Chapter 50: Secrets of the Undercroft
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
He swept into the Entrance Hall, swept excess rainwater from his sleeves with a rake of his wand, and then stood in the nearly empty atrium, struck momentarily by the absence of direction.
The faithful arm of the marble staircase reached down from one direction, feeding students up into the airy halls, where the Tower houses laid in wait; Hufflepuffs bobbed in and out of the cheery rain-shadowed corridors that branched off from the hall; and drifting from the antechamber beyond, warm, rich foodsmells emanated from the Great Hall. Gold light spilled from the slender V of the cracked doors, and the echoes of a chattering crowd drowned out the sound of the rain.
Draco turned and descended the stairs to the dungeons.
Light cooled and then dimmed to an artificial glimmer from the torches. The course downward wrapped around hairpin staircases with a haste that was perilous to ankles and necks. Long identical hallways spanned out in a dizzying landscape of orthogonal squares, flat lanes of black tile, corners that vanished into a darkness flat as night, when just two floors above, daylight still dappled the floors of the Entrance Hall. He cut through a passage hidden behind a tapestry of Barnabas Deverill and stepped into a wide hallway terminating in the Potions classroom, the locked door to which succumbed at a simple Alohamora.
In the cool, dark room, there was a soft silence, broken by the weeping beads of dew that formed from crevices in the roof, and the patter of candles sweating wax into their brass holsters. None of the burners crackled. Snape was gone, absent from his normal post at the front brewing station, where he often fretted and scowled away the hours between classes and meals.
Disappointment tasted bitter, though that could have been the cigarette residue on his teeth.
He wandered around the table and peered into the empty cauldron. A leatherbound book lay prostrate on the desk, and he picked it up, flipped it open in the cradle of his arm: it was a recipe. Veritaserum, read the heading, in a nearly unintelligible scrawl, followed by two pages of instructions so brutally annotated that most lines read like an unbroken trawl of black ink.
In the margin above it, in ink old enough to flake, someone had scrawled: Ulceratio. There was a wand movement diagram beside it, sketched on a clumsy four-point cross, and beneath that, a concise summary: Good. Messy.
Interesting. He replaced the book on the table as it had been.
A voice crested through the door to the office, and then subdued again. Draco startled. He hadn’t thought anyone was there; he’d assumed that Snape must have been at dinner.
Once it became clear that the voice was not in any hurry to emerge, his curiosity cornered his discretion, and he approached.
The thick wood muffled the sound, but that was his good fortune, because those inside must have trusted it enough not to mask their voices with spellwork. Leaning against the wall beside the door, the dull strains of a conversation among two clamoring men became audible.
“…powerful accusation you’re making. If you’re right, he belongs in prison.”
“I am aware of that.”
That was Snape, then. The disdain was unmistakable.
“If you are correct in your suspicions — and they are not so credible as to bar all doubt — then this is a man of such reckless narcissism it verges on sociopathy.” It was Barty Crouch. “I am merely raising a possibility.”
“A possibility that the evidence cannot sustain. Someone has forced Potter to compete, and they have continued to work on his behalf in the Tournament. They sedated the Horntail—”
“That was an accident. The dragonkeepers dosed them all beforehand to keep them manageable, and one of them miscalculated. We closed that investigation weeks ago.”
“An accident? Someone fed it an industry-grade sedative on accident? Never mind — does the Ministry seriously contend that its dragonkeepers, N.E.W.T.-holding wizards in magicopharmacology each to each, cannot perform the simple arithmetic that divides one dose from fifty?”
“Even if that were enough to convince me, which it isn’t,” said Crouch tiredly, “you’d have to persuade a jury, and the first question they’ll ask is how a man who, by every account, was nowhere near the dragon paddock for the duration of the First Task, somehow managed to sedate the Hungarian Horntail all by himself. Can you answer that question? Because if you can, please do, and we’ll set you up to testify.”
“Fine. What about my gillyweed?”
“I presume you are still unwilling to tolerate the possibility that Potter stole it himself,” said Crouch, “though why, I am not sure, since he did, in fact, use it.”
“Potter doesn’t know what gillyweed is.”
