Chapter Thirteen - Through A Glass Darkly  

Alcohol and fire did not mix, thought Draco, staring into the grate, where the flames had burned themselves down to a bed of glowing red embers. He had now made it through three more Mai Tais since returning to the bedroom, and his surrounding were starting to look a little peculiar. The warmth of the fire, combined with the heat of the alcohol running through his blood, was making him sweat through his clothes, not to mention the fact that his vision was blurring. He wondered if it were entirely normal that the liquor in his glass was staying quite steady while the furniture seemed to be sloshing up and down. 

Blurred as it was, the room had started to remind him of his father’s study back at the Manor. The same thick stone walls, ominous tapestries full of snakes and spiders, the same heavy armchairs; how often had he seen his father sunk into a chair by the fire, glass of Firewhiskey Regal in hand, staring moodily into the flames, exactly as he was doing now. He almost felt as if he were back home, or if not at home, at least in some place other than this fortress: a place both foreign and strangely familiar, where reality assumed the texture of a dream. 

Through the silence, he heard Slytherin´s voice in his head again, telling him about the covenant that held the world together, the necessity of opposites, the dark and the light, night and day, good and evil. Freezing cold and furnace heat, deadly blackness and petrifying light. He saw Harry´s face, and the expression on it when Harry had looked at him in the cell -not quite rage, not quite disgust, not quite disappointment, but a far worse combination of all three. 

What’s wrong with me? Why am I thinking about these things when there’s no point? He glanced down, and saw his own distorted reflection in the side of the silver cup he held: the smooth plane of one cheek, marred only by the tiny scar on his cheekbone, the silver of his eye. Or maybe I´m just getting really drunk. He put the cup he was holding down on the table next to the chair, very carefully, and waved a hand at the fire. "Incendio," he whispered, and the flames leaped up again as if new. The amber light of the fire lanced through the green liquid in his glass, turning it gold. He leaned back, resting his head on the back of the armchair, very slowly lowering his eyelids so that he looked at the firelight through his lashes, a fringe of silvery grass. 

A shadow passed across the fire. He ignored it. The images that danced across his inner lids held his attention. The Mirror of Judgement, its silvery surface reflecting back at him: first his own pale frightened face, then...other things. Afterwards, he´d barely resisted Slytherin dragging him off to examine his "army." Which was ridiculously vast. Dementors, werewolves, trolls and various other nasties stretching as far as the eye could see. He had hardly cared. Fleur had told him that Slytherin would show him things so terrible that he might die of them. Well, he hadn´t died, but what he had seen left a white-hot trail across his soul. Some things you don´t recover from. 

Another shadow passed in front of his eyelids. This time, he felt his muscles tense. There was someone in the room with him. He swung around in the chair, half-expecting to see Fleur, or Slytherin, or another random minion. But not who he did see. 

Standing in front of him, her flame-colored hair seeing to light a halo around her pale face, was Ginny. 

*** 

It had started to rain. The grass around Sirius and Lupin´s feet was wet, and soaked through the cuffs of their trousers as they waited on the hillside. Their heads and shoulders were dry, however, thanks to the Parapluieus Charm Lupin had cast after they left the Potter house. Sirius had been too absorbed in thought to pay much attention to the weather - too absorbed in thought, and in staring at the scabbard that was, without any doubt, the Gryffindor Key. It was a beautiful thing, so well made that the art that had gone into carving the flowers and leaves all up and down the sides of it almost had nothing to give it. The idea that it had belonged to generations of Potters, James included, made Sirius so nervous at the thought of dropping or damaging it that Lupin had suggested he cast a Reductus charm on it to shrink it to the size of his hand so he could conceal it carefully in the inner pocket of his cloak, which he did. 

"What are we waiting for again, Sirius?" Lupin queried, shivering slightly in the bitter wind. All nature seemed to be caught up in Sirius´ dark, preoccupied mood - silver-black clouds scudded across a sky the color of wet iron, and the wind made the tree branches sing mournfully. 

It’s be easier to catch our ride up here," said Sirius, as they arrived at the top of the hill behind the Potters´ old house, Sirius took a small silver whistle from a pocket of his cloak, and blew it; it made a sad, shrill noise. Without any further explanation, he repocketed it. 

Far sooner than he had anticipated, they heard the flap of wings, and spun around to see - 

An owl? 

A small, apricot-colored horned eagle owl. 

Lupin blinked. "Little small to carry both of us, don´t you think?" he asked, as the bird settled on Sirius´ shoulder and pecked gently at his shoulder. He took the parchment that had been tied to its leg, and unrolled it as the owl took off again, pale wings beating hard against the dark sky. 

"It’s from Narcissa," said Sirius, when he had finished, and handed the letter over to Lupin. "She wrung some information out of that demon, apparently. Nothing too useful, though." 

Lupin, having scanned the letter, was about to reply when a large shadow blotted out what little light the weak sun had been casting on the parchment. He looked up, and saw the circling form of a huge animal circling down towards them - the body of a horse, ornamented by the wings and head of an eagle´s and a lion´s thrashing tail. 

"Buckbeak?" he demanded, turning to Sirius. He recognized the hippogriff, of course, he had seen Sirius ride him before, and remembered him from the time he had lived tethered outside Hagrid´s hut at Hogwarts. He had never gotten too close to him, though, for very good reasons. "Sirius..." 

The hippogriff landed on the grass just ahead of them, and strode over to Sirius. Buckbeak was a beautiful animal, his dark gray coat blending into tawny plumage at the wings, his eyes gleaming and bright. He ducked his head against Sirius´ shoulder, and Sirius was about to reach up and stroke his feathered head when he saw that the hippogriff had stiffened and was staring past him, eyes narrowed. 

A low rumble rattled in Buckbeack´s throat, and he started to back away. "Beaky, what..?" Sirius began, turning to follow the anxious hippogriff´s gaze. 

He saw Lupin, standing with his arms folded, his robes swirling about him in the stiff wind like black, folding wings. He shook his head a fraction. "Sirius. It’s me." 

"Ligatus," said Sirius, holding out his wand. A silver rope sprang from the end of it. One end wound itself around Buckbeak´s neck; the other hardened and reshaped itself, becoming a handle in Sirius´ fist. Gripping the hippogriff´s leash firmly, he turned back to look at Lupin. "What do you mean it’s you?" 

"He senses I´m a werewolf," said Lupin, looking tensely at Buckbeack. "He´s afraid of me." 

'Afraid of you? No offense, but if it came to hand-to-beak combat, I think he could take you." 

"That doesn´t matter. He´s part horse. Horses hate wolves. It’s in their blood." 

Sirius stroked a hand down Buckbeak´s neck. The hippogriff stood rigid, every inch of his body tensed as he glared at Lupin. "Horses also hate lions, and he´s part lion. You´d think he´d be a little more tolerant. I know animals don´t like you, but I thought - a magical creature like Buckbeak - I mean, you can handle grindylows -" 

"Those are dark creatures. Buckbeak´s a magical animal, created from other animals, his has an animal´s instincts. He doesn´t know what to make of me. I don´t look like I´m anything more than human- but I´m not, and he senses that." 

Sirius shook his head. "You are human." 

"I´m not, you know," Lupin said, patiently. 

Sirius looked at him hard. 

"Maybe I don´t want to be, either," he added. 

"Maybe you don´t." Sirius rested his head briefly on Buckbeak´s side, then raised his eyes. "But you still have to get on this hippogriff with me. I don´t see another way for us to get where we’re going. You know the way, but we can´t Apparate. I´m sure there are wards up all around the castle, we´ll get splinched for sure." 

Lupin shook his head, and took a step towards Sirius. 

Buckbeak reared back, nearly knocking Sirius over. Sirius ducked out of the way, narrowly avoiding behind smacked in the face with one of the hippogriff´s wildly beating wings. "Beaky!" he snapped, yanking hard on the rope that tied him to the hippogriff. "Buckbeak! Settle down!" 

Buckbeak didn’t look like he wanted to settle down. He continued to plunge and rear, eyes rolling wildly. Lupin didn’t come any closer, but stood where he was, not moving. 

"Buckbeak," said Sirius again, his voice low and soothing, pulling the hippogriff towards him by the chain he had conjured. Lupin watched, feeling apprehension curdling in the pit of his stomach. It was simply a fact that he had grown to accept, that animals loathed him. After he had been bitten, his family had had to get rid of all their pets, their cats and dogs, even the rabbits in the outside hutch would wince and huddle away from him when he passed by. 

There had always been werewolf clans in the woods near where he had lived as a child, which was how he came to be bitten in the first place. He remembered one of the elders telling him when he was a child, You are outside the world now, not of it. Animals will shun you, knowing what you are, and silver, the blood of the earth, will reject you. Wherever you go the earth will try to heave you off its face, for you are an unnatural thing and the earth hates that which is outside its nature. 

"We could just Summon our broomsticks," he pointed out, speaking very quietly, although he knew it was no use, as it never was any use when Sirius got a bee in his bonnet about something. 

"Buckbeak...is...faster," panted Sirius, still holding the hippogriff´s leash tightly. He reached out and firmly stroked the plumage at the side of the animal´s neck, and chucked Buckbeak under the chin. Very slowly, after repeated cajoling and stroking, Buckbeak had calmed down enough to rest his head on Sirius´ shoulder, although his tail still lashed from side to side. 

Sirius turned around, his black hair pasted to his forehead with rain, and held out a hand to Lupin. "Come on, Remus," he said. 

Lupin approached slowly, remembering suddenly and not without amusement the bandages Draco had worn on his arm for a ridiculously long time during third year, after Buckbeak had injured him. Well, any animal willing to bite Draco the way he had been back then couldn´t be all bad. He reached out and laid a hand against Buckbeak´s flank. The hippogriff flinched, his skin rippling under Lupin´s touch, but he did not move away. 

Lupin raised his eyes and saw Sirius, looking done in but grinning at him all the same, his eyes sparking. "See?" he said, catching his breath. "Easy." 

Lupin didn’t say anything. He let Sirius help him up on Buckbeak´s back and sat still while his friends clambered up behind him. He could feel the hippogriff´s skin writhing and twitching where he touched it and knew that Buckbeak suffered him as a rider only out of love for Sirius. Which wasn´t the worst reason, he supposed, to suffer anything. 

*** 

"Harry?" 

"Yes?" 

"Are you going to wear that Charm, or not? It’s not safe, just holding it like that." 

Harry was silent. Hermione gazed at him, full of anxious curiosity. Still chained to the wall, Harry had managed to wriggle around so that his bound wrists were in front of him, rather than in back. He still looked uncomfortable, but slightly less so. She looked down at her hand where it was wound together with his, resting on his knee. His other hand held the Epicyclical Charm, the charm gripped in his fist, the gold chain threaded through his fingers. As if he neither wanted to let go of it, nor knew what to do with it. 

She glanced over and looked at Ron, who was leaning against the wall near the entrance to the cell, flipping through a book he´d found tucked between the cushions of one of the sofas pressed against the wall. It looked like it was entitled How To Be Evil, by Steve The Third. That can´t be much of a distraction from his anxiety about Ginny, she thought. She would have liked to go over and offer him consolation or company, but she could tell that he wanted to be left alone, and anyway Harry needed her more at the moment. 

She fought down her feelings of panicky anger. What was Ginny thinking, she thought in despair. She tried to be charitable. Well, if it had been Harry, she would have gone after him without thinking, wouldn’t she? Of course, Ginny couldn´t possibly love Draco as much as Hermione loved Harry. She barely knew him. She didn’t even know him as well as Hermione did, didn’t love him like...well that was an unproductive line of reasoning. And wouldn’t bring Ginny back, either. 

"I don´t know," said Harry finally. 

"You do believe me that he was just acting, don´t you?" 

Harry expelled a very weary-sounding breath. "Yes. I believe you. I believe you that he didn’t knife me on purpose, either, although I do think he probably got a bigger kick out of it than you’re willing to admit." 

"Why?" said Hermione, sharply. "Would you get a kick out of it, if your situations were reversed?" 

Harry leaned his head back against the wall, half-closing his eyes. "Don´t start." 

She scrambled around on her knees until she faced him. "Harry, I know this has something to do with whatever it was he told you to get you angry enough to break down that door. Doesn´t it?" 

"Maybe." Harry didn’t open his eyes. 

"Would you please tell me what he said?" 

A short silence. "I’d really rather not," said Harry. 

Hermione fought down the urge to shake him. She wanted to protest that he shouldn´t hide this from her, that they always told each other everything, but then she knew that wasn´t true. It was Ron who always told her everything; while she could read Harry´s expressions well enough, Harry was much more likely to try to keep from speaking about his feelings to either of them, and the more something tore him up inside, the harder he worked to hide it. 

"It wasn´t about you," Harry added, as an afterthought. 

A short wave of guilty relief passed over her. "I didn’t think it would have been," she lied. 

Another short silence. 

"Harry, please," she said. 

His eyelids lifted slowly, and he looked at her, his irises darkening. "I’ll just tell you that it was something really, really terrible," he said. "Something I won´t forget. Ever. Something unforgivable." 

She shook her head. "You have to forgive him, Harry." 

"Why?" 

"Because whatever it was he said, he was just trying to save your life. And he must have known you´d hate him for it. Can´t you understand how hard it must have been for him to make that sacrifice?" 

"You’re defending him?" 

Hermione set her chin. "Would you rather I didn’t tell you what I really thought? Would you rather I didn’t tell you when you were wrong?" 

"He could have done it some other way." 

"What other way? Anything that would get you that angry would make you hate him, there’s no way around that." 

Harry was silent. He looked strained; the skin of his face seemed to be pressing back against the bones. 

"Harry, he would never hurt you on purpose. Not like that. I mean sure, he´ll jab at you and he´ll try to unsettle you and part of that is because he doesn´t even really understand how he feels about you, only that you mean something to him, but he doesn´t know what. It doesn´t fit into any recognizable category of experience for him. He´s never had a brother, Harry. He´s never even really had a friend. Not someone who could match him intellectually. Not someone whose good opinion he´d have to exert any effort to keep. He doesn´t know how to act towards you. So he falls back on being sarcastic, or nasty, and then when he is kind, you don´t trust that kindness, and you throw it back at him. Come to think of it, he´s actually pretty patient with you." 

"Patient?" Harry spluttered, staring at Hermione with a disbelief so huge it was almost funny. "Malfoy?" 

"There you go again, calling him Malfoy," said Hermione serenely. "What’s the point? Can´t you say his name? He´s going to be related to you--" 

"I am not related to Malfoy! He is not a part of my family!" 

"But in a way, Harry, he is. What do you think family is? People who are tied to you, and you don´t get to choose who they are, and you can´t change them and you have to live with them and you just have to love them anyway." 

Harry looked at her sideways and she realized how inapplicable this was to his own upbringing. She bit her lip. 

"It’s a bit much," he said flatly, "asking me to love Malfoy." 

"Well, you could start off just by using his first name, and work from there." 

Harry look mutinous. "He calls me Potter." 

"Yes, he does." Hermione tilted her head up, and, to Harry's surprise, kissed him lightly on the temple. "Because if anything between you two is going to change, you’re going to have to be the one to change it. You’ve got the advantage over him, Harry. You’ve had friends. You know how to treat them. He doesn´t. He just reacts instinctively. If you treat him like a friend, he´ll be the best friend you ever had. And if you treat him like your worst enemy, then that’s what he´ll be." 

"He doesn´t think of me as a friend," said Harry truculently, but Hermione could see the stubbornness crumbling away behind his eyes, leaving a clouded anxiety that she could read as easily as she could always read his expressions. 

"No," she said, gently, "maybe not. You’re less a friend in his mind than you are the better part of himself." 

Harry looked down at her. And she reached over, and took the Epicyclical Charm out of his hand. She felt its weight in her palm, so familiar, and so light for what it was - the essence of a human life, made manifest. She had grown so used to its pressure around her throat that for the past few days she had woken up reaching for it, startled and bereft to find that it was not there. Now she unclasped the chain, and looked at Harry. 

He bent his head, and she fastened the chain around his neck, dropping the Charm down into his shirt. "That’s a lot of responsibility," he said, staring down at it. 

"Not for you," said Hermione. "It’s just...what you are." 

*** 

Ginny stood frozen, Invisibility Cloak wrapped around her, looking at Draco. For a moment, when she had first come in, she almost turned around and left, wanting to talk to him, and not wanting it. It seemed like every time she saw him these days he looked different: another step away from his known and recognizable self. In the cell, he been so cold, removed and frozen she had hardly been able to look at him. She had expected to find him alone the same way, but instead he looked faintly ... relieved, as if some burden had been taken away from him. He slumped as if quite relaxed in the armchair before the billowing red-gold fire, which itself laid a tawny glow over everything in the room, including Draco, turning his silver hair blond, warming his pale skin to gold. 

She let the Invisibility Cloak slide down around her feet, and waited for him to see her. 

He didn’t. At least, he didn’t seem to. He continued staring into the fire as if hypnotized. She took another step towards him, and another. She was close enough to reach out and touch his arm when he swung around, gray eyes snapping open, fixed on her face. 

She held out her hand to him. "Draco?" 

The glass he had been holding fell out of his fingers. It hit the floor without breaking, and rolled into the fire. Ginny stared after it, blinking, not wanting to look at his face. 

He did not look glad to see her. He looked horrified. "Ginny?"  

She could feel her heart pounding in her throat. "Are you all right?" she ventured. 

He simply stared at her, still with the same stunned, frozen expression. Finally, he laughed. She was, briefly, taken aback. Surely even Draco didn’t see anything funny in their current situation. "You came after me," he said, and there was now a hard edge of anger to his voice, although his mouth still smiled. "Isn´t that cute. In a stupid sort of way." 

She felt something inside her shrink. "You’re not glad to see me." 

"No. Did you really think I would be?" 

She raised her chin. "Yes." 

"Why? If you met your best friend in Hell, would you be pleased to see them?" 

Unsure what he meant, Ginny stared at him, feeling a chill pass over her. 

