HPSlashFics - 7 Burning the Boats

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
--GBS

***

He stood beside a polished rosewood table on which sat a chess set carved from fluted glass. The chess set was familiar to Draco. He had seen it somewhere before. It nagged at him, but like all things seen in dreams, he could not pinpoint its place in his life. The room the Dark Lord stood in was full of shadows: Draco knew this room, and the gilded cage that stood at one end of it. At the moment, the cage was empty.

Lucius, who stood a little ways away, seemed to hesitate. "That is one possible outcome, my Lord."

Voldemort nodded. In his long-fingered hand he was holding a chess piece: a green knight. "And this risk is acceptable to you?"

Voldemort began to turn the chess piece over and over. "Perhaps he will die of a broken heart first."

Lucius blinked. "I have never known you to concern yourself overmuch with hearts, my Lord."

"To everything there is a season, my dear Lucius," said the Dark Lord, and set the knight down on the polished surface of a rosewood table.

"No need to quote Scripture at me, Lucius," said the Dark Lord, sounding amused. "We have the Cup now, or at least it is no longer where we cannot reach it. When the Ritual is performed, I shall ascend, and the old order will pass away, as shall the old gods. I shall be the only ruler of not just the wizarding world, but all worlds. My name will be legion. I will show to them the true nature of gods."

"Which is?" Lucius asked. Draco could hear a note in his voice that surprised him: he sounded strained, perhaps angry. Voldemort did not seem to notice.

Lucius looked as if he were about to speak, when the door opened. Wormtail entered, carrying a tray. He crossed the room, and put the tray down on the table beside the chess set. Draco saw that the tray held a decanter of brandy: he suspected it was Re'em Martin, his father's favorite.

"Thank you, Peter," said Lucius, without looking towards him. To Draco's surprise, Wormtail then seated himself at the table, and poured a glass of brandy. He raised it to his lips, and the Dark Lord frowned at him.

"Is she returning tonight?" Wormtail asked, jerking his chin towards the empty cage along the far wall.

The Dark Lord's frown deepened. Without another word, he gathered his robes around him and stalked from the room. As the door shut behind him, Lucius whirled on his unfortunate companion.

"I was just asking a question," Wormtail said belligerently, and drained the glass in his hand. When he set the glass down on the table, his hand was trembling. "An innocent question."

Wormtail poured himself another glass of brandy. "Does he know where the Cup is?"

"He knows who has it - why do you question? Have you information which you have been withholding?"

"I thought my opinion was of no interest to you," said Wormtail, with an odd flash of his eyes.

Wormtail bared his little rat teeth over the rim of the glass. "He is mad. Mad, and you know it."

"Silence!" Lucius bellowed, so loud that the fabric of the dream began to rend and split, and Draco felt his eyes fluttering open. "He can hear you..."

The dream was gone. Draco opened his eyes and the room swam into focus around him. He tried to sit up, but something was gripping his upper arm like a vise. He turned, and saw her lying beside him, drowned in deep sleep, her face pillowed on her tumbled hair - Hermione? What's she doing here, in bed with me? Good God, what've I done? - and then he remembered, and sat up so quickly he almost knocked his skull on the headboard.

She came back to consciousness if she were swimming up through deep water, her eyelids fluttering open slowly. Her dark eyes focused on him, and he saw the confusion in them for a moment. Then she seemed to remember, and half-sat up, rubbing at her eyes. "I was dreaming," she said. "You were in it."

"Was I?" He sat back against the pillows, and tried not to think about how much he wanted to stay there and rest. "What was I doing?"

"You were in it, and so was Harry. You were... different. We were all in London. I think you were...I don't know, gangsters or something. You had guns. It was very peculiar."

"Never you mind." A smile ghosted across Hermione's face. "You were older. You were..."

"Nothing." The smile widened, then vanished. She sat up straighter, her shoulders tensing. "What time is it?"

She bit her lip, looking tense and unhappy. Her hair tumbled around her head in unruly curls, which had begun to frizz up at the ends. "I have to get back to Gryffindor Tower," she said.

He leaned forward, ignoring the exhaustion, which dragged him down like a lead weight. "Are you sure that's a good -"

"Okay." He hesitated. "And again, I have to ask you. Are you sure that's a good idea?"

"I want to ask him to put the Veritas curse on me." Her hands balled into tight fists at her side. "Then he'll have to believe me."

He reached out for her, but she jumped off the bed and began pacing up and down the room. The fire behind her had burned down to orange-red embers, and the smoky light outlined her body through her clothes, tinting her hair a dark scarlet. She spun and faced him, looking determined.

"He trusts you," she said. "Come with me to talk to him. If you put the Veritas curse on me without telling him you're going to -"

"I don't want to put the Veritas curse on you without telling him I'm going to."

"I don't," he said coldly, "have to do anything." He swung his legs over the side of the bed, and looked sharply at her. "I'd do a lot for you," he said. "I'd go so far as to say I'd do almost anything for you. But I won't blindside Harry. Maybe he trusts me now, but would he then?"

She looked shocked for a moment. Then her shoulders drooped. "You're right," she said. "I'm sorry." She looked back at the fire. "Come with me," she said again. "Just to talk to him, then."

Draco fought down his misgivings. "All right." He slid off the bed, landed lightly on his feet - and almost passed out. The blood roared in his ears as loudly as thunder, and black diamonds of darkness danced in front of his eyes. He grabbed at the bedpost to steady himself.

"Draco?" Hermione was at his side in an instant, her hand on his arm. "Are you all right?"

"I'm sorry," she said softly. Her dark eyes were fixed on his face, full of concern. "I haven't forgotten about what you asked me the other day - about your shoulder. I've been looking in the library..."

"I said I was all right." He shook off her hand, not looking at her. He bent down again, this time carefully, and grabbed for his boots, which were under the bed. She watched him while he laced them up, biting her lip and looking anxious. It was exactly the way she usually looked at Harry, he thought - concerned and ... protective. He didn't like it - didn't want to feel worried about. He stood up and grabbed for his cloak, which had been flung across a chair back. "Let's go."

The corridor was deserted, thankfully, as was the common room. The torchlight in the outside hallways was dimmed almost to nonexistence. Draco murmured lumos at his wand, and grimly smiled to himself at how they must look - the Slytherin prefect and the Head Girl, sneaking along the corridors like a guilty couple on their way back from the Astronomy Tower. Although in that case, he imagined, Hermione probably would have been clinging to his arm. Instead, she walked a little apart, lost in thought.

Hermione was biting her lip. "The prefects' meeting room..." She turned and pointed. "We just passed it."

Draco lowered his wand. "All right. Let's check it out." As he passed Hermione, she caught at his sleeve, and they walked the rest of the way to the meeting room door like that. Now we look like a guilty couple, Draco thought, and shoved the thought back.

The meeting room door was closed, but a faint bar of light lay across the bottom. That in itself meant nothing, but it was enough to make Draco turn back to Hermione. She was staring at him with huge eyes. She jerked her chin towards the door.

He sighed, and put a hand on the knob. "Eirenaeus Philalethes," he said, and the doorknob turned under his fingers. He pushed, and the door swung open.

The light inside was dim, and it took a moment for Draco to focus his eyes on the scene before him. When he did, he stared.

He saw Ron standing by the table. He had shrugged off his school robes, and was in a shirt and jeans. His red hair was wildly rumpled around his head, and he was leaning forward, his hands on the shoulders of a girl seated in a chair in front of him. It took a moment for Draco, noting Ron's posture, to realize that he was not touching her affectionately, but instead, holding her tightly in place. She was wearing white pajamas, sprigged with flowers, and her dark hair was pulled back. Even without seeing her face, Draco knew immediately who she was. He was not at all surprised when she whipped her head around at the sound of the opening door, and he saw her wide dark eyes, the familiar line of her nose, the curved-bow mouth.

"I don't know," said Charlie, and walked restless over to the small table by the bay window in the office. Outside, the moon hung round and white above the snowy grounds. "Something's obviously going on."

"Things are often going on, as you put it," said Dumbledore, gazing calmly at him. "It does not necessarily mean I should intervene."

Charlie pushed his hands into his pockets; he was very cold, although a fire was roaring in the grate behind Fawkes' perch. It seemed a year since he had run up the stairs of Gryffindor Tower, responding to the alarm wards which had been set off by the Veritas curse Harry had performed, although he knew it had been only a matter of hours. "The last time I saw my little brother cry was when he was six," he said. "And then again tonight."

"What's to be sorry about? Ron wouldn't do something like this -" Charlie broke off, and turned away from his old Headmaster. "He loves Harry, they were like brothers."

Dumbledore was silent for a moment. In the silence, Charlie could hear Fawkes rustling on his perch. It seemed to him the phoenix was making a low humming noise, almost music. "I know," Dumbledore said finally, his eyes troubled. "But perhaps you are too close to this situation, Charles, to be objective. I can only reiterate that at the moment, it is not my business to intrude."

"Objective about what?" Charlie demanded. "This puzzle doesn't add up, sir. If Ron's telling the truth, then both he and Hermione were acting bizarrely out of character. And apparently Hermione denied the whole thing. So either she's lying, or my brother is, or one of them has gone completely mad - which, I should think, would be a matter of concern for the school."

"I talked to your brother at length," Dumbledore said. "He is not mad. He is quite lucid."

"What does Remus say?" asked Charlie abruptly. "Has he contacted Sirius? Perhaps Harry could go home early. Classes are all but over, after all."

Dumbledore shook his head. "Harry specifically requested that we not contact Sirius. He was anxious that the wedding not be spoiled."

Charlie felt a frustrated anger tug at him - at himself for not seeing something was wrong earlier, at Harry for stubbornly refusing any kind of comforting, at his brother for being so willfully blind. His sympathies were torn - he could only imagine what it would be like for Ginny when she discovered what had happened. Ron was their brother and they loved him unconditionally, but Harry had always been an honorary member of the family as well, and he was so very obviously shattered by what had happened. Charlie's heart broke for him, not just for the teenager who had lost his two best friends in one night, but the fragile little boy who had never had a family. For years Ron and Hermione had been all the family Harry had ever known.

When he spoke, his voice was rougher than he intended. "I should think you could see there was something else going on here. I would think you'd want to protect Harry."

"That has always been," said Dumbledore gravely, "my primary concern. I have always sought to protect Harry from any harm that might come to him, physically or magically. But I cannot protect him from the ordinary disappointments of life, nor would I if I could."

"But that's what I'm saying," said Charlie in a low voice. "There's nothing ordinary about this. This behavior isn't like my brother, it certainly isn't like Hermione either. Obviously there's some outside manipulation going on. It might look like some irrelevant adolescent romantic tangle, but..."

Charlie opened his mouth, then shut it again. He knew perfectly well that there was no reason not to say the name, but was reluctant all the same. "Well," he said, "the obvious."

"Unlikely why?" Charlie demanded. "Ron and Hermione have always been among Harry's greatest protections. If they were taken away -"

"If Voldemort wanted them taken away, he would kill them," said Dumbledore flatly, and Charlie shivered. "Such a ruse as this would never occur to him. He is not like a human man. There are no thoughts like our thoughts in his head, no feelings like our feelings in his heart."

"But he must have felt once," said Charlie. "He was born a human man, like the rest of us."

Dumbledore reached out a hand and gently stroked Fawkes' head, and the phoenix hummed again. "You mean when he was Tom Riddle," he said. "Yes, perhaps then, he knew human feeling. If not love, then he knew jealousy and yearning and rage. Not just this blind grasping after power. Not this passionless killing."

"I would be a fool not to be wary," said Dumbledore. "And yet I do not think he was behind this current...situation."

The girl-who-looked-like-Hermione-but-wasn't gasped once, and Ron spun around. His eyes widened hugely in his white face, and he stared at the real Hermione, who gaped back at him. The moment hung suspended between them, like an airplane with its engines cut, waiting to plummet.

Released from the grip of Ron's hands, the girl bolted to her feet. Ron spun back around and reached for her, but she was too quick for him - she tore her sleeve out of his reaching grasp and raced for the door. She avoided Draco but slammed straight into Hermione, knocking her down. This barely slowed the girl's hurtling forward progress - she stumbled, righted herself, and flew down the corridor, vanishing around the corner so quickly she almost skidded and fell.

Ron immediately flung himself after her, but Draco was too quick for him. He grabbed Ron by the arm, and barked at Hermione, "Go! Go!" She didn't need to be told twice; she sprang to her feet and bolted after the girl, dragging her wand out of her sleeve as she ran. Ron tried to pull away, but Draco spun him against the wall so hard that the breath was knocked out of him. He gasped and his knees buckled; Draco caught him with an iron grip on his upper arms, and held him fast. "Who is she?" he hissed, and shook Ron, hard. "Who is she really?

"Bollocks," said Draco, and slammed him back against the wall again. Ron regarded him blindly, as if he wasn't there, as if the grip on his arms didn't hurt. "Who is she?"

"Think whatever you want," said Ron, looking away from Draco, "I'm telling the truth."

Draco stared at him, taking in the blank, stunned expression on Ron's face. "So you don't even know who you've been shagging, do you? That must be nice for you. She could have been anyone. Anything."

"Don't," Ron said, but his tone was hopeless, as if he didn't expect mercy, and wouldn't have thought he deserved it if it were offered.