“Well, he obviously figured it out,” said Crouch impatiently. “Or someone else did, and told him, but that doesn’t mean some conspiracy—”
“I found him, Crouch.” Snape was triumphant; he seemed to think this was a trump card. “The night before the Second Task. He was creeping around the undercroft. He said that he was looking for something he’d lost, a bit of parchment, a billfold… obvious lies. My inventory was wholly untouched before I caught him; and the next, the gillyweed is gone.”
“That’s not proof! That’s inference! Strong inference, I admit, but you can’t possibly expect me to act—”
“He has been acting suspiciously all year—”
“He’s a dodgy man, and what do you expect, after the war—”
“—jumpier than I ever knew him—”
“What do you mean knew him—”
“I have an option,” said Crouch stiffly. “I can bring him in for questioning. Voluntarily.”
Snape scoffed, but Crouch spoke over him. “I don’t have a pretext for arrest, but if I tell him he’s been named in an investigation concerning Harry Potter, it’s possible he’ll go on the record to avoid the possibility of serious charges.”
“He’s not going to confess if he’s guilty, you punctilious fool. You’d leave him free to run for the hills—”
“I’m doing my job,” said Crouch.
“But it isn’t.” Snape’s voice was rich with the savor of malice. “Not anymore. There’s only one auror in this castle, and he isn’t in this room.”
Draco physically recoiled from the abrasive silence that followed it. There was a creak, closer to the door, and he hurriedly stepped away from the wall. The conversation shifted and slipped into indistinct murmurs, and satisfied that he’d heard as much as he could, he crept back through the silent Potions classroom, his mind turning so furiously that the world seemed slow and foggy by comparison.
The last remark threw the whole exchange into focus — it meant Mad-Eye. He had to infer the conversation had been about Moody. The suggestion that Crouch had ‘gone soft’ on him, that they’d worked together for years — not to mention that the gillyweed had been found in Mad-Eye’s office — he’d never thought to question where Mad-Eye acquired it, but how else could he have come by it on short notice? Moody had even pointed them in the right direction for the egg, telling them about Fleur and the prefects’ bathroom; had he offered other hints that they had missed?
Come to think of it, he didn’t have any great reservation about endangering students, either. He’d seemed fairly nonchalant about throwing jinxes, and he’d barked orders at Hermione like he expected war to break out before lunch. Watch your corners, indeed.
Which was advice that Draco shortly thereafter wished he’d taken, because he rounded the corner coming out of the Potions hallway and almost slammed into a girl who was hurrying in the opposite direction.
His wand came out without thinking; she fumbled for hers, but a Disarming Spell twitched it out of her none-too-nimble fingers, and it skittered uselessly into the hallway. Only in the hackle-sinking aftermath did he identify the girl, a reedy Slytherin with a fox-like face and hair the color of dirtied wheat.
“Carrow?”
“Oi!” she snapped. She doubled over to snatch up her wand, and a streak of marbled blue bruising gaped from the lip of her collar. A moment later, however, it was hidden again. “Watch where you’re going, gobshite.”
“You first. What’s on your neck?”
“What are you, a prefect?” she shrilled. “I could ask you the same question. Your common room’s not even around here!”
“Neither is yours,” he pointed out, which was true: the Slytherin common room lay in an entirely separate wing from the Potions classroom. He’d learned that the hard way, trying to find the blasted thing.
“Mind your own business!”
“Gladly,” he said sharply, “and eagerly. I haven’t the slightest— weren’t you a hostage in the Second Task.”
“Oh! Wow! Good for you!! You have a long-term memory!” She tried to brush past him. “I don’t have time for this — I don’t know you — goodbye!”
He ignored her shrill invitations, of increasing profanity, to extricate his proboscis from her affairs. He stepped into her way, and found, to his satisfaction, that she stumbled back. “Why didn’t you opt out?”
“Why didn’t you bluh bluh bluh? Get out of my way!”
She was shrill, and unusually urgent, considering he’d only disarmed her. That was interesting. He touched his wand when she tried to shove past him a second time, and she jerked back, eyeing him warily.
“They didn’t force any of the hostages. Davies declined. Granger could have, only she didn’t, because she’s mad. You’re nothing to Warrington,” he said, curiously, “or at least he claims you are, so why go to the trouble? Why didn’t you pass it off?”
