Chapter Twelve: London After Midnight  

Odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.  -Catullus  

*** 

It was a hell of a kiss, too. 

Not that it mattered much, in practice, although perhaps, Harry would think later, it mattered in some kind of principle. At the time he was mainly aware of shock, a jolting sort of shock that seemed to fling the breath right out of him and he was suddenly pressed back up against the wall and the wet stone ground hard into his back and he was shivering all over and he would have thought that being smashed up against a wall like this by Draco would have offered some kind of warmth but really, it didn't. 

Really, it made him colder than he had imagined it was possible to be, as if not just his cloak but his skin had been stripped away, leaving him shaking there in the dark. He didn't know what to do with his hands: they banged, flat, against the wall behind him and the gritty rock scraped his skin. His knees were giving out; he could not stand up. Without Draco to hold him up he would never stand up again. 

Somewhere in the back of his mind words were forming. He could do nothing to shape them or to hold them back although he knew that Draco would not hear them, was either beyond hearing them or had chosen not to listen, or there was something even more terribly wrong than that, something he was only beginning to guess at, but his mind raced ahead of his guesses and the silent cry came out without his being able to help it: Not this way, not this way - 

Draco let him go and stepped back. 

Harry took his hands away from the wall. They were bloody where they had scraped against the bricks. He looked down at them with a dull fascination and then at Draco. Draco was sucking his lower lip in a meditative manner and the rain dripped off his eyelashes and his mouth and he then grinned at Harry, unaffectedly. "Well, all right," he said. "If you don't want to play." 

"Play?!" Harry's voice scraped out of his throat. "What the hell are you playing at?" 

"So you don't want me to kiss you. What do you want?" Draco shoved a wet lock of hair behind his ear. "Help me out here. I'm creative, but nobody's that creative." 

"W-what?" Harry struggled for words, lost them, inhaled another gasping breath, and realized. It was like being slapped in the face, repeatedly. Each slap a different emotion. Realization. Shock. Anger. Disgust with himself, for being so stupid. Disappointment. "You're not Draco," he said. 

The other boy cocked his blond head and smiled. "Of course I am." 

"No," Harry said. His voice had hardened. He knew. If he hadn't been so shocked before, so desperate, he would have known immediately. And now that he did know he couldn't believe he'd ever been deceived, even for a moment - and he felt a sudden horrible pity for Ron, a pity mixed for the first time with understanding. To see what you wanted to see - "No," Harry said again, more harshly. "You're not -" 

"I am," said the boy, and laughed again that laugh that Harry hadn't liked. "Well, I am until next morning, anyway. After that -" 

"Shut up," Harry said. "And stop fucking smiling at me. Who are you?" 

The boy frowned petulantly. "You're not allowed to ask me that." He raised his hand, and again the small spark of light lit in his palm. "You should know better." He sounded cross. "If you're going to be all weird like this, I'm going to go back inside." 

A cold and venomous rage was beginning to spread through Harry's veins. "Oh no," he said. "You aren't," and he flicked out the fingers of his right hand, whispering under his breath. 

The light flew out of the boy's hand and sailed across the alley. Harry reached up and plucked it out of the air. It was a small glowing cube, about an inch across, with a wick of fiery light trapped inside it. The letters MC were marked across one side of it. 

Harry glanced up at the boy, who was gaping at him in surprise. "Are these your initials?" 

"N-no. Of course not. You just - how did you do that? Magic without a wand?" 

"I'm a Magid," Harry said. "I thought everyone knew that." 

A strange look came into the boy's eyes. He looked horrified and - afraid. Harry saw it and hated it because even though he had no idea who he was actually talking to, those eyes were still Draco's eyes, and the face wearing that expression was still his friend's, and he felt as if someone had taken a Quidditch bat to his ribcage and was trying to batter their way through to his heart. 

"A Magid?" the boy said in a half whisper. "But there are only a few - and they're registered - they never would have let you in if they knew that you -" 

"Let me in where?" Harry demanded, furious. "Look, tell me what the hell is going on here or I'll break every bone in your body without touching you, I don't need a wand to hurt you, and I will if -" 

"You're not," the boy said, still looking horrified. "You can't be." 

"I can't be what?" 

"Really him," the boy said. 

"You know who I am," Harry said in a low voice. "You said my name. Several times." 

"But you can't be Harry Potter. He'd never come to a place like this." 

"I didn't come here!" Harry shouted. "I told you! I was chased here! I told you, you stupid bastard! And you, poncing around, pretending to be Draco, not listening to a word I said, it would serve you goddamn right if they caught up with me and wrung your bloody lying neck!" 

"If...if who caught up with you?" 

"The Death Eaters!" Harry yelled at the top of his lungs. 

"You mean," the boy said, "those Death Eaters?" 

He pointed behind him. 

Rather against his own good judgment, Harry turned and stared. 

The boy had not been lying. The entrance to the alley behind them was entirely blocked by an line of hooded men in familiar dark robes, and they were walking steadily towards Harry and his companion. 

*** 

"Sorry if I startled you," said the young man sitting on Ginny's desk, his tone amused. He fixed her with a pair of familiar dark eyes and grinned engagingly. His eyes, as before, reminded her of Harry's eyes - not in their color, but in their ability to project a sort of opaque sincerity. "I didn't mean to shock you." 

Ginny closed the door behind her, then turned to face him. "Ben?" she said.  

He nodded once. 

"You look different," she said. 

He did look different. His dark hair was longer than it had been and there were scars on his face and hands that hadn't been there before. His eyes were the same and the thick uneven lashes around them; he looked up at her through those lashes and said, "I am different. I'm older than I was the last time we met. I'm twenty-six." 

"Oh." The strangeness of it all hit Ginny a little bit then, and she hung back from going near him. "I am glad to see you," she said, "but why are you here? I didn't think I would ever see you again." 

He smiled a little, looking as if he were thinking of something. "Come here," he said, and held out a hand. The memory of another voice telling here, commanding her, come here, echoed in the back of her mind and for a moment she flinched away - but she reminded herself that this was Ben, who she knew, and who wouldn't touch her, and who had never been anything but kind to her, and she went over and stood in front of him. 

"You don't look well," he said. "You're all right?" It was a question, not a statement. Up close, Ginny could see that the hem of his robes was damp, and so were the ends of his hair. So he had been outside, and not Apparated directly into her room. 

"Are you all right?" she said, turning the question back on him. "Is Gareth -" 

"He's waiting for me in the garden." Ben smiled crookedly. "He doesn't think you like him very much." 

Ginny pictured arrogant blond Gareth, Slytherin's First Heir, clomping around irritably in the potato patch, and smiled for the first time that day. "He can come up if he wants," she said. Of course I like him. He just reminds me of Draco, that's all." 

"Draco." Ben's amused look faded. "How is he?" 

"Not that well," Ginny said slowly. "He's..." 

"Dying," Ben said. "I know." 

Ginny's mouth opened. "How do you know that?" 

Ben put his elbows on his knees. As he leaned forward his cloak fell away and Ginny saw the gold glint of the scabbard at his waist with its elegant design of leaves and flowers; there was no sword in it. Harry's scabbard. "Because," he said. "You told me." 

"Oh!" Ginny realized suddenly what he must mean and a small flame of hope suddenly crackled inside her. "I came back in time, didn't I? I went to see you. That means I must get my Time Turner back again. Why did I go back in time? What did I want? Ben -" 

He held up a hand to forestall her. "Slowly," he said. "Let me explain. I can't tell you everything you said to me, because you asked me not to. I can tell you that -" 

But he didn't finish his sentence, because at that moment there was a crash from the garden. Looking startled, Ben sprang to his feet and went over to her window. He pushed it open and leaned out into the night, and called something out into the cold dark air - it sounded like another language, Ginny didn't recognize it - and then a moment later the pop of displaced air sounded in the room and Gareth was standing there next to him, looking very ill-tempered and hopping on one foot. 

"Something bit me," he said, crossly, and glared at Ginny as if it were entirely her fault that he had been trespassing in her back garden in the middle of the night. He looked slightly different, just as Ben did - older, his face more sharply planed, still wide cheekboned with the chin narrowing out like a cat's and the same unlikely green eyes and the same ghostly resemblance to Draco. He wore finer clothes than he had the last time she had seen him: a pale green heavy cloak over black robes, belted with silver. In his right hand was a chased silver dagger. "Right in the ankle." 

"Oh, dear," Ginny said. "It was probably a garden gnome." 

Ben put a hand on Gareth's shoulder and leaned around him to peer at his ankle. "Mortally wounded, are you?" 

"No." Gareth looked satisfied. "I stepped on it and squashed it." 

"Good work," said Ben, straight-faced. "Those gnomes can be tricky." 

"It made a crunching sound," said Gareth thoughtfully. 

"Blech," Ben said. "Spare me the details of your victory." 

"Crunch," repeated Gareth with morbid glee. 

Ben glared at him. 

Gareth winked, and moved to put his dagger away. As he did so, Ginny, who had remained silent while they talked, suddenly gasped so audibly that both men looked up - Ben with concern, Gareth with his hand tightening on the dagger. Ginny simply stared at Gareth - not at Gareth, precisely, but at his wrist. As he had moved his arm his sleeve had fallen back and she had seen a bright flash of scarlet that struck her like a blow, for around his right wrist she could now see plainly that Gareth wore a dark red glass-like band, its edges scratched with runes, that was the twin of Harry's own. 

*** 

Once upon a time, said the demon girl, there was a wizard, and he was a Malfoy, although they might have been called something slightly different then. Malfoy: a name they had not given to themselves, for all they wore it as a badge of pride. Bad deeds, bad faith, how could anyone bearing a name like that be expected to be anything but the darkest of Dark wizards? 

I'm sorry. You're bored. No? Irritated, then. You don't like the Malfoys. They get under your skin. I see how you twitch when I say his name. Your eyes going black. No, not Lucius. You know who I mean. 

Anyway, to get back to my story. There was a wizard once, who lived in a southern city. He was, for all practical purposes, a Malfoy, and like all Malfoys, his pride exceeded his wisdom. He fancied himself a sorcerer, a doer of great black deeds. He liked to call up storms that would destroy all the ships in the harbor. He cast a yellow plague over his city, and when that did not satisfy him, he cast a red plague of fever. On Tuesdays he summoned volleys of flaming arrows and on Wednesdays he made the city river run with blood. This was very bad for local property values, but the wizard did not care. He had made his reputation on grand and showy dark magics, and besides, he had no plans to sell his mountaintop castle any time soon. 

Comeuppance for his behavior came to him, as comeuppance often does, in the form of a woman. A beauty with long black hair, a handspan waist, and eyes like black coals. He glimpsed her dancing amid a crowd of nobles, and when he inquired after her, he was told she was the daughter of a prosperous wizarding family. He determined that he would marry her, and sent a message to the family ordering them to deliver up their daughter speedily. They did so, which did not surprise him - it is never wise to say no to a wizard. 

Had he made his inquiries more closely, he would have found, to his great perturbation, that in fact that family had never had a daughter. 

Are you cold? You're shivering. The tips of your fingers are nearly as blue as your eyes. Come here. I'll give you a bit of my robe to wrap around you. Now where was I? 

*** 

When Draco came out of the bathroom at Hogsmeade station, it took Hermione a moment to realize why it was that he looked different. Then she clapped a hand over her mouth in surprise. "Oh!" she said, around her fingers. "Draco. Your hair." 

He looked, for a moment, mildly self-conscious. "You hate it?" 

"No, it's..." She made a helpless little gesture with her hand, staring at him. He was dressed in what, for Draco, probably passed as low-key undercover gear. Worn-looking dark hooded jumper, Quidditch cords, and boots. "It's just different," she said. 

She supposed she shouldn't be surprised. He'd been complaining it was too long for weeks, and had always been pushing it back out of his eyes. It wasn't that he'd never had hair this short before - it was that it looked like he'd taken a pair of Muggle scissors and lopped off the parts he felt were too long, without much regard for evenness or regularity. All the looping tendrils were gone, and instead his hair, no longer weighted down by its length, curled and stuck up and out and was, well, generally... 

"It's a bit untidy," she said. 

He shrugged. "Shearing Charm. Bit hard to do properly without a real mirror -" 

"Draco!" she interrupted him, aghast. "You're not supposed to be doing any magic at all!" 

He was saved reply by the sudden activation of the station's Sonorous Charm. "Midnight Train - King's Cross! Platform Two!" 

Over her protests, Draco grabbed her bag on the way to the train, and Hermione stalked after him, irritably. "You're only supposed to be doing magic in emergencies," she reminded him as he held out a hand to help her up the stairs to their compartment. Draco had bought six tickets to ensure that nobody else would sit with them. Hermione had reluctantly conceded that this was a good idea. With Draco in the mood he was in, she dreaded what he might do to anyone unfortunate enough to annoy him. 

"The state of my hair is an emergency," he said, swinging himself up into the compartment after her and pulling the door shut. 

"Well, it certainly is now," Hermione said. 

In reply to this, Draco gave her a very dark look. 

She relented. "It's not so bad. It's kind of punk rock." 

He threw himself into the seat by the window. "I have no idea what you're talking about." 

Hermione decided not to enlighten him. Served him right. They had been chugging away from the station for at least ten minutes before she spoke again, "This is the same train we took that night to the Manor when we went after Harry - do you remember?" 

Draco didn't reply. When Hermione turned to look at him, she realized to her surprise that he had fallen asleep, curled up against the window with his head resting on one gloved hand. His feet were propped on their bags. 

She supposed she should not be surprised. He was ill, after all. Of course he was tired. 

She drew off the scarf she was wearing - it was the one he had given her for Christmas - and spread it over him. She briefly stroked his newly cut hair. It felt like dandelion fluff, so fine it clung to her fingers. Her fingertips brushed his cheek, and burned. He was feverish. She drew her hand away. 

She realized with a grim amusement that his use of her bag as a footrest meant that she could no longer reach her books, at least not without disturbing him. There was nothing else around to read except a rather lurid-looking copy of Teen Witch Weekly that someone had left behind on the seat beside her. Hermione picked it up with a resigned air. She detested TWW; all they ever did, in her opinion, was make up astounding lies about Harry, and print "true life" stories about terrible things that happened to young witches, related in every juicy detail. "Help! My Brother's a Werewolf And It's So Embarrassing," "Veelas Stole My Boyfriend," "My Bosom Enhancement Charm Went Horribly Awry," "I Fancy My Potions Professor" ("Oh, no," Hermione thought, "I can't look") and, "I Took A Potion And Now I'm In Love With My Worst Enemy!" 

"Ghastly rubbish," Hermione muttered to herself, paging through it listlessly. She paused, then, her lip curling up at the corner. Across from a gigantic photo spread of Oliver Wood wearing approximately two-thirds of his Quidditch uniform, was Teen Witch Weekly's annual Ten Most Eligible Wizards Under Twenty-Five article. Hermione groaned to herself. Harry had been in it last year - never before, because the lowest age allowed was sixteen - and Draco hadn't, and he'd humiliated Harry horribly over it in the Great Hall. He'd had twenty copies of the front page of the article, (which featured a Colin Creevey-snapped photo of Harry coming out of the prefects' bathroom wearing just a towel and a horrified expression) printed up and placed strategically around the Hall. Then he'd stalked over to the Gryffindor table at the head of a sniggering line of Slytherins, each carrying copies of the magazine, and had gotten down on his knees in front of Harry, who was looking as if he wanted to die of abject humiliation and rage. 

Draco'd held the magazine out to him, and had said in a wheedling sort of put-on voice (at odds with the bright look of malice in his eyes) "Could you autograph one for me, Potter? You can sign it, 'Harry Potter, ladies' man', if you like.'" 

Harry, going quickly from red to white, had snapped out, "No." 

"'Harry Potter, Big Name Sex God? 'Harry Potter, Casanova'?" Draco had suggested. "Harry Potter, Singlehandedly Responsible For Ruining Knickers Across England?'" 

He'd grinned up at Harry. Behind him, the rest of the Slytherins had been collapsing against each other with mirth. 

"You're disgusting, Malfoy," Harry had said. His tone was cold. Hermione had put her hand over his, tightening her fingers, not wanting him to hit Draco - not when Gryffindor had a game against Ravenclaw that afternoon that they couldn't afford to lose. "Go away." 

Now, Hermione thought, he would have laughed it off. Draco had given him that, a portion of his own protective armor, although in Harry it was softened, less like arrogance, and more like indifference. Indifference, of course, was cruel in its own right. You could break yourself against that indifference and Harry would not notice. She wondered if Draco was ever sorry for what he had given to Harry, for how he had changed him. 

At that time, of course, Harry could not laugh it off. He had snatched the magazine out of Draco's hands and crumpled it in his fist. Draco's grin had turned to a leer of triumph. "You going to hit me, Potter?" he said, a little breathless with the delight of having gotten to Harry, even a little bit. "Go ahead - I'll sell a gawk at the bruises to your fangirls over at the Weekly - look where Harry Potter touched me -" 

Harry had bolted to his feet, Hermione still gripping his hand. Draco had blinked, flinching back as Harry leaned into him, their noses nearly touching. When Harry spoke, his voice had been so soft that only Draco and Hermione had heard him. "You wish I'd hit you," Harry had said, his voice soft and very deadly. "Don't you, Malfoy?" 

Draco's lip had curled. "Meaning what, Potter?" 

"Meaning it would tell you I thought you were worth hitting. But you're not even worth spitting on. And you know it." 

Draco's face had tightened. And all around him, the Slytherins had gone silent; in those days, they had all been attuned to him, reacting as he did, following his lead. But Draco had said nothing -he'd been uncharacteristically silent, staring back at Harry, mouth set in a bitter line. A moment later McGonagall, sensing trouble, had bustled up and sent the Slytherins packing back to their table. 

Hermione, remembering now the bitter look on Draco's face, reached to stroke his shoulder. He shifted against her hand but did not wake up. 

Hermione went back to her magazine, although she was only half reading it. Oliver Wood was on the list, which did not surprise her, and so was Charlie Weasley, which did, although she supposed it shouldn't have. He was posed against a background of dragons in flight, looking mildly amused at having his picture taken. There were one or two foreign Quidditch players she didn't know, the lead singer of the Every Flavor Boys (a talentless but attractive wizarding boy band - Hermione was amused that this phenomenon seemed to exist in both magical and Muggle worlds) and Viktor Krum - Hermione stifled a giggle. Oh dear. If only she had been a bit more attracted to Viktor, her life might have been a lot less complicated. She had liked Viktor. He had been nice, and interesting to talk to, and he had known a surprising amount about the Philosophy of Magic. But he had never made her stomach feel as if she had swallowed a Fluttering Fern. 

No, there were only two boys who had ever made her feel like that. And there they both were when she turned Viktor over, Harry and Draco, on facing pages. Their names printed above them in curlicue script, Harry's running horizontal across the full page, Draco's vertical and to the right, the 'r' at the end of Harry's last name overlapping with the first 'r' in Draco's. The article made breathless much of the connection between them: their impending stepbrotherhood, the rivalry between their Houses, their history of enmity on the Quidditch pitch. Photos of Harry had apparently been harder to come by this year (probably because Harry had threatened Colin with death or expulsion if he ever sold another picture of Harry to the Weekly); all the ones they had were blurry shots taken with Omnilenses: Harry at a distance, Harry with his eyes averted, hand over his face, half-hidden by dark hair, cloak hood pulled down, ducking the gaze of the wizarding world. 

Photos of Draco were easier to come by. He loved having his picture taken, or he had once, anyway. He looked the same in all the pictures: arrogant chin-tilt and amused expression, flirting with the camera as he'd flirted with the girl who interviewed him: 

TWW: And do you have any interests? 

DM: I enjoy spelunking, romance novels, canoe portaging, building tents out of cutlery, rubbing myself with pesto, origami and pornography. 

TWW: Really? 

DM: Well, actually I find origami extremely boring. Maybe I can make a scale model of Hogwarts out of ten pieces of paper and a matchstick, but in the end, of what benefit is that to wizardkind? I ask you. 

TWW: Can you tell us anything about your relationship with Harry Potter? 

DM: No. 

TWW: Come on, just one little thing? After such a long history of being enemies, you're about to be stepbrothers. Surely you've tried to make some kind of peace with each other? 

DM: Well, sometimes we wrestle naked in treacle. 

TWW: Really? 

DM: No, but wouldn't it be funny if we did? 

TWW: What would you like to be when you grow up? 

DM: When I grow up? * laughs * When I grow up, I'd like to be a pastry. 

TWW: You mean a pastry chef? 

DM: No. I mean a pastry. I don't have very high aspirations, really. I'm a meek sort of fellow. 

TWW: If you'll forgive me interjecting my own opinion, you don't seem meek to me. 

DM: Well, I certainly am meek. I heard somewhere that the meek are going to inherit big one of these days and I plan to be around to cash in when it happens. It takes a lot of income to look as pretty as I do. 

TWW: So there you have it, girls. Draco Malfoy, seventeen years old, probably the richest wizard in England. Blond good looks, a rapier tongue, and when he grows up, he wants to be a pastry. We here at TWW think he already is one. 

A faint twinge of wistfulness tugged at Hermione as she turned the page and saw more photos of Draco there, mixed in with photos of the other boys on the list - there he was in his summer Quidditch uniform, all bare arms and tan skin and wicked bright grin and his fist clenched over the fluttering Snitch. Hermione felt a pang - he seemed armored in the unassailable beauty of youth and perfect health. He stirred against the window and shifted, and as he did so his hand slid from his lap to the seat beside him, and she saw something, just under the edge of his glove where it ended at his wrist. Something that looked like a thin line of silvery thread - but his gloves were black. 

She reached down, moving as carefully as she could so as not to disturb him, and delicately peeled back the edge of his glove. He stirred but did not wake up as she drew it off his hand. And caught her breath. 

His hand was a mess. The palm was crusted with dried blood around two deep, cross-shaped scars that slashed their way from the heel of the palm to the base of his fingers. She knew immediately that he had tried to obliterate the scar he shared with Harry. He had half succeeded. It was not gone but when his hand healed the shape of it would be altered forever. 

"Oh," she whispered, under her breath, and tugged the glove back up. Very lightly she closed her fingers over his hand. She felt as if she had seen something she was not supposed to see. At the same time it had not surprised her. She supposed she had guessed what he had done. As a gesture, it was just like him. 

His eyes were closed, the lids faintly bluish. She leaned sideways and gently kissed his temple, just where the white-fair hair waved away from the sleep-dampened skin. He did not move. She wondered what he was dreaming. 

*** 

The marriage took place speedily and for several weeks the wizard was very happy with his new bride. True, she had a number of odd habits. She never ate in front of him, preferring to take all her meals alone in her room. He never saw her about during the day, for she claimed to have a rare allergy of the skin that made her extremely sensitive to sunlight. When he hung gold jewelry on her she winced and shrank from it in disgust, claiming that she had been brought up to find gold ostentatious and unattractive. She allowed him, however, to buy her as much silver jewelry as he liked, and seemed to have an especial fondness for green gemstones. 

All these things were odd, indeed, but she more than made up for her small peculiarities, in his eyes, by her talents in other areas. Indeed, she was so remarkably skilled in the arts of giving pleasure that he found he could not be with her often enough. If it had not been for her insistence upon withdrawing to her own bedroom for meals he would not have been able to part from her at all. His studies suffered, as did his practices of magic. All he thought of was her. He dreamed of drowning himself in the nets of her dark hair, burning himself on the coals of her eyes, abandoning himself to the drowsy sensuality of her touch. He wanted nothing but her and dreamed of nothing else. 

