Chapter 36: Mad-Eye Moody
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
It was mid-morning when the Weasleys and company lagged on foot through Ottery St. Catchpole and made their way down the unpaved lane to the Burrow and the frantic woman standing outside it. She appeared at the first sight of them through the window and ran up the driveway to meet them, barefoot, with a fistful of skirt and soon two arms full of children. It was unclear what portion were hers: she was embracing any she could get her hands on.
She threw her arms around Arthur’s neck and kissed him with a little more vigor than Draco thought was necessary. Ron politely made noises of death.
After much too long, Molly broke off. “Boys,” she gasped. “Ginny — Hermione, your shoes! Get inside at once, I’ll draw some water for a bath—”
“Can I have a bath, too?” said Ron hopefully.
“Yes, but after the girls.”
“That’s sexist.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Hermione.
“It is,” said Pansy, thoughtfully. Molly finally noticed her.
“Arthur—?”
“Ah. Yes. Picked her up with Draco,” said Arthur. “Her name’s Pansy Parkinson, Parkinson as in Prescott.” Draco couldn’t tell if he was making fun.
Molly and Pansy regarded each other with expressions of equivalent shock. “You brought home the Parkinsons’ daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
“Hm. Yes.”
“I see,” said Molly. “And where is she going?”
Pansy had turned around and begun walking back up the path. Bill caught her and dragged her back by the collar.
“Right,” said Mrs. Weasley bravely. “Well. What’s one more?” (Draco thought one more, in a house of twelve, was actually a great deal.) “Come in, dear. Cuppa?”
“I’m not thirsty,” said Pansy.
“Have,” said Molly, “a cup of tea.”
Pansy did.
They crammed into the tiny kitchen. Certain compromises were made with respect to personal space and physical laws. Mrs. Weasley made a cup of eye-watering tea that Mr. Weasley gave a no less eye-watering shot of Ogdens, and they sat in a dull silence of clinking and slurping that was somehow its own comfort. The walls of the Burrow had never seemed more firm and more necessary to his survival than they did now.
When the clock tolled five, Arthur stood up. “I have to go in. They’re going to need all hands.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Percy at once. The two crossed to the door, and a pair of cracks sounded beyond it.
Harry was rubbing his forehead like he wanted to erode it from friction. Ron nudged him.
“You’re about to start a fire over there, mate.”
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “It hurts.”
“Does it often?” said Pansy curiously.
Everyone looked at her. It was the first time she had said anything since coming in.
“Not usually,” said Harry. “Just sometimes, when I have nightmares. Molly says it’s psychomat- no, hang on— psychosoto…” He looked at Hermione.
“Psychosomatic,” she said. She was tucked into a corner of the sofa and holding herself very tightly, a small and defensive posture that gave the impression at any moment she might burrow between the cushions and vanish.
“Yeah,” he said, “that. Thing where your brain makes your body thinks it’s hurting, even when it’s not, because it’s scared. Apparently it’s not uncommon for people who… I mean, if you’ve seen stuff, and you…”
The conversation dwindled awkwardly, like a swish of dirty water circling a drain.
To Draco’s surprise, it was Pansy who intervened, giving Harry an approving jerk of her chin. “Cool. My dad has a magical scar on his back.” She leaned forward on her knees. “He got it fighting a horde of feral muggles in the underground.”
“They’re not animals,” said Hermione coldly.
“Fine. Whatever. Mad muggles, then. It’s what you call muggles that see magic and go crazy,” she said. “Their poor brains can’t handle the shock. Then you have to go clean it up and Obliviate them. My father’s not an Obliviator, that’s busywork, but he has to deal with the residual magic.”
“What was it?” said Harry. “That your dad was doing, I mean.”
She sniffed. “I don’t know. My father’s an Unspeakable, all his missions are classified.”
“What does an Unspeakable do?” said Hermione.
“Are you deaf? I just told you, his missions—”
“They’re the Ministry’s covert operations unit,” Draco said quietly. “They work in the Department of Mysteries. Platinum-grade clearance only.”
Hermione gave him a quiet, fleeting glance of gratitude. He shrugged. It wasn’t as if it were particularly impressive knowledge to hold.
“Dad’s silver-grade, for reference,” Ron told her.
Hermione turned to Pansy. “So your dad’s a spy?” she said bluntly.
The other girl flicked her eyes at the ceiling. “If you wanted to be painfully simplistic, I suppose. It would be more appropriate to say he’s a top-clearance political operative. He isn’t running around in fake mustaches and silly hats. I see you got your metal off, by the way. Mazel tov. Does this mean you’ve become a woman, in muggle custom?”
“What?”
Pansy rolled her eyes and bared her teeth.
“Oh. I did, thank you,” said Hermione stiffly. “And it doesn’t mean anything except that my teeth are healthy. If you were a friend, I might suggest you get some, actually, yours are slightly crooked.”
Pansy turned scarlet and sealed her lips like a seam. “I beg your pardon?”
“Well, it’s true. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, most people need them.”
“I believe you’ll understand,” said Pansy thinly, “if I don’t take cosmetic advice from you.”
“Parkinson,” said Draco, mostly from exasperation, as the other three recoiled in varying states of distaste. Harry sat up straight and scowled, while Hermione — against whom this accusation was terribly unfair, really; she was quite put-together, most of the time, with the sole exception of her hair — suddenly found something of great interest in her clasped hands.