“Not so I could stand here and have you yammer at me about it!” she shrilled. “I didn’t know what they were asking; I thought I’d only wake up once we were out of the lake.”
He tilted his head. It was a lie: the hostages hadn’t been told they were going into the lake. At least, Hermione hadn’t, which raised the question of why Flora Carrow was a different case. No one gained anything from telling her; she hadn’t helped Warrington, so far as he could tell, and none of the administrators had any interest in her. Dumbledore wouldn’t have given her special treatment, and he doubted Crouch or Bagman even knew her name.
He pocketed the information for later. “How did you know Warrington would win?”
“Are you serious? Cassius Warrington, up against a half-breed, a half-blood, and a mudshagging quidditch player—?”
“Careful, Carrow.”
“Warrington’s the best wizard at this school, and every real person here knows that.”
She spoke with the anguished pleasure of someone who had no real right to the pride they were feeling.
“Has he promised you anything?”
She made the face of a woman sipping bile. “…What are you talking about?”
“Because if he has, he’s lying.” He was impatient with her, and vaguely irritated at himself for taking the time to help, but it was necessary for someone to take her in confidence about her delusions, and he sincerely doubted that Theo or Pansy would shoulder the responsibility. “Warrington doesn’t think he’s obligated to you. He’s not going to offer you protection. He said—”
A sound skittered from the end of the hallway. Flora yipped shrilly; Draco started; and she took the chance to duck under his arm and run, vanishing around the corner before he could call her back.
Voices issued from the corner where the noise had come from. He weighed between investigating and following her, found he held not the slightest interest in submitting himself to any more of her company, and went in the opposite direction.
Something ran over his shoe. He grimaced and kicked away a small beetle, which buzzed off into the musty shadows, leaving him irate and ill at ease. All sorts of fauna nested in the castle — there were rats and beetles aplenty in Gryffindor Tower, and that was infinitely better kempt — but down in the dark everything felt more iniquitous and seedy, making him itch to cast Inciendo and scour the whole place as it had earned.
Voices bounced queerly from the narrow passages, warped by the shape of the high, vaulted walls. When he turned the corner he ran into an ancient stone clock set into the wall, its faces set in blue lapis lazuli, with gold arms that pointed at hours marked in constellations instead of numbers. The face of it hung slightly ajar from the wall, and when he prodded it with his wand, it creaked and swung out, suspended on an invisible hinge in the brickwork.
The passage beyond was a hole of shadows, lit only by a glimmer at the other end.
This being the beginning to any number of memorable stories where the subject ended up in a bloody tangle of limbs at the bottom of a mineshaft, Draco promptly pivoted on his heel to go do something else.
“…don’t hear… find him?”
“…most of it… message.”
Even these would not have been curiosities enough to tempt him into a Guaranteed Toll-Free Mauling, but he was too slow in his route of egress, and caught the tail end of a thin, reedy sound that made him wince and stop dead in his tracks.
It was a shriek. A child’s shriek, to be more precise. A very young child, if one wanted Granger-esque levels of precision.
Which just roped him into a Gordian knot of moral culpability, damn the thing.
He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, in the vain hopes of repelling an oncoming migraine.
“…shut him up, eedjit, he’s gon…”
“…s’the bloody point…”
“No — no! No, no! Please don’t!”
This was Hermione’s fault, really. Somehow. He’d figure out how once he’d had some time to think about it.
He cast Lumos, stepped over the threshold of the clock, and crossed into the passage, muttering to himself.
What do you mean, you heard someone screaming, and you didn’t do anything, Draco? What kind of a person doesn’t do anything? I went lake-diving in February for a twelve-year-old I never even met, and you can’t spare a moment to see if a child is dying?’ Notwithstanding the last time we went poking around in odd corridors, we ended up squaring off with a three-headed dog and the embodied vessel of the Dark Lord, but no, we’re Gryffindors, so let’s just stick our necks out for anything that whimpers in our general direction —
The light coming through the grate was the color of bilgewater, strained through a large, vaulted stone space populated by columns the side of oak trees, walled with barrels and braziers so old that rust smeared jade patinas on their chains, and the miscellaneous detritus of a basement clustered under the shrouds of dusty sheets. It was large enough to fit a quidditch pitch, and its size shattered every sound into echoes, which bounded in dizzy loops around the ceiling. This meant that it was hard to tell whether one child was shrieking, or three, though as he approached the mouth of the passage, he made out the three squabbling figures at the foot of one column.
