here we are to save you,' and they say, 'But I just ran off to have a quiet think and a pint,' and then there's embarrassment and apologies and you've wasted a whole afternoon and I think I feel a bit sick. Ugh." He closed his eyes and breathed deeply for a moment. "The antidote," he said. "It makes me a little nauseated. Sorry. Where was I?"

"Rescuing people who aren't in danger," she replied, quietly. "Draco. What are you doing?"

Something flashed behind his eyes briefly, a dark light that sent a chill through Hermione's nerves. "I don't know what you mean. We were talking about everyone's favorite subject. The Boy Who Ran Away. Leaving you to pick up the pieces as usual, I might add. Being a selfish fuckwit must just be built into that whole 'How To Be A Hero' business."

"Because villains are noted for their kindness and generosity?" Hermione said. A faint inkling of what was going on with Draco had begun to seep into her consciousness. "Look, I know you're angry at Harry --"

"This isn't angry," Draco said. A bright spark of fire flashed beneath the lowered lids of his eyes. "And I'd rather not have a sentimental conversation about Potter, if you don't mind. As my father used to say, sentiment breeds weakness. A prescient man, my father."

"True," Draco admitted. "But as a strategic move, you must admit it was effective."

Hermione stared at him. Finally, she said faintly, "I think you'd better tell me about your game plan."

"All right." Draco leaned forward. The firelight danced along the curve of his mouth as he talked, the line of the full lower lip marked as if he had bitten it. "He might not be letting me into his mind these days, but I can still think like he does. He left his Firebolt behind, so he didn't go anywhere by broomstick. He could have Flooed, but I know he hates that, and besides, Floo networks can be tampered with. I would imagine he took the train. Either from Hogsmeade or from one of the Muggle villages along the train route to London. Probably the midnight train. We've taken that one ourselves, if you recall."

"I recall," said Hermione. "And I'd pretty much come to that conclusion too. So I'm glad we agree. The question, of course, is where did he get off the train?"

"London," said Draco promptly. "He'd go to London. He's familiar enough with it that it won't panic him, it's big enough that he can lose himself, Diagon Alley has whatever he might need, and if he needs money he'll have to go to Gringotts. And he will need money. He never brings enough to school and he always has to owl for extra if he wants to buy anything."

"He wouldn't walk into Gringotts as Harry Potter," Hermione pointed out. "He's not that dense. And he wouldn't stay at the Leaky Cauldron. He'd find somewhere where they wouldn't recognize him on sight. I wish I had a map of wizarding London --" Her mind was busy now, ticking over possibilities. "Have you got one?"

Draco looked thoughtful. "I have a map of wizarding strip clubs but I doubt that would be all that useful to you."

"Fantastic Breasts and Where to Find Them. You can borrow it if you think it will help."

"Who knows?" Draco's voice was careless. "That boy is apparently just full of surprises."

He folded his arms across his chest, interlacing the gloved fingers. "Hermione?" he replied, mimicking her serious tone.

"What are we going to do with him? Bring him back here, I guess. Did you think we should go somewhere else?"

"No. I didn't mean that. I mean...what are you going to do?" She took a deep breath. "I can tell what you're doing. And I know why you're doing it. And if that's what you have to do, then fine. But it won't hold when you see Harry and you know it won't --"

Bang! Draco had kicked over the ottoman. It hit the floor with a crash that made Hermione jump. "Are you asking me if I'm going to hurt him?" he said, and there was suddenly a terrible light in his eyes and his voice cut like the edge of a whip. "Are you asking me that?"

"Then what did you mean?" His eyes narrowed and Hermione shivered. For a moment she remembered all those past years, the semi-feral cruelty of which this delicately pretty boy was capable when pushed.

"Actually, I didn't." He lowered his eyelids. His lashes were a shade darker than his hair, a tarnished color. "And for your information, I want to find him for the same reasons you do. Well, perhaps not precisely the same reasons," and his lip curled slightly, less a smile than wry shrug. "To make sure he's all right, to bring him back safe, you know the story. So he won't die. Because I promised I'd look after him, didn't I? And I will."

"I don´t understand why you're doing this," she said, despairingly. "It's me -- I love Harry -- I miss Harry -- I want to talk about it --"

"Back at the Manor," Draco interrupted, still staring at the fire, his voice very flat, "back at the Manor, when I was growing up, my father used to have this chair he'd bring out every time he had a dinner party and he'd put it next to him and I'd have to sit in it. Those parties used to go on for hours and hours. You wouldn't know what something like that would be like, but they're like ceremonies. Very formal affairs. Everyone plays a part. Everyone. My father was like that. He planned everything. That chair was a special trick of his. It was enchanted. It had what looked like a row of raised decorations across the back. But they weren't just decorations. They were filed to points like knives. They ran along the arms of the chair, too. And I'd have to sit very straight all through dinner and speak normally and behave normally, and if I moved to make myself more comfortable, or shifted away from the knives, then they'd get longer, and sharper, and it would be worse. And I couldn't get up or get away from them. I had to pretend that I was having a good time. And I got good at it, too. It took years. But everyone always told my father what wonderful manners I had."

"Not a riddle," he clarified. "A parable. They're two entirely different things."

"A short tale from which a moral conclusion may be drawn. Better living through allegory. Surely you know what a parable is."

"I know what a parable is," Hermione said. "But I don't have quite the gothic turn of mind that you have. I'm practical. You know that. If thinking about Harry is like knives sticking into you then I don't see why you would even agree to come with me and look for him in the first place --"

"I haven't got a choice," said Draco. "You ought to know that. It's your doing, anyway."

"'Stay with him'," Draco said. "Don't you remember? 'Stay with him always - and watch him - and make sure he´s all right. Don´t leave him, and don´t let him go off on his own - and if he does, you have to follow him. Promise me, Draco. Promise me.'"

Hermione blinked at him. "I didn't think this would happen," she said. "When I made you promise that. I thought I might not be there to protect him, and that you would. You don't have to..."

"But I do have to," he said. "I'm a Malfoy. And I gave you my word. I don't get out of that."

"No," he said. "You can't. And you wouldn't, if you could. You said you needed me. You said I shouldn't leave you. Do you want me to leave you?"

He was still staring at the fire. Hermione wound her fingers nervously together. "No," she said. And then, "Can I ask you just one more thing?"

"I still think we should start with Gringotts," he said, cutting her off. "It's worth owling them. At least we can alert them to look for Harry. The Leaky Cauldron, too. He's Harry. He forgets...sometimes...how famous he is. He'd cover his scar, I think...maybe take his glasses off. But I don't think he realizes how recognizable his face is. Even his eyes. Not a lot of people have eyes that color. I don't think it would occur to him to change them..."

Hermione slid off the chair. She was kneeling on the floor now, not at his feet, but opposite him, looking up at his face. He was still staring into the fire and his hands were a black tangle in his lap.

"Draco," she said, again. Her voice caught -- she wanted to say gentle things, but knew her words would break like hummingbird wings against the glass walls of the resistance he had thrown up to keep everyone out and himself in. "Did you..."

Before he could speak the portrait door swung open and Madam Pomfrey stepped into the room. She looked slightly flustered and there was a packet of bandages still in her hand, as if she'd forgotten she was holding it.

"Ginny is awake," she said. "She's asking for you both. She says she has to speak to you immediately."

The goblin behind the bank teller window squinted its eyes at him suspiciously. "And you're quite sure you're Sirius Black?"

"Yes," said Harry, firmly. "I hold the rights to Vault Six Hundred and Eighty Seven along with my godson, Harry Potter. Here's my key, right here, and my paperwork -- you can see it's all in order."

The goblin raised on arched eyebrow, but indeed, everything was in order -- Harry had the large gold key to the vault, and the paperwork he'd taken from Sirius' desk at the Manor. Harry was, briefly, thankful that the wizarding world did not rely on things like photographic identification, and even more thankful that goblins both had poor eyesight, and took little interest in the affairs of wizards. "Indeed, and may I say, Mister Black," said the goblin, lifting the key in its long, clever fingers, "that you're looking fantastic for your age, really fantastic. One would hardly recognize you from your Wanted posters."

"Well," said Harry weakly. "I moisturize daily. It does wonders for the complexion."

The goblin shrugged, losing interest. "Very well. I'll have someone take you down to your vault. Unless there's something else I can do for you?"