What was that? You want to know if he loved her? Well, that's a good question, isn't it. That would depend on how you define love, I suppose. You think you can define it for me? You're just a child, what do you know? Oh, come now, don't be offended. Come back and sit by me, let me put my robe around you. Give me your hand. I'll listen. Ask me questions. 

Did he want to be with her all the time? Why, yes, he did at that. And did he think she was beautiful? Yes, he did. And did he miss her when she was not there? Indeed, he felt it as if his own hand had been wrenched away. And did he want no one else to have her? Why, he would have killed any man who touched her. 

And did he want her happiness more than he wanted his own? 

Well, no, of course not. He was a Malfoy. Malfoys don't love like that. 

*** 

Death Eaters. 

Harry's hand flew to his belt and gripped hard at the runic band there. It was freezing cold to the touch. His mind did what it always did when faced with a panic situation - narrowed itself down to a set of exact determined points. He saw the whole alley clearly: its one exit point, the barred metal door in the brick wall, the piles of wet, broken boxes, the places where the stones underfoot were slippery. He flexed the fingers of his right hand and wondered how many of them he could take out before they overwhelmed him - 

"Wait." The blond boy who wasn't Draco stepped in front of him, a hand out, and Harry faltered for a moment, because despite everything this stranger still looked like Draco, and the instinct inside him to be loyal and cooperative was hard to choke down. "Give me back the cube - and wait - you don't know - just wait, wait right here -" 

Dazed, Harry held the cube out; the boy took it and hurried down the alley towards the mass of Death Eaters. Harry saw them pause, all in a line, black-gloved hands going for their wands and was reminded of a set of black chess pieces. He remained where he was, left hand braced against the wet wall. He could feel the locked power inside him, wanting to break free, and remembered the release he'd felt inside the Shrieking Teacup as the fire rose inside him like a wave, breaking through his brain and out through his hand, burning a path for him. 

He stayed still, fist clenched against his side, shivering - and watching. 

He could not hear what the blond boy was saying to the Death Eaters. They stood impassive, looking at the boy, pale faces like a row of white dots under their charcoaled hoods. The boy himself, from this distance, looked so much like Draco that Harry could only look at him out of the corner of his eye, noting the wet blond hair, the nervous tension in the shoulders as he moved. He looked as if he were explaining something to the Death Eaters: his gestures were conciliatory. 

He pointed back at Harry and then at himself, and then held out his hand, the small glassy cube glimmering on his palm. The Death Eaters glanced at it, and then the tallest of them glanced back at Harry. A tense moment followed. Harry stood where he was, very conscious of the icy dampness that dripped down the back of his shirt, his shaking, frozen hands. Through the still falling frozen rain he looked at the Death Eaters, and they looked back, the slender figure of the blond boy in between them. Then they turned as one, and walked away. 

The boy turned and began walking back towards Harry. Harry let himself sag back against the wall, still tense. His heart was beating like a triphammer in his chest. As the boy neared him he held out his hand with the glowing cube in it and said in a subdued voice, "If you still want this -" 

"What did you say to them?" Harry demanded sharply, brushing the proffered hand away. "What did you do?" 

"I told them I knew who you were," said the boy. "Or, at least, that I knew you weren't Harry Potter." 

"And they believed you? I find that hard to imagine." 

"You wouldn't," said the boy, "if you knew where we were. They were very apologetic - very embarrassed, actually. Everyone knows the Midnight Club. No one's supposed to interfere with employees or customers. They know that." 

Harry blinked rain out of his eyes. "Customers?" 

"It would be a lot easier if you'd come inside with me," said the boy. "I could show you -" 

"Show me what? I don't trust you -" 

"I could have turned you over to those Death Eaters if I'd wanted to!" 

"I don't see why you'd help me," said Harry, crossly, and shivered. "You don't even know me." 

Some kind of guardedness fell away from the boy's face. "You're Harry Potter," he said. "Aren't you?" As if that somehow explained everything, and there was something plainly and briefly vulnerable in the way he looked at Harry. Draco would never have looked like that. "And you're freezing. If you stay out here, you'll die of the cold." 

Harry tried to shake his wet hair back, but it was too sodden and heavy with icy water. He scrubbed the back of his cold hand along his cheekbone and hesitated. He could, of course, flee again - but the Death Eaters were still out there, and he had no desire to run into them again, as he had no idea what lie the blond boy had told them to get them to go away. He looked at the stranger, who had his hand on the wide bar of the heavy metal door in the wall. 

"Have you got a name?" Harry asked. 

The boy looked briefly surprised, then shook his head. "I keep forgetting you don't know. I can't tell you that." 

"I won't call you Draco," Harry said stiffly. 

"I know. That's all right. You don't have to call me anything, then. Just - come on." 

The boy gestured for Harry to follow him. Harry hesitated for a moment. Then, casting a last glance behind him at the empty frozen alley, he followed. 

*** 

"Ben," said Gareth in an irritable tone, "your underaged female admirer is being extremely peculiar about my runic band. Would you mind detaching her from my arm?" 

Ben looked curious. "Is she underage? I hadn't thought about it." 

"I am not," said Ginny crossly, releasing her grip on Gareth's sleeve. "And I'm not an admirer, either. I wouldn't dream of it. I think you two are very cute together." 

At this, Ben looked startled and Gareth heartily amused. "I always wondered what the history books said about us," Gareth said. 

"Most of the good stuff is in the footnotes," said Ginny. "I've got a lot of books about Founder history -" 

"I want to read one," Gareth said. 

"No," said Ben, very sharply and unexpectedly, "you don't." 

Now it was Gareth's turn to appear startled. He did not, however, argue the point. 

"Now what's all this about Gareth's runic band?" Ben said to Ginny. 

"Harry has one just like it," Ginny said. "Nobody knows where it came from or what it does. I've been worried all this time it was something dangerous. If there's another one like it -" 

"I can't imagine there would be," Gareth said. "My father made this specifically for me when I was born. It must the same one. I suppose it had to go somewhere after I died," he added, matter-of-factly, "although odd, it ending up in the hands of a Gryffindor heir." 

"Not that odd," said Ben. He did not appear disposed to elaborate and Ginny did not press him. There would have been no point. Ben said what he wanted to say when he said it, and not a word more. 

"What does it do?" Ginny demanded of Gareth, who seemed quietly amused to have found himself the center of attention. 

"Even I don't know entirely," Gareth said. "It's a rather complex protection charm, from my understanding. It repels demonic activity - vampires, hellhounds, succubi and such forth. In addition, when the wearer is lost, it guides him towards the nearest aid, without his knowledge that he is being guided. It's a handy item, and no mistake." 

"So it'll keep Harry safe?" Ginny said. 

"Well, not entirely," Gareth said. "It'll guide him towards help, and it'll keep demons away, but other than that, it won't save his life, or heal his wounds, or protect him from malicious spells. Not as far as I know, anyway," he added. "I know there are some complicated charms woven into the runes around the band. I doubt anyone other than my father could tell you what they all do." 

"Can I see it?" Ginny asked. 

"I can't take it off, if that's what you mean," Gareth said. "I can't ever take it off - but if you want to look at it, you can." 

He held out his arm, drawing the sleeve back as he did so. Ginny went over to him, a little nervously. He gave off the same impression that Draco sometimes did, that it was not entirely a good idea to stand too close to him. "Turn your wrist over," she said, and he did. What she had thought was another bracelet on his arm was in fact a tattoo of a brightly colored serpent, gold and green and blue. Its tail coiled around his wrist and its head curled in the crook of his arm. She lightly touched the runic band, feeling, as she had felt before when she touched it in the Gryffindor common room, no sense of Dark magic emanating from it. "It will guide him when he's lost?" she said. 

"It will bring him to the closest person willing to aid him," Gareth said. "I've met some interesting people that way." 

Ben chuckled under his breath but said nothing. He had seated himself on Ginny's desk again and was watching them curiously, elbow propped on his knee. 

"Why can't you take it off?" Ginny asked, still looking down at Gareth's wrist. She had a slight urge to ask him if she could touch the tattoo, which looked unbelievably alive, but had a feeling he'd take it the wrong way if she did. And he was already so jumpy. It hardly seemed worth the risk. 

He withdrew his wrist from her grasp and touched the runic band himself with long, careful fingers. He looked at her sidelong. His eyes were not the same color green as Harry's, although they had the same startling quality. "Because I can't remove it while I'm still living," he said. "It won't come off my wrist until the day I die. It's enchanted that way." 

*** 

"Draco," protested Hermione, tugging at the sleeve of his robe. "What are we doing here? This is the most expensive hotel on Diagon Alley!" 

Draco shrugged. "So?" he inquired, scanning the front of the building with a look of blasé satisfaction in his gray eyes. It was a lovely building, Hermione had to admit - it had once been the offices of the Ministry of Magic before they had outgrown it. It was too expensive a hotel even to have a name. It just had a street address and a silk awning, protected from the damp with Impervio charms. 

"So, I thought we were going to try to be low-profile." 

"I agreed to be low-profile. I didn't agree to slum. You can't expect me to stay in some flophouse." 

"I didn't say flophouse - what about the Leaky Cauldron?" 

Draco wrinkled up his nose. "The Leaky Cauldron? So déclassé. All the stairwells reek of stew, and you can't honestly expect me to sleep on sheets someone else has already slept on. That way lies skin disease and unsightly rashes." 

"The sheets in the Leaky Cauldron are perfectly clean." 

"By plebian standards," said Draco. 

Hermione shot him a ferocious glare. 

Draco looked amused. "I suppose you think that sounded arrogant." 

"I think that boat sailed with the 'flophouse' comment, actually." 

Draco made an exasperated gesture. "Look, it's just as easy to be low-profile in an expensive hotel. Easier, in fact. A few well-placed fistfuls of Galleons and the management will be prepared to swear on oath that my name's Nigel Todwhacker, and I'm a well-known industrialist with a thriving whelk exportation business and a manor house in Walton-on-the-Naze." 

"You're seventeen," said Hermione crossly. "Nobody's going to believe that you're a well-known industrialist. Perhaps you should think of something more age-appropriate." 

"Well, I could tell them my name's Nigel Todwhacker and I spend all my time in my room masturbating and memorizing the liner notes on old Chöcolate Frög albums, but that might be more information than they need." 

Hermione burst out laughing despite herself. 

Her laughter coaxed a smile out of Draco. He no longer smiled the way he once had, of course, but a smile was still a smile. "Besides, they don't have to believe me," he added. "They just need an excuse to act like they believe me. I don't like lying unless I have to, you know that, but if you're going to lie the key is to give the other person a reason to want to believe you." 

"He's right, you know," said a silky voice. Hermione spun around and saw, with a flash of alarm, Blaise Zabini standing on the pavement a few steps away from them. She wore an ornately decorated set of silk robes, a colorful cloak, and looked, as always, beautiful. Her scarlet hair showered down around her, free of clips or other ornaments. Hermione wondered how long she'd been listening. "He should know - he's the expert at telling people what they want to hear. Still," Blaise added, her voice dropping, "you can only get away with that sort of thing for so long ... right, Draco?" 

*** 

Harry found himself being hurried down a long, undecorated hallway so quickly that he barely had time to register his surroundings. His companion had a tight hold on his bare arm and was using his leverage to shove Harry along the corridor so quickly that Harry was having difficulty not tripping over his own feet. 

It was freezing cold. Harry had a feeling that they were under the main part of a building, perhaps using a sort of tradesman's entrance. The corridor ended in a stone stairway that curved away into darkness. Pausing at the foot, the boy let go of Harry's arms and spun Harry around to face him. "You need to put your glasses on," he said, in a sharply agitated voice. "Why do you keep taking them off?" 

"I charmed my eyes so I wouldn't need them," Harry said gruffly. "Now they make my vision blur." 

"Well, put them on anyway or you'll get in trouble." The boy cast an anxious glance up and down the corridor. "Do it now." 

Harry did it, grudgingly, sliding the glasses down to the bridge of his nose so he could see over the lenses. "In trouble with who?" 

"With the manager," said the boy. "All our Harrys have to wear the glasses. School robes too, usually, although you look all right, you're all wet, that could be a look, I guess. Bit weird, but...you don't have any Quidditch gear with you, do you?" 

"No, I bloody well don't." Every time the situation seemed as if it couldn't get any more surreal, Harry reflected, it did. "Maybe I should just go..." 

"It's not safe out there and you know it." The boy's cold hand closed around Harry's wrist - a weirdly familiar feeling, those delicately articulated long fingers he knew by touch. "Go on up the stairs ahead of me." 

Harry went, not quickly, keeping his right hand out of his pocket. He thought about the alley and his willingness to kill the Death Eaters there and what that said about him. Although wondering about it wasn't the same as regretting it, which he didn't. 

The stairway ended in another hallway. This one, however, was far from undecorated. The walls were painted an almost blood-colored scarlet, and the rich Oriental carpets on the polished floor were tasseled with red and gold. Enormous gold-framed oil portraits hung on the walls, and bronze candelabras floated in midair, spilling smoke so heavily scented that Harry could taste it on the air, sweet and musky, like spoiled fruit. He narrowed his eyes and turned to the boy standing behind him. "What is this place?" he said. "It looks like a hotel, or an eighteenth century brothel." 

Looking rather helpless, the boy shrugged. "I don't know anything about the eighteenth century...." 

He cut himself off and edged nearer Harry, blocking him, as several people appeared at the end of the hallway. "Come on," the boy said, and pushed Harry again, down the hall. They went slowly enough this time for Harry to get a better look at the oil paintings on the walls. They were ornately tinted, all pinks and whites and blues, and they showed nude wizards and witches, festooned with ribbons, engaged in the sort of activities usually featured in the magazines that Fred and George kept hidden under their beds. Eighteenth-century brothel, Harry thought again, rather dizzily, and then something occurred to him was both so logical and at the same time so disgusting that his mind reeled. 

He was still reeling when they came out into an enormous circular room, from which many small corridors extruded like the spokes of a wheel. This room had a floor of black marble, veined with gold, a high ceiling painted with naked angels, chandeliers dripping teardrop crystals. Two spiral staircases rose from the center of the room. Huge couches ran along the walls and there were wizards and witches sprawled in them. Some of them Harry recognized - famous faces, the kind that usually looked out from the cover of Teen Witch Weekly. Some of them he didn't. He saw handsome faces, beautiful faces, and some who were quite ordinary. He felt the boy standing next to him relax slightly. "Oh, good," he said, "the other Harrys, they must be upstairs." 

"Upstairs?" Harry said, his own voice sounding like a stranger's. 

"Which is where we're going," said the boy quietly. Harry began to move, but the boy pulled him back. "No, not that way, that way is the manager's office and the catalogue rooms." 

"Catalogue rooms?" said Harry faintly, letting the boy steer him towards the leftmost staircase. 

"You know," said the boy, "the catalogues. I mean, they like it if you bring hair or eyelashes or whatever that they can use to make the potion, but if you don't, or you want someone famous, then you can choose someone out of the catalogue. The price varies by how hard it is to get the materials. You're expensive. But it doesn't matter, they usually keep a few of you around anyway. Someone always wants you." 

Harry's stomach knotted. "Someone always...wants me? Wants me for what?" he asked, although he had a feeling he knew perfectly well what. 

"Well, a lot of them want to be you," the boy said, his tone hesitant. "That's why I thought - when I saw you - that you were a customer. You reacted like you recognized me, and I thought you were...you know...playing." His voice trailed off. 

"And Draco," Harry said. They were at the top of the stairs now, and had turned onto another interminable corridor. More oil paintings lined these walls, but these were not portraits. Harry could see flesh-colored paint, writhing limbs, long trailing scarves of lace and satin. At regular intervals down the corridor were doors, each one set with a bronze numbered plate. "Someone paid you to ...?" 

"Well, not specifically. They usually keep a few of him around as well. Especially since he's been in all the news articles lately...that always ups the demand, and -" 

The boy's speech was interrupted by Harry, who had chosen that moment to stagger off into a corner where he could be violently sick. He had eaten so little that day that there wasn't much to come up, mostly stomach acid that burned his throat. When he straightened up and turned around the boy was staring at him. 

"I'm sorry," the boy said nervously. "I forget, working here, that the idea might upset people who aren't used to it." 

"Used to it?" Harry said savagely. "It's disgusting, how could you get used to it, or want to? It's using people." 

"It doesn't hurt them. They don't even know about it -" 

"That's not the point!" Harry shivered. The nausea was receding, replacing itself with a feverish anger. "If they did know - if Draco knew about this, hell, if his father knew about this - I mean, I hate the bastard, but I can't imagine he'd be any too pleased if he knew that--" 

"Well, of course Lucius Malfoy knows about the Midnight Club," interrupted the boy, looking surprised. "He owns it." 

*** 

Dearest Seamus, 

Nothing could have made your father and I happier than your last letter. That you should choose to be so open and truthful with us makes us very proud parents indeed. Although we really don't understand the cause of your anxiety. It's perfectly all right with us, of course, if you're gay. We're just glad you were honest with us so that we can be properly supportive. Let us know if there are any organizational meetings we should be attending. If there are no existing organizations we'd be happy to start one. And if you'd like to bring your boyfriend home for the holidays, that would be fine as well, we've still plenty of room in the East Wing. And if you haven't got a boyfriend yet, your aunt wants me to remind you that she always thought that Dean Thomas you were friends with was a nice, good-looking boy. And so artistic! 

Enjoy your holidays and don't drink too much butterbeer at New Year's - you remember what happened to your Uncle Eamon. Although we suppose they don't have nearly so many cattle gratings in London. 

Love,  

Mum  

Standing in the alley outside the Shrieking Teacup, Tom read the letter over again. It was his sixth reading and still he could not believe his eyes. Surely the Finnegans had misunderstood his initial missive? But no, it appeared that they hadn't and that in fact he himself had made a miscalculation. Not a grave one, but a miscalculation nevertheless. 

He tossed the letter into the air, where it burst into flames. The ashes sifted down around him like a fine dark powder, dusting the shoulders of his cloak and catching in his damp hair. 

He bit his lip in vexation. It would not be exactly accurate to say that things were not going to plan. He had no plan for events to either go along with, or at least, if he had a plan, it was not yet a fully formed one. He had seen Harry in the bookshop and wanted to cause him trouble; that had, he thought, worked splendidly until the Death Eaters who had been chasing Harry had returned, shaking their heads, apparently having somehow lost their quarry. They were not inclined to share the details of their defeat with him, a total stranger, and he did not deem it wise to lose his temper and show his hand at such an early juncture. More importantly, he thought, he had heard them speak a name - the Midnight Club. 

Tom knew the Midnight Club. It existed in his day, owned by Lucius' grandfather and run very profitably. During the war years it had been a base for smuggling operations, but at its heart, it had still been what it had been designed to be: a whorehouse. Tom had always found the concept rather amusing. A logical extension of the uses of Polyjuice, to be sure. And a testimony to the venality of the Malfoys. Very admirable. 

It would not be difficult to find the club again. In fifty years, the streets surrounding Diagon Alley had hardly changed at all. He began to walk down the alley, fastidiously skirting the banks of dirty snow piled at the edge of the pavement. If he recalled correctly, the Midnight Club allowed the nightly rental of its rooms to patrons, and never asked for any kind of identification. They were not in a business where asking for identification would have been a judicious professional move. He could pay them in the cash he had taken from Seamus' trunk for a room and they would ask no questions. All the rooms were warded by Silencing Charms. In relative peace and quiet, he could read the books he had bought in Diagon Alley - he could learn his own history. And later... 

He glanced down at his left hand, where he had wound the single strand of Ginny's poppy-red hair around his ring finger. Later there might perhaps be time for other amusements. Yes, later. He closed his hand into a fist and drew his hood up to hide his sudden savage grin. 

*** 

Blaise felt a chill as Draco turned around to look at her. He didn't look pleased to see her - not at all. He looked tense and tired and his face was pale between the dark collar of his coat and the hood that concealed his silvery hair. 

"Blaise," he said. "What do you want?" 

She had seen the two of them from across the street. For a moment she had thought nothing of it. She was always seeing Draco, in crowds of people, from the windows of trains, navigating his way along city pavements. Any slim tall boy reminded her of him - sometimes it was less than that: the spark of sunlight off blond hair, the angle of a pair of shoulders, that certain way of walking, the expensive cloaks he favored. This time it was only the fact that Hermione was with him that had convinced her it really was Draco. 

"I need to talk to you," she said. She had spent the last two days wondering how on earth to get in touch with Draco safely; bumping into him on Diagon Alley, whomever he happened to be with, was too good a chance to pass up. She had followed him from outside the Leaky Cauldron and had finally worked up the nerve to interrupt them. She was glad she had. Even if he didn't look terribly happy to see her. 

He sighed and raised his chin. His hood fell back and she saw that his pale hair had been cut shorter, and was tangled as if he'd forgotten to brush it - for Draco, an oversight as serious as if he'd gone out with no trousers on. "What about, Blaise?" 

For a moment she just looked at him. She had missed looking at him. She saw the way Hermione moved towards him when he spoke, the unconscious way she reached out and put a hand on his arm. And she saw the way he let her. She took a breath past the catch in her throat. "It's about Harry," she said. 

Hermione dropped her hand from Draco's arm, her lips parting and her eyes widening. Draco evinced no similar response. His face was a study in utter blankness. "So talk." 

Blaise tightened her lips. "Just give me five minutes alone," she said; it hurt to ask. She hated begging; it went completely contrary to her nature. Draco knew that, too, and for a moment their eyes met in perfect, if not amicable, understanding. 

"Fine," he said. 

She followed him under the shadow of the awning; Hermione, her mittened hands in her pockets, waited for them by the edge of the pavement. Blaise restrained herself from shooting Hermione a triumphant look. 

A brass handrail ran down the middle of the staircase. Blaise leaned up against it and turned to Draco. He was staring at her with an unnerving fierceness in his eyes. He put his hand out and caught at her wrist and his gloved hand was cool against her skin. "What about Harry?" he demanded. 

She took a deep breath. "It's not about Harry, it's about you." 

He went still all over. Then he flung her wrist aside with surprising force. "Why did you lie?" 

Blaise braced her hands on the rail behind her. "Because it was the only way I could get you to listen to me - all you care about is Harry." 

"That's not true." His voice cut like a whip coming down on her bare skin. It took force of will not to flinch away. "If you've got nothing to say to me--" 

"I didn't say that. Just because I've got nothing to say about Harry doesn't mean I've got nothing to say!" 

"So you have something to say that doesn't have anything to do with boys, hair or cosmetic charms? It's a bloody fucking first, then. Call out the Prophet reporters, it's a red letter day. Let's make the most of it." 

Blaise blinked. This was unprecedentedly vicious, even for Draco. For a moment all she wanted to do was slap his face and walk away - leave him to whatever the Slytherins had planned for him. But she couldn't. She loved him, she thought, the way he had once hated Harry - with bitter resentment. Why did it have to be him, of all people; there was nothing special or interesting or different about falling in love with the best-looking boy in school, who was also rich, who was also popular, who was also captain of the Quidditch team. It was predictable and stupid. And she had done it just the same. 

