The Golden Trio

Chapter 44: The Golden Trio

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

On Christmas Day, while the church bells in Hogsmeade crooned, Gryffindor Tower rose blearily to laze about in its jimjams and trade presents over cups of hot cider. Draco woke sooner than most, since Dobby had Apparated directly on top of his legs. This was no more pleasant than it had been when he was six.

The elf had darned a tea cozy apiece for Draco, Hermione, Harry, and Ron, each printed with different flowers; Draco’s were jasmines, while Harry and Ron got a sprig of bright red holly, and Hermione’s were patterned with marigolds. Harry mistook it for some sort of hat, and put it on his head, which Dobby took as a compliment of such high esteem that he burst into tears, and was still weeping when he left.

“He takes the holidays seriously,” remarked Hermione. Her hair had swelled to its normal bush now the Sleekeazy had washed out, but a few bits of gold still twinkled in it.

Draco passed her a package wrapped in gilded green paper. It contained a full set of Everfull Inkwells — expensive ones, but justified as an investment in the vain hope that she would stop stealing his. Signing the card would have felt like an insult to her intelligence, so he hadn’t. “Course he did. Potter wore his gift as clothes,” he said. “For a house-elf, you can’t get much more serious without proposing.”

Ron, who had not spoken to Hermione or Draco since the Yule Ball, silently shuffled over and deposited a pair of packages in both their laps. This being the closest they were likely to get to an entreaty of reconciliation, Hermione thanked him stiffly, while Draco cleared his throat and muttered something vaguely grateful.

It was a strange, slightly strained Christmas, but at the very least the bad feelings from last night had abated; the atmosphere was not dislike or bad feeling but embarrassment, as though no one had a great deal of pride for how they comported themselves. Even Draco, who thought honestly that he had done nothing wrong, was not spared from the tension, and found himself wishing that Harry and Ron would go celebrate elsewhere. All the same, when they drifted together into a private corner of the common room, chatting in low voices about something that had Harry glancing more than once over his shoulder at Hermione, Draco felt ill at ease, even though his wish had been fulfilled.

Ron’s present for him was a sweater from Mrs. Weasley, along with a package of Ton-Tongue Toffees that had obviously been stolen from Fred and George. Draco almost said something to this effect, but Hermione spoke first.

“Er. Ron, what’s this?” She was holding a weatherbeaten English-French dictionary, its spine splintered white from wear.

Ron jumped. “Er. Yeah,” he said. “Sorry about the wrapping, I know it isn’t pretty.”

“Oh, I don’t care. But… why…?”

“I thought you might like to know what they’re saying,” he said stiffly, jerking his chin at Draco. Draco glanced up in disgruntlement. “When the purebloods are talking, you know. Or the kids from Beauxbatons. I just remember it annoyed you, and I know it’s pretty tough, feeling left out. So.”

“That’s very thoughtful,” she said. “Thank you, Ron.”

She hugged it to her chest. Ron grinned at the floor.

“Yeah, well. It’s a rubbish copy, so don’t go spilling anything on it, or anything.”

“I would never,” she said seriously, and there were a few beats of happy silence. Harry actually gave a little sigh of contentment. It seemed that everyone was pleased by this exchange except Draco, feeling even more irritated than before — he was the only tosser in the room who actually spoke the language, it wasn’t like Ron would know a good French dictionary if it tried to mount him in his sleep — and he waited for Ron to turn away before he leaned against the back of Hermione’s armchair.

“If you wanted to learn French, I could’ve taught you.”

He spoke in a low voice; Ron was busy trading Dungbombs with Harry. She looked up in surprise.

“But now you won’t need to,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’d think you’d be glad to save the time.”

“I’ll be the judge of what I have time for. Anyway, reading a dictionary hardly makes you fluent.”

“It’s still a thoughtful gift,” she said.

“Oh, yes. And wildly generous. I don’t know where I’d even go about finding something from the Stone Age, myself.”

She scowled and shooed him away, calling him a spoilsport; but a few minutes later, she was absorbed in trying out her new inkwells, and the dictionary lay under a pile of books from her parents, apparently forgotten. He decided not to bring it up again.

When the common room was a hurricane of boxes and wrapping-paper, they waded out into the cottony snow, swaddled in new sweaters from Mrs. Weasley. Some students from Beauxbatons were building ice sculptures in the shadow of the Forbidden Forest, while the Durmstrang ship glittered with tall bonfires, and there was music from aboard the deck.

At two, Fred and George led a party down to go ice skating on the lake, but they were turned away on the shores by a grim Barty Crouch in a fur hat, informing them the lake had been fenced off for construction related to the Second Task. Instead, they hosted a snowball tournament, in which Harry and Angelina led a siege on the Ron and Ginny’s snow fortress that left the whole pack of them soaked and red-nosed and cackling when they filed back into the common room, where Hermione and Draco had been spending their afternoon on a delightful excursion through Middle Eastern pictographic scripts.

At the sight of Angelina, however, Hermione broke away from their enrapturing work — Draco hardly noticed, having spent most of the past hour reading about novel uses of the Banishment Charm — and stood up.

“Oh! Angelina! Glad I caught you! Are you interested in joining a club?”

Angelina shrugged, stretching her muscles with a deep knee-bend. “Sure. I reckon. What about?”

“It’s called the Society for the Cultivation and Recreation of Underage Muggle-Born Youth,” she said in one breath. “It’s for muggle-borns and half-breeds and people of otherwise underprivileged circumstances. I’m starting it with Colin and Dennis. I’ve invited Nigel Wolport and Justin Finch-Fletchley from Hufflepuff, and Dean, too, even though he’s technically half-blood, because he was raised as a muggle which is the main thing—”

Angelina straightened. “Not sure that’s not such a good idea, Hermione.”

Hermione sputtered out. She looked like a bird that had flown into a window, all disarray and pain. “You don’t… want to?”

“It’s not that I don’t want to,” she said, “I mean, mudblood and proud, right?”

At the word mudblood, Hermione flinched. So did Draco, who looked sharply up from his book. Angelina said it like beautiful, with her whole chest.

“But I’m not gonna put my name on a list of ’em, either,” she added.

It took Hermione about two seconds to process this, and then she sat up very straight. “You don’t think someone might…?”

Angelina shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. I tell you what I’m not gonna do, is find out, though.”

“So you’re just going to hide, then?” Hermione’s shoulders had assumed defensive formations around her ears. “You’re going to let people assume, what, because you’re scared of someone—?”

“Oi,” said Angelina sharply. “Cool off. Tell you what, I’m scared of nothing and his cousin, bugger-all nobody, and if anyone in this castle wants to test that theory, my door’s open seven days a week. Doesn’t mean they need me making it easier for them, though. You get me?”

Hermione appeared to be thawing to Angelina’s perspective. She gazed doubtfully at her notebook, fretting at her bottom lip. Quiet stretched over the common room. Ron and Harry fidgeted with their presents. Draco waited, intrigued as to what Hermione would say; he had never heard her lose an argument about muggle-borns before.

It was into this mire of pensive silence that Lavender Brown called out: “I’ll join, Hermione.”

Hermione’s eyebrows prepared to clear the ceiling. Draco had noticed Lavender’s exclusion from the list of muggle-borns, and as Hermione pressed her lips together with faint guilt, he realized that might have been deliberate.

“Like, you are so right, Angelina?” Lavender added, pitching up the end of the sentence like the question it wasn’t, “but I don’t, like, see it that way, personally? It’s like, anybody who really super cares enough to go after all muggle-borns ever is probably, like, smart enough to also figure out who’s a muggle-born? And I’m, like, super open about it, so joining a social club is like, not going to make a difference for me? Personally.” She smiled guilelessly, drumming her periwinkle blue nails against her cheek.

“It’s not a social club, actually,” said Hermione, under a taut skein of politeness. “It’s a dedicated political organization for the advancement of underprivileged groups. And it’s important.”

“Oh, if it’s im- por -tant,” said Lavender, rolling her eyes. “Come on. It’s muggle-born club. What are we gonna do, talk about boy bands? I do that already.”

The skein snapped. Hermione’s voice kicked up at least an octave. “Well, it’s been a lot of work, actually! For me! And it’s meant for people interested in solving real problems at this school, because — honestly, Lavender, no offense, but there’s such a thing as priorities.”

Lavender’s smile had the brittle sweetness of toffee. “Wow,” she said. “Cool! Never mind. Have fun running your super-duper serious club with the Dweeby Brothers, I guess. Hard to believe anyone wouldn’t want to be part of that group.”