Ron said “Oi,” calmly but firmly, and Pansy made a little scoff, but still fell silent; Hermione was unusually subdued.
It was a bad moment, feeling-wise, for everyone.
“Oh, God, silences this long should be illegal,” said Pansy. “Bugger this, I’m going to get some air.”
She stood up, wrenched her jumper straight, and stalked out of the room with the airs of someone on six-inch heels, instead of a pair of muddy loafers. The door clattered emphatically behind her.
“Little bint,” muttered Ginny.
“She’s just spoiled,” said Hermione calmly, though she was still staring at her hands. “Her teeth are crooked. It would do her good if more people told her things she didn’t like to hear.”
Then she looked sidelong at Draco, as if she expected him to say something. He didn’t. He was glad Pansy had the good sense to remove herself before something more pyrotechnic happened. He didn’t trust her and Hermione alone together in a small space for more than five minutes; neither had the patience to deal with each other. It was an unfortunate remark on his social situation that most of the girls he knew well had more personality than patience.
The fire blazed green. They cleared a small space for Arthur Weasley to stumble over the grate.
“Ministry inquest,” he said breathlessly. “Aurors dispatched for questioning. Everyone out—”
Too late. The fire turned green again, and there was a screeching and thumping of furniture as everyone tried to clear yet more space in a living room that was already all but bulging outwards at the seams.
Three men stepped over the grate, one at a time. The first was a short, pug-nosed man in a double-breasted black uniform, with his hair slicked within an inch of its life to his skull. The second was Barty Crouch. The third was an auror.
He wore an oily brown leather greatcoat over his auror’s uniform and a wand holster with a longknife strapped to it. A dirk sat on his other hip, while two handles jutted from his boots, and another holster disappeared under his jacket. He had a beady blue glass eye and a shag of silver hair, and the only face Draco had ever seen with more scars than Remus Lupin’s.
The auror hopped the grate with an agility quite unfit for his age, and planted a gnarled walking stick on the rug. Crouch stepped aside, clearing his throat, and the glass eye swiveled around to follow him. In fact, the glass eye never left Crouch, no matter where the auror was looking.
“Mad-Eye,” said Arthur, with surprise and faint warmth.
“Arthur.” The auror, Mad-Eye, scuttled over and exchanged a grim handshake. “Sorry to intrude. Prissy Parkinson here insisted.”
“Quite alright, I understand completely. Mr. Parkinson, I’d like to apologize—”
Prescott Parkinson pointed his wand at Arthur.
“Where is my daughter?” he said, in a calm steady voice, with a calm steady hand.
Crouch massaged the bridge of his nose. “Prescott,” he began. “We talked about this—”
“Put that down!”
It was Molly, come in from the kitchen; she drew her own wand and jabbed it at the intruders. “Not here! Not under my roof!”
“If someone doesn’t answer my question, you will soon have very little roof left to worry about,” said Parkinson. “My daughter. Where is she?”
“Touch Arthur, and in a minute she’ll be scrubbing her father out of the carpets,” snarled Mad-Eye.
Prescott turned to him, and there was a beat of intense silence.
Just when Draco was certain that the next word spoken was going to be a curse, the door banged open. Pansy stalked in, followed by a harried Bill.
“Father,” she said. “Finally. Do you know how long I’ve been stuck in this hovel?”
Parkinson dropped his wand. A change came over him completely. “Poppet,” he breathed, and dropped down to embrace her. Pansy hissed and danced out of reach.
“Dad! No! God! Not in front of the auror!”
“What happened to your hair? Didn’t Mummy offer—?”
“Nothing! Nothing!! Don’t draw attention to it!”
“Prescott,” said Crouch tiredly, “you have acquired your daughter. Acquit yourself.”
Nodding stiffly, Parkinson turned to Arthur. “We require use of your Floo,” he bit out.
“We don’t have any powder,” said Arthur calmly. “If you want to Apparate, you’ll have to go out to the yard.”
Without a word, Prescott Parkinson silently swept his daughter out of the room. Draco didn’t meet her eyes as she left, and she didn’t try to meet his.
“I apologize for the interruption,” said Crouch smoothly. “Prescott insisted on joining us. We’re here to conduct interviews.”
“Interviews?” piped up Fred. “Are we going to be in the paper?”
“Not if you know what’s good for you,” snarled Mad-Eye. Fred paled.
“All eyewitnesses will be questioned. Starting with Ministry officials and their guests. Someone breached Ministry security — someone on the inside.”
“Is that an accusation?” said Molly coldly.
Mad-Eye softened, insofar as the word ‘softened’ meant anything, for him.
“Molly,” he said.
“Hello, Alastor. Lovely to see you. Answer the question, please.”
“It’s procedure,” snapped Crouch. “A hundred employees and their families have been interviewed already. Starting with the inner circle.”
“Oh, yes? All of them?”
“Sibelius Nott has been under questioning since sunrise, as has his fourteen-year-old son. Please do not think I fail to understand the gravity of the situation.”
Draco startled.
“And the muggles?” said Arthur.
“Obliviated,” said Crouch. “Having their memories modified as we speak. When they wake, last night will be a strange dream.”