"Spit it out, Zabini." Draco swung his arm up and shot a glare at the watch on his wrist. "You have fifty seconds." 

"Draco-" 

"Now you have forty-seven seconds." 

Blaise bit back her wrath. "Your life's in danger," she said. 

This did not have the effect she was expecting. For a moment, Draco stared at her. Then he burst out laughing. He laughed so hard he had to lean against one of the awning poles. 

Blaise narrowed her eyes. "I'm not joking." 

Draco was still laughing. "I know - you're not," he got out, between gasps. "It's just - the look on your face. So concerned. You're worried about me - that's awfully cute." 

"It is not cute! You're an idiot, Draco Malfoy, and if you don't listen to me then you're going to be a very dead idiot. And I won't be sorry, either." 

"No -" he gasped out. "No, you wouldn't be. You always - looked good in black." His laughter had turned into a coughing spasm. He leaned back against the awning pole, catching his breath. "You know," he said, "I have to congratulate you on your delivery, there. It's not often you get a chance to go up to someone and tell them 'Your life's in danger.' It's right up there with 'follow that flying carpet.'" 

Blaise stared in bewilderment. "You've lost your mind," she said. 

"Among other things." He had sobered now. She was glad. She had not liked that brittle laughter at all. "Blaise," he said. "Blaise, darling - angel - you're wasting your time." 

"Don't," she said. He had always showered endearments on her, especially in public - baby, angel, darling, sweetest - always with a sarcastic edge that left her feeling somehow abused. "I suppose you already know, then. I don't see how - Pansy said you didn't. But there's no need to make me feel like more of a fool than I do." 

Her words had an odd effect on him. The faint smirk went from his face and his eyes narrowed. "Pansy?" he said. "Interesting. Perhaps you'd best explain after all." 

Hesitantly at first, she explained what she knew: about the protective charms they had all been given, all the children of those who were still part of the Dark Lord's circle. Barrettes in some cases, earrings, buttons - each containing a bit of enchanted basilisk scale or skin. How Pansy had asked for an extra set of protective charms and been refused, and what Blaise suspected her of doing to remedy that lack. What Pansy had said when Blaise had gone to her, and how Blaise now knew for certain that Pansy would not stop at hurting Draco if it seemed necessary, and how Blaise had gone to Marcus afterward and he had explained, rather reluctantly but more thoroughly, what was in store. 

That she had panicked subsequently and become quite abusive towards Marcus, she left out. 

When she was done, Draco did not look grateful for the news. He did not look anything except, possibly, slightly interested. "So if I'm not poisoned to death by Monday, Voldemort's death squad is going to off me along with everyone else on Tuesday," he remarked. "Relatively speaking, of course." 

"I don't know what you mean about being poisoned," Blaise said. "But you don't seem terribly afraid of dying." 

"I am," he said. "Horribly. But - it's rather freeing, this imminent death business. It creates a strangely consequence-free environment. One feels one could run through the Great Hall wearing only a pair of luminous shorts and shouting that Professor McGonagall has a shady relationship with the giant squid, and you wouldn't even get detention. Not that I'm planning to of course, and did you say that Pansy was the one who shot me with that arrow? Pansy?" 

"That's what she said," said Blaise. 

"And how much of this did you know before?" he demanded. 

Blaise slid her eyes away from his. "Just a bit of what Pansy was up to." 

"And you never told me." His lip curled at the corner. "And here I thought you loved me." 

Blaise gaped at him in mingled consternation and fury. She had always wondered - half-hoped, half-hoped not - if he knew how she felt about him. She had assumed he didn't. That he did know was infuriating to her. The fragile tether of her patience snapped, and she drew herself upright in a rage: "Loved you?" she spat out. "Of course I loved you. But just because you love someone doesn't mean you don't see what they are - and how they feel about you. You never loved me back." 

"No," he said. "I didn't." 

"You see, then," she said. "Maybe I wanted you punished. Maybe I hated you a little bit for not loving me enough or properly - haven't you ever felt that way, haven't you ever loved anyone who didn't love you? If you haven't then you don't know how it feels. It's not as if there weren't things you didn't tell me." 

Draco had gone quiet, the sort of quietness that was like a yell or an interruption. He looked away from her. 

Blaise sighed, feeling defeated. "You hate being blamed for anything," she said, in a bitter tone. "How could I forget that?" 

"It's not that," he said. He looked at her and she had the feeling that for the first time he actually saw her. "It's just that it never occurred to me before that what I did to you was wrong. I'm sorry about that." 

For a moment she could not react. Part of her did not want to accept his apology. It seemed too little a thing in the face of how much he had made her love him and how angry she still was. On the other hand she had to accept that perhaps he had not made her love him. She had decided to love him, because he had saved her, because he was beautiful, because she was restless and wanted something and he seemed like a solution. 

He said, "Would you be willing to help my friends as well?" 

She raised her chin. "Don't insult me," she said. "I already have helped them." 

He nodded. "True, so I know you know where the Burrow is. Can you go back?" 

"If I have to." 

"I need you to talk to Ginny for me." 

Blaise winced inwardly. Hermione she had always disliked, but could grudgingly respect. At least she was brilliant. Ginny was a useless Weasley and the way she looked at Draco was sickening. "And tell her what?" 

"Everything you just told me." He produced a quill from his pocket, wrote something quickly on a piece of parchment, and handed it to her, folded. "And give this to her, as well, or she won't believe I sent you." 

Blaise took it with a dry look. "What if I read it?" 

"My father used to say that if you peep through a keyhole you may see what will vex you," said Draco, with a slight lift to the corner of his mouth. "Read it if you want." 

"You vex me already," she said. 

The slight lift became less slight and there was suddenly an odd softness in the way he was looking at her, a look of recognition. "Look at you," he said. "Fighting the good fight. Saving the world. I'm surprised at you." 

"I don't care about the world," she said. "I care about you. I still do love you. I don't care if you love me back and I don't care if you don't deserve me loving you. You're selfish and you're spoilt and God do you not care about anyone but yourself, so you probably don't deserve it, but I do love you, and that matters to me because it's mine." 

He had ducked his head but he was still looking at her with that unnerving oblique look of recognition. His face was so familiar to her, but still a stranger's: she knew the funny little white scar under his eye, but not how he had gotten it. 

"I always did tell you," he said, "that you were just like me." 

She tucked the note he had given her into her sleeve. "I'll owl you, then," she said, "and tell you what Ginny says." 

He nodded. Then, to her surprise, he touched the side of her face lightly with his hand, lifting her hair away, and kissed her cheek. It wasn't a romantic gesture, really, but it surprised her all the same. 

"Thank you," she said. "And - no luminous shorts?" 

He smiled faintly. "No," he said. 

She turned away. She was already on the pavement and heading down the street when she heard her name called. Not by Draco. A girl's voice. She turned around and saw Hermione hurrying towards her, her dark winter cloak clutched around her. 

Blaise frowned. "What do you want?" 

Hermione halted, a little breathless, in front of Blaise, and raised her chin. "To show you these," she said, and, under her hood, pushed a dark curl of her hair back so that Blaise could see the glitter of the green barrettes caught in her hair. "I just wanted you to know I was wearing them." 

"Good," said Blaise. "It's nice to know all Gryffindors aren't as moronic as they look." 

This didn't seem to faze Hermione. Blaise supposed she was used to Draco. "I wanted you to know that I trusted you," she said. 

Blaise had nothing to say to that. She just nodded, awkwardly, at Hermione, and turned away before the other girl could see her blush. Slytherins didn't blush. Blaise walked away quickly. 

*** 

Harry had never given much, if any, thought to what a room in a wizarding brothel might look like, so it was perhaps slightly odd that his first thought upon seeing one was, Well, that's hardly what I would have expected.  

It was, however, hardly what he would have expected. Even in his dazed and feverish state Harry found that he was surprised at how bare it was, especially compared to the richly decorated corridor outside. His guide had taken him to the door farthest down the hallway, which bore a plaque proclaiming it to be Room Thirty-Four. It had no lock: instead the boy tapped the glowing cube he'd been holding outside against the knob, and the door swung open. 

Inside was a room that was nearly austere in its simplicity. Clean wood walls, a bare wood floor, a fireplace and a desk. On the desk was a small, elegant gold writing set: quills, parchment, and inkbottle. A window, heavy silk curtains drawn closed across it, let in no light. And, of course, there was a bed. Draped across the bed was the only object in the room with any color: a dark violet velvet bedspread with the letters TMC intertwined across it in gold. Staring, Harry heard Draco's voice in his head, tense and weary, speaking to him on top of that frozen tower at the Manor, I've always known my father was into some nasty stuff...dragon´s blood bars, unicorn smuggling, polyjuice brothels... 

"No one's going to be using this room," the boy said, standing a little awkwardly in the doorway. "The silencing charms need repairing. You'll have to be quiet." He shifted his weight. There was something about the way he stood and looked at Harry that Harry thought of as odd, but since Harry couldn't stand looking at him directly or for very long, it didn't seem worth following up on. The boy reached out and shut the door behind him. "I'll check in on you," he said. "But I can't stay." 

"I don't really want you to," Harry said. He was still looking around the room. There was a framed painting on one wall of a woman in a blue dress, which was slipping down around her shoulders. She winked at him, and he looked away. "I need sleep," Harry said, thinking out loud. "At least a few hours, until I can go. Will I be safe here that long?" 

"I don't see why not - I can't promise anything, but I'll try. I'll come here and let you out of there are any problems -" 

"Fine," Harry said, shortly. "Will you still look - like that?" 

"Yes. I have to. Do you hate it that much?" The boy looked at him, nervously, and this time Harry forced himself to look back. It turned his stomach a little - although it wasn't as if he hadn't played with Polyjuice himself, before; he knew it was no more than a glamour, a thin skin of enchantment drawn over reality. But that didn't change the fact that this stranger looked back at him with Draco's eyes and frowned at him with Draco's mouth and that as he looked at Harry, Harry saw something in his face that he had never seen in Draco's when Draco looked at him, and that was fear. 

"I hate it that much," Harry said. "Are you afraid of me?" 

"Yes. Isn't everyone?" 

Harry leaned against the mantel over the fireplace. The warmth that came from the fire barely seemed to penetrate his clothes. His bones felt as if they were made of ice; his head was heavy, and ached. He wanted to lie down and wrap himself in blankets. He could hardly remember what it felt like not to be tired and cold. "Is that why you're helping me? Because you're afraid of me?" 

"No." The boy moved forward, a little hesitantly, and then, to Harry's great surprise, knelt down on the floor at Harry's feet. Harry's hand tightened on the mantel. "You're Harry Potter," the boy said rapidly, looking down, "everyone knows who you are. The Dark Lord would have killed us all, if it wasn't for you. I used to celebrate your birthday, when I was growing up - we all did. You might think because I work here, I'm one of them - the Death Eaters - but I'm not, none of us are, we're just ordinary wizards and witches. It's just the money, and we're not hurting anyone, not really. I don't want the Dark Lord coming back any more than you do - than anyone does. Any one of us would help you. Almost anyone in the wizarding world would. I'll do whatever I can." 

Harry knew he should say something gracious, but he couldn't. The idea of anyone kneeling at his feet was too horrible, and that it was Draco, or at least wore his face, was more horrible still. "Don't," Harry said, feeling supremely wretched, "don't do that - get up off the floor, please get up." 

The boy looked up at him. "You knew I wasn't him," he said. "You knew it right away, how did you know?" 

"Almost right away," Harry said. It was the way you said my name, he thought, but that was not what he said. "You kissed me," he said. 

"Ah," said the boy. "No truth to the rumors, then?" 

Harry made a faint sound in the back of his throat, and moved away from the fire. Instead of being cold all over, he was now very hot on one side of his body, and freezing on the other. "I wish you'd get up," he said. "You're making me uncomfortable." 

"Sorry." The boy got to his feet with a scramble that lacked any of Draco's usual grace. Harry winced a bit inwardly, but hid it. "I just wanted you to know that you could trust -" 

"I trust who I have to trust," Harry said. "If you really want to help me..." 

The boy nodded. "I do." 

Harry reached into his jeans pocket and drew out a small iron key. "You know where King's Cross Station is?" 

Apparently, he did. He took Harry's key, and, after promising repeatedly to return as soon as he possibly could with Harry's things, he left, to Harry's great relief. He was probably a perfectly nice bloke, Harry thought dizzily, sinking to the floor in front of the fire, outside of the whole being a prostitute and possibly not even a bloke business, not that that mattered one way or the other. Nor did it matter if he was nice or not - Harry couldn't stand looking at him without wanting to be sick. 

He remembered being polyjuiced himself, the oddness of looking down and seeing a body that wasn't his body, hands that weren't his hands. The little things that would give him pause and startle him: the new length of his eyelashes, even, the wider span of his fingertips' reach. Every day had been a thousand tiny shocks. But that was nothing compared to looking at the face of someone you knew, knew as well as you knew your own face, and seeing it animated by a stranger's spirit and intelligence. He wondered if it had been like this for Hermione when he and Draco had switched bodies and felt a momentary flash of guilt over what an ass he'd been to her about it. 

The fire was making him drowsy. Unable to bear the thought of going anywhere near the bed, he stretched out on the floor next to the fire, put his head on his arms, and closed his eyes.  

*** 

It was not long before the peculiar behavior of the wizard's new bride began to excite talk amongst his servants. The house-elves seemed merely afraid of her. Their ears trembled when she came near, and when she walked down the halls they slunk before her like whipped dogs. But the human servants hated her. At first the wizard put it down to jealousy, at least on the part of the female staff, but when his most favored manservant announced his intention to leave the wizard's service, the wizard lost his temper. "And what's the matter with you?" he raged at the unfortunate man. "Has my entire staff run mad?" 

The servant gathered his courage. "It is your wife, sir," he said, in a quavering voice. 

"I don't understand." The wizard clenched his hands in fury. "Is she a harsh mistress? Does she beat or upbraid you?" 

"No, Lord, it is not that." 

"What, then?" 

"She isn't human, sir." 

An unpleasant silence followed. The wizard stood and glared at his servant. His servant looked stolidly at his shoes. 

"What do you mean," the wizard ground out finally, "she isn't human?" 

"She is nosferatu, sir," said the servant. "A demon. An evil thing." 

"She is the daughter of a noble family," the wizard protested. 

"I have made inquiries, my Lord," said the servant. "That family has no daughters. She is not who she says she is." 

"You lie," the wizard raged, and he ordered the servant out of his sight, and later, sent word to his guards and had the man whipped. But the servant's words stayed with him, as the truth often does. For days he could not get the man's words out of his head. She is a demon. An evil thing.  

And he thought about his new wife. He thought about her allergy to sunlight, and the way she never ate in his presence. He thought about her hatred of gold, that metal most unloved by demons, for it resembled in its color the sun which they hated and feared. He thought about her black hair and her white skin and he began, finally, to wonder. 

From such tiny beginnings do doubts grow like seedlings in the heart, putting forth their branches, unfurling their leaves, until even the memory of love is suffocated. 

*** 

Dear Mum and Dad, 

You can't imagine how pleased I was by your warm response to my news. Unfortunately I realized that this meant I must be completely honest with you. In fact, the truth is that when I ran out of pocket money last semester I was forced to supplement my income by appearing in numerous pornographic films. I now feel so ashamed of my activities that I cannot possibly face you. 

I am sure this will be very hard for you. However, if you miss me, you can always rent Wizards Gone Wild, Take It Like A Giant, or Quidditch Through The Arse - although I was just an extra in that. I'm the guy in the back of the kitchen orgy scene wearing only a chef's hat.  

I am sure you will never want to see me again after this news and I completely understand. 

Your son, 

Seamus  

Tom folded the letter in half and handed it to the receptionist behind the Midnight Club's front desk with a charming smile. "Could you find an owl to post that for me, my good ..." Tom squinted, and hazarded a guess. "Goblin?" 

The receptionist's answering smile showed a flashing row of metal teeth. "We'll be happy to take care of that for you, sir. Now, as to the room rates, we have only upstairs rooms available, nothing in the dungeon. Did you want a room for half a night, or the full night?" 

"The full night," said Tom. He glanced around with a feeling of pleasure: the club had hardly changed at all in the past fifty years. The same gaudy crystal chandeliers, the same intricately lascivious oil paintings. Scented candles burned in front of a nearby triptych in which a number of naked, painted nymphs were frolicking in a pool and splashing each other with water. Tom cocked an eyebrow. The nymphs were very pretty, but interested him not at all. He had somewhat specialized tastes. "Lovely décor," he said. 

"The Midnight Club prides itself on having the best of everything," said the goblin receptionist with a wink. "I'm afraid, sir, that I'll have to ask for your wand now. We don't allow guests any use of magic inside the club." 

"Oh, of course." Tom could hardly contain his smirk as he drew Seamus' wand from an inside pocket and handed it across the desk. Most likely they would have a catalogue of photos of registered Magids somewhere behind the desk. Seamus Finnegan, of course, would not be on it. He watched the wand disappear into a locked copper box with no regrets. 

"Now, sir, as to companionship," the goblin began delicately. 

"Companionship?" Tom blinked, then allowed himself the smirk he'd been yearning for previously. "Oh. You want to know if I want a whore?" 

The goblin looked pained. "We prefer not to use that term. It's...old-fashioned." 

"So am I," said Tom. "I'm an old-fashioned sort of chap. Now, what can you do for me?" 

"We have many girls you can choose from immediately, of course." The goblin spoke smoothly, back in his element. "Beautiful girls and, of course...beautiful boys?" 

Tom shook his head. "I want someone specific. A specific girl." 

"A famous witch or wizard will cost you extra, depending, of course, on how hard it is to get hold of the ingredients. You'd be surprised what some Quidditch players will sell on the black market for a little extra gold, no questions asked. But if you want someone like, say, Harry Potter, well then, we have to rely on some rather specialized thievery for that, so..." 

"I said I want a girl," Tom snapped. "And I am not interested in your celebrities." He reached down and unwound the thin strand of copper hair from his ring finger, and held it out across the desk. "I want this girl." 

Carefully, the goblin reached out and took the fragile hair from between his fingers. "Pretty red hair... is she an equally pretty girl?" 

"Quite," said Tom, dispassionately. "I have a few other requirements, as well." 

As he detailed them, the goblin's greenish-yellow eyes widened and he paused, arrested in the middle of retrieving a room key labeled Twenty-Eight from beneath the desk. "That may take some time, sir. A few hours at least." 

"I don't mind waiting," said Tom, and held out his hand for the key, lips curling up into a smile. "I plan to catch up on my reading." 

*** 

As Tom Riddle used an enchanted key to let himself into Room Twenty-Eight, Harry lay in his own room farther down the hall, facedown in front of the fireplace, trying to get warm. The heat seemed to come and go, leaving him sweating and shivering at regular and monotonous intervals. If he had not already been so ill, he might have recognized at this point that he had a fever. Very few people can spend a significant amount of time in freezing rain after several nights of little rest and an exhausting journey and not catch a fever, and Harry was no exception. 

He was, however, not aware of this. He was only aware of the fact that he could not seem to get warm enough, despite lying as close as he could to the fire, and that sleep had turned into a distant possibility. He also seemed to be both having trouble organizing his thoughts and to be aware of things with a sudden piercing clarity that was both a relief and a disturbance. 

He kept seeing the boy who he had thought was Draco, standing opposite him in the rain-soaked alley. It had been rather surprising to be kissed, that was true, and he wondered if it should have bothered him. It hadn't bothered him. But what had bothered him, and what had stayed with him, was the look on the boy's face as he'd spoken - the look on Draco's face - the way he'd looked at Harry as if Harry didn't matter. 

Harry wasn't used to Draco looking at him like that. He was used to Draco looking at him as if he were all that mattered in the world. 

He rolled onto his back, stared up at the ceiling. The fire threw a dancing pattern of shadows across the smooth surface. He could hear Draco's voice in his head, blurred with sleep, almost a whisper: Are you going to stay? 

Yes. I'm going to stay. 

But he hadn't stayed, of course, and so the last thing he'd said to Draco, the last thing he might ever say to him, had been a lie. 

He shivered. His clothes were still damp, the fire had only partially dried them. There was a knot in his stomach. He wished he could still the voices in his head. 

Is that what you want, Harry? 

It's what I want. 

Then I'll do it. 

He rolled onto his side and looked at the fire. The heat stung his skin, this close up, but he didn't mind it. He felt cold down to his bones, as if he'd never be warm again - and in his mind, he was back on that tower, kneeling opposite Draco, cold moonlight spilling down on both of them, bright and stinging and clear as pure alcohol. Maybe you just hate me, Harry had said, shivering in the freezing night. 

Hate you? Draco had said. I could never hate you. 

At least Harry thought that was what he had said. Perhaps it had not been worded quite like that. His tired mind struggled after the memory - kneeling on that tower, his hands full of glass and blood. He had picked up the glass carelessly on purpose, wanting the pain and the injury. You hate me, he'd said to the boy kneeling opposite him in the moonlight, I always thought you hated yourself, but maybe you just hate me. 

He couldn't remember exactly what Draco had said back: some kind of denial, a sputtered half-sentence before interruption. Harry felt sick, thinking about it now; how could he have said something so stupid? He remembered Draco kicking the antidote bottle, breaking it beyond repair, and Harry had felt a terrible rage against him in that instant, a blindly narrow despair: how could he do that to me, how could he? When of course it hadn't had that much to do with Harry at all, or at least Harry couldn't believe that it did, because if it had then it was a gesture of such an ultimate sort of devotion that the thought of it filled Harry with a hollow and profound sense of unworthiness. 

No, it hadn't been about him at all, but that was no reason for him to accuse Draco of hating him when he knew perfectly well that he didn't. You could tell when Draco hated you. For a moment there, in the alley that night, he'd thought he was talking to a Draco who hated him and it had unsettled him in a way he hadn't expected. He remembered what it had been like when Draco really had hated him, when they'd hated each other. There had never been any doubt in his mind back then that if Draco ever got the chance to, he'd cut Harry's throat and walk away smiling. Harry hadn't minded being hated - well, he'd minded it, nobody liked being hated, but in an odd way he'd taken an obscure pride in the fact that he seemed the one person in the world able to make Malfoy lose all his self-control. On rare occasions he had to admit he'd taken pleasure in goading Draco into rages; it had amused him the way that Draco's mouth twitched and his knuckles went white, the tendons in his hands knotting and unknotting as he tried to hold himself back from leaping at Harry and strangling him. 

Sometimes, of course, he couldn't hold himself back. Fifth year, when Gryffindor had won the Quidditch cup yet again, Harry'd had Dobby deliver a blue velvet cushion to Draco in the middle of breakfast, on top of which rested a small plastic drinking glass and a note reading 'Perhaps this cup might be a bit more your size, Malfoy - H. Potter.' 

Draco had done nothing at the time, but later Harry had been behind schedule, running alone to Potions class, when he'd felt a hand tug on his sleeve. Turning, he'd found his arm seized and without warning he was dragged under the nearest stairwell, his legs kicked out from under him, and Draco was on top of him, hands fisted in Harry's robes, doing his level best to render Harry unconscious by knocking his head repeatedly against the stone floor. 