Draco leaned his face in close to Ron's, and spoke in his ear. His tone was conversational. "You know, there are two simple rules of friendship, Weasley, and you've broken both of them. The first one is: you don't screw your best friend's girlfriend. Two: you don't screw your best friend's girlfriend." Draco grinned without amusement. "I recognize that's only one rule, but since you apparently failed to catch it on the first go-round, I thought it was worth restating."

Ron dragged his eyes back to Draco's face, and looked at him with dull loathing. "I don't see what it's got to do with you, Malfoy."

"Why? You hated me before. Now you get to hate me with Harry for company. What's the difference? Aren't you glad I turned out to be just what you always thought I was?"

"If you're waiting for me to thank you for living down to my expectations of you, you'll be waiting a long time," said Draco shortly. "Even I expected better of you than that."

It was a moment before Draco could speak. When he did, his tone was sharp and cold as an icicle. "Might I point out," he said, "that she didn't want you either. Snap out of the dream state, Weasley. She never wanted you."

Ron laughed. It sounded less like a laugh than a gasp of pain. "But you're not denying it," he said. "Are you?"

Draco slammed Ron back against the wall, hard. "One more smart word out of you," he snarled, "and trust me, Weasley, eternity with Satan and all his hellish minions will be nothing compared to five minutes with me and the pointy end of my wand."

"Let him go." It was Hermione's voice. Draco turned and saw her standing in the doorway. She was very pale but seemed composed. She was clutching her robes tightly around her, as if she were cold. Draco immediately wondered just how long she had been standing there. "He doesn't know anything."

"How do you know that?" Draco asked, and gave her a hard look - but it seemed to be the real Hermione, not the pajamad impostor. She had the same tear tracks under her eyes, the same tangled hair, the same clothes.

"Because I do," she said tiredly. Her eyes glanced over Ron, who looked quickly away. "We need to go talk to Harry now - that's what's important."

Hermione shook her head. "She got away. She ran too fast for me to catch her, and then she turned a corner and she just...disappeared. If I didn't know better, I'd think she had an invisibility cloak."

"So she's gone. Wonderful," said Draco, and added, in a low voice, "assuming of course, that it even was a she." Ron flinched but didn't look at him. With a shrug of disgust, Draco released his grip on Ron and stepped back. He looked the other boy up and down once, as if taking his measure. Then he smiled. "You saved my life," he said. "And because of that, I won't hurt you. Not now. But if you come near me again...if you come near Harry again..."

"That's for Harry to say!" Ron burst out suddenly, and just as quickly subsided, as if he were sorry he'd spoken.

"I can't speak for Harry," Draco said. "Actually, sod that. I can speak for Harry. One of those fun side effects of lying to someone and stabbing them in the back, is that usually, afterwards, they're not too eager for your company. But if you want to give it a try, by all means --"

"Draco," Hermione said from the doorway. "Please don't." She held her cloak even more tightly around herself. "We need to go."

Out of the corner of his eye Draco saw Ron wince. As if he had finally truly felt the way she was looking at him, or not looking at him - but then perhaps it had just been her use of that one word, we. A we that obviously didn't include him. Draco felt a savage satisfaction. Good, he thought. "Later, Weasley," he said, and gave him his most arrogant smile, the charm of which, he felt fairly certain, would be wasted on such stony soil. Ron, drooping against the wall, kept his eyes on his shoes as Hermione and Draco walked out of the room.

Once in the corridor, Draco fell into step beside Hermione, who was walking quickly and purposefully, her arms crossed. He gave her another hard look. "It really is you, isn't it?"

"I could tell you more about my dream," she said. "You were wearing vinyl in it."'

They were at the stairs that curved up to the Gryffindor Tower now. Hermione led the way. "Not exactly," she said over her shoulder as they ascended.

"Well, you weren't the one who had to suffer the slimy touch of vinyl against your skin, now were you?"

"I think you might have been wearing glitter makeup as well," she added thoughtfully.

"Tell me any more about this dream, Granger, I'll leave you here to fend for yourself."

Hermione made a face at him. They were at the portrait of the Fat Lady now. Draco scooted behind Hermione in hopes of going unspotted, but the Fat Lady seemed to be asleep anyway. Hermione took a deep breath. "Mundungus," she said, and the portrait swung wide. Draco looked at her, but she gestured that she should go first; with a deep breath, he stepped through the portrait hole.

"How dare you?" Rhiannon gasped, staggering back against the wall, clutching the tattered remnants of her garments about her with trembling hands. The ragged strips of damp cloth did nothing to obscure the heaving, womanly curves of her bosom. Tristan feasted his eyes on the moist orbs as he advanced, his wand outstretched stiffly before him. It was, he thought grimly, not the only stiff thing in the room. He dragged his mind back to the matter at hand. "How dare you approach me thus?" she cried.

"You scorned to speak with me otherwise," he growled. "But I will force you to listen!"

"You abandoned me years ago," she snarled, her eyes flashing like furious emeralds. "I never thought you would return."

"And now I am married to Montague!" she replied, with a heave of her honey-colored breasts. "And he is a good man, a fine man."

"But you do not love him," Tristan snarled, advancing upon her, and pressing her back against the stonewall with his firmly muscled arms. She writhed within his grip, but could not escape. "Not as you loved me!"

"I love you no longer," she spat. "I hate you, I despise you, nay - I loathe you!"

"And yet you cannot keep yourself from wanting me," he breathed, and plunged his lips against hers. She struggled, but it only brought her lush, ripe feminine frame into more insistent erotic contact with his rock-hard masculinity. His wand clattered to the ground between them, unheeded, but he no longer needed it to keep her at bay. She had begun to return his insistent kisses, panting desperately against his rather thick neck, "Oh, Tristan! Oh, Tristan! Oh! Oh! Oh!"

"My flower," he whispered into her hair. "My angel, my flame-haired vixen...!"

Ginny looked up from Passionate Trousers and frowned. The fire in the grate had died down again, and there was no longer enough light to continue reading. She was reluctant to light the candles in the wall sconces, not wanting to attract anyone else downstairs. She preferred the common room empty at this late hour of the night; she had only come down because she had been unable to sleep, and was afraid that reading in the dormitory would have woken Elizabeth or Ashley.

With a sigh, she got up, took her wand from the small table next to the couch, and poked the end of it at the grate. "Incendio," she whispered, and the fire roared up in the grate with a loud crackle that almost obscured the sound of the portrait door swinging open. Almost, but not quite.

Ginny looked up in surprise. Who could be coming into the tower at this late hour of the night? She did not get up from where she was sitting, knowing that the couch in front of her hid her from view - not even when she saw who it was stepping through the portrait hole, and had to cover her mouth with a hand to choke off a cry of surprise.

It was Draco Malfoy. He ducked into the common room, straightened up, and looked around. Through the high bright glow of the fire he seemed outlined in gold, his pale hair turned the color of candlelight. He looked tired, and less immaculate than usual - his hair was too fine to tangle, but it was rumpled around his head, and his clothes looked as if he had slept in them. He hesitated for a moment, glancing around- even now he appeared to be looking down his elegant nose, as if mentally ticking off all the ways the Gryffindor common room was inferior to its Slytherin counterpart. Then he turned, and held out his hand, and Hermione stepped into the room beside him.

Ginny blinked in astonishment. Hermione? And Draco? What were they doing? The obvious answer presented itself, but she rejected it, a little too firmly. Hermione wouldn't do that to Harry, and furthermore, neither would Draco. Of that, Ginny was positive beyond all other doubts. He would slice off his own left hand, quite cheerfully, before he would let anyone touch a finger of Harry's; he would hardly hurt Harry himself and he would know he was doing just that. She remembered Draco in the rose garden, the night of the Pub Crawl, telling her, "Everyone has one weakness. He's protected elsewhere. Not where she's concerned."

Hermione had straightened up beside Draco, and was looking not around the room but at him, as if for guidance. Ginny had never seen Hermione look like that - as if she were quite lost. She was always so confident. She, too, looked rumpled, and her face was marked with the traces of recent tears. "Draco," she said very softly, and he turned to look at her. "Are you sure I should go up with you?"

Draco glanced up towards the ceiling in exasperation. He seemed to be counting to ten in his head. "Hermione," he said. "You need to tell him what we just saw."

Hermione almost looked as if she might smile. Ginny didn't blame her. There was something amusing about Draco's look of total determination. "You'd hit a girl?"

Now Hermione did smile. It wasn't much of a smile - wobbly and tearful both. But it was a smile. "All right," she said. She held out her hand, and Draco took it, almost absently. She began to walk towards the stairs that led to the boys' dormitory, and Draco followed her. As they started up the steps, he turned, and glanced back at the common room. For a moment, Ginny thought he saw her - a look almost of recognition flitted across his face. Then his expression darkened, as if a shadow had come between him and the firelight. He turned back to the stairs, and followed Hermione up into the darkness.

Harry lay flat on his back, staring up into the shadows. He wasn't exactly sure how he had gotten back to his bed, put his pajamas on, and lain down, but here he was. The events of the evening were fuzzy in his mind after the point where Hermione had rushed out of the common room, holding the watch he had thrown at her. He remembered turning back to Ron, who'd looked white and sick and on the verge of throwing up. Neither of them had said anything, and a moment later, the professors had begun pouring in through the portrait hole. Charlie had been there, Lupin, McGonagall....Harry remembered being taken down to Lupin's office, and Charlie walking Ron off the other way, an arm over his shoulder, casting worried glances back at Harry as he did so.

There hadn't been much discussion of punishment, not that Harry remembered. He was fairly sure he'd told Lupin what happened, and that there had been a lot of shocked silence, and some discussion of calling on Sirius, which Harry had nixed. He didn't want to talk to anyone right now, and that included Sirius. He wondered if Lupin had walked him back to the Tower. He really didn't remember. Much of the evening was like a long howl of static, punctuated by short lucid bursts of sound. Are you all right, Harry? Do you need anything? I'm fine, I just want to go to sleep.

And here he was. In bed, in his pajamas. Curtains drawn, staring up into the flat darkness overhead. Sleep was a faraway country he could not touch. He heard his own breathing, felt the beat of his own heart, and wondered that his body kept on going although all feeling seemed to have stopped. Inside him was a lion on a chain, and if he let it free it would bring the castle down around his ears. Some fierce inner part of him took pleasure in the image - his Magid powers gone wild, the window glass shattering in, the walls shaking apart. But most of him was grateful for the icy control that seemed to have settled over him like the jaws of a trap slamming shut. He did not know where it had come from. Draco, he suspected. But he was grateful for it.

A soft whispering noise made him jump. He rolled onto his side, and saw with astonishment that the curtains on his bed were being drawn back. He blinked as faint light flooded the darkness, and he saw the blurred shape of an arm, pulling the curtains back, a shoulder, the glint of light on fair hair.

"Malfoy?" Harry whispered, shielding his eyes against the sudden light. "What the --?"

Harry felt for the glasses on his nightstand, and slipped them on. Instantly, the world sprang into focus, and he saw Draco standing above him, holding back the bed curtains with one hand, his expression set and grim. And behind him - behind him was Hermione. She had her arms wrapped around herself as if she was cold, and her hair had tumbled forward, almost hiding her expression.

Harry heard his own voice as if it came from a distance. "I won't talk to you with her here," he said, and jerked his chin towards Hermione.

But Hermione merely looked stricken. She looked at Harry as if he had slapped her, then looked quickly away. Harry felt a bitter sense of horrible triumph; it went away as quickly as it had come, leaving him feeling sick and ill. Something nudged at the back of his mind then, and he knew it was Draco, trying to think to him as he had been trying to do all night. Harry ignored it. He did not want anyone in his head right now.

Draco opened his mouth to reply, but before he could say anything, Hermione interrupted. "Fine," she said, and her voice was slightly shrill with tension. "If that's the way it has to be to get you to listen, Harry - I'll go."

"Hermione -" Draco began, but she was gone, having turned away quickly, and Harry heard the soft sound of her footsteps as she walked quietly away. The dormitory door opened and closed, and as it closed Harry winced, feeling as if something sharp had been driven into his heart.

"You wouldn't understand," said Harry in a fierce whisper. He glanced around at the lumped shapes in the other beds - it seemed that Neville, Dean and Seamus were managing to sleep through all of this. "Nobody's ever betrayed you."

"Oh, bollocks," said Draco succinctly. "My father tried to kill me - remember? If you really want to play at Whinging Sweepstakes, that is."

"It's not the same," Harry said in a bitter voice, knowing full well he was being a complete git about this. "Anyway, I don't want to talk about it."

"Too bad." Draco's voice was flat. "Because there's something you need to hear."

"No. I won't do that." Draco reached out a hand and took hold of Harry's arm. "Would you come with me -"

"I said leave me alone!" Harry jerked his arm out of Draco's grasp, and as he did, the water glass on the nightstand next to the bed trembled, shook, and flew off the table, slamming into the stonewall. It shattered, spraying glass and water in all directions. Harry glared at Draco. "Now look what you made me do," he added, with illogical fury.

"Harry?" It was Seamus' soft Irish voice, speaking from the other bed. Harry turned his head and saw that all three of the other boys in the room were now awake, struggling into sitting positions and staring. "Is everything all right?"