Molly was skeptical. “And how do you intend to explain what happened to any other muggle witnesses?”
“Gas leak,” grunted Mad-Eye. “Cockridge and Peaseblossom hacked up a pipe near the closest town, and they’re leaving a tip-off in with the muggle paper.”
“Hard to do better,” Arthur admitted. “But the children were with me all night. You can question me, instead.”
“Arthur,” said Molly, disapproving and sharp.
“All of them?” said Mad-Eye. “The whole night?”
“Yes.”
“Dad, that’s not true,” said Percy quickly. “Malfoy left the tent, remember?”
Ron made a furious noise. “Perce, you great fat snitch!”
The unwitting elegance of this betrayal left Draco slightly impressed. The Minister and Mad-Eye both confronted Draco with new interest.
Hermione stood up suddenly. As gestures went, hers warmed him, but he actually rather wished she’d stayed out of Mad-Eye’s sightline.
“What? It’s true!”
“He’s fourteen,” said Molly loudly. “I repeat, fourteen.”
Crouch ignored him. “Mr. Malfoy, is that true?”
Draco nodded jerkily.
“He went to get water,” said Hermione. He was torn between wanting to thank her and wanting to clamp a hand over her wretched wonderful fearless mouth. “He was thirsty and the tents don’t have plumbing, and anyway, I’m certain there are thousands of wizards you can’t account for, it was havoc. Draco’s hardly an unusual case.”
Crouch acted as though he hadn’t heard her. “A quick interview,” he said crisply. “We’ll make it short—”
Mad-Eye grunted in disapproval. “No. Prior incantato.”
“Really, Alastor?”
“No special treatment, Barty.”
They traded a strange, knowing look. Mad-Eye did something with his cheek. Crouch clicked his tongue. Mad-Eye did it again. Then Crouch sighed and flapped his hand and Mad-Eye turned back to Draco, faintly smug, as if he had won something.
“Draco, listen,” said Arthur quickly, stepping between him and the Ministry men. He spoke in a low voice. “You don’t have to cooperate. You’ve got a right to an attorney. Alastor would be the first person to tell you that.”
Mad-Eye made a grunt that could be interpreted as agreement. It could also be interpreted as homicidal intent. All in the eye of the beholder, was Mad-Eye.
Draco felt an unexpected touch of affection for Mr. Weasley.
“I’m aware.” Come to think of it, he didn’t know how to get ahold of Gatz, if he needed to; they didn’t have Floo powder. But the Ministry men didn’t need to know that. “It’s fine. I haven’t anything to hide.”
The kitchen was cleared for his questioning. The others shuffled upstairs or into the garden and closed the door, leaving the Burrow eerily quiet, animated only by the dripping faucet and the creak of floorboards as people tried to eavesdrop upstairs. Mad-Eye and Crouch sat on one side of the table, and he sat on the other.
He pulled out his wand, flipped it, and held it handle-out. He tried not to show how it unsettled him. A man wasn’t supposed to be separated from his wand.
Mad-Eye took it by the handle — his index and third finger were covered by a dragonskin wand-guard, and a rather expensive one; Draco wanted one on sight — and lifted it before his glass eye. He grunted at whatever he saw, and gave it an experimental swish. “Do you know its properties, boy?”
“Do I? Please. Ten inches, hawthorn wood and unicorn hair. Pliant.”
“Hawthorn, eh?” Mad-Eye danced it over the back of his fingers, a gesture that was facially useless but patently cool. Draco wondered how he did it. “Any good at healing magic, are you?”
He wasn’t about to bloody well say no. “Better at jinxes, sir.”
“I see. The second wizard, then.”
“…Sir?”
“You know the saying about hawthorn,” muttered Mad-Eye, though he didn’t. “Every tree makes two wands. The first is for a healer, and the second is for the wizard who keeps them in business.”
He suspected he had been accused of a murderous nature. It wasn’t impossible, but at fourteen, it seemed a touch premature.
“I’m not an expert in wandcraft,” he said delicately.
Mad-Eye snorted. “Hark at him. ‘I’m not an expert.’ Lucius Malfoy rides again. And Merlin wept.”
Crouch cleared his throat in discomfort. Draco narrowed his eyes.
“Forgive me, but I have a hard time believing you knew my father. Sir.”
“I knew his backside well enough when I was chasing it over hill and dale,” said Mad-Eye, with a certain gleam in his real eye. It reminded him slightly of the Weasley twins. “Enough chatter. Let’s have a look at you. Prior incantato.”
The hawthorn wand trembled, and from its tip issued a length of white mist. The mist took the shape of a lock.
“Colloportus,” said Crouch with satisfaction. “And some time ago, judging by the color. What was that for, Mr. Malfoy?”
“I locked my trunk before I left Hogwarts, in June. Is that enough?”
Mad-Eye spun the hawthorn wand around and handed it back to him. “Hardly,” he growled. “You could’ve cast the Mark in a dozen ways we’d never know about. You could’ve stolen someone else’s wand. Obliviated them. Or made one of them do it. Arthur Weasley could be under Imperius as we speak.”
Draco folded his arms. “I’m flattered,” he said, “but we don’t learn Unforgivable Curses until next year.”
Neither of them laughed at his hilarious joke.