Draco had surprise on his side, and a near-blinding rage, but he wasn't a particularly skilled fist-fighter - he'd been taught fencing and dancing and the like, but Harry'd honed his brawling skills on the wrong side of Dudley's bad moods and knew exactly how to squirm away to evade wildly placed blows. He squirmed now, kicking upward with his legs, and they rolled sideways, a writhing, punching mass of flailing fists and kicking feet. They fetched up against the far wall, Draco's knees pinning Harry to the ground. Harry ducked, trying to slide out from under Draco and avoid the blows aimed at his head, when he realized suddenly that he didn't want to squirm away from Draco - he wanted to hit him back. 

He stopped squirming and jerked his body upward, startling Draco so that the other boy lost his chokehold on Harry and slid sideways. Harry flung himself up and over and now he was the one on top, the one with the advantage, and he bashed Draco across the face one, twice, hard with the side of his fist and the third time he hit him his hand came away bloody and then Draco jammed his forearm into Harry's throat, choking him, and shoved his hand down between them and Harry realized Draco was going for his wand and so he jerked his knee up, brutally hard - a dirty-fighting move, something Dudley might have done. It was enough to make Draco gag and double up, and Harry shoved him away and staggered to his feet, and only realized when he was standing up that he had grabbed Draco's wand himself and was holding it in his bloodied fist. 

Draco was choking and gasping on the floor. Very slowly, he raised his head and looked up at Harry. His eyes widened, registering the wand gripped in Harry's hand. It was an expensive wand - Harry knew as much from Draco's bragging, it had been in Draco's family for generations, had in fact been carved out of rosewood for an ancestor of his during the Tudor dynasty. It felt smooth and cool in his own hand and surprisingly light. 

"You want me to break your wand in half, Malfoy?" Harry snarled. "You want to explain that to your father?" 

Painfully, Draco pulled himself up to a kneeling position and looked up at Harry through his hair. His cheek was gashed and there was blood dripping from his split lip onto his shirt. He was still trying to catch his breath. "Give me .... back ... my wand, Potter, you fucking stupid...." 

The wand made a faint springing sound like a violin string snapping back into place as Harry bent it into a wishbone shape with a flick of his fingers. Flexible, the wand bent with his movement, but a little more - and it would snap. Draco winced despite himself, staring at it, his chest rising and falling rapidly with his gasps. 

"Apologize," Harry said. 

Draco made a choking sound. "For what?" 

A bizarre rage boiled up inside Harry - the strength of it surprised him. "For everything," he snarled. "For being who you are. For being a miserable, slithering, slimy, pathetic, racist, smirking little maggot. The next thing out of your mouth better be an apology, Malfoy, or I'll snap this wand of yours into eight bloody pieces and I'm not kidding. I'll do it." 

There was a silence. Draco raised his eyes and looked at Harry - a long, considering, struggling look, and for a moment Harry thought wildly that Draco actually was going to break and apologize, make some kind of conciliatory gesture, because he didn't seem to be about to try to hit him anyway, and then Draco leaned forward on his hands and spat a mouthful of blood all over Harry's shoes. 

Startled, Harry stepped back despite himself, and Draco sank back on his heels, his head hanging down, eyes slitted closed, his voice a barely audible hiss, "There's your apology. Now do what you want." 

Harry looked down at the other boy - his shoulders tensed, hands gripped on his knees, waiting for the snapping sound of his irreplaceable wand being broken in half - and he thought of Lucius Malfoy - and he couldn't do it. Cursing himself and his own stupid weakness, he flung the wand at the floor in front of Draco, "Take it - just take it, and fuck the hell off with it -" 

Draco's head snapped up and he stared at Harry and there was no gratitude in his gaze, only a desperate bleak hatred. He didn't reach to touch his wand or wipe the blood off his mouth. He just stared at Harry and when he spoke his voice was uneven, as if he were struggling not to cry or to yell. "Why won't you die, Potter?" Draco half-whispered. "Why ... won't ... you ... jus ... fucking ... die?" 

The sheer loathing in Draco's tone had astounded Harry. He'd realized then the essential inequality in their relationship - an inequality to which Draco seemed preternaturally sensitive. Harry didn't hate Draco as much as Draco hated him. He just didn't. The real depth and richness of Harry's hatred was reserved for Voldemort. All that was left for Draco was the rags and bones of what was really no more than an intense dislike. Harry couldn't imagine spending that kind of hatred on Malfoy. After all he'd never killed anyone Harry loved. It would be like hating a piece of grit in his shoe, a blister on his heel, an annoying snatch of song stuck in his head. And Malfoy knew it. 

Hate you? I could never hate you, Draco had said, and he'd meant it. Oh, he'd meant it; he couldn't imagine hating Harry now any more than he'd once been able to imagine not hating him. Whatever he did - hating or loving - he did it with his whole soul, and Harry's inability to do the same had hurt him in ways Harry couldn't imagine or explain and was only just beginning to understand. He felt suddenly with a bursting feeling behind his ribcage how unfair it all was - he wanted to go find Draco and shake him and explain to him that just because they'd once been unequal in hatred didn't mean that they were doomed to be unequal in all their relations with each other, forever. Fate and history were what Malfoys believed in: destiny and the weight of thousands of years of nothing ever changing. Harry believed in none of that. He'd spat in the face of the expected order of things when he was barely a year old. He wanted to tell Draco that there was more than one way for things to be - 

But he couldn't. Not after what he'd done; he'd lost that chance, cut himself off, walked away and started over. He'd left all that behind by choice, everything and everyone, and he done it by refusing to think about it. He'd told himself he wouldn't think about Draco or Hermione, Ron or Sirius, anyone he'd loved or been loved by and who he had left. And he'd staggered around half-blind with guilt and despair because of it, he'd been ineffectual and stupid because of it, but he'd started on this path, and now there was no going back. Not even now, when things that had not made sense to him were finally beginning to make sense. He felt as if he had been sitting in a dark locked room, listening to incomprehensible noises filtering through a crack in the door, and now finally the door had been flung wide open and he could hear that the noises were music, and that he knew the melody - had always known it, but had not been able to hear it properly until now. 

And yet there was nothing he could do about it. There are few feelings in the world worse than completely inopportune realization, and Harry felt it as a twisting knot in his guts as he leaned back against the wall next to the fireplace, and for just one moment abandoned himself to a scathing bitterness - What have I done? Oh, what have I done?  

He couldn't stand it any longer. He got to his feet, went over to the desk, and fumbled for parchment and a quill. 

***  

"I think we need false names," said Hermione, banging the edges of her small metal cauldron with the long-handled brass spoon she was using to stir the antidote as it settled. "Or at least, you do." 

Draco glanced at her, looking faintly surprised. He sat on the counter next to the impromptu workstation she had set up in the kitchen of the hotel room. Hermione had insisted on having a kitchen so that she could mix the antidote properly; Draco had insisted on having the biggest and most expensive room in the hotel, so it had all worked out rather well, aside from the fact that Hermione, daughter of middle-class dentists, was, despite her knowledge that Draco could well afford the extravagance, secretly rather appalled at the gaudy splendor of their hotel suite. 

A pair of gigantic fireplaces buttressed a vast marble-floored drawing room. Two bedrooms opened off it, one papered in all white and one in dark green and gold. Hermione had fled from the sight of the enormous bathtub with its silver mermaid spigots and floating, enchanted heart-shaped pillows. Curtains of white velvet draped the floor-to-ceiling windows: they had a thick, waxy feel to them when she touched them, like lily petals. There was a full kitchen with a selection of enchanted copper pots and self-washing plates. 

"False names?" Draco said. "Why?" 

"You're too famous," said Hermione. "And your name is pretty unusual, you know. Anyone seeing me calling 'Draco' to a tall blond boy is going to turn around and wonder." 

Draco half-smiled. "I'm not the famous one." 

When they had checked into the hotel, Hermione had worried that they would be recognized, that the desk clerks would want their names. Draco had lounged against the registration desk, one foot up on the brass-railing bar, and like a Muggle street magician had trickled a seemingly unending stream of gold Galleons out of his sleeve and onto the blank registration forms that requested his name. Like magic, the forms had disappeared back into the desk clerk's drawers, unsigned and unmarked. "Money buys silence," Draco had said to Hermione as the levitating staircase bore them up to their room. "He won't say anything." 

"It's not just Harry who's famous anymore," Hermione said now. 

Draco cut his eyes away from her. He always did that when she talked about Harry. Hermione said nothing; just stirred the antidote and looked at him. His black pullover jumper was slightly too big for him. He had dragged the sleeves down over his hands so only the tips of his fingers were visible. Wisps of curling white-blond hair poked out from beneath the drawn-up hood. He bit his lip. 

"Fine," he said. "Pick a name for me." 

"Something that sounds like your name, so you'll respond to it," Hermione said thoughtfully. "Drake?" 

Draco's head came up and gray eyes flashed at her from beneath the hood. "Call me that and I'll kill you," he said. 

Hermione grinned at him. "No?" 

"I don't like nicknames," he said succinctly. "You might as well go around calling me 'muffin' or 'boo-bear'.'" 

"Now there's an idea." 

"If rule 413 of the Malfoy Family Code of Conduct didn't proscribe me from violence against females, Granger, you'd be wearing that pot you're stirring on your head." 

"Hmph," said Hermione. "Hold my spoon while I drain." 

She handed him the long-handled spoon and he held it, looking mutinous, while she drained half the mixture she'd made into a smaller mixing bowl and emptied a small packet of vert powder into it. She grabbed the spoon back and began stirring furiously. This part of the procedure had to be done quickly or the antidote would be ruined. 

"I think we should come up with a name for you," said Draco, leaning back on his hands. "Something classy. Trixie LaBouche? Boobs McChesty?" 

"I'm not the one who needs a fake name and if I did, I wouldn't want to go around sounding like a porn star," protested Hermione, half out of breath from stirring. 

"I always rather fancied that if I grew up to be a porn star, I would rename myself Baron Hotcock von Hugenstein," said Draco in a mock-wistful tone. 

Hermione choked. "You wanted to be a porn star?" 

"Doesn't everyone?" said Draco. 

Hermione tried to imagine Harry wanting to be a porn star, and failed utterly. She bit back a giggle as she put her spoon down - the antidote was done. "Well, it's not very accurate," she said, pouring some of the mixture into a glass. 

Draco looked affronted. "How would you know?" 

"I just meant," she said, putting the glass into his hand, "that you're not a Baron." 

He looked at her suspiciously. 

"Drink your antidote," she said. 

He half-closed his eyes and drank it. It took three swallows, and then he choked and dropped the glass and shut his eyes tightly, his hand pressed to his head. Shudders racked his body. Alarmed, Hermione grabbed at his hands, pulling them down - for a moment, his fingers wrapped her wrists and gripped them with bone-crushing force - then he released her and sat back, gasping and white-faced. Bright spots of dark red fever burned on his cheekbones. 

"Are you all right?" Hermione asked. 

"Oh, yes, terrific." Draco's tone was acidic. 

The emtpy glass had fallen to the counter. Hermione picked it up and began rinsing it in the sink, biting back a response. She had no idea what to say really anyway. Snape had told her that Draco's reaction to the antidote would keep getting worse. If it got any worse than it already was she had no idea how she would deal with it. 

"Draco..." she began, tucking a damp strand of hair behind her ear. 

Before she could go on, a tapping sound came from the window. It sounded like an owl's beak. Wondering if it was perhaps a reply to their Gringotts inquiry, Hermione went across the room and drew the curtains back. It was an owl. She unlatched the window and the bird flew inside, shaking snow from its feathers. It flew directly across the room to Draco and dropped a rolled bit of parchment into his lap. It then hung about, keening softly, until Draco took a Sickle from his pocket and held it out; the bird snapped up the silver piece and flew out through the window. 

Hermione closed the window behind the owl, latched it, and started back across the room towards Draco. He was staring down at the unopened letter in his lap. When he finally raised his head and looked up at her she was shocked to see that he had gone bone-white. 

"It's from Harry," he said. 

*** 

The wizard decided to follow his wife the next time she left the castle. He did not have long to wait. She had a habit of walking in the woods, alone, at night, and the next time she set forth upon one of her solitary journeys, he wrapped himself in his Invisibility Cloak and followed her. 

Cloaked in darkness, she made her way to the heart of the forest, clutching a witch-light lantern to guide her way. At the center of the forest was a clearing, and she stepped into that clearing and called out in a voice that made him shiver. And from the shadows between the rocks and the spaces between the trees evolved a host of other shapes. Other women, like his wife, all with their dark, dark hair and dark-burning eyes and all beautiful. And the wizard sank back against the tree and stared at them. 

They came together, these women, and greeted each other like sisters, and then they sat together in a circle and discussed their situations. Each, it seemed, was a succubus, and each had recently married a mortal man at the behest of the greater demon they served. Each complained bitterly and intently of the boredom of these marriages, of the inadequacy of their human husbands, how loathsome they found them, how hideous compared to demon-kind. And as he listened to this the wizard felt his heart grow cold and shrivel inside him until he wondered that the blood still moved inside his veins. 

The demonesses then waxed philosophical. It seemed that their term of servitude was coming to an end. They had been ordered to marry these men that they might bear offspring, offspring who would be half demon and half human, with all the strengths of each species and none of the weaknesses. Demon children who could walk abroad in sunlight and bear the touch of gold. Humans who would be immortal. The demonesses had minimal interest in this goal, but seemed to look forward to a time when they were free of their marriages and could return to their lives as succubi, seducing human men and draining them of their lives and powers. 

"I shall look forward to murdering my husband when I go," said the wizard's wife in a reflective manner. "I plan to drain him of his life slowly while he spasms in my arms." 

At that the wizard was hard pressed to restrain himself from drawing his wand and damning the consequences. Only the knowledge that a Killing Curse could not work upon a demon kept him in his hiding place. He remained there while the demonesses laughed together about the murders they planned to commit, and remained there while they kissed each other in farewell and slipped away from the clearing, each returning confidently to a besotted and unsuspecting spouse. He remained there while the night waned into pallor and the sun rose over the forest, and when the day had broken, his heart had shrunk to the size of a splinter of glass and all his thoughts were thoughts of vengeance. 

And now you really are shivering. Give me your hands, let me put them inside my cloak. There is no need to blush. It is easy enough for me to keep you warm when I cannot, myself, feel the cold. 

***  

"This book," said Ben, when Ginny, who had left in search of food, came back into her bedroom with a plate of sandwiches, "is full of historical inaccuracies." 

Ginny blinked and set the sandwiches down on the bed. Ben was sitting on the desk, Gareth next to him, reading Passionate Trousers. The dark head and the light, bent together as they read, made her think of Harry and Draco. "I can't believe you're reading that," she said. 

"As if we hadn't invented Obliviate charms by the tenth century," said Ben crossly. "There's no need for..." 

"Oh, you're at the bit where the Dark Lord Morgan is ravishing Rhiannon," put in Ginny, with some relish. It was one of her favorite parts. 

"Ravishing is one word for it," said Gareth. "She appears to have put up what only her mother would consider a struggle." 

"This book is strangely riveting," Ben observed. "Would you mind if I took it back with me?" 

"Yes," said Ginny. "I haven't finished it. Although I might consider trading it to you for a little more information." 

Gareth looked sideways at Ben and raised an eyebrow. Ben shrugged. "What kind of information?" he asked cautiously. 

"Well, I was going to ask you what you're doing here, but I'm not sure that counts. I can't see why you would have bothered coming at all if you weren't going to explain yourselves eventually." 

"I just came for the food," said Gareth equably. He drew his short-bladed dagger out of the jeweled sheath at his belt, reached around Ben, and stabbed it into a sandwich. Apparently, Ginny thought, unlike his descendant, he had no problem with peanut butter. 

"A thousand years is a long way to come for a sandwich," she pointed out. "And not that I'm not happy to see you ... both of you ... but...” 

Ben, relented, drew his cloak aside and reached into a drawstring pouch that hung from his belt. "I came to give you this," he said, and held out his hand. In it was something slim, branched and gold-green. He laid it on her palm. 

Ginny blinked. "A flower?" 

It wasn't quite a flower. It looked more like a twig that had been torn from some kind of flowering plant. The stem of the twig was soft and dark green. Tiny, half-opened flowers, the pale yellow of fresh butter, budded along the stem. 

"Flora fortis," Ben said. "Colloquially they call it Will-Power. It's sort of a hedge-witch remedy, but it works. Break off a bud every day and swallow it. If you keep the stem alive, it'll keep budding." 

"Oh. Thank you," Ginny said hesitantly, "but what exactly am I supposed to use this for?" 

"I'm a bit unclear on that myself," said Ben cheerfully. 

"I suspect you'll know when you come to it," said Gareth, who was busy removing all the cucumbers from his cucumber and tomato sandwich. 

"You eat a lot," Ginny observed, looking at him curiously. Gareth leaned behind Ben, so that Ben couldn't see him, and made a horrendous face at her. Ginny tried not to laugh. "I assume the flower has something to do with strengthening will, maybe helping people fight off the Imperius Curse?" 

"Good thinking," said Ben, absently. He had returned to reading Passionate Trousers. "I kind of like Tristan," he said. "I think she should run off with him." 

"I'm sure you do," Ginny said, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Gareth was reading over Ben's shoulder and swinging his feet; his right foot regularly thwacked Ben in the ankle, but Ben didn't seem to mind. It made Ginny feel oddly sad. She saw the way they were together, the way the lines of their bodies seemed to flow unconsciously towards each other like plants underwater, guided by a current. It made her sad because she wondered if she would ever have anything like that herself, and because they reminded her of Harry and Draco, as if she were watching some strange, mirror-warped version of the two of them when she looked at Gareth and Ben. 

"Did I tell you anything else?" she asked in a small voice. "Did I tell you anything about Draco, whether he's going to be all right? Did I say anything about Tom? Or Harry? Or -" 

Ben set the book down, his dark eyes suddenly serious. "No," he said, shaking his head. "You gave me a Time-Turner set to this date. You told me to give you that flower. You said you'd need it later, and that..." He screwed up his face thoughtfully. "That I should tell you that you are the anchor." 

"I'm the what? The ankle?" 

"Anchor," Ben repeated firmly. "Does that not help?" 

"Not a lot," Ginny said with a sigh. 

"Oh," Ben said. "You also told me to remind you to lock the bedroom door, so your mother doesn't come in and find us here." 

"Oh, now you tell me!" Ginny leapt to her feet and ran to her door. She slid the lock home and leaned back against the door. A moment later, the knob rattled. 

"Ginny!" called Mrs. Weasley from the hall outside. "Are you all right? George said you were up looking for food." 

"I'm fine, Mum!" Ginny called back. "I'm just going to sleep!" Ginny bit her lip. She hated lying to her mother. Still, this seemed a sin of omission, as it seemed unlikely that her mother was going to ask if her if there were two ancient, time-traveling, rather cute but probably gay wizards hanging out on her desk, reading romance novels. " I'll see you in the morning!" 

"Hmph," said Mrs. Weasley. "Well, all right then." 

A moment later Ginny heard her mother's footsteps retreating down the hall. She sagged against the door in relief and looked over at Ben and Gareth. Ben was regarding her over the spine of her book, a quizzical look on his face. 

"You don't mind if we just stay here and finish the book, do you?" he asked. "I do want to know what happens in the end." 

"Oh, dear," said Ginny. 

"Bloody buggering hell," said Gareth, his tone mournful, "I've eaten all the sandwiches." 

*** 

Malfoy,  

I know I said I wasn't going to write but this is important. I don't know exactly how to say this, but I think you should keep an eye on Seamus Finnegan from now on. I can't really say what happened but I bumped into him in Diagon Alley and he was acting very strangely. I would have warned Ginny directly but then I thought it would probably be better if I told you and you could keep an eye on them both. Something very strange happened to me today and I (the next part of the letter was blotted out with ink and carefully written over) hope you're all right and that everything else is too. I'll be back as soon as I can, 

Harry 

"Seamus," said Draco flatly, and let the letter drop out of his hand. "He bumped into bloody Seamus. Sorry, Tom. How bloody ironic. I'm surprised he's still alive to write and warn us." 

"Don't say that," said Hermione automatically, picking up the letter. She glanced over it, fumbling in her pocket for her wand. She tapped the tip of it to the letter and whispered, "Originatus revelatus." 

Nothing happened. The spell meant to reveal from what location the letter had been sent was not working. Harry, Draco thought, must have blocked it. 

"Harry's not quite that dimwitted," said Draco, with a dry sort of amusement. Hermione made a face at him. "Although, certainly, dimwitted enough. That letter will be one for the history books. 'Bumped into Seamus Finnigan the other day. He seemed a bit off color. Perhaps he has 'flu, or has been possessed by the spirit of the most evil wizard who ever lived. Both options are so exciting I'm having difficulty choosing.'" 

"Oh, let Harry alone," said Hermione. "You know, it isn't exactly a conclusion that most people would jump to." Something seemed to occur to her. "Oh, God," she said. "I hope he isn't stalking Harry or anything. Oh - we have to get to him, Draco, as soon as possible." 

"I'm aware of that." There was a bitter taste at the back of Draco's throat that had nothing to do with the antidote he had just swallowed. "Any suggestions as to how?" 

Hermione was still looking thoughtful. "Have you ever heard of The Continuum Translocatrix?" 

"Didn't they get to number five on the pop charts with I Do Believe We're Naked?'" 

"Don't joke." Hermione glared. "It's a locator spell that uses time magic. See, we burn the letter and make a paste out of the ashes, then we feed the ashes to a Kneazle, and then we use some of the Kneazle's blood to make a Locanarus Potion, and we boil the potion six times, and after that we -" 

"We could do that," Draco agreed. He had picked up the letter again and was holding it up to the light. "Or we could just go to the address printed on the parchment." 

"The what?" Hermione snatched the letter out of his hand. "What address?" 

"It's a watermark. Hold the paper up to the light." 

Hermione did as instructed. Her brow furrowed. "I just see three letters. TMC." 

"Yeah," Draco said. "It's a place." He hesitated. "Not a very nice place." 

Hermione lowered the letter. "What do you mean? Is it a dangerous place?" 

"It's near Knockturn Alley," said Draco, a bit diffident now. He wasn't exactly sure how Hermione was going to react to the news that Harry seemed to have found his way to an infamous den of wizarding vice. He wasn't sure how he felt about it himself. Knowing Harry, he'd wandered in there thinking it was a flower shop. But then Draco wasn't sure exactly how well he actually did know Harry after all. "It's a club of sorts. A... gentleman's club." 

Hermione narrowed her eyes. "A strip club?" 

"It's not a strip club," said Draco, with perfect truth. 

"Then what is it?" 

"It's a brothel," Draco said, and cringed. 

Hermione went a greenish sort of color. "A brothel?" 

"A Polyjuice brothel," said Draco. "Very illegal. People go there to..." 

"I know what people go there to do!" Hermione said furiously. "I've read about places like that." Belying her officious tone, her cheeks were scarlet. "And how do you know all about this one, Draco Malfoy?" 

"Because," he said. "My father owns it." 

Hermione shook her head. "I suppose that shouldn't surprise me." She sagged back against the counter, biting her lip. "Now what? We can't exactly turn up at a polyjuice brothel and demand to search the place. Those places are horribly illegal and I doubt they like attention. They'd toss us right out on the street, or worse." 