"No, Finnigan," said Draco, in a voice dropping with sarcasm. "It's Santa and his twelve tiny reindeer. You've all been such good little boys, I decided to bring you your presents early."

"I don't believe this," said Dean Thomas, his voice fuzzy from sleep. "How the hell did he get into our dormitory?"

"Apparently he came down the chimney," said Seamus darkly. "What do you say we stuff him back up it?"

"Try it and I'll break every bone in your body," said Draco in a soft and deadly voice. He still hadn't turned around to look at Seamus, but Harry could tell from the sudden change in his posture that he was very aware of the movements of the three boys behind him. "Potter...come with me. We need to talk."

Harry looked at Draco's outstretched hand, and crossed his arms over his chest. "I'm not going anywhere."

Draco looked utterly exasperated. "Okay, fine." He took a deep breath. "You asked for it....Ron," he said, his voice very firm, "is not now, and never has been, sleeping with Hermione."

A stunned silence. Dean. Neville and Seamus stared with open mouths, frozen in a tableaux that would under other circumstances have been very funny. Harry stayed where he was, sitting up in bed, frozen. Bizarrely, Neville, speaking from the depths of his bed, was the first to break the silence.

"Oh, fuck the hell off, Longbottom," said Draco, but the side of his mouth twitched. He pitched his voice low, and spoke again: "Potter...?"

Harry flinched once, violently, at the sound of his name, without being able to prevent it. The next words he spoke tumbled out of his mouth without him even thinking about them, "I don't believe you," he said.

"What?" Draco looked stunned - Harry had a feeling he'd been prepared for a number of reactions, but not this one. "How can you -"

"You said what you came to say," Harry said. "And I don't believe you. Now go away."

Draco went white, then two red spots appeared on his cheekbones. His eyes flashed. "Not until you listen."

Draco moved so quickly that Harry had no time at all to pull away: his hand shot out and closed around Harry's upper arm, jerking him unceremoniously off the bed, swinging him around, and flinging him to the floor. Harry hit the ground sprawling, the breath knocked out of him. "You," said Draco, breathing hard and staring at Harry as if he had never seen him before, "are a total - a total - I don't think a word has even been invented yet to describe what you are, but you are one. And a total, total one at that. Aren't you listening to me? Did you not hear what I said? Do you not care what you're doing - to her, to everyone?"

Harry didn't get a chance to reply. Suddenly, Seamus was standing between them, having moved as quickly as if he had Apparated there. He faced down Draco, looking furious. "How dare you burst in here like this, Malfoy," he said. "Are you trying to be funny?"

Draco's eyes trawled slowly over to Seamus, raking up and down him with a look of amused disbelief. "At least I can be funny when I try, you tedious little worm," he said. "Now, if you don't mind, this doesn't concern you."

"It bloody does concern me," Seamus said. "This is our dormitory, our house, and Harry is my friend. And I do believe he told you to go away. Translated into Slytherin, that means: 'fuck off, you stupid bastard'." He took a menacing step forward. "Got that?"

"Finnigan, you'd lose a battle of wits with a stuffed iguana," said Draco, sounding weary. "If you want to hit me, hit me. But quit with the attempts at repartee. It's painful."Seamus' mouth twitched. Then he rolled up his sleeves - an almost quaint gesture - and began to walk toward Draco. Draco kept his arms at his sides, his eyes still on Harry. He wore an expression of amused detachment. He wasn't going to hit Seamus back; that much was obvious. Even without being able to read Draco's mind, Harry could tell what Draco was thinking - this was Harry's dormitory, his place, his responsibility to do something. Draco didn't plan on doing a thing.

Harry sighed. He felt suddenly exhausted, tiredness welling up within him like blood welling from an open cut. "Let him alone, Seamus," he said quietly, and sat up.

"I said let him alone," said Harry in a dead-tired tone. He looked at Seamus, and Seamus did a double take, as if what he saw in Harry's expression had shocked him. "He has a right to be here."

"No." It was Neville. "There'll be people there." He looked at Dean, and then at Seamus. "We'll go."

"Yes," Neville said, and cast a pointed, sideways look at Harry. "I admit I don't know what this is about, but it's obviously important. So we'll go, and we'll come back later."

"Yes, we will," said Neville firmly, took hold of Dean by the back of his pajama top, and marched him towards the door. After a moment Seamus, having cast a considering look at Draco and Harry, followed them. They all three went out, and the door shut behind them.

"Typical," said Draco, turning back to Harry. "No Slytherin would give up a night's sleep just so his dorm mate could work out his interpersonal problems."

"It doesn't matter," said Harry, still feeling bone-weary, "just tell me whatever the hell you came here to tell me, and go away."

"I already told you," said Draco, crossing his arms across his chest, "and you didn't believe me."

"Which," Draco went on as if Harry hadn't spoken, "considering I'm the one person in the world who cannot lie to you, is pretty damn ironic."

Harry paused. There was a note of sharp bitterness in Draco's voice that Harry had rarely heard there. "How," he began, and paused again - something seemed to have caught in his throat - "how do you know they aren't - that it's not true?"

Draco sighed, and looked down at Harry. Had Harry been in another mood, he would have noticed how tired and drawn the other boy looked: his eyes swam in blue hollows, and there were dark lines of strain by his mouth. "I can tell you so you'll have to believe me -"

"Fine, then." Draco sat down on the trunk at the foot of Harry's bed. "I know because I saw it for myself, all right? I saw Ron with the girl he thought was Hermione. Of course, it wasn't Hermione. You know how I know that? Because the actual Hermione was standing next to me at the time." Draco gave a short bark of laughter and looked up at the ceiling. "You honestly think she'd ever do that to you?" he demanded. "You honestly think she'd even want to?"

Harry looked at him, but he was hearing Ron's voice in his head. I'm in love with Hermione, and she's in love with me. "And you're so sure..."

"Of course I'm sure. I told you why I'm sure. I'm absolutely, utterly sure. Ron's been shagging someone, but it isn't and never was Hermione. Someone's playing bloody tricks on all of you, I promise you that. Now do you believe me?"

Harry looked down at his hands, and said nothing. He wondered when he had started biting his nails again. Bitten they certainly were, down to the bloody cuticles. He curled his fingers in protectively against his palms.

The whiplash crack of the other boy's anger struck Harry like a blow, even though he had closed his mind off as best he could. He flinched back as Draco's inner voice cut into his thoughts, And would I lie if you asked me to? Is that what I do - lie at the behest of others? Have I so little will of my own?

I'm telling you what I saw! The girl he thought was Hermione, wasn't Hermione. I don't know who she was --

Draco nearly tipped off the trunk in exasperation. "I'm telling you! I saw it for myself! Why can't you listen? Isn't this what you want to hear?"

"It's exactly what I want to hear!" Harry shouted back. "That's why I can't listen!" He spun away from Draco, and faced the wall. There was a tightness in his chest, as if something was constricting his breathing. A yell of anger was pressing against the inside of his ribcage, choking him, struggling to get out. "I don't trust this," he said. "I can't trust this. I don't trust anything any more."

"He did, then." Harry stayed where he was, staring at the wall. "What about Ron?"

There was a long silence. When Draco spoke, finally, it was in a low voice. "I'm sorry about that, Harry."

Harry noted, vaguely, the use of his given name. He supposed it ought to make him feel more kindly towards Draco. It didn't. Rage was beginning to crash against the inside of his head, in rhythmic waves like the ocean crashing against the shore. "You didn't really think about that, did you," Harry said in a hissing half-whisper. "You never even tried to like him, or treat him kindly, not even for my sake. I bet all this makes you glad." He spun around then, and glared at Draco, who had gone a chalky sort of color and looked appalled. "How am I supposed to believe what you say, when you'd never let yourself believe she'd do that - not for a second. Because you could stand to see her with me, but you could never stand to see her with Ron. Maybe you even like her being with me, because it's the closest you'll ever get to being with her yourself. But Ron, you've always hated him, you think he's beneath you -- you always have - she'd be dirty if she let Ron touch her - admit it! Admit you felt that way! -- and maybe if you didn't, maybe if I hadn't let you treat him like that, he wouldn't have felt like I wasn't his friend any more! Like I picked you over him! And I never picked you, Malfoy -- I never picked you! Whatever there is between us, it was forced on me -- I never wanted it!"

His voice broke on a half-shout, and cracked, although he was not crying. He felt a bleak triumph. He had been hurt, and terribly. He wanted to hurt someone back. And judging from the way Draco had flinched away from him, he was succeeding in doing just that. "I never got a choice," he said again, harshly - and then broke off, staring at the other boy. Draco's eyes were huge in his white face, huge and startled. He looked very like a child who has reached for a parent's hand, only to be slapped away with no explanation. And Harry fell silent, realizing suddenly that he had hurt Draco nearly as much as he had been hurt himself. More, perhaps. The feeling of satisfaction vanished instantly. "Malfoy, I -"

But Draco was on his feet, backing away from Harry's outstretched hand. "Fuck you, then, Potter," he said, his voice a serrated dagger of ice. "You want me to leave you alone? Consider yourself left. Stay here and rot, for all I care. Ruin everyone's life. Ruin your own --" He broke off, as if he couldn't stand to look at Harry any more - spun around on his heel, and stalked to the door and out of it, slamming it hard behind him.

She looked up from Passionate Trousers, and to her surprise saw Seamus, coming down the boys' staircase. He was wearing a dark cloak, thrown over a pair of red and white striped pajamas. His feet were bare.

She set her book down on the table beside her. "Seamus...what are you doing awake?"

"Hey." He sat down next to her, and in a very uncharacteristic gesture, put a hand on her wrist. She looked at him in surprise. His dark blue eyes held a troubled, anxious look. The firelight behind him turned the edges of his light hair to a fringe of pale gold: a faint halo. "I went to your room, you know...woke up Elizabeth and Ashley. They said you were here, reading."

Somewhere in the middle of the explanation, Passionate Trousers fell off her lap and hit the floor with a bang. Ginny stayed where she was, rooted to the spot, staring at Seamus with awful amazement. "How..." she whispered finally. "How do you know?"

"I bumped into Hermione in the hallway when I left," he said. "She explained...she asked me to explain it to you." He bit his lip. "Ginny...."

She wrenched her wrist out of his grasp. "I can't believe this! I can't believe it! It's - it's - it's so unfair!"

"Everyone falls in love with Hermione! Everyone!" Ginny leapt up out of her chair, picked up the poker she'd been using to stir the fire, and flung it at the grate. It hit the metal with a clang, and bounced off. Seamus winced. "First Harry, then Draco, now my own brother...." She whirled on Seamus, who was slumped down in the armchair, staring at her. "Who's next? You?"

Ginny put her hands on her hips. She realized she was being ridiculous, but didn't seem able to stop. "Why not?"

Seamus looked exasperated. "I don't know, Ginny...she's Harry's girlfriend, isn't she?'

"Oh, so is that why you like me? Because I'm not that clever?" Ginny raged. "Because I don't intimidate you?"

Seamus cast a hunted look towards the stairs. "I think I'll go back to the dorm," he said. "There may be glass flying around, but it's a bit more peaceful up there."

Ginny stamped her foot. "So what's the problem with her then? Not good enough for you?"

Seamus, finally, lost his temper. "Because!" he shouted. "I'm in love with you!"

Ginny stared at him. He stared back, looking astonished, as if he couldn't believe what he'd just said. Neither could Ginny quite believe it. She'd dreamed of having a boy tell her that. What girl her age had not? But it had never been like this in her mind - the words had never been shouted -- the eyes gazing into hers had never been blue. Blue was the color of her brothers' eyes: the color of steadiness and dependability and kindness, not of passion or romantic love. She thought suddenly and irrelevantly of Tom. She could no longer remember the color of his eyes, although she knew they had not been blue. They had been green...or was it that they had been gray, was that why she loved gray eyes, that bitter-cold color that said so little and hid so much?

Her voice trailed off. He was sitting, looking at her very steadily, his hands in his lap. The firelight played shadows over his just-mended, bruiseless pale skin, the strong straight nose, the lightly freckled arc of his cheekbones. He was handsome the way picture-book heroes were handsome - he looked like he ought to be slaying a dragon with one hand, and carting off a fainting maiden with the other. And yet his handsomeness didn't touch her - not the way Harry's melancholy-prince looks had touched her once, or Draco's fallen-angel beauty, or Tom's....

She shook off thoughts of Tom. "Oh," she said again, softly, and then, to her own great surprise, she added, "I have to go find him."

Seamus nodded without looking at her. "I saw him come up the back stairs and go into his room."

"All right? - no," he said, and then at her expression, amended himself. "He looked pretty devastated. But physically, yes, he looked fine."

She sighed - in relief, in fear, in despair, she didn't know. She went to Seamus then, and kissed his cheek, and he let her. But he did not look at her. "Thank you," she said.

He didn't reply, and Ginny did not stay to ask him why. She made a beeline for the boys' staircase, all her thoughts now focused on her brother.

Draco ran down the front steps of the castle and out onto the snowy path without looking where he was going. He shivered, but did not stop walking - it was an icy night, and he had not brought his cloak. Throwing his head back, he stared up at the sky - it arced above in black and silver, the moonlight a steel-colored shriek raining shards of light down onto the snow. For the first time in days, there were clouds: heavy as blocks, they seemed about to collide with each other. He wondered if that meant it was going to snow again soon.