Having delivered this tinkling cudgel to the face, she swiveled back to Parvati and Romilda. Hermione made a sound like a broken steam engine. Draco swore he actually watched the fingers of her wand-hand flex — he tried to decide how he’d feel if she jinxed Lavender, settling on ‘dismayed, but strongly amused’ — but she held back, possibly because half the common room was watching. Instead, she threw herself into a chair and disappeared into the smoky cowls of a Granger Sulk.

“Bungled that one, I think, Hermione,” murmured Angelina.

“What do you care? You’re not joining anyway,” she snapped. She then shot a wary look at Draco, who cleared his throat and feigned a reverie of fascination with his book.

Two weeks and several centuries of cumulative research later, he and Hermione were still left with nothing but two heads full of empty and an egg full of scream. Each morning he methodically downed the mug of lukewarm tea and stacks of brittle sourdough that Hermione ferried up from the kitchens, and scoured compendiums on spell incantations, looking for anything that required the user to scream. He pored over Moste Potente and Defense Against the Dark Arts textbooks. He even considered writing to his mother. He didn’t think she would know, but any word from her would be more reassuring than the short, terse card she had attached to his present (a pair of fireproof dragonhide gloves, expressly requested) at Christmas. He was beginning to suspect that she was cross with him, but Snape had been impossible to get ahold of, and he was not yet so desperate he was willing to submit a letter to Ministry confiscation via owl post.

Everything was cold and frustrating and strange, right down to the Gryffindor common room. With every passing day, jaws of icicles closed over each windowpane, and anxiety about the Second Task made Harry remote and uncommunicative. Cabin fever worked its claws into his mind. He toyed incessantly with his pocket snitch, and sprang up like a shot every time an owl fluttered at the window. There was no distraction, no game of Exploding Snap or snowball fight or marshmallow-eating contest, too trivial to claim him; Hermione had to haul him down to the common room by his ear to get him to work on the Task at all.

“What the hell am I meant to be doing down there?” he said plaintively, as she fruitlessly tried to teach him the Bubble-Head Charm. His efforts spluttered out with a bubble the size of a fist. “Finding another egg?”

“Unlikely,” drawled Draco, bent over a spreadsheet of translations from Banshee. He had not known before today that it was a comprehensible language, and an hour of study had not rendered him convinced. “Too predictable.”

Hermione nodded. “Besides, even if it is an egg, you’ve still got — wand up, Harry, come on, twirl and flick — you’ve still got to plan around whatever’s down there. It wouldn’t be a challenge if they didn’t implement some defenses for whatever you’ve got to do in the lake. I’d guess it’s some sort of guardian, like the dragon — it’s a classic setup — brave the lake, slay the monster, claim the reward.”

“What reward? Not getting eaten?”

“A very motivating reward, one thinks,” said Draco. “Almost as good as not drowning. You’re leaking.”

Harry’s wand had begun panickedly spluttering bubbles at the idea of his oncoming demise. Hermione sighed and swept them into the fire with Ventus.

“Why don’t you two stop riding him for a minute?” suggested Ron. Draco was startled not so much by the flinty streak in his tone as the fact that he was awake at all: he had spent the better part of the last hour with his head pillowed in his arms. His contributions to their brainstorming consisted of derisive snorts and the errant horsey sigh. “Let him work it out without you needling him.”

Though it was addressed to both of them, it was clearly aimed at Hermione, who had been trying to fix Harry’s wand form. It caught her all the deeper because she had been off her guard. “Work what out, Ron?” she said shortly. “We don’t have any clues. The best we can do is start preparing for what we can predict, and move forward whenever we solve the egg — which, by the way, did you read the book I asked you to?”

It proved that hope sprang eternal, he thought, that Hermione had assigned both Harry and Ron some research on theories of aquatic spellcasting. The last touch either of those books had known was hers.

Ron ignored this. “That’s what I’m saying,” he shot back. “You’ve been on Harry about the Task since Christmas. How’s a bloke s’posed to think with you twittering in his ear about Bubble-Head Charms?”

Draco lifted his head. He slowly set down his quill.

“I do not twitter,” said Hermione hotly. “And if Harry doesn’t start working on the Charm soon, he’s not going to get it in time for the Task, and so excuse me for twittering, Ronald, but I think it’ll be easier for him to bear than drowning.”

“See? See? That’s what I’m talking about. You can’t go five minutes without reminding him he might drown, or get eaten, or get murked by the squid. Gosh, I wonder why he hasn’t got it yet!”

Harry’s lips bunched into a purse the quarter of their usual size. “It’s fine,” he said loudly. “You lot, it’s fine. I’ll be fine.”

“Harry had a month to relax,” said Hermione. The lines under her eyes were ashen and inflamed, from an abundance of reading and none of sleep. It made her face dire and bloodless. “He had a nice long break while Draco and I tried to figure out the Task. Just like we did last time, incidentally!”

“Gee, Hermione, did you and Draco do something for the First Task? You never said!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Ron raised his head. “I dunno! Sorry. I dunno. It’s just — you act like you want a medal or something,” he said flatly. “Alright. You figured it out. It worked. So what?”

It was an arrow to the square of Hermione’s back: the suggestion that she had not, in fact, been helpful.

“So what?” she stuttered. “So what — if we hadn’t, it wouldn’t have happened! Harry would’ve been stranded!”

“You don’t know that!” he snapped. “Why d’you assume that Harry and I couldn’t do it without you, huh? Why’s Draco the only one who gets a mite of credit where brains are concerned?”

A flare of panic scuttled across Hermione’s face.

“Because I often happen to use them,” Draco said coolly, and Ron twitched, apparently just remembering that he was still in the room. “If you wanted credit for helping, you might try the same. Or haven’t you noticed that the rest of us have been working for the past hour?” He unfurled his hand at the notes beneath him.

For a moment he expected Ron to throw something at him. But he must have judged his odds wanting, because after a palpable unclenching, he muttered, “Never mind,” and screeched his chair away from the desk. “I’m gonna get some air.”

“That’s a great idea,” said Harry, nearly hysterical with relief. “Really good. Best I’ve heard all day. Air! Let’s get some air! Hermione, Draco, do you want some air? I think I’ll get my cloak.”

Hermione was glaring after Ron’s back in the portrait-hole. What she wanted for was clearly not air so much as the chance to stuff a piece of her mind through his thick skull. But she swallowed whatever she wanted to say next — a clump of words so thick they visibly moved down her throat — and tucked her wand into her hair. “I’ll go get some tea,” she said thinly. She flashed Draco a look of heated exasperation and snatched up her robe on the way out.

Harry exhaled and leaned over on his knees.

“Don’t put your back out keeping the peace, there,” said Draco dryly.

“I dunno what to do with them,” he groaned. “I’d stick my foot in but I think I’d lose it. Why can’t they just get along? It’s not that hard for the rest of us to not rip each other’s throats out.”

This last was questionable, but he let it go.

He flipped the book closed. “Do you want to know what your problem is?” he inquired, crossing his legs casually.

“If I say ‘yes,’ will it get me out of this conversation?”

“No. But good thought,” said Draco. “Your problem is you let your friends rule you.”

“I wouldn’t describe what you’re doing as ‘ruling,’” he said doubtfully. “‘Bothering,’ maybe—”

“Too late, I’m still talking. Now. You came to this school and welded yourself indivisibly onto the two — and I’ll even admit it, three — most headstrong, contrary, pertinacious wankers of the crop. An incredible yield, really. Once-in-a-generation. And all of them would kill for you, but they’d die before they let you win an argument.”

He opened his book with a decisive flick, and returned to it.

“I don’t want them to kill anybody,” said Harry philosophically, from a reflective pose laid upside-down on the sofa. “And I don’t need to win arguments. If it’s Ron, I’d rather let him win than have him be angry, and if it’s Hermione, she’s probably right anyway.” He smiled, soppy and guileless, at Draco. “And if it’s you, I just let Hermione know, and she takes it up with you for me.”

“You play your hand well, I admit. But it’s not tenable.”

“Why not?”

“Because one day, one of us is going to be wrong,” he said. “It won’t be me, obviously—”

“Obviously,” said Harry, nodding somberly.

“—but it’ll happen, and if you don’t find it in you to shake one of them off, you’ll end up hauled into mortal peril by the hooks in your heart.”

Harry was puzzled.

“If they’re in mortal peril, I don’t want to shake them off,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I go with them?”

He felt an unwelcome rash of heartburn. Talking to Harry this way reminded him why he infrequently attempted to engage on matters that were neither practical nor trivial. Draco made a point of carefully moderating the sincerity in his diet. Like all rich foods, it risked indigestion. Now was not the day to find out how Harry could bear to gorge himself on it.

He opened his mouth to say Hopefully because I am also there, yelling at you, but was interrupted by a crisp rap on the portrait-door. Harry made an abortive attempt to sit up that somehow ended with him slumping even more comfortably into the pillows, groaning at the imposition.