"Wait," said Harry hastily. "There is one thing --" Turning his pocket inside out, he produced the gold coin he'd taken from Lucius' belongings, and pushed it across the counter towards the goblin, who squinted at it in much the same manner it had squinted at Harry. "Could you tell me anything about this coin?"

"It's a Carpathian Gallien," said the goblin, after a moment's contemplation. "Not much seen around these parts, Mister Black. Romanian, probably, in origin. I can certainly check it for you while you're down in the vaults, and give you a precise location when you return."

Two smaller goblins in red and gold suits were summoned to lead Harry down to the vaults, and Harry allowed himself to be led. The goblin behind the counter watched bemusedly as the thin boy with the bright green eyes and the untidy black hair disappeared through the double doors at the end of the hall. Harry Potter breaking into his own vault, he thought to himself with a mixture of disapprobation and amusement. Wizards certainly are a peculiar breed, very peculiar indeed.

Hermione sat and listened to Ginny's recitation of events with the bizarre sense that she was dreaming. It all seemed so very unreal. That such enormous occurrences had been going on behind the scenes and she had had not a single clue about them astonished her. Although, she supposed, after Harry's departure nothing should come as a shock.

Draco stood by the window while Ginny spoke. No flicker of interest crossed his expressionless face. He stared out at the darkening sky. There was frost on the windowpane and it threw oddly shaped shadows against his pale skin, like feathery scars.

"To paraphrase Hamlet, Oedipus, Lear, and all those other guys," was all he said, when she had finished speaking, "It would have been nice if we'd known all this before things got quite so out of hand."

Ginny, pale but composed, looked at him, and then at Hermione. Her eyes were dark, unhappy. There were bruise-blue shadows under them although other than that Madam Pomfrey's healing magic had taken care of every mark on her. "I know what you're thinking," she said. "I was incredibly foolish. And, Draco -- I stole from you. From your house. I'm sorry. This is all my fault."

"That would be an accurate assessment of the situation, yes," said Draco, still staring out the window. His gloved thumbs were hooked into the belt at his waist. "At least Dumbledore took that Time-Turner away from you. About time."

Ginny said nothing, but the tense lines around her mouth deepened. Hermione fought down the urge to scream. It was at this point that Harry would have stepped in and said something to Draco, and Draco would have made a smart remark back, but he would have quelled himself, because Harry had requested it. But there was no Harry here to curb or curtail him and there had never been anyone else he would listen to. "Draco," she said, knowing it would make very little difference. "Don't. She knows."

An almost imperceptible shift in his position, and now he was looking at her out of the corner of one gray eye. She could sense the rage in him. It was like a thin silver wire winding through all of his movements. He was holding it down. She could see that, too. But eventually it would filter into everything he did like poison spreading slowly into water.

"I am not entirely sure," he said, "that we can assume she knows anything, given her recent actions. Although I suppose there is a logic to it. Apparently we didn't have enough murderous psychopaths running around with my father, the Dark Lord, and that nymphomaniacal postal worker of his constantly stalking us. Apparently Ginny here decided four psychopaths makes a matched set. I think we should just all take a moment to admire the symmetry."

"I know," Ginny said again. She was still calm and her voice betrayed no hurt. Only her fingers, plucking nervously at the white counterpane stretched over her thin knees, indicated her tension. "I'll take care of it, as much as I can. I'll tell Dumbledore --"

The effect of this statement on Draco was immediate, galvanic, and astonishing. He went white as a sheet and spun away from the window, hissing, "No. No! You can't go to Dumbledore. I forbid it."

Ginny stared at him. So did Hermione. "You forbid it?" Ginny demanded. "What on earth ...?"

Draco laughed -- not a mirthful noise at all, but a peremptory bark of derision. "You really don't know?" His lips curled back as he looked at them; he was the only person Hermione could think of who could make a sneer look elegant. "Don't you understand what she's done? Intentionally or not, Ginny, you raised the dead. Lord Voldemort -- Tom Riddle -- he was dead, and you brought him back. That's necromancy. That's the worst kind of magic there is. It's the Dementor's Kiss. You go straight to Azkaban, no appeals, no second chances. Do you understand? They'll kill you for this."

Hermione sucked in a little gasp of air. "No, surely not. She's an underaged witch, and she didn't do it on purpose --"

"You tell that to my father," Draco spat, his voice edged with venom. "He tried to kill her when she was eleven, you think he wouldn't now? And maybe Dumbledore would try to protect her but I'd like to see him and this fucking deserted school stand up against the Ministry, the Dark Lord, and all my father's Death Eaters. They'll lay siege to this place and they'll drag her out of her and throw her to the Dementors in the middle of Hogsmeade and they'll be making an example -- my father loves to make examples --" He turned his blazing silver gaze on Ginny. "And may I point out," he added, more quietly, "that, since Finnigan obviously isn't Finnigan anymore, and we don't know where he is, there might well be a murder charge in there somewhere, too."

At that, Ginny did lose her composure. Tears flooded into her eyes and spilled down her cheeks.

Hermione held herself back. She wanted to go to Ginny and comfort her. But more than she wanted to do that, she wanted to see what Draco would do. He stood where he was without moving for a long moment, looking down at Ginny, who was obviously trying to get a hold of herself. She cried the way someone who desperately does not want to be crying would cry -- breathy, tearful gasps, as if she could not get enough air. She brushed the back of her hand furtively across her eyes, scattering tears onto the counterpane. "I'm sorry --" she said. "Crying. It's stupid, I know."

Draco's eyes narrowed. Then he reached out his hand and gently touched his gloved fingers to her cheek. "It's a war," he said. "There are casualties in a war."

"He might be all right," Hermione said, quietly. "In most cases of possession, once the possessing demon or spirit is destroyed, the victim reverts to normal with no recollection of what occurred."

Draco took his hand from Ginny's cheek, but sat down at the foot of her bed. This was better behavior than Hermione had expected. "And in the other cases?" he asked.

Trust Draco to ask questions Hermione did not want to answer. "Sometimes they remember," she said.

Ginny's weeping had quieted, but she flinched at this. "If it'll help Seamus," she said, "we should go to Dumbledore anyway. I don't care what happens to me."

"But we don't know that it will help Seamus," said Hermione. "And Dumbledore isn't here, either -- there's a note on his door that says he's gone to London. We don't know how dangerous Tom is or even how much he remembers. I mean, Ginny...you said he attacked you last night, and you were knocked out."

"But we found you this morning," Hermione said. "And he hadn't -- hurt you any more. You said all the bruises you have and the bump on your head, that was all from last night. Then you were unconscious. If he'd wanted to hurt you or kill you, he could have. And he didn't. He ran away instead. Maybe it was just a temporary possession, and then Seamus reasserted himself, and was completely horrified and ran away." She shrugged. "I know it sounds stupid, but the point is, we don't know."

"There is one thing we do know," said Draco. He had taken a parchment out of his pocket and was holding it up to the light. After a brief moment, Hermione recognized it as the Marauder's Map. "Neither Seamus Finnigan nor Tom Riddle is currently in the castle."

"I know." Ginny's voice was small. "I can sort of...feel Tom when he's around. He's not around. He's gone."

Hermione sighed. "Our first order of business is to find Harry," she said. "Then we'll tell him about the Tom Riddle business, and see what he thinks we should do. Meantime, I'll owl Seamus -- it's worth a try -- and owl a few people in Diagon Alley, tell them to keep a look out for him." She blinked at Ginny's expression. "Ginny, what?"

Draco, in the middle of stowing the Marauder's Map in a pocket, looked up, his expression for a moment unguarded. Then his eyes went opaque.

"No." Ginny sat up very straight, tossing her hair back. "Tell me. I told you everything, please don't hide things from me."

"Indeed," said a voice behind them. A voice that made Hermione jump and spin around in surprise. A voice she had not been expecting here, just as she had not been expecting to see its owner.

"That's pretty much what I was about to say myself," Charlie Weasley went on, striding quickly towards them, his fiery hair tousled and damp from the cold air outside. "Now what's all this with the miserable expressions and the talk about hiding things? Would somebody like to tell me what's going on?"

When, halfway up what seemed like the sixth round of spiral stairs, a three-headed snake lunged out at him from behind an alcove, Ron was perturbed.

Gasping out a very rude word, he stumbled backward, almost knocking Rhysenn down the rest of the stairs. She shrieked and staggered to the side as he seized a torch out of a nearby bracket and spun to face the serpent.