There were three of them, two big and one small, two green ties and a red one, shouldering each other roughly against the marble. He felt a touch nauseous. It was Colin Creevey.
Goyle had a fistful of his hair, and was dangling him against the column like Sebastian on the cross.
“—leave anything on his face,” Goyle was saying, earnestly, “cuz Cass said he won’t help us if—”
“Bloody hark at you, Cassius’s bitch—”
“No, jus’ saying, it’s easier to tell…”
“…up and piss off, Greg, get this over with.”
Flint did something that made Colin give a ludicrously high scream. Draco took three quick steps into the light, cast up the grate with a flick of Leviosa, and stepped into the room as the shrieking metal played herald for him.
The Slytherins greeted his entrance with not one iota of the respect he was due. They dropped Colin in a crumple of robes and pain, correctly judging that he wouldn’t try to escape, and pivoted shoulder-to-shoulder, with a slightly ridiculous unison, like the world’s dumbest-looking pair of beefeaters.
“Well, if it isn’t Malfoy,” said Flint, grinning.
Draco rolled his eyes. In the hierarchy of ways to open a confrontation, ‘if it isn’t so-and-so’ ranked near dead last. It also made him feel a bit better, frankly, since it reminded him that he was dealing with dullards.
“Flint,” he said. “Goyle. Odd place for a threesome, but don’t let me interrupt.”
Colin hadn’t moved since Flint dropped him. That was concerning, but not immediately resolvable. Draco made a note of it without taking his eyes from the bigger boys.
“Doesn’t meet your standards, dozzit?” Flint’s grin was fleshy and a touch nervous. “Scouting places to suck off Potter? Would’ve thought by now you’d worn a hole in the Tower floor.”
“Would’ve done, but your mother says it hurts her knees. Anyway, what’s this?” He twitched his wand at Colin, who squirmed slightly, groaning.
“None of your business, is what it is,” grunted Goyle. “Go ’way.”
“Like a scalpel, your wit, Greg.”
“Don’t call me that,” he snapped. Draco and Flint both looked at him with surprise. “You can’t call me that. You’ve no right.”
“Fine, Gregory,” said Draco, disgruntled, but Goyle fished out his wand and stabbed it at him.
“It’s Goyle. You’re no friend of mine,” he snarled, “after what you did to Marcus.”
“Been whinging about that, has he? You might recall it wasn’t me who Transfigured him. This is a red tie, not a yellow one. Don’t fret, I know colors are hard.”
“You attacked him!”
Goyle’s shout reverberated around the undercroft. Colin twitched and whined in pain.
Draco eyed him. It wasn’t clear at all what Flint had done to him; he wasn’t bleeding, and apart from some minor scrapes and bruising, he didn’t seem badly hurt. That was more chilling, not less.
“After Granger saved him from turning into a pavement stain, sure.”
“He wouldn’t have been there if not for the fairy, and you still jinxed him afterwards — Merlin knows what the mudblood would’ve done if the teachers hadn’t come—”
“So you’re going after Creevey?” It was hard not to sound incredulous; the internal machinations of the profoundly stupid never failed to amaze. “Because he’s in the same house as me? That’s a thin pretext, even for you.”
“Either way, he’s not your lookout,” said Flint. “Run away, Malfoy. I’m sure you remember how.”
“If I don’t, I’ll know who to ask.” He twirled his wand through his fingers. “I got a nice long look at your back the last time we saw each other, Flint.”
“Wasn’t a fair match, was it. You and the rest of bloody Gryffindor. Would’ve been different if it were just you and me.”
Draco’s mouth experienced one of those rare moments where it acted totally without clearance from any of the better parts of his head. He blamed Ron Weasley.
“It’s just you and me now,” he remarked, still twirling his wand. “Unless you count Goyle, although one can treat his tactical value as a rounding error.”
Flint snorted. Goyle, who didn’t seem to understand he’d been insulted, did too.
“Is that a challenge?”