Crouch stood up. “We’ve spent enough time indulging your habit for conspiracy, Alastor. The boy didn’t do anything. Mr. Malfoy, I apologize for the interruption. Please enjoy the rest of your summer vacation, if you can.”
The glass eye swiveled around to follow the other wizard as Crouch stalked out of the kitchen. Mad-Eye waited and then leaned over the table, bringing his pitted face altogether too close to Draco’s. “Remember what I said,” he muttered.
“…About what, sir?”
The eye stayed trained on something behind his head, giving him the unnerving impression of a glassy white sclera. The other eye was cold and bright and wide as a dinner spoon. “Absence of proof is not proof of innocence. That’s what no one at this kangaroo court of a Ministry can get through their heads. No one is ever innocent until you have the man who did it at the point of your wand.” He paused, and when Draco thought he might have blown a gasket in that old ramshackle machine of a head, he shrieked: “Constant vigilance!” and Draco shouted and banged his knee on the table so hard that he was still nursing it when Mad-Eye scuttled out.
“Just a spell? That’s all?”
“You sound disappointed. Would you rather I was put to the thumbscrews?”
They were in Ginny’s bedroom, where Hermione was finishing her last-minute packing before they departed in the morning. (The ‘last-minute’ phase still occurred several hours before Draco intended to so much as think about packing at all.)
He sprawled sideways over the pillows while the Cranberries fought to be heard over the bellow of rain on the tin roof. The evening light dappled through the water on the windows.
“I had hoped it might build character,” she said. He smirked at her. “But what they did is much more interesting. So a wand keeps a history of its uses? Like a ledger?”
“More like a palimpsest, I think. It only showed the last spell I’d cast.”
As befit the privileges of Only Girlchild, Ginny’s room was nicer than Ron’s. It was covered in peeling yellow wallpaper and Weird Sisters posters, as well as a Holyhead Harpies pinup calendar that Hermione, amusingly, couldn’t look at without blushing. (Draco could, and did.) A small bed was wedged in the corner, and Hermione’s sleeping pad had been rolled out on the floor beneath the window.
She pulled a garment bag from Ginny’s closet and paused in thought. “That’s still fascinating. Flitwick told us a wand is a conduit, like a vessel for water, but a vessel doesn’t remember the nature of what it holds.”
He turned a page of Quidditch for Seekers. An advertisement for riding gloves featuring one of the Bulgarian beaters winked at him. “It can still keep traces.”
“But that doesn’t make sense, because the spell should end once you’ve stopped casting it. How can you have a ‘trace’ of a spell like Colloportus? It doesn’t produce anything. If anything, it’s just a particular form of motion, moving the tumblers in a lock. It’s the same concept as Bombarda, or Ventus.”
“Fine, I’ll bite. How do you think it works?”
“I don’t know! I really don’t! But I do have a theory.”
“Shock. Surprise,” he said, turning another page.
“It would be simple to test, if only we could use magic — I suppose it’ll have to wait. But if your wand has memory, like a computer—”
“Objection. Refer to the Granger-Malfoy Treaty on Use of Muggle Analogies.”
“You analogize to things I don’t know all the time— no, never mind, we can’t do this again. If it has memory, in theory, you should be able to retrieve prior spells other than the last one. Possibly without going in order.”
“Very exciting. Of course, without limits, your theory implies that your full spellcasting history is accessible through your wand, which obviously can’t be the case.”
She had a special pout reserved for whenever he said one of her theories was demonstrably incorrect or impossible, especially because of things she had no reasonable ability to know. It was deployed now in full force. “Why not?”
“Because it could have been used to exonerate Sirius Black,” he yawned. “‘Did you blow up those muggles? No? Very good, sorry to bother you, have a nice day.’ Now, he still tried to kill Pettigrew,” he added, “so it doesn’t necessarily get him anywhere, but the point stands.”
“It’s possible they haven’t figured out how.” Sudden bursts of energy to her brain often stalled her in other places, and so she had been gripping the same garment bag, half-folded, for several minutes. “Spellwork is some of the most complicated magical theory. Especially metamagic, spells having to do with spells themselves. There’s a reason wandwork is so hard.”
He deserved an Order of Merlin, Second Class at least, for not making a joke about ‘wandwork.’
She was quiet again, and he put down the magazine.
It had been two days since the Dark Mark. Hermione had been unusually subdued since then, although out of respect for her and an obvious recognition of its probable cause, no one had — as far as Draco knew — yet commented on it. He found himself waiting for the right moment to broach the subject, but it was never good, it was never not awkward or inappropriate or a violation of some unspoken rule of engagement that kept their little rapport buoyant and tugging along.
And he was embarrassed, too: embarrassed because when he’d seen her on the hill, there had been a full minute or thereabouts where he hadn’t thought a thing else, and that was alarming, in its own way. There was a wildness and rough-edgedness to those feelings that he didn’t care to directly address. He didn’t like that she’d seen him that way. She knew that about him, now. If she wanted, she could throw it in his face. Just because she hadn’t didn’t mean she couldn’t.
He shifted uncomfortably. “Alright, Granger?”
“Of course,” she said, with a funny look. In fairness, he hadn’t exactly told her what he meant, which was: Are you unaffected by watching a family of muggles being tortured for possession of the very blood that flows in your admittedly magical veins? Are you processing the information that certain people want to hurt you, Hermione Granger, very badly, in a healthy way? Because certain other persons in this room are not.