Ron swore again, under his breath. He hated snakes. Not as much as he hated spiders, but he was still not a fan. The fact that Harry could speak to them had never endeared the cold-blooded, slithering creatures to him much. They remained, in his mind, creepy and vaguely slimy.

He moved slowly up the stairs, the torch outthrust stiffly before him. He could see the shadow of the snake thrown in sharp relief against the wall up ahead of him, and he swallowed hard, his throat as dry as dust. He tried to imagine what Harry or Draco would do in this situation. That was easy in Harry's case; Harry would talk to the snake, whisper soothingly to it in Parseltongue, and soon enough the snake would adoringly obey his every command. Draco would whip out one of his annoyingly sharp and expensive-looking swords, and within five minutes would be juggling two of the snake's heads while playing football with the third one and mentally composing a scathing one-liner to fit the occasion.

Ron, knowing himself capable of none of those actions, tightened his grip on the torch and took another, hesitant step upward.

"Oh, for goodness sake," said an irritable voice behind him; he turned his head and saw that Rhysenn had regained her feet and was regarding him with a vexed expression. "There's no need to get so wound up about Kevin."

"Oh, really." Ron's voice dripped sarcasm. "It didn't occur to you that maybe we should take one of the other exits to the roof, then? Like, the north exit or the east exit even the west exit?"

"If you're so afraid," said Rhysenn with a sniff, "I'll go first," and with that, she stomped by him, the skirt of her corseted black dress held high. Ron followed her, feeling foolish.

The snake watched Rhysenn go by with only a flicker of it's lazy adder's tongues. But when Ron made as if to pass it, it reared up, and fixed him with the cold gaze of its six golden eyes.

Ron stared back at it. Its eyes were hypnotic, gold fissures in the dark scales around it. When it spoke to him, he was only somewhat surprised: he heard its voice inside his mind, much in the same way that he imagined Harry heard Draco's.

You are bitter, for one so blessed. Such a gift as yours is rare. The dreams you dream are true dreams and will come to pass.

Ron thought of his vision of Ginny dead and it struck him again, like a second blow against his heart. Is there nothing I can do? Is the future I see set in stone? Can it be changed?

No. What you see cannot be altered or undone. All things end, Diviner, and to you is given the gift of seeing those ends. If you tried, you could see the end of the world.

Ron lifted the torch; the light of it blazed up between them and turned the gold eyes he stared at into six individual flames. What do you mean? What else can I do?

But the snake, startled by the fire, shied away, hissing. It slithered away from him, and vanished through a hole in the alcove.

But Rhysenn had caught at his sleeve. Her gray eyes were dark with some distress he could not define. "Do not trouble the castle's inhabitants," she said softly. "It would be unwise."

Ron said nothing, but allowed her to tug him up the stairs. When he drew level with her, she moved to take his arm, and in his distracted state, he let her.

He had been looking down at his hands where they lay open on his knees, now he looked up at his sister. "What is it, Ginny?"

She could still hardly believe he was here. He had arrived so unexpectedly, had shooed Hermione and Draco out of the infirmary, closed the curtains around her bed, and sat down on the low chair next to her. She had waited for him to say something, but he had been silent, allowing Ginny her own silence, giving her the space to gather herself.

His blue eyes were on her now, steady, reassuring. She thought of her brothers. Bill, so much older than she was, she had always looked up to. He was dashing and glamorous. Percy was reliable, sometimes irritating, dependable in an emergency. George and Fred had made her life a torment when she was younger, but they also made her laugh. Ron, she loved the most out of all of them, he was the closest to her in age, the most like a friend. But Charlie was the kindest.

"He owled me. He said you'd been hurt, I should come right away." Charlie shrugged. "So I came right away. I should thank him for owling me and not Mum or Dad -- I don´t think they could have taken it right now."

"He must have done it while I was unconscious," Ginny said. She looked down at her hands against the white bedspread, several shades darker than the white sheets but still very pale. She felt bruised all over, although she knew Madam Pomfrey had healed most of her injuries. She could still feel where Tom had touched her. Like rings of fire where his hands had braceleted her wrists, her arms. Her mouth felt bruised where he had bitten it. "Charlie," she said, slowly. "I've ... done bad things. Really bad things."

He put his hand over hers on the bedspread. His fingers were warm and strong. "You don't have to tell me," he said.

"I can't tell you," she said. "But I want to. I want to ask you what I should do."

She shook her head. "I wish I could," she said. "I really do. But it seems like... running away."

"Running away from what, exactly?" Charlie asked. "You want to be with your friends when they need you. I understand that. You want to be with Hermione and with Draco and Harry--"

"Harry's gone," Ginny said. "They don't want to tell me what's happened. But I can see it in their faces. He's gone off somewhere."

Charlie looked at her as if he couldn't quite believe what she was saying. "Harry's gone? Gone where?"

"Oh," said Charlie. He looked stunned. Ginny, for a moment, was almost amused. "You sound pretty calm about it."

"I always thought he would," Ginny said. "They never saw it. They didn't want to. It was just a matter of time. If they hadn't loved him so much he would have left a long time ago. He was never really entirely here. There was always that part of him he had sort of bound up, locked away. Waiting. There was always that part of Harry you couldn't get to or touch."

"No," she said. "No, I don't. That's why I could see it, and they couldn't." She lifted her chin, looked at her brother. "Charlie..."

Charlie leaned forward and put his arms around her, and Ginny let her head fall down on his shoulder and for a moment just allowed herself to lose herself in being held by her brother, in forgetting. Charlie smelled like the kitchen at the Burrow, like smoke and soap and scrubbed wood. He smelled like home.

But when she closed her eyes, other images came to dance against the backs of her eyelids. Other blue eyes lit the darkness in her mind's eye. She heard a drawling voice in her ear and felt the bones in her hand snap like twigs. But he didn't hurt me. He could have done anything to me. I was unconscious. But he just left me there. Why didn't he murder me when he had the chance?

Charlie pulled away from her, looking startled, and she realized she had spoken aloud. "What on earth are you talking about? Who could have killed you?"

Charlie expelled a breath. "I can't make you come home, Ginny," he said. "All I can tell you is that I think it would be the right thing for you to do. We're all exhausted...working around the clock...we could use you. Use your help. And...we miss you."

Ginny looked tiredly at her brother. It was not that she wanted to stay. She wanted to go home. She could not help Harry; he was gone. Hermione had never needed her help and did not need it now. And Draco. She would have wanted to help him, but she couldn't; she could see through the coldness in his eyes to what lay beneath: shock, panic-stricken loneliness, abandonment beyond any abandonment she could imagine. And she knew who would need to help him with that, who would be, perhaps, the only person who could, and it was not her.

And there was something else, as well. Something harder to define. She looked down at her hand. The burn was healed, but it had left a latticework of pale white lines along her skin, from fingertips to wrist. Like a veiling of openwork white lace. She was glad it was there; it served as a reminder. Tom was out there, somewhere, in the world; he was there because she had brought him here. And this time there was no Harry to send him back where he had come from. This time she would have to do it herself.

The last of the sunlight had narrowed to a coppery spindle and the rest of the sky was full of ominous black clouds. A cool wind blew from the Forbidden Forest across the lake, up over the grounds, and broke like a wave against the front steps of the school where three small figures stood in a huddled group. A taller figure, scarlet-haired and wrapped in a dark green cloak, waited at the foot of the stairs.

Hermione said her farewells to Ginny first, embracing the younger girl tightly, and Ginny hugged her back. Then Hermione stepped away and back up the steps, leaving Ginny and Draco to say good-bye to each other with a modicum of privacy.

Draco stood one step above Ginny, looking down at her. Her hair was the same coppery color as the last sunset light. He reached out slowly -- everything seemed to be coming slowly now, as if he moved through thickened water -- and tugged on a lock of her bright hair and said, "I suppose I haven't treated you very well, have I?"

Incredibly, the corner of her mouth curved into the ghost of a smile. "You make it hard to be complacent, you know," she said. "I know why you said what you said to me, yesterday. But you don't make it very easy, do you? On anyone. Yourself least of all."

There was a part of Draco's mind that simply shut down whenever anyone said anything about Harry, and he shut it down now. It was like an portcullis falling; he could hear the ringing sound as the iron spikes drove home, sealing that part of himself safely away. "Yeah. He's gone. Did Hermione tell you that?"