Draco looked at the letter again. The writing was hurried, urgent, the letters sprawling across the page, but still unmistakably Harry's, those looping a's and curving s's. He wondered if anyone could imitate Harry's handwriting well enough to fool him. He doubted it. The tone of this letter, like the other he had received yesterday, was Harry's; he heard Harry's voice speaking to him in his head when he read it. And Harry's terrible handwriting would be hard to imitate. His own would be much easier: it was careful, elegant, standardized handwriting, just as his father had taught him. 

He looked down at his right hand. Pale and slender, the index finger heavily laden down by the weight of his family signet ring. He flexed his fingers and lowered his hand thoughtfully. 

"Draco?" Hermione said, in a worried tone. "Are you...?" 

"I need parchment," he said. "And a quill. And some wax - sealing wax. And we need to hurry - I'd imagine we don't have very much time." 

*** 

She drank the Polyjuice Potion before she put on the costume they had given her to wear. She couldn't have fit into it otherwise. The clothes were very small, made to be worn by a young girl, one no older than sixteen or seventeen, and a small girl at that. 

She had worn her share of schoolgirl clothes before. It was amazing how many wizards had that fetish. The only other costumes more common in the brothel were Quidditch players' outfits. People went mad for those, and the brothel made them with "special adjustments" - tight trousers, high leather boots, heavy-buckled wristguards and formfitting summer tops. She had a feeling this schoolgirl outfit had been adjusted as well. Also, unusually, it was branded with the badge of a House - the infinitesimal black skirt was buttoned with small gold lion's head buttons, and the badge of Gryffindor adorned the tight white shirt. She rolled the thigh-high stockings up and twisted her long red hair into plaits and was done. No makeup, she'd been told, no cosmetic charms of any kind. Barefoot, she went down the long hallway to the door of Room Twenty-Eight. She tapped her charmed cube against the door and it melted away just long enough for her to step through it. 

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness inside the room. Her customer sat on the edge of the bed, haloed by the pinkish light coming from the rose lamp behind him. He raised his head as she came in. 

"Hello," she said, and paused there in the doorway. 

He stood up. She was taken aback. He was young - very young - and surprisingly good-looking. Dark blond hair, eyes a clear and definite blue. A narrow, firmly set mouth and a lithe, muscular body. His clothes were dark, nondescript. There seemed no cunning in his face, but his eyes were old, belying his age. 

She wondered what he wanted. Without a cue from him she did not know if he would prefer her to pretend to be naïve and terrified or precocious and daring. She lifted her hand and slowly pulled one of her plaits forward so that it fell down against her breast. Then she looked at him, coyly, through her hair. 

"Come here," he said, and held out a hand. 

Barefoot as he had requested, she went across the room to him. She took his hand and he drew her up against him. His hands slid down her body to her waist and held her there, lightly but firmly. "You will call me by my name," he said. "I am Tom. Say it." 

"Tom," she said. 

A faint little shudder ran through him. The air in the room seemed to her to be thickening somehow although she assumed it was merely the light in the lamp dimming. His hands ran restlessly up her body. He tilted her head back, touching her face with his fingers as if he were creating the shape of it himself out of the textures of the night and the air between them. 

She held still as he touched her. She was used to peculiar reactions from customers. Given the business she was in, she supposed it could only be expected. People did not come to the Midnight Club for sex alone - what the brothel really dealt in was dreams and fantasies, the dark materials of the human soul. Lust brought people there, but so did love, and so did grief. She was used to being wept on, clasped, worshipped and adored, hated and despised. It was all in a day's work. 

"Ginny," said Tom now, his thumbs under her chin, tilting her head up. "Look at me." 

She looked up at him. The room was definitely darker now. She could see only the outline of his features, the shadows cast by his lashes, the blue eyes. 

"Are you afraid of me?" he said. 

She took a guess at what he wanted her to say. "Yes." 

Another shudder went through him and his arms tightened around her. He bent and pressed his lips against her cheek. They were cold and she shivered unaccountably. "Love," she heard him whisper, and she didn't think he was talking to her. "Such a selfish emotion. It feels only its own pains, knows only its own fervor, suffers only when its ambitions are thwarted. It makes the body a slave, and shackles the will to its narrow desires - and yet it is thought ennobling, why is that?" 

She did not know what he meant but his tone made her nervous. Her relief at seeing him was rapidly beginning to drain away. This boy was beautiful, but he also seemed to be more than a little unhinged. "Your hands," she said. "So cold -" 

"Be quiet." He shook her once, hard, by the shoulders, and she quieted instantly, startled into silence. Almost immediately the anger went out of his eyes and they went soft again, dreamy, unfocused. "Tell me you love me," he said. 

This was more familiar ground. "I love you, Tom," she said. 

"And you belong to me." 

"I belong to you, Tom," she said, because he seemed to like the sound of his own name. 

"And you'd die for me," he said. 

"And I'd die for you, Tom." 

"Beg me," he said. 

She flicked her gaze upward, and was sorry she had. She did not like the look in his eyes at all. "Beg you to what?" 

"Beg me to hurt you," he said. 

She had had enough. She jerked away from him. "No. No - that's against the rules. You can't hurt me." 

The dreamy look in his eyes intensified. "I think you'll find I can do whatever I want." 

He was no longer holding her. She stepped away from him and he watched her, the same look in his eyes, unsettling, distant, familiar. She whirled around and ran for the door - 

And found him standing in front of it. Leaning against it, in fact, his back slightly arched, a faint smile playing on his elegant mouth. "You don't want to run away from me, Ginny," he said. "You want to be with me. You wouldn't have brought me back to you otherwise, would you?" 

A frightened sob caught in her throat. She stumbled back, away from him, whispering under her breath, "Excubitor, excubitor -" 

He began to walk towards her. "The guards won't come," he said. "I've dismantled all the safety charms in this room. You can scream and scream. Go ahead. I want you to." 

She tried to take a step backward, but her feet wouldn't move. They seemed bound to the floor. She whipped her head up and stared at him. He was walking towards her, his left hand held out and she saw that his lips were moving as he walked. The air in front of him seemed to shimmer...wandless magic? But how - 

"Cry out if you like," he said. "No one will hear you. It will make no difference to me. You are mine to break. Look up at me, now. Look up at my face." 

She obeyed, looking up at him through her terror. His face seemed illuminated by some savage inner light - his eyes glowed, a clear and lambent blue. She recognized the look in them now, and why it had seemed familiar. It was the look of a cat batting at the body of a dying mouse. 

"Don't hurt me," she whispered. "Please, please don't hurt me, I'll do whatever you like -" 

"Yes," he said. "You will." He took his left hand from his chest then, and touched her face, and smiled. Then he put his hands around her throat. She tried to scream, but the pressure of his fingers cut off her breath; as the darkness opened like a pit beneath her feet her she heard the clear sound of his laughter following her down into unconsciousness. 

*** 

Hermione was impressed by the spell on the front door of the Midnight Club. It seemed to her to be an interesting combination of an Unplottable Charm and a Distraction Spell. The building was there, quite visible, if a bit nondescript - it was sandwiched between two warehouses in a cul-de-sac several streets down from Knocturn Alley - but unless you knew it was there, and were looking for it, you couldn't see it at all. 

If you did know what you were looking for - as Draco plainly did - the view revealed, shimmering slightly through a distortion in the air, a set of double red doors with black-bracketed smokeless torches burning on either side of the stone steps that led up to them. The building that rose above the doors was grey stone, windowless, imposing. 

"So," Draco said, unnecessarily. "Here we are." 

Hermione cut her eyes sideways at him. He had changed in the hotel room, out of his old clothes, and the sight of him now made her uneasy. He looked as if his father had dressed him - in fact, he looked very much his father's son. He wore elegant black clothes, a cloak over a suit, cut from heavy dark material that looked as if it had been imported from the nineteenth century specifically for Malfoy use. The cloak was made out of some weather-resistant enchanted cloth that the snow couldn't dampen or touch. His dress shirt was ferociously, spotlessly white, and the cold burn of his green cufflinks was the only color he wore. He had run a brush (her brush) through his hair before they left and Hermione had been forced to admit that it actually looked better now: the shorter cut suited the thin shape of his face, and in the wet weather, it curled damply against the nape of his neck in a way that - 

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Draco inquired, interrupting her thoughts. 

Hopefully not, unless you're even more in love with yourself than you pretend you are, Hermione thought darkly, but all she said was, "If it's 'How the hell did Harry wander in here', then yes." 

"That wasn't it," said Draco, still staring at the doors with a bemused expression. 

"Well, if you're hoping that they have a karaoke bar so you can sing a cover version of 'You Don't Own Me', then no," said Hermione. 

Now Draco did look at her. He smiled faintly. "I was wondering how we were going to get back out," he said. "The place is a fortress." 

Hermione tapped the side pocket of her cloak. "I brought one of the hotel's return Portkeys," she said. 

Now his smile was less faint. "You think of everything," he said. 

She felt herself flush. "I try." 

They went up the stairs together and Draco lifted the heavy bronze knocker and let it fall. The sound of the knock seemed to echo down some far corridor. When, a moment later, a small panel opened in the door, Hermione thought at first that there was no one there, only a faint, pale green light that seemed to emanate from within. A high-pitched voice trilled, 

"Show your passes." 

Hermione, panicked, looked to Draco. Not looking nervous at all, he was sliding the black glove off his right hand. He raised the hand and indolently waved it front of the open panel. There was a look on his face she recognized. Contemptuous, arrogant. She knew he was playing a part but she did not like it. "Recognize the ring?" he sneered, lowering his hand. "You should. A hand that wears one like it pays your wages. Open the door." 

There was a silence. The panel sealed itself up. Abruptly, with the rattling sound of a dozen bolts sliding back, the door opened in front of them, revealing a long blue corridor that stretched away into the middle distance. Gold torches burned at intervals along the corridor walls. And hovering in front of Hermione and Draco, roughly at eye level, was a fairy. 

Hermione blinked. It was definitely a fairy - a small green one with gold and violet wings. It was not at all like the pictures of fairies she had seen in books. Its green-silver carapace had an insectile sheen, and behind its narrow lips shone a row of razor teeth. They gleamed as it squeaked a question: 

"You have been sent by the Malfoys?" 

Draco's eyes narrowed. Hermione couldn't help but admire how completely he had transformed himself. All his tiredness had dropped away and you could no longer see that he looked weary, or ill, or that he had dark shadows beneath his gray eyes. He wore the overbearing egotism of his family as if it were a second expensive cloak. "I am a Malfoy," he spat. 

"Then," inquired the fairy, "why didn't you use one of the official Portkeys, sir...?" 

Draco looked furious. "Because I was testing your security measures, you overgrown hornet!" he shouted. 

The fairy's double-lidded eyes opened wide. "I am a pixie," it hissed. "And if you continue to shout at me in that manner -" 

"Be quiet," Draco barked imperiously, and the fairy's mouth snapped shut. "My father sent me here to inspect the facilities, and that's exactly what I intend to do. Now look here. You can either take me immediately to Mister Blackthorpe - he's still the manager here, isn't he? - right, then, you can either take me to his office, or I can come back with an industrial-sized flyswatter and repaint these walls in a stylish new shade called "Pixie Guts Splattered All Over." It's a long name, but I think the color would go well with the floor tiling." 

The fairy spluttered. Because it was so small, the splutter sounded rather like the buzzing of a bee. For a moment Hermione was afraid that the winged creature was going to fly at Draco and bite him. 

"Very well," it ground out, finally. "...Sir." 

The fairy darted off down the hall. Gathering her cloak around her, Hermione moved to follow, but Draco stilled her with a hand on her arm. 

She tilted her head back. "What?" 

"Wait just a minute." 

He turned her to face him, and looked at her consideringly - a long slow look, up and down. Hermione felt a blush start at the open neckline of her sensible button-down cardigan, and spread up towards her face. 

"Put your cloak back," he said. When she didn't move, he hissed an exasperated breath through his teeth. "Fine-I'll do it," he said, and unbuckled the front of her cloak with a fluid movement, pushing the separated halves back over her shoulders. His hands went to her waist, pulling her cardigan out of the waistband of her skirt, fingers rucking up the material, cold on her skin. She shivered. 

"Draco, what are you -" 

His voice was low as he replied. "Just trust me." The word trust sounded strange in his mouth: an intimate threat. Hermione stood stock still as his fingers glided over her clothes, flipping the lower buttons out of their holes, tugging the cardigan up and tying it tightly under her breasts, leaving her stomach bare. He tackled her skirt next, folding the waistband over several times, shortening the skirt until the hem of it brushed the tops of her thighs. He straightened up and looked at her, the gleam of evaluation in his eyes. 

Hermione struggled not to blush. "If you think that I -" 

"You said undercover," he said, and tugged the barrettes from her hair, a swift but not ungentle gesture. Her hair - frizzing a bit at the ends from the damp outside - tumbled down over her shoulders, and he ran his fingers through it, quickly, tangling it. "Better," he said, and pressed the barrettes into her hand. "Don't glare. This is a good look for you." 

She glared at him. "What look is that? Underaged Prostitute?" 

He ignored this. "Just follow my lead and do whatever I say," he said, and started off down the corridor. "I know how to handle these people. They're my kind." 

"I wouldn't be so proud of that," she said sharply. 

He glanced back at her over his shoulder but didn't stop walking. "At least I'm not the one with visible knickers." 

"I hate you sometimes," Hermione muttered under her breath, but he was already halfway down the corridor and couldn't hear her. Tugging ineffectually at the hem of her skirt, she followed. 

*** 

Upon learning of his wife's betrayal, the wizard spent the next few days closeted in his tower, perfecting a number of spells. Then he dressed himself his finest robes and presented himself at his wife's chamber. She greeted him there as modestly and sweetly as she always had, taking his hands and drawing him to the bed, but he resisted her. All her beauty seemed to him now to have taken on a ghoulish aspect. 

She sensed his mood and wished to know if anything was wrong. 

"No," he said. "It is only that I shudder at your touch," which was, after all, true enough. "Now lie down upon the bed." 

And she did so, shrugging her robes to the floor and stretching herself out along the bed. She looked up at him through her hair as he drew a number of silk ribbons from his pockets, and held them up. 

"You wish to bind me, Lord?" she asked. 

"They will not hurt you," he said. "They are only ribbons." 

With a cat's smile, she held her wrists out to be bound, and he knelt over her and bound her wrists together, and then her ankles, before she could protest. 

She writhed in sudden anguish. "What have you done to me?" she wailed. 

"Gold," he said, with some satisfaction, for threads of gold metal had been woven by him by enchantment into the ribbons. "And may it burn your skin to the bone, demon witch. May you writhe in the anguish you planned for me, before I hurl you out into the sunlight and end your hell-spawned existence." 

She wept and pleaded then for mercy, and begged him in the name of his love for her to spare her life. But he had stopped his heart to her pleas. All his love for her had curdled into the purest hate. Hate that once was love is the strongest sort of hate. Hate that does not forget or know forgiveness; hate that is unmerciful. 

At last she subsided into silence, and lay limp in her agonizing bonds. "My Lord," she said, looking up at him, "I know now that you will show me no mercy. And surely you can claim my death. But there is something that you do not know. I carry your daughter, Lord, in my body. Your blood runs in her veins as well as mine. Will you not, then, show mercy to her?" 

*** 

"Love," observed Tom, kneeling next to the dead girl, "that curious condition." 

He took a moment to admire the picture she made. All red and white and gold, pale bare skin and hair torn out of its braids and just a little blood. At first he had been irritated that her struggles had resulted in ripped and shredded clothes, but upon reflection the disarray added to the overall symmetry. She could have been Leda after the swan's ravages - although Leda had survived that rape, and this girl was quite, quite dead. A swift spell had broken her neck, and she'd collapsed forward into him, pliant and willing: his hands that were not only his hands had held her up, carried her to the bed, and inside him that tiny part that was still Seamus had wept and beaten its fists against him and finally fallen sick and silent long before he was done. 

He ran the back of his knuckle gently along her freckle-dusted cheekbone, up to her temple, his fingers stroking the soft hollows behind her ears. He sat back on his heels - he was reluctant to go, to leave her, she was so beautiful lying the way she was, with her hair all about her; he had never forgotten that hair, the precise color of it, like blood in wine. The marks of his fingers were darkening on her throat. Where her shirt had torn at the shoulder, he could see the blue tracery of veins against her peach-pale skin. 

Earlier that day he had found a bruise on his arm, just below the elbow, dark against Seamus' winter-pale skin. It had startled him for a moment. He had no idea how Seamus had gotten that bruise - playing Quidditch, climbing trees, something innocent and pointless and foolish - and for a moment he had swum dizzily in the disorientation of knowing that he inhabited a borrowed body, that he was powerless over its history. And even as he wore Seamus' bruised skin, so he retained, somewhere in the depths of the living, thinking mind he had stolen, the memory of Seamus' love for Ginny. He had felt the ache of it, like the ache of the bruise on his arm, an ache like hunger. An ache he hated. An ache he did not understand. 

It was easier when he thought of it as hunger. Hunger he understood; hunger could be cured. Surely love, too, could be cured by feeding it what it wanted. He leaned now to kiss her unresponsive lips, and searched inside himself for that bruise, that ache-of-love, but he felt nothing. 

Elated, he sat back, his fingers trailing along her lips where his mouth had just been. If only he could - but no, he could not stay. He had only bought an hour with her, and she would be missed, whoever she was really; the brothel owners would come seeking her, and would be angry to find her dead, all her usefulness spoiled. Still, she had been useful to him at least. He had fed the hunger that was the love inside him, had stuffed it on a surfeit of death and desires fulfilled, and in doing so surely he had destroyed it. He was strong now, whole and perfect, all vulnerability burned away. He had to be. 

With a last touch of his fingertips to her fiery hair, Tom rose to his feet, drawing his robes close about him. He knew exactly where he had to go now. 

*** 

"Irregular," muttered the green-skinned demon who had turned out to be the manager of the Midnight Club. He wore long silk robes of deep purple that had been altered to accommodate his vestigial arms, and a red bowler hat with an ostrich plume. He stood behind the enormous mahogany desk in his gleaming walnut-and-cherrywood paneled office, tapping nervously at the open letter on his desk with the tip of a bronze quill. Beneath the brim of his hat, gold antennae quivered with agitation. "This is all most distressingly irregular." 

"Oh, yes," Draco agreed cheerfully. He was sprawled in a gold-and-burgundy watered silk armchair with gilded armrests, his long legs flung out, his feet up on the mahogany desk. His cloak was open, and he was twirling a small green drink umbrella between his fingers. The drink it had come from sat untouched on a nearby table. "I told my father that myself, Mr. Blackthorpe. He was most displeased. He told me off for back talking. He's quite right, of course. He is a business genius, after all. And he doesn't like back talk or disobedience. Why, just last week our head gardener accidentally planted a whole copse of Festering Fireweed upside-down. Well, I bet you can guess what my father did about that." 

Blackthorpe looked up at him, his mouth set in a thin line. Behind him, two hulking troll-like men Hermione assumed to be his bodyguards, glanced at one another and frowned. 

"No, Mister Malfoy, I can't guess." 

Draco leaned forward with a beautifully engaging smile. "He had him killed," he said, and snapped his fingers. 

Everyone in the room jumped, Hermione included. She bit her lip. She had promised Draco she wouldn't say anything until he cued her once they were in the office, and she hadn't. It was more difficult than she had thought it would be. Still, a grudging admiration for him kept her silent. As if the past eight months had never happened, he was suddenly his old self again, all razor looks and smiling malice. It was an impressive performance. 

That was, of course, assuming it was a performance. 

"Sorry if I scared you gentlemen," Draco said, not sounding sorry at all. His eyes were sparkling. He had unknotted his dove-gray silk tie, and against the bare hollow of his throat, Hermione could see the bright gleam of his Epicyclical charm. "Didn't realize you were so jumpy." 

Blackthorpe cleared his throat. "It isn't that I don't want to respect your father's wishes," he said, glancing down again at the letter on his desk. Draco had done a good job on it. The signature was unmistakably Lucius', and the mark of the griffin seal ring, pressed into black wax on the parchment, was impressive. "It is merely that Lucius usually conducts his inspections on a more ... scheduled basis. We had an understanding -" 

"Indeed." Draco sounded bored. "That was, however, before the recent security breaches came to our attention." 

Blackthorpe 's deep green skin paled to an unpleasant shade of chartreuse. "Security breaches?" 

Draco smiled like a knife cut. "You hadn't heard? Photographs," he said. "All sorts of photographs, anonymously mailed to the Ministry. My father had quite a job covering it up, I can tell you. He had to cast six or seven Obliviate charms on the secretaries who opened up a packet of photos of Frances Parkinson cavorting about with a Polyjuiced version of the Every Flavor Boys. I'm sure you know how disastrous this kind of exposure could be for you, my good demon." 

"I'm not a demon," said Blackthorpe tensely. 

"Ah," said Draco delicately. "Skin condition, then?" 

"I am an incubus!" 

"Of course you are," Draco said soothingly. He settled himself more comfortably in the armchair, still twirling his drink umbrella. "You know, I'm awfully hungry. Have you got anything here to eat?" 

"No," Blackthorpe snapped. He was visibly distraught. "About these security breaches..." 

Draco shifted in his chair. "Nothing to eat? I'll take chocolate. Biscuits? Scotch pancake?" 

"I saw some scones down in the espresso bar," opined one of the troll-guards helpfully. 

Draco grinned delightfully. "Were they the kind with the little chocolate bits in?" 

"Be quiet, Thorvald!" The Manager shot a glare at the troll behind him, then jerked his sharply pointed green chin towards Hermione. "And who is she?" he demanded poisonously. "Why is she along for this inspection tour of yours?" 

Draco lazily slid his feet from the desk and turned to look at Hermione. "You mean Hepzibah? She's my personal secretary," he said smoothly, and winked at Hermione. "Charming girl." 

Hermione opened her mouth to speak. 

"Unfortunately," Draco added swiftly, "she doesn't speak a word of English." 

Hermione's speech turned into a gasp of outrage. She shot Draco a violent glare, which he ignored. He was gazing at her with a bland smile. 

If the green incubus manager had had an eyebrow, he would have raised it. "One might question the efficacy of a secretary who doesn't speak English," he said. 

"One might," Draco agreed, "but I've never had any complaints about her performance." He examined his fingernails. "You should see her take a memo," he added conversationally. "When she bends over the desk -" 

"Right," interrupted Blackthorpe with a moue of distaste. "Tell me, Mister Malfoy, just exactly what kind of inspection did your father have in mind?" 

Draco smiled, a lazy cat smile, and slowly uncurled himself from the leather armchair, rising to his feet with arrogant grace. "A thorough one," he said. "I'd like to take one of your guards and search all the rooms. Check the surveillance spells ... among other things." 

Mr. Blackthorpe began to open his mouth. 

"All the rooms," said Draco firmly. 

The manager's shoulders sagged. "As you wish," he said. 

*** 

Harry had finally succeeded in falling into a light doze on the floor when the door burst open. He sprang to his feet, flinging his hand out - "Stupefy!" 

There was a small burst of light and a muffled cry, followed by a thump. "Don't! It's me!" 

Harry blinked. The boy-who-looked-like-Draco-but-wasn't was sprawled on the floor near the door, nursing his arm. He looked at Harry resentfully, which had the side effect of making him briefly resemble Draco far more closely than he had so far. "Ouch! Why did you do that?" 

"You burst in," Harry said, feeling a bit silly. "I didn't know who you were." 