The rain drummed on the windowpane like another musical instrument. He was struck by the idea that if they stayed here, in this room, then there would never be a need to concern themselves with Death Eaters ever again. Her blood status would be irrelevant, being that there were only two of them; it would be terribly easy. He could lay hexes on the doors, the windows, the cracks in the walls where the wind slithered in. And Hermione would be alright. And he would get to relax, for once in his life, because he wouldn’t have to worry about anyone getting herself hurt when his back was turned.
Ridiculous idea. She’d hex him in half for the suggestion, anyway.
“What?”
“What, ‘what’?”
“You’re staring.”
“I’m not,” he said immediately. “I don’t suppose — you don’t need any Sleeping Potion, do you?”
Her hand hesitated on its journey to the sock drawer. Then she resumed with a certain brittle businesslike vim. “Not recently,” she said. “I haven’t had trouble sleeping. More than usual, anyway.”
“If you do.”
“I’m fine.”
“I know.”
“This isn’t the first time — I mean, in second year, someone wrote a threat in blood over the Pink Lady—”
“I know,” he repeated, curtly. “I remember. But you’d be entitled—”
“I’m not some delicate muggle-born naif—”
“Obviously not, and neither am I, but one still might worry.”
He hadn’t meant to say that.
“You worried?” she said curiously. “I wouldn’t have think it was as awful — for you. Considering. No offense.”
She had a habit of appending no offense to statements that were heedlessly tactless, as if that helped. Still, it was endearing that she tried.
“Don’t be daft,” he snapped. “Only an idiot wouldn’t. Muggles floating in the sky, insurgents everywhere, it was madness—”
“Death Eaters, you mean.”
“We don’t know that for certain. It could have been a hoax.”
“The muggles looked fairly real,” she said, slightly acerbic.
“No, clearly, but the wizards might have been anyone. Death Eater was a real title, it referred to a fledged soldier of the Dark Lord, and there aren’t that many of them left. If everyone in masks at the Cup was a former Death Eater, it would mean everyone left in Britain showed out. No, it’s more likely that the group was inspired—”
“I think the kind of people who use Death Eaters for inspiration,” she said, “aren’t so very different from Death Eaters, actually. From my point of view.”
The beat that followed was distinctly guilty.
“Fair,” he said.
“I’m not afraid of them,” she said firmly. “Death Eaters or not, whoever they are.”
“Merlin’s sake.”
“I mean it, I’m not. I’m not going to run away from them. They can do whatever they like, they’re pathetic, and I’m not frightened—”
“I respect that you’re a Gryffindor and have to save face,” he said, with dwindling patience. “But it might occur to you one of these days that cowardice and wisdom are not mutually incompatible qualities.”
“Would you rather I was afraid?”
“I want you to save your own skin,” he said, irritably, “so as to save me the trouble of doing it.”
“Oh, because it’s such an inconvenience to you, is it—”
“More of an irrational compulsion,” he drawled, and hoped that the sarcasm would dry out any hidden evidence of feeling. He flicked another page of the magazine.
Hermione seemed taken aback. Her fingers curled tightly around the side of a hanger, and she fidgeted with a loose thread, absentminded.
“Were you — worried about me? At the Cup?”
He glared at her over the top of his magazine, lowered his eyes, and said nothing.
“You were scared — for me?”
“I shall reiterate the situation,” he said, “since it may have slipped your mind. Explosions. Killing Curses. Muggles in the sky. I was worried for everything living in a five-mile radius, I don’t know why you think this is some revelation.”
“But for me in particular. Specifically.”
“What do you want from me, witch? A signed confession? I, Draco Malfoy, do hereby declare I should not desire the violent and premature death of Ms. Granger, chiefly from aversion to the disastrous inconvenience of finding a new potions partner? Fine. Yes, in particular,” he said sourly. “Go on and laugh.”
“I don’t think it’s funny,” she said, still slightly startled. Now that was starting to annoy him, too. It wasn’t that ludicrous for him to care. He had a beating heart, for God’s sake, he wasn’t some cretin. “I worried about you, too — in particular — obviously. You know that.”
“That’s different,” he said. Hermione would have been worried if bloody Pigwidgeon went missing. If poor Ronald had misplaced himself, she’d have mobilized the Queen’s navy by sunup. He would have been insulted if she hadn’t shown a bit of nerves, honestly. “As you said, it’s not the same for me.”
She hummed in thought. “I wanted to go looking for you,” she said, absently. “Me and Harry volunteered. Mr. Weasley stopped us.”
He cast a sharp look at her over the magazine. “It’s a bloody good thing he did,” he said curtly. “I never took you for a lemming.”
“That’s rich! You went running off by yourself. And how did you end up with Pansy, anyway?”
“That was an accident.”
“Alright, then don’t tell me.”
“I’m not lying.”
“Mm. You just ran into her after midnight, then. On accident.”
“I entreat you to take that implication and stuff your woeful mouth with it. That’s heinous, Granger, she’s a child.”
“She’s almost our age,” she said, but she was very bad at repressing laughter. “I’m sure Harry would have done the same with Cho, if—”
“That’s enough.”