It took two encores before Draco finally threw back his chair and went to get it, taking responsibility for absolutely everything, as per usual.

It was Theo. His hair had recovered from the rictus of gel at the Yule Ball and he had dressed quite snappily in a brown wool suit and tie, his breast double-studded with the Slytherin badge and the League one beneath it. He was fanning himself.

“Merlin’s sordid rectal prolapse, she wasn’t joking about the stairs. This is untenable. This is disrespectful to the student body. My body, to be precise. Surely you don’t do this every day? I’d hurl myself over the banister. I would learn to levitate. I have,” said Theo, “a stitch.”

“You play quidditch, you emphysematous bellyacher.” Draco leaned against the portrait-hole. “If you think that’s rough, Oliver Wood would dine out on your liver. Ah, wait; he already did.”

“If you’re referring to the late and tragic miscarriage of justice that denied us our fairly won Quidditch Cup, then I refuse to hear it, for I am selectively deaf to all remarks under a certain threshold of intelligence. The threshold is ‘any.’ Any intelligence. In case you need it spelled out for you. Speaking of spelling things out, are you busy? It’s been ages since we’ve caught up, and I’ve missed being mocked with five syllables.”

“Pansy knows the word ‘emphysematous.’”

“Yes, but she prefers ‘twat.’”

“She’s efficient.”

“Among other things. Do you have time for a butterbeer, or is your dance card full for the afternoon?”

He weighed his options. Ron and Hermione likely wouldn’t be back for a while. It had been miserable working on the egg, and he wasn’t keen to be the only one at the grindstone if everyone else had decided to lark off. He wanted a short vacation, somewhere breezy and calm and not tempestuous, where everyone could be trusted to lock up their unpalatable emotions in a vault. Repression sounded delightful, right about now, frankly.

He turned around.

“Potter!”

“What!”

“I’m going to Hogsmeade. Be back at dinner.”

“What do you want me to tell Hermione about the egg?”

“Tell her it’s not Banshee, and if she wants to check my work, she’s welcome to, though it’s a fate I wouldn’t wish on a mountain troll. I recommend we get started on Hagspeak, instead.”

“Okay. I’ll try. I’ll remember maybe half of that, though.”

This was rank optimism. Draco had put the over-under at one third.

“That’ll do. Afternoon.”

“Have fun!”

He dropped down from the portrait-hole. Theo rediscovered the world outside his cuticles and swept the conversation tactfully aside with a pivot on his heel.

They wound down through the maze of staircases. The castle was quiet and chilly in the weekend emptiness, the halls hollowed, narrow stairwells grown newly ample.

“Have a good Christmas?” Theo said unexpectedly, his voice skittering in the chill gloom. “I’m sorry I didn’t get you a present. I sent Narcissa some poinsettias, of course, but she hasn’t written back, and considering the usual tempo of her correspondence, I can only conclude I’ve committed a grave sin. Is she allergic? I didn’t think to ask.”

Theo’s voice was smooth and nasal, but the vibration behind it was poorly suppressed. He wasn’t really half as good at hiding his feelings as he thought he was.

Not that Draco had much room to think of it. At the mention of his mother, a black pit of worry, like the stone heart of a cherry, congealed in his chest.

“The sin of tardiness, perhaps,” he said. “She’s probably not received it yet.”

“Slander. I ordered it a week ago.” Theo thrust open the Entrance Hall doors with a wave of wand, and they waded out into the sludge carpet of the lawns. Snow was still wafting in dark sticky flakes from a lumpy mattress of clouds, a sorry medium between powder and rain, stinging their heads and cloaks.

“But she’s well, then? I shouldn’t worry?”

“No. She’s fine, thank you.”

Theo sent him a sidelong look.

“What.”

“Do you remember coming to the Yule Hunt at my house?” he said mildly. “I understand if you don’t. It was fully two years ago.”

“I remember.”

“Mm. Do you remember how you left?”

Draco cut a sharp look at him, and Theo met it, evenly and expressionlessly.

“Perfectly. I also remember telling you what would happen if you tried to hold it over my head.”

“I’m holding nothing.” He demonstrated with a flick of his hands. “I should fry my fingers in oil and serve them to lions before I willed any harm to your mother. Incidentally, if you require someone to make discreet visits—”

“Your concern is appreciated but unnecessary.”

“—someone to check in, from time to time—”

“If you require an illustration of the word ‘unnecessary,’ please refer to a mirror.”

“Do you want me to beg you?” he said shortly. “Do you want me to go down on my knees and plead to let me help? That’s not normally how this goes, Draco. Normally, you ask, and I give, and we don’t wait for someone to hurt herself before it happens.”

Draco shuttered. He felt all the doors and windows of himself slamming closed, at once, generating a cold breeze that whistled through all the chambers of his heart.

“We have help. We don’t require your charity.”

“Oh, thank Merlin. Maybe your gardener can weed her back to health. You do understand that your mother is sick, don’t you? Properly sick. If she weren’t a Malfoy, she’d probably be in St. Mungo’s.”

“Hark at you,” he said coldly. “What leprous fool gave you a healer’s license? You know nothing about her condition.”

“And you do?” said Theo incredulously. “You’re here three-quarters of the year and flouncing off with the Potter Pals for the fourth. If she had an attack, when would you know about it? Would you?”

He moved his hand to his hip; Theo twinned the movement, touching his holster.

They stood with their ankles turning wet in the snow, awkwardly facing off on the trail to Hogsmeade.

It was silly. He made a disgusted sound in his throat and lifted his hand away from the holster, flashing five fingers. Theo relaxed and folded his hands behind his back.

“She wouldn’t accept it, you know.” His voice was quiet. “She raised me. I don’t know why you think her position will be any different than mine.”

They came upon the gnarled iron gates to Hogsmeade. Black cloaks scuttled here and there sparsely through the gray downfall.

“I don’t know either,” said Theo. “I suppose you get your stubbornness from the Blacks.”

“At least mine has a better pedigree than yours.”

They passed under the iron archway, and left the subject outside it.

Striding past the Three Broomsticks, Theo turned in at a dingy stone building that looked like the earth was trying to digest it. Scummy moss stained at the half-timbered walls and spread in gangrenous patches over the pitched roofs, and an old billygoat in the courtyard wailed balefully at them as they crossed it.

“Darling, you take me to the nicest places.”

“Left your mettle in the Tower, did you? It’s discreet.” Theo dodged the main entrance, over which flew a wooden sign of a hog’s head leaking blood onto a white tablecloth, and picked his way through a litter of rubbish and mold-nibbled barrels in the alley. He tapped out a pattern on the brick with his wand, and a slot opened in the wall. A pair of beady eyes peered out.

“Password?”

“Godelot,” said Theo.

The slot closed, and part of the brick wall swung open. Theo flicked his hood up and gestured for Draco to do the same, which he did, after a moment, feeling terribly silly.

Inside it was a low-ceilinged barroom sparsely populated with witches and wizards in dark cloaks. Grime laid too thick on the windows to cast much sunlight, so they found their way by the light of small candles which guttered on each table. Behind the bar there was a mirror turned black as a chalkboard with tarnish, and a wizened bartender with few teeth and fewer hairs, polishing a glass.

“Aberforth,” said Theo, and the bartender grunted. The glass appeared to be getting dirtier from his polishing.

Coming in from the side door, they cut directly behind the bar and up the rickety stairs to a sitting room, where a long wooden table sat under a withered brass chandelier, and a fire roared in a great stone fireplace to one end of the room. The film on the windows was so dark it could have been night, and an owl roosting in the rafters gave a keen warning of their arrival.

Blinking the darkness out of his eyes, Draco picked out Theo rolling off his cloak with a sure ripple of his shoulders, talking to another boy. It was Gregory Goyle. He hadn’t seen Goyle up close since last year’s quidditch final, a time all evidence suggested he had spent guzzling growth potions continuously: he had progressed from big to unhealthfully large, whereas the unhealthful applied to Draco, not him. He’d started working on a beard, too, under a generous definition of “started,” “working,” and “beard.”

“Draco,” said Theo, turning, “you remember Greg.”

“I seem to recall a large blur trying to kill my seeker.”

A younger Goyle would have risen to the bait. This one snorted and threw back some of his tankard.

“S’ just a game,” he said. “Don’t be a girl.”

Draco waited for the customary threat of unsettling violence, but none came. This was a new, unspirited Goyle, more interested in glugging butterbeer than declaring his malevolent intentions toward Draco’s bones. He reflected with new interest on the possibility that all his menacing had been Goyle’s idea of trash talk, and found it both unsettling.

“I thought we might have a shared grievance,” said Theo, “since we’re all three quidditch players. Monstrous that they’ve canceled it, this year.”