"No," she said. "I could see it in your face." She reached up, then, and brushed the hair out of his eyes; he withstood the brush of her slim cold fingers against his skin with a twinge of guilt, feeling somehow that touching him might damage her in some way he couldn't quite explain. "Now I'm worried," she said.

"Ginny!" It was Charlie calling, from the foot of the stairs. "Ginny -- we'd better go before it gets dark."

Ginny, turning, began to lower her hand. Draco caught it lightly and turned it over, palm up. She looked at him, startled, as he reached into his pocket with his free hand; finding what he wanted, he laid it gently on her open palm.

He had picked it up from the Gryffindor common room floor that afternoon. It was all that was left of the destroyed bracelet Seamus had given to Ginny: the remains of the glass heart-shaped charm, cracked in half. He had looked, but had not been able to find the other half anywhere.

"I know," she said. She closed her fingers around it. He kept his hand on her wrist. He could feel the faint pulse of her blood even through the thin layer of the gloves he wore. Her heartbeat was steady and rapid. She was so very alive; even at the heart of all the mistakes she had made and the disaster collapsing around them all he could not blame her entirely. Some part of him envied her. At least she had done something. He had done nothing, and it had lost him everything. "Draco?"

Draco raised an eyebrow. There had been some ugly arguments on topics related to Hermione, months ago. He did not want to have them again. "So?" he said.

"Harry's gone," she snapped, her voice suddenly flint-hard. "And if I know him, he won't make it easy for you to find him. Maybe he wants to be found. Maybe he doesn't. I can't tell you. What I can tell you is that with him gone you won't know who you are anymore. So when you find that out, maybe you'll finally know what it is you want, Draco, because you certainly don't know now. And if Hermione can help you figure it out, then fine. Do what you have to do and don't worry about the rest of us. I think we'd all be happier if you just knew what you wanted. If there even is anything you want. God, I hope someday you can at least tell me that."

It was the most she had said to him in a long time, and several responses suggested themselves immediately to Draco. Some were flippant, a few were denials, one at least was cruel. But a sudden memory had also come to him, of himself standing on these same front steps with Hermione, looking down at their interlaced fingers, gloved in white and black, and then he had looked down the stairs and seen Harry, his gaze on both of them. In some way Harry and Hermione had always been inseparable in his mind. Hermione was a part of Harry, as much as his green eyes, his vulnerable honesty, his willful stubborn pride.

He remembered his father's chair again, the row of knives that ran along the back. He remembered after the parties were over, getting undressed in his room, peeling off his clothes and turning around to see the blood that ran down his back in vertical threads like the marks of a whip. Later the house-elves would be sent with Healfast potions and by the next day all the marks would be gone. It had not occurred to Draco then that there was such a thing as an injury which magic could not help.

He looked down at Ginny. The rising wind took her hair and her cloak and blew them out behind her like banners of fire: gold and red. There was an intent look on her small pale face. You could not set someone free when you had never had them, but he could tell that was what she was doing anyway, cutting the ties that bound her to him, such as they were. He had wanted her to do this and now that she was he recognized the irony of it; it would almost have been amusing, had everything not been so bleak.

He reached out to touch the edge of her red hair. He had not lied when he said he had a weakness for it. He had a weakness for all beautiful things, sunsets and expensive clothes and beautiful places. In the faded light her hair was nearly the exact color of blood, edged with fainter gold where the light outlined it.

She pulled away. "Don't," she said. "You think it's kind, but it's not kindness."

She stepped away from him, backwards down the stairs. "Then what are you?" she said. "Do you even know?"

He did not reply, just put his hands in his pockets and looked down at her. She raised her eyes to his, briefly. Then she turned and was running away back down the steps towards the carriage and her brother waiting next to it.

Harry ducked and swore under his breath as a copy of Who's Who In the Wizarding World tumbled down from an upper bookshelf, almost making a dent in his head. He grabbed at the ladder he was standing on to steady himself and leaned back, looking up at the innumerable shelves disappearing into the air above him -- he'd never been in this section of Flourish and Blotts, and in fact the clerk behind the front counter had looked at him quite oddly when he'd come into the shop and asked for the Travel section -- although perhaps he was just trying to place the slight, nervous-looking boy with tangled black hair and no glasses, who ducked away from the light as if he were shy of it.

"You look a bit like Harry Potter," the clerk said, directing Harry towards the back of the store.

"People always say that," Harry had replied nervously, pulling his cloak closer around himself. "I don't see it, myself."

Harry bit his lip now, gaze skidding over the travel book titles -- Let's Floo Europe 1997, The Lonely Broomstick Guide to Eastern Europe, A Wizard's Guide to Muggle Europe, Culture Shock: The Carpathians, The Wizarding Rough Guides. Harry reached out a hand and pulled a few of the more helpful-looking volumes off the shelf. Jumping down from the ladder, he made a beeline for an overstuffed chair in one of the more hidden corners of the shop. He sank down into it, expelling a small sigh of relief -- it had been hours since he'd sat down, and his sleep on the train had not been exactly restful.

The books turned out to be something of a disappointment. They failed to contain any information on how to get from one place to another -- which was what Harry really wanted to know -- and instead were full of what wizards no doubt considered helpful tips on how to get along in the Muggle world. Harry read the tips with increasing disbelief and a sense of incredulous amusement.

Muggle trains, unlike their wizarding equivalent, are unequipped with Sounding Charms which alert the passenger when the train draws near a station. Therefore the traveler must remain vigilant. You may wish to stick your head out the window and keep an eye on the surrounding countryside to ensure that you do not miss your stop. The farther you stick your head out, the better your view will be.

Harry choked on a muffled laugh, and looked up and around, the book sliding onto his lap. He couldn't remember the last time he'd read something so ridiculous and he could only imagine what snide comment Draco would have to make about it --

Harry sobered quickly, subsiding back into his chair. He'd forgotten for a moment that Draco wasn't there. They'd been anchored to each other's sides so constantly for the past eight months, in near-constant mental contact when they were not actually physically proximate, that having him suddenly not there was like opening his eyes on darkness and realizing he could see nothing because he was blind.

He tried to return to reading, but the words washed together on the page. The sudden recollection of Draco's absence had been a physical sort of shock, as if someone had walked up and, without warning, slid a very cold, very thin dagger sharply home between two of his ribs. He could only imagine how much worse it was going to get as the days and weeks wore on and on. He remembered being told about amputees who still felt pain in the limbs they'd lost long ago, the mind's map recalling as whole those places which had been burned or cut away.

He thought about reaching out to Draco just once, unblocking his own mind and looking for his friend's. He knew he could do it at this distance. It would be difficult but possible; that past summer Harry had managed to find Draco over the distance between the Burrow and the Manor. Lying on his back in the sunshine one afternoon, in the grass out by the quarry, an arm over his face, he had thought of an amusing observation, and wished Draco were there to share it with him. Having suddenly missed him, he as quickly sought him through the space between them, reaching out as if he searched for a light in the darkness. There you are, he'd thought, smiling as he found him. Is the sun shining at the Manor, too?

And the reply, drawling, sarcastic, almost instant. No, Potter, the sun only shines on you.

I'm flying. Draco's inner voice had sounded like summer: lazy as a slow river under the hot sun. See?

And he had unlocked his mind to Harry, as if he had thrown a window wide open. Harry, his gasp hitching on a laugh, had caught with one hand at the grass underneath him as in his mind he left the ground and soared up into the hot blue air, the earth dropping rapidly away below. He had seen the fountains and gardens of the Manor spread out beneath him, a riot of blue water and apricot roses, had seen the dark rise of the forest in the distance, Malfoy Park held cupped in the curve of the trees, a shimmering ribbon of river -- before Ron's voice calling to him from the house had snapped the cord that held him and he'd tumbled down and back into himself and sat up gasping, his heart pounding and his eyes wide. Magic was something he'd grown used to, it was a part of his daily life, but for a moment, sprawled on his back in the grass as if he'd actually fallen from a great height, he felt like someone who'd never heard of electricity before and had just now switched on his first lamp.

That was gone now, though, and he'd better get used to it. And unblocking his mind to Draco's was not a good idea -- Harry knew, without false modesty, that his will was strong enough to withstand almost any enchantment brought to bear against it, but he also knew that Draco was cleverer that he was, that he was brilliantly manipulative, and that while he couldn't lie to Harry, he could certainly artfully present the facts. Draco would break his resolve down in two seconds flat. No, it was better to do what he had been doing, and keep the contact closed, much as it hurt him, much as he was already desperate for news of his friends. In the end, this decision would keep them alive and that was what mattered.