“It’s an observation.” They were standing close to Colin. If he fired something at them, they’d likely dodge or try Protego, and the rebound could hit him. It would be more prudent to move the brat before they tried to duel, but he’d have to come up with a reason to do it.
He didn’t much fancy dueling Flint. In the best of all worlds, he’d have grabbed Colin with a Levicorpus and hauled him off, with nary so much as an Expelliarmus exchanged in either direction. That dream seemed increasingly hopeless, however.
On the other hand, if Flint dueled him, he wouldn’t have to worry about him and Goyle coming on at once.
Colin groaned, lurched up, and vomited a steady stream of something black onto the stone.
Flint and Goyle danced back, hooting with laughter. In contrast, Draco’s stomach and kidneys interlaced, and he stared hard at the black sludge foaming from Colin’s mouth before realizing what it was: it was mud. Thick, black, oily mud, veined with blood and bile.
“You know, I’m almost impressed,” he said, battling dizziness. “That’s not a simple spell.”
“Dunno what you mean,” said Flint. “Pretty sure mudbloods just do that on their own.”
Then he grinned, and Draco broke out of his reverie. The nausea vanished. He drew his wand and took a sidestep into Flint’s line of fire.
“Formal challenge,” he said, and tried to remember what all the book had said he was supposed to do next. “Wands and hands. Clavicle to sacrum. First to disarm.”
There was a stunned beat as everyone tried to figure out whether or not he was serious, himself included.
“You haven’t got a second,” said Flint.
Fuck. Well.
He jerked his head towards Colin. “Creevey. Indicate.”
Colin moaned and heaved another mouthful of sludge onto the stone. Goyle barked a high peal of glee.
“Sure,” said Flint, grinning beatifically. “Hell. Good enough, I reckon.” He drew his wand and shook out his arm, sending sparks twirling into the floor, like he was limbering to dance.
Draco turned to Goyle. “Call us,” he said.
“I’m not your second.”
“And I’d ask mine, but you’ve packed his gastric tract with silt, so he’s preoccupied,” Draco snapped. “Flint, tell your second to call, or it’s off.”
“Greg. Do it. This’ll only take a minute.”
He lifted his wand at Draco.
“To the wizard’s disarm,” called Goyle, with clear dislike for both of them. “Clavicle to sacrum. Wands, hands. Call.”
“Marcus Flint,” said Flint, shifting into an underhand grip. He held it with the tip arrowed down, leering from a great height.
“Draco Malfoy.”
With their names still skittering around the ceiling of the undercroft, they dueled.
Flint’s echo was still fading when he realized that he had made a mistake. To his credit, he was a seventh year student at Hogwarts, with the very bare minimum of knowledge that credential entailed, and so he knew how to dodge a spell— probably having tempted more than one of his peers. He also knew how to cast one, and he was quicker than expected. His arm was fast and his aim was good, his posture flexible and limber, like a chaser’s should be. He came barreling down the duelist’s line with an avalanche of footsteps, hurling jinxes on every half-step. He moved well. He moved intimidatingly well.
Draco moved like fire on a fuse. He was up the line and under Flint’s guard before the first spell shattered on the stone behind him, two jinxes tossed off like a courtesy greeting, parrying a Knockback and shattering it harmlessly against the column. He sliced a Diffindo up the front of Flint’s shirt and swept down with an overhand Langlock, which hit belatedly as a red line bloomed over a bisected Slytherin tie, and Flint gagged himself trying to voice his pain with a mouth that couldn’t move.
He made his first mistake when he paused for a quarter-second, looking for a quick way to disarm, instead of following up with another assault — because in the exhilaration of winning the first movement, he, the idiot, had forgotten that seventh years learned nonverbal magic.
The Bombarda lashed at him in a white blur, and he hurled himself back before it slammed into the ground where he’d been, cratering stone. He fumbled the footing and just barely got his feet under him before Flint unsealed his mouth and roared something that sent ice spikes soaring from his wand. Draco dropped and slid sideways, ruining the line, but sod the line, because a row of spikes erupted from the place where he’d been and melted harmlessly away.
Flint launched another three at him on the backhand sweep, and this time he had gathered enough of his wits to parry, exploding the spikes against a Shield Charm that saved his face from getting ribboned. Then Flint lunged, and with a fractional motion of his wrist, Draco moved the shield, using Flint’s own momentum to crack him in the skull.