He stretched out a long leg, and shoved one of the smaller footstools towards her. "Well, if you aren´t going to go away, why don´t you sit down and have a drink with me. We can hang out. Tell jokes. Wait for the apocalypse." 

"Jokes?" Ginny echoed faintly. 

Draco leaned his head back against the chair. The firelight threw the hollows under his eyes into relief, the angle of his cheekbones, painting his face with its own colors of gold and darker gold. Making him almost hurtfully beautiful to look at. Certainly, something inside her hurt. "Sure. Jokes. For instance, how many Malfoys does it take to change a lightbulb?" 

She stared at him as he held up a finger. 

"Just one. But in the good old days, a hundred servants would change a thousand lightbulbs at our slightest whim." He grinned mirthlessly, sliding down in the chair. "One of my father’s, that one. Maybe you have to be a Malfoy to think it’s funny." 

Ginny wrinkled up her nose. "You’re drunk," she said, suspicion crystallizing into certainty. 

"I am not," he said in injured tones, brushing back the silver-fair hair that was falling into his eyes. "I’ve only had four Mai Tais and they haven´t afflicted me at all." 

"You are," she snapped. "Look at you. You haven´t even asked me how I got here." 

"That would presuppose an alternate universe in which I cared." 

"I used a Time-Turner," she said shortly. "It’s a long story. We came through time into the adamantine cell to get you and Harry." 

"Only," he said softly, "I wasn´t in the cell." 

"Oh, yes. You were." 

He sat back. The lovely lazy half-lidded eyes looked up at her thoughtfully. "You were there? Just now?" 

She nodded. 

"You said we," he remarked. It was a question. 

"I came with Ron. And - Hermione," she added, a bit reluctantly, knowing the effect this might have on him. She saw the pupils of his eyes dilate slightly, his hand tensing on the edge of the chair. But other than that, his reaction was minimal. "We were under the Invisibility Cloak." 

"Really." There was a secretive faintly wicked inner brilliance to his eyes that unnerved her. "An invisible peanut gallery. And I never guessed. I must have looked fairly stupid to you." 

"No." She suppressed a shudder. "Stupid? You didn’t look that." 

"So you came to rescue Harry," he said, flatly. "Why aren´t you busy rescuing? What is this? Coffee break? Thought you´d come by and say hello?" 

"We came to rescue both of you." 

"But as you see," and he leaned back, managing to indicate with a single compact gesture of his hand the room, the fire, the empty glasses on the table, "I don´t need to be rescued. I´m just fine." 

"Just fine? You do not seem just fine to me." 

He sat forward with a sudden violence that surprised her. "Were you watching, back there in the cell? Did you see me?" 

"I saw you." 

"Did you see me slice up Harry? Your beloved Harry, who you’ve had a crush on for six years now? Did you hear what I said to him?" 

Ginny´s voice was steady. "I saw you cut him by accident. I saw you say a lot of things you didn’t mean." 

"How do you know I didn’t mean them?" 

"I just know." This, she knew, sounded unconvincing. She raised her chin defiantly. "I know more about Dark magic than you think I do. I can sense when people aren´t acting of their own free will. You weren´t." 

"Wasn´t I?" 

"Why do you keep answering me with questions?" 

"Am I answering you with questions?" 

"Now you’re just trying to annoy me," she snapped, irritably. 

"Yes, I am," he said. "And behold my success." 

She glared at him. He had sunk farther into the depths of the armchair, and was regarding her with a weary, irritable expression. 

"It’s easy to annoy me," she said. "Too easy for you. Like pulling the wings off flies. A bit like what you were doing to Harry, back in the cell." 

Now he looked away. 

"I figured it was all part of some bigger plan for you," she went on. "I could tell you were acting. But you don´t seem to have much of a plan. Unless full-time sulking factors into it somehow." 

"My current plan is to get very drunk and wait to see if Harry decides to kill me. So far I have, but he hasn´t. If that makes sense." 

Ginny understood only part of this diatribe. She made a face. "That’s your plan? That’s pathetic." 

His eyes sparked again, this time with more energy than he had displayed during the course of their entire interaction. He got to his feet, swaying only very slightly as he did so. He might be drunk, but he didn’t show it the way, for instance, Fred and George did when they crept home after drinking several bottles of Ogden´s Old Firewhiskey. He seemed to be articulating his words even more precisely, constraining himself even more tightly than he usually did. 

"I´m pathetic?" he said, his voice soft and dangerous. "I wouldn’t start that competition, Ginny. Not if I was you." He took another step closer to her, and reached out to touch her hair, winding a loose tendril around his fingers. "What did you think was going to happen when you saw me, Ginny? Did you think I’d fall into your arms, follow you home like a rescued puppy? Did you think I’d be grateful?" His hand left her hair, and touched her cheek, and shocks ran through her skin like lightning. Up close, she could smell the alcohol he had been drinking, laid over the smell of him that she remembered: spice and leather and smoke from the fire. "Maybe you have less imagination than I thought." 

She heard her brother´s voice in her head. It takes imagination to credit you with having a soul in the first place, Malfoy. 

"I don´t understand," she said. She pulled away from him, from his touch, and turned her back. It was easier when she couldn´t see his face, and she didn’t want him to see the tears in her eyes. "Are you saying you won´t come with me? I have the Invisibility Cloak - it won´t be dangerous - " 

"Dangerous," he spat. She shuddered, unable to see him she could still visualize the look on his face, his anger. "Is that what you think this is? Cowardice?" 

"That’s what it looks like." 

For a moment he was silent, and she nearly turned around. Then she felt his hands close about her upper arms, and he pulled her back against him. She felt the muscles of his chest and shoulders pressing into her back, and blades ran through her nerves where he touched her. "Let me tell you something," he hissed into her ear. "You don´t know me. You think you do, but you don´t. You don´t understand what I really am." 

"And you do?" 

"Damn right I do. I’ve seen it. You’ve heard of the Mirror of Erised? Well, Slytherin´s got another mirror just like it. Only this one doesn´t show you what you want. It shows you what you really are." He took Ginny by the shoulders, and spun her around in his arms. She stumbled backwards, and he followed her until she was backed up against the wall, Draco standing over her, still so close to her that she could feel his breath stirring her hair. "Would you want to see what I really am, Ginny? Is that something you think would interest you?" 

She spun around in his arms and met his eyes with her own steady gaze. "I don´t think it would be that bad." 

He laughed, a laughed that snapped in the middle, as brittle as an icicle. "You know what I saw in that mirror?" 

She shook her head. Her breath had gone out of her, but her eyes begged him. Tell me. 

"I saw my family. I looked in that mirror and I saw my father looking back, and his hands were covered in blood and standing behind him were generations of Malfoys, stretching back to Slytherin, who made us what we are, and all their faces were like the faces of devils. And I knew - that’s what I am. All those generations of evil have left their stain on me. Even if they aren´t my actions, it’s in my blood: dark wizardy, murder, necromancy. The blood of innocent people is on my hands. Everything good that I have ever done has been a lie -" 

"No!" She placed the palms of her hands flat against his chest, and stared at him, trying desperately to communicate some of the intensity of what she was feeling. "That’s not true! You’re not responsible for other people´s actions. Just being what you are - even if you are the Heir of Slytherin - that doesn´t make you evil." 

"It does in my eyes," said Draco, his voice very bitter. "It does in Harry´s eyes, and Hermione´s eyes. It does in the eyes of everyone with eyes. That’s exactly what it makes me." 

Ginny shook her head. "It’s not what you are that matters. It’s what you do, what you’ve done. Haven´t you done enough - haven´t you proved you aren´t like your father? Didn’t you stand up to him, didn’t you save Hermione´s life, just like Harry would have--" 

"Oh, bloody Harry!" he yelled suddenly. He was paper-white with rage, his eyes blazing with a gray and stellar fire that was frightening to see. He so rarely yelled that this was, in fact, alarming as well. "I´m not Harry! I will never be Harry! If I ever acted like him, it was only because of a spell. Can´t you get that through your head?" 

"Listen to me. Every bit of goodness in you does not come from Harry. If you don´t believe yourself, believe me. I can feel evil in people. I felt it in Slytherin when he came into our house. I never felt it from you. You’ve often been a hateful, miserable git, but you were never evil. So you can just...stop. Stop with this whole "I´m the Dark Prince of Evil" business. Because you aren´t. You’re just a person, Draco Malfoy, just a person like anyone else. And your problem isn´t that you’re evil. It’s that you’re scared. You’re always running away. You ran away from the Manor when you thought Harry and the rest of them didn’t trust you any more, and then you ran away from me when I told you to go home. You even ran away from Snape. You kept the sword because it gave you a reason to run away from Harry and Hermione and all the things in your life you can´t face, and then you tried to run away from the darkness it conjured up but you can´t, and all you’re doing is running away from yourself and falling farther and farther away from anyone who could help you. You had what you wanted, you know? A family, people who cared about you. And you ran away from it! 'Oh, I’ve got to go, I´m a danger to everyone else, I´m so evil, somebody smash me in the head already, blah blah blah.´ What a bunch of self-indulgent crap!" She poked him hard in the chest with her finger, and he actually goggled at her in astonishment. "Who says you have to sit here while these huge events you’re so excited about blow up all around you? Why don´t you fight? Because I don´t know about you, but I’d rather make a mistake and do something than be frightened into doing nothing!" 

She caught herself up short, gasping as if she´d run a marathon. What on earth had she just said? She´d been shouting - at Draco - her ears were still ringing. Astonished, she raised her face slowly and saw him, looking down at her, the oddest sort of expression in his eyes. "Draco--" her voice cracked. "I´m so--" 

--Sorry, she was about to say, but before she had a chance to say the word, before she had barely a chance even to think it, Draco caught her by the arms, pulled her forward, and kissed her hard. 

It was like lightning, striking through her. And it was nothing like the brief and icy kiss they had shared in her bedroom. Possibly from their proximity to the fire, possibly from the alcohol in his blood, possibly from something else altogether, his skin was no longer cold, but the temperature of her own burning blood. She felt the heat of his hands on her shoulders, scorching as his fingers ran down her back, burning through her dress. Her insides seemed to liquefy, transforming into to molten metal, and the heat ran through and through her, scorching her veins, turning her bones to glass. 

When he lifted his mouth off hers she felt lost, and caught at him, a short involuntary clasping at his shirt, but he had only moved to pull her closer (although, she thought, surely they couldn´t get any closer, it felt to her already as if every inch of their bodies was touching) and his hand slid somehow into the nonexistent space between them and began to fumble with the fastenings of her clothes. It was a very slight fumble, but noticeable, and rather endearing. It meant he was nervous. Good. So he should be. 

Her robe came open, and his hand slid inside and over the thin silk of the camisole she wore underneath, which provided no barrier at all to his touch. It felt to her exactly as if there were no material between his hand and her own naked skin as his fingertips slid around her body to trace her spine, the wings of her shoulder blades, the hollow at the back of her neck. It seemed suddenly extremely important that there be even less clothing between them, and with that objective in mind her hands flew to his shirt and tugged so hard at it that she had a sudden vision of herself ripping the front of his shirt away completely, leaving him standing there in nothing but the sleeves. 

That made her giggle. She let go of his shirt and giggled helplessly against his mouth, leaning into him. He pulled back a fraction, and the gray eyes looked down at her, half-lidded and sleepy and curious. "Nobody I’ve kissed has ever laughed at me before," he said, amused. 

Ginny couldn´t answer. She was still spluttering. It wasn´t that funny, and yet she couldn´t quite stop giggling. Nerves, she thought to herself. Do shut up. But it was no use. 

"Let´s see how long you can keep that up if I do this," he said, with a wicked sort of smirk, and his mouth went to her ear, and did something very interesting there that made her knees turn to water. Oh dear. Now she felt as if she were going to faint. His lips traveled down to her throat, and did something there that was even more interesting and she found that she wasn´t giggling any more, only clutching at him, her hands winding into his hair, which was impossibly fine and delicate and soft, as his mouth moved back up to hers, and all thought dissolved, or at least all ability to separate thoughts into cogent threads of consciousness. All that mattered was his mouth on hers, his heart pounding against her own, and she wanted to drown in it, wanted to drown in him, in the hard grip of his arms on her back, the softness of his mouth, the pressure of his body --- 

"´Ow long are you two planning to continue with this?" came an irritable voice from the vicinity of the bed. "Because I was trying to sleep through it, but quite 'onestly, you are making a great deal of noise and it is very embarrassing." 

Ginny felt as if someone had just doused her with an enormous bucket of ice-cold water. She leaped back from Draco with a little scream, and whipped around. 

Fleur Delacour was sitting up in the bed, the blankets tangled around her waist, although one long slender leg was visible poking out from beneath them. She wore a luminous white nightgown that had slipped partially off her shoulders, and her silver hair showered down around her like a sheet of sparkling glass. She looked astoundingly beautiful and Ginny loathed her with a passion so intense she found herself completely unable to say anything. Instead, she just gaped. 

Draco of course was under no such restriction. "Bugger," he said, with feeling. "Fleur. I’d forgotten all about you." 

"That much," said Fleur, looking imperious, "was obvious." 

Draco shook his head. Looking at him, Ginny was startled to realize she had managed to get more of his clothes off than she thought. His shirt was unbuttoned to the waist, a fact which didn’t seem to bother him at all as he stood there, gazing at Fleur irritably. "Well, you should have said something," he snapped. 

"Like what? "Voila!?´ Please. You were busy." Fleur swung her leg back and forth impatiently and the tiny silver chain around her delicate ankle glimmered in the firelight. "I thought you were partial to brunettes, Draco," she added with a glimmer of a smirk. "This is a fascinating new development. She does have the cutest little freckles. But," and she opened her eyes very wide, "Can she make you go Boom?" 

Ginny had had enough. She rounded on Fleur. "You will not talk about me like I´m not here!" 

Fleur narrowed her beautiful eyes. "I am sorry," she purred, in a voice so syrupy you could have poured it on a waffle. "I think I 'ave forgotten your name." 

"Oh!" Ginny gave a little gasp of indignation. "Of course you have. You only dated my older brother Bill for two straight years! You blonde French tart!" 

Now it was Fleur´s turn to give a little gasp of surprise. "I am not!" 

"Not what? Not actually a blonde? There’s a shocker." 

There was a faint sound from the corner. Ginny realized it was Draco, choking down a laugh, and rounded on him. "Tell me right now," she demanded, pointing her finger stiffly in Fleur´s direction, "What is she doing in your bed?" 

Draco wiped the smirk off his face, but his eyes were dancing. "Well, at the moment she just appears to be sitting there. Why? What does it look like to you?" 

"To me," said Ginny between clenched teeth, "it looks like you’ve been having it off with Mademoiselle Yo-Yo Knickers over here. Which is fine, of course. You can do whatever you like. But you could have at least told me we had an audience!" These last words came on a high-pitched scream. 

Draco seemed unperturbed. He had set to work buttoning his shirt in a leisurely fashion. "I forgot," he said. 

"You forgot?" 

He shrugged. "I forgot." 

"I hate you," she said. 

"No you don´t," he said, and smirked the cocky smirk that previously, she had wanted to hit. 

She pointed her wand at him instead. "Sobrietus!" she snapped. 

*** 

Flying seemed to calm the anxious Buckbeak. Having taken off into the air, he seemed able to ignore the presence of Lupin on his back, and responded to Sirius´ reassuring caresses with faint clucks that could only be interpreted as affectionate. 

He tensed again, however, when they reached a dark stretch of forest. Lupin took a deep breath. The sight of the forest stirred within him memories of being Called; memories that weren´t really memories at all, but more primal than that. He knew the forest, knew the paths through it, knew, as he reached forward to tap Sirius on the shoulder, where they needed to descend to find the gray-towered castle surrounded by thickly leaved trees. 

Chirruping with anxiety, Buckbeak allowed himself to be encouraged to land just inside the walls that surrounded the castle. As soon as Sirius and Lupin had been dismounted, he took off again into the air, wings pumping vigorously as he vanished over the treetops. Sirius smiled wryly and touched the copper whistle around his neck. "I guess he doesn´t much like this place, either." 

Lupin turned his attention to their surroundings. They were standing just inside the high gray walls that surrounded Slytherin´s castle. Without ever having been there before, Lupin had felt a stabbing sense of recognition as they approached, as if he revisited a location previously seen in a dream. The high walls were familiar, as was the overgrown garden that surrounded the castle proper. The sky overhead was pearl-blue, streaked with the faint violet afterimages of sunset. 

Sirius tipped his head back and glanced around. "So what do we do now?" 

Lupin shrugged. "This is as much outside my experience as it is yours. Why ask me?" 

"Because. You're a problem solver. Your one of these people who will pick up a garden hose that's gotten all tangled up and spend an entire day untangling it. You like this sort of thing." 

"No, I don´t." 

"Yes, you do." 

"I do not." 

"Yes, you do. Sometimes I try to picture you sitting on a beach with absolutely nothing to do."  

"And?"  

"And, the picture always ends with your head exploding." 

Lupin threw up his hands. "I wish you didn’t know me so well." 

"We’re old souls. Get used to it," Sirius grinned. 

"I was only saying." Lupin returned his attention to the castle and its environs. The black walls were smooth and towered above them, the few visible windows so very high up that there was no chance of climbing up to them. The only entrance he could see into the structure was the set of huge, intricately carved bronze front doors. "Sirius. How are we going to get in? We can´t just walk up to the front door and knock." 

"Oh, yeah?" 

Lupin glanced at him. Sirius had that look in his eye. That "Who says I can´t ride my motorcycle on school grounds?" look. That "Who says I can´t rappel down the side of the Astronomy Tower using Toothflossing Stringmints?" look. That "Who says I can´t walk right up to the front door and knock?" look. 

Sirius walked up to the front door, and knocked. 

Lupin raced after him. He wasn´t sure exactly why, but he´d had some practice in preventing Sirius from getting killed before. If necessary, he felt he could do it again. 

The door swung open, without the loud ominous creaking one might have expected from such a very imposing-looking entrance. A tall, hooded creature stood in the entrance, swathed in long gray robes. 