“Only thing that made this stupid school worth coming back to,” muttered Goyle.

A door to the privy opened and Pansy came out, pink and swaddled for the cold. She wore a League of Promising Youth badge high and proudly on her collarbone, but her Warrington badge was gone.

She saw Draco and grunted amicably before scuttling into the warm radius of the fire. “Balls, it’s cold,” she snapped. “Why couldn’t we meet in the castle? That privy retains cultures from the Pleistocene Era.”

“There are few things so expensive as privacy,” said Theo, “as my father likes to say. A little discomfort is a bargain price.”

“Maybe yours is. I hope mine isn’t. Who else is coming?”

“I invited Blaise, Cassius, and Tracy, but alas, it’s a day that ends in Y, so Tracy’s got a shagging appointment with Higgs, and Blaise is a notorious flake. Cass might come, but he sprained his ankle, so it depends on whether he can pull Pomfrey away from a Hufflepuff outbreak of the first year flu.”

He noticed that Crabbe and Bulstrode hadn’t made the guest list. But then, neither had Daphne.

“Anyway, it’s a bad day for the side all-around. We’re trying to decide who to root for if Cass is still hurt for the Second Task, and it’s slim pickings. Krum’s seeing a muggle-born, and rumor has it the Frenchwoman’s a half-breed. I think Potter has it by a nose.”

Draco gripped the table.

“Who?” he gritted out. “Are you talking about Granger?”

“It was a joke,” sighed Theo. “Are those still legal, in Gryffindor?”

“Speaking of which,” said Pansy severely, pointing at him as if she were conducting an inquest. “What the devil is she doing with the Durmstrang champion? I thought she was with Potter.”

He narrowed his eyes. “She’s neither.”

“What? Not Krum, either?”

“No.”

“Hm. They were awfully friendly at the Yule Ball. If she’s smart, she’ll hold onto him, she’s not likely to get a better match.”

“Your mouth is about to get ‘awfully friendly’ with a Scouring Charm, if you don’t find a better use for your tongue than septic waste,” he snapped. “I didn’t realize an escort was meant to precede a fucking marriage proposal, I would’ve sent you and Theo flowers.”

Her eyes flared auspiciously. “Don’t be saucy. I was only asking for Gemma’s sake, anyway, she has a crush on Krum.”

“My wishes for a swift recovery,” he snapped. “I’m sure Granger would tell her happy hunting. For her part, she’s been in a long-term engagement to her personal library since she was about three, and they’re blissfully happy together. Put your nose out.”

He sat down in bad grace. Why everyone suddenly thought Hermione’s love life was their personal Witch Weekly column was a profoundly unpleasant mire of a question, rivaled only by the dark mystery of what he would do to them if they didn’t soon recover.

“I don’t like Potter,” said Goyle, slowly and emphatically.

“We know, Greg. The world knows,” said Theo. “The question is whether you like him better than someone whose grandfather dabbled in bestiality.”

The new turn of the conversation hip-checked Draco from brooding into disgruntlement. “The hell? Nott, clarify.”

“Delacour. Her grandmother’s a veela,” he said mildly, tracing the tip of his tankard with a finger. “Didn’t you suspect? That’s where she gets her looks. Also why her magic’s weaker than the other champions’, I expect. Blood’s diluted.”

“Diluted?”

“You know how it is. The further you get away from a wizarding line, the less magic you have. There’s science about it. Some studies show that muggle-borns—”

“Stop.”

It became very quiet in the room. Pansy stared at him. Theo’s finger stilled. When it started again, it moved in the opposite direction.

“Anyway,” he said, after a moment. “Whatever. It’s a hang-up of yours, I get it. But half-breeds are different, everyone can agree on that. They’re not fully human, so their magic doesn’t fully manifest. Take Hagrid, for instance. Is it any wonder that he got expelled?”

Draco startled.

“Hagrid? A student? You’re lying.” Pansy was sniggering.

“Oh, yes. About fifty years ago. He’s older than he looks. That’s giant blood, for you.”

Draco said, “Giant blood?”

“You should be reading the Cavalier Post,” said Theo, tapping his nose. “Keep you up to date on everything the Prophet won’t let to print. Yes, he’s a half-giant. So’s Maxime.”

“How the devil can you tell?”

“…Is that a joke?”

“He’s big. Goyle’s big, that doesn’t mean he’s a half-giant.”

“You’d be amazed what you can find, digging through old school records,” said Theo airily, picking some lint from his tie. “Newspapers dating back to the 1930s, for example. I even found McGonagall’s graduating class — total riot, well worth a look if you’ve got a strong stomach — and a few delectable tidbits about the lake. In fact—”

But the door swung open, interrupting him. In swept a tall, golden-haired boy with an oily pompadour.

“Cass,” said Goyle, with the first thing approaching real gladness he had shown all afternoon. He got up and hurried to shake the Head Boy’s hand.

“Greg. Delightful.” Warrington pumped his arm and gave a short bow to Pansy. A light German accent cushioned his consonants. “Parkinson. The cold becomes you, does it not? Du bist so schön wie Rosenrot.”

She gave him a haughty scoff and turned her head toward the fireplace.

He moved one of the chairs with his wand and Summoned a tankard from the sideboard. “Good call with the private room, Nott. It’s just the ticket. Of course, it’s not the faculty lounge, is it? I admit, I’ve become accustomed to the brandy.”

“They only let us use that for meetings. And if I try to book twice in a month I think McGonagall will transfigure me into an etiquette manual.”

“Shame. It was big of your father to let us use the Boardroom, once, I’ve been spoiled for it. What a building! Filled with history. If I live to a hundred I’ll never forget hearing Odin Davis delivering that speech. You missed it, Greg — it was the nine of us at the table, and Lord Nott had brought Mr. Davis to talk to us about careers in law enforcement — you remember Mr. Davis, from the attacks last year? We watered him up with brandy and oysters on the half-shell, and when dinner was over he told us the whole story, including how Lord Nott saved his life — he found him and raced him to St. Mungo’s, even though it meant the savage escaped. That’s nobility, for you. And Nott, do you remember his story about killing a whole den of them, in Wales? Four grown mongrels and a pair of bitches, one with pups. All dead. Merlin knows how many lives he saved.”

“Werewolves, you mean,” said Draco.

“If you like.” Cassius turned to Draco and beheld him, at a distance, like a new and intriguing species of blind mole. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“No. You’d remember.”

“Warrington, Malfoy,” said Theo, waving boredly. “Draco, Cassius. Prefect, Head Boy, Hogwarts champion — the original, not the decoy. You may have sneered at each other before.”

Cassius tilted his head in interest. “Pleasure.”

“I’m sure it is. Well done, there, with the dragon and the birds.”

Cassius’ smile recalled the shade of shattered eggshells.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Read it in a book?”

“Hm?”

“The trick with the egg,” said Draco calmly. “Did you read it somewhere?”

“Ah — I understand. No. My family has a summer house in Romania. It neighbors a dragon reserve.” Warrington flicked his eyes to the table in a winning imitation of bashfulness. It faded too soon. “I, ah… learned some tricks, as it were.”

“Mm. Impressive trick to pick up on your own.”

Another feint at humility, a smile too cold to be sheepish. “Well, I never said I didn’t have help.”

“No, of course. I’d heard it suggested,” said Draco, ignoring a slight jitter of danger, “that you might have been helped.”

Theo made a soft hiss in the back of his throat. Warrington merely blinked at him.

“It’s Malfoy, isn’t it?” he said, apropos of nothing. “Strange that we haven’t met. Ravenclaw, are you? The curious type?”

“No.”

“Then I must be thinking of another family.” He smiled, and it was a genial, beatifically handsome thing that Draco got the feeling he could wipe off with a napkin. “I apologize. As you can imagine, I have a great deal on my mind.”

“Certainly.” He drummed his fingers. “Give my regards to Miss Carrow, by the way. My mother’s aunt was a dear friend of her grandmother’s.”

“I’m afraid I could not presume to take that liberty,” said Cassius apologetically. “Miss Carrow and I are not socially involved.”

“No?”

“No.”

“I wonder how I could have been so mistaken,” said Draco.

There was a pregnant pause. Theo looked at Draco flatly over Cassius’ shoulder, while Pansy gave him a proud, sidelong sort of smirk.

“I am continually surprised by how people have treated the Ball as an exercise in matchmaking,” said Cassius. “That was not the purpose, as I understood it. In the classical Wizarding tradition, it was customary for brothers to serve as escorts for their sisters at social events. It prevented the appearance of impropriety and vouchsafed the family’s virtue.” He paused. “In fact, I had presumed that was why you took Miss Greengrass, Mr. Malfoy. I have made a point not to tolerate any rumors to the contrary.”