"I brought your bag," the boy said, pushing it towards Harry with his feet. "But that's not why I ran in here. Listen, you have to go. There are inspectors here. They're searching the rooms. They say Lucius Malfoy sent them. I think they might be looking for you." 

Harry grabbed for his bag and whispered the spell that would shrink it down to pocket size. He stowed it, yanked his glasses off the mantel, and turned around. "How do I get out of here?" 

The boy chewed his lip nervously. "I'll take you down to the Portkey room. It's for clients who want to come in and out without using the doors. You can Portkey away, just lock the door behind you." He unbuttoned the cloak he was wearing and handed it to Harry. "Here, put this on, and pull the hood up." 

Harry did as instructed, already on his way out of the room. In the corridor outside they kept to the shadows, walking single file. Harry had to walk quickly to keep up, his fingers slipping on the unfamiliar cloak buttons as he did them up. The cloak itself was heavy wool, and smelled of cigar smoke and dirty snow. 

By the time they got to the staircase they were almost running. The boy fled down it, and Harry followed. There was another, smaller, staircase leading down from the ground floor, which they took at a run. Harry kept one hand on the railing as he ran. He was finally beginning to realize that the dizziness he was feeling was more than exhaustion. I'm ill, he thought, as his feet hit the last step, really ill. Damn. This is not convenient.  

This level of the club was all businesslike wood walls and a polished wood floor. Harry kept a hand on the wall as they went, steadying himself. His skin felt dry and feverish and his eyes prickled. They reached the door at the end of the hall and the boy once again used his lighted cube to open it. He pushed Harry through and then stood in the doorway, looking tense and nervous. 

"The Portkey is in there," he said, pointing. The room itself was almost completely bare, with slick stonewalls. The only item of furniture in it was a round walnut-wood table with gilded legs. A thick rope of gold chain wound around the table and was attached at the top via a padlock to a round, heavy-looking bronze ring. The other end of the chain was sunk into the wall. "The ring is the Key," said the boy. "It's the kind you don't have to take with you. Just touch it, and it should work." 

Harry nodded. He turned around and cleared his throat, wanting to say, Thank you, but the words seemed stuck behind his teeth. In the dim light, he could see only the outline of the other boy looking at him, that he had blond hair and was thin, and if Harry squinted he could imagine that the resemblance to Draco was no more than a superficial similarity of coloring and build. But if he stepped closer ... no. Harry couldn't thank him. "Look," he said, finally. "Have you got a name? An actual name? Because..." 

But there were footsteps in the corridor outside, and the boy, with a startled look, fled, slamming the door so hard behind him that Harry jumped. A moment later there were more noises outside the door and Harry saw the doorknob twist and heard the unmistakable click of a bolt sliding home: he was locked in. 

Not that this was necessarily a bad thing. At least it meant there was no immediate pursuit on his trail. He turned to the table, reached a hand out to touch the Portkey - and paused. He leaned closer, examining it: it was nothing more than a round, solid-looking bronze ring, padlocked to the last link in the gold chain that wrapped the table. He could, of course, simply touch it and be flung to whatever destination it led to, but wouldn't that make it awfully easy for anyone following him to know exactly where he'd gone? Much better to take the Portkey with him, and cut off - or at least slow - any chance of pursuit. 

He dug into his pocket and pulled out the penknife Sirius had given him for his fourteenth birthday. One of the attachments was a thin-bladed short knife, which Harry had discovered early on doubled spectacularly as a lockpick. Leaning forward, careful not to touch the Portkey, he went to work on the padlock. 

*** 

Next to the door of Room Twenty-Eight was a small gilded table on which rested a cut-glass candy bowl full of colorfully wrapped, tiny packets that looked like bags of Fizzing Whizbees. On closer inspection, however, Hermione discovered that the contents of the bowl were not in fact edible. "Every Flavor condoms," she muttered under her breath to Draco. "Do the Bertie Botts people know about this?" 

"Perhaps a strongly worded letter to them is in order," Draco murmured back. 

"And downstairs - so many Oliver Woods!" Hermione added, sounding bewildered. "Whoever thought there was a need for thirteen Oliver Woods?" 

"I never saw a need for one Oliver Wood," Draco pointed out. 

"And that one that was wearing the tutu..." 

Hermione trailed off, shaking her head. Draco shot her a sideways look, trying to hide his concern. He hadn't actually really paused to think, before charging into the club, how its attractions (so to speak) might affect her. Bookish though she was, Hermione was not actually very prudish. He supposed it came from having spent most of her adolescent life with boys for constant companions. Still, the Midnight Club would shake anyone up. They'd walked through rooms where the writhing shadows in the darkness had looked up at them with familiar faces, winked and smiled and beckoned... 

He dropped his voice to a whisper so that Thorvald the troll, who was currently fiddling with the lock on the door of Room 28, which did not seem to want to cooperate with his efforts, couldn't overhear. "Hermione, are you bothered?" 

She glanced up at him, eyes clear and curious. "What? Oh, no, not bothered. Bit bewildered." She glanced around. They were standing in an ornately decorated corridor, which was currently deserted. It hadn't been when they arrived, but at the sight of the troll bodyguard, the few club denizens there had melted away. One of them, a tall woman in backless silver robes wearing a cat mask, had pinched Draco in a very inappropriate place on her way down the hall. "I did feel bad for Filch when we saw him in the sauna room. He looked so embarrassed. I'm sure he recognized us both." 

"Maybe it wasn't really him," Draco suggested, leaning back against the red-wallpapered corridor wall. Seeing Filch hadn't bothered him much. He'd been to the Midnight Club before, as a child, although at the time he hadn't quite understood why anyone would pay money to "play" with Polyjuiced celebrities, or Polyjuice themselves into a celebrity. But then, of course, he was Draco Malfoy, and until he'd met Harry Potter it had never occurred to him that he might ever want to be anyone else. 

Hermione rolled her eyes. Draco tried not to look sideways at her. She was leaning against the wall next to him, idly playing with one of the buttons on the top half of her blouse. He wondered if she had forgotten he was there or if she simply didn't realize that from this angle, when she did that, he had a clear view down the front of her shirt. Not that this was of interest to him in any way. 

"You honestly think people are paying good money to sleep with a Polyjuiced Filch?" she said dubiously. "I mean, the warts alone..." 

"There is no need to be judgmental and dismissive," Draco said. "Sure, to you, Argus Filch might be a barmy old coot with an unsettling cat fixation and enough ear hair to choke a walrus. But to someone else out there, he might be a radiant sex god." 

Hermione looked at him through her hair. "Would you sleep with him?" 

"Don't be disgusting," Draco said. "I'd rather die." 

"AUUUUUUUGH!"  

Both Draco and Hermione jumped. Thorvald had hurled his ring of keys to the floor in exasperation and was swearing in Trollish. It was an unpleasant language and sounded like a bag of grapefruits being dumped down a well. 

"Is there a problem?" Draco inquired. 

"Door charms broken," the troll muttered. "Talk to manager. Get counterspell. Be right back. You stay here." 

He glared at them. 

"Of cou-" Hermione began. 

Draco quelled her with a glare. "Si le poisson, ou jeudi matin!" 

Hermione blinked at him, then shut her mouth. With a confused glare, the troll lumbered away. Draco leaned back against the wall. 

"You're not supposed to speak English," he reminded her sternly. 

Hermione was looking at him curiously. "Did you just say, 'Either the fish goes, or Thursday morning'?" 

"Possibly," Draco admitted. "I didn't know you spoke French." 

"Well, you never said you spoke it, either." 

"I never said I didn't."  

Hermione shot him a considering look. "And you were looking down my shirt just now," she said, in a mildly observational tone. "I did, actually, notice." 

Draco jumped and cleared his throat. "I was being in-character." 

"Congratulations." She sounded annoyed. "It was very convincing." 

Draco ignored this. "I feel like we've been at this for hours, and all I've learned so far is that there are a lot more uses for Fizzing Whizzbees than I ever thought there were. And still no sign of..." 

"Harry," Hermione said. "Can you not even....sense him, a little bit?" 

Draco shrugged. "A little. Maybe. I'm not sure." 

The tramp of heavy feet approaching cut off any reply that Hermione might have made. It was Thorvald, carrying what looked, from a distance, like a crowbar. He waved the bar at them as he drew closer. He seemed slightly sheepish, although Draco thought he might perhaps be imagining that. "Door charms broken," he said. "Got crowbar." 

"That much is evident," said Draco, stepping back. "Go to it, then." 

With a grunt, Thorvald wedged the crowbar into the crack between the door and the wall and pushed. Hermione winced at the sound of splintering wood. She glanced at Draco. He looked distant, distracted, as if he were doing sums in his head. The guard threw his weight against the bar, and this time the door tore away from its lock with a rending noise. Thorvald backed up, and Draco crossed in front of him, pushing the door wide with a gloved hand. He took a step forward. 

Hermione could not see into the room, but she could see Draco's face. It went from the blankness of distraction to the blankness of shock in less than a second. He whitened, and staggered back with a little cry as if something had hit him. 

"Draco?" Forgetting that she wasn't supposed to speak English, Hermione flung herself towards him. "What is it, what's wrong -" 

He stiff-armed her away, hard, and gripped her arm. "Don't look - stay back." 

"No. Let me go." She struggled, but he only held her tighter. "Let me go. Is it Harry - is it Harry?" 

"No," he said. "It's not Harry." 

Knowing he wouldn't lie about that, she stopped struggling briefly, and stared at him. His mouth was a twisted line and he didn't seem able to look at her. "You're hurting my arm," she whispered. "Let me go, Draco." 

He loosened his grip. She tore her arm out of his grasp and pushed past him, almost knocking him back against the door. She heard him call after her, but not what he said: she was inside the room now, and her heart was hammering in her chest. 

It was a room like the others. Plain wide bed, fireplace, bricked-up window, neat rug on the floor. A rosy lamp burned atop a chest of drawers. The mirror behind it was cracked in half. On the floor lay Ginny Weasley, on a bed of torn clothes and tangled hair, her neck twisted at an impossible angle. She was obviously dead. 

Hermione crumpled down on her knees beside the body. She felt numb and floating, as if she were very far away. There were marks on Ginny's throat: finger-shaped bruises, ugly and dark. Her white shirt, open at the throat, was stained with blood. Something glittered in her outflung hand. 

Hermione said, "Draco. Come here." 

"No," he said. She looked up at him. He was inside the room, leaning back against the wall near the door, chest rising and falling quickly under his shirt. He looked pale and sweaty, like someone who was about to throw up. "I can't." 

"It's not her. It's not Ginny," Hermione said. "It can't be. This is a Polyjuice brothel, Draco. What's the chance it's actually her?" 

"I know that," Draco said. He was still not looking at her. Hermione noticed dimly that the guard seemed to have vanished. "But I can't. If it was -" 

"It wouldn't be your fault," Hermione said. 

Now Draco did look at her, slowly, as if his gaze was being dragged in her direction. "Liar," he said. 

Hermione could not hold his gaze. Her own flinched away. "I don't have my wand," she said, looking down at her hands. "I can't change her back without you. We could wait -" 

There was a rustle. She heard Draco move away from the wall, and whisper something: there was a flash of light, and the girl on the floor began to change. Hermione held her breath as the long red hair faded and withdrew into the scalp, the pale freckle-dotted skin darkened, and the clothes tightened as the body inside them swelled. Within a few moments a tall girl with a mop of short dark hair lay on the floor, her hazel eyes wide and unseeing. 

Relief washed over her, and then a feeling of guilt. Whoever this girl was, she had been murdered. She reached out, and lightly touched the girl's dead hand, which lay half-open on the rug - "Oh, God," Hermione said. "Tom. It was Tom." 

"How do you know?" Draco asked. 

She sat back. "The charm you gave Ginny," she said. "That half a heart, cracked down the middle -" 

"Yes? What about it?" 

"This is the other half of it," she said, and held out what had been in the girl's fist. The edges of the glass heart were dark, as if it had been scorched in a fire. "He left it. So we'd know it was him." 

Draco just stared for a moment. Then he held out his hand, and let her put the glass charm in it. He was still pale, and there was a dark, considering look behind his eyes now; Hermione was not sure she liked it any better than the brittle look he had worn earlier. 

"I don't understand," Hermione said. "Is he trying to send us some kind of message? Why kill her? Just because he hates Ginny?" 

"Because he loves her," Draco said. 

Hermione blinked at him. "What?" 

"He loves her," Draco said dully. "I expect because Finnegan did. He loves her, and he hates that he loves her. Love isn't an emotion that would be any use to him. He can't use it; it won't make him stronger or smarter or more powerful. It would just make him weak. If he could cut it out of himself, like a cancer, he would -" He broke off, and Hermione thought fleetingly of his bloody hand; he might have thought of it himself, because he closed his gloved fist around what he was holding. "But he can't - and he doesn't know why he can't. He's angry and that makes him want to hurt her, break her in pieces. You only hate people like this when you loved them once." 

Hermione stared at him. "You sound as if you're sorry for him," she said. 

"I'm sorry," Draco said. "But not for him." 

Before she could respond, the door burst open again, and Thorvald the security troll was suddenly there, Mr. Blackthorpe behind him, and several other men in dark cloaks. They swarmed into the room like bees and Hermione stood up and backed away from the body on the floor as they crowded around it, silent and grim-faced. Mr. Blackthorpe looked up first, his yellow cat's eyes narrowed to slits. He was staring straight at Draco and the expression on his face was as sour as curdled milk. 

Hermione glanced quickly at Draco. For a moment she saw him as he actually was: exhausted and ill and too young to be doing what he was doing, nerves worn thin from multiple shocks. Then, like a cloak, he seemed to draw his arrogance, his Malfoy-ness, around himself. He stood up straighter, squared his shoulders, raised his chin at a disdainful angle, and when he spoke, his voice was strong and carrying. 

"Next time," he said, "perhaps you'll believe me when I tell you that there is a problem with your security." 

*** 

"Oh, Tristan," she whispered, tightly clasped to his broad, rigidly muscled chest. "I always knew you would come for me. Even during the darkest of my hours, deep in the dungeons of Castle Plumeria, I never despaired. Even when Sven held me down and ravished me...and ravished me...again...and again....and again...." 

"Yes, well," said Tristan. "I think it would be best if we never spoke of that again, don't you?" He gazed at her, his eyes the color of impassioned hyacinths. "Oh, my minx...at last you are with me...and happiness is mine!" 

"Oh, Tristan!" 

"Oh, Rhiannon!" 

"Oh, for God's sake," interupted Gareth. "Isn't this bloody book over yet?" 

"One more page," said Ben, giving him a superior look. "Fine. I'll read it to myself." 

If there was one thing you could certainly say about Ben, Ginny thought, it was that he knew his own mind. He raised the book to cover his face and continued reading, looking very incongruous sprawled amongst Ginny's teddy bears and heart-shaped pillows. Gareth, who was sitting on the floor by the foot of the bed, slumped back against the wall and commended twiddling his fingers in a bored, desultory fashion. The runic band around his wrist gleamed when he moved his arm. 

Ginny got up off the desk and went over to sit down next to him. He looked at her, faintly surprised, but shifted aside to give her space to sit down. "Gareth," Ginny whispered, pitching her voice very low, "your bracelet - it really won't come off before you die? There's no way to break that charm?" 

He shook his head. "Not that I know of. Why, is it not that way for Harry?" 

She shook her head. "No, he can take it off." 

"Hmm." Gareth looked thoughtful. "Well, that could be because it was made with some of the same blood that -" 

"I can't believe it just ended there!" Ben interrupted, throwing the book into the air. "I mean, she doesn't even realize that Tristan isn't actually Tristan, but is in reality Tristan's evil twin brother Sebastian, and Tristan himself has been taken prisoner by the evil Duke Scorpio -" 

"That's why it has a sequel, Ben," Ginny pointed out. "Although, admittedly, you'll have to wait a thousand years for it to come out." 

Gareth jumped up from the floor. "Meanwhile, we've been here for four hours, and I'm hungry again. Benjamin, can we head home?" 

Ben got off the bed and put his arms around Gareth and hugged him hard. "If you want to go, we can go." 

Gareth just turned his face into Ben's shoulder, and smiled. They stood like that for a moment, and then they drew apart. 

Ginny looked up at them from the floor, and tugged thoughtfully on a braid. "You probably had better go," she said. "I wouldn't put it past my mother to come back and break the door down if she sees my light's still on. But thank you - for coming, and for the flower, and everything." 

Gareth said something noncommittal, nodded at her, and, freeing himself from Ben's embrace, went to the window. He smiled at Ben. "I'll see you down in the garden," he said, and clambered back over the sill, dropping into the darkness outside. 

Ginny looked up at Ben. "Can't you just leave from here?" 

"Our swords are downstairs. It's rude to bring edged weapons into someone else's house. Didn't you know that?" 

Ginny shook her head. "Must have slipped Mum's mind when she was teaching me manners." 

He reached out and touched her hair, and said something in the same language he had spoken to Gareth in earlier, that was soft and sweet sounding and that she did not understand. Then he dropped his hand. "You will see me again," he said, "but if I do not see you, then take care for yourself, and be well." 

"I will," she said, and watched him walk away, and he was almost gone when she spoke again. "Ben!" she called, and he turned at the window and looked at her. In the shadows, with the light behind him, she could see only the set of his shoulders and the outline of his black hair, and it was as if she looked at a vision of what Harry would be in ten years. If he lived ten more years. 

"Yes?" he said. 

"Why didn't you want Gareth to see my Founders book?" she asked. "You looked so angry. Is there something in it?" 

Ben sighed. "Of course there's something in it," he said. "History." 

"You mean if you knew what was going to happen to you it might create a time paradox...?" 

"Oh, sod time paradoxes," Ben said sharply. "I don't want to know when he dies, all right? I don't want to know when I die either, but Gareth - he's never careful -" Ben paused. "I know if it was you," he said, "you'd want to know. It seems like you can't bear not having the truth..." 

"I've been lied to so much, you see," Ginny said, but it didn't seem like he was listening. Perhaps he already knew, or understood. 

"And truth is a beautiful thing," he said. "In principle. But it's also an unyielding thing. And the truth between two people always cuts two ways. Maybe I'd find out that we'll live and grow old together and maybe that would make me happy. Or maybe I'll spend the rest of my life waiting for him to die because I'll know what day it'll be. You can have too much truth, Ginny." 

She nodded. The feeling of sadness had come back, worse than ever. "I know you're right," she said. "And I'm glad I'll see you again." 

He smiled. "I might not be too happy to see you at first," he said. "Don't take it personally," and with that he was gone, flipping himself over the windowsill and vanishing into the night as if he had never been there at all. 

*** 

Mr. Blackthorpe and the security trolls couldn't bundle Draco and Hermione out of the room with the dead girl in it fast enough. "To my office," the incubus manager snapped, glaring at them both as if the dead girl was their fault. "Now." 

Draco considered briefly insisting that they be allowed to stay in the room, but he could tell from Blackthorpe's manner that he had reached the end of his patience. Any more requests, Draco was fairly sure, and his father would be called in. As a matter of fact, his father would probably be called in anyway. It looked like the time to use Hermione's Portkey might well be at hand - a very unwelcome thought, since they had not yet found Harry. 

Hermione's hand on his arm startled him out of his reverie. He glanced down at her. She was pale, unhappy-looking, but composed. He slowed his walk slightly, so that they dropped behind the rest of the group. Blackthorpe, in whispered and slightly hysterical-looking conference with the hulking security trolls, didn't notice. "Hermione, are you all right?" 

"I'm fine," she whispered back. "But I'm worried about you. You're two hours past the time you should have taken the antidote again. We have to get back." 

"I feel fine," he said. His heart had quickened inside his chest. If the antidote was really wearing off, he could try - it might not work, but at least he could try - 

She dropped her hand from his arm. "I could Portkey us -" 

"No," Draco said. He moved away from her a little bit, not much, but he caught her hurt look. He dismissed it and willed his mind blank. It was hard, concentrating like this and also managing not to walk into a wall, but years of fencing practice had given him a better than decent ability to concentrate under adverse circumstances. Trailing one hand along the wall for guidance, he thought as hard as he could of nothing: in his mind, he was suddenly wandering in shadows, turning to seek out the barest sliver of light. A whispering din surrounded him, like the dry muttering of the ghosts in the Gray Places. He listened hard - 

A sharp pain, in his hand. He'd cut his finger. It hurt. "Ouch. Stupid bloody padlock. Twisted the blade. Have to use another - Sirius would laugh if he -" 

"Draco!" Hermione's voice sharp in his ear, snapping him back to the present. "Are you all right?" 

He turned on her, furious. "I said I was fine!" 

She bit her lip. "You don't look fine." 

He glanced ahead. Blackthorpe was still enmeshed in conference with his guards. They seemed absorbed. Draco turned on Hermione, "I'm going," he said. "Stall them as long as you can in his office. Tell them - tell them I ran off to check out a suspicious noise. Tell them whatever you want." 

Hermione's hand shot out to grab his sleeve, her voice a startled whisper. "But I'm not supposed to speak -" 

But he was gone, spinning on his heel and running back down the corridor. He raced around the nearest turn and slowed his pace: his chest hurt, just a little bit. If he had the antidote - 

But the antidote blocked his ability to find Harry. Who was nearby, Draco could feel it. He leaned heavily on a chair propped against the wall (black laquer and walnut wood, with carved inlays - probably Louis XV and doubtless expensive) and tried to blank his mind again. It was easier this time. He remembered, eight months ago in Malfoy Manor, thinking that the connection between himself and Harry was like a thin cold unspooling between them as they walked away from each other. And it was still there: faint and barely tangible, as if he followed a cord made of nothing more substantial than dust motes. 

There was a staircase around the next corner; Draco took the steps two at a time, ignoring the tightening pain in his chest. He jumped the bottom step, hit the stripped-wood floor with a clatter of boots, and was running down the hallway. There were several doors, unmarked, but it didn't matter: he knew which one he needed. He could feel Harry nearby now, as if they stood in the same room. Nerves and shortness of breath made his fingers shake as he tried the door: it was locked, of course. 

Draco stood back and put his hand against the door. He took a deep breath. He knew perfectly well that he wasn't supposed to do this. He was not meant to be using magic. Not for something like this - not for anything. He knew that, but it didn't matter. He could feel how close he was, and at the same time he could feel the pressurizing rise, the power uncoiling inside him that wanted to be used. Harry always envisioned it as a beast on a chain, barely controlled. Draco had never questioned his own control. He didn't question it now. He merely opened his hand against the surface of the door, and pushed. 

The spell seemed to tear out of him as if the bones of his arm were tearing through the skin. He felt the blaze of it down through his veins and into his hand, taking him by surprise with its force. To Draco's great astonishment, the door gave a great jerk under his hand, and ripped itself off its hinges with a grinding noise. It toppled forward and Draco, taken completely off guard, tumbled after it. He staggered forward, tripped, and sprawled on the floor at Harry's feet. 

*** 

The wizard had planned to kill his succubus wife immediately, as it were, but when he learned that she was pregnant, his plans took a different turn. It was not that he had a sentimental attachment to the idea of a daughter. It was that she was something of his, his blood and his breeding. Surely, then, her fate should rest in his hands. 