He had reached the bottom of the path, where the Quidditch pitch was, and veered off sharply towards the right, alongside the Forbidden Forest. Some part of him knew he was following a route that Rhysenn had set for him, that he had often followed to meet her. He did not think about why he was going this way: he wanted to be alone, he wanted to be far from the castle, and he wanted...what did he want?

He was at the low wall now, that ran perpendicular to the forest's border. He leaped over it and landed on the other side, silent as a cat in the deep snow. This was where he had met her all those weeks ago, that night he had bumped into Harry and they'd gone to get drunk in Hogsmeade. His boots sank up to the ankles in the snow as he took a few steps forward into the clearing, and paused. He stood there for a moment, gasping in lungfuls of icy air, trying to still the pounding of his heart. There was no way for him to know it, but the same thoughts that had run through Harry's mind earlier, in the dark, ran through Draco's now. Inside him, too, was the same lion on a chain, and its roaring was loud in his ears. Iron control had been drilled into him since he was a child - hours spent locked in dark places, waiting for his father, hours spent in enforced silence without speaking. Over his emotions he had laid his own will, like heavy bars of steel, keeping everything contained. And yet....he visualized for a moment the steel bars snapping, the rage and grief inside him breaking free, how he could tear down the trees with the force of his anger, crack the world in half.

But of course he could do none of those things, not in reality. Instead, like a petulant child, he flung himself facedown in the snow, and buried his head in his arms.

The cold bit into him instantly; the snow freezing under his body, his bare hands. He ignored it, hearing his own voice in his ears. Stay here and rot, for all I care. Ruin everyone's life. Ruin your own!

It was better, still, than hearing the things Harry had said to him. Horrible things. Not that no one had ever flung insults at him before, but it was worse, coming from Harry. Especially since he suspected that Harry had been right about most of what he'd said.

"Draco?' said a voice in his ear. "What are you doing? Did you fall out of a tree?"

He knew that voice. He supposed he should not be surprised that she was here, but he burrowed his head further into his arms anyway, willing her to go away.

She didn't. "Poor baby boy," she said, her voice lilting with amusement. Her breath tickled the back of his neck, and when she spoke again it was in a theatrical tone. "How art thou fallen from heaven, oh Lucifer son of the morning?"

Draco sighed, and rolled over on his back. Rhysenn was kneeling above him, her hair tumbling down, a tent of black silk around them both. She was cloakless, her shoulders bare and white under the moonlight. Draco spat snow out of his mouth, and sat up. "I'm hardly an angel," he said.

She stood, in a rustle of silk, and he got to his feet as well, mostly because he didn't want her standing over him. He had been right, she wore no coat, or any covering against the cold. She was dressed in black with her black hair loose down her back. Her feet, where the black dress ended, were bare on the snow, and where she walked, they left no marks behind them. The bodice of her dress was tightly corseted and above it her breasts and shoulders were very white.

"It is going to snow," she said. "Why did you summon me here, when it is going to snow?"

He looked at her, breathing hard, as if he had been running - he was exhausted. "I did not summon you here," he said.

"I heard you crying out for me." She made a little pirouette, her skirt flying out, and suddenly her clothes had changed - now she was wearing a French maid's outfit, complete with fishnet stockings, a feather duster, and a peaked cap. "I came as soon as I could."

"Good. I know exactly what you can do to help me, then." She looked up inquiringly. "You take messages from my father, to me," he said. "I know you do. Now I want you to take a message back."

"You'll take this one," he said, and there was something in his voice that made her look at him sharply. "Tell him," Draco said, "tell the Dark Lord, and my father too, that I know that they had something to do with what happened tonight. They did this. And I will find out why, and how, and they will regret what they have done. They will regret what they did to my friends." He paused. "I will make them pay for it."

Rhysenn smiled her cool little smile. "Is there any more to that speech?" she asked. "You could add a bit about drowning them in their own blood, or some stuff about cold vengeance - up to you of course."

"It's just a long list of unspecific threats," said Rhysenn, sounding disappointed. "Honestly, if you could add something about ripping out their spinal columns, or roasting them over an ever-burning fire of pitch and molten lava..."

"Oh all right." Rhysenn looked vexed. "But it's a very boring message, if you want my opinion."

"The only thing I want less than I want your opinion, is syphilis," said Draco pleasantly.

"So he is," Draco observed. "It's like I always say. Of all my relations, I like sex the best and my father the least."

"What, you didn't think that was funny? I thought it was rather funny. All right, the delivery was a little off, but chalk that up to the freezing temperatures."

"I've had a hard day," Draco said tightly. "And you, with your ridiculous -" he made a vague, irritated gesture in her general direction - "outfits, I mean what the hell do you need a feather duster for, it's ten degrees below zero out and there's nothing to dust!"

She rolled her eyes. "Well, then. There's always the outfit I wore to charm your little Gryffindor friend. Would you prefer pigtails and knee high stockings?"

Draco gave a short bark of laughter. "How do you know that's what Harry prefers?"

Her lip curled. "Just look at his girlfriend," she said silkily. "Saddle shoes, cardigan sweaters, short wool skirts. A little girl. So I expect, that's what he wants."

Draco's heart thumped hard and sickeningly against the cage of his ribs. It had never occurred to him that she would have seen Hermione, or noticed her. But of course, she would have. "And what about me?" he asked, trying to change the topic. "What do I want?"

"Oh, very funny." She laughed, and shook her hair back. "You suffer," she said, "I feel it. Perhaps you are foolish to spurn what comfort I might offer you."

He looked at her then, as calculatingly as he could, and she looked back at him out of her oddly shaped gray eyes that were like his own. It was strange how she could look quite ordinary from some angles, even ugly, and from others so beautiful that despite his dislike of her he felt his own awareness of her beauty strike through him like a note of music sounded through the depths of sleep. "You offer me nothing," he said. "You never try with me, not like you try with Harry. Why not?"

"I think my father told you to stay away from me," he said. "Apparently Harry's another matter."

"What I choose to do with Harry, or he with me, is hardly your concern," she said lightly.

"I don't think he's choosing anything," Draco said bluntly. "If he was, he wouldn't go near you. And what do you want from him?"

Rhysenn burst out laughing, and sat down, still gracefully, in the snow. As she sat, her short skirt fell away from her thighs, allowing Draco to see that, distractingly, she was wearing hot pink knickers. On the other hand, he supposed it could have been worse; she could have been wearing no knickers at all. "Harry's a virgin?" she said. "Oh, that's priceless."

Draco suddenly wondered if this had been supposed to be some sort of secret. Then he wondered if it was even true. He'd always assumed, but... "I don't really know," he said, a bit stiffly, feeling somehow that he had lost ground here. "I was just guessing."

"That little girlfriend of his must not be much use," said Rhysenn, and there was a cool contempt in her voice that shot a bolt of ice up his spine.

"Leave her out of this," he said, his tone clipped. "As a matter of fact, leave them both out of this. Stay away from Harry from now on."

"No, you don't. You just want something from him. Well, too bad. He's been through enough."

"Oh, I don't know," she said, tilting her head back as if she were bathing in the light of the moon. "I think you underestimate him. All that untapped power, it's attractive. And empirically of course - those eyes, that hair. He's very appealing on his own merits."

"Don't tell me you can't see it," Rhysenn said, tracing lines in the snow with a bare toe. "I so enjoyed watching you two fight just now... all that delicious tension. Tell me you didn't enjoy manhandling him about just a little bit."

Draco looked at her as if she had sprouted an eleventh toe. "You're a very strange woman."

"I-" Draco spluttered, then paused. "You just really don't understand people, do you?" he said, sounding weary. "Have you never had a human emotion, or was it just so long ago that you forgot?"

An odd flicker came and went behind her eyes, and for a moment she looked almost angry. Then her expression smoothed itself out into a mocking half-smile. "I would have thought Lucius would have told you that it's hardly good manners to mention a lady's age like that," she said.

"He said I shouldn't mention a lady's age, sure," said Draco, finally fed up. "I don't remembering him saying anything about demon bitches from hell."

She leapt to her feet, her eyes flashing. "How dare you," she said, and he shrank back - she seemed suddenly to tower above him, her eyes flashing, her hair whipped by an invisible wind. She came towards him and it took all his self-control not to step away. "Stupid child," she said, and her face had taken on the narrow, predatory look of a veela's. "Stupid, impatient little boy."

"Oh, you are," she said. "So painfully young, and that is why it is so sad," and she took his face between her long and narrow hands, not sounding sad at all. He did not move away - could not move away. "Are you cold?" she whispered, and her breath stirred the hair at his temples. "Not now, but always? Do you wake up freezing from nightmares you cannot remember? Does your breath come short, does your heart pain you when you breathe? Does your vision begin to blur?" Her hand slid to cup his chin, and she drew his face up, until he met her gray gaze with his own. "Angel-boy, with your sick beautiful eyes," she said, and her voice was like liquid silver. "Too pretty to go mad or blind, and die of it...but it is long past stopping, now."

"Die of what?" Draco said, and he heard the note of blind panic in his own voice. "What's long past stopping?"

She took her hands from his face and stepped back from him. "If you cannot guess, you will know soon enough," she said, and smiled like a devilish angel.

What is wrong with me? he wanted to ask her, Am I ill, and how ill am I? -- but he knew that if he did, she would respond teasingly, with more questions; so instead he turned, and took a few steps away from her. It seemed to him that the horizon had lightened, a paler pewter blue ribbon between the black earth and the blacker clouds overhead. "Please leave him alone," he said, finally, without looking back at her. "Leave us alone."

He waited, but she did not reply. When he finally turned, she was, as he had known she would be, gone; the snow underfoot showed no marks at all where she had walked.

"Mundungus," he said, and the portrait door opened. Draco paused a moment to admire the irony of the fact that he now knew the Gryffindor password. Years ago, he would have paid good Galleons to know it. Now, it seemed trivial.

He stepped into the Common Room and the portrait swung shut behind him. The room was not empty: someone was standing over by one of the overstuffed armchairs, apparently putting something into a pocket. He knew immediately it was Ginny, even before she turned around, knew from the flaming-red hair that was currently screwed into a topknot at the back of her head. Curling tendrils escaped and wound around her face like licks of fire. She looked harried. "Draco, what are you doing here?"

She glanced down at her kitten-printed flannel pajamas, and pulled her robe closed around her. "Where's Harry?" she said.

"Came to see Hermione," Draco said, rather shortly. "Unless you have a problem with that."

Ginny gave him an extremely superior look, as if he were a troublesome toddler. "I don't," she said. "But Hermione might."

"Meaning Harry went to talk to her about a half hour ago, and she slammed the door in his face," Ginny said. "Then he took his cloak and left, and I haven't seen him since."

Draco frowned at her and stalked over to the fireplace. There was a poker lying beside the grate; he bent and picked it up, and prodded moodily at the glowing coals with the pointed end. "Harry needs to grow up," he said. "He's acted like a complete arse, and he might as well know it. The only thing that might do him the blindest bit of good at this point would be if she kicked him down the front staircase and he bounced down every single step."

"Ah, well," said Draco, and prodded savagely at a coal. "You win some, you lose some."

There was a short silence. Draco raised his eyes to Ginny, expecting her to look angry, or appalled, or disgusted with him. Instead she looked merely sad. "I take it he got angry at you," she said.

"You could say that," Draco said, hearing the acid in his own voice. "He accused me of lying to him, and despising his best friend, and basically causing all this, which I apparently did by being a selfish, overbearing, snobbish and despicable bastard with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I asked him if there was anything I could do to help, and he indicated that he might perhaps feel a bit better if I were to swallow six pounds of lead and throw myself into the lake. So I left."

Ginny pushed a lock of red hair back from her eyes, and sighed. "I thought you couldn't lie to him," she said. "Not...mentally."

"Yeah, well," said Draco, in a flat voice, "He blocked me. I couldn't reach him at all."

"Nobody could have," she said gently, and put a hand on his shoulder. The contact was strangely comforting, perhaps because he was so cold and her hand was warm. "You have to go find him."

"I don't have to do anything," Draco said. "Except, possibly, go back to my room, get unbelievably pissed on Archenland wine, and sleep until the middle of next week. Maybe when I wake up, the Boy Who Lived will have sorted out his hellishly complex love life without my assistance."

Something half-remembered from a dream chimed inside Draco's head, and he laughed, not happily. "He won't die of this. It's just a broken heart."

"Well, I'm glad you remember them," said Draco, and his voice was colder than the ice forming on the windowpanes. "Because I don't think he does."

"What would you know about it?" Draco said, and instantly regretted having said it. She looked startled, then hurt, and then annoyed. He didn't blame her.

"So what are you going to do, then?" she demanded sharply. "Go back to bed and see if you can sleep? I'm betting you can't. Not knowing that he's somewhere, needing you, and you didn't go and help him."

"Of feeling anything," she snapped back. "Caring about people makes you vulnerable, and you hate that. You need Harry, and whatever you might think, he needs you. And he's all alone right now, and he's more miserable than he's ever been in his whole life, and so what if he yelled at you? So damn what? Like he hasn't forgiven you for worse. When you were injured, when that arrow hit you, I've never seen anyone as upset as he was. And then he slept on the floor of the infirmary all night, remember? Or don't you? So whatever this massive poncy diva sulk of yours was inspired by, let it go. It doesn't matter. Spank your inner child, stiff upper lip, shut your eyes and think about your country - I don't care what you have to do. Just do it, and go out there, and find Harry, because I'm worried sick about him and you should be too."