Draco stilled. Then he twitched his mouth into a cold smile.

“They must have been very confusing rumors, indeed,” he said, “since you didn’t know my name before Theodore introduced us.”

Cassius inclined his head, his expression half-indulgence, half-condescension, and a trifle of respect.

“One hears so many things that aren’t worth remembering,” he said. “I try to give every man no more or less than the credit I would ask for myself. My own name has been abused in all sorts of absurd contexts, you see; I’m sure you can sympathize.”

The wind whistled in the eaves. Draco found himself tired.

He was tired of being cold. He was tired of tension and stress. He was tired of performing conversational acrobatics just to keep his head above water. He was even tired of Theo and Pansy, who for all that he liked them always left a sour aftertaste. They sat and drank and talked as if there were no human beings outside the walls of this dismal cellar, and apart from that — apart from the long list of things that he knew, with a deep and squirming discomfort, that Hermione would have said if she could hear them — he did not understand why, if at all, it gave them any particular comfort.

It wasn’t warm. It wasn’t civil. It was the world they came from; it belonged to them, it was made for them, carved in their bones and the graves of their forefathers; but he didn’t have to like it. It felt puerile and small.

Once he would have done a great many things to be in this room, crossing glasses with the Head Boy, a Nott, a Parkinson, and a Goyle. There was another world, another blond boy in another tie, where he was the man Warrington wanted to please. He would have asked for entry into the Boardroom, and been granted it.

That boy had never seen the world from the top of Gryffindor Tower, with its windows full of starlight and mountains, its smoky firelit rooms. But he’d also never seen a werewolf’s teeth under a full moon. He’d never seen the inside of a dementor’s throat, how dark it was, how fathomless.

He saw the two rooms set against each other like opposed mirrors, reflecting a corridor that fanned out into oblivion, and down one path he could see himself here — drinking brandy in three-piece suits with men and women who would flay their own hands to kiss his signet, who adored him madly and easily and automatically, and he wanted it so badly it made him ache in places he’d forgotten. In the other, he was sun-blistered and sweaty on the Burrow’s roof, exhausted and miserable and riddled with strange insensible guilt, and it was always hard, and it never got easier, and nobody cared for his ring or his name and one day he feared he’d wake up not caring, either, mundane and not caring, mediocre and not caring, no different and no better than anyone else.

And if he wasn’t different, he was nothing. They would peel off everything that he was, and they’d burn it up, and whatever was left of him — if there was anything left of him — would have nowhere, no one, if not them. They’d consume him.

Which, in a way, wasn’t so different from what Warrington’s people would have done. It was just a different part of him that was dying. A different limb to shear away. Why couldn’t his life fit all of him in it?

He wanted to talk to Hermione.

“What are you doing?” said Theo.

He had stood up.

When Hermione talked about these things, they became simple. The world through her eyes was moral and elegant and easily mastered through brute application of brilliance and will. When she disliked something, it was immoral, irrational, evil, and irredeemable. When she liked something, it was perfect and reasonable and good. She was ruthless and scant with her praise, but when it came, it came like sunlight, and just then he was terribly cold.

He wanted to capture the way she looked at him when he told her he would bait the dragon before the First Task, capture it whole, and lock it up somewhere that no one else would ever find. He wanted her to look at him that way all the time, and never look away. He wanted to never see it again. The two wants didn’t cancel each other out, they just sat together in his ribcage, bleeding.

“I have an obligation. I just remembered.”

“Did I say something?” said Warrington, politely, but it was clear he didn’t really mind that Draco was leaving.

“I’ll walk you out,” said Theo.

“I will, too,” said Pansy. Goyle didn’t offer, and for some reason that stung.

They came with him to the door and squeezed into the small dank hallway over the stairs.

“Sorry for Warrington,” whispered Pansy. “He’s a bit of a pig.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, which was true.

As he turned to leave, Pansy broke out: “Wait, I wanted to ask you a favor.”

“Parkinson—”

“It’s not for me, it’s for Daphne.” She pulled a small golden badge from her pocket and held it out to him. “Will you give this to her?”

“…Has she joined?”

“No,” said Theo quietly, “but it’s still an option for her. We want her to know.”

He curled his lip. “Has she expressed any interest, whatsoever, that she might someday be inclined to join?”

“No, but it’s not about the club, you ninny. You think Daph gives a fig for politics? We just want her to know we haven’t forgotten her,” said Pansy, with characteristic impatience, as if she didn’t understand why everyone in the world didn’t think the same things she did and on the same schedule. “We won’t ever. Tell her if she wants to come back, all she has to do is show that at the door.”

She pressed the badge into his hand. It branded his palm with a cold kiss. He curled his fingers over the curlicues of gold and felt hollow.

“So you want me to lie to her.”

Pansy’s mouth parted. Theo, tellingly, showed no surprise at all, but a toothless exhaustion that dug fresh trenches under his eyes.

“She can’t come back. You know that. So does she.”

“Millie will get over herself,” whispered Pansy. “She just—”

“Millicent Bulstrode isn’t the reason Daphne isn’t welcome in her own common room anymore.” He tossed the badge at Theo, who caught it. “Give it to her yourself, if you can find the audacity. I certainly couldn’t.”

He turned and went down the stairs. He had not made it three steps into the snow when he heard his name called, and Theo came hurrying after him, his boots crunching in the sludge.

“Hang on,” he said breathlessly, skidding alongside Draco. “Gracious, tarry a moment, would you? I still had something to say.”

“I really do have an obligation.”

“Right, okay, like everyone in the room couldn’t see through that for a barefaced lie. I know Cass is a strong flavor—”

“Again, it wasn’t anything to do with Warrington.”

“It could be,” said Theo indifferently. “He irritates Pansy out of her skin. But that’s not important. I wanted to invite you to the next League event. The next speaker is Quilliam Coalhend, he’s got a doctorate in Herbology from Oxford, revolutionized the use of aquatic plants in Potioneering. He’s a brilliant alchemist, a great connection for anyone in academia, I thought you might like—”

“I’m not joining. I thought I made that clear.”

“And I thought everything happening recently might have made you reconsider. Obviously, I should have known better, since you and everyone else I can possibly stand has a habit of calibrating your decisions to whatever makes my life hardest. Speaking of which, can you ask Daphne—”

“Daphne is besotted with you.”

Theo dragged his hands over his face. The snow had hastened and came down in stinging sheets, melting inches above his face into ice-cold rain.

“Did you know that?”

“Yes,” he said finally. He pulled his hands away from his face, newly pink, and blinked away sleet. “So?”

“So?” Draco had no idea what to say to that. He had assumed Theo would have some sort of answer. He hadn’t the first notion of what you were supposed to do when you were in love with someone, except hang around each other and snog a bit and then eventually get married. “So… I don’t know. Do something about that.”

“Like what?” Theo’s mouth crooked.

“Anything! Do I have to do bloody everything? I’ve already pulled more than my weight here. And don’t go proposing to her again, it’s a disgrace.”

“That was a moment of weakness.”

“You think so?”

“In my defense, I hadn’t slept in a while. While I maintain that it would have solved several problems—”

“When’s the last time you did sleep, speaking of?”

“—I concede that it was ill-founded. And I don’t know, I passed out after splinching myself at the World Cup, that must have been a good six or seven hours. It’s not important. I’ve got just two problems right now that don’t have to do with the Ministry of Magic, and that’s you and Daphne. Both could be solved, incidentally, if you and her could just get on side, join up, and let me protect—”

“I don’t like your friends.”

The snow settled into sad gray lumps in the alleys, like a stray cat.

“Cheers,” said Theo briskly. “I loathe yours.”

“Crabbe and Bulstrode are callous and insipid gossips.”

“The Weasley twins in particular I find crude and disrespectful of others’ property.”

“Goyle tried to hit Hannah Abbott for defending her prefect.”

“The She-Weasel is a violent hypocrite.”

“Marcus Flint is a barbarian.”

“Do you expect me to disagree?” he snapped. “They’re my friends, I don’t have to like them.”

Draco had no idea what to call the kind of sadness this inspired. It was big and quiet and painful.

“I’m going back to the castle,” he said. “I assume you’re not.”

“No,” said Theo, who seemed no happier about it than him. “I’ve obligations, too.”

Abruptly, to Draco’s surprise, he held out his hand to shake.

Draco did. It cost him nothing, and it put some color back in Theo’s face.

“You should stay with us again, next summer,” he said, without much heart. More words that cost him nothing, because they were rejected, predictably, at once.

“Dad wants me home.”

“For what?”

“He’s taken an interest in my education. I’m being groomed for leadership. I’ve already got a job offer upon graduation, did I tell you that? If I live that long.”