Harry got to his feet, slowly, looking at the pile of books on the armchair. Finally he selected The Lonely Broomstick Guide to the Continent almost at random and dragged himself over to the front counter to pay. Exhaustion hung over him like a second cloak. He was so tired he stepped on a round-faced witch's outstretched foot and nearly knocked over a hooded wizard carrying an enormous pile of history books.

Flustered from apologizing, Harry was halfway through paying the clerk behind the counter when a thought occurred to him. "Excuse me," he began, a bit nervously, "But I was wondering if there's a way out of Diagon Alley that won't take me back through the Leaky Cauldron?"

The clerk looked up at him sharply, and once again Harry had the feeling that the man was trying to place him. "What's wrong with the Leaky Cauldron, lad?"

"I..." said Harry, swallowing hard. "I'm trying to avoid an old girlfriend. You know how these things are."

"Ah. Yes." The clerk wrinkled his narrow face in thought. "I don't know as there's a better way..."

"There is another way," said the hooded wizard with the history books, who had been silently standing behind Harry in the line. "There's a back way out through the Shrieking Teacup. It's a pub. Two streets down from Margin Alley you take a left and keep walking. You can't miss it."

"Ah," said Harry. He would have thanked the stranger, but there was something in his aspect -- in the cloak drawn close about his face, and the withdrawn posture -- that advised against it. "Well," Harry said. "I'll be going along then."

He took his purchase and escaped out into the street, now almost completely dark. The firefly lamps were lighting themselves, one by one, pale beacons of light in the greater darkness. Harry set off towards Margin Alley with a determined stride.

Back in the bookshop, the wizard who had directed Harry to the Shrieking Teacup pushed his stack of books across the counter towards the clerk, his hood slipping back slightly as he did so, revealing his bright hair.

The clerk ducked his head. "Young Mister Finnigan," he observed, with a pleased smile, and glanced down at the stack of books with a chuckle. "Doing a bit of brushing up on your history, then?" he asked, running a finger along the embossed spines. The Rise and Fall of the Dark Lord, The Downfall of Darkness: A History of You-Know-Who, I Was Voldemort's Minion: The Autobiography of An Ex-Death Eater, The Trial of Igor Karkaroff, Inside the Ministry Trials, Death Eaters Who Recanted. "You know," he added, brushing his wand across the book covers and adding up the prices that appeared, glowing, in midair, "I don't think your parents would be any too pleased that you were hanging about in a place like the Shrieking Teacup."

"Oh, I wouldn't go there," said Seamus Finnigan, and his blue eyes lit with amusement. "I was just having a bit of fun with the tourist."

"Good lad," chuckled the clerk. "I suppose I should have guessed. You Gryffindors are such pranksters, although I always say there's no harm in you, really."

"Isn't that the truth," agreed Seamus, sliding his Galleons across the counter. "I mean," he said, raising his fair, blue-eyed face to the light, "do I look like someone who was likely to cause any trouble?"

And he smiled, a bright boyish smile that made the clerk think of pleasant spring afternoons and Quidditch and cats with tangled balls of yarn and cheerful childish laughter. He chuckled. "Not at all."

As the boy scooped his purchases off the counter, the clerk asked him to pass along his regards to the elder Finnigans.

Hermione looked sideways at Draco as he watched Charlie's carriage pull away from the foot of the steps. Clouds had begun to roll in over the horizon now and the light had turned the color of pewter. The shadows of the clouds overhead moved up the steps and Hermione shivered, but Draco didn't seem to notice. His face was hidden behind the uneven locks of white-blond hair that tumbled forward to cover his eyes. She remembered what he said about needing it cut; it curled the way ivy vines curled when they grew too long -- in looping tendrils. He tipped his head back then, and looked up, and his hair fell away from his face. In the tarnished light he seemed a photo negative of himself: ice-white skin and white hair and white eyes, and all that monochromatic pallor ought to have looked washed out, but it didn't. People ought not to be that beautiful, Hermione thought. There ought to be limits on these things, or what would be the point of imagination?

"I think," he said, and the normalcy of his tone startled her, "that it's going to rain. We should go inside."

It was an odd, fleeting thought, and vanished as soon as it had crossed her mind.

They went inside, side by side, and the door to the Great Hall closed behind them just as the first drops of rain struck the paving outside. Already the inside of the castle, all damp stone that it was, smelled of rain, and Hermione remembered another rainy night, and Harry soaking wet, Crookshanks in his arms, and he'd looked up at her and past her at Draco on the stairs next to her and she had seen what passed between them even then, that peculiarly empathic antagonism that wasn't hate and wasn't love either, that was, even then, an indefinable connection. You hate what you need. The more he has of this antidote the more it will hurt him. You may have to hold him down.

"Draco," she said, softly, but he was looking out one of the near windows, distantly curious, at the gray-black night, crystallizing now to shattered silver, alive with frozen falling rain. "Draco," she said again, and this time he turned and looked at her.

There was something moving behind his eyes: it was a cool, resolved look, the look of something icy that was not icy at all, a refracted sort of frozen flame. She remembered him in Potions class, cracking firecrabs for a powder. The other students had used their small jeweled pins on the crabs first, a swift and merciful killing, but Draco had crushed them alive. They had burned his fingers as they died but he had not minded, or at least, it had not removed the look of intently fascinated cruelty from his face. He wore a similar look now. It was an inward look, giving her no clue what he was thinking. But it sent a shiver up her spine.

I will have to watch him, she thought. Not just for his own good, but for everyone's safety. Even my own.

"I'm going to the Owlery," she told him calmly, "to send a letter to Gringotts. You can come if you like."

He shrugged but fell into step beside her as she headed up the stairs. "I checked the Marauder's Map over again," he said. "Riddle's definitely nowhere on the grounds, and neither is Finnigan. Of course, the map doesn't show the Chamber of Secrets..."

"True, but after what Dumbledore did to the entrance to the Chamber after second year, I doubt anyone could get in there. Anyway, there's nothing in there Riddle would want now. Harry killed the basilisk and Dumbledore had the whole place flooded with lake water."

Draco looked at her sideways. "At some point, you're going to have to tell me a bit more about Tom Riddle and that diary business. I'm thinking my education might not have included some of the more salient particulars. Like why he's got it in for Ginny, for a start."

"My father didn't tell me much." The windows, as they passed them, were opaquely silver with rain. "I know he is -- was -- the Dark Lord," said Draco. "I know Tom Riddle was a friend of my father's before he became Voldemort."

Draco sounded almost amused. "Everything in our lives is weird. What's one more undead evil maniac out to terrorize the populace? And may I point out that I always said Seamus Finnigan was up to no good."

"Perhaps not but you can bet the Dark Lord recognized a kindred spirit in him. 'Here's the kind of guy who could do with a good possessing!' he thought to himself the moment he clapped eyes on Captain Cardboard. 'He's got no personality himself, so plenty of room for mine.'"

"One of these days," said Hermione darkly, pushing the door to the Owlery open, "you can explain to me exactly what your problem with Seamus is --"

"Was," said Draco, blandly, ducking past her and into the long, dimly lit room beyond. Up here at the top of the school, the smell of rain was even stronger, along with the smell of dismal, wet owl. Hermione could never understand why people were always coming up to the Owlery to snog. She could not imagine engaging in passionate romantic activity with a bunch of goggle-eyed birds staring down at her.

He crossed the room to the large picture window that looked down over the grounds. Hermione scribbled several notes, including an inquiry note to Gringotts, addressed them, and sent them off with a brown barn owl. Then she joined Draco at the window.

Beyond the glass, rain tautened like silver strings, barring her view of the Forest and the grounds outside. She could see the slightly blurred reflection of Draco's face in the rained-over glass. His eyes looked black, veiled with lighter lashes, his gaze distant. She knew what he was thinking. She was thinking the same thing. Where was Harry, was he all right, did he have somewhere to go, somewhere out of the rain? Was he alone, did he think of them, had he dismissed them from his life, was he safe now, would he die soon, would Draco know if he did, would Harry know when Draco was gone? Would he sit up in bed, as Draco had, blind-eyed with a sudden shattering sense of something missing, and whisper into the empty dark that he had lost something but he didn't know what?

He placed his gloved fingertips against the glass. "You can be a real bitch sometimes, you know that," he said tonelessly.