He had a cage built inside the largest of his halls, and all its bars were made of solid gold. The succubus he had cast inside it, heavily bound in chains of gold. And there she withered and there she died, poisoned by the metal all around her, but even as she died the baby inside her body waxed and grew healthy. At last the child was delivered and once it was cut from her body, the succubus crumbled away to dust, which the wizard scattered on the wind. 

He went then to look upon his daughter. 

She was a baby not quite like other human babies. She had been born with a mane of long dark curling hair, and her eyes, heavily lashed with black fringe, were as gray as windowpane glass. She had long nails the color of blood and skin like white snow. The wizard took her and set her down in a patch of sunlight, and she began to weep there, and to wriggle in pain, but she did not die. 

"You are mine," said the wizard. "And yet you are also not mine, for the ichor of demons runs in your veins alongside my own blood. There is always the chance that you will revert to the maternal strain. Precautions must therefore be taken before you can begin to be useful to me." 

His daughter looked at him with wide uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that were his own eyes, set in the face of what he hated. And perhaps his voice was not steady as he called for his servants, and perhaps his hand was not steady as he held his wand, but it made no difference to the effectiveness of his spells. He had had nine months to work on them and they were perfect. 

He cast first a spell that would bind the child, utterly, to that side of her inheritance which was human in nature, and which was more specifically Malfoy. For as long as she lived she would be unable to lift a hand to harm anyone of Malfoy blood. Her obedience also he bound. She would be obedient to the head of the Malfoy family, bound to his bidding, whatever he might ask. His lightest request would be her law. She would come and go at his pleasure. And when he died, she would pass, like an inherited trinket, to the next in the family line. 

You look curious. You want to know, I imagine, what would happen if there were only daughters. But there are never daughters. Draco never told you? Malfoys only have male children. It is a peculiarity of the line. But I digress. 

All these spells and bindings the wizard laid upon the child. At the end, he bound her with sympathetic magic. Should she harm the Malfoy she served, should her disobedience or failure cause him pain, she would feel that same pain herself. And the farther she was, physically, from the one she served, the weaker her powers would be. Eventually she would feel it as a physical debilitation. She could not stay away long. 

When he was done, he lifted the child up in his arms and kissed her once, on the forehead, and then he set her down inside the golden cage which had killed her mother, and he walked away. He did not speak to his daughter again for ten years. 

And now you look sad. Have I made you sad? It is a sad story, I suppose, although it is my story, so I rarely think of it that way. And all love stories are sad, especially for you mortals. You have such short lives. 

What's that? Well, of course it was a love story. Isn't a love story, after all, just a story about love? Must the story end happily for the love to have been real? There are many kinds of love, after all. Love that cannot harm and love that never abandons and love that cannot imagine betrayal. And then there is love that corrupts, and love that destroys, and love that works in the blood like poison. And they are not so far apart as you might think. 

*** 

Harry gave a little gasp of astonishment, but other than that, remained perfectly still. He did not move away as Draco scrambled to his feet. He stood where he was and stared at Draco, and Draco, feeling stupid with relief and shock and exhaustion, stared right back. He hadn't seen Harry in so long - or at least it felt as if years had passed, although he knew perfectly well that it had been a matter of days - that all the words he had wanted to say turned to dust in his mouth. 

He looked around instead. They were in a small room paneled in plain wood. There were no furnishings (unless one was to count the destroyed door lying in the middle of the floor, which Draco didn't.) Harry was standing by a small table on which sat what looked like a bronze paperweight. A gold chain lay coiled around the base of the table. He held an open padlock in one hand. 

Draco coughed. Harry was still staring at him. For some reason, Draco could taste blood in his mouth. Maybe he had bitten his lip. "Harry," he said, finally. The name sounded odd. "Are you all right?" 

Harry said nothing. Draco became aware of the way that Harry looked. He looked ragged. He was wearing a torn and filthy shirt and there were tears in the knees of his jeans. His shoes were caked with mud. His black hair straggled over his face in damp and tangled strands, and he was flushed, the hectic color high in his cheeks. He wasn't wearing his glasses. One of his hands was bleeding, although not badly. 

"Harry?" Draco said, and got to his feet. 

Harry seemed to come alive. With a jerk, he stumbled back, putting himself between Draco and the table behind him. "Don't," he said vehemently. "Don't come any closer." 

"It's me," Draco said. "It really is me -" 

"I know it's you!" Harry half-shouted, startling them both. "I can't believe I ever-" He broke off and shook his head. He looked sick to his stomach. "I know it's you, Malfoy," he said, more quietly. "How do you know it's me?" 

"Oh, for God's sake, Potter," said Draco. "Could we possibly have this idiotic conversation later? Like, once we're out of this pit? And what the hell are you protecting there? A paperweight? You're acting like it's the last Portkey out of Azkaban." 

"It is," Harry said, "a Portkey." 

"Oh," Draco said. He swallowed. "Well, where does it go to?" 

"I've no idea," Harry said flatly. "Away from here." 

"You don't need to use it," Draco said, very quickly. "I can get you out - Hermione's got a Portkey, she can get us all out -" 

Harry looked shocked. "She's here, too? You brought her here?" 

"We had to come," Draco said. "We had to see if we could find you -"  

"You can always find me," Harry said, a sort of factual desperation in his voice. "I don't know why I bother running away. You keep finding me and finding me. Everywhere I go, every corner I turn, in crowds, on trains, in bloody bookshops, I keep seeing you. And when I don't see you, I hear you in my head." He shivered, and Draco saw how weary and exhausted he looked. "If I asked you to stop looking for me, would you?" 

"If it was me that went missing," Draco said, "would you stop looking for me?" 

"Yes," Harry said. 

Draco stared at him. It had been one thing reading the letter, disconnected as it was from the actual Harry. It was another thing to have Harry standing right in front of him, completely familiar from his tangled hair to his scarred hand to the faint twist at the corner of his mouth that meant he was saying something he didn't like having to say - to have Harry right in front of him, and to have him confirming that everything Draco had hoped was a mistake was not actually a mistake. "What?" 

"If you asked me to, I would," Harry said. There was a faint sulky tone in his voice. "If it was important -" 

"Liar," Draco said, with all the venom at his disposal. 

"I left," Harry said. "I left, and it practically killed me to leave, you know that? I look back and I can't believe that I did it. And now that you've found me, what? We get to say a friendly hello and then I leave and it kills me all over again? If you cared about me at all -" 

"If I what?" Draco exploded. "You fucking hypocrite, Potter, it's amazing you don't choke to death on that bloody double standard of yours. And all this time I thought you were so honest -" 

"I tried to be honest," Harry said. His voice sounded worn away at the edges, like one of his eternally frayed shirts. "I wrote you a letter. Did you...not read it?" 

"I read it," Draco said, and into those three words he poured every ounce of bitterness and misery and rage in his heart. 

It was enough to make Harry flinch. "I meant every word," he said quietly. 

"I don't doubt that you did," Draco said disgustedly. "As if that's something to be proud of, Potter." He felt his hands curl into fists at his side. It wasn't that he wanted to hit Harry. He didn't want to hit him. It was just something to do with his hands. "And the amazing thing about you," Draco added, "is that you probably thought you were being helpful." 

He expected Harry to look angry or defensive. Instead, Harry merely looked stricken. "I'm sorry," he said. "I wanted you to know." 

"Well, now I know," Draco said. "And it doesn't change anything." 

Harry continued to look stricken. "You didn't understand?" he said. "You really didn't understand why I had to go?" 

"I understood why you had to go," Draco said. "I didn't understand why I couldn't come with you. You promised me you would wait for me and I believed you. I guess I thought you wouldn't lie to me. I trusted you. I never trusted anyone else in my life. But I trusted you." 

Harry's mouth opened in almost comical surprise. And Draco felt the same astonishment. He couldn't believe he had just said what he had said. He was so used to evasion, misdirection, showing what he felt without saying it, expecting others to read his motives from his actions, that having so blatantly just stated exactly what he was thinking felt as if he had exposed a part of himself, cut his wrists open and bled on the floor at Harry's feet. He wondered what the hell had possessed him to say it. 

Harry pushed a damp lock of hair out of his eyes. He was shivering. His thin shoulders shook as he took a deep breath. "If you read my letter," he said, his voice set and firm, "and you still don't understand, Malfoy, then it's probably because you don't want to understand. I told you the truth. I'm sorry if you didn't like it, or you don't believe me, or I annoyed you or disappointed you somehow. But I can't change who I am or what I want, or what I have to do." 

"What you have to do? When have I ever -" Draco cut himself off, biting his own lip to shut himself up. When have I ever wanted you to be anything other than what you are? When did I ever think what you were wasn't good enough? I hated you for being what you are, and then I didn't hate you any more, and when have I ever asked you for anything? When have I even asked you for any of your secrets, for your pity or your compassion or even your friendship - I only asked you for that once, and you said no. I know better than to ask you for anything, Potter. Anything except to let me come with you and that was only because I had no choice but to ask. 

But of course Draco said none of those things, nor did he think them aloud. Pride washed through him like an icy wave, freezing his spine into straightness, leveling his shoulders, forcing his chin up. "You're correct," he said. "There is no need for you to apologize. It was my mistake." 

Harry's shoulders slumped. "So now it's all a mistake of yours? Look, Malfoy -" 

"It doesn't matter." Draco cut him off. "It doesn't matter what I think." 

"It does matter. Look, I'm sorry -" 

"I told you not to apologize," Draco said, as viciously as he could. 

Harry bit his lip. I hate it when you sound like that. If I could just make you understand - 

GET OUT OF MY HEAD, POTTER!  

The force of Draco's shout took them both by surprise. Draco felt the echo of it inside his head like the recoil of a rifle shot, slamming against the inside of his skull. He winced and put a hand to his head, but it was nothing compared to the effect on Harry, who reeled as if Draco had shoved him. He staggered back- Draco reached out to catch him but Harry twisted away, falling backward against the table - the table went over with a crash of splintering wood - and Draco's reaching hand closed on empty air. 

Harry had vanished. And the Portkey had vanished with him. 

The padlock, having fallen out of Harry's grasp, thumped to the floor where he had been standing a moment before. It was several minutes before Draco could bring himself to bend down and pick it up. 

*** 

Hermione scrunched herself deep into the leather chair inside Mr Blackthorpe's elegant wood-paneled office, where he, along with six or seven dark-clad and official looking wizards, were embroiled in a panicked conference. She was terrified that at any moment Lucius Malfoy would join them, and the entire gig would be up. Where the hell was Draco? How could he just leave her here like this? Fortunately they hadn't asked her for an explanation, given that they didn't think she spoke any English, but she didn't like the way they were looking at her, not at all - 

The crash of the door slamming open took them all by surprise. Blackthorpe jumped; Hermione twisted around in her seat as a glowering tower of icy rage stalked into the room. It took her a moment to recognize that it was Draco. 

She had never seen him angry like this. He was absolutely livid, clutching what looked like a metal padlock in one hand. With his other hand, he gestured imperiously for silence. Which he got, as everyone in the room stared at him. He looked so angry that Hermione was astonished that sparks were not actually flying off him, setting fire to the furniture. 

"This," he ground out, between his teeth, the effort of keeping himself from yelling obviously a strenuous one, "this padlock secured a Portkey. Am I correct?" 

Mr Blackthorpe looked astonished. "Did you pry it off the chain? Whatever for, if I may ask?" 

"I did not pry it off the chain," Draco snarled. "It was used by someone else, to escape this place." 

Mr. Blackthorpe looked as if he might faint. "The murderer?" 

For a moment, the look of rage in Draco's eyes faded. "Yes," he said, after a brief hestitation that was enough to tell Hermione that the person who had used this Portkey to escape was Harry. "I need to follow him, immediately. Get me another Portkey." 

There was a short silence. Mr Blackthorpe cleared his throat. "There is no other Portkey," he said. 

"Excuse me, what?" Tense with disbelief, Draco stared at him. "What did you say?" 

"There is only the one Portkey. It was never considered wise to have more than the one - and it was sealed to the chain with Level Five binding charms -" 

"Which proved so effective." Draco's voice dripped acid. "Where did this Portkey go?" 

"To the Central London Floo Hub." Blackthorpe cleared his throat again. "Over three hundred fireplaces there, serving the whole Floo Network - he's probably long gone already. Mister Malfoy, if I might say - I'm sure your father wouldn't want you chasing after dangerous miscreants as it is. The murderer has killed once already -" 

"I don't care about my father!" Draco shouted. Hermione, properly alarmed now, began rising from her seat. Draco would never normally talk about his father this way in public. And he was beginning to frighten her. Iron control was so much a part of his affect, so much a part of everything he was, that to see cracks in it was like doubting the security of Hogwarts. Or so she would have thought. "I want another Portkey! You must have an emergency backup Portkey - you must be hiding it around here somewhere -" 

"I assure you, Mister Malfoy," Blackthorpe said, "that I am not." 

Hermione believed him. No one would lie to Draco in the state he was in. Draco, however, seemed unconvinced. He threw the padlock, hard, against the far wall. It fell to the sideboard, knocking over a decanter with the satisfying sound of smashed glass. 

"I want another Portkey," he snarled. "Or some Floo Powder. I want out of here, you understand me? I want to get to the Central Floo Hub and I want to get there now. The only question is whether I'm going to have to crawl there over a land bridge built out of your dead and eviscerated bodies." He threw a sharp glance sideways at Hermione, as if remembering for the first time that she was there. Color was beginning to come back into his livid face - too much color. He was flushed as if with a fever, his eyes wildly bright. "Get behind me, Hermione," he said. 

Mr Blackthorpe made a sound of protest. "I thought you said her name was -" 

"Shut up!" Draco yelled. "I asked you, are you going to help me or not?" 

Mr Blackthorpe spread his hands wide in a gesture of helplessness. "Mister Malfoy," he said. "There is nothing I can do for you in this case. Nothing at all." 

Draco's only response to that was to grin, suddenly and terrifyingly. Hermione knew that grin. She had only just time to scramble behind him when the mahogany desk and everything on it exploded in a shower of splinters and glass. 

*** 

Harry hit the ground hard, as if he'd been dropped from a great height. He rolled, gasping, and sprawled flat on his back for a moment, dazed. Then he scrambled to his knees and cast about him, half-hoping - 

But the room he had been in, with its smashed door and flat-paneled walls and Draco, too, that room was gone. He was kneeling on a damp and cold stone floor, inside what looked like a small entryway. Empty black archways led off in several directions. There was very little light. Harry could hear voices in the distance. The room smelled of chimney smoke. 

He knelt where he was for a moment, his heart pounding. He opened his hand abruptly and the Portkey rolled out of it. It hit the stone floor with a dull clink. It's not fair, Harry thought bitterly, It's not fair. 

He got to his feet. A wave of dizziness flooded over him and he put out his hand to brace himself against the wall. He could still see Draco in his head, white-faced, looking sick with horror and loathing. Without thinking about it, Harry suddenly hauled off and kicked the dropped Portkey viciously hard. It flew across the room and hit the far wall with a metallic clink. This relieved Harry's feelings only marginally. 

He bit down on his lip. Don't think about it. Don't torture yourself over what you can't alter. It's done.  

Someone jostled his shoulder then and a voice swore at him in a language he couldn't quite comprehend. Harry pressed himself back against the wall as a group of men poured through the room, laughing and talking to each other. They were dressed in identical dark robes, each robe striped around the cuffs with red and orange. Something like a memory tugged at the back of Harry's mind, but he was too ill now with fever and misery to concentrate. It was all he could do to slip in at the back of the line of strangers and follow them through the archway. 

He trailed after them down a short corridor, which emptied out into a truly enormous room which was packed with wizards. The group Harry had come in with scattered around him as he stood and stared. 

He seemed to be at the bottom of what looked like an enormous chimney, going up and up and up until the roof vanished into the distance above him. The air was thick and hazy with smoke and smelled of ash and cinders and damp, cold brick. All along the walls above him were dark holes - fireplaces, Harry realized. Walkways bracketed the fireplaces. Harry could see people walking along them, ducking into the fireplaces, and vanishing in bursts of green and orange light. 

I'm in a Floo Hub, he realized, with a sense of mixed wonder. He had heard of Floo Hubs, although he'd never been in one before. Hundreds of fireplaces, each connected to the Floo networks of different countries. You could get almost anywhere in the world from a Floo Hub. If escape was what he wanted, he could not have come to a better place. And yet... 

He glanced around. Most of the wizards here on the ground floor seemed to be clustered around a desk at the far side of the room. Harry was fairly sure that this was where you purchased your Floo Powder and passes. His sense of misgiving returned. As far as he knew, you had to present your wizarding certificates in order to be allowed to Floo out of the country. Somewhere in his bag was his school certificate, but he hardly wanted to present that. As soon as they saw his name, they'd be all over him. 

Harry sighed. His back and neck were aching, his bones hurt from exhaustion and illness, and it was nearly impossible to get his thoughts under control. He wondered dully how much Hermione hated him now. He was glad she hadn't been with Draco. He couldn't have stood it if they'd both looked at him like that. It was bad enough that Draco was furious with him. Although certainly he'd forgive him, eventually, wouldn't he? He'd have to. Harry could reason with him, tell him, explain. Sit him down and think at him until he had to admit that Harry wasn't lying. An ill-advised confidence surged over Harry suddenly. Of course Draco would relent, because he had to. He couldn't just give up on their friendship, he couldn't walk away from it; what bound them together was much more than both of them. Nor could Harry imagine living the rest of his life without Draco in it. Therefore Draco would have to forgive him. 

This seemed to Harry, in his fevered state, to be the most sensible logic he had ever encountered. He smiled, and began to reach into his pocket for his book bag. He had just raised his hand when the world suddenly and terrifyingly seemed to burst apart around him. 

He staggered and fell as a wave of blackness rolled up and over him, knocking him to the ground. He heard screaming in his ears and felt shards of glass tearing his skin. He screamed, having no idea who or what he was shouting for. He could not hear his own voice over the howling wind in his head. He seemed to be in two places at once: he could see wavering light in front of him, blood and fire, splintering walls. At the same time he felt the cold stone floor under him as his body twisted and thrashed in agony. 

Through the fog of pain and the wailing screams that surrounded him, hands reached to touch him. There were voices all around him, chattering in another language. Harry wondered briefly if he was dying. Then he didn't care. Arms went around him and lifted him up. A familiar voice said his name in his ear but he fainted before he could reply. 

*** 

Faint light moved in a reddish glow and behind that glow were shadows. Draco came up out of the darkness slowly, as if he were crawling his way up through mud or layers of water. When he opened his eyes, he did not immediately know where he was. 

Slowly the blurred shapes that he was seeing resolved themselves and he recognized his surroundings. He was lying flat on his back on the bare marble floor of the hotel room in Diagon Alley, and his head was pounding as if a mountain troll had set up residence in his cortex. 

Draco sat up slowly, convinced that if he moved quickly his head would come off completely. Pain laced his vision with a black mesh and he had to blink several times before he could focus. When he did focus, the first thing he saw was Hermione. She was sitting on the floor a little distance away from him, wearing white pajamas, her back against the couch. She was staring at him. In her pale face her dark eyes looked enormous, like wells of black ink. 

"Hey," he said. 

It was all he could think of. 

Her hands, clasped in her lap, tightened themselves hard around the small silver flask she had been holding. Draco recognized it as the antidote flask she had been carrying around with her since they'd left school. It was chased silver, with a dark blue stone top. In the dim light it had a strange, bluish sheen that was somehow familiar. "You look awful," she said. 

"I feel awful." Sitting up was proving to be too difficult. Draco lay back on his propped arms and concentrated on breathing through the pain in his head. He glanced down at himself - he was shoeless, wearing only his shirt and trousers. His shirt was splotched all over with silver stains and his gloves were gone, his hands bare. "Er...what happened exactly?" 

She blinked at him. Her expression didn't change. "You don't remember?" 

He shook his head, and winced as another bolt of pain shot through his temples. "I went looking for another Portkey..." 

"So," she said, her voice very measured. "You don't remember tearing apart Blackthorpe's office? You started off by blowing his desk into toothpicks, and moved on to smashing every single on of the windows. I'm surprised you didn't kill everyone with the flying glass shards. Then of course all the floorboards wrenched themselves up and burst into flames." 

"I put the flames out," said Draco, to whom recollection was returning in rather lurid fragments. 

"With a rain of blood," said Hermione frigidly. "Then all those snakes burst out of the wall. Although they didn't get the attention they deserved, I fear, since everyone was kind of distracted by the wailing chorus of the damned and the giant rats that ate each other." 

"I was proudest of the flock of invisible ducks, myself," Draco said. 

Hermione did not laugh. She did not seem remotely amused. "I suppose you think you really showed them," she said. "Especially the part where you keeled over in a dead faint and I had to use the hotel Portkey to get us back here. Thank God I had it, or we'd both be dead." 

Draco was interested. "Did I really keel over in a dead faint?" 

"Yes," Hermione said flatly. "That's why you're on the floor. I couldn't lift you. I didn't want to use a spell. I think you've had enough magic tonight. Harry always did say that if you ever let your Magid powers get out of hand it would blow the roof off Hogwarts. I guess he was right." 

Her flat tone of voice was beginning to alarm him. "How long have I been out? You changed into pajamas..." 

"I had to," she said expressionlessly. "You coughed up blood all over my clothes." 

"Oh." This, Draco felt, ought to be worrying information. He didn't feel upset, though. Just very tired. "I'm sure the hotel has house-elf laundry services. I'll pay for it -" 

Thwack ! Draco barely flinched away in time as the flask Hermione had been holding sailed by his ear. It smacked soundly into the tiled floor and rolled away. He blinked at her. 

"How dare you," she hissed. "How dare you sit there and act as if this is all about laundry?"  

"I didn't say it was about laundry -" Draco began in what he thought was a reasonable tone, but barely had he gotten the words out of his mouth when Hermione seized a crystal candlestick off the coffee table and slung it at his head. He ducked, again, and it shattered against the floor. 

"Hey!" Draco protested. "You could have hit me!" 

"Good!" Hermione shrieked. She was on her knees now, cheeks scarlet with rage and suddenly, with an almost painful clarity, Draco remembered the skinny, wild-haired girl who had slapped him full across the face when he was thirteen years old. It had been the first really stunning thing that had ever happened to him. "I wish I had hit you! Do you even have any idea what you did, you stupid, stupid bastard? You're not supposed to use your magic! I told you that! Snape told you that! Don't you listen to anyone? Did you think he was telling you that because he was trying to be funny? You're not supposed to use your magic because you're dying, and it takes every bit of your own strength and every bit of the strength in that antidote just to keep you alive! And then you go and have a stupid temper tantrum like this one, and I can't even imagine what it's cost you - a week off your life? Two weeks? And for what? For nothing. It's not like you got what you wanted. They couldn't have helped you if you'd burned the whole place down." 

"I was angry," Draco said. "I'm tired of living every second like I'm under a death sentence -" 

"You are under a death sentence," Hermione said savagely. Casting about for something else to throw, she seized a heavy ceramic mug and hurled it at the far wall. It hit with a crash. Draco winced, but Hermione seemed to feel better. "You're not tired of living like you're under a death sentence, you're just bloody tired of living. I have to make you take your antidote. You go walking into a place like that brothel without even bringing a Portkey to get you back out. And then that little display of suicidal temper. If it wasn't for me you'd be dead three times over today and you act like you don't even care. You don't care about anything now, and it isn't fair. He left me too, you know." 