“—half a chance — or Fred and Angelina, I’m sure he knows a dozen ways to sneak out—”
He tossed the magazine onto the bed and sat up. Crookshanks glared at him balefully for jostling the mattress. “Right. I’m going to go vacate my intestines into a toilet bowl, and once I’m finished, if you’d care to act like a gentlewoman, I’ll return, and we can revisit other subjects of conversation.”
“You’re such a boy,” she laughed, and threw a pillow at him. He caught it with ease, snickering. He had a seeker’s reflexes, and she had what you could only generously call ‘reflexes’ at all. “You act like you’re so different from Harry and Ron, but you’re really just as silly as they are, only with a posher accent.”
“I am not,” he said indignantly. “I am a gentleman.”
“A posher accent,” she repeated. He scoffed.
“So what, then? You’re a girl.”
“And what is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. You are, aren’t you?” he said vaguely, and when he glanced up she was looking at him. She was wearing her light-wash jeans and a two-tone muggle shirt with sleeves more sheer than the camisole beneath, so one could see her soft birdlike arms and pointy shoulders through the film. She didn’t dress like this at Hogwarts. It was very hard to forget she was a girl when she was wearing such different clothing. Maybe that was why the subject hadn’t come up until now.
A lock of hair drifted into her face, and she blew it away. He followed the movement with his eyes.
“Your mother thought I was a boy,” she said finally.
“So? That doesn’t mean I did,” he said. “I don’t keep her abreast of everything that goes on at school, either. I think the werewolf and her disinherited cousin would be more of a shock than the fact that I’m mates with a girl.”
“Being ‘mates’ doesn’t mean you can’t mention it,” she said, with a sulky lilt. “I mean — and I don’t care, mind, it’s obviously not important, but — you never even used a pronoun? How often did I come up?”
“Often enough, and what did you expect? ‘Hello Mum, Granger looked ever so womanly today, as we brewed a Polyjuice Potion illegally in the second-floor girls’ bath, of which she is one, a girl, of the feminine sex. Yours, Draco.’”
“Trust you to miss the point,” she said, and set about folding her socks.
“Apparently I have missed it, because I wasn’t aware you had one.”
She was putting a real dent in the sock population. It was brutal. The day would live in infamy in sockdom.
“My point,” she said emphatically, “is that — I’m a girl.”
He stared at her.
“I know that. We’ve only been discussing it for about five years now, I have acquired the gist.”
“Good!”
“Yes, good.”
He had no idea how they had ended up in an argument, which meant, on experience, that he was on the verge of losing.
“…Are you angry, Granger?”
“Don’t be silly,” she muttered. “Why would I be angry? We agree. Like you said.”
The socks were packed into their soldier’s graves, row upon row of sad white tombstones, and sealed away in the tomb of her trunk. She sat on the lid to get it closed, with a bit more force than was necessary.
“I’m glad we have an understanding,” he said suspiciously, and returned to a magazine. She rolled her eyes and went to change the CD, which had skipped into static.
Getting a bit cryptic these days, was Hermione.
On Hermione’s suggestion, Mrs. Weasley ordered muggle taxis into London. Draco generously decided not to resent her for this, despite the fact that it meant all eight of them — the four schoolbound Weasleys, their guests, and Mrs. Weasley, Mr. Weasley being still stuck in the glut of post-Cup madness at work — had to cram into three musty-smelling green taxi cabs, along with their trunks, four owls, a cat, and a case of Filibuster’s Fabulous Wet-Start No-Heat Fireworks, which would not have been a problem had Fred’s trunk not sprang open at the first red light.
Draco, pinned between Harry and the door, put his head to the window and concentrated on not being sick. Crookshanks used every leg he could find as a stretching post. The stop-and-go traffic lurched them around the packed cab, which smelled of something sour and earthy and also, bizarrely, of pineapples. He tried to roll down a window and was yelled at by the driver for letting rain into the car.
He concluded that driving was a fresh hell that Hermione and Harry had both become inured to by exposure, which raised his respect for both of them, but when he tried to tell them so, they assured him that most car rides “weren’t like this,” for his next one would be “much better,” and the very idea of a “next one” reduced him nearly to tears.
Everyone was better when they got outside. Hermione scooped Crookshanks from out of the cabbie’s lap, apologizing profusely. Fred scraped the burnt firecrackers out of the cab under his mother’s immolating gaze. The rain soaked them in an instant, and this leant a somewhat hurried, unsentimental quality to their goodbyes. Nobody was congregating to chat on the platform this year, and the convivial spirit, damp but undaunted, migrated onto the train, where people were drying off with Warming and Siphoning Charms in every aisle. Magic hummed overhead, that taut, wavery quality like air over hot pavement.
Piling into the compartment, the four of them shucked their wet clothes and let them dry over the luggage racks. “I can’t believe I don’t get new dress robes,” moaned Ron. “Everyone else did. Harry got them. Fred got them! Even Ginny got a new dress.”
“What do you even need dress robes for?” said Hermione. “You never wear them.”
“They’re on the school list! Dunno why there’s so much bloody new stuff this year.” He flopped his threadbare copy of Standard Book of Spells, Grade 4, which wore the marks of three careful owners and two not-very-careful ones: its cover clung to the spine by four spindly threads, like bony fingers. “Why do I never get new things?”