"It's not just anyone we're talking about, here. It's Harry. If you hate him --"

Draco looked sideways at her. She could see the dull gleam of his Epicyclical Charm where it lay in the pale hollow of his throat. "I was expecting a bit more of an argument on that one."

"Look, it doesn't matter if you hate him. You used to hate him. It doesn't matter if you love him or hate him or despise him or want to kill him or think he's the only real friend you've ever had --"

"If you keep trying to talk to me about Harry," said Draco, forgetting, for a moment, to use his surname, "I will walk away from you, Hermione, I promise you that."

"--It doesn't matter because it doesn't change anything, not really. This connection you two have, it's not dependent on love or hate or even liking each other at all. It's beyond that. You're beyond that. You're too angry to see it or to want to see it, but if you wanted to find him, you could."

"I think you didn't try," she said. "You can walk in and out of his dreams. You think you can't find him? He's Apparated himself to you, before, when you needed him --"

"I could get you to him," said Hermione, a little desperately. "I could send you --"

"I'm not so sure, Hermione," said Draco, "that that's something that you would want to do."

"And I want a solid gold bonnet. We don't always get what we want in this life."

"Don´t you dare be flippant at me!" Hermione shouted, losing control suddenly and shockingly. "If you won't even try --"

He moved quickly, so quickly she hardly saw him move towards her or catch at her arms and spin her to face him. Her back was against the cold glass of the window. When he leaned to her ear she smelled on him the antidote she had made herself, scents of blood and bitter aloe.

"You want," he whispered, his voice alive with soft mockery. His grip was tight on her upper arms; she could feel the pressure of his fingers through the skin, against her bones. "And you think I don't? You think I don't know about wanting what you can't have? You lot of fucking Gryffindors live everything you are on the surface -- every pinprick, every disappointment, you've never learned to swallow it down, even when it's poison and it chokes you. And because I have learned it, because I don't bawl my eyes out over every bloody paper cut, you think I don't care. You think you can push me and push me and push me and I won't break --"

He cut himself off. Hermione did not know what to do. He had drawn back and was looking at her as if he loathed her and in that moment she knew she represented every Gryffindor he had ever hated or been frustrated by to him: she was Harry to him, she was Ginny, she was herself.

He drawled, "You sound like you haven't decided whether that's a good thing or a bad thing."

The sound of the rain on the window behind them was louder now. It sounded like gunfire. The glass rattled against her back.

His voice was cold. "I thought I already told you not to tell me what I do and don't mean."

It didn't work. Any shifting just brought her in closer contact with his body. She could feel the buckle on his belt where it dug into the space just under her ribs. His clothes were damp and smelled like rain.

Hermione stopped trying to pull away. A sudden arrow of remorse shot through her. There was no point in trying to hurt Draco, no point in fighting. They were on the same side, and anyway, he had already been hurt beyond the point of being able to be hurt again. "If you're determined to lose your mind over this," she said, as gently as she could, "lose it some other way."

He raised his eyebrows, in that way he had that lifted the veiling silvery lashes slowly up over his smoke-colored eyes. The pale scar at the corner of his eye looked like a line drawn in metallic ink. "What other way," he said, "would you suggest?"

She looked up at him. She had the sudden urge to tell him things. He had said he would not talk about Harry to her, but he had not forbidden her to do the same. She wanted to tell him how she had always thought that being as smart as she was would get her out of anything. That the idea that there was a problem she could not figure or study her way out of made her want to put her hand through a window. That Harry not leaving her a letter had broken her heart, that doing what she was doing, keeping busy, solving problems one by one, was the only way she could avoid thinking about it. That if Draco kept holding onto her arms like that and looking at her like that she was going to do something that would make them both very sorry. That she knew why he was doing it, too, and that it bothered her less than it probably should have.

She opened her mouth -- she never knew what it was she would have said had she spoken, for at that moment something as white as a falling star in the dimness hurtled between them. A snowy owl, wings outstretched, making a distressed, soft-pitched whooping noise -- Hedwig.

Draco let go of Hermione's arms and stepped back, half-raising his arm in surprise.

Hedwig banked, swooped towards him, and landed on the crook of his elbow. She folded her wings, bent her head, and thrust her beak into his hair.

The spell was broken. "That's Harry's owl," said Hermione briskly, folding her arms over her chest. "Hedwig."

"I know perfectly well it's Potter's owl. What's it want with me? Oi there! You silly bird. Get off."

"I'm not him, though," said Draco flatly, and looked at Hedwig as if she had personally insulted him.

Hedwig nipped at Draco's ear. An odd look crossed his face -- Hermione looked away. She heard Draco say something, under his breath, to Hedwig. Then he crossed the room and firmly deposited the woeful owl back on her perch, despite her insistent wibbling.

"Daft bloody bird," he said when he returned. He was gnawing his lower lip. "Look, Hermione --"

He stuck his gloved hands in his pockets. "At least let me do that," he said. "You hadn't done anything wrong."

"I don't want an apology," she said. "I want you to try to find Harry. Just try once."

An odd look came into his eyes. It was a look she had so rarely seen on Draco's face, and certainly not for years, that it took her a moment to place it in this context.

Before she could think better of it, she leaned towards him and kissed him in the cheek. He tasted like rainwater and salt. "Thank you," she said.

"I'll do it." He didn't take his hands out of his pockets. "But I won't answer for any consequences."

"I know," Hermione said. She tried to push down the faint worry that his resigned tone produced in her. What consequences, after all, could there be?

Later, Harry would remember that first sight of the interior of the Shrieking Teacup and marvel bitterly at what a fool he had been. But when he first stepped through the doors, all freezing bare hands and chattering teeth, he was conscious only that it was warm inside and that the blood in his veins felt half-frozen.

The interior of the pub -- if that was what it was -- bore some resemblance to the Leaky Cauldron, but not much. It also was dark inside, illuminated mainly by the glow of a banked fire in an enormous stone grate along the far wall. But where the Leaky Cauldron was shabby, this place was all polished brass railings, deep armchairs, plush dark green sofas, and a gleaming bar. It was full of wizards, although he saw no witches. Sunk into the heavy armchairs, puffing on pipes, most were heavily robed and cowled against the chill air that soaked through the leaded glass windows.

The bar itself was staffed by a dour-looking man in tailored dark robes. Harry ordered a hot spiced butterbeer and went to stand by the fire. He had wanted to ask about the back way out, but some part of him rebelled passionately against the idea of heading back out into that rain. Instead, he set his drink on the mantel and leaned shivering to the fire. He didn't dare push the hood of his robe back; since the clerk in the bookshop had called out to him, he'd felt strangely naked and identifiable.

The fire, throwing its flaring shadows along the stone floor, made him think of the fire in the Gryffindor common room. And that, in turn, made him think of sitting on the sofa beside it, strands of long brown hair tickling his face as he did his schoolwork, Ron's quick voice in his ear. He reached out his hands closer to the fire -- they were wet and pale, almost blue at the tips, the scar along his palm an angry dark red. He had been stupid to have left his gloves in his bag at the station.

The heat of the fire was drawing his eyelids down. Pale gold sparks flew from it as a log settled, illuminating the bright sequins of brass affixed to the brick fireplace façade at regular intervals. Harry leaned a bit closer, tracing them with his fingertips. They were individual bronze plaques, and each one bore a name.

Evan Rosier. Antonin Dolohov. Augustin Mulciber. Bela Travers. Augustus Rookwood. Sebastian and Mary Lestrange. Peter Pettigrew. And, below that, Bartholomew Crouch, Jr.

Harry stared for a moment in blank incomprehension. Then his heart gave an almighty lurch and slammed against his ribcage with the force of a rogue Bludger.

Swiftly, he straightened up and looked around him. Nobody seemed to be looking at him, thankfully. Yet everything in the room had taken on a sinister cast. The men in their dark robes by the chess table, the sour-faced bartender, the shadows pooling in the corners of the room. The brass rods that held the heavy black curtains in place over the windows were carved in the shape of curling serpents.

The names carved into the plaques on the fireplace were the names of those who had fallen or been lost in the service of Voldemort.

This was a Death Eater meeting place. He had not been looking at the street names as he had been walking. Perhaps he had turned onto Knockturn Alley without meaning to. It hardly mattered now. What mattered was that he was here. And that he had to get out.