Lupin saw Sirius go white, before apparently realizing that it was not, in fact a dementor. It wasn´t tall enough, and the hands that reached from the sleeves of its gray robes were long and spatulated, not scabbed and rotting. "I am the Guardian of the Door," it said importantly, straightening its narrow shoulders. "What do you want?" 

He opened his mouth to say something, but Lupin cut him off. 

"I´m Remus Lupin," he said. "I´m a werewolf, and it’s, er my first time here." He paused. "I was Called here," he added, as clarification. 

"Yes, very interesting." The creature waved a long, grayish hand at them irritably. "Didn’t you read the sign?" 

Lupin and Sirius craned their necks to look where it indicated. A bronze plaque was affixed to the stonewall, to the left of the door. It read Dark Creatures Being Called: Please Use Side Entrance. 

"Oh," said Lupin, grabbing at Sirius´ arm, and dragging him back from the door. "Sorry. We´ll go around the side." 

"See that you do," sniffed the creature, and slammed the doors shut. 

The side entrance was much more modest. A tall, arched doorway with an intricately carved architrave was half-hidden by vines and creepers. Sirius pushed them aside and knocked. 

A moment later, the door was opened by a tall woman in the long gray robes that seemed to be the uniform of Slytherin´s minions. However, hers were much more tight fitting, showing off an impressive hourglass figure. She was quite tall, nearly as tall as Sirius, and long, sheet-straight black hair fountained down around her, reaching past her waist to her knees. Her eyes were large and very dark, her lips blood red, her teeth white and even. She smiled when she saw Lupin and Sirius. "Well, hello there," she purred. "Did you just come by to say hello, or have the man-eating trolls finally found a restaurant that delivers?" 

Sirius seemed to be busy putting his eyes back in, and had nothing to say. Lupin shouldered him aside. "I´m Remus Lupin; I´m a werewolf," he said. "I´m answering the Call." 

She raised two delicate dark eyebrows curiously. "Most of the werewolves arrived days ago," she pointed out. 

"I got sidetracked." 

"Sidetracked?" 

"Sidetracked," repeated Lupin firmly. "Are you the Guardian here? Is there someone we should be speaking to?" 

"You can speak to me. I´m on watch. My name is Raven." There was a bright spark that might have been suspicion, or could have been something else, as she ran her gaze over Lupin, and turned to Sirius. "And you are?" 

"I´m -- " Sirius began. 

"He´s a vampire," said Lupin quickly. "It took us a while to get here because we could, uh, only travel at night." 

She looked at Sirius with interest. "You’re a vampire?" 

"He´s called William the Bloody," said Lupin, embroidering. "He´s quite well-known for his viciousness and his, um...bloodthirstiness." 

"Both of you are Human-Born? That’s unusual. And a vampire and a werewolf travelling together...well, I suppose you could keep a lookout for crosses and stakes and he could protect you from silver. Still, it seems impractical." She leaned against the doorjamb, inhaling with great effect. "Does your vampire friend talk? Because I have to ask you both the Questions." 

"The Questions?" Sirius echoed, snapping to life. 

"There are three. The first would be 'What manner of Dark creature are you?´ but I guess you’ve already answered that. Then there’s 'Have you come here to be cleansed?´" 

"Cleansed?" echoed Lupin, briefly thrown off. 

"Your souls must be cleansed," said Raven severely. 

"Sure they must," said Sirius. "I’ve been thinking lately that I need a good soul-cleansing. I've been having impure thoughts like you wouldn't believe. Really lurid stuff. There was this one dream I had, where I was dancing with a bunch of house-elves in luminous tights -" 

"Your souls must be cleansed of humanity," corrected Raven, staring at Sirius as if he´d come from another planet. 

Lupin stepped in front of him. "Vampire humor," he said hastily. "He had some bad blood in the Netherlands. He´s been a little off since then." 

She raised her eyebrows high. "And are you willing to accept the Snake Lord as your master and acknowledge the superiority of pure wizarding blood?" 

Lupin clamped a hand firmly on Sirius´ wrist. "We are," he announced. 

Without saying anything, she leaned back against the open door, creating enough space of them to pass, although not quite enough space for them to pass without brushing against her. Once they were inside, she shut the door behind them and picked up a small lantern which glowed with an intense blue light. "Follow me," she said, and started off down the hall. 

"What is she?" Sirius whispered to Lupin as they followed the rather mesmerizing sway of Raven´s hips down the hallway. "A veela? No...she´s too dark." 

"I’d guess she´s a banshee," Lupin whispered back. "And have I mentioned that when there are pretty girls around, you suck at undercover? Now shut up." 

Raven slowed down a little as they turned a corner, allowing them to catch up to her. Lupin glanced around with great interest. So this was the stronghold of Salazar Slytherin, one of the greatest Dark wizards who had ever lived, who had inspired so many imitators, like Grindelwald, Voldemort and Steve The Third, who wasn´t as successful at evil as the others, but had written some very famous self-help books. The walls were ancient stone that bore the marks of the tools used to hollow out a passageway, the ceilings beamed in dark and heavy wood. Everywhere there were serpents - not live snakes, but a clear reptilian motif: carved snakes writhed up and down the architraves, were mosaiced into the floor, adorned the gleaming bronze torch brackets. It was actually quite warm inside the castle - fires were lit in almost every room, flaring and fading as they passed, some of them large as bonfires. Warm enough for cold-blooded creatures, Lupin thought. 

They turned another corner. Raven was looking at Sirius again. "We´ll have to keep you away from the veelas," she said, cheerfully. "They´ll just eat you up. Not literally, of course. Well, not most of them." 

Sirius looked alarmed. "Why me particularly?" 

Raven poked him gently with her index finger. "Come on. Have you looked in a mirror lately? Oh. Well, no, I guess you wouldn’t have, being a vampire and all. But they do like good-looking dark-haired men." 

Sirius grinned. "I’ll have you know my friend Remus here has been quite a hit with the veelas back where we come from." 

Raven looked disapproving. "Veela-werewolf relationships never work out," she said to Sirius in a stage whisper. "Although they do have the cutest little wereveela babies. Oh look, we’re here." 

She paused in front of a large ivory door - or at least, Lupin would have thought it was ivory if any creature alive was large enough to yield such unbroken sheets of whiteness. He blinked, and the door swung partly open under Raven´s touch. She glanced at him. "You go here, for the Testing." 

"But--" he turned to look at Sirius. 

Raven looked annoyed. "What is it with you two? Can´t you be separated for a minute?" she snapped. "We are segregated here - werewolves separated from veelas, banshees separated from trolls. Unless you really want to bunk with the dementors?" 

Lupin glanced towards the half-open door. "That room is full of werewolves?" he demanded, wondering if this meant, by extension, that Sirius would soon have to cope with a room full of vampires. 

"You say that like it’s a bad thing," said Raven, and prodded him inside. He barely had a chance to glance at Sirius before the door shut between them, cutting his friend off from view. 

*** 

Draco sat down very hard in the chair by the fire and clutched at his head. The faint blurring of his vision and the pleasant sensation of drifting were gone, replaced by a pain that felt as if a small mountain troll had taken up residence in his head and had just decided to add on a second story and perhaps a nice bay window. "Owww," he said, gingerly touching his face and looking at Ginny accusingly. "Why´d you do that?" 

"You were drunk," she said severely, putting her wand away in her pocket. Anger was rising off her in shimmering waves like the heat from a mirage; her small, freckled face was glowing pink and her round lower lip was trembling. 

"I must have been," he said shortly, thinking that he had to have been quite drunk to forget that Fleur was still asleep in the bed. 

Ginny´s face crumpled. Draco looked at her in surprise for a moment, before realizing how what he said must have sounded. He bolted to his feet, forgetting the pain in his head. "Ginny--" 

"Shut up." She jerked away from his reaching hand, her eyes suspiciously bright. "Don´t touch me." 

Draco threw up his hands in exasperation. "Look--" 

But at that moment Fleur created a disturbance by suddenly, without so much as a sound, falling off the bed in a dead faint. 

Draco darted forward just in time to keep her head from hitting the stone floor. He caught her up in his arms, deposited her back on the mattress, and bent over her, his heart hammering unpleasantly. "Fleur?" 

Her head rolled back on his arm, her eyes still closed, their lids bluish. 

"Fleur!" He touched the back of his hand to her forehead, found it cold and clammy. At least she was still breathing, her chest falling in a rapid, shallow motions. 

A second later Ginny was at his side, pushing him away. She bent over Fleur with her wand, whispering something Draco couldn´t hear. There was a bright flash of light, and Fleur jumped, her eyes flying open. Ginny stood up and backed away as Fleur´s eyes filled with tears. 

"What 'as happened?" she demanded, struggling to sit up. 

Somewhat reluctantly, Draco leaned forward to help her into a sitting position. He could feel Ginny´s gaze on them both. "You fainted," he said. 

She reached out and clutched at him. I´m dying. 

Draco jerked back. What are you doing? He can hear us. 

Draco. No. He can´t. He doesn´t have his full powers yet - won´t have them until the Orb is opened. He cannot hear you talking to me, or to Harry. I know you don´t want to believe me, but please, if you have any trust left in you at all - please believe this. 

He believed her. For the first time since he had realized her betrayal of them, he believed her, not lastly because he knew that nobody could lie while they spoke this way. He was aware of Ginny looking daggers at them both, and knew it must look like he and Fleur were gazing silently into each other´s eyes. Couldn´t be helped, though. 

I can help you, said Fleur. Please let me. I want to. I know things. I can tell you - 

She broke off, and, as she looked over Draco´s shoulder, her eyes widened. He whipped around to see what she was staring at, and saw that the door to the bedchamber was open, and one of Slytherin´s servants was standing there, gaunt and silent in gray, hooded robes. 

He spun around immediately, his heart hammering against his ribcage - but Ginny was gone. She must have concealed herself with the Cloak. Clever girl. 

He raised his head, and straightened up, drawing arrogance and poise around himself like a cloak of his own. His eyes narrowed as he looked at the servant. "What are you doing here?" 

"I come with a message," said the servant, gazing at Draco. 

"I’d really rather have some more Mai Tais," said Draco. 

"The Snake Lord says you are to have no more beverages," said the servant in humorless tones. "He wishes to see you. I am to bring you. Come." 

Draco glanced back at Fleur, and the blank space that was (hopefully) Ginny. He reached down and grabbed his cloak up off the floor. "All right. Let´s go." 

The servant led Draco to a room he had not seen before. It was high ceilinged, and the walls seemed to have been hollowed out of one giant block of stone. There were no windows, and the walls were lined with shelves holding books and a variety of magical and beautiful objects. There seemed no reason behind their selection or the design of the room. Grimoires of Dark Magic sat side by side with books on household charms and spells. An Egyptian cat of clean and elongated lines contrasted with an ornate red, black and gold Russian icon. A miniature painting of a knight on horseback hung above the desk where Slytherin sat, his hands crossed in front of him. He sat in shadow, so that Draco could barely see his face. 

The servant let himself silently out, closing the door behind him. Draco came to stand in front of the desk, his hands in his pockets, feeling awkward. His head was pounding rhythmically. "You wanted to see me?" 

Slytherin looked up at him, and didn’t smile. Not that Draco would have expected him to. "I did." 

"Why?" said Draco, feeling suddenly twelve. 

"Why do you think?" 

Draco hesitated. "Look," he said finally. "You don´t ask me a question unless you already know the answer. So let´s just pretend you asked me, I didn’t know the answer so I lied, you caught me, you told me off, and now we can cut right to the point. Why did you want to see me?" 

"Do you ever worry," said Slytherin, pushing his chair back from the desk and standing, "that with such a sharp wit, you will one day cut yourself on its edge?" 

"I have enough to do worrying about being cut up by real sharp edges, thanks." 

Slytherin got up from his desk and walked around to stand by Draco. Draco flinched back as Slytherin´s hand came up and landed on his shoulder. "Come over here by the light," said the Snake Lord, and Draco followed him reluctantly to the fire, where Slytherin stopped, his hands on Draco´s shoulders. "Raise your eyes to me," he said. 

Draco raised his eyes, and saw, with a dread near to revulsion, his own face reflected in Slytherin´s eyes, inches away. The Snake Lord held him there like that for a moment, searching Draco´s face with his eyes. Draco glanced away, desperate to look at anything else, and his gaze swept over Slytherin´s desk. There were heaps of blank parchment there, stacks of Dark Magic books, and next to the books... 

A wave of nausea washed over him. In between one stack of books and another, lay a sword. Or, part of a sword. The blade, to be precise. Long and shimmering, the color of moonlight on water, as long as the blade of Draco´s sword and with the same groove running down the middle. Only this sword didn’t end in a hilt. It ended in a lump of bloody tissue that was only somewhat recognizable as a section of a human wrist. 

Without being able to help it, a gagging sound escaped from his throat. 

Slytherin turned and looked over his shoulder. His eyes lit on the blade, and he smiled. "You recognize that," he said. 

Draco nodded reluctantly. "Last time I saw it, it was part of Wormtail." 

"The Living Blade turned out to be more useful than the servant it was attached to," said Slytherin, reaching out to run a hand along the blade. He lifted it briefly, watching the light run down its surface like water, then put it down. "Do you know, Draco, how a Living Blade is made?" 

Draco shook his head. "No, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me." 

"Even I do not know all the secrets of fashioning such an item. But I know that the blades, after cooling, are thrice-washed, in the tears of a phoenix, in human blood, and then in the blood of unicorns." 

Draco felt himself jerk so violently that he almost expected his heart to stop. Slytherin´s eyes fastened on him again. 

"You don´t like that," he said. "What part of it? The unicorn blood? Unicorn blood is very useful. It can prolong life, even save it." 

"Then why don´t you give some to Fleur?" said Draco, between his teeth. 

"The time will come soon when I no longer need her," said Slytherin. 

"And will there be a time when you no longer need me?" 

"That depends on you. What have you being doing lately, Draco? Sulking in your room and drinking enough for a regiment, at least according to your servant. You seem to be able to hold your liquor, which is certainly an estimable quality, but not what I was looking for when I made you the general of my armies." 

"What were you looking for? I haven´t got any experience to speak of. I haven´t even got any experience not to speak of." 

For a moment Slytherin just looked at him, steadily. He did not seem angry, which was something of a change of pace. "When I was your age, I was eager to experience battle. I assumed you also would want to see how a war was fought, very badly." 

Draco refrained from replying that if Slytherin's plan was to fight a war very badly, then he couldn't see why the Snake Lord had any use for a general in the first place. "It's just..." 

"It's just what?" 

"The world isn´t like it was when you were...first alive. There are different weapons, different laws, even magic has evolved, changed -" He broke off, not sure why on earth he was telling Slytherin this. 

"I count upon that," said Slytherin, nodding. "They have forgotten me. I am a legend now, not real, not a threat. When I fall upon them with my army, they will have no means with which to resist me. It will make my earlier accomplishments pale by comparison. Those like you and will live forever. And the thousands who were murdered to buy that immortality will be a monument to our greatness." 

"Murder. You say it like it’s nothing." 

"Muggles. Mudbloods. Those who resist. Only they will die." 

"Everyone will resist. It’s not like it was in the old days. Nobody in the wizarding world expects to be ruled. Not anymore." 

"If everyone resists, everyone dies." 

"Why don´t you just kill me?" Draco demanded, raising his chin. "What do you need me for that you have to keep me alive when you know -" 

"That you aren´t to be trusted? You cannot fight me. It would be impossible." 

"What do you need me for?" 

"The Prophecy states that I shall rise to power with my descendant at my side, and that together we will bring destruction and chaos to the wizarding world. Now, prophecies are not immutable. I know that. But when I built the line that resulted in your birth, mixing my blood with the blood of creatures I fabricated out of elements of dark magic, I created something unique. I had always intended this moment. When I have opened the Orb, when the bargain is fulfilled, then I will make you my Source. And when that happens, I will command such powers, I will do such things, that I will be the terror of the earth." 

Slytherin´s eyes were glowing with a weird black light. Draco almost couldn´t bear to look at him. "Aren´t you afraid?" Draco asked, his voice unsteady. 

"Afraid of what?" 

"I don´t know." Draco looked down at his shoes. "Retribution." 

"No." Slytherin said. "I am afraid of nothing." 

"No one is afraid of nothing. There must be something..." Draco said, not impressed, but horrified. To lack fear in such a degree seemed to him an entirely inhuman quality, like lacking a capacity for wonderment or surprise. 

"No. Fear is born from caring. I care for nothing." 

"Have you never loved anything?" 

"No. I have never loved anything, person nor place nor object. Even Rowena was only a part of myself." He turned his eyes on Draco. They shone in the darkness like a cat´s. "Love is a sickness. Cure yourself, or I will cure you." 

Draco looked down at the floor, a finger of cold sliding up his spine. Love is a sickness. He had thought that himself, lying awake at night in the Slytherin dungeon those last weeks of school, staring up at the ceiling, feeling as if a heavy weight were pressing against his chest. Wondering if it was possible to feel so terrible and continue living. Guilty that thoughts of losing Hermione actually crowded out the thoughts of his father behind bars, which was what he should have been thinking about, but couldn´t. Knowing that he was being stupid, childish, that people loved in their lives over and over, their hearts broken and reformed, yet afraid anyway that he would be the exception, that he, of all people, might have finally encountered something he could not buy or ignore or ridicule away, that something had actually happened to him from which he would never recover. And they had not gone away, those feelings. That he knew now that part of this had to do with Slytherin´s rising, that some of the emotions that surged and broke inside him had their birth in a bloody thousand-year-old history, almost didn’t matter. Pain is pain, however arcane its origin. 

Reality came to him with a jolt, and he started, alarmed that Slytherin had said anything that struck a chord in him. He swallowed hard, and glanced up. And saw that the door to the room was open, and a servant was standing there, speaking with Slytherin. Apparently he had been there for a few moments at least, for they appeared to be in the middle of a discourse. 