“Bugger that,” said Draco, surprising himself. “Run away.”

Theo blinked. “Where?” he said curiously. “With you and Narcissa?”

“She’d have you in a heartbeat.”

“And what would she do when my father came looking?”

“Nothing anyone would be able to prove.”

Theo put his head back and laughed. The snow laid a veil of frost in his dark hair, turning it, too, gray, like the sky, like the dirt.

“That’s the first one I’ve had in a while,” he gasped, blinking up at the dull clouds. “Thank you. I really mean it. I needed that a lot.”

“Is that a ‘yes’?”

“Of course not,” he said, still talking softly to the sky. “There’s no running away. It’s too late for that. And if you could ever hold your nose and actually show up to a League meeting, you’d know why. Hell, in a year, there’ll be nowhere to run away to.”

“I am at my limits of toleration for riddles, believe me. What’s happening in a year?”

“It was a figure of speech,” he said, dropping his eyes. “Dumbledore’s going to lose the oversight battle, you know, in the Wizengamot. The Tournament was a smart concession, on his part, but he can’t hold off reform for long. Runcorn wants skulls. Trelawney, Hagrid, Burbage, they’re all on the chopping block — do me a favor and don’t break that before the Prophet does, by the way — and there are more staff changes coming at the Ministry. Names you’ve heard of. The old families are coming back.”

“Coming back from where?” He understood perfectly well what Theo meant, but he wanted him to say it. In him was a cold and mean sense of curiosity about how far Theo would go, out loud. He was also, frankly, frightened of it. “We never left.”

A pause. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it,” murmured Theo. “But you know I mean. Better than anyone, sometimes, I think.”

“Massive slight to Parkinson out of nowhere.” His voice was light, but he was unsettled. “I’m touched.”

“I didn’t say I liked you better than anyone,” he muttered. “But you do understand. You get it. I know you do, I’ve seen it. Your dad… actually, perhaps that’s why I kept thinking you’d fall in. You know? Eventually. You’d have your fun while we were kids, and run around with rabble, have your little Prince and the Pauper moment… but you’d come back home, when the time came. Once you figured it out.”

It was very cold, standing out in the open snow.

“Figured out what?” he said tonelessly.

“That you’re the same as I am,” he said bitterly, “only luckier.”

Draco tipped his chin back, considering.

“No,” he said. “Braver, I think.”

Theo put his head down and laughed.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. ‘Where dwell the brave at heart,’ indeed. Inarguably so.”

Given time and opportunity, he would have wrestled Theo down, and forced him to justify his ominous prognosticating. Contrary to assertion, he did not, in fact, know what he meant, and whatever change Theo was referring to, it was a vague darkness whose contours remained obscure to him. But Theo had nothing more to say, and at length it became clear that neither did he; and they shook hands again, before they parted ways.

---

The distance between Hogsmeade and Gryffindor Tower vanished in the blur of deep thought. When he blinked back to reality, he was standing in front of the Pink Lady. She was fiddling nervously with her braid. When he told her “Cetus,” she pursed her lips.

“If you’re quite sure,” she said. As soon as it unsealed, shouting swelled from the common room.

“—THINGS HAVE YOU BEEN SAYING ABOUT—”

“We didn’t say anything! God! Can you read? You’re being completely stupid!”

“STUPID, AM I? OUT OF PROPORTION, IS IT? YEAH, CLASSIC RON, ALWAYS MISSING THE POINT—”

“Mate, c’mon, you are being stupid, it’s all bunk, you’re the one making this up—”

“SHUT THE HELL UP, HARRY!”

He had never heard Ron yell at Harry before.

Draco scrambled through the portrait hole and pulled out his wand as he rounded the curve to the common room. What he saw made him feel like he had come stumbling into a playhouse halfway through the second act.

Harry and Hermione made an isosceles triangle with Ron at the tip, in postures of various placation, which had obviously failed to cool their bristling third. One of the desks lay fetal on the ground, bleeding from a shattered inkwell. Ron gripped a balled-up newspaper. In another universe, it could have been the scene of a comically unsuccessful fly-swatting, but the illusion shattered as soon as Hermione caught his eye and shook her head, trying to warn him back through the door.

Too late: Ron spun around.

“Oh! There you are! Bloody wonderful! Fantastic! The Trio’s all here!”

“What the devil is going on? I was gone for an hour!”

“You don’t know?” Ron snapped. “Ask your pal Rita Skeeter! She seems to know all about it!”

The newspaper flew at him. It collided with a crackling white Locomotor.

He lowered it slowly, and suppressed the urge to hit back with Levicorpus.

“What in Merlin’s holy name are you ever about?”

“Absolute utter rubbish, thanks for asking,” snapped Hermione. Each syllable dropped off her tongue like the stroke of a cleaver. Ron made an owlish sound of anger. “Skeeter wrote another piece of trash making you and me and Harry look like total prats, and he’s upset because he wasn’t included.”

“Hermione,” pleaded Harry, with a tired, thin diplomacy, “let’s just, you know, let’s just be nice for a second, alright, he doesn’t—”

“You be nice to him. That’s your answer for everything, isn’t it, Harry? Oh, poor Ron, he’s got it so hard, let’s baby him, let’s be nice to him, let’s let him say whatever he wants and never get angry — of course, it’s easy when you’re the only one he ever apologizes to!”

“That’s not fair,” said Harry indignantly, and now he and Ron were pivoting towards her, like the magnetic center of the room had shifted. “I’m just asking us not to shout.”

“That’s all you ever do! Let’s not fight, let’s not get angry, let’s shove it all down so that Harry doesn’t feel uncomfortable!”

“I didn’t say that,” he snapped, hurt. “I don’t like shouting. I don’t — I hate playing this card, so I wasn’t going to bring it up, but — but the Dursleys do it, a lot, and — and, you know, I d-d-don’t— I don’t like it when you do it. I don’t think that’s, like, this incredibly unreasonable thing.”

That was it. It earned a beat of incontestable silent observation from all.

Hermione set her jaw into a rictus that could have snapped through wood. She said, in a very tight, very small voice: “I’m sorry.”

He broke immediately. Ice shattered, the waters thawed, and he sagged out of his posture as if it had taken every ounce of strength in him. “That’s okay. It isn’t a big deal, really. I just — yeah.”

“Well, I’m glad that you two have sorted things out.”

Ron’s interjection was a bead of ink unfurling in a clear lake. It stained the waters swiftly and completely.

Draco finally consulted the newspaper. The article on the second half of the page caught his attention first: MUGGLE UNREST NEAR BRIGHTON, DARK MARK REPORTS UNCONFIRMED. This sent a jolt of something watery through his stomach before something even more striking on the page caught his eye: his own name.

---

[img: https://i.ibb.co/3dg1KwS/Screen-Shot-2023-06-02-at-8-25-49-AM.png]

---

The ensuing article proceeded to sketch out some sort of bizarre star-studded social clique including Harry, Hermione, and himself. This clique, as Hermione had suggested, came across as rather less attractive than insufferable, as Skeeter’s “anonymous source” seemed determined to augment their glamor through as many adjectives as possible: “reserved,” “coy,” “selective,” and “mysterious” all made double appearances throughout the article. At least twice, it hinted at a romance between Harry and Hermione, though Skeeter appeared to anticipate a plot twist on this score, and entreated readers to submit their opinions on “Hermione’s choice.”

The first page featured a moving photograph of the common room, empty save for a blurry head that might have been Seamus; on the second page, the three of them were captured in shifting black print, posing candidly on some sort of staircase. Ron was absent. The photo credit for both pictures was Colin Creevey.

“Where is he?”

“What?” snapped Ron, turning. “Who?”

Draco calmly ripped the newspaper in half. “Creevey,” he said. He tossed both halves in the bin, and set them on fire with a jab of his wand. “Where is he?”

“Don’t,” said Hermione shortly. “It’s not a good idea.”

“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”

“No, see, actually, I do, and I’m telling you, it’s not a good idea. I thought of it first.”

“Sod off. Why not?”

“Retribution,” she said simply, which slightly surprised him; he’d thought she would object to the prospect of grievous injury. Then again, the article hadn’t been too kind to her; it had used her and ‘coquette’ in the same sentence, which was going to cost Colin several fingernails and a tonsil, if Draco ever found him. “He’s got access to Skeeter. If you threaten him, he’ll just run and tell her. And if he tells a teacher…”

“He won’t.”

“You could face disciplinary action. Which gets us nowhere.”

“So you want to let him go?”

“I didn’t say that,” she said, her eyes glittering, and he knew he was mirroring the savage little smile on her face — he couldn’t help it; it was his second favorite expression of Hermione’s, the one he loved almost best, because when she smiled it there was nothing in the world except her and him and the poor dead bastards who didn’t know what was coming for them — when Ron cleared his throat.