Draco looked at her narrowly. She was slightly out of breath now, and flushed, her cheeks bright pink. "You done?" he asked.

Draco leaned the poker against the mantel, and paused for a moment. "Let me ask you something."

Ginny sighed. "Because I have to stay here," she said. "I actually just came down here to get my book, and then I was going to go back and sit with Ron. I have to take care of my brother," she added, looking down at the book in her hands, and then back up at him. "And you should go take care of yours."

Draco looked at her - she was still pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, and in her kitten-print pajamas looked like a little girl, although she most manifestly wasn't. "I don't even know where to look," he said in a low voice. "I can't....find him."

Ginny shook her head, without looking at him - she seemed to be glancing around the room to see if she had forgotten anything. "Of course you can find him," she said. "Not everyone has telepathy to rely on, you know. Sometimes all you have is how well you know the other person, and you know him better than anyone. Where would he go?"

He felt something loosen in his chest at her words - she was right. As a matter of fact, he had a fairly good idea exactly where Harry would have gone. "I wouldn't know what to say to him."

"You'll think of something," Ginny said, extinguishing the last lit candle with a pinch of her fingers. Now there was only the fire for illumination. It turned the edges of her hair to candleflame. "I have faith in you."

He almost laughed. "Well, that sets you apart from the masses, doesn't it," he said.

She looked thoughtful. "Well, I can eat an entire ice cream sundae without using my hands."

The side of her mouth curled up. "Really. Now, go on - I have to get back upstairs."

"I wouldn't know," Draco said. "I think that's maybe why I..." He trailed off, unable to formulate the statement properly.

Ginny smiled at him, a little sadly. "You want to know what I think? I think you don't know a good thing when you have it," she said, "that's what I think," and she disappeared back up the stairs.

By the time Draco found the room again, through some amount of trial and error, it was full morning. Night had passed like a wheel turning, and in his exhaustion, the corridor walls and even the floor beneath his feet seemed to shimmer in the pale gray light.

He knew where he was going. A dark room, not that far from the main staircase, a room filled with old furniture and dusty unused books. And on the wall, a mirror framed in tarnished gold, a mirror he had never looked in. I show you not your face, but your heart's desire.

He had been there once, and walked out - it was not a place that figured happily in his memories. But for Harry, it would be different. That he knew. Standing by the lake, drenched in rain, that afternoon, he had felt what Harry was feeling as if it were water pouring through a sluice gate that could not be closed. Harry's happiness had layered itself over his own pain until he was no longer sure exactly what he was feeling, his emotions wavering light and dark like a Flickering Charm: happy/sad happy/sad happy/sad. He had put his hands over his ears and slid down the trunk of the tree, waiting for it to be over. He was not used to feeling with such intensity: not such happiness, nor such misery. It was like bleeding to death.

He remembered the door now, the corridor outside. It had been wide open that day, now it was open only a crack. He put a hand on it, pushed it wide, and stepped into the room.

The pale dawn light drowned the walls of the room in silver. The furniture, shrouded in white-sheeted coverings, looked like icebergs looming up out of the grayish darkness as Draco navigated his way across the room. Through the bay window in the east wall, he could see the world outside: white sky, white snow, the slender penciled shapes of winter trees. And on the window ledge sat Harry.

He had his legs drawn up, his hands clasped loosely across his knees. He was looking out the window, and the faint light chased the planes of his face with silver. As Draco approached, Harry turned and looked at him. He seemed unsurprised to see him there, or if he was, Draco couldn't tell. Harry's face was a mask.

The two boys looked at each other across the dark space that separated them, as if they faced each other across a Quidditch pitch. Had the mirror on the wall been a true mirror, it would have cast back a curious reflection: the two boys both the same height, the same slenderness, one so fair and one so dark, one in black and one in white. Some odd tableau of perfect opposites seemed to be being enacted. No living soul could have failed to notice it, but there were no other souls in the room, and Harry and Draco could not see themselves.

Draco hesitated. A bitter voice spoke in the back of his head, wanting to snap back at Harry, Why did you think I would come? Because I have nothing better to do, because I follow you, pathetically, believing in our friendship, while you call me a liar to my face?

But another voice shouted that voice down. Oddly, it was Sirius' words, words he had spoken months ago. I would forgive you for anything that required my forgiveness...The things we do for love, those things endure.

Draco glanced around the shadowed room, and back at Harry. "I thought you'd come here."

Harry looked down at his hands. When he spoke, his voice was rapid. "I'm sorry."

Feeling suddenly exhausted, Draco leaned against one of the sheeted white pieces of furniture. He suspected from its shape that it was an ottoman. "Sorry for what?"

"Even the part where you said, 'Hey, Malfoy, what're you doing here?" Draco asked, but Harry didn't crack even a slight smile. The faintness of the light smoothed the lines of strain from his face, made him look younger, a solemn-faced child.

"I hate everyone right now," Harry said. His voice was still even. "I looked at you, up there in the dorm room, and I hated you too."

"It's not okay." Harry took a ragged breath. "I've got no reason to hate you. You were just trying to help."

"Don't," Draco said, and straightened up. He began to cross the room towards Harry, who was still looking down at his hands with that same look he had worn in the graveyard: that look like blindness, as if were seeing through this world to another and terrible place beyond.

"I wanted to hurt you," Harry said. "I had to keep my mind locked down so I wouldn't hurt you."

It occurred to Draco to remark that Harry had managed to hurt him just fine anyway, but that seemed a childish and petty thing to say. Most of his anger was gone, now that he had seen Harry; he felt only terribly exhausted and horribly sad. "You apologized," he said, "does that mean that you believe me now?"

Harry nodded, ever so slightly. I believe you now, he said, and Draco almost jumped at the unexpected contact. Some part of me believed you then, but I didn't want to admit it.

Except that she hates me. Harry unclasped his hands from around his knees and swung to face Draco, dangling his legs over the side of the windowsill. And not without good reason. I was horrible to her. I wouldn't forgive me, either.

How can she understand when I don't understand? I don't understand what happened, and I don't understand why I never noticed anything, and I don't understand why Ron would...Harry raised his eyes to Draco's; in the half-light, they were black. Do you?

Understand what happened? No, although I have my guesses, Draco replied. Do I understand why Weasley did what he did? Yeah. I think I do. I also think I'm not the best person to explain it to you.

Because I hate him for what he did, Draco said flatly. And a big part of me wants you to hate him too, but my reasons for that are selfish reasons, and I know that.

There was a short silence and then Harry, apparently having decided that pressing Draco on this point would be a bad idea, nodded again, and scooted sideways on the windowsill. Draco accepted the unspoken invitation and went to sit beside Harry. They sat for a while without speaking, in neither a companionable nor an awkward silence - Draco felt it was somehow a watchful silence, as if he were waiting for Harry to reach some sort of conclusion. He sat where he was as the sky outside the window lightened and lightened, the clouds parting to reveal strips of silvery gray sky.

The light began to spill into the room, turning the mirror on the far wall into a gleaming sequin, starring Harry's pitch-black hair with jewelry light. The light showed, as well, the lines by the side of his mouth, the mother-of-pearl half circles under his eyes. He held out his hand, and for a moment Draco just looked at it, unsure what Harry wanted. It was his right hand, and along the flat palm the thin zigzag scar shone like silver wire. He turned his own hand over to see the counterpart scar there, and flinched in shock when Harry took the hand he had extended, and held it tightly.

Draco looked at Harry in surprise. He had always watched Harry and Ron with wonder and some envy of their easy physical camaraderie - the pats on the back, the hugs when they won a Quidditch match, how Ron would hold Harry up if he was laughing too hard to stand, or casually shove him while they were walking, and catch him when he fell. He and Harry had none of that: they touched each other only in extreme circumstances, and then it was a light brush on the shoulder, a tap on the wrist. Even when he'd thought Harry was dying, he had not touched him.

The pressure on his hand increased, and he flinched, because now it hurt. Harry was less holding his hand then crushing it, his grip so tight that Draco could feel the bones of his fingers grind together. He winced but didn't move. Harry's grip grew tighter and tighter until Draco thought he could no longer keep from exclaiming at the pain, and then Harry let go.

Draco took his hand back, and looked at it with trepidation. He half expected to encounter a shapeless blob of crushed flesh, but his hand looked the same. He wiggled his fingers. They worked. "Ouch," he remarked conversationally. "So you've decided to blame my hand, then?"

Harry blinked for a moment, as if waking up out of some kind of dream. "Sorry. Did that hurt?"

"Oh blah blah, Dean's dating Eloise, Parvati's marrying a Death Eater's son, Blaise is fooling around with Malcolm behind your back..."

Draco almost fell off the windowsill. "Blaise is fooling around with Malcolm behind my back?"

"That I could be a bit more like you," Harry said. "I mean, not in most respects of course. But it'd be nice not to care."

"Not caring's overrated," Draco said. The idea of a Harry who didn't care was foreign and somewhat bothersome to him. "Anyway, on that topic, have you decided what to do about Hermione?"

"Far be it from me to tell anyone to apologize," Draco said. "because, myself, I'd rather be chewed apart by rabid weasels. Then again, I've never been a git like you were last night."

"That is such a lie," Harry began indignantly, then paused. "Right, you're just winding me up. Okay, so I was a git."

"Yes, you were. You were a git of epic proportions. You were such a git, they should name a town after you. Dorksville springs instantly to mind. Or, perhaps, Little Wankerton. I suspect that one's not taken."

"I decided a tough love approach might work wonders here," Draco replied. "Because frankly all the intensive moping and 'death, death, oh welcome death' stuff is starting to get on my nerves."

"Well," Draco said thoughtfully. "If I were you, which thankfully, I'm not, I would recommend that you recognize the fact that Hermione's about six times smarter than you, or me either for that matter, and therefore you should be honest with her. Because if you aren't, she'll see right through you anyway."

"Well, take a whack at it. If that doesn't work, groveling makes a solid backup plan. Then again, why are you asking me? I'm not the one with the girlfriend."

"Not any more," said Draco, and hopped down off the windowsill. "Look, try again with Hermione today, and if she still slams the door on you, I'll talk to her."

"Thanks," Harry said, a little stiffly. Draco could tell that he loathed the thought that Draco could talk to Hermione and he couldn't. On the other hand, he was biting it back, which Draco appreciated.

"I have to get some sleep," Draco said. It was true. Exhaustion seemed to be drizzling through his bone marrow like cold water. Harry was starting to look very blurry indeed and he could hear his own pulse beating in his ears. "Will you be all right?"

"I'll be all right," Harry said. He caught Draco's expression, and almost smiled. "I'll be fine. You look knackered, Malfoy. Go to bed."

Draco was halfway to the door when Harry spoke again, and Draco turned around instantly, wondering if Harry was calling him back. He wasn't: he was standing now, obviously getting ready to leave as well, but he had paused, one hand on the window sill. "Malfoy?"

Draco knew immediately what he meant. "I don't know," he said honestly. "She looked like Hermione. It was a good disguise."

Draco nodded, slightly. The sun had risen outside the window, but there was still no color in Harry's face. He looked wan and ghostly, and Draco was suddenly reminded of the way he had looked second year, when he'd toppled off his broom during a match, and the bone in his arm had broken with a sickening crack. Draco hadn't been at all sorry, but a certain primal empathy of feeling had made him wince all the same. He remembered Harry's sick, pained, white-faced look then - he looked the same now. "Who hates me that much?" Harry said, and his voice was a little wistful. "To plan something like that?"

"If it's any consolation, Potter," said Draco, as gently as he could, "by my calculations, it didn't have anything to do with hating you."

The sky outside Dumbledore's office window was pale gray, streaked with darker gray clouds. Hermione kept her eyes apathetically fixed on it while she waited for the headmaster to arrive. She was exhausted, having not slept all night, and she felt slightly dizzy. She had been absolutely dreading breakfast, but to her relief, McGonagall had been the first person to knock on her door in the morning, and had requested that she come straight to Dumbledore's office. Well, that wasn't exactly true. Harry had knocked on her door late in the night, and she'd opened the door, taken one look at him, and shut the door in his face.

I know he came to apologize, she thought. She'd seen it in his face. But she hadn't wanted to hear it then. She didn't want to hear it now. She wondered if she ever would.

The door opened behind her, and she heard someone come into the room. A throat was cleared, and a voice spoke: it was Dumbledore, as she'd known it would be. "I'm afraid I need to speak with you, Miss Granger."

He moved to stand behind his desk, looking very grave indeed. "Please come and sit down, Miss Granger."

Hermione nodded. She had no idea how much the professors knew about the events of the night before. A great deal, she imagined - she'd seen it in McGonagall's face, and saw it now in Dumbledore's. At another time this would have withered her with humiliation, but now she was beyond the point of caring. She went towards the seat that Dumbledore had indicated, in front of his desk, and sat down, clasping her hands in her lap. "What did you want to talk to me about, Professor?" she asked.

Dumbledore took the seat behind his desk, and regarded her gravely over the top of his gold-rimmed spectacles. "A rather serious matter, I'm afraid," he said gently. "Normally I would not call you in to discuss the private business of another student, even a close personal friend of yours..."