Harry set his cup down on the mantel. The faint clank as it settled sent a shiver up his spine. He pulled his damp cloak about himself and stepped away from the fire. Staring down at his feet, he began to walk across the room. It wasn't far to the door -- no more than thirty paces --

"Harry!" a voice called out to him cheerfully. "Harry Potter! What on earth are you doing here?"

Seamus Finnigan stood directly in front of him. He wore a heavy cloak, and the hood was thrown back, showing his bright hair, starred all over with drops of rain as if it had been sprinkled with seed pearls. His face was open, guileless. He stepped forward, holding out a hand towards Harry.

"Seamus!" Harry was at the other boy's side in an instant, gripping his arm. "Shut up. What are you doing here?"

There was something wrong with this assertion. Harry recognized it even through the turmoil in his mind. "How did you see me? I had my hood up --"

"Your watch." Seamus pointed at Harry's wrist. "That gold watch that Hermione gave you -- wasn't it your father's?" He blinked once, slowly, at Harry, like a lizard blinking in the sun. "Is there something wrong, Harry?"

"But why not?" Seamus' voice was lazy, curious. He reached up then without warning and batted at the hood of Harry's cloak. It fell back, and Harry was bareheaded in the glare of the firelight. "It is you...isn't it?"

But it was too late for protestations. All around him Harry could hear rustling. The Death Eaters were standing up, setting down the glasses they had been holding, getting to their feet. Coming towards him. Harry's stomach twisted in panic.

Harry let go of Seamus' arm and stumbled back. The Death Eaters were advancing on them now, slow, unhurried. They moved as smoothly as Dementors. There were perhaps twelve of them. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly. Harry reached to jerk his right sleeve up: the runic band on his belt was freezing cold against his bare wrist. So cold it burned.

It felt for a moment as if all Harry's pent-up anguish and fury was pouring down through his veins, into his hand, and through his fingers. Light flared, and a bank of fire sprang up just behind Seamus, blocking the Death Eaters from view.

But the other boy shook his head, his eyes gone suddenly dark. In fact, they were altogether a darker blue than Harry remembered them. But there was barely time to notice that detail; the Death Eaters had begun pushing their way through the wall of flame, which was already beginning to die down.

Seamus, bizarrely, grinned. "I don't think so, Harry." He crossed his arms over his chest. "Let's see if you can run as fast as you can fly."

Harry gaped. But there was no time. With a last, shocked look at the intransigent Seamus, Harry spun around and fled through the door and into the rain-soaked alley beyond.

The evening sky was violet, the color of venous blood. Ron sat at the edge of the castle's roof and looked down and understood why Voldemort had laughed at him when he'd said he wanted to go outside.

The castle stood perched on the top of a cliff, and the cliff fell away below it on all sides, steep and sheer as the side of a razor blade. Far below the cliff vanished into clouds; below the clouds, the slender line of a river was visible, rocketing along between the walls of a chasm. Mountains were all that was discernible in the distance. Ron felt as if he stood at the edge of the world.

Rhysenn spoke from the shadow of the tower through which they had come up to the roof. Her eyes were shut, her narrow little face as white as salt. Her dress blew around her like wings in the cold mountain air. She had been clinging to the shadows at the base of the tower since they had come outside.

Ron turned back and looked at the last gleam of the sun as it vanished over the horizon, drowning itself in the shadow of the blue mountains. "It's gone."

"Any night is better than any day," said Rhysenn, her tone positive, but she came to join him at the edge of the roof. "Careful," she said. "Fall, and I cannot catch you. I cannot fly."

"Yes," she agreed. "Or I would not bother to warn you." She sat down then, about a foot from the roof's edge, her black skirts spreading around her like dark water. "I am here to watch you," she said. "But I will talk to you also, if you desire."

"You're being awfully agreeable," Ron said bitterly. "I suppose you've been told to keep me happy. What's next? Turn yourself into Hermione and offer to shag me?"

"How does that work, anyway?" Ron asked, desperate to get off the subject of Hermione. "How can you be only half a demon?"

Rhysenn looked, briefly, amused. "It's a long story. I can tell it to you if you like."

Ron shoved his hands in his pockets. He was cold. "It isn't like I have anything better to do."

Rhysenn took a deep breath. Ron decided not to notice that this made her bosom inflate impressively over the bodice of her corset. "Six hundred years ago," she said, "A wizard, an ancestor of the Malfoys you know now, raised a demon with a spell..."

He had left the Shrieking Teacup far behind him. But he had seen the Death Eaters pour out of the doors after him, a swift army of black-clad ants, and knew they were hot on his heels. They had Tracking Charms; they knew the area much better than he did. They would find him, and they would back him into a corner.

He hoped that when they did, he'd be able to kill at least a few of them before they took him.

He shook the thought out of his mind. He should not be defeatist. If he could find his way back to Diagon Alley he'd have a chance --

But the narrow alleys had turned into an unrecognizable warren of twisting, labyrinthine tunnels between blind stone buildings. The streets were slick with frozen rain and the mist covered everything like a blinding cloud. There seemed no doors in any of the buildings, and no windows.

So Harry ran. His booted feet found a skidding purchase on the icy ground. For almost the first time, he blessed his scrawniness, his wiry lightness and delicate build. It was what made him such a good Seeker, and now it allowed him to race over the ground as swiftly as an arrow flying through the air.

His heart pounded in his ears and the blood sang in his veins and he felt a savage sort of satisfaction as he reached a low metal fence and scrambled up and over it, dropping lightly to the other side. He winced as his cloak caught on a barb -- he twisted and slithered out of it -- it marked him out too clearly, anyway, was too recognizable. He began running again, only his worn t-shirt covering his arms now, but he had been running too hard to really feel the cold.

The rain sizzled against his flushed cheeks as he ran, caught in the tangles of his soaking hair, dripped down the round collar of his shirt. His feet, inside the dragonhide boots, were dry, but his trousers were almost wet through.

He thought he could hear the Death Eaters behind him, the pound of feet on the pavement, but perhaps that was just his imagination.

He put on a burst of speed as he reached the end of a long alleyway, and spun around the corner. Two narrower alleys branched off in opposite directions here -- Harry blinked, then flung himself blindly to the left.

He fled down the alley. He was beginning to tire now. His breath rasped in his chest. He heard Draco's voice in his head suddenly, laughing and incredulous: only a few months ago, they had been talking about their methods of Quidditch training. And you mean you don't make your team run laps around the field?

The alley turned a sharp corner. Harry spun around it at top speed -- only to find that it dead-ended at the side of a building. He skidded to a stop and looking around himself despairingly. Wet black walls covered in ancient posters advertising now-defunct charms and potions rose all around him -- there was a bolted door in the side of the wall furthest from him -- he wiped rain out of his eyes and jogged forward quickly.

It was a moment before he realized there was someone there, leaning against the wall by the door. At first just a dark silhouette, and then there was a spark of light -- it flared to a greater glow-- and the faint illumination wove a thousand silver strands out of the still-falling frozen rain. He saw a slender figure in a long dark cloak, a bent fair head, a face hidden by a raised hand, a peeling poster behind the figure advertising Finian's Finishing Potion -- Now in Brand New Cherry Flavor!

Harry felt a tightening around his heart, the sharp pressure of shock behind his eyes, even before the figure lowered its hand, and raised its head, and looked at him, and smiled.

The kitchen at the Burrow was full of light and warmth. Ginny submitted rather numbly to being kissed and hugged by her mother, whooped over by Fred and George, and ignored by Percy, who was sitting at the kitchen table behind a massive stack of parchments. There was ink in his hair and a deal of chalk dust on his nose. It suited him.

Mr. Weasley was apparently out; Mrs. Weasley only looked shifty when she was asked where "out" was, although wherever it was he had apparently gone there with Mad-Eye Moody. Sirius Black, meanwhile, was in the living room with Professor Lupin. Like Percy, they were surrounded by parchments, file folders, and boxes of papers. Lupin was using his wand to draw bright sets of words on the air between the two of them; Sirius, sprawled and exhausted-looking on the couch, was nodding and adding check marks to some of them, x's to others. To Ginny, at this distance, it looked like a list of names.

"You're sure you're all right, Ginny darling?" her mother fussed anxiously. "You look so pale -- would you like some tea? Hot cocoa? Butterbeer?"

"Boyfriend problems," said George sagely, pointing at her with the end of the quill he'd been chewing on. "I suspect little Ginny's been having boyfriend problems."