Flint staggered upright, blood beading at a nick on his forehead, where one of his own ice shards must’ve rebounded at him. Draco’s shield flickered out, and he lifted his wand again, hesitant.
Flint was strong and trained, but he was muscle, not brains — Oliver Wood had figured out how to beat him years ago, and the trick was bothering to think even a single move ahead. Draco rolled his wrist and feinted right with an Expelliarmus, then another to the left, slipping back inside his guard, so close that he could have reached out and shoved him, if he wanted to — and Flint, mistaking haste for desperation, brought his hand down in a bellowing Flipendo that would have shattered a slower man’s ribcage.
Draco cast Protego.
His own Knockback Jinx exploded against the shield and hurled Flint half the length of the hall. He landed on his back and skidded, with a roar that thundered in the echoey hall like a full set of church bells. His wand flew from his hand.
Draco dropped his arm, warm, fervidly perspiring, and jittery with victory. “Disarmed,” he said.
Flint shifted upright, clutching his arm, and gasping for breath. His eyes were shining and wild with a resentment that was shockingly near hatred. Draco took a step back.
“Alright, Flint?”
“Alright?” rasped Flint. “Alright, you pissant? Are you joking?”
“I’m asking if you need the Hospital Wing,” said Draco, as calmly as he was able, which was not much. His body hadn’t figured out it wasn’t in a fight anymore; his stomach had transformed into a loose and watery medium, and his arms jittered whenever he stood still. He shifted his weight onto his back foot, hoping to burn off some of the excess cortisol. “I’m taking Creevey. Gentleman’s honor; Madam Pomfrey won’t know a thing.”
“What honor?” Flint spat. It was pink and viscous. “If I slit you open, tits to bollocks, you’d bleed black as him.”
“Careful, Flint. That’s the second time I’ve beat you. The third time, I’ll be less patient.”
“You pestilent little shit,” croaked Flint. “You worthless muggle-loving fruit. No wonder you’re not in Slytherin, thank God, I’d have had to kill myself from shame—”
Draco’s wand moved. From deep within the fog of a furious daze, he was intrigued to know which spell would first reach his tongue — but he never found out, because something hard and powerful collided with the back of his head, and the world was a lightless slate of stars and pain.
When his mind reunited with his skull, he was kneeling, gasping for a breath that wouldn’t come, while jarring waves of nausea rolled ceaselessly over his head. In his periphery the blurry silhouette of Goyle drifted in and out of focus. The world kept slipping out of focus. Blinking failed to clarify it. He swiped at the back of his neck and found it reassuringly whole, no blood, no warmth, but his fingers felt oddly numb, and kept slipping away when he tried to apply force.
In his right hand, Goyle held a long lead pipe. In his other hand was his wand, but it wasn’t hard to see which weapon he’d elected.
“You — absolute — arsehole, Greg.” It was hard to concentrate. His tongue kept slipping around his teeth. “We’re not dueling.”
“Dunno why we have to be,” said Goyle, which was, hang his life and every object in it, not a bad point.
He swung.
Draco didn’t quite collapse, but he didn’t quite execute the smart duck-and-roll he’d wanted, either. In actuality he flopped over sideways and tumbled onto his back, dodging the whistling sweep of the pipe over his head. Goyle stepped over him and brought it down again, cracking it on the stone with a horrible shriek that jangled in his newly-throbbing head, and Draco threw himself aside. He got up on one knee, poised to stand, and then the pipe came sweeping around and connected with his kneecap.
He went down. There was nothing he could do to prevent that. Everything in his leg was an unbroken continuity of pain. He didn’t even strictly feel like he had a leg anymore, just a searing starburst of a raw nerve where his knee once was. He didn’t scream, but that wasn’t for lack of desire, or some manly impulse not to. The pain actually closed his throat, so all he could manage was a deep gasp of shock.
“Don’t kill him,” called Flint warily.
“Not gonna kill him,” Goyle grunted. “M’not stupid.”
The breadth of permissible harm contained under that ceiling would give any man good reason to panic.