Hermione clucked her tongue and ran her wand over the back in what must have been its umteenth Mending Charm. “I’m sure that your mother does the best she can. You said things were getting easier, now Percy has a job.”
“Yeah, but now Ginny’s getting bigger, and she gets all new stuff, because she’s a girl,” he said sourly. “And Percy doesn’t like paying for us. He wants to spend all his money on nice robes and snooty quills.”
Draco subtly adjusted the sleeves of his robes, which were, of course, new, and a soft midnight black, cut from the finest cotton that Madame Malkin had to sell.
Pigwidgeon chose that moment to erupt in a fit of screeching. Ulysses, Thucydides, and Hedwig all glowered as if deeply ashamed to share a species with him.
“See?” Ron pelted an Owl Treat at his cage. “Even my owl’s rubbish.”
There came a tap at the door. It revealed a yellow-haired girl in a Slytherin tie, with a milk-white canyon of scars running from her right ear to her left jaw, and disappearing into the folds of her collar.
Hermione’s breath hitched.
Daphne smiled bravely. “Boo,” she said. “Hullo, chaps. Surprised?”
“Merlin’s taint,” said Ron. “Your face.”
Draco pulled out his wand and jinxed him. Ron’s tongue sealed to the roof of his mouth, and he gave a panicked grunt.
“Ron,” said Hermione furiously. “Daphne, it’s really — you’re lovely as ever, and really well — I’m sorry—”
“Oh, what, like you think I didn’t know?” Daphne tittered. “Yes, it’s a big honking ugly scar. Just hideous. I shall never be an actress. May I sit down?”
There was a beat.
“What,” said Harry, bewildered, “with us?”
Another beat. Daphne, caught in the compartment door, faltered and folded her small white hands around the handle of her trunk.
“Unless you’d object.”
“No,” said Harry, “but it’s just — you’ve never sat with us, before.”
“I was never invited. You four are dreadfully insular. You’re a harder ticket than Queen Charlotte’s. I was all aflutter to be invited to your Christmas party. I thought: ‘Now I’ve really made it, the Gryffindor Four are letting me in.’” She gave a nervous, tinkling laugh. “I don’t mean to put myself where I’m not wanted, of course. I suppose I can go sit with the first years or something—”
Ron scooted over on the seat and patted it. With obvious relief, she dropped with a bounce onto the seat between Ron and Harry, legs swinging girlishly.
“Well!” she said eagerly. “What shall we talk about? Muggle sports?”
A number of furtive stares ricocheted around the compartment.
“No, then,” she said. “No muggle sports. That’s fine. There’s plenty to talk about. Do you want to know what I did with my summer? I’ll tell you anyway. I read through the complete novels of Philomena Guinea. There are forty-seven in toto, and each one involves a strapping warlock fighting for the hand of a pureblood gentlewoman unwillingly affianced to her rich blood-traitor cousin. I won’t spoil the rest but if you like the kind of book where people are always ‘frozen in astonishment’ at the ‘fathomless depths of his onyx orbs’ then boy, does Miss Philomena ever have a story for you. Hermione, in fact, there’s one that you might like — the princess is only a half- blood in it, and she has four cats. Are you all this quiet all the time? Stop staring, I feel like I’ve spinach on my teeth.”
She turned to Harry. “You’ve got a scar on your head,” she said, belligerently, “and nobody stares at you.”
“They do, actually,” he replied. “These ones are just used to it.”
“But yours is such a neat little shape,” she said thoughtfully, touching her cheek. “I, er… how long was it, would you say? Before your friends were used to it?”
Apropos of little, Hermione said: “Won’t the other Slytherins sit with you, Daphne?”
Daphne smiled. “What do you mean? Everywhere was full.”
“…Every compartment?”
“Oh, thereabouts!” she said. “I don’t want to bother them. It’s not a pleasant thing to be reminded of, and I can understand… how one might think…”
She paused.
“Well, I might as well get right out in front of it,” she said fiercely. “I don’t know who came up with the idea that I’d caught lycanthropy, but you should all know it’s not true. I’m very well and I keep myself very clean.” She tucked her hair behind her ear. “So you haven’t anything to worry about.”
Hermione’s mouth fell open. He could hear her mentally adding Daphne to her collection of endangered objects, a coterie that was as large as it was motley, and he was unsure whether or not Daphne would be glad to know she was in it. Hermione hoarded lost and broken things like dragon’s gold.
If it made her occasionally annoying, well, he had an annoying streak himself, anyway.
“We’re not worried,” said Harry loyally. “Lupin was our friend. It wouldn’t matter if you were a werewolf.”
“But I’m not,” she snapped.
“Oh. Okay.”
The train chugged on in silence through the coursing rain.
“I’m human,” Daphne said.
Ron unstuck his teeth with a monumental effort. “H’llo,” he managed. “Y’lk. Wkuh.”
She blinked at him. “I beg your pardon?”
“You. Look. W’cked,” he said, and drew his finger down his cheek. She brightened.
“You’re a dirty liar, Ronald Weasley,” she said. “And if you weren’t so nice to me, I’d give you the scolding you deserve. Now — oh, who’s there?”
There was another knock on the compartment door. It revealed Theo, whose arm was in a sling, and Pansy, who was lurking in the background, eyeing all of them with mistrust.