"I know," she interrupted, her own voice sounding a little desperate in her ears. She kept her eyes fixed on his desk : "You want to talk to me about Harry."

There was a short silence. Hermione kept her eyes fixed on Dumbledore's desk: Finally, he spoke, still gently, "No, Miss Granger. I wanted to talk to you about Mr. Weasley."

She raised her eyes slowly, and the compassionate kindness she saw in his expression almost undid her. "About Ron?" she whispered.

For a brief and bizarre moment, Hermione thought that he meant that Ron was dead. The room seemed to tilt crazily around her, and she grabbed tightly at the arms of her chair. "He's what?"

"He has resigned as Head Boy," said Dumbledore. He glanced down, and she followed his gaze. Only then did she realize that the shiny square she had noted earlier was a badge... Ron's Head Boy badge, to be precise. It was upside-down, and she could see the inscribed lettering where his name was printed, backwards. "He has left Hogwarts."

"Classes are over for this term," Dumbledore said. "I could compel him to stay, if I wished. But I saw no point in it. I hope he will want to return, once the holidays are over..."

"No," Hermione whispered, staring at the silver badge on the desk. "He can't have left, he can't -"

"Miss Granger, I had hoped that we could discuss the fact that, since there is no longer an acting Head Boy at Hogwarts -"

"No," Hermione said again, and stood up so fast that her chair crashed to the ground. "Headmaster, I - is there any chance he's still here, do you know, has he left yet?"

Dumbledore regarded her with cautious alarm, rising from his seat. "He went to clean out his room and to collect his belongings," he began, and might have added something else, but Hermione did not wait to hear it. She turned on her heel, and ran out of the room, leaving Dumbledore staring after her.

The door to Ron's room was closed, but not locked. Hermione flung it open, and stepped inside. Her heart sank.

The room was bare. The Chudley Cannons posters had been stripped down from the walls, the trunk was gone from the foot of the bed, and the school books from the shelf by the door. The patchwork duvet cover Mrs. Weasley had made for Ron fifth year was also gone, and the bed looked as bare and impersonal as a hospital cot. The only sign that Ron Weasley had once lived here was a small object tucked into the frame of the mirror that hung on the wall by the window. Moving slowly, Hermione crossed the room and gently pried the object out of the frame.

It was a photograph. Not a wizarding one, but one that had been taken with her own very ordinary Muggle camera, on a delayed timer. It showed herself, in her school robes, standing between Ron and Harry, a hand on each of their shoulders. They all looked well and happy and smiling. Staring at the photo, she felt a fist clench at her heart. Slowly, she set the photograph down on the windowsill, and turned away.

The door behind her opened. She spun around. She saw a slender white hand on the doorknob, then a bright red head. It was Ginny, and she was talking to someone behind her. "If you want to look one more time to make sure you haven't forgotten anything," she was saying, "then we could..."

Ron, Hermione thought numbly. She stood frozen in place, the rest of Ginny's words lost on her, as Ron came into the room after his sister. Unlike Ginny, he saw her instantly - his eyes went straight to hers across the room, and for a long moment they stared at each other in silence.

Ginny broke off, and turned to follow his gaze. When she saw Hermione, she paled, but held her ground. "Hi," she whispered.

"I was....Ron and I were just going downstairs," Ginny said. She glanced around quickly, and then back at her brother. "It doesn't look like you left anything behind, we should probably just -"

The hitch in Hermione's throat loosened. "You left this," she said, and plucked the photograph from the windowsill. She held it out to Ron, who looked at it, and whitened. "Don't you want it any more?"

It was Ginny who moved to take the photo, but Hermione retracted her hand. Ginny looked at her brother, her eyes alight with concern. "Let's - it's better if we just go."

Hermione bit her lip. "Please," she said imploringly to Ron. "Just talk to me for six minutes, and you can go, I won't ask you again. I promise." Her voice shook. "You owe me six minutes, at least."

But Ron understood, as Hermione had expected he would. "Six years," he said in a remote voice. "One minute for each year we've been friends."

Ginny's face fell, and she glanced at her brother, but his mouth was set in a stubborn line. With a resigned shrug, she went to the door. "I'll meet you on the steps," she said to Ron, and went out.

The door shut behind her, and Ron and Hermione were alone together in the empty, silent room. Ron crossed his arms over his chest, hugging his elbows as if he were cold. He was staring at a point just past Hermione's left ear, as if he couldn't quite bring himself to look directly at her.

"You can't leave," she said to him. It wasn't what she'd meant to say at all, but there it was. "You can't."

He still wouldn't look at her. "I'm leaving," he said. "It's done. And don't tell me I didn't have to resign -"

"I'm glad you resigned," she interrupted coldly. "That's not what I mean. You can't leave without talking to Harry."

"An apology?" Ron's voice was a slap. "You think this is like that little disagreement we had back in fourth year; you think this is something that can be solved with an apology? Hermione, he hates me now, after what I did."

"Yes, I did." He was hugging himself again, his knuckles white. "In every way that matters, I did."

"Why?" The question she had promised herself she would not ask, burst out of her. "Why did you do it?"

He was silent. After a few minutes had gone by, he dropped his hands from his elbows, and straightened up. And his eyes met hers. "I thought you loved me," he said. "I thought..."

His voice trailed off into silence. She looked at him, seeing as if for the first time how white and drawn he was. His red hair fell in dank tangles over his forehead, his eyes were shadowed with a violet as dark as any of Pansy's horrible eyeshadows. His clothes were crumpled, as if he had slept in them. He looked like someone who had been ill for days. She wanted to hate him and reached for the anger she knew was there, the rage that ticked away just below the numbness that had claimed her thoughts. Instead, she saw a series of images cast like shadows against the walls of her mind.

Ron, on the train to school, eleven years old in threadbare robes. Sitting in class, chewing a quill, a look of intense concentration on his face. De-gnoming the Burrow garden with determined glee. Facing down Snape, facing down Sirius Black, teetering on his broken leg, wincing in pain. Soaking wet when Harry dragged him out of the lake. The first time he had kissed her. The way he had looked when he had brought Harry up out of the Bottomless Pit, and Ron had pushed Harry towards her, and then turned away while they embraced. His face in that prison cell under Slytherin's castle, and she wondered again what he had been about to tell her. Her eyes went to his left hand where the hilt of the sword had burned its cross-shaped mark. I want to hate him, she thought, but I can't, any more than Ginny can. He's part of me, my own blood and bone. My childhood.

"Of course I love you," she said. "And you love me. And you love Harry, and he...he loves you."

"I don't know." His voice was fierce. "I told you I don't know. I can't explain it. It's like I went mad for a while. It's like I was looking down from some high place, seeing myself do these things, and it seemed right and justified. And I loved you..." He looked away again. "I never have loved anyone else."

"She never existed," Ron said. His voice was bitter. "That's what I think. There never was a girl I loved...just something evil that took the shape of what I wanted."

"Like a demon?" Hermione asked, her mind suddenly flipping the pages of her DADA textbook. "Like a succubus?"

"I thought she was you!" he burst out. "Maybe I'm a fool, and I just saw what I wanted to see, but she did a damn good impression of you, Hermione. She had your mannerisms down - the way you curl your hair around your finger when you're thinking. The way you bite your nails. She had your clothes -"

"I know. I saw. My pajamas." Hermione shook her head. "Six years of friendship," she said in an icy voice, "and all it took to convince you was a little bit of nail-biting and a pair of stolen pajamas."

Ron made a little gasping sound, as if she'd walloped him in the chest. "Maybe I believed it because I wanted to believe it."

Ron put a hand up, as if to ward off her rage. "This -- this is why I have to leave."

"Yes, because you want to know why. And there is no why." His voice was flat with exhaustion. "I don't have any answers."

"I don't. It seems like a fever dream." His shoulders hunched, and he shoved his hands in his pockets, shivering. "I close my eyes, I see her face. Your face. I was sick all night, thinking about what I did. I've been sick all morning. I've been throwing up till there's nothing left to throw up, and then I throw up again." His eyes were bleak. "I touched her, I spent nights with her, hours and hours talking. It wasn't just sex, you know. We talked, we ate together, we did our Potions homework. And I don't even know who she was. She could have been anyone - anything." He shook his head, and leaned back against the wall. "So don't ask me why I did it - because it's what I've been asking myself, and I still don't know."

"Don't try to tell me how much you're suffering." She heard her own voice in her ears, and was shocked at its cruel tone. "I doubt it could be enough."

His mouth hardened. "Let me ask you something, Hermione. If I'm so horrible, if I'm so awful ... then why do you want me to stay?"

"Put Harry back together. I..." Ron looked at her blankly, and she bit her lip. "I saw him tonight...just now, and he..."

Ron's blue eyes darkened, but when he spoke his voice was steady. "He's been broken for a while now, Hermione," he said. "You never saw it because you didn't want to. That other Hermione...whoever was pretending to be you...she saw it." He looked, then, at the photograph in his hand. Abruptly, he shoved it into his breast pocket. "She saw it better than we did."

She looked at him, then turned away quickly and went to the window. She put the palm of her hand against the cold glass, and looked out. The sky was heavy, leadenly gray, the clouds weighted with their freight of incipient snow. The only color in the white expanse of ground before the Forest was a cluster of moving black dots where some students were having a snowball fight. Hermione closed her eyes, remembering Ron's cold hand in hers, her other hand gripping Harry's. Promise me...that we'll always be friends.

"That doesn't matter," she said, in the same remote voice. "I'd do anything for Harry. Anything. Even if it made him hate me."

That made her eyes fly open. She stared at Ron, who stared grimly back, his blue eyes steady. "You mean if he wanted me to? If he - despises me now?"

"No," said Ron. "Not exactly." He took a few steps towards her, and then, seemingly assured that she was not going to lunge at him and slap him, came to stand beside her. The gray light from the window cast a sickly pallor over his already pale skin. Hermione wished she had a Pepper-up Potion to give him. Then she tried not to wish it. She was, after all, still angry. "Hermione..." He took a deep breath. "I know you won't believe this, because you're too angry, and you - you have every right to be angry. But when I say I don't know why I did it, I mean it. It was like I went mad for those few hours every night. Pieces of my memories come back to me now and they seem like hallucinations - not like dreams, too real and vivid for that, but like waking nightmares. And yet they're memories of happy times. At least, I thought I was happy."

"That maybe I don't know why I did it because...because I wasn't in control of what I was doing. I know it sounds like an excuse, but I'm not making excuses. I blame myself, I do, but at the same time - at the same time, maybe you're right, and all this really is about Harry. After all, what better way to get at him than through you and me?"

Ron spun away from her and stared at the wall. "I don't know. But I know I'm right."

"Is that why you're leaving?" she asked, in a small thread of a voice. "To keep him safe?"

"Maybe. A little bit." He covered his face with his hands. "I don't know. I'd like to think so. But ... I've spent all these months missing him, wondering where he'd gone, where we went. Us, our friendship. I blamed Malfoy for all of that being lost. But now I wonder." He took his hands away from his face. The redness of his eyelids (so he had been crying) made his eyes look bluer, his face consequently even younger. "I don't think it is Malfoy. I think it's something inside Harry. There's something he's dreading, but he's obsessed with it, too. I just don't know what it is." He looked at her, hard. "Do you?"

After a long moment, she shook her head. "No. And I still don't see how you can justify leaving him."

"Leaving him?" Ron gave a short bark of almost-laughter. It was the most unhappy sound she had ever heard. "How can I leave him? He's already gone."

"You think...you really think...that I'm putting him in danger?" Hermione asked. "I try...I try to protect him, however I can."

Hermione looked at him. "Why," she whispered, "do things have to get this bad before we can talk like this? You never said any of these things.."

She stared at him, a question blossoming in her mind. "How did I never know," she whispered. "How did you never say anything to me, anything that would have given you away..."

Ron looked at her out of haunted eyes. "You...there was a spell..." he began, but the door opened then, interrupting him, and Ginny came in. She had her dark brown cloak pulled around her, and her cheeks were red with cold.

"The carriage is here to take you down to the station," she said softly. "We have to go."

"Okay," said Hermione slowly, ""Okay," and then, looking at Ron, she said, "And you're really going to go?"

"I have to go, he replied, not looking at her. "I have to," and he looked so miserable that she took a step forward towards him - it was her instinct to put her arms around him, but he stepped away from her violently, almost knocking into his sister. "I can't," he said. "I look at you - I see her."

"Ron," Hermione said miserably, but Ginny had already taken her brother's arm shaking her head. She cast a desperate look at Hermione, who blanched and stepped back. She kept her eyes fixed on the floor, and waited until she heard the sound of the door clicking shut before she raised her eyes.

He had sworn not to do this unless it was an emergency, but he had begun to think that all this was exactly that. Sitting at his desk, Lupin reached with a sigh for the brassbound box that sat on the left side of his desk, and drew it towards him. He opened it, and took out a parchment, which he unrolled across the desk blotter.

He remembered Sirius asking him to make a new map, at the beginning of term, handing him the last of the Zonko's Reality Pencils. He'd demurred - it was hardly something a Hogwarts professor wanted to have discovered stashed in his office. But Sirius was very persuasive when he wanted to be. "Just make a rudimentary map," he'd said. "One that shows the boys, at least."