"--finished testing the blood you gave us, Master," the creature was saying. "It is clean of charms and spells, although our results are not without interest. Would you like to come and see?" 

Slytherin nodded. "Yes, I would." He turned to Draco. "Wait here for me." 

Once Slytherin was gone, Draco was able to relax very slightly. He began to examine the shelves of books, arranged in no particular order, most of which seemed to deal with the Dark Arts. Slytherin had copies of Epicyclical Elaborations of Sorcery, The Necronomicon, How to Raise Demons and the Dead, and something called The Handbook for Evil Overlords, which didn’t look as if it had been read much. At random, Draco picked up a book entitled The Dragon Glass, which fell open to an illustration of red dragons in flight. He had just begun to skim it when the door behind him opened with a soft click, and someone poked their head into the room. 

He turned and blinked. There was a woman standing in the doorway; one he recognized from his tour of the armies the previous day. Long, dark hair and an impressive figure, and the telltale upswept black eyes of a banshee. "Raven," he said slowly, plucking her name from some recess of memory. "What is it?" 

She straightened up, and walked into the room, trailed by a tall man in a black travelling cloak, who Draco recognized instantly and with an enormous, boiling shock, as Sirius. 

He barely heard Raven speaking, saying that two of the Called had arrived that morning, one of whom, a werewolf, had been sorted in with the other lycanthropes, but that this one was a vampire and that consequently there was no place for him. "We just don´t have any other vampires," she sighed, looking exasperated. "Alphabetically, I could put him with the veelas, but I don´t think that’s such a good idea, do you?" 

Draco tried to find his voice, which had temporarily deserted him. He was staring at Sirius, who he could tell was as shocked as he was, although he was doing an excellent job of hiding it. All those years of Auror training, no doubt. "Leave him here with me," he said finally, his voice coming out slightly shrill. 

Raven blinked. "Beg pardon?" 

"I said leave him here. I want to ask him something." 

"But, Master -" 

"I said leave him!" 

She jumped in surprise, then nodded, and left, quietly shutting the door behind her. Heart pounding like a jackhammer against his ribs, Draco turned to face Sirius. 

*** 

Ginny watched as Fleur slowly sat up in bed. She was paper-white and her breathing was just beginning to steady, but she seemed to be improving. She glanced over at where Ginny stood, wrapped in the Invisibility Cloak. 

"It is very rude to be invisible when people know you are there," she said coolly. 

Ginny let the cloak slide down to her feet and glared. "It is very rude to pretend you don´t know people´s names when you perfectly well do," she snapped. 

Fleur suddenly smiled. "It 'as been nearly two years since I last saw you," she said. "You 'ave changed. A great deal." 

Ginny hesitated, not sure if this was going to turn into a compliment or an insult. 

"The Ginny Weasley I knew would not 'ave told off Draco Malfoy in such uncertain terms. I was...impressed." 

"You were jealous," said Ginny, rather nastily. 

"I was not. I was a bit afraid I was going to be treated to more of a floor show than I wanted. I am not a voyeur." 

Ginny blushed furiously. "I wouldn’t - we wouldn’t have -" 

Fleur leaned back on the cushions and grinned. "Are you quite sure of that?" 

Ginny set her chin stubbornly. "He wouldn’t have. He doesn´t really want me." 

Fleur gave an unladylike snort. "That’s not what it looked like." 

"He was drunk," said Ginny shortly, hating herself for the vulnerability she heard in her own voice. She deserved nothing better, she thought, for being stupid enough to get involved with Draco in the first place. Not that they were, per se, involved. For being stupid enough to allow herself to have feelings for him, then. Of course, feelings couldn´t be controlled. She tried to think back - was there some particular moment that her old hatred had been swept away as if by a fire, and this new feeling had been born out of the ashes? It wasn´t the same feeling she had had for Harry, comprised of sincere admiration and liking. This was more basic, primal even, as if it grew out of some very deep place in her heart that could be neither controlled, nor comprehended, nor solaced in its disappointment. To her horror, she felt tears welling up in her eyes. 

Fleur reached out, and put an arm around her shoulder. "There is no reason to cry." 

Ginny opened her eyes very wide, willing the tears to go away. "You don´t understand." 

"I do understand," said Fleur, and patted her shoulder. "It’s Draco. 'E´s special." 

Ginny snorted, the tears fading. "And by special you mean sexy. Don´t you?" 

Fleur shrugged. "That is a fact. That boy will never have to worry about being lonely. He probably gets anonymous snog sessions in the mail. He could have any girl." 

Ginny smiled weakly, and poked at a pillow with the toe of her shoe. "Except the only one he really wants," she said, her voice sounding sadder than she had meant it to. "He can never have her." 

Fleur looked at her closely. When she spoke again, her voice was gentle. "Draco is only sixteen," she said. "It’s a little early for 'only´ and 'never´ and all that." 

"Not if you’re Draco Malfoy," said Ginny firmly. "But you probably know that." 

Fleur settled back among the pillows. "We 'ave only ever kissed, and that is all." 

Ginny´s heart bumped against her chest, but she didn’t change expression. "You mean you haven´t - you didn’t --?" 

Fleur shook her head. 

"And when did all this restraint take place?" Ginny snapped. 

"It was only two kisses, and I don´t think 'e wanted either of them." Fleur smiled. She had the easy confidence of a girl who knew that, for every Draco Malfoy who didn’t want to kiss her, there would be ten other men who would. "´E is not an easy one, that one. 'E 'as secrets, and much darkness; 'e could be something very special, but that is not always a lucky thing." 

Ginny hesitated. She was picturing Draco now, in her head. Sometimes when she closed her eyes and visualized him, she saw Tom instead. Tom who she had never really clearly seen, only in dreamed-of diary pages, but whose face was branded into her memory. Tom with his black hair like Harry´s, and his eyes as blue as her brothers', better looking than any boy she had ever known, and more frightening for it. All that terrible beauty rotting into evil, that clever brain fermenting into a sewer, so much more horrible for everything he could have been. 

She looked down. "Fleur," she said. "Why are you being nice to me? Harry told me what you did, but I can´t believe - was he wrong? Did you not betray them?" 

"It’s a long story." Fleur looked away, dropping his hands into her lap. "My sister," she went on, a little haltingly. "Gabrielle." 

"The youngest one? I’ve met her. Is she ill, or dying...?" 

Fleur shook her head. "No. She was born without any magic." 

"Oh." Ginny opened her mouth, then shut it again. "A Squib?" 

"Yes, that’s what it’s called 'ere." 

"Well, that’s pretty terrible, but there are worse things -" 

"Not in my family." Fleur shook her head. "If a child does not display some evidence of magical ability before the age of fourteen, they will be disowned from the family, sent to live in a Muggle orphanage. The child cannot inherit, and no one in the family can have contact with them any more." 

Ginny stared. "That’s horrible!" 

"My family is just like Draco´s. Very old, and proud of their wizarding blood. Squibs do not exist, and if they do 'appen, they are made to not exist any more." Fleur´s voice was bitter. "Gabrielle is very fragile. She 'as no magic, but she suffers from many ailments that only magic can 'elp. It is my belief that were she abandoned to live among Muggles, she would soon die." 

"Fleur..." She reached out to touch the other girl´s arm, then drew back. "But I don´t understand why..."  

"I wanted to get a source of power," said Fleur bitterly. "I thought, if I could do that, I could channel some of it towards Gabrielle. 'Elp her....I tried to get Professor Lupin to talk to me about it at school. He told me there are ways to transfer magic from very powerful objects to people. I tried to use the sword, but it would not let me keep it. But 'aving it even for a short time called the Snake Lord´s attention to me. He contacted me. Promised to 'elp Gabrielle if I would agree to be 'is Source. 'E said it would be for a brief time." 

"He lied, then," said Ginny. 

"No. 'E did not lie. It will be for a brief time. I am dying." Her eyes went to Ginny´s. "You understand, though? I thought I was 'elping my sister. You would do the same, for one of your brothers, wouldn’t you?" 

"I would," said Ginny softly. Then she paused. "Well. Possibly not Percy." 

Fleur´s smile lit up her face. She was still, even weak as she was, amazingly pretty. Ginny would have been jealous, only she felt much too awful for her to manage it. 

"I understand," said Ginny, serious again. "I don´t know if I would have done the same thing. I couldn´t bear to do anything that would hurt Harry or Draco." 

"I didn’t know. I thought 'e wanted them only to fight the manticore. I knew they could do it. Together, they are very powerful, much more so than they know. And 'Arry has killed monsters before." 

Ginny shook her head. "What would Slytherin do if he could hear you saying all this?"  

"Kill me, I am sure. It pains me to even say such things about him," said Fleur. "But 'e thinks I am weak. Not a danger. 'E is so powerful, so strong, you 'ave no idea what 'e is capable of. It would take an army to stand against him." 

Ginny felt her heart sink - then flip. "An army?" she echoed. 

"An army," said Fleur firmly. "You 'ave not seen the power 'e commands. The creatures that flock to serve 'im. There are hundreds. Thousands. And when 'e travels, more will rise and join 'im. In 'is time, he destroyed whole armies at a blow, wiped them out with lightning, drowned them in sorcerous floods. 'E once made a whole army that was rising against 'im disappear without a trace. The Ministry is not prepared for this. They cannot understand it. It is not as it was a thousand years ago, when people still believed in miracles and in true evil. They cannot be prepared for this." 

"You sound as if you’re sure he´ll win," said Ginny, her voice low and steady. 

"I am sure," said Fleur, looking towards the window. "I see no other way." 

There was a short silence. Then Ginny got to her feet, and picked up the Invisibility Cloak, and handed it to Fleur. "When Draco gets back," she said softly. "Give this to him. Tell him to take it back to Harry." 

Fleur stared. "But why? Where are you going? Don´t you need it?" 

Ginny put her hand to the Time-Turner around her throat, and shook her head. "Not where I´m going, I don´t," she said. 

"But what will Draco say when 'e comes back and you are gone?" 

"Draco," said Ginny, with satisfaction, "will be very, very annoyed," and with that, she walked out of the room. Outside the door, she leaned against it for a moment, looking up and down the corridor, her heart pounding. Then she glanced down at the Time-Turner, hesitated for a brief moment - and flipped it over. 

*** 

For a moment, Sirius just goggled. Then, he took a few steps forward across the room, grabbed Draco, and hugged him hard. He could feel how thin the boy had gotten, the bones of his shoulders poking through even the thick material of his silver cloak, and for just a moment, Draco returned the embrace, his hands gripping Sirius´ back as tightly and awkwardly as if no one had ever hugged him before, his head buried in Sirius´s shoulder. 

Then he pushed him away, and took a step back, shaking his head. "Don´t do that." 

"We thought you might be dead," said Sirius, by way of explanation, and knowing he sounded a bit like someone´s mother. 

Draco grinned without mirth. "I was. I got better." 

"Draco -" Sirius took another step forward when, to his everlasting astonishment, Draco reached behind him, and grabbed one of the long, tasselled spearlike weapons off the wall, and pointed it at him. 

"Don´t come any closer," he said. 

Sirius just stared at him, his mouth open. Once again his eyes scanned the room, this time more slowly, taking in the rich tapestries, the gleam of the firelight off the weaponry, and Draco himself, all gold and silver and black, looking as much as if he belonged there as if he were a general piece of the decoration. 

"What the hell," said Sirius, "is that? And why are you pointing it at me?" 

Draco looked down at the metal object in his hand and shrugged. "It’s a pike. Made by Giants. Strong enough to punch through a stone door. Why?" 

Sirius narrowed his eyes. "Raven said I should wait here to meet with Slytherin´s general. Is that..." 

"You’re looking at him," said Draco with a sort of desperate amusement. "Like the uniform?" 

"Not really," said Sirius. "I don´t like the uniform, your general attitude or the fact that you seem to be on buddy terms with Slytherin. What’s happened to you?" 

"What hasn´t happened to me?" Draco replied sharply. 

"And you smell like alcohol. Have you been drinking? You should know better." 

"I should know better? What about you? What are you doing here and why the hell haven´t you rescued Harry and left? Everything here is about to come crashing down. Do you even know where Harry is? Have you found him?" 

Sirius held up a hand. "No. Not yet. Remus --" 

"He´s here? Hurrah for the big reunion. Did we leave anyone at home, or did everyone come to the let´s-get-killed party?" 

"Draco--" 

Draco´s voice shot up an octave. "Harry could be dead already for all you know." 

"Not true." Sirius held out his arm, showing Draco the bracelet with its darkly glowing stone. "Vivicus charm," he said briefly. 

A little of the tension went out of Draco´s shoulders. "How did you get into the castle?" 

Sirius explained, as briefly as possible. Draco´s eyes crinkled in confusion. "A vampire?" 

He echoed. "But the Test -" 

"Yes. I heard there was a Test," said Sirius. "Raven wanted me to meet with you first." 

Draco swore, at length. Sirius was impressed. He had quite a range and fluency for someone his age, not to mention a deft hand with imagery. 

"That sounds like it would really hurt," he said gently, when Draco was done. "Assuming you could even get it to stretch that far." 

"Shut up, Sirius. Let me think." 

"I pretty much have to do whatever you want, don´t I, considering you’re pointing a pike at me. Is that really necessary?" 

"Yes. Did you say you had Harry´s Key?" 

"I did." 

"Give me the Key." Draco held out his hand. "Quickly." 

"You know," said Sirius conversationally, "if I really wanted to, I could take that pike away from you, and break your arm." 

Draco went a little paler, but kept his hand out. "I know that." 

"Maybe you might want to tell me what you want with the Key, then." 

Draco opened his mouth to reply - and stopped. Sirius heard the click as the door behind him began to open. And Draco swung the pike around -- so quickly that Sirius´ eye barely followed its movement -- and jabbed the end of it into his arm. Sirius watched in astonishment as the blood sprang up and drenched Draco´s sleeve. And Sirius stared in bewilderment, Draco, now smiling a tense and very unpleasant smile, flipped the pike around in his hand, and threw it blunt-end-first at Sirius. 

Who caught it. And stood there, staring, as Raven, coming into the room at that moment, inhaled a shocked breath and scrambled for her wand. "What’s going on here?" 

Draco clapped a hand over his bleeding arm, and assumed a furious and injured look. "Raven," he said, pointing at Sirius. "This vampire just tried to attack me." 

"Attack you?" echoed Raven (now holding Sirius at wandpoint) and Sirius, in unison. 

"Yes. He lunged at me with that pike." Draco pointed at it, and Raven, looking ashen, Summoned it to her quickly. "It is against the Law to lay hands upon Slytherin, or by extension his Heir. Such an act is punishable by death, of course." Draco raised his chin. The light from the torches turned his hair to a rather ironic silvery halo. Sirius just stared at him. His eyes said trust me, but his actions said something else again. 

"It could be blood sickness," Raven interrupted, looking concerned. "Vampires do get that sometimes. Makes them behave quite oddly." 

"That’s what I was thinking," Draco agreed smoothly. "Since there are no other vampires here we could consult, I suggest you take him down to the dungeons and keep him contained there until the sickness passes." 

Draco´s wince was almost imperceptible, but he ignored him. 

"I’ll have to take his wand from him," said Raven, her eyes bright on Sirius. "And search him." 

"Do what you have to," said Draco. "Only - don´t harm him." 

"Of course not," said Raven. "I would leave that to you, Master." 

"Thank you," said Draco, and there was a sort of desperate hysteria in his voice, although none at all in his eyes as they met Sirius´ across the room. He turned his back then, and Sirius couldn´t see his face as he said, "You´d better take him now, Raven. I have work to attend to." 

"Of course," said the banshee smoothly, and laid her hand on Sirius´ arm. He followed her without protest. 

*** 

The door shut behind Lupin with the metallic clang of a portcullis crashing down. He coughed, and looked around a little nervously. 

He was in a large, stone-arched room, whose high ceiling vanished into mist. No, he realized - it wasn´t mist, it was smoke, a cloying, sweetish smoke that filled the room with vapors. He squinted around, trying to see through the dimness. The room seemed to be designed almost like an amphitheatre, with a low, central stage sunk into the floor and ringed around with long benches piled high with beaded cushions. Sprawled on the cushions were a number of figures he couldn´t quite make out, although they were obviously human - 

--Not human, he reminded himself. Lycanthropes; other werewolves, like me. The thought was unsettling. It had been years since he had been around other wolves in any number. Twenty-five, perhaps thirty years. 

"´Lo, there." A figure evolved out of the smoke at his side. A male werewolf of about twenty-five, wearing a shocking green robe and with his short hair clipped around his head called out in an American accent. "Catch." 

Something flew at Lupin´s face. Without thinking, he plucked it out of the air and held it for a moment - it was a wandlike object with one sharp end, the other end of which was decorated with a glass bauble of some sort. It gave off a brief flash of light when he touched it, and then went dark. 

"Right, then, you’re one of us," said the werewolf, plucked the wandlike thing out of Lupin´s hand, and made it disappear into his robes. "That was the Test. You passed. Congratulations. What’s your name?" 

Lupin introduced himself, then blinked around. "Now what?" 

"Buggered if I know," said the werewolf, looking gloomy. 

"Well--who´s in charge, here?" Lupin demanded, wondering if he could weasel a glance at their plans or their battle strategy. 

"I am," replied his companion, looking even more gloom-ridden. 

"And you don´t...?" 

"Well, look what I have to work with!" The werewolf swept an arm towards the rest of the room, which Lupin was able to see a bit more clearly now. It seemed as if there were thirty or forty werewolves in the room, all of whom were recognizable only as dim shapes sitting or lounging around on the cushions, giggling and poking each other. "Bunch of apathetic, useless, longhaired cubs," the werewolf muttered. "I tell you, all the fighting spirit´s been bred out of us over the centuries. The fiercest of us were slaughtered. Look what´s left. Bunch of wimps. Hey, you got anything to eat on you?" 

"No," Lupin replied absently, still scanning the room. "You mean Slytherin - the Snake Lord just lets you loll about here like this, not doing anything? Where are your battle plans, your strategies?" 