“Aren’t you two bloody chummy,” he said, in tones of pelagic depth.

Draco no longer suffered from any impulse to smile whatsoever. He turned his head to face Ron, slowly, and rolled out his wand-wrist. Silencio would do nicely.

“What now, Ron,” said Hermione, and he knew at once it was the wrong tone, the wrong phrase. She came in hot and fast and this time even Harry was wringing his empty hands like he knew they couldn’t stop her, while Draco gripped his wand and thought that it was possible he could, but found he didn’t want to. He was holding a pocket ace, and he didn’t even have to play it.

Because Ron and Hermione had built up about four years’ worth of quarrels, petty and not, including some nastiness Draco was sure even he didn’t know about. And they were catalysts for each other, high-intensity conflict engines without a decelerator, and he knew how they fought; he’d watched them do it all last year. Let them run long enough, and it would hit terminal velocity. Eventually one of them would smash into something unforgivable, and their speed wouldn’t give them time to stop.

And that would be that, the birth of a new uncrossable distance, the sides drawn, the pairs cemented, Harry-and-Ron against Draco-and-Hermione, and the thing was — it would be all Ron’s fault. Draco would have nothing to do with it. He and Hermione would be best friends, and Harry and Ron would be their other friends, and all the frustrating mercurial dynamics of their quartet would be laid to bed. People grow apart, he would say, don’t blame yourself, Granger, not everyone can be like us, and Hermione would be sad and then less sad and she’d never give Ron her tears or her laughter or her secret smiles ever again.

Which was the kind of thought he might expect more often if he were a clinical psychopath, actually, or made a habit of using his soul as fishing-bait in a tar pit. The rest of his brain united in appallment. He’d never thought anything like that before. He liked Harry and Ron. He didn’t want them to go away.

“Explain yourself,” he said roughly. In actuality, he did not want Ron to explain himself. He thought there was very little about Ron’s position that required explaining; it was himself he didn’t understand. He wanted to go upstairs and take a minute to work through what he was about. He wanted for everyone to shut up, for at least thirty seconds, while he put his mind in order.

This was a request that would have made the very cosmos roll with laughter, if it could hear.

“It’s always you two, isn’t it?” said Ron, very calm, and very unhappy. “It always comes back to you. It’s never ‘let’s all do this,’ or ‘let’s plan something, the four of us,’ it’s ‘what do Draco and Hermione think we should do?’ How do Draco and Hermione think we should do the First Task? Polyjuice is pretty easy for Draco and Hermione, maybe that’s how we should help Sirius! What do Draco and Hermione think the egg means? But at least you’re nice enough to let Harry in on it!”

He scoffed. “If you objected to those plans, you could have used your grown-up words and voiced them. Did you expect us to send you a permission slip before we saved Potter’s life?”

“When would I bloody object?” Ron roared. “When would either of us bloody object? I can barely get a word in with either of you when the other person’s in the room! Sometimes Harry and I have to wait for you two to leave to talk to even each other—”

“What?” said Hermione, stricken. She turned to Harry, who cringed as if he wanted to fold himself into a box the size of his chest. “Is that true?”

“No, it’s n— I mean — but it’s not like that, honestly, I mean sometimes, but—”

“You know, I reckon I did have it wrong, earlier.” Ron’s fingers kneaded the flesh of his palms like gestating fists. “It’s not the three of you. It’s two.”

“We’re your friends, Ron. Of course you’re part of the group.” Hermione spoke as if to a small child, which was not the thing in any number of senses, but Draco was still reeling too hard to interject.

It was the way Ron said Draco-and-Hermione, like one word. At the bottom of his anger — and it was a very, very, deep bottom — there was a kernel of something else; not even disagreement, just a mild bit of proud rankling, as if Ron were saying the right thing in the wrong way.

“Yeah,” Ron said, blinking something shiny out of his eyes. It was tears, he realized, though whether tears of anger or distress Draco couldn’t parse. He couldn’t think of a time he’d seen a man cry before, and it was unsettling as hell. Ron scrubbed them away in humiliated haste before he could examine the feeling further. “Yeah, I’m part. The last part. The part you two always forget. Did you even notice you left me out of the First Task? Did it cross either of your big brains that I wasn’t there? Don’t answer that.”

Hermione spun from condescension to fury in the space of an axon tip.

“No! No, don’t you dare! You said you wanted to watch,” she said angrily, stabbing her finger at him. “You wanted to see what Fleur did—”

“BEFORE I KNEW WHAT YOU WERE DOING! Of course I wanted to watch! It’s a bloody DRAGON! That doesn’t mean I couldn’t have helped!”

“How?” snapped Draco. “By doing what, exactly? It’s not our job to make sure Ronald gets his playtime. What do you suggest you’d have done?”

“You’ll never know! Because you didn’t ask me!”

“Ron, it wasn’t personal, there really was nothing for you to d—”

“And there never is!” he bellowed. “There never is, is there? Not nowadays! Not when you two have Harry rigged up like a sockpuppet! But do you want to know what’s funny, Hermione—”

“Safely assume she doesn’t, thank you, and neither do I. You’re crossing a line.”

“Do you want to know? Do you? It’s that during second year, when that twat called you — you know what he called you—”

“Weasley, the ice where you’re standing is so thin it’s about to be steam.”

“—and it was just the three of us? I remember that. I don’t think you ever paid so much attention to me in your life, Hermione, and it was sodding great. And then he comes back, because, what, he bought you a whole stinking garden—”

“Go to hell,” said Hermione. Ron flinched; she had dropped from molten frustration to a quivering, cold fury.

“You can go straight to hell for that implication, Ronald.”

Harry inhaled on a wince. Shiny-eyed with hurt, Ron still hesitated only for an instant.

“Well — but — well, it’s what he did, isn’t it?” he snarled. “Little rich boy, isn’t he, with a castle and an inheritance? He can buy anything. He can even buy an apology.”

“That’s what this is about? Are you serious? You’re ripping into me because you’re jealous of something that happened two years ago?”

“So what! So what if I am? He gets EVERYTHING!” Ron was bellowing at both of them, now, and there were fresh tears he had made no effort to wipe away. “For four years, if anything in my life is worth having, Draco Malfoy’s got it, and he’s got a better one than me! Money, and grades, and quidditch, and better presents, and better broomsticks, and better clothes, and pretty girls, and whatever it is that makes you like him better than you ever liked me—”

“As if you don’t play favorites.” Hermione’s voice cut through his like a hot knife through sand. “I mean, I don’t even know where to start. I could say it’s disgusting and chauvinistic to talk about me like I’m somehow equivalent to a nice broomstick. I could say that things like ‘better grades’ and ‘quidditch teams’ require time and effort, not just money, and in any case it’s not my fault you don’t have them. And I could say that I’m a human being, and I get to spend time with who I very well please, and if you wanted more of my attention then you could have shown a little interest in my hobbies instead of complaining that I don’t make more time for you, but actually, I won’t say any of those things, because Ron Weasley, you look me in the eye and say you don’t like Harry better than me.”

Her voice cracked on the word Harry.

Harry froze, and stared at Ron, who rendered fully silent for the first time in the argument.

“I don’t,” he said, by and by, but it was strained. “I don’t. I like both of you — differently.”

“You’re a hypocrite,” muttered Draco. Ron sneered at him, but Hermione guffawed and turned away.

“And — and anyway,” Ron snapped, working back into it, “it doesn’t matter. Because at least Harry doesn’t — doesn’t look at me like I’m a species of bug or something whenever money comes up! You think I don’t hear you two talking about me? All the times you’ve said something about my robes, or my house? Yeah, bet you didn’t think I heard that one, did you! The two of you cozied up together, gossiping about how bloody awful it must be to be so poor— you both hated the Burrow! Admit it!”

“No! Ron, don’t be ridic—”

“I admit I’m not used to living in a house with more dirty dishes than blades of grass,” Draco said.

To his own surprise, it turned out that he didn’t need to wait for Ron or Hermione to cut the tendon, because his mouth was more than happy to go hurtling ahead with the knife. He was very angry. It was not entirely clear to him, until he heard himself speaking, how angry he had been.

“I admit that I’m accustomed to a house with more structural integrity than a sand castle. I admit that I’m not used to living in the same dirty kennel as ten other people” —this was a lie— “sharing beds and bathrooms and closets and God knows what else” —it was far past time for him to stop talking— “all crammed in together like an incestuous autoclave, no, I’ll admit, I’m not accustomed to it, and if my luck holds, I never will be.”

Now Ron was shaking like something was about to burst out of him. He had never been so livid. Draco thought there was something faintly relieved in the fury on his face.