And so it did: as Lupin's eyes scanned the parchment, he saw the two blue dots that were Draco and Harry - Harry seemed to be sitting in Gryffindor Tower, and Draco was making his way up from the Slytherin dungeon. Lupin sat and watched the progress of the second blue dot, his mind awhirl with confused thoughts, until it drew near enough to the corridor where his office was. Then he got to his feet, and went to the door, slipping the map into his breast pocket.

The hallway was empty, and for a moment Lupin almost rechecked the map. Then Draco came around the corner up ahead. He was walking with his hands in the pockets of his black trousers, his silver head bent, but he seemed to sense Lupin's presence, and glanced up as he rounded the corner. "Hey," he said, slowing down slightly, "Professor Lupin. Hi."

Draco glanced down at the silver watch clamped around his slender wrist. Lupin spared a moment towards wishing that the Malfoys weren't biased quite so heavily towards that particular metal. "I'm meant to be meeting Harry and Ginny..."

Draco lowered his arm and shrugged. It was an elegant shrug. Everything he did was elegant. Sirius, at his age, had had much the same panthery grace. "All right."

Lupin ducked back into his office, and Draco followed, shutting the door behind them without being asked. He leaned against the door, and looked at Lupin with wide-eyed, put-on innocence. In the faint winter light, his eyes were bluish, like the shadows under them. "What is it, Professor?"

"The wedding," Lupin said, feeling it wise to start off with something safe. "It's in less than a week, and since everything has been ... chaotic, I wanted to make sure you have everything you need -"

"Harry and I had our clothes tailored months ago," said Draco coolly. "And sent to the Manor. We're fine."

"Just say what you want to say, Professor," said Draco, rubbing the back of a hand across his tired eyes. The scar across his palm flashed once: brightly, vividly silver. "I know you know. Harry told me. You're worried about him."

"Because you're obviously not doing well," Lupin said bluntly. "You lost that Quidditch match, your marks are down in your classes, you seem distracted and upset, you've not written your mother in over a month..."

"I also forgot to send my grandmother a toffee cake for her birthday," Draco supplied helpfully.

"Bad," Lupin said, and Draco immediately looked so offended that he was almost amused. "Ill, I should say," he amended himself gently. "You're pale, you've lost weight again..."

"It's winter and I haven't been hungry," Draco said. Lupin just looked at him: at the very thick fair hair that wanted cutting (and it wasn't like Draco to neglect his hair); Draco had always been slender, but now he looked thin. More than that, there was a translucence to him, a faint sort of silvery light that seemed to be shining through his eyes and skin. It was alarming. "How much does Sirius know?" he demanded abruptly.

"I have told him nothing that Harry asked me not to tell him," Lupin said heavily, "although I wish it were otherwise, as I believe he could be a great help to Harry."

"I should also add that I was quite concerned about your altercation with Mister Finnigan at the museum," Lupin added. "It makes me wonder exactly what your motivation could have been. It is not like you to resort to fist fighting. I can only imagine you were trying to create some sort of distraction. But from what?"

Draco smiled a sideways smile. "Hermione agreed to talk to him. I'm meant to lend moral support."

Draco lifted one shoulder and let it fall. "Harry doesn't seem to care about that much anymore," he said thoughtfully. "And since I'm persona non grata with the Slytherins..."

"The façade's pretty cracked at this point," Draco said. "Harry and I are friends. People know it. Word gets around. The Slytherins won't tolerate that. I don't blame them, really. And when I break it off with Blaise, that'll be the nail in the coffin."

Lupin shrugged regretfully. "Sorry," he said. "And I'm sorry about the Slytherins as well."

Lupin nodded, and stood up. Draco looked at him apprehensively as he approached, and when he laid a hand on the boy's shoulder, Draco looked every so slightly panicked, as if he wasn't sure what to do. "I know there are things you aren't telling me," he said gently. "And I know it can't be easy...but you can tell me anything, I hope you know that, and it will remain in my strictest confidence."

Draco raised his face; the glare from the window struck through his fair hair, firing it to individual strands of white light. He had his father's coloring, and all his mother's beauty, but somehow, Lupin thought, he looked like neither of them: only wholly somehow his own person. "There is one thing," he said.

"Something Dumbledore told me," Draco said. "But it's about Harry's parents, so you might not want to hear it."

"Uh-huh." Draco's face was impassive, but the gray eyes begged for understanding. "How...how well did you know my father, back in the seventies?"

"Not well at all," Lupin said, wondering where this was going. "I knew of him. Everyone knew of Lucius Malfoy."

"You know he sat on the board at the Daily Prophet," Draco said, and Lupin nodded. "He was also wholly responsible for the running of certain of the smaller magazines...the Malfoy Park Banner, of course, and the Hogsmeade Gazette..."

"And very few people knew he ran the Hogsmeade Gazette. After Peter Pettigrew graduated from Hogwarts, it was one of the few places to offer him a job.."

"And that put him in my father's pocket, although he didn't know it at the beginning, apparently. I'm fuzzy on the exact details, but at some point early on my father arranged that certain sensitive papers be discovered in Pettigrew's desk," Draco said. "Papers that tied Pettigrew into the illegal exportation of dragon's blood. You know the penalty for that, especially in those times: he would have gone to Azkaban for life without trial, or gotten the Dementor's Kiss immediately."

"My father blackmailed Pettigrew into turning informant against his friends. He drew him into the Death Eaters...my father was the one who was responsible for the plot against the Potters...the Secret-Keeper idea...he turned Harry's parents in to the Dark Lord...and he went with him that night in Godric Hollow. He was there when they died," Draco finished, and slumped back slightly against the wall, as if this recitation had exhausted him.

Lupin held himself silent for a long moment, thinking. None of this, really, was that surprising: certainly it was nothing he would have put past Lucius Malfoy, who, it had always seemed to him, sat at the Dark Lord's right hand. However, in the context of Harry's new relationship with Draco and all things Malfoy, it was disturbing indeed. "And you haven't told Harry?"

Draco shook his head. "No. Dumbledore only told me a few weeks ago, and since then...there hasn't been an opportunity, really," which Lupin knew was only half-true.

"Harry knows his parents are dead," Lupin said bluntly. "For a child to grow up knowing his parents are not just dead but were murdered....he's already had the worst of it, don't you think?"

Draco seemed to consider this. "He's very angry," he said. "Especially now...and its sort of an uncontrollable rage. I don't know how to explain it, but I can feel it. When he was younger, Voldemort always came after him, looked for him, but now, if he could, I think he'd go after the Dark Lord on his own...it's that kind of anger."

"And you don't want to make him more angry? Or are you worried he'll focus his anger on you? Because he won't, Draco - Harry knows you aren't responsible for the things your father did."

"Maybe not, but it seems a little stiff to ask him to come and live in a house owned by his parents' murderer," said Draco with a bleak sharpness, and Lupin stared at him.

"But your father's dead," he said. "That house has passed to you; you own it. And when you turn eighteen, if you choose, you can rip it down brick by brick."

A shadow passed across Draco's face. "Right," he said. "Because my father is dead."

Lupin didn't know quite how to respond to this. Draco seemed to have shut himself off, his brief confiding mood having passed. "If there's anything I can do..."

When Hermione received the owl from Draco asking her if she would see Harry that day, she'd thought about it a long time. She'd just come from talking to Ron, and felt wrung out...but she had to see Harry. She needed to. She agreed to meet him later, in neutral territory - Ron's empty room. She sent the owl back to Draco. Then she looked around her room. Then she began to pack.

She was nearly finished when the clock struck noon, and she straightened up from her packing. She hadn't eaten in almost a day, and felt dizzy when she stood too quickly. She regarded her haggard reflection in the mirror with a sense of distant dismay. An attempt to apply a lip-reddening charm only made her look more washed out, so with a sigh, she straightened her cardigan and headed out the door.

Ginny and Draco were waiting outside Ron's room when she got there. Draco was leaning against the wall, Ginny sitting on the floor at his feet. She had a book on her lap, but she wasn't reading it. They both looked at her and Ginny smiled waveringly; Hermione smiled back as best she could, not wanting Ginny to think that she was in any way angry with her because of the situation with Ron.

Then she opened the door and went in. The door swung shut behind her, and she was alone in the room with Harry.

He was standing next to the bed, with its colorful counterpane, holding on to one of the bedposts. He looked up as she came in, and for a moment his eyes lit up with relief. Then they darkened, and he looked down at the tops of his boots.

Hermione turned and shut the door on Draco and Ginny, who were waiting in the corridor. She turned to face Harry, and took a deep breath. "Hello, Harry," she said.

The sound of her voice seemed to galvanize some electric response inside him. His head went up, and he crossed the room to her. She didn't move. He reached out a hand to touch her shoulder, and she stiffened. Slowly he lowered his arm. "Hermione..."

She just looked at him. She could tell he meant it. He looked half-desperate to make her understand: he was very pale, and the eyes behind the glasses were intently green. She noticed, vaguely, what he was wearing: a black sweater that was at least three years old, with frayed, far too short cuffs that showed his thin wrists. It was a sweater Ron had given him; she wondered what that meant.

"Draco told me," she interrupted shortly. "I'm glad you listened to him. God knows, you wouldn't listen to me."

The tone of his voice made her look at him again, and she was startled at what she saw. He looked pale, tense, unhappy, but he was there - present in a way he hadn't been present in months.

"You're right," he said again, heavily. "I didn't listen to you. I didn't let myself listen to you. And there's no apology that I could construct that would make it up to you for that. I didn't trust you even though you've never given me a reason not to trust you. And I hurt you, and I'--"

"You did hurt me," she interrupted. "If you'd spent years thinking about it, and planning it, I don't think you could have come up with anything that would have hurt me more."

He winced. "I know," he said. "Tell me what to do. There must be something I can do...to fix this."

"Don't -" he reached out for her again, and this time she let him. He put his hands on her shoulders and looked down into her face. She had stood this way with him so many times -- it was familiar, and yet she felt as if she were looking at a stranger. Despite their physical proximity, she had never felt further away from him in her life. "I'll do anything," he said. "Anything you want me to do."

His hands tightened on her shoulders. "Something I can do," he said. "Hermione - help me."

"Let you? I'm asking you. Hermione, I'll apologize to you every day for the rest of your life, if that's what you want, because you deserve it. I'll get down on my knees and beg you to forgive me -"

A look of relief so enormous it almost undid all her plans passed over his face. He ducked his head and kissed her. She had been expecting it, and let him. She tried to lose herself in it, knowing as she did that it might be the last time, but she could not. Those words, the last time, the last time, echoed in the back of her head. She closed her eyes, and put her arms around him. Holding him tightly was more satisfying than the kiss itself, which seemed as if it was taking place somewhere far away. But the feel of him under her hands, the slightness of his body, the fragile bones, the sharp blades of his shoulders, made her want to protect him again. But this was one thing she could not protect him against.

She drew away. "I forgive you," she said again. "But that doesn't mean things are going to be like they were."

"What do you mean?" he asked, the look of relief beginning to fade from his expression.

"You don't really think things can be the same again, do you?" she asked, her voice wistful. "Not after what happened."

"Nothing happened," he said fiercely. "Nothing happened - I was a git, that's all. Nothing happened to us."

"That's not true, Harry. You showed me something important last night. You showed me you don't trust me."

"It is true," she said inexorably. "You don't trust me. You don't trust anyone. And I know why."

He just stared at her. From the look in his green eyes, she could tell he was dreading her next words, and she wished in some way she could spare him, even as she knew that this was necessary.

"You don't trust me because you know you can't be trusted," she said, her voice very flat. "You lie to me, so you imagine that I could lie to you. You hide things from me, so it makes sense to you that I could hide something so huge, so horrible, from you, and pretend as if everything was all right. It makes me wonder...how bad is it, Harry? What you're not telling me?"

He went very white, and stared at her as if she had turned into something monstrous. "It's not the same," he said.

"Because what I don't tell you - it has nothing to do with us. It has nothing to do with you and me, or how I feel about you."

"That's where you're wrong," she said, suddenly furious. "I'm your friend, your best friend, and I'm your girlfriend. And I'm sick of asking and getting evasive answers, or no answer at all, or patronizing half-answers. Something's eating at you, something's chewing you up from the inside out. I love you and it kills me to see you suffering, Harry, but it makes it ten thousand times worse when you won't even tell me what it's about. You can't keep some huge secret and expect it to be separate from the rest of your life. It doesn't work that way. We don't work that way. I'm not Draco, I can't read your mind, but I can see what you're feeling. It shows on your face. Except lately...I can't even look at you." Her voice dropped, miserably. "I don't know what to do."

She waited, braced for him to say anything - to say something angry, or bitter, or defensive. He raised his head to look at her finally, and she was shocked at the look in his eyes - the bleakness in it, the despair. "So you're going to leave me?" he said. "Because of this...you'd really leave me?"

"Harry," she whispered. She wanted to go and throw her arms around him, wanted it badly, but she held herself tightly where she was. It was the hardest thing she had ever done. "I'm not leaving you - I could never really leave you."

"Then what are you doing?" he demanded, and some small part of her cursed the Dursleys bitterly and for the thousandth time for all of this. "I don't understand."

"In other words," Harry interrupted, his voice suddenly sharp, "we should 'still be friends'."