"Ah, but which boy?" wondered Fred portentously. "The dashing yet otherwise occupied Harry Potter? The stalwart yet tedious Seamus Finnigan? The redeemed-yet-still-sarcastic Draco Malfoy?"

"Oh, for goodness sake," Ginny wailed. "And Fred, I don't even know why you'd mention Harry, you know perfectly well I've been over him for ages."

"I suppose that leaves Malfoy," said George regretfully. "Which is too bad. You'll spend the rest of your life competing with his hair products for attention and fighting over which one of you is the prettiest."

"It is not," Ginny said, shooting them both glares of loathing, "a boy problem."

Fred raised his eyebrows at her. Ginny knew perfectly well what they were doing; George and Fred had always used humor as a way to deflect the pain of bad situations. Without being able to help herself, her eyes went to the ivy plants in the window, each charmed to reflect the health of a Weasley child. Ron's was still blooming and healthy -- but for how long?

Ginny's mother saw where her daughter was looking and bit her lip, her eyes suddenly bright. "Oh, Ginny -- I'm glad you're home," she said in a soft voice, and Ginny let herself be gathered into another hug. It was Charlie who finally broke into the embrace, tapping Mrs. Weasley on the shoulder.

"Ginny's had a long, exhausting day," he said gently. "We should let her get some rest."

Nodding, Mrs. Weasley let her daughter go. With a grateful smile at Charlie, Ginny headed up the stairs to her bedroom, pausing to wave down at Lupin and Sirius as she went. It was nice to have a house full of people, especially people she liked so much. If only she were in a fitter state to appreciate it.

Her bedroom door creaked as she opened it. It was full of shadows and, unlived in for so many months, smelled faintly of soap and dust. Ginny drew her wand out and waved it once, murmuring, "Luminesce." A soft glow suffused the room and Ginny stepped inside, shutting the door behind her.

It was only after she had locked the door and turned around that she realized that her bedroom was not, in fact, empty. There was someone sitting on the edge of her bed, and to say that that someone was the last person she would ever have expected to see now would not have been far from the truth.

"Good lord," she exclaimed, utterly surprised. "What on earth are you doing here?"

"Malfoy?" Harry's jaw dropped open and stayed open. The bitter rain went into his mouth and he nearly choked on it. "H-how -- how did you -- how did you know -- how did you find me?"

"Are you really that surprised?" Draco took a step away from the wall, and began walking towards him. Slowly, as if there were no hurry in the world. Harry stared at that face he hadn't really expected to ever see again. Sharp features, familiar gray eyes, the hood of the long cloak down around his shoulders. His hair was as wet as Harry's, plastered across his cheeks and forehead in long colorless streaks. "I can always find you."

"No." Harry's voice was a half-whisper. "I did everything to prevent this --"

"You're not glad to see me?" The narrow mouth curled up at the corner, like paper curling as it burned. "How astonishing."

"Of course I'm not glad to see you. I mean, I'm glad. But Malfoy -- there are Death Eaters chasing me --"

Draco, unexpectedly, threw back his head and laughed, a bright sharp bark of laughter so unlike him that Harry stared. "Death Eaters chasing you? Oh, you are funny. I love it. What's next? Going to start up with that whole and-I'm-a-pitiful-orphan-take-care-of-me-because-I-have-to-save-the-world thing? God, but you're boring sometimes."

"No, of course you never." Draco was still smiling the same half-smile and there was something about it Harry really didn't like. "Of course you don't." He raised his hand, there was something glowing in it, like a spark of witchlight or marshfire. "You're Harry Potter, after all."

Harry began to back away, driven by instinct. He wondered if Draco was going to hit him and if he could bring himself to hit back. He didn't think he could. He deserved this, after all. That didn't make it any more unsettling. "I'm serious, Malfoy. There are Death Eaters chasing me. Your father will probably --"

Draco shook the wet hair out of his eyes. "Oh, right. My father. How could I forget my father. Such a bastard." His voice was toneless, cool, amused. The rain ran down his bare face in rivulets, parting the thick silver blades of his eyelashes, sliding down into the open collar of his shirt. "You know, don't you get bored with the same old whining every once in a while? Don't you want to do something a little different?"

"Different? What? Malfoy, I -- " Harry broke off as his back hit the damp wall. He could back up no farther. He shivered. "Okay, I know you're angry. I'm sorry I left you --"

"Left me?" Draco laughed. He lowered his hand, and the light in it winked out. "That's a new one. You make it sound so dramatic. You don't really think that's the sort of thing I'd care about, do you?"

Harry stared at him. He reached out then, tentatively, with his mind, but it was like hitting his hand against a concrete wall -- the other boy wasn´t letting him in at all. Draco was close enough to him now that Harry could see the damp hair curling at the ends, the rain beading on his lashes, the familiar silver scar under his eye. Harry himself had made that scar, indirectly, just as he had made the scar on Draco's hand, just as he had marked him in dozens of ways that were less visible. "Well, I thought that you would --"

"Really, Potter." Draco's voice was the same cool drawl Harry remembered from years gone by. He took a last step forward, closing the slight gap between them, and pushed Harry, hard, against the wall. Harry felt cold wet stone through the thin material of his shirt. Grit scraped his bare elbows. Draco held him pinned there, his hand against Harry´s chest, and with his other hand he reached into Harry´s shirt pocket, and drew out his glasses. "I was wondering where these were." He flicked the glasses open, and slid them onto Harry´s face. "Better," he said.

Wordless, Harry looked at him. It could have been a gentle gesture, this restoration of his glasses, but somehow, it wasn´t. The glasses were wet with rain anyway and slid halfway down his nose, which actually was a good thing, or he wouldn´t have been able to see at all. "I left you a letter," he began, stumbling over his words. "Didn't you read what I --"

"Shut up," interrupted Draco pleasantly, his grip tightening on Harry´s shirt, and for a dizzy moment Harry was positive Draco was going to hit him, just grab him and bang his head into the wall, and his muscles tensed up hard. Draco grinned. "Scared, Potter?"

"Hit me," Harry said. "If you want to hit me, hit me. If it'll make you feel better --"

"I feel fine," Draco said. He looked down at his hand, where it rested against Harry's chest. "You always have to make such a big deal out of everything," he said, and then he did exactly the last thing Harry would ever have expected, and leaned across the small space that separated them, and kissed Harry on the mouth.

The letters: Yes, I have both versions of the letters, Harry's original letters to Hermione and Draco, and the altered version that Draco actually received. We'll see the full texts of all of them eventually.

Ginny: I remember at the end of DS6 when I sent Ginny and Ron back to the Burrow and everyone had mad hysterics that this meant that they were out of the story for good. Then, of course, in the next chapter, everyone else went to the Burrow so it was irrelevant. Ginny's return to the Burrow here does not mean she is out of the action. She is still around. She has much to do. She has mysterious visitors in her room. She will see Draco again. They will discuss their relationship. Keep your pants on.

"The kind of family that bought their own furniture" --Draco's family, of course, would never buy a piece of furniture, having inherited the stuff down through the generations. MP Alan Clark once famously said about fellow politician Michael Heseltine that he was a man so unaristocratic that he had "bought his own furniture"-- the first time I came across a reference to this expression was in Textual Sphinx's lovely fic "To Sever the Lining From A Cloud," and it has stuck in my head since.

"You were mine first." -- This conversation between Ron and Harry was inspired by clokeofdarkness' "Best Friend", which is Ron POV, and briefly made me like Ron. But, then the feeling passed.

" I told you once you were wasting your time to barter your destiny for the friendship of a boy who would never like you." From DS6, Lucius talking to Draco: " You think I didn't see your face, back at the Mansion, when you looked at him, and at her, and her face when she looked at you both? Do you want to barter your destiny for the friendship of a boy who will never like you, and the favours of a girl who doesn't return your love? To ally yourself with people who will never regard you with anything more than suspicion and mistrust? They are not our kind of people, and they never will be. You will never belong with them." Yay for back-story continuity.

"To paraphrase Hamlet, Oedipus, Lear, and all those other guys" -- Roger Zelazny, The Sign of the Unicorn.

Next chapter: In which 1) Harry gets several shocks in a row 2) Rhysenn tells her life story 3) Draco spills some blood that isn't his own 4) Lucius gets a surprise visit from an old friend 5) Tom decides to get rid of Seamus' feelings for Ginny once and for all 6) Hermione gets in a fight 7) a hotel room suite decorated with heart-shaped red cushions features prominently.

Chapter Eleven: The Hostility of Dreams