She broke off, but Draco remained silent. He lay where he was and looked at her, as the angry color slowly faded out of her face. She bit her lip. 

"Say something," she whispered. 

"Every time I say anything, you throw something at me," Draco pointed out. 

"I won't this time. Just say something." 

Draco sighed. He felt very tired. "This isn't about Harry," he said. "But if you want to make it about Harry, then fine. He left you, too. But he didn't write you a letter and tell you how worthless you were and how it made him sick to look at you, did he?" 

"He didn't say that to you, either," Hermione said. 

"Not literally, perhaps, but that was the general gist. Harry's too kind a soul to say anything like that outright. Apparently he couldn't stand living in my head anymore because it's such a revolting place. I can't blame him. I don't like it there myself." 

"What Harry thinks hasn't got anything to do with it," Hermione said. "I love Harry. But he's not infallible. And you shouldn't be living and dying by his opinion. I don't know why he wrote what he did. I have to believe he had a good reason. I also have to believe it doesn't matter. Because, in the end, he did leave, and we have to live with it. Only I'm terrified that you - you don't want to." 

"It's not your job, Hermione," Draco said, "to keep me alive, you know. I wouldn't blame you if you gave up on me. Nobody would." 

She shivered. He was aware suddenly of how small she was. At the best of times Hermione could only be generously thought of as slender - really, she was skinny, and more so now, as they had all lost weight in the past weeks. "You think I want to be responsible for you?" she whispered. "I'm so sick of being responsible. Of taking care of everyone. Only no one else will do it, will they? And first Ron left, and I lost him, and I thought, okay, I can get by still, I'll figure out a way to live without him until we get him back. And then Ginny, and I told myself I could get by without her, too. And then Harry left, and I told myself that if I just focused on going after him and getting him back I could survive even that. But if anything happens to you - if you leave me - then I have nothing, I have no one, and I can't do this alone, I was never meant to be alone, I was only ever any good when I was with Ron and Harry -" She broke off on a ragged breath, and put her face into her hands. "I shouldn't tell you these things. It can't help." 

Slowly, Draco levered himself up into a sitting position. His chest felt strangely tense, as if he couldn't quite breathe properly. He held out his arm, and Hermione looked at him wonderingly for a moment and then crawled across the floor to him and half-leaned, half-fell against his chest, hiding her face. 

He closed his arm around her. The fact that he had withstood the impact of her embrace without keeling over backward seemed to him fairly impressive, given his current physical state. They were in a very awkward position now: Hermione, shy of sitting in his lap apparently had thrown her legs over his, and her knee bumped against his ribcage. "You're kicking me," he said. 

She looked up. Her face was wet and there was a damp spot on the front of his shirt. She smiled. She was like Harry, he thought, in that she seemed to have a light behind her eyes that, when she smiled, broke across her face and lit it to a strange a sudden prettiness. "I didn't want to squash you," she said. 

"You're not," he said. 

She leaned her head against him again, and seemed to rest there for a moment, very still. Looking down, he could just see the nape of her neck, pale and vulnerable looking between the white collar of her pajamas and the strands of her dark hair. She was still shivering, but less violently now. For the first time in days he found himself feeling someone else's pain besides his own, and it was strange and startling and he tightened his grip on her. She smelled faintly of antidote: belladonna, bitter aloe, a scent like blood oranges. He said her name without being aware that he was saying it, and this time, when she looked up, her dark-lashed dark eyes wide and curious, this time he kissed her. 

She did not seem startled to be kissed. Her arms came up around him, thrown awkwardly over his shoulders, her hands cold against the back of his neck, and she did not try to pull away. He held her tightly on his lap, hands on her waist, and leaned into her mouth, and he could feel the outline of the blue glass ring Harry had given her, hard as a splinter of bone, trapped between their bodies as they leaned together. 

His strength gave way then and he fell backward, holding her. They thumped to the floor, a tangle of arms and legs. He heard her cry out in surprise but when he reached for her she quieted him with her fingers against his mouth. "Stop," she said. She looked determined, very serious. "Did I hurt you?" she asked. 

"Yes," he said. 

She put her face down by his, and her clouded dark hair fell over them both. "I'm sorry," she whispered, her cheek brushing his, and he tasted the salt of her tears and thought, it was the closest he had come to crying in ten years. He seemed to be able to see them both, as well, from a distance, as if some part of him were hovering over the proceedings and observing in a disinterested manner. The blond boy sprawled on the floor, the dark-haired girl lying beside him, and if he also imagined a third shadow flung over and between them, it only made him more conscious that there was no one there to cast it. 

"I'm sorry," she said again. She kissed his face where the scar was, just under his eye, and then drew his hand towards her, kissing his palm lightly, her mouth moving over the angry scars there to his wrist. He could feel the beat of his own heart, painfully, as if his heart had cracked in half, spilling blood like a river down through his veins to the point where her mouth met the pulse of his wrist. It was a feeling like falling. He reached over to her and pulled her down to fall with him. 

It would have been a lie to say he had not imagined this before. He was too much of a Slytherin to strictly discipline his own imagination; surely he could not be blamed for acts he had never committed. Still, against the grain of his nature, eventually the idea of betraying Harry had been too painful to contemplate even in the abstract and even now he felt that pain like the afterimage of sun against closed eyelids. It blended with the pain of the cold tiles digging into his skin and his bones bruising on the hard floor and the pain in his cut hand, trapped between their bodies as they clung together. It was pain like a winter chill, sweet and piercing. 

Her hands on him were restless and a little uneasy. Her fingertips glided over his face, she stroked his hair as if he needed or wanted reassurance; she made a whispering sound when he kissed her that was like the soft sound of snow falling in layers on the ground. He kissed her throat, then, and the lids of her closed eyes, and she shivered and moved so that he could kiss her mouth. The lazy, sensual falling sensation was leaving him, sinking away like spilling sand, and he felt the new urgency in her as she moved against him. She locked her arm around the back of his neck and he rolled towards her, hooking his leg around the back of her knee, pulling her against him, her breasts against his chest. And he knew that he should stop what they were doing, stop it right now, and wondered if it was his illness and exhaustion that had killed all his willpower or if he really was the awful person that Harry apparently had always thought he was, and if Harry hated him anyway there was no point in stopping, in fact there was hardly any point in not doing anything he wanted to do. 

His hand, no longer trapped between them, still throbbed with a dull painful ache as he traced the line of her collarbone down to the top buttons of her pajamas and began to undo them one by one. He thought at first that it was the pain in his hand that was making the operation so difficult and it was only after a few seconds of fumbling that he realized that there was something caught in the buttons. He tugged at it, impatiently, and it came away in his hand, startling him. He tried to close his hand around it, but it slid through his fingers and hit the tiles with the sound of splintering crystal and only then did he realize what it had been. 

Hermione gave a little gasp and scrabbled for it with her hand. "My ring -" She twisted around to pick it up and held it up between them. It was not shattered, but a thin and branching crack had spread through it, almost splitting it in thirds. "It's all right," she said. "It's all right, I can Reparo it." 

"Can you?" Draco said. His voice was affectless, and his face was calm, but she could see the pulse jumping in his throat. He propped himself on his elbows and looked down at her as she drew the chain through her hand and then closed her fingers around the ring itself. She felt suddenly aware of his weight pressing her down. For two boys so similarly built, Draco and Harry felt very different. Harry was wiry-thin, hollow-boned like a bird, all light touches and tangled hair and inexpert sincerity. Draco was more substantial, muscle curving over bones, stomach flat where Harry's was more concave, hair silky where Harry's was fine and rough and yet in other ways they were very much the same. 

Draco reached down to touch her face. 

Without thinking, she shied away. "Don't," she said. 

He let his hand fall. "Don't what?" 

She shivered. The ring was cold in the palm of her hand. "Don't touch me," she said. "Because if you do, then I will - and I can't. We can't." 

He looked at her. Their faces were inches apart. She could see his eyes, her own reflection in them, the texture of the irises. This close up, they were more than just gray, she could see where they were threaded with blue and slate and hazel. "And why not?" he asked, his voice still very calm and cold. 

"Because of Harry." She shivered again. "I don't want to hurt Harry." 

"Oh," he said. He half-smiled and she thought how that pretty mouth was no longer pretty when it twisted like that, into a cruel amused line. "Well, I do. Isn't that what this was all about?" 

She froze. "Get off me," she said. 

He laughed. His breath stirred her hair. "Whatever you say," he replied in a mocking tone, and moved to get off her, slowly, very slowly, so that she could feel every inch of him as he slid down her body. He rolled casually off her and sprawled on the floor, legs apart, booted heels angled against the marble tiles. 

"Is that why you kissed me?" she demanded, sitting up, scooting backwards away from him. "To hurt Harry?" 

"No," he said. 

She felt a wave of peculiar relief. 

"It's why I didn't stop, though," he added, flicking an invisible something off his cuffs with a sharp nail. 

The relief vanished, and bitterness took its place. "Well, I don't want to hurt Harry," she said, through her teeth. "If you do, that's your problem." 

His eyes narrowed like a cat's. "So," he hissed, his voice all velvet, "if I didn't want to hurt him, then it would be acceptable? Mealy-mouthed self-serving protestations of good intentions excuse our behavior, somehow? Oh, I don't want to hurt Harry, so I'll announce that I don't want to hurt him before I go right ahead and rip his heart out, that'll make it okay. Or were you planning on fucking me but keeping it a secret? Because you couldn't, you know. He'd find out. And he wouldn't want you anymore, not after that." 

She expelled her breath in a ragged little gasp. "That's not true -" 

"It is true," he said. "He wouldn't want you. Not if it was me." 

"You -" 

Hermione bit off what she was going to say. He was looking at her, glaring really, all his old refined malice plain in the set of his shoulders and the tense line of his mouth. His eyes were the only expressive things in his face: like bright fissures in a blank wall. She saw the rage in them, the fury and the fierceness, and behind the fierceness a terrible emptiness that seemed to spiral away to a place without any light. She had always wondered why she never envied this odd, bitter, intense boy who had so much of her Harry, and now she knew: no bond, however close and beautiful, was worth buying with this pain of loss, this terrifying severance. Not for her. Perhaps for Draco it was worth it. But she would never know, because she could never ask him. 

"You don't need to be cruel to make your point," she said, which was not what she had been going to say. "However cruel you are to me, you're worse to yourself. And I hate watching it. So I'm going to sleep. Do what you want." 

He looked startled. Hermione felt a vague disconnected pleasure at the fact that she had been able to startle him. She leaned forward and very carefully laid the blue glass ring down on the floor between them. She heard him inhale softly and sharply, but she didn't look at him. She got to her feet and turned around and walked into her bedroom and managed not to turn around and look back at him before she shut the doors. 

*** 

"Are you quite certain it is not my son?" Lucius said to the nervous-looking little secretary standing in front of his office door. Lucius wondered briefly if the man had some goblin blood in him - he was extremely ill favored, and there was a certain lumpish cast to his nose that Lucius did not like. He resolved to fire him as soon as possible, and also to fire the assistant to who had hired him. "It is not Draco?" 

The secretary shook his head. "It is not the young master." 

"Some other boy? And he barged into my office and demanded to speak to me?" 

"Yes. He said you would be glad to see him. He seemed quite certain of it." 

"Indeed." Lucius' voice was dry. "We will see about that." 

Lucius pushed past the trembling secretary and threw the door of his office open. He strode inside and cast about for the intruder. Who was not hard to spot - a fair-haired teenage boy lay sprawled across Lucius' desk on his back, his hands raised above him, tracing lazy circles in the air with his fingertips. He turned his head as Lucius closed the office door behind him and smiled engagingly. "Hello there, Lucius," he said. "You are looking well." 

Lucius blinked. 

Are you quite certain it is not my son? he had asked the secretary, and the secretary had said, It is not the young master. And he had been correct: it was not. Whoever this was, he was a complete stranger to Lucius, although he seemed to have made himself so at home in Lucius' office that this fact would have come as a surprise to any casual observer. The boy was lying across Lucius' elegant rosewood desk, his dark school cloak wadded up and stuffed under his head to make a pillow. He was slender and tall and blond like Draco, although his features were much less sharply defined. A handsome boy. Open-faced, a conspiratorial grin, and, when he fixed his eyes on Lucius they were the color of dark blue water looked at through blue-tinted glass, and Lucius was somehow sure he had seen those eyes before. 

He went rigid, cold all over. "You are trespassing in my office," he said coldly, biting off each word. "I hope you can explain yourself, boy. Do you know who I am?" 

"I think," said the boy, straightening up slowly, "that the more appropriate question, Lucius, would be, do you know who I am?" 

"Considering I've never seen you before in my life, I think the answer to that question is fairly obvious," Lucius snapped. "And please refrain from calling me by my first name. Whoever your parents are, they have taught you no manners." A horrible thought occurred to him. "Muggle-born, are you? I shall have to have my desk thoroughly cleaned if so." 

"Oh, no," said the boy, softly, his eyes never leaving Lucius' face. "My mother was a witch. You used to tell me that that cancelled out my father's dirty blood, that I must be all her son, with none of him in me. But then you were always a past master at telling me what I wanted to hear. Even when you were just a child." 

Lucius narrowed his eyes. "When I was a child, you wouldn't even have been born, my insolent young friend." He leaned against the closed office door. "I admit that your method of entry into my office initially intrigued me. But you are proving tiresome. Either explain what you are doing here or I will have you ejected from this place and your parents notified." 

The boy had slid himself into a sitting position now and had swung his legs over the desk. "Oh, Lucius, Lucius," he said, shaking his head. "You break my heart. Don't you know me, don't you know me at all?" 

Lucius' tone was curt. "No. Who are you?" 

The boy smiled, and his pale face lit up like a morning sunrise. But his blue eyes were as cold and dark. 

"Retribution," he said, and stood up. 

Lucius found that his voice had dried up in his throat. Those eyes - but it couldn't be. This was some child, some boy playing tricks or games, a friend of his son's - 

"Do you remember," the boy said softly, his voice gentle, deliberate. "The day you were Sorted? The hat said 'Slytherin' right away, of course, and then you jumped down from the stool and came to sit with us. I'd already cleared a space for you, at my right hand... " 

"What?" Lucius felt himself go cold all over. "How could you possibly know...?" 

"You were such a little thing," said the boy. "You never thought I'd take much notice of you. But I knew what you'd become. What you have become. And now look at you." 

Lucius shook his head numbly. "This isn't possible," he said. "You lie." 

The boy paused in the middle of the room, a delicate smile on his mouth. "I am Tom Riddle," he said. "I am sixteen years old. Now and forever, sixteen years old. I was ink and paper. Now I am flesh and blood and fifty years have passed like a dream." 

"The book was destroyed," Lucius said. "I threw it on the fire myself." 

The boy's eyes widened. "Did you?" 

"It was ruined already, my Lord," said Lucius quickly, without thought, "a precaution only -" He broke off and then cursed himself inwardly as a delighted smile spread across the boy's face. 

"You believe me, then," the boy said. "You know it's me. Or are you not satisfied? Ask me, if you like, Lucius. Ask me something only we would know. Do you remember that seal ring of yours, with the griffin wings? And how when they named me to be Head Boy I took the sharp edge of a wing and cut words into my arm, do you remember what those words were?" 

"I remember," said Lucius. "Do you?" 

The boy's expression was grave. He lifted his left hand then, and with his index finger wrote on the air between them. Shimmering words appeared, tracing fiery paths in the air. Non serviam. 

"I will not serve," said Tom, and Lucius remembered Tom looking down at his bleeding arm and remarking that when Lucifer had ridden to battle against Heaven at the head of a host of rebel angels, those had been the words written on his banner. 

Lucius found that his knees had bent and he was kneeling on the floor at Tom's feet. "My Lord," he said, feeling himself half delirious with shock. "I remember you - I remember everything." 

Tom waved a hand, and the shimmering letters vanished. "If only I did," he said, his boy's voice a little wistful. " I have spent the past two days reading histories of my life, Lucius. At first I could hardly believe it. Such a tale of defeat and betrayal it was. I was filled with rage. I wanted to destroy everything in my path. Then I realized that was foolish. There are those who deserve my condemnation and vengeance and they shall receive it. All my Death Eaters who left or renounced me - they will die." His voice was cool and certain. "One by one I will kill them all." 

"But they are protected," said Lucius, stumbling slightly over the words. "They have been forgiven, and their houses warded by the Dark Lord -" 

"Wards will not keep out the one who made them," said Tom. "And we are one and the same." His sharp teeth showed in a snarl. "Well, not precisely the same of course. As for him - my elder self - he above all is deserving of my vengeance. I cannot understand how he has come to be what he is - old and insane and weak and ugly. I would never have allowed myself to become such a disappointment. Better to have died. And die he will. There is hardly room for two of me in this world," and a faint look of amusement touched his face. "In fact, I recollect you saying that there was hardly room for one of me. Do you remember, Lucius, the first time we ever met?" 

Of course I do. "I was ten years old," Lucius said. "Perhaps I do not recall." 

Tom took another few steps towards him. "You recall," he said. "You were with your father. I believe he was on a school inspection tour. The Headmaster introduced us, for your father always had an interest in Slytherin house and its best students. I was expected even then to be the next Head Boy. Do you remember what he said to me?" 

"Yes," said Lucius, through numb lips. 

"He said, 'I trust you will look out for my son,'" said Tom. 

"And you did," said Lucius. 

"I did." Tom spoke quietly. "You cannot desire to serve him. Not that mad old man, that sick and vile creature. Lucius - together we can start over. It is your choice." 

For a long time Lucius did not reply. Finally, Tom touched him on the arm. He had to reach up to do it - not much, but just a little, as Lucius was taller than he was now. "Lucius," Tom said to him, and Lucius looked across the space between them at the blond boy who was regarding him through narrowed blue eyes and remembered that when those eyes asked something of him he could not say no. "Do you choose me?" 

Lucius bowed his head. "I am, as always, loyal to you, my Lord," he said. "You and no other." 

*** 

Hermione was nowhere close to asleep when he came in. She had crawled under the heavy covers and pulled them up around her shoulder and lay there in the bed, too tired to sleep. The French doors to the main room threw barred squares of light against the pale, tiled floor. The bed smelled like a hotel bed: soap and too much starch. The sheets were rough against her skin but she didn't mind the light abrasion. It felt like a punishment, something deserved. 

She did not quite remember how it had felt to kiss Draco. It seemed to have gone, like the memory of pain. She could remember that it had happened, but not the feeling of the specific moments. It had been like a storm of weeping after months of holding back tears. She felt strangely empty now, spent of emotion. When she closed her eyes she could feel his fingers as if they still touched her hair. 

There was a click as the knob of the door turned. Hermione didn't move. Head pillowed on her wrist, she watched as the door opened and he came in. He shut the door behind him and leaned back against it. 

Backlit by the faint illumination coming through the panes of glass, he was only a silhouette. The light outlined his thin body, the curve of his shoulders, the angle of his jaw. She could see the shadows pencilling his collarbones, his hair a negative halo, lit to a pale flare by the dim light. The dull gleam of gold chain sparked against his throat as he turned his head and looked at her. 

"You're awake?" he said. It was a question. 

She sat up. The covers rustled around her, the starched sheets crackling like a bed of dry reeds. She pushed her hair back behind one ear. It was still damp from tears. "I'm awake," she said, and drew the covers beside her back, clearing a space for him. 

She heard him sigh, and his shoulders relaxed. It was an odd sort of sigh. It sounded like defeat. She could see exhaustion plain in the lines of his body as he crossed the room and sat down on the bed beside her, his bare feet making no noise on the carpet. He unbuttoned his cuffs and slipped his shirt off over his head and lay down beside her. 

She turned slightly to look at him. He was flat on his back, his hands crossed on his chest, staring blankly up at the ceiling. His lashes cast long shadows on his cheeks, making him look younger than he was. She had always thought his long lashes were the only gentle thing about his face. No longer. Weariness had not destroyed his beauty, only softened it somehow, all his sharp planes and angles gone to the curves of tired eyelids and downturned mouth. Only the hands on his chest were clenched tight with a sort of furious penitence. 

She remembered the night she had slept in his room in the dungeon, how he had lain awake all night beside her, staring up into the darkness overhead, the thought of Harry lying between them like a drawn blade in some Arthurian legend. Harry lay between them now. He always would. He would be a part of Draco for as long as either of them lived, and if one of them died it would be an endless struggle for whoever was left behind not to follow. Love one of them and you loved the other; lose one, and you would lose them both. 

She reached out then to touch him, reached across the space between them that was occupied and always would be. He turned towards her at the same moment and put his own arms out and drew her against him, under the covers, and in the darkness they curled together, around each other and around the ghost of what they both loved. Clutching each other like children, they fell asleep there in the dark.  

*** 

Thanks, references and author's notes:

The kiss. The slash. The het: 

I put a disclaimer on the last chapter that said that just because Draco kissed Harry, doesn't make the trilogy slash. I am now going to state that just because it wasn't Draco who kissed Harry, doesn't make the trilogy not slash. It might not have been actual!Draco who kissed Harry, but that doesn't mean it's not going to prompt a re-evaluation of Things As They Stand on Harry's part. Nor does the Draco/Hermione sequence mean that the eventual end pairing is going to be Draco/Hermione. There are seven more chapters to this fic planned. Much will happen. Much. If you really, really, really hate slash in all its forms and incarnations, this might not be the fic for you: it is slash-friendly, as am I, and will remain so. (Whee! Ron/Snape!) 

The Polyjuice Brothel: 

I think Black Dog once said Polyjuice is the crack of the wizarding world. I suppose you can consider this the crack house chapter. I know Polyjuice is often an easy out for authors, a sort of deus ex machina that shortcuts more complicated plot explanations. I've been free with the Polyjuice in this chapter, which I recognize, but I felt I had to commit to going all the way with it, because you can't write about the seamy, dark underbelly of the wizarding world without writing about Polyjuice. It's simply got too many opportunities for abuse and exploitation attached to it, and the idea of a Polyjuice brothel was one that was suggested to me a year ago by Heidi and Ebony, and I just fell in love with the concept. I do promise, however, in future, no more Polyjuice. I've taken it to its most extreme logical conclusion, and am done with it. 

*** 

Odio et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.: I love and I hate. You ask me why this is so; I do not know, but I feel it, and it torments me. (Catullus) 

"I've always known my father was into some nasty stuff...dragon´s blood bars, unicorn smuggling, polyjuice brothels..." Draco said this to Harry in DV9. See? Clue! 

"... memorizing the liner notes on old Chöcolate Frög albums": It's something of a fanon convention that there's a bad wizarding band called Chöcolate Frög. I think they're Swedish. 

Every Flavor Boys: These belong to my roommate and erstwhile plot conspirator Ali. 

"Didn't they get to number five with I Do Believe We're Naked?": This manages to be both a Red Dwarf *and* a Simpsons reference. 

"I think that boat sailed with the..." Frasier.  

"'Either the fish goes, or Thursday morning": courtesy of my friend Josh, upon being asked for "a very stupid sentence in French." Yes 

Credit for the evil little doorkeeper fairy goes to my recent reading material, more specifically Holly Black's Tithe, which posits a lot of quite nasty little fairies indeed, along with some hunky fairy knights. Read it.  

Floo Hub: Credit for the idea of Floo Hubs goes to Soz's fantastic fic Russian Roulette. Used with her kind permission. 

Chapter 13