"You love me, and you're still my friend, but things can't be the way that there were. Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but before, we were friends, and we loved each other, so what exactly is different now?"

"I can't be your girlfriend," Hermione said, her voice remote and flat. "That's what's different."

He hardly seemed to hear her. He was very white, and the skin of his face seemed to be pressing back against the bones. She wanted to tell him not to look like that, but she couldn't. "Can't? Can't or won't?"

"I don't know, Harry," she replied despairingly, "when you say you can't tell me what's bothering you, do you mean you can't tell me, or you won't?"

"It is fair! It's completely fair!" She hugged herself tightly, willing herself not to cry. "You're lying to me and I hate it. I hate it and pretty soon, I'll hate you too."

"Hate me, then," he flung back at her. He was holding the bedpost again, so tightly his knuckles were white. His face was white, too, his green eyes the only color in it. "If you could hate me over something like that, then maybe you never loved me in the first place."

She had thought she was beyond being hurt again, but apparently not. His remark went into her like an arrow in her heart. For a moment, it was hard to breathe. "I can't do this," she whispered. "I can't."

She turned automatically towards the door, but his voice stopped her like a hand on her shoulder. She had never heard him sound like that. "I love you," he said. "Please don't go."

"Then tell me," she said, without turning to look at him. "Tell me what it is you've been hiding. Tell me, Harry. Please."

His silence was the only answer she needed. She shut her eyes, willing her voice to remain even. When she did speak, she was startled at the calmness of her tone.

"I'm leaving school, Harry," she said. "I'm packed, and I'm taking the train out of Hogsmeade to London tonight. If you want to say goodbye to me, I'll wait for you on the platform. I hope you'll come. I do love you. I always will love you. Believe that, if you don't believe anything else."

He was still silent, although she could hear his uneven breathing, and she wanted very much to turn around. But she didn't. Blindly, she walked towards the door, and blindly turned the knob, and blindly stepped out into the corridor. Draco and Ginny were still there, staring at her silently, but now her vision was so blurred with tears that they looked like distorted, funhouse versions of themselves. She saw Draco reach a hand out to her, and a voice from a long way away asked her, "What happened?"

She shook her head. "Go in there," she said, "go take care of him," and then she fled down the corridor without looking back.

Ginny looked at Draco. Not surprisingly, he was looking away from her, down the corridor where Hermione had fled. "She shouldn't be by herself," he said.

He shook his head slowly, and brought his eyes back to hers. "You should. I'm not particularly good at girl talk."

Ginny sighed. "I'm not sure I am either. All those brothers..." she trailed off. "Still. You'd better talk to Harry. Whatever happened, he'll tell you."

"You remember him? Quiet fellow, square jaw, Irish flag up his arse? Probably dyes his hair?"

"Well, shouldn't he be around through all this? Lending you a massive, unsightly shoulder to lean on?"

"It's complicated," she said, but she had the unnerving feeling that his clear gray eyes saw right through her. For a moment, he almost looked sympathetic.

"Well, don't break his heart," he said. "We've got enough broken hearts around here already," and with that, he pushed open the door to Ron's old room and went inside. Ginny caught a brief glimpse of Harry sitting on the edge of the empty bed before the door shut, blocking her view.

With a sigh, she headed off down the corridor. It was a small flight of steps and a turn to get to Hermione's room; the door was closed when she got there. She raised her hand to knock, then hesitated, trying to think what she should say. She had no idea, and no idea what Hermione might be feeling, and no idea if she would hate seeing Ginny at this moment. After all, she was Ron's sister. She slowly lowered her hand, and on impulse, put her ear to the door.

Hermione was crying. Ginny could hear it very clearly through the door. It was a terrible, sad, desperate sort of messy crying, the way a child might cry - the way her mother had cried, all those years ago, over Andrew, night after night for months. It was the crying of someone who knows they have lost something they will never get back.

Ginny hesitated, one hand on the doorknob. Then she slowly stepped back, and leaned against the wall. She slid slowly down it until she was sitting on the floor; then she put her head on her knees, and did not move for a long time.

Hermione had been standing shivering on the platform for nearly an hour when she finally understood it: he was not coming. It was almost midnight, and it was freezing cold, so cold that the chill seemed to have soaked into Hermione's bones. The Hogsmeade train station was utterly deserted; she was the only person on the empty platform, and a light, dusting snow had begun to fall.

With a sigh of resignation, she glanced down at the watch in her hand. It was Harry's watch, that he had thrown at her. She had not been able to bring herself to give it back to him. It was, apparently, five minutes to midnight, and there was no point waiting any longer on the platform. He wasn't going to come.

She turned, climbed wearily onto the train and went into the nearest compartment. She sat down close to the window, and propped her chin on her hand. From here, she could see the lights of the castle, faint in the distance, glimmering on the clifftop. The mountains behind were wreathed in mist, and there was a shroud of vapor around the moon. She felt the sting of tears fierce at the back of her eyes. I can't leave him here, alone...he only has me...how can I?

And then she heard it: the sound of running footsteps on the platform. She stood up so fast she nearly banged her head on the overhead luggage rack; swiftly she seized at the window, and pulled it down hard, leaning as far out as she could. Someone was running along the platform towards her: a slender, shadowy figure, turned to a silhouette by the mist: she saw a black cloak, recognized the dark school clothes, and then as he emerged from the shadows she saw in the torchlight that the banding at the wrists of his cloak was green and silver, and she realized with a queer stab at her heart that it was not Harry after all, but Draco.

"I'm here!" she shouted. He had been gazing up and down the empty platform; now he turned, and blinked at her. "I'm here! Draco -"

He came quickly to stand below the train window. He threw the hood of his black cloak back; they were almost on a level, but he had to tilt his head to look up at her. He was flushed from exertion, his hair a crackling white halo around his head. Flakes of melting snow clung to the dark silver blades of his lashes. She drew in a breath: sometimes he was almost too beautiful to look at -- nearly girlishly pretty, but no, there was too much steel in his expression for that. "I know I'm not who you were expecting," he said, low-voiced. "He told me you would be here. I came as quickly as I could."

"Not exactly." Draco shrugged, elegantly. "I hated the thought of you going off like this, with no one to say goodbye to you."

"Thank you," she whispered. She reached out then, and touched his shoulder gently; he looked at her in surprise. "I need you," she began, "I need you to promise me something."

He didn't move, only his eyes narrowed slightly. Harry would have said, "Yes, anything," and Ron would have said, "If I say I'll do it, I'll do it. You don't need to make me promise." But Draco just looked at her out of long diamond-gray eyes, and said, "That depends on what it is."

"Because," she said, and paused - but it seemed right to explain, in fact, she could not imagine anyone else who would understand. "They used me to get to him, Draco," she whispered. "They used me - and Ron - they know how to hurt him the worst, and I can't be part of that. I won't be."

She sighed. "The other things I said to him - they were true as well. Nothing else I say would change anything. He still wouldn't tell me what's been tormenting him, and I -" She sighed, and bowed her head down. "I don't suppose you know, do you?"

He said nothing, only looked up and down the platform, and then back at her. The cold air ruffled his hair, turned it to blown silver tinsel. There was no reading his expression, or his gray eyes; he had nothing of Harry's transparency. But there was no one else. And she trusted him, because she had to. "I still think you should talk to Harry again," he said stubbornly. "You shouldn't have to go. Not like this."

The train whistle sounded then: a long, high piercing shriek that made her jump. Draco took a step back away from the train.

"I haven't got time to talk about this any more," Hermione cried out, close to despair, "I need you to do this for me, I want you to promise, to swear it - swear it on your family honor, Draco Malfoy. Swear it on your own name."

"Stay with him," she said. Draco looked taken aback. Hermione went on, not really knowing what she was saying, just letting the words come. "Stay with him always - and watch him - and make sure he's all right. Don't leave him, and don't let him go off on his own - and if he does, you have to follow him, because I can't now. I want to take care of him, but he won't let me. He won't let any of us near him. Until I know how to fix that, you'll have to do it. Owl me every day - tell me how he is, what he's doing, if he's all right."

"Oh, you know what I mean!" Hermione cried out. "Keep him safe. Stay with him - promise me, please!"

There was a long silence. It stretched out between them like a length of silver cord unspooling. Hermione stared down at him, her hand still on his shoulder, although she hardly felt as if she were touching him - he seemed so far away, as if he had gone beyond the mountains, into some far cold place she couldn't imagine. His face was still, expressionless, the pale skin burned silver by moonlight, eyes opaque as mirror glass. When he finally spoke, his voice was as slow as it was steady. "Very well," he said. "I promise."

She might have imagined it, but she thought she felt something leap between them then, like an electrical spark. She slowly loosened her grip on his shoulder. "Oh, thank goodness," she whispered. "Thank goodness."

"I would have done it anyway," he said, looking down at his shoulder, where her hand rested. His voice was remote.

The train whistle sounded again, shrill as a scream. The next few moments were a blur. She took her hand away from his shoulder, wondering at what she had just done, at what she had made him do. He raised his face to hers, his lips shaping words that were drowned out by the sound of the train's brakes releasing. Suddenly something snapped inside her. She could not bear to leave him here like this, alone and with such a burden placed on him. She leaned forward, and did something she had never done before: she kissed him on the forehead, and as she did he closed his eyes.

His eyes opened, but there was no chance for him to reply, for with a jerk, the train began to move. Hermione grabbed at the window's edge to steady herself, and leaned as far out as she safely could, the cold stinging her eyelids, staring back towards the lighted platform and the solitary figure standing there - hands in his pockets, looking after her. He did not wave in farewell, and neither did she; she only stood watching as the platform and the station and Draco himself grew smaller and smaller in the distance and finally vanished altogether, swallowed up by the encroaching darkness.

At one in the morning, the Slytherin common room was deserted. Draco's boots left dark wet marks on the stone as he crossed through; he had not bothered to clean off his boots. He was enjoying making a mess. Something in his chest was twisting savagely - he felt angry, not at anyone in particular, but at life in general. Everything seemed to be falling apart around him in huge shattering chunks, and for a change, the mass destruction was due to nothing he'd done.

"Bloody Weasley," he muttered as he reached his door - and paused. "Right," he said to himself. "Better do it now," and he turned and went back along the hallway to the other side of the dungeon, where the girls' rooms were.

The door to the room Blaise shared with Pansy was closed - not surprisingly, since it was long past midnight. Draco raised his hand and rapped sharply on the door: one, two, three sharp knocks.

He heard the sound of swift feet, and the door opened. It was Blaise. Her red hair was down, tumbling around her shoulders, her face bare of makeup, but her glittery barrettes in place. She wore a long silky pale green dressing gown, printed with an embroidered blue dragon which curled across her shoulders and rested its head on her breast. Her eyes widened when she saw him. "Draco?"

"Hello, darling," he said, leaning against the doorjamb. "All dressed up for Malcolm?"

Draco unpeeled himself from the doorjamb and sauntered into the room. It was a large room, separated in half by a huge Chinese screen printed all over with blue and green water lilies. This side was Blaise's: decorated with an understated simplistic elegance, everything she owned was nevertheless obviously expensive. He turned to look at her. She stood with her hands on her hips, her silk gown pulled tight across her chest. She was very obviously wearing nothing underneath.

Blaise flushed and crossed her arms over her chest. "It's a bit rich you coming here and tweaking me about Malcolm," she snapped. "He told me he saw Hermione Granger coming out of your room this morning. Explain that, why don't you."

"I'd like to know what Malcolm was doing lurking around my room this morning," Draco said.

She threw up her hands. "I've never fooled around with Malcolm," she said. "I just started that rumor to see if you'd care. Which, patently, you don't."

Draco raised an eyebrow. "You started a rumor you were snogging that weasel-faced tosser just to annoy me? I'm touched."

Seizing a glass candlestick from the table by the bed, Blaise flung it at his head. Draco ducked, and it hit the wall and shattered. "I said get out!"

"Good," Draco said. "Then she won't stop me from doing this," and he waved a hand at her. Silver cords sprang out of the air and snapped around her wrists and ankles. She shrieked in surprise, and sat down hard on the floor, struggling against the cords. "What is your problem?" she hissed at him, her green eyes full of rage.

"I don't know," Draco said thoughtfully. "I guess I'm just not a very nice person."

"I hate you," Blaise snarled, but he had set himself to ignoring her. Walking quickly, he crossed the room and flung open the trunk at the foot of her bed. He kicked it, and it fell sideways, spilling clothes, books and papers all over the floor.

Blaise shrieked out loud. "What are you doing? You -- leave my things alone! Leave them alone!" Her voice rose into a piercing scream. "I hate you, Draco Malfoy, you lying, cheating, stealing, pointy-faced bastard! I hate you!"

Draco glanced over at her and smiled. "Scream if you want," he said pleasantly. "It won't make any difference. I'll stay here until I find what I'm looking for."

***

Angst for the memories. Believe it or not, the next chapters are cheerier. Chapter eight: we leave Hogwarts for the long-awaited wedding. Unexpected guests. Hermione makes a discovery. Sirius' bachelor party. Ron, Ginny, Seamus and the rest of the guests come to the Manor. Too much is drunk by some, with upsetting results. Ginny gets a present. Somewhere, a kitty is still stuck up a tree.

Chapter Seven: Burning the Boats