"I wrote a few stragetic plans on the chalkboard, but nobody´s paid attention. You don´t have any food? Hippogriff Crunchies, maybe? Lamb Pops? Goat Crisps? Peanuts?" 

"I said no." Lupin squinted down at the board at the foot of the amphitheater. It appeared to be a white chalkboard on which was written in dark green ink Plan For World Domination, above a few squiggles. Also, it looked like someone had been playing noughts and crosses. "And that’s all you’ve got?" 

"Pretty much. This is our War Council. I hear the trolls are a lot better organized. You really don´t have any food? All we get here is hard-boiled eggs. I’ll take cookies." 

"No, I don´t have any -" Lupin checked himself, and reached into a pocket. He pulled out a handful of Every Flavor Beans in Flower Power flavors, checked to see if there were any purple ones (there were two) and deposited the lot into his companion´s outstretched hand. Then he turned his attention back to the room. "This doesn´t look like the setup for a War Council," he said irritably. "This looks like the setup for a poetry reading. What’s the strategy? Bore the enemy to death with free prose and herbal tea?" 

The werewolf chortled. "I like the way you think," he said. "How´d you like to be an admiral, or possibly a baron? You can help me whip these pups into shape. Plan strategy. What do you think?" 

"I think 'admiral´ is a naval term, and I´m not prepared to be a baron either. But I’ll be a general." 

He thrust out his hand towards the werewolf, not sure if that was proper etiquette but willing to risk it. After a moment, the other took his hand, and shook it. "General Lupin," he said. "Welcome to the war." 

*** 

Draco stood staring at the door to the bedroom, imagining Ginny and Fleur inside, waiting for him, sitting on the bed. They would ask him "What did he want? What happened?" and he´d have to tell them about Sirius and Fleur probably wouldn’t care, but Ginny...Ginny would hate him even more than she did already. 

He sighed and rested his head for a moment on the cool closed wood of the door. I put my father behind bars. Maybe not directly, but I let it happen. Now I’ve put my stepfather in prison, and I did it with my own hand. I meant well. But does that really matter? He heard his own voice, talking to Slytherin. You can´t do good with powers that come from Hell. 

You can´t do good. 

He pushed the door open, and walked in. He saw Fleur, sitting on the edge of the bed, and his eyes immediately flicked around the room, searching for a sign of flame-red hair, a flash of green dress. 

Nothing. She was gone. 

He whirled on Fleur. "Where is she? Where did she go?" 

"She didn’t say." Fleur shook her head. "She just left. She even left the Invisibility Cloak 'ere for you. I’d imagine she went back to 'Arry and the others. She probably didn’t want to see you, after the way you behaved." 

"The way I behaved? Oh that’s rich. Bloody buggering Hell." Draco threw himself down in a chair, glaring at her. 

"It’s not very nice to go around kissing people if you don´t mean it," said Fleur primly. 

Draco made a strangled noise. "Look who´s talking." 

Fleur looked martyred. "Men," she said. 

Draco ignored this. "It’s damn annoying," he said. "especially since I was hoping she´d come back with me." 

"Where?" 

"I’ve got to go talk to Harry." He started to get to his feet. "And I should do it as soon as possible." 

"But the Snake Lord -" 

"What he doesn´t know, won´t hurt him." 

Fleur shook her head, looking at him. "I do not understand it," she said. "Don´t you feel the pain?" 

"I feel the pain of having a hangover, if that’s what you mean." 

Fleur sat up straighter, her shoulder set, and reached down to pull up the sleeve of her nightgown, baring her arm. Draco briefly glimpsed the disfiguring scar of the Dark Mark burned into her creamy skin before she pulled the sleeve back down. "That does not 'urt you?" 

"It hurt me when he burned it into my arm. But it seems to have healed. I don´t like it. It doesn´t hurt, though." 

"Well, it should," she said. "I feel it twinge every time I speak his name. Were I to act against him, as you do, the pain would be blinding. I don´t understand how you do it."  

"Maybe it’s because you’re his Source." 

She shook her head. "The Mark connects us to 'im, as the Dark Creatures he commands are connected to 'im by the Call. It makes no sense. With the enchantments you have on you, and the added bond of the Dark Mark, there should be no way on earth you should be able to resist. In any way. It makes no sense at all. It should be impossible. 'E knows that. I know that." 

"Could be the Will-Strengthening potion," said Draco, a little absently - but he knew it wasn´t, he remembered the feeling of the potion draining away as he stood with Harry in front of the adamantine door, and then - 

Fleur looked at him doubtfully. "I don´t think you believe that." 

"It doesn´t matter what I believe," he said quickly, grabbing up the Cloak where Ginny had left it at the foot of the bed. "We don´t have time for a big ontological study of what´s going on with me. I’ve got to get to Harry and the others." 

"What’s happing to -" 

"No," he said, sharply, and saw her flinch. "You’ll forgive me," he added, a little acidly, "if I don´t tell you all my plans in detail quite yet. You’re not exactly back on my good side." 

He was at the door when Fleur spoke again. 

"Be safe," she said. 

He looked back at her, nodded, and went out. 

*** 

"Two hours," said Ron. 

It was the first thing he had said almost since they had realized Ginny was gone. He had come back to sit with Harry and Hermione at least; they sat in a line against the wall, Harry in the middle, with Hermione on one said and Ron on the other, all their shoulders touching. She could sense that Harry was happy to have Ron back with them, even if he was subdued and quiet. Harry was always a slightly different person when Ron was there, and certainly a happier one; Ron´s presence allowed him to make a certain kind of peace with the world around him that nothing else quite seemed to provide. 

"She´ll be back," said Harry, his chains rattling as he touched Ron´s shoulder. "Look, it’s not your fault." 

"Of course it isn´t. It’s Malfoy´s fault." 

"That’s the spirit," said Harry, with a half-smile. 

Ron just shook his head, leaning it back against the wall. As he did so, Hermione noticed something peculiar. She leaned forward, blinking, and then reached across Harry to touch Ron on the shoulder. He looked over at her, and she saw it again -- there was a mark on the side of his temple, just above and to the side of his eyebrow, a faint, silvery mark just where Rowena had kissed him. It looked almost like the scar of a years-healed burn, only she knew that Ron hadn´t had such a mark that morning. "Ron," she said slowly. "You don´t - you can´t - sense anything about where she might be, can you?" 

Ron looked at her as if she were barking mad. "I can´t what?" 

"Rowena said you were a Diviner," said Hermione. "I thought maybe you could divine something." 

"Well, I bloody can´t," said Ron peevishly. "I can´t just perform on demand. I can´t perform at all, as a matter of fact. Wait, that didn’t come out right." He rubbed the back of his hand across his tired eyes. "I just mean, I’ve never divined anything, I don´t really feature myself starting right now." 

Hermione sighed. "Never mind." 

Ron perked up briefly. "Unless I was divining some horrible torture for Malfoy. That I could do." 

"Oh, Ron." Hermione let out an exasperated sigh. "I for one wish he was here. He could explain what´s going on." 

"Right, because he did such a good job of explaining when he was here earlier," said Harry, although he said it without rancor. 

"I wish he´d just bloody show up too," said Ron, bitterly. "So I could punch in his face." 

The black opening in the wall swung open, and Draco came in. 

There was a short silence. 

"And now I wish I had a million galleons," said Ron, and glanced around hopefully. 

Hermione looked at him. 

"Just checking," he said. 

She turned her attention back to Draco, who was walking rapidly across the room towards them. Ginny was not with him. He was carrying his sword, unsheathed, in his hands, and his expression was so extraordinarily bleak that it nearly stopped her heart. Before she could formulate much of a thought, quick as lightning, Ron had gotten to his feet and stepped sideways to put himself between Draco and Harry. 

Draco stopped dead, and stared at him. "What are you doing, Weasley?" 

Ron crossed his arms over his chest. He didn’t need to raise his chin - he already towered over Draco - but he did anyway. "Don´t come any closer," he said. 

"Move out of the way," said Draco. 

Ron shook his head. 

"Do you want to move," Draco said, with narrowed eyes, "or do you want to find out what fine Italian footwear tastes like?" 

Ron blinked at him. "What?" 

"I think he means he´ll kick you in the face," said Hermione helpfully. 

Draco rolled his eyes. "I´m having a bad day," he said. "My threats are not what they could be. Let´s start this over. Move out of the way, Weasley." 

"No," said Ron. 

"Move out of the way, or I’ll slice off your leg and beat you to death with the boot end," said Draco. 

"Oooh, that was much better," said Hermione supportively. "Really good imagery." 

"I´m still not moving," said Ron. 

Hermione looked from Ron to Draco. Harry was behind her, she couldn´t see his expression. Draco seemed caught between surprise and bitter amusement. 

"Stand aside," he said. "I mean it." 

"Put that sword down first." 

"Weasley, we haven´t got much time. Get out of the way." 

Ron didn’t move. Draco glanced over at Hermione, who raised her eyes to his. For a moment, their gazes caught and interlocked, and she remembered that these eyes belonged to a boy her own age, and one she loved and had trusted. She had looked into them so many times and seen his own love for her, reflected back, only now it was overlaid with something else, and somehow changed. 

It was Harry who spoke next, and for the first time since Draco had come into the room. "Ron. It’s all right. Let him by." 

Reluctance tempered by confusion, Ron stepped aside, and Draco moved to stand where he had been standing. Hermione saw the bright gleam of blue light on the blade of the sword as he raised it over his head. And Harry - Harry had gotten to his knees, and held his cuffed hands out, so that the chain pulled taut between them. He was looking up at Draco, and his green eyes were steady. 

"Do it," he said. 

Draco brought the sword down, so fast and so hard that it seemed to whistle as it cut the air. It sliced down, striking the coils of adamantine chain binding Harry´s hands together, and shearing them neatly in half. They fell to the ground, not with the clanging sound of metal, but with a hissing sort of noise as of a snake shedding its skin. 

Hermione caught her breath and started forward, but a hand gripping her arm prevented her. She knew without looking that it was Ron, but not why he was holding onto her. 

Harry got very slowly to his feet, reaching out for the wall to steady himself. She saw Draco reach out as if to help him, then take his hand back quickly. Harry, who was looking down, didn’t notice. 

Ron let go of her arm. She ran forward to Harry, and put her arms around him, helping him stand up. She felt him grip her shoulder, as if standing up after so long being chained hurt him. It probably did. He stood still for a moment, as if gauging the steadiness of his legs. Then he took a quick step forward, grabbed a very surprised Draco by the front of his shirt, and shoved him hard against the wall. "All right, Malfoy. Where the hell is Ginny?" he said. 

*** 

"Look, a strip search really isn´t necessary." 

"Oh, but I think it is," said Raven, who was standing with her hands on her hips, looking at Sirius as if she really craved chocolate and he was the last Crème Brulee truffle in the box. "Now remove your clothes." 

"Not without dinner and flowers first." 

Raven looked sideways at him, and smiled. "Prisoners must be divested of their wands and other weapons, that’s the rules. You could have hidden your wand somewhere on your body. All I have to do is call out, and this room will be filled with dementors willing and eager to assist me. Therefore, you must remove your clothes, or I will bind you and remove them." 

"No, come on, I’ll just give my wand to you. Look, here it is." He held it out, and Raven took it and pocketed it, a small smile playing about her red lips. There was a certain dark hunger in her eyes that made her banshee heritage suddenly seem very apparent. Sirius felt very sorry that he had ever thought she was attractive. Perhaps this was karma. He sent out a silent apology to Narcissa, who he suddenly missed very much. 

"How do I know you don´t have two wands?" Raven demanded. "How do I know you don´t have a Lockpick Charm?" 

Before this ineluctable logic, Sirius had no response. 

"Now remove your clothes," she said. 

He began unfastening his robes, wondering how this had all happened. He was meant to be rescuing his godson, and instead he was doing a striptease for an extremely demanding banshee in a very cold dungeon. He wondered if Draco had known that his incarceration would involve nudity. Better not to think about that. He set to work on his shirt as Raven took hold of his discarded cloak and went through the pockets. She giggled at the Every Flavor Beans in Flower Power Flavors, and gazed quizzically at the Zonko´s Magical Reality Pencils and stacks of old letters. "I like you," she said, running a red-nailed finger down his bare chest in a very familiar fashion. "I will let you keep these things." 

"If you really liked me you wouldn’t make me take my trousers off," he pointed out, backing away. 

She smiled at him. "Don´t worry. I know it is very cold in this dungeon. I will not pass judgement." 

Sirius sighed, and set to work on his trousers. 

*** 

"I don´t know," said Draco, not taking his eyes away from Harry´s. "I thought she´d be here. That’s why I came. Part of the reason, anyway." 

"You don´t know?" This time it was Ron who spoke. He was pale with rage, his freckles standing out in splotches. "She went to look for you." 

"Did she find you?" put in Hermione anxiously. 

"Yeah," said Draco. "She found me." 

They all stared at him expectantly. 

"Would you let go of me?" he said to Harry, almost plaintively. "You’re ruining my shirt." 

"That is a shame," said Ron, "especially when he should really be ruining your face." 

Harry let go of Draco and stepped back. "Talk," he said, tersely. 

Draco´s eyes went to Hermione. "I was in my room. Ginny found me. I left her there with Fleur when I was summoned to talk to Slytherin. When I came back to the room, she was gone. Fleur said didn’t say where she was going, she just went." 

"And why should we believe you?" said Ron in a soft and dangerous tone. 

"You’re right, Weasley. She found me, I killed her, and then I decided to come and tell you all about it because I hadn´t yet reached my personal abuse quota for the day and I thought you could help me fill it." 

"Well, I think you’re lying," said Ron. "That’s my opinion." 

Draco looked as if he had reached the end of his endurance. "That’s your opinion? Well, how would you like me to put my fist in your opinion?" 

"Enough!" said Harry sharply. "You two, either have a proper fight, or shut up and get along. But this...this... sarcasm rally is not helpful. Ron, he´s got no reason to have come here if he is responsible for Ginny being missing. Malfoy, start talking in the next five seconds or I will make you swallow that sword." 

Draco grinned. It was a fatigued sort of grin, but a real one. "Well, since you ask nicely," he said. The grin faded quickly, and his eyes darkened to slate. "She left this," he said, and held out the folded silvery square of the Cloak. Harry took it without comment. "This is a very bad time for her to be wandering around the castle," Draco added. "Events are on the move. Part of the reason I came here was because I was looking for Ginny. And part of the reason that I need to find her is that, if what she told me is true, she was the way that you all got here. And she´s the only way you can leave. And you need to leave now." Now he was looking at Harry. "Slytherin wants you dead," he said bluntly. "I stalled him and kept him from killing you; I told him there was some kind of charm on your life. That’s why he wanted your blood. Now that he´s examined it, he´ll know I was wrong, or lying, and he´ll come for you. You have to get out of here before that happens." 

Hermione felt as if her blood had turned to ice water. "You got into the cell," she said to Draco. "Can´t you let us out?" 

He shook his head, avoiding her eyes. "I can let you out, or Ron out. But the wards are charmed to recognize Harry as the prisoner here. If he leaves, the alarms will go off like a rocket. We´ll be deluged with dementors within seconds." 

"Then Harry stays here," said Ron, firmly. "I’ll go look for Ginny." 

"I’ll come with you," said Hermione quickly. 

"Hermione, no," said Harry, even more swiftly. He had gone quite pale. 

She turned back to him. "Harry, it makes sense. The Lycanthe can feel the presence of other powerful magical objects. It´ll be attracted towards the Time-Turner. It´ll help us find Ginny, but it won´t work for Ron, so I have to take it and go with him. Otherwise he´d just be wandering around lost, and we´d never get you out of here. We´ll take the Cloak; it´ll be safe." 

"There are dozens of powerful magical objects in this castle -" Draco began. And stopped. 

"But these two were meant to be used together," said Hermione quietly. "I don´t want to go wandering around here any more than Ron does. But it makes sense." 

Draco looked down at the floor; Ron looked set and determined. She knew he would go after Ginny even if she didn’t come. She turned to look at Harry - and found him staring at her intently. 

"I need to talk to you, Hermione," he said, in a fierce, low tone. "Now." 

She let him take her hand and draw her across the room, around the side of the wardrobe, where there was a modicum of privacy. Of course, she could still hear Draco´s voice, telling Ron to take the Cloak, and he´d give him some instructions on how to find his way around the castle. "Draco Malfoy, deigning to help us," Ron replied, irritably. "Finally I can die happy." 

"That could be arranged," replied Draco, ice in his tone. 

"Listen, Malfoy. You can take your instructions and you can shove them right up your--" 

"Hermione, are you listening?" Harry said. 

She turned and raised her face to his, and caught her breath. He was very white, as white as he had been that day when they had stood in front of the Mirror of Erised and he had told her he loved her. She knew how hard that had been for him, sure as he was at the time that what he had to say was too little and too late. She wondered what equivalently terrible thing was weighing on his mind now; or perhaps it was just the danger they were in... 

She reached out and took his hands, glancing down at them as she did. Harry´s hands, so familiar and so known, even when he was eleven and scrawny and small, he had had these delicate beautiful articulated hands. They were very like Draco´s hands, the same tapering fingers, the index a little longer than the others, the same scar on the palm, but they were uniquely Harry´s -- hands that passed her quills in Potions class, that carried her books, that reached to catch the Snitch, that held her tightly in the dark. 

"I don´t want you to go," he said, with a sudden and surprising intensity. "I have a bad, bad feeling about this, Hermione. I want you to stay here." 

"I have to go. Ginny -" 

"I know." He drew her towards him by her wrists. "I know, but--" 

"I’ve hardly ever seen you be frightened," she said, with a wobbly sort of smile. "This isn´t the first time we´ve ever been in danger, we´ve looked death in the face before, it’s been worse than this -" 

Harry´s hands tightened on hers. "There are worse things than just dying," he said, his voice low and fierce. "I couldn´t stand it - if something happened to you - and I had to wonder, if you were somewhere, waiting for me to - to -" 

"Harry!" Having no idea what he was talking about, but responding without thought to the pain in his voice, Hermione almost tripped over herself in her hurry to get near him. She flung her arms around him and hugged him hard, and he brushed a hesitant hand over her hair. 