“Theo!” said Daphne happily. She wriggled over, nearly sitting on top of Ron, who grumbled and made a sliver of room on the seat. “Pans! Come join us.”
Pansy burst into a suspicious fit of coughing.
“Tempting,” said Theo, and his voice could have dried a lake. “But I can’t. What are you doing here, Daph?”
“I wanted to catch up with everyone,” she said, without batting an eyelash. “I haven’t seen these chaps since before the summer. Where have you been, anyway? I looked for you for— longer than a gentleman has any right to make a lady look.”
“That’s my fault, we got caught up. Crabbe wanted to have a word about the League.”
“He’s not joining, is he?” Daphne was astonished. “Vince?”
“Unclear. He said he’s ‘interested,’ which is the first time I’ve heard him utter the word, so I don’t really know what it means.”
“But he’s not political! Vince? Vince!”
“It’s not all politics,” said Theo sorely, as if this were the third or fourth incarnation of an argument. “It’s a social club, we have speakers and things. Honestly I thought you’d be happy for him, you’re the one always getting on his case about having no hobbies.”
“Drinking in stuffy rooms with old people isn’t a hobby, it’s a career,” said Daphne hotly, “and Vince hasn’t got the brains for politicking. He’ll insult someone’s wife by accident and end up in St. Mungo’s. It’s irresponsible to let him join.”
“Come and save him, then,” suggested Theo, leaning against the door. “We’re rounding up for the first meeting.”
“On the train?” said Hermione shrewdly. “Jumping the gun, aren’t you?”
He shrugged. “It’s easier to schedule when we’ve got everyone in one place. Anyway, are you coming, or not? You’re welcome too, Draco,” he added, nodding at him. “But Pansy suggested that your summer activities might incline you to spend your time elsewhere.”
Draco’s stomach gave a queasy flip.
Hermione took a sharp breath and stared at him. He wished she wouldn’t; on the one hand, it felt like she wasn’t giving him enough credit, and on the other, it felt like he was being forced to decide something critical and important whose nature he could not begin to name. Why couldn’t he just have all of what he wanted at once?
He waved his hand lazily at the door, as if he couldn’t be bothered to move from his seat. “I’m not walking the length of a train for your Parliament of Prats. If I wanted to be bored stiff, I’d go sit with the Ravenclaws.”
“Have it your way,” said Theo. His voice revealed nothing. He jerked his head at Daphne. “Seriously. Daph. Come on.”
“I’m not sitting with them,” she said.
“Then stand, damn you, or I’ll carry you. Everyone’s there, they’re waiting.”
“They wouldn’t sit with me before,” she said, in a hard voice. “I’m not going to sit with them now, just because they’re scared of you.”
There was a thin dark silence, like the ice in the center of a frozen lake.
Theo stepped back from the doorway. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. I — okay. Whatever. I don’t actually care. Sit with the rabble if you want. Hell, go live with them, apparently that’s what Draco’s doing.”
Ron gave a cry of outrage, but Harry was already on his feet.
“I reckon she was pretty clear, but maybe you’re so thick you need someone to spell it,” he said. “She doesn’t want to go. And we don’t want you to stay. That means you’re leaving, and she’s not coming with you.”
“Isn’t she?” said Theo crisply. “Isn’t she, now!” He turned to Daphne. “Should I tell them what you said about blood traitors at Beltane? Or will you do the honors?”
“Just go,” she said miserably. “Theo, I’m sorry. I can’t go to the meeting. I’ll — I’ll join next week or something.”
“Fine. Or don’t. I really couldn’t care less.”
Which would have been more convincing if he hadn’t slammed the door.
Hermione let out a long breath, and sagged into the wall.
“He’s not bad,” said Daphne in a small voice, to no one in particular. “He’s a good person. He cares a lot. He’s under a lot of stress now, that’s all.”
“Yeah, what could that be like?” said Harry. “I guess none of us would know.”
Draco snorted.
“They make me nervous,” said Hermione. She was watching the compartment door. A frown twitched her brows together. “I don’t know why.”
He frowned at her.
“They make me sick,” snarled Ron. He propped his chin in his hand and stared out the window, his face streaked by the shadows of raindrops. “‘Live with pigs.’ Posh little wanker trotting around like he owns everything. Just because his dad’s got a Ministry connection. My dad could’ve had a promotion whenever he wanted…”
“Don’t let them get to you,” said Hermione bravely. “You just can’t let them get to you, that’s all. That’s giving him what he wants.”
“I’ll give him what he’s asking for, one of these days,” Ron said darkly. “For me and for you.”
Draco folded his arms and slid back into his corner. Meanwhile Ron and Hermione exchanged a broken trapjaw of a smile, which left him feeling like a man standing outside of a warm cottage in the rain.
And we’re back to Hogwarts.
-Daphne my beloved! We’ll get more from her later. There are several asterisks by her name in my outline for this year.
-Oh, dear Hermione.
-I am completely confident that Hermione is the kind of girl who organizes her socks by material and day of the week. Draco is the kind of person to whom it has never occurred to use “organize” and “sock” in the same sentence. This is still an improvement over Harry and Ron, who are on distant terms with the word “organization” at all.
-As always, a metaphorical bouquet of extravagant roses to everyone who commented! Next chapter is “The Triwizard Tournament.”
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