“I know.” Somehow he kept his voice steady, despite the shaking. “That’s the thing, Malfoy. I know. You think you’re so clever and subtle, laughing at this big stupid oaf and his sorry life, but I know what you think. I’ve always known.”

Once upon a time, he’d said a word he would never repeat, and he had watched it slowly rip open the conversation beneath its terrible weight, wishing he could snatch it out of the very air.

This didn’t feel as bad as that did. He didn’t know how anything possibly could. But it was not an unrelated feeling.

Hermione was stony and silent. Draco tried to catch her eye, but she was gazing at Ron like he was the last man on the planet, and she was the last saber-toothed tiger.

“I love your family,” said Hermione quietly. “I think they’re wonderful. And I loved the Burrow.”

“Yeah, sure. Okay. The thing is — the thing is, Hermione? I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. I’d still rather live in a hovel and sleep on a dirt floor than be the— the—”

It was going to be bad.

“—the sidekick of someone who treats your parents like they’re animals.”

Hermione flinched. And that was it, that was all it took.

Draco rolled his fingers into position on his wand. His heart was playing a song on the inside of his ribs, and the song said hit him, hit him, hit him .

“Weasley, take out your wand.”

But he was too quiet. Ron barely seemed to remember him.

“Doesn’t he?” Ron demanded. He swept a hand at Draco. “Be honest. When’s the last time he asked after your parents? Can he name them?”

“You’re being cruel,” said Hermione. She was crying, but trying to speak through it, as if they could possibly fail to notice. “And you’re doing it on purpose. Stop it.”

He — he could, couldn’t he? He could— but it was an old memory, and he was too distracted, he couldn’t think, he needed a moment, he needed space—

He needed to put a Furnunculus Jinx so far up Ron’s nostril he’d be sneezing boils on his deathbed. Yes. That’s what he needed to do.

“I said take out your wand.”

Ron still didn’t. Fine. He’d been warned. Draco raised his arm.

“No!” roared Harry, and he threw himself between them. It was the first time he’d spoken in — Draco didn’t even know. Maybe hours. “No magic! Put it down! No hurting each other!”

“Too late, Potter.”

“Far too late, mate,” said Ron, staring at Draco’s wand with a hollow sort of shock. His eyes flicked up to Draco’s. He could see the wide bloody crescents of the whites in them, bracketing the rust-rimmed blue. “Missed the train by a couple years.”

Draco eyed him. He still hadn’t drawn his wand.

He twitched his wrist—but Harry was faster.

“Expelliarmus!”

His wand leapt from his hand, and Harry snapped it out of the air. Then he brandished it at Draco, instead of his own, as if to make a point.

“NO MAGIC!” The sight of Harry Potter shouting at him was so fearsome and irregular that his anger packed its bags and quite simply hauled ass. “Get it through your skull! No magic, not on each other, not ever! And what the hell do you think you’re doing, anyway? It’s Ron!”

Draco reviewed the ledger and found that he didn’t have any sort of response. Ron had made Hermione flinch; he obviously couldn’t say that, but it had seemed a perfectly reasonable answer, at the time.

“I don’t know,” said Ron. The air had gone out of him, but the anger was still there, like venom in a pufferfish skin. “I really don’t know what’s going on with us, anymore. But I guess I’ll give you lot some room to find out.”

For a moment it looked like Hermione was going to say something, and he wished she would: say something, say anything, unveil a sudden dazzling twist of ingenuity that threw the whole problem into perspective and saved them. But no such pearls were forthcoming and after a miserable sound of protest, she closed her mouth again.

“That’s one thing you’ve got to say for me,” said Ron. He was blinking like he had eyes full of sand. “I know when I’m the problem. I’m — that’s another way of looking at this, isn’t it? Maybe you three aren’t the problem, it’s just— it’s supposed to be three. Not four. And I’m the idiot trying to shove a spoon in a wandsheath.”

He turned, ignoring a chorus of his name, and fled up the boys’ stairs. This exit would have been more impressive if had not been executed at top speed, and with a terribly recognizable choking sound.

Harry sat down hard in an armchair. Hermione swiped her hand over her face. For a long time no one said anything, just listened to their own ragged breathing in the awful quiet.

Draco leaned on the back of the sofa and listened to the thunder of his own pulse running itself out. Unlike Harry, he didn’t take deep breaths or try to settle himself, because he didn’t want to calm down. He dreaded the moment the adrenaline receded. He heard his own voice rattled back at him like a cassette, and it made him sick. A dirty kennel. An incestuous autoclave. So easily, he’d said those things. He hadn’t had to think about them. They’d come bubbling up from a secret trench and surfaced without his consent, like was only a vessel for the cruelty, just a mouth and a tongue and the hard mean things they could do.

It was enough to make a man wonder just what kind of thing he was carting around in his chest.

“Here.”

Draco looked up, and found the handle of his own wand staring back at him.

“Sorry for disarming you,” said Harry quietly.

He gave a graceless jerk of his head and took his wand back.

“I— er.” Hermione rubbed her forehead. He stood up straight when she did, mirroring her, and still in him was that unfair hope that her next words would make the whole miserable situation go away. Or the next ones. Or the next. “I — do either of you want dinner?”

Both of them stared at her as if dinner was a word she’d invented.

“Well, we have to do something,” she said miserably. “We can’t just sit here reeling until — I mean, someone’s going to come down and find us. And I can go up, but you two — shouldn’t. So unless you feel like explaining to people—”

“It’s a good idea,” said Draco. She broke off with evident relief. “Dinner. Best thing. Potter?”

Harry was staring at the boys’ staircase.

“What?”

“Food. Come on,” he said, and jerked his head at the door.

“Shouldn’t we—” Harry hesitated over the fallen desk.

“Right,” muttered Hermione. “Yes.”

In a word, they cleaned up their mess. Hermione levitated the desk back onto its side and repaired the inkwell. The ink had to be siphoned from the floor, and what little remained, Harry went after with a rag. Draco cast Reparo on the chair, and after they had cleaned up as much of the scuffing as they could, they stood in the clean empty common room, holding in their minds the only evidence that there had been a fight.

When they were done, they stood shoulder to shoulder with their backs to the portrait-door. Hermione was between them.

“Well,” she said, in a small voice that made his stomach tie knots, “I suppose that’s everything.”

And it was.

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At the risk of harpooning you with tonal dissonance: COVERS!! Cover images for this fic are available now on Tumblr and Imgur. Those include back covers, which I made for fun, because I sort of got carried away.

Miscellaneous other notes:

-I hate to leave you on such a dour image this week. You all know how much I love Ron, and I could talk for ages about his character arc in GoF, but suffice it to say he’s quite simply going through it this year. As is everyone, in fairness. I like to think that a fight is a failure of problem-solving, whereas all parties had things they probably should have said earlier, and in different ways. But I’ll shut up and play dead author, now.

-I’ve read in several circles that Lavender Brown is a pureblood, but the evidence for it is mostly secondary or inferential (e.g. JKR’s “original forty” list, the fact that Lav stays at Hogwarts in seventh year). Which is fair, and I grant she was probably intended to be a pureblood in the books, but Terry Boot stays on, too, and he’s muggle-born in early drafts. So there’s a nebulous amount of creative license going on in my interpretation. Plus, one can always invoke the ancient transformative author’s rule of My City Now.

-More generally, I think that having Lavender be a muggle-born is a lot more interesting in the context of her rivalry with Hermione, both in this fic and in the books. Because like, Lavender is not an academic weapon. She doesn’t care about “earning” her place at Hogwarts, and plays shamelessly into the stigma about muggle-borns being insipid and more interested in muggle culture than magic. And she doesn’t care! Lavender does not give a stone cold hoot what other people think of her. I think that adds a few interesting layers to how much Hermione dislikes her. Put bluntly, there’s a reason she doesn’t want people thinking they’re in the same club.

-I’m always tickled when someone in the comments guesses something that’s going to happen, and it’s even more impressive when they call it from, like, fifteen chapters out. Someone called a major arc in Book FIVE the other day, just as errant speculation, and I remember sitting there like :O. No spoilers, but damn.

-I am never not staggered by how kind you are in the comments. I have hoarded messages like little treasures, and when writer’s block hits, I go through and read them, and it gets me through the next one thousand, two thousand, five thousand words like gasoline on flames. I’m so eager and determined to do right by you, and if you’ve left any comment on the past few chapters, I hope you get — well, I don’t even have a good metaphor, this week, but I just want to give you a really nice thing!

-NEXT CHAPTER: “Come Seek Us Where Our Voices Sound.” It contains a feature appearance from Mad-Eye Moody, Invisibility Cloak shenanigans, and a bath.

-See you there.

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