"I’ve always loved your hair," he said. 

"Oh surely not," said Hermione, before she could help it. "You and Ron used to say it looked like I had a very angry cat on my head!" 

Harry choked. "Yes, when we were twelve." 

"It was still very rude of you," said Hermione. "You should do something to make it up to me." 

"I´m not sure we´ve got enough privacy for that," said Harry, looking solemn. 

"You certainly don´t!" called Draco irritably from the other side of the wardrobe. "Please - spare us." 

Harry closed his eyes. "I´m just going to pretend I didn’t hear that." 

Hermione reached up and pulled his head down, and kissed him soundly. It always amazed her, even now, that she had to reach up to Harry, that he had become so tall and limber and ... grown-up. Not that grown-up was bad. Grown-up was good, especially when it suited someone as well as growing taller and broader in the shoulders seemed to be suiting Harry. 

It was a brief kiss, nonetheless. She broke it off, and let Harry lead her back to the center of the room, where Draco was leaning against the wall near the cell entrance, all elegant scowling and long legs and arms crossed over his chest. She looked at him. "Where´s Ron?"  

"I´m here," said Ron´s voice, from a spot next to Draco. "Why?" 

"Erm," said Hermione, staring. 

"I threw the Invisibility Cloak on him," said Draco blandly. "I got sick of looking at his face." 

There was a sputtering sound, and Ron reappeared, having wriggled out from under the cloak he had, apparently, not noticed he was wearing. He was glaring at Draco again, and quite pink around the ears. "You - sodding - bastard -" 

Hermione seized hold of him and dragged him towards the exit. 

*** 

Having turned the Time-Turner over, Ginny found herself falling through clouds of violet blankness, but in no recognizable direction. It might have been up, down, or sideways through space. Everything had vanished into the violet nothingness. She knew an endless moment of vertigo and rushing motion, then the dizzy emptiness vanished in a breath and she was standing with her feet on solid ground, surrounded by blackness. 

She strained her eyes to see, her heart pounding. She had tried to set the Turner to bring her back to the past at the moment after she had left it, but she wasn´t yet adept at setting it. Perhaps she had missed her goal by a few hours, and it was nighttime. 

But even in the darkest night she should be able to see her own hands in front of her face. 

She scrambled for her wand, and fumbled it out of her pocket. "Lumos," she whispered. 

Light blossomed from the wand´s end, lighting her surroundings. She was standing in the corridor, exactly where she had expected to arrive. It looked much the same, although the floor was thickly layered in dust, and the torches were missing from the wall brackets. 

She hurried forward, suddenly desperate to get outside of the castle, which had a terrible, grim, deserted sort of feeling. Her feet slapping the dusty floor made the only sound: there was no whistle of wind, not even the sound of insects. She reached the end of the corridor, found a heavy, curving stone staircase, and barreled down it as fast as safety permitted. When she reached the foot of the stairs, she found herself in a huge antechamber whose floor, like a chessboard, was patterned with green and white squares of marble. She raced across the floor to the huge double doors, yanked them open, and stepped outside. 

And blinked, for a moment unable to grasp quite what it was that she was looking at. Here, there was more light - a faint, gray light almost blocked entirely by an enormous wall surrounding the castle, pushing against its outside walls. Ginny stared in surprise. She had no idea where the wall had come from: circular and huge, it seemed to stretch in all directions around the castle, and up, up, up as far as her eye could see, vanishing into dim nothingness against a smidgen of blue sky the size of a child´s marble. As she slowly descended the stairs, she became aware that the wall was not smooth at all, but uneven and irregular, and starred with strange red blossoms... 

Roses. It wasn´t a wall at all, but an enormous hedge of thorns. Like the brambles that had surrounded Sleeping Beauty´s castle she thought, almost giggling with the intensity of the nervousness she felt. The Prince had managed to cut his way through the brambles - she thought very briefly of Draco, and his sword - but there was no Prince here, she was on her own. 

Driven by an impulse she couldn´t quite identify, she reached out and gently touched the Time-Turner to the edge of a leaf. 

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, with a loud sussuration, like the sound of many rushing waters, the branches began to curl away from her, bending themselves backward, opening a path to let her through. Through the gap in the hedge she glimpsed brilliant green grass, starred with white flowers. She stepped through quickly, and the hedge sealed itself up behind her as if there had never been a gap. 

She glanced around wonderingly. She stood in a clearing, and in the distance she could see the dark line of trees where the forest began. The forest that had grown up to the very edge of the castle in her own time. But now it was far back, and in front of it stretched a long and grassy clearing, in the midst of which were a number of multicolored tents. She was strongly reminded of the war camp she had visited with Ron and Hermione. 

She set forth nearly at a run, suddenly filled with a desperation to see people - almost any people, she felt, would have done. The castle had been so silent, so eerie. She reached the center of the camp, and glanced around. There were tents in many colors: blue, bright green, orange, and to her left a tall scarlet-walled tent bearing on its closed flap the emblem of a golden lion. 

Gryffindor . 

She ran towards the tent, and paused at the entrance. There was nowhere to knock, that she could tell. Gingerly, she reached forward and drew back a corner of the tent flap, and peered into the darkness inside. 

Like most wizarding tents, the inside bore no resemblance to the outside. On the inside, the walls were made of dark, panelled wood, there was a fireplace (empty-since the day was warm and bright) a number of small windows, without panes, and a large round mahogany table in the center of the room, which was embossed with patterns of stars and moons in gold. Leaning against one table leg, quite casually, was a long silver sword in a scabbard decorated with brilliant enameled leaves, flowers and animals. 

A movement in the corner of the room caught her eyes. She turned, and stared. 

And saw someone staring back. Sitting in the corner of the tent, on a wooden footstool, was a tall man with a shock of unruly black hair, and brilliant dark eyes. He looked as if he were about twenty, and more interestingly, was shirtless, wearing a pair of leather breeches, and apparently in the middle of doing up the laces on his boots. 

He stared at Ginny. 

Ginny stared at him. 

He found his voice first. Letting his boot drop to the ground, he stood up, and in a voice several octaves deeper than it had been the last time she had heard it, said, "Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my tent?" 

Caught between shock and an insane desire to giggle, Ginny took her hand away from her mouth. "Ben?" she said. 

*** 

The dungeon was a dungeon. It bore a startling resemblance to other dungeons Sirius had been in. The Malfoy dungeon, for instance. Thick stone walls dripping with unpleasant moisture. Thick gray cell-bars wound around with magical wards. The smell of moss, old sweat, and fear. Dungeons were all the same. 

At least he had his clothes back. Raven had allowed him to have them back, along with all his possessions save his wand. He wondered how long it would be possible to survive on Every Flavor Beans. He wondered if he was going to find out. 

The silence of the dungeon seemed to stretch on and on. To distract himself, Sirius reached into his pockets and began to spread their contents on the ground in front of him. V The Zonko´s pencils. The letters from his old girlfriends. He picked one up and flipped it open randomly. Darling Sirius, I´m sitting here in History of Magic - thinking about whether I should catch up on that sleep I missed last night while we were - um...watching the stars... Anyway, is it just me or is Professor Binns getting kind of dusty? 

Sirius grinned and shoved the letter back into his pocket. Then there were other letters, addressed to James, in Lily´s delicate handwriting, the sight of which made his throat close up and his chest tighten. James Potter, 30 Galloping Drive, Godric´s Hollow, Wales. The sight of the address written there in Lily´s hand brought up the memory of the house as even the sight of its blasted ruins had not, the memory of the house as he had last seen it, crawling through its rubble under a sky striped green and black. 

He tightened his fist on the parchment, crumpling it in his hand. James. They came now, the memories, thick and fast: the dark thoughts of ghosts. James. He hadn´t been able to find Lily at all, that night. She has been buried, gone, rubble had covered her. But James. He had not been crushed, or wounded in any visible way, but it was a lie, Sirius thought 

<feeling the grit under his hands as he crawled over broken wood and stone, tasting bitter copper in his mouth where he had bitten his lip> 

that the dead resemble their living selves, only sleeping. He had known right away that James was dead. He lay where he had fallen, on his back, one hand flung out and clutching the wand that, at the end, had been no use to him, the other hand on his chest. His glasses were gone, had fallen off, smashed somewhere, and Sirius wanted to find them and give them back to him because of course James couldn´t see properly at all without his glasses, he never could, but there was no time for that, was there? Crumpling to his knees, Sirius had taken hold of his friend´s shoulders and pulled him upright. He felt real under Sirius´ hands -- still the same hands that had passed Sirius quills in class, the same arms that had embraced him at James' wedding, the same shoulder he had leaned on when he was injured -- and yet at the same time he was altered forever, as if whatever had made him James was gone. 

There in the broken house, choking on poisonous dust, Sirius put his face down on James´ shoulder and cried, a crying too awful and too profound to produce any tears. He whispered under his breath as he cried, asked James to come back, to please come back. If James had lived, he would, however far away he might have been, have returned to Sirius had his friend so desperately called for him. But the dead are selfish and reluctant travelers. They do not come back, no matter how much they are needed, no matter how greatly they are missed. No matter if their loss can be survived by those who are left behind. 

*** 

"It´s not working," said Hermione, in disbelief, holding the Lycanthe in her hand and staring at it. 

"What do you mean it isn´t working?" Ron demanded. 

They were huddled together, the cloak wrapped around them, under a stairwell just outside the cell. Clutching the Lycanthe so tightly that it dug into her palm, Hermione stared at it. "It´s not picking up anything," she said, her voice tinged with panic. 

"Now what?" She could feel the tension in Ron´s shoulder where it pressed into hers. "What do we do?" 

She straightened up, letting to Lycanthe fall to the end of the chain around her neck. "We go - this way," she announced, randomly dragging Ron out of the stairwell and down a corridor. He didn´t protest as he followed her, which was, she thought, unlike him. He was probably out of ideas as well. 

The hallway ended in a staircase, whose steps were so worn that many of them seemed almost no more than irregularities in the stone. Hermione wondered whose feet had originally worn them as she and Ron began racing down them. A clear memory formed in her head of racing down these steps before, hand in hand with someone else. Someone not Ron. Someone with silver hair. 

She stopped, and put out a hand to steady herself. She heard Ron´s voice in her ear. "Hermione, what´s wrong?" 

"Nothing - I´m fine." 

But she wasn´t. They turned a corner and found themselves in a broad, semicircular hallway whose walls were lined with innumerable doors. The ceiling above vanished into greenish mist. The walls were bare, but Hermione knew, as if by memory, that once they had been hung with tapestries depicting a unicorn hunt. And the ceiling had been enameled with stars. There had been couches along the walls, long couches covered in pillows of scarlet and emerald and blue, and she remembered having lain down on those couches, and not alone, either... 

Hermione felt herself turn scarlet and was very glad that she was invisible. Oh my. She looked down, realized she was clutching the Lycanthe, and released it quickly. The feeling of memory pressing in on her faded slightly. She was fairly sure that she was still bright red, though. How does one do that on a couch without falling off? 

"Hermione." It was Ron, speaking into her ear again, or near her ear. He couldn´t see her, so he was pretty much speaking into her neck. "Do you hear that?" 

She raised her head, a little dizzy. "What?" 

"Listen. Someone´s crying." 

Hermione swiveled her head, listening. And heard it. The faint sound of sobbing, coming from behind one of the closed doors. "That doesn´t sound like Ginny," she said, positively, but Ron had already grabbed her hand and was dragging her towards the door. She felt him glance around, then push the door open, and they went through. 

This room was low ceilinged and bare, and evoked no memories in Hermione. At least, it looked bare at first glance, and was very dark. But then, as she stared, she saw a patch of greater darkness, a huddled shape like a puddle of shadow, in one corner, from which the crying sound originated. As she and Ron moved uncertainly towards the shape, she realized - she knew - that it was not, of course, Ginny. The crying was the weak, plaintive crying of a child, but as they drew closer it became clear that this was in fact, an adult. An adult man, short, round, and plump, whose balding head glimmered in the faint light and whose sniveling cries were very, very familiar... 

"Wormtail," hissed Ron, in astonishment. 

Wormtail´s body jerked to attention with a rattling sound, and Hermione saw that there was a cuff around his leg, chaining him to the wall. It wasn´t an adamantine cuff, only rusty metal, but then he wasn´t a Magid. "Who´s there?" he barked shrilly. 

Hermione caught at Ron´s arm, but it was too late. He had stepped out from under the Invisibility Cloak and was standing with his wand pointed at Wormtail, his blue eyes blazing with rage. "You," he hissed. "Murderer." 

"I never murdered anyone!" squeaked Wormtail, thrashing about in his chains as if he could get farther away from Ron somehow. His eyes were huge and fearful. "What are you doing here?" 

Hermione pulled the cloak off herself and rushed over to Ron, catching at his arm. "What are you doing?" 

"I´m going to kill him," said Ron. "Somebody ought to have, a long time ago." 

"Ron! You don´t know how to do the Killing Curse -" 

"I can try it till I get it right," he said, his wand still aimed at Wormtail´s heart. 

"Go ahead," said Wormtail, in a sneering, squeaking voice. "There are wards up all over this room. One spell, and the guards will be all over you." 

Ron looked furious. "You´re lying." 

"Ron!" Hermione lunged at him, grabbing his wand arm and hanging on. "Don´t!" 

"I´m not going to," he said quietly, his eyes still fixed on Wormtail. "But I want to know what he knows. And if I can´t do a spell, I´ll break every bone in his miserable body." 

"Do I look like I know anything?" spat Wormtail. "Do I look like I am still my Master´s most trusted confidante? He said I betrayed him - I nearly allowed his Heir to die. He kept me alive but he took - this." And with a snivelling gasp, he ratcheted back his right sleeve, and held out his arm. 

Hermione swallowed her nausea. His hand was gone; his pale, pudgy arm ended in a blackened stump of scar tissue. She had no sympathy for him - if there was any one person in the world she hated without reservation, it was Wormtail - but the sight was still sickening. 

"Do you know what his plans are?" she demanded, her eyes fastened on Wormtail´s pudgy, fearful face. He was sweating profusely, as he usually did when he was afraid, the sweat seeming to come from a deeper place than his pores, as if he actually sweated fear. "What does he want with Harry?" 

Wormtail´s eyes widened. "He´s got Harry?" 

Ron almost seemed to be vibrating with rage. "Don´t pretend like you don´t know," he snarled. "It´s your fault - all of this is your fault." 

In response, Wormtail, his face striped with sweat and dirt, glared back at Ron, and spit on the floor at his feet. "Go on and torture me if you want," he said, his voice still squeaky. "I can´t get away. I can´t stop you. Do it." 

Ron didn´t move, just stood where he was, waves of anger pulsing from his body. Hermione put her hand on his arm. "Ron, come on," she whispered. "He´s not worth it. We´ve got to go." 

Ron allowed her to lead him away, although he glared back over his shoulder at Wormtail as they went. Her heart ached for him - she knew he had felt somehow as if Wormtail was his responsibility, as if he should have known about Scabbers and done something. And it just wasn´t in Ron´s nature to torture a man who was chained up and couldn´t get away, no matter how foul or evil that man might be. He was probably blaming himself for that, too. She was about to say something to him, something reassuring, when Wormtail spoke from behind them. 

"It´s the Orb you want," he said. 

Hermione spun around, Ron beside her. "What?" 

"The Orb." Wormtail´s round chin was sunk into his fat neck, his eyes glittering with what could have been malice, or could have been fear. "If you can get to that and open it before he manages to fill his bargain with the demons - you might have a chance. That´s the last thing he wants." 

Ron´s hand was tight on Hermione´s wrist. She remembered Rowena´s quiet voice, telling her about the Orb, its powers. "Where is the Orb?" she said, her voice unsteady. "Where is he keeping it?" 

"When you were first here, do you remember that he took you to a room with a tapestry in it? It´s in there. Find it, open it - if you can figure out how - you might have a chance." 

"And how do we know you´re not lying?" she demanded. 

Wormtail´s eyes flashed briefly. "You don´t."  

"Bastard," Ron hissed under his breath, and Hermione began to lead him towards the door again, her back prickling with revulsion and fear. When the door had closed between them and Wormtail again, she unfurled the cloak, and threw it to Ron. Then she reached around her throat, and took off the Lycanthe. She placed it in the palm of her hand. "Ultima thule," she said, and the Lycanthe swung around to point north. 

"What are you doing?" Ron demanded. 

"The room he was talking about was in the west part of the castle. I remember seeing the sunset out the window while I was looking at the tapestry." 

"Hermione," protested Ron, shaking his head so that his red hair fell into his eyes. "You don´t believe him, do you? He´s probably leading us into a trap. If he wants us to go west, I say we go east. West is probably some room full of guards or something." 

"We´re got the cloak," said Hermione, a little weakly. "It wouldn´t hurt to check." 

Ron gave her a steady, searching look. Reluctantly, she nodded, and replaced the Lycanthe around her neck. "Fine. We can go east. Maybe I´ll start picking up some sign of Ginny in that direction."  

They wrapped the cloak around themselves, and headed towards the easternmost corridor. It twisted sharply to the right, then to the left, then to the right again, and just as they turned the last blind corner, they ran directly and without any preamble into the arms of a large group of gray-robed guards. 

*** 

The dark opening in the wall closed up behind Hermione and Ron, and Harry felt a wave of fear wash over him. It had taken every bit of self-control he had not to try to stop them, and because his concern was magnified by the sight of them going, the sight of Hermione looking back over her shoulder briefly, her eyes worried and dark and fixed on his, almost undid him. 

He turned away, fell back against the wall, leaning hard against it, and closed his eyes. 

When he opened them again, the first thing he saw was Draco, looking back at him, his gray eyes very wide and nearly transparent in the glare of the blue light. 

Draco, chameleon-like, usually had the ability to look at home in almost any setting. Now, however, he looked extraordinarily uncomfortable, as if he very much wished to be somewhere else and in fact was imagining that he was somewhere else. He almost didn´t seem to see Harry at all, or at least his eyes didn´t focus on him properly until Harry moved, his hand going to his throat, taking the Epicyclical Charm by its chain, and drawing it over his head. He held it up, dangling it in front of Draco´s eyes, and said, 

"What the hell was this about, Malfoy?" 

Now Draco reacted. He smiled, his eyes on the Charm. "Happy Birthday?" he suggested gently. 

Harry blinked, surprised. He had forgotten that it was his birthday in two weeks. The fact that Draco had actually remembered this was also disturbing, but not in any way that he wanted to tackle at the moment. 

"You couldn´t have maybe gotten me a watch?" he said irritably instead. "Or you, know, maybe not cut a big hole in my arm? In honor of the occasion." 

"It´s not that big a hole in your arm," Draco pointed out. 

"What was that? Was that an apology? Oh, wait, no, that was just you being obnoxious some more." 

"Last time I apologized to you, you told me to sod off." 

Harry blinked. He had no recollection of Draco having apologized to him, at any point. His memory of pretty much everything after Draco had told him about his parents, up to the point where Fleur and Slytherin had come in on them, was a blur of shrieking noise, splattering blood, and a white blank buzzing in his head. "You apologized?" 

"Profusely." The side of Draco´s mouth twitched. Harry looked at him suspiciously. 

"So do it again." 

"What? Apologize?" 

"Yeah." 

"I apologized to you once. You threw in back in my face. The day I apologize to you again, Satan will be ice-skating to work." 

"Why? Didn't your father teach you good manners?" 

Draco flinched imperceptibly, even though his expression didn't alter. "Would it mean anything to you even if I did? If I apologized again?" 

"Do you think it's that easy?" Harry felt his anger rise again. "One word, and it all goes away?" His hands were clenched. "Well, just to let you know it's not." 

"I know." Draco took a deep breath. "What do you want to do then? Hit me?" 

"No I don't." Harry paused. "That doesn't hurt enough." 

"You don't want to?" Draco smiled humorlessly. "I doubt that. If I were you, I'd want to hit me. Sometimes I want to hit me." 

"Really?" 

"Yeah." 

"All right, then," said Harry, and drew back his fist and punched him hard in the stomach. 

-Several minutes later- 

"Sorry, Malfoy." 

"Urgh." 

"I´m really sorry. I didn´t know you were wounded. You should have said something." 

"Urgh," said Draco again, and sat up, gingerly. The moment Harry´s first had made contact with him, he had turned white, doubled over and dropped like a rock, with his hands wrapped around his stomach. When he took them away, there was blood on his fingers. Harry had been completely astounded. He hadn´t hit the other boy that hard, had he? He had fallen to his knees next to Draco, who had grabbed him by the front of his robe and told him in very profane terms exactly how much it hurt getting punched in the stomach when one already had a sword wound there, and how, if Draco could actually stand up, he would make Harry very sorry indeed. Visions of all the punching fights they´d already been in danced in Harry´s head. He´d never actually managed to knock Draco down with one punch before. He didn´t feel too good about it at the moment, though. 

"So much for hitting me not hurting enough," said Draco, when he got his breath back, and stopped swearing. "In retrospect, not an accurate theory." 

"Why haven´t you fixed it?" Harry demanded, absently looping the Epicyclical Charm back around his neck because it was too much trouble holding it in his hand. "Why walk around with a big cut if you don´t need to?" 

"Keeps me honest." Draco sat up, touched his fingers carefully to his side, flinched, and shook his head. "My father used to say..." 

He broke off, leaning back against the wall as if he were very tired. 

"What?" said Harry, curious. 

"Nothing." Draco touched his side again, and winced. 

"Something about pain?" 

He shut his eyes. Let it go, Potter. 

Harry jumped. "What are you doing, Malfoy?" 

Don´t talk out loud. Not that it probably matters, but. I have some things I need to tell you. 

Harry´s eyes darted around the room. But... can´t he hear us? 

Not according to Fleur. 

I think I missed the part where I believe anything she says. As a matter of fact, I may have missed the part where I believe anything you say. 

Draco opened his eyes and looked at Harry tensely. Would I have given you the Charm, the means to kill me, if I wasn´t to be trusted? 

You know I wouldn´t use it. 

Sure you would. 

Harry wasn´t sure whether or not to be appalled. Even if I wanted you dead -- that would be a cowardly way of killing anyone. 

Draco´s eyes were fixed on Harry. You´d do it if you had to. What if I was threatening Hermione? You wouldn´t believe what you´re capable of, Potter, if you´re pushed. You´re not all that different from me. Not really. 

Let me get this straight. Harry felt his head beginning to hurt. You gave me the Charm to show I could trust you. Did you have some kind of a plan? 

I did have a plan. But there was a tiny flaw in that plan. 

Which was? 

It was bollocks. 

Harry rolled his eyes. Have you got a better plan, now? 

No. I´ve got no plan. I´m just winging it. But there´s something you need to know. 

Is this something that´s going to really, really upset me? 

Draco paused for a moment. Yes. 

Is it absolutely necessary that I know this? 

Another pause. Yes. 

Fine. What is it? 

Sirius is here, in the castle. 

Harry´s heart leaped up and banged painfully against his ribcage. What? Where? 

In the dungeon. 

Slytherin threw him in the dungeon? 

No. Draco tilted up his head, and looked Harry directly in the eyes. I threw him in the dungeon. 

A long moment of silence. Harry silently counted to ten, which didn´t help at all. When he spoke again, he could hear the ice in his own voice. "It just never stops with you, does it?" 

Draco´s eyes narrowed. He began to get to his feet, bracing his hands against the wall. Harry got up, standing as Draco was standing, not wanting the other boy towering over him. 

"And you told me this why?" said Harry. "Do you want me to hate you?" 

"I told you because it´s the truth and you should know it," said Draco, tonelessly. 

"Now there´s a new attitude coming from you," snarled Harry. "I thought your idea of the right way to handle these things was to wait until you needed a wall broken down, and then hey, out with the truth! Let´s see how hacked off Harry can get! Let´s tell him all about his dead parents! Let´s throw his godfather in jail for a lark!" 

Draco´s eyes had narrowed to slits. "Congratulations," he said. "You have truly perfected the fine art of whining. Did you ever think that maybe this had nothing to do with you?"  

"This is Sirius we´re talking about! Throwing him in prison, it´s not like just locking up anyone! He spent twelve years in jail, did you ever--" 

"I was trying to save his life!" Draco yelled at the top of his lungs, so angry now that even his hair seemed to be crackling with rage. "He would have died if I hadn´t thrown him in prison! And so would you bloody have, if I hadn´t done what I did for you!" 

'Yeah, because you would have killed me!" shouted Harry. "There´s circular logic for you! You saved me from you! Congratulations! Pin a medal on this guy, he´s a hero. What did you save Sirius from?" He was shouting so loudly now, his words were bouncing off the walls of the cell, mingling with the echo of Draco´s voice. "Were you about to run him over and you decided nah, let´s throw him in prison instead?" 

"He came here in disguise, you stupid twonk," Draco snarled, his eyes flashing copper with rage, like a cat´s. "He disguised himself as a vampire, but all dark creatures coming into the castle have to be Tested, and the Test is fatal to humans. So I had him put where they wouldn´t be able to get at him, not now, anyway. And he´s safe there. And I am done explaining myself to you, Potter! I am sick and tired of you not believing me! If you think I´m so bloody untrustworthy than why don´t you take out that Charm and stomp it the hell into dust! I won´t stop you -- in fact, I´ll encourage it, because I´d rather die than spend one more second listening to you whinging, you mealy-mouthed, rat-faced, four-eyed little bastard!" 

Draco brought himself up short, gasping for breath as if he had been running. His eyes were nearly black with anger, his fists clenched at his sides. 

Harry looked at him in surprise. Usually Draco expressed his ire via stony seething. Harry had never seen him so visibly angry before. It was a bit of a shock and, somehow, a blow to his own rage. Harry felt his own anger drain out of him as if someone had pulled the plug on a basin filled with boiling, poisonous water. He raised his head and looked at Draco squarely. 

"Could you repeat that?" he said. 

Draco just blinked at him, rage blocking out comprehension. Finally, he ground out, nearly in a whisper, "What?" 

"That was a pretty impressive speech," said Harry. "I´d kind of like to hear it again." 

Draco´s hands very slowly unclenched at his sides. His voice was unsteady. "Which...part?" 

'I think I was particularly partial to the bit where I have a rat face," said Harry, quite sincerely. 

Draco shook his head, slowly. "You´re barking mad, Potter." 

I´m also sorry. 

What? Draco´s eyes widened. The faint blue light struck copper sparks from his eyes. What for? 

For a lot of things, but mostly because I never told you I was sorry your father died. 

Shock moved across Draco´s face, followed by suspicion. I figured that was because you weren´t sorry. You know, no big loss to the gene pool and all that. He wasn´t the nicest guy. And he was planning on killing you. You could be forgiven for not feeling... 

I´m the last person to want anyone to lose their parents, Harry replied. 

For a moment, that statement simply hung there, so heavily that Harry could almost imagine his words painted on the air between them. Draco looked as if he were grasping after words, which Harry wouldn´t have previously imagined was possible. Finally, he straightened his shoulders and looked at Harry squarely. 

About your parents, Potter...about what I said... 

Forget about it. 

Forget about it? 

Now it was Harry´s turn to take a deep breath. I guess you can´t, can you? Because I know I never will. I won´t forgive you for that. 

Draco looked, very briefly, blank with shock. Whatever he had been expecting Harry to say, it hadn´t been that. The shock went away, and was replaced by something worse. The unhappiness in his expression was startling. Harry felt it cut through him as if it was his own. Well. Even Draco´s inner voice sounded terse and wretched. I guess that´s your right. 

He glanced away. Harry watched him, and felt suddenly - contrite. More than contrite. As if he had hurt Ron badly, or Hermione, or someone else close enough to him that their pain had become, in some sense, his own responsibility. 

Malfoy. Wait. 

Draco´s eyes widened fractionally and he paused. What? 

I shouldn´t have said that. I can forgive you. I can make myself. 

Draco just looked at him. 

Hermione. I was talking to her about this today. 

And what? She hates me now, too? 

No. She doesn´t. She doesn't see you the way you see yourself, Malfoy, or even the way I see you. She doesn't see me that way, either. She sees what we could be, what we could do, and that's what's real to her. In her eyes, we're better than we are, braver than we are, more honest than we are. She believes in you. And I´m not going to deny that she might be right. She usually is. So I will - I mean, I do. Forgive you. 

A very small smile had come to hover around the corners of Draco´s mouth. Somewhere in his expression, Harry found a memory of a little boy in Madam Malkin´s dress shop, pale and small and somewhat lost in his black robes, who looked at him with superior eyes and drawled like no eleven-year-old Harry had ever met before. The first Hogwarts student Harry had ever seen. And that had been the first and almost the last time Draco had ever smiled at him. 

That, and even Draco´s inner voice, Harry thought, had a little bit of a drawl to it, was a hell of a speech, Potter. 

Yeah . A wry smile touched the edge of Harry´s mouth. I´ve been practicing. He looked down briefly, saw the Epicyclical Charm glittering around his throat, and on impulse, stuck out his hand, feeling slightly silly as he did so. So we´re all right, then. 

I dunno. Draco looked at his hand with his eyebrows raised. You still think I stabbed you in the back? 

Maybe , replied Harry. But I´ve decided that, given everything we´ve been through, you get that one for free. Next time, though. Next time I´ll take your head off. 

Draco stood there for another long moment, looking at Harry´s outstretched hand, his gray eyes unreadable. Harry was reminded again of Draco at eleven, holding out his hand in the train compartment for Harry to take. And Harry hadn´t taken it. Now he held out his own hand, and waited for Draco to take it, thinking it would be only poetic justice if he refused it. 

Finally a smile broke out over Draco´s face, one of his rare, infrequent real smiles that were like music or sunrise and reminded Harry why it probably was that Hermione liked him so much. 

Draco reached out, and took Harry´s hand: his left hand, and Harry´s right. The scars on their palms brushed each other, and Harry felt a bolt of cold go through his hand. 

I really am sorry about your father. It´s not fair. 

Draco´s eyes unfocused slightly, almost as if he was looking at something beyond Harry. That´s true, he said, but think how much worse it would be if life was fair, and all the awful things that happened to us happened because we actually deserve them. I for one take great comfort in the completely impersonal hostility of the universe. 

Wow. That´s a really depressing worldview, Malfoy. 

Thanks. So you trust me? 

I trust you. 

*** 

"Do you think we´re going to die?" said Ron, sounding curious. 

Hermione lifted her face out of her hands and looked at him dully. Like her, he was sitting on the floor, his back to the wall. This was probably because the cell they were locked in had no chairs, not even a bench to sit on. It was a windowless stone room without even straw thrown on the floor. The walls were dank and freezing to the touch. She had begun to wish she had her jeans back again, since the hem and sleeves of her blue robe had been draggled in the dust and dampness, and a guard had torn a ragged hole in her sleeve when he had thrown her in the cell. Ron had come off a bit worse: one of the guards had hit him when he resisted having the Invisibility Cloak taken away from him, and he had a dramatic and rapidly purpling bruise on one cheek. 

"I don´t know," she said softly, and glanced down. One stroke of luck was that none of the guards had tried to take the Lycanthe away from her, probably assuming it to be jewelry of some sort. However, no spells she tried inside the cell seemed to be working at all. It must, she decided, be quite thoroughly warded. "I´d imagine they´re going to report finding us to Slytherin, and he´ll probably...come for us." 

Ron was looking away now. "We lost Harry´s cloak," he said, after a moment. 

"I know." 

"It belonged to his father." 

"I know that. Don´t dwell, Ron." 

"He´s going to -" 

"Be panicking over where we are, not worrying about his stupid cloak. Oh, God," said Hermione, with a sort of despair. She couldn´t bear thinking about how worried Harry would be. Couldn´t get the memory of that look on his face when she and Ron had left him in the cell out of her mind - white with worry, trying to smile, not because he wanted to, but for her. She turned away from Ron, and, miserably, began poking at a loose brick in the wall with the point of the Lycanthe. 

Ron was silent for a moment. Then she felt, rather than heard, him get to his feet and come to sit beside her. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see a bit of red hair, the scuffed knees of his jeans, his tanned, freckled hand resting on his knee. "You´re not trying to tunnel our way to freedom, are you?" he said, after a moment. 

"No. I´m not." 

"Good. Because I think you´re just tunneling into an adjacent cell anyway." 

Hermione stopped poking at the wall, and turned around, resting her back against the stones. At the look on Ron´s face, she relented slightly. "We´ve been in situations where we thought we were going to die before, haven´t we?" she said gently. "And we´re all right." 

"Yeah." Ron´s voice was distant. "But we were usually with Harry." He was quiet for a moment, staring into space. "Hermione?" 

"Uh-huh?" 

"If we´re going to die anyway..." 

"Don´t be defeatist," she admonished, poking the Lycanthe at the wall again. 

"Well, you admit it looks bad for us." 

"I don´t admit anything." 

"Yeah, you never do." 

"I am not going to squabble with you right now." 

"Look, I´m just saying, if we´re going to die anyway..." 

"Don´t say that!" 

"I always thought I´d have sex before I died," he added thoughtfully. 

Hermione dropped the Lycanthe. "Ron! Too much information!" She reached down to pick it up, and accidentally jammed one of the points of the sideways X into her thumb. "Ouch!" 

"You all right?" 

"I´m fine." She put the cut side of her thumb in her mouth and sucked on it mournfully for a moment. 

"Good." 

"No thanks to you," she added, slightly childishly. 

Ron ignored this. "Be that as it may, as we are, obviously, going to die, then there´s something I think I should tell you." 

She looked at his suddenly serious expression in surprised bewilderment. "What are you going on about?" Something occurred to her then, and she scooted closer to him, staring anxiously into his face. "Ron. Are you all right? Is everything - you´re not sick, or dying, or--" 

He cut her off with a short, mirthless laugh. "No. It isn´t that." He reached out then and took hold of her hands, closing his fingers a little awkwardly around them. She looked at him in utter bewilderment, shocked by how pale and determined he seemed, by the clouded, troubled look in his blue eyes. "I hope this doesn´t make you hate me," he began, his voice very low and urgent, "because I don´t know what I´d do if you hated me, but I have to tell you that-" 

"Psst!" 

Hermione´s head whipped around. "Did you hear that?" 

Ron looked mutinous. "I didn´t hear anything." 

The noise came again. "Psst! Hermione! Ron!" 

Hermione yanked her hand out of Ron´s and spun around, listening for the source of the noise. "Who´s there?" she whispered, her eyes huge. 

Ron was goggling as well now. "That sounded like Sirius," he whispered. 

"It is me," came the voice again, and this time Hermione was able to gauge the location the voice was emanating from - the wall. "I think you managed to loosen one of the bricks by scraping at it, so I pulled it out of the wall. Can you see me?" 

Ron at her side, Hermione stared at the wall until she found the dark opening Sirius had made. Then she scrambled towards it, bending down to stare, and found Sirius´ bright dark eyes looking back from the other side. 

"Sirius!" she gasped, both wildly relieved and horrified to see him at the same time. "What are you doing down here?" 

"Actually," he said, and there was a note of almost-amusement in his voice, "I was sketching. As to how I got down here, it´s a bit of a long story and I´m not sure you would believe me if I told you. The real question is, are you all right? Are you hurt at all?" 

"I´m fine," she said, a huge lump forming in her throat. "I´m fine, not hurt at all--" 

"And Ron?" 

Hermione leaned back as Ron took her place at the wall. He looked just as relieved and shocked as she felt. "Sirius!" he exclaimed. "I´m fine, too, but what about you? How long have you been down here?" 

"Few hours," said Sirius briefly, an I-don´t-want-to-talk-about-it note in his voice. "I was listening to you two talk for a while before I realized who you were. And none of us are going to die. All right?" 

"All right," said Ron, managing half a grin. 

"And don´t worry about Harry´s cloak. We´ll get it back." 

Ron nodded. "Okay." 

"Oh, and Ron?" 

"Yeah?" 

"Don´t worry about the not having had sex business," said Sirius magnanimously. "You´re only seventeen. Good things come to those who wait." 

*** 

They sat facing each other across the small round table: Ginny on one side, Benjamin Gryffindor on the other. He had gotten dressed and was staring at her, as he had been since she had arrived, as if he had seen a ghost. The Gryffindor sword was still leaning against the table; every time she saw it, she thought of Harry, and of the rest of them, in the future where she had left them. It was so quiet here and so peaceful, with all the pretty multicolored tents among the green grass and the view of the castle over the hedge of brambles, looking as pretty and harmless as a picture from a history book. 

"So let me get this straight," said Ben, still looking at her, wide-eyed. It was still a bit odd to see such dark eyes in a face that looked like Harry´s. "You want to borrow an army?" 

Ginny sighed, and templed her fingers together under her chin. "Look," she began, trying to find the words to explain. "We haven´t got the resources to face Slytherin in the future. We haven´t got armies like you do, and the Ministry doesn´t even believe that he´s returned, mostly because they don´t want to." 

Ben looked at her quizzically. "The Ministry? Is that like the Wizards´ Council?" 

"Probably. Wait, let me see if I can remember my history. The Council was abolished in 1612 because--" 

"Don´t. Don´t tell me too much about the future. I don´t want to know." He sighed, and shook his head. "I have to say I really never thought I´d see you again. I do actually remember you, even though I was only twelve." 

"Well, I remember you," smiled Ginny, "but that´s because for me, it was yesterday." 

Ben nodded. "Rowena said she´d given you the information you´d need to defeat - him - in your own time." 

Ginny shook her head. "It wasn´t enough. I don´t know if she understood that in the future, the magical community just wouldn´t be prepared to deal with a threat like this. He´s got all the Dark creatures on his side - the werewolves and the trolls and the dementors - there are just so many of them." 

He raised his eyebrows. "How do you know so much about Slytherin´s weaponry and the forces he commands?" 

"From my friends. It´s complicated...but..." Ginny broke off. "Ben, where are the Heirs?" she asked abruptly. 

Ben looked taken aback. "Who?" 

"The other Heirs. Besides you." 

"Well." Ben ticked them off on his fingers. "Rowena´s daughter is eleven; she just started at Hogwarts. The rest of Helga´s brood are all over in Ireland right now. And I´m here, keeping an eye on things. Just a few months out of the year, but somebody has to..." 

"And the Heir of Slytherin?" 

"Gareth?" Ben´s eyes flicked away from hers. "He´s not around much." 

"Do you know him? Are you enemies?" Ginny demanded, suddenly fascinated, seeing as she did the possibility for a weird echo of Harry and Draco´s complicated and often bewildering relationship. 

"Why? Is this something to do with the Heir of Slytherin in your own time?" Ben neatly turned the tables on her, leaning his chin on his hand. "What´s he like?" 

"Draco? He´s...complicated," said Ginny. "He isn´t an simple person to know. He´s not very easy to be friends with, although he´s loyal, and he never lies, even though he does conceal things. Oh dear. It´s hard to explain. And he treats girls appallingly," she added as an afterthought, pulling a face. 

Ben raised his dark eyebrows. "Has he treated you appallingly?" 

"Not yet," said Ginny. "But I´m working on it." 

Ben coughed, which sounded a lot like a laugh that he was covering up. At that moment, the tent flap opened and a house-elf came in with fruit and bread and cheeses on a tray. Suddenly feeling famished, Ginny tore into the food. When she looked up again, Ben was still gazing at her, a faint line of worry between his eyebrows. "I don´t understand this business about wanting an army," he said. "I mean, yes, the soldiers who fought in the War are still around, and we could form an army now if needed, but what good does that do you? We´re here, in our own time." 

"I thought I could bring them through," said Ginny, fixing her eyes on Ben. "This Key of Helga´s, this Time-Turner, is very powerful. If I could borrow your army, I´m pretty sure I could bring them all through to my own time. I can´t explain how I know I could do it, but I could." 

But Ben was shaking his head, and Ginny saw, with a sinking feeling, that he looked not intrigued by her suggestion, but appalled. 

"Ginny, no--" 

" I know I arrived here about eight years after I meant to, but I think I know what I did wrong, I can fix it, make it work this time-" 

"It´s not that!" Ben sprang up, and put his hands on the table, leaning forward. "It´s the nature of time I´m concerned about," he said, not looking at her. "Ginny, if you bring people into the future, you´re taking them out of their own time. What if they die there? And what if, because they die there, people who were supposed to be born were never born? Helga used to talk about time paradoxes. That´s just what you´d be creating. The result might be an alternate future, one where you, or your friends, were never born at all." 

Ben shook his head, his dark eyes full of regret and sorrow. "I´m so sorry," he said. "I can´t help you." 

*** 

They sat shoulder to shoulder on the floor of the adamantine cell, as Harry had sat earlier with Hermione and Ron. And to Harry´s surprise, it was equally comforting, in an odd sort of way, to have Draco there. He never would have thought that proximity to Draco Malfoy would be a source of consolation. How things did change. 

"Knut for your thoughts, Potter," said Draco, who had his knees pulled up to his chin, his arms wrapped around them. 

"I was wondering if you still had those sudden urges to kill me," said Harry. "Not, you know, that I´d judge you if you did." He grinned. "But I might send you out to get me an asbestos-coated flak jacket, just to be safe." 

A line of confusion appeared between Draco´s eyes. "A what?" 

"Nothing. Bad joke. But I was serious about the killing me thing." 

Draco shook his head. "No." 

"No? It just went away?" 

"Uh-huh." Draco shrugged, seeming disinclined to elaborate. "Since we fought the manticore. I don´t know why. It´s just another in a long list of things that doesn´t make any sense." 

There was a introspective pause during which both boys seemed lost in thought. Finally, Harry sighed. "You know, I´m getting a little tired of all this 'go here, stand there, wait for the evil that will inevitably come and kill you.´ Not that I´ve died yet, but it´s just a matter of time. I want to do something." 

"Come on, Potter. Where´s your sense of mystery and adventure? I mean, I already died. It wasn´t so bad." 

Harry idly watched Draco as he flipped over the sword in his hand, the light reflecting off its grooved surface. "Are you trying to cheer me up?" 

"Not at all. Wouldn´t dream of it." 

"Good. Because it really depresses me when you do that." 

"In that case, let me point out that Slytherin probably has something really horrible planned for you. I mean, he said he´d use any means necessary to wipe out the Gryffindor line. I think that indicates that he intends to go beyond the use of harsh language and disturbing imagery." 

Harry suddenly sat bolt upright. "Sod all this sitting around and waiting. Let´s do something. Let´s practice." 

"Practice what? Human sacrifice?" 

Harry got to his feet, and went over to where Godric´s blade lay propped against a table. He lifted it in his hand, startled as always at how well the time-mellowed metal of the hilt seemed to conform to the shape of his hand. "This," he said. 

Draco got to his feet, his eyes quizzical. "You want to fight?" 

"I want to practice. I´ve been chained up for two days. I want the exercise." 

Draco got slowly to his feet. "All right." 

Draco picked up his sword, and walked to the center of the room. He turned and faced Harry, and saluted. Harry returned the gesture back so exactly it was almost a mockery, and raised his sword. Then whipped it through the air, offering Draco a very professional feint, followed by a jab past his guard that would have sliced Draco's arm if he hadn´t spun away. He heard the fabric of his shirt part under the blade with a whisper, although the sword didn´t cut his skin. He glanced up at Harry in surprise. 

And Harry grinned. I´ve gotten better. Haven´t I? 

He had gotten better. This, of course, should have been impossible. Draco could only assume that this was a result of their strengthened mental connection. He had nearly forgotten the pleasure of fencing with someone who was a match for him. The swords struck against each other with the light, regular rapidity of piano keys striking home -- and in Draco's ears they made their own, very pleasant music. It was interesting, he thought, that although Harry had absorbed his knowledge of swordplay from Draco directly, he had nevertheless developed his own style. He fought like he played Quidditch, instinctively and without any fear. Which was a good quality when it came to Quidditch; less so with swordplay, where an understanding of the mortal potential of one´s actions was integral. He also fought directly, with much forward motion. Draco himself fought with cautious treachery, having been taught the tricks of betrayal by his father, although he did not use them here. Not on Harry. 

He brought his sword in from the side, and then, just as Harry moved to block and reply, he glanced over Harry´s shoulder and saw that Salazar Slytherin was standing by the entrance to the cell, watching them. 

He stopped dead. He was vaguely aware of a flash of silver at the corner of his eyes, and then Harry´s voice exploded into his brain. 

Jesus, Malfoy, I almost killed you! Why the hell didn´t you block me-- 

Look behind you. 

Harry turned slowly. And froze. And took a step back. They were shoulder to shoulder now, facing Slytherin. Who stood with his long arms crossed, one white finger against his chin, his eyes black and unreadable. 

Finally, Draco found his voice, or at least a voice. It sounded a little squeakier that he would have liked. "You followed me," he said to Slytherin. 

"I did not," said the Snake Lord, uncrossing his arms and propelling himself off the wall. "I came here for the Heir of Gryffindor. I was not expecting to see you." He looked from Harry to Draco and back again. "I must say I´m not at all sure what to think," Slytherin went on, and his voice was low. "Here is my Heir, trying, to all appearances, to kill the Heir of Gryffindor. Which is admirable behavior on his part, and should be applauded. And yet. And yet I have to ask myself. Why did he not just run our enemy through while he was chained to the wall? Why release him, and not just release him, but arm him with weaponry? It makes no sense." 

Draco didn´t say anything. He stood with his hand tight on the hilt of the sword. He didn´t move, because he couldn´t. 

It was Harry who spoke, Harry who looked at Slytherin with two smoldering green coals of eyes, and spoke in a voice that was deadly. "I told him that the only reason you were ever able to kill Godric is that you snuck up and stabbed him in the back. It´s in the history books. You´re famous all right - a famous coward. And I asked him if he wanted the Slytherin line to be famous as cowards forever." 

Slytherin´s eyes flicked away from Harry. Draco got the feeling that he hated Harry so much that it actually hurt Slytherin to look at him. He looked at Draco instead. 

"So he baited you," he said. "And you let him." 

Draco cleared his throat. "I wanted a fair fight." 

"A fair fight. There´s no such thing." Slytherin shook his head. But his eyes were amused. "Very well then. Leveler heads than yours have allowed themselves to be swayed by such mockery. I suppose it speaks well of you, that you wish to defend the honor of our House. So. Carry on." 

Draco gaped at him. "What?" 

"You heard me," said Slytherin. "Carry on." He leaned back against the wall. "It´s rather amusing." 

Draco stared. 

"Do as I say," the Snake Lord said. 

Draco looked at Harry. Who raised his sword, and shrugged. He looked pale, but not with fear or consternation. His face was set and a little distant. So his father´s ghost had looked, when met in the afterlife. Harry met Draco´s eyes steadily. How long can we stall for? 

Automatically, Draco raised his arm, and saluted. Harry returned the gesture. Stall? You mean until the others get here? 

Harry feinted towards him. That´s what I mean. 

It took Draco a moment to respond, and block him. The swords rang against each other, striking sparks. I can´t believe we´re going to do this. Then he broke off, as Harry´s sword came at him again, this time cutting from above. Draco blocked him, without much enthusiasm. 

Harry´s eyes met his over the flashing metal. Like you mean it, Malfoy. 

Fine. 

Harry´s blade cut low, and Draco sprang away from it, crouching as he came down as he had been taught by his father, and thrust his own blade in under Harry´s guard. The tip of it lightly cut the material of Harry´s shirt, before flicking away. 

Harry blinked. Maybe not that much like you mean it. 

Draco glanced at him quickly. Did I hurt you? 

Doesn´t matter. An infinitesimal shake of Harry´s head. Cut me if you have to cut me. 

From the corner of his eye, Draco could see Slytherin, watching them. He was smiling. 

Well, said Draco, if you're going to be like that about it -- and with a grin he brought his sword up, hard, with all the force of his arm behind it. And Harry raised his own sword to reply. In midair they struck together. Braced for the expected sound of the blades ringing together, the grinding of shattered metal that followed took Draco completely by surprise. He stumbled forward, caught off guard, as his own Living Blade (mistaking, it seemed, the sincerity of his intentions) cut through Gryffindor's sword as if it had been made of glass. His blade shattered in half, Harry swore, startled, and put up his free hand to catch Draco and steady him. 

Together they stood as still as a painting of two boys, staring down at the ruined sword. The blade had broken into three parts that lay now about Harry's feet. It was destroyed. 

"Well," said Slytherin, breaking the stunned silence with a hiss of barely-concealed delight, "Who would have thought that Godric´s blade would be made of such shoddy stuff? I told him those cheap Gypsy tinkers were no good, but would he listen? And now look." He voice had reached a pitch of amusement that grated on Draco´s nerves like needle sawing across violin strings. "Kill him, Draco," the Snake Lord added, waving an imperious arm. 

Draco looked at Harry. Harry looked back. His hair was pasted to his forehead in sweaty black question marks. He didn´t look the least bit worried. In fact, he looked as if he were trying not to laugh. Damn that shoddy Gypsy workmanship. 

Draco felt his hands shaking. Adrenaline was still surging through him in explosive bursts. Oh shut up, Potter. 

If only this thing came with a warranty. 

I MEAN it, shut up. 

"He´s unarmed," said Draco, pitching his voice louder so that Slytherin could hear him. 

"Yes, and doesn´t that make it much easier to kill him?" Slytherin pointed out. "Consider it a shortcut." 

"It´s dishonorable," said Draco shortly. "That was the whole point of this." 

"He fought you. His weapon was inferior. It was a fair fight. The fight is over. Kill him." 

Draco shook his head. "Get him another sword." 

"There is no other sword that can stand against a living blade," snapped Slytherin, sounding impatient. 

"Then we could duel another way. Get me another sword. Whatever you have to do to make this a fair fight." 

"We could wrestle," said Harry, looking innocent. 

Draco fought the urge to kick him in the ankle. "I wasn´t taught to take advantage of an unarmed opponent--" 

"You were taught to do as you should!" shouted Slytherin, losing his temper at last. "Do you expect me to think that your father taught you to show mercy to your enemies? The Malfoy family has not lasted a thousand years on that philosophy!" 

Draco´s face twisted into a snarl. "I won´t do it," he said, jaw set, eyes intractable. "I am not a coward. Maybe you had to kill Godric by sneaking up on him. But I am not like you." 

"You," said Slytherin, his eyes on Draco, full of light and hate. "You are exactly like me, and your duty is to me, and to the line which made you what you are." 

"Who are you to think you know what I am?" said Draco, in a voice as sharp as crystal, and as transparent. Scorn was in it, and rage, and fear, and a little of the wild delight of rebellion. 

"You defy me?" Slytherin´s eyes scraped over Draco like knives. "This should be impossible," he said, clearly and a little feverishly. "The enchantments on you are what they are, perfect. I can only conclude that it is you who are defective." 

I´ve been telling you that for years. It was Harry´s voice in his head, amused and detached and gentle, and it didn´t really matter what he said, just that he said something. The sound of his voice was like sanity, an anchor to reality. Draco looked at him and saw that Harry had let go his broken sword and was looking at him, his eyes dark and brilliant green, and over Harry´s shoulder he could see Slytherin watching them both. 

"You don´t know what I am," Draco said again, his voice soft with menace. "I don´t even know what I am. But I do know what I´m not. I´m not your Heir." As the Snake Lord, his face white as bleached bone, took a step towards him, and another, Draco raised the sword , pointing the tip of the blade towards Slytherin, his feet balanced lightly, as his father had taught him. "I´m not your general. I´m not anything belonging to you," he said, and felt something inside him lighten, a weight lifting at last. 

He was barely aware of Harry watching him, was barely even aware of what he was saying, knew that he couldn´t kill Slytherin, not even with his enchanted sword, but in that moment felt perfectly happy to die trying. He gripped the sword tighter as Slytherin took another step in his direction, and another, and then a last, sideways step, and Draco realized in a split and blinding and horrible second that Slytherin wasn´t walking towards him at all. 

And froze, as he realized -- but by that moment it was already too late, for, having taken several swift steps forward, Slytherin seized Harry firmly by the back of his shirt and thrust him forward as hard as he could onto the outstretched blade of Draco´s sword. 

And Draco knew what it was like, suddenly and dreadfully and unforgettably, to kill another human being with a Living Blade. 

The blade sliced straight through Harry´s body as if it drove through something with no more substance than paper. Draco heard what sounded to him like a whispering noise, a blade cutting air, or smoke, as it pierced the cage of Harry's ribs, cut through bone and muscle, stopped his beating heart. Draco saw Harry´s eyes fly wide open and look straight into his own before he staggered back, yanking the blade free, too late. It slid noiselessly out of Harry's body, red to the hilt. 

Draco stood where he was, holding the sword, too appalled to move. And opposite him stood Slytherin, his pale hands lightly dappled with blood, still holding Harry as if he could not bear to be parted from what he had done. At last he released his grip, Harry's body crumpling almost soundlessly at his feet, and smiled, the look upon his face one of pure pleasure, as if to say: Look, here it is.. .another victory. 

*** 

References: 

1)"And behold my success." Buffy. 

2) "Think how much worse it would be if life was fair, and all the awful things that happened to us happened because we actually deserve them. I for one take great comfort in the completely impersonal hostility of the universe." Babylon Five. 

3) "It does in the eyes of everyone with eyes." -- Red Dwarf. 

4) I will do such things, I know not what but they will be the terrors of the earth." King Lear. 

5) "I know it is very cold in this dungeon. I will not pass judgement." The X-Files. 

Chapter 14