Goyle hefted the pipe, but as he did, there was movement behind him. A shadow in the passageway that lead out to the dungeons — a light, someone’s wand-tip — and Draco could have cheered in relief.
Cassius Warrington’s square white face appeared in the passage, his wand clasped lightly in his outstretched hand.
“Evening, gentlemen,” he said, at length.
Goyle lowered the pipe. Draco sagged against the floor, blinking away dizziness, and thanked the ceiling in a silent reverie of relief.
“Cass,” said Flint. He wet his lips, and began to say something — but as if on cue, Colin rolled over and emptied his last bellyful of mud onto the stone.
Cassius watched the boy unearth the sordid contents of his intestines with one acutely arched eyebrow. When he was finished, his lip curled.
“Marcus,” he sighed, as if he’d caught him with a hand in the biscuit jar. “This wasn’t what I meant.”
“The hell was I supposed to know that?”
“I don’t know. Discretion, perhaps?”
“We were being discreet.”
“I dread to think of the alternative. Greg, put that down, for God’s sake, you’re not a hired goon.”
“Warrington,” called Draco. “Creevey’s been cursed.”
“I can see that,” said Cassius calmly. To Flint, he added, “And what message is that supposed to send, exactly? Besides leaving something for the house-elves to clean up?”
“It’s not exactly pleasant, is it.”
“I know that, but I can’t give you license to hurt him,” said Cassius calmly. “Scaring him is one thing; this is quite another. I don’t actually get any pleasure from inflicting pain on first years, Marcus, it isn’t my cup of tea. In fact, it’s my job to protect them.”
“That’s not my fault,” he said sullenly.
“No, but that is,” agreed Cassius, indicating the unmoving Colin. “And having witnessed it, the rules of the Hogwarts School Handbook give me no choice.”
“Aw, c’mon—”
“Detentions,” he said crisply, pointing two fingers at Flint and Goyle. Goyle cried in betrayal. “Saturdays and Sundays, seven o’clock sharp, for the rest of the year. Scrubbing silver. No magic. And fifty points apiece, from Slytherin.”
“Mate!”
“You’re joking!”
“I am absolutely not,” said Cassius calmly. He folded his hands behind his back. “And if any professor asks me what you were doing in the undercroft, I intend to tell them the full and unvarnished truth: I found you brutalizing a pair of defenseless younger students, stopped it immediately, and issued punishments of a severity proportionate to the wrongdoing.”
Draco figured out what it was about Cassius that had bothered him: he was missing his tie. He’d never seen the Head Boy in anything less than uniform-to-code.
“Busybody,” muttered Goyle sullenly.
“That’ll be ten more points.”
“Oi!”
“Don’t you raise your voice at me. This is embarrassing and unconscionable. If this gets out to anyone, I’m taking it to Snape.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Try me, Marcus,” said Cassius. He gestured at Colin. “And if he’s not in the Hospital Wing by tomorrow morning, you’ll be in Dumbledore’s office by the next.”
He turned on his heel and walked away.
“Warrington?” demanded Draco. Flint was still holding his wand. “What—”
Cassius didn’t appear to hear him. He strode unhesitatingly out of the undercroft, his head high, his eyes fastened resolutely forward, like the whole sordid scene had ceased to exist when he finished talking. He was deaf to the calls of his name.
The Head Boy flourished his wand over his shoulder, and the grate shuddered down behind him.
Draco stared after him. Deep in his stomach, fear raised its head again, shaking free of its leash.
“He’s going to the Hospital Wing anyway,” muttered Flint.
Goyle was still holding the pipe. He and Draco realized this at the same time.
With a half-second of grace, a shield blazed to life and met the hard crack of the pipe. The impact sent white fissures arcing through it. The pipe swept around a second time for his ankles, but Draco found his footing and sprang away.
The movement ignited a minor supernova of pain in his leg, and his knee buckled under his weight. Flint cast something yellow and sinewy that lashed through the air over his head and he rolled, but his leg was bad, and the next one whipped him off his feet: he lashed out and shot a Furnunculus into Goyle’s eye, making him scream as welts erupted in a profusion that closed over the socket; he was not even slightly sorry for the pain in his voice.
He set his teeth and thought of Sirius sitting on the bank in the rain, and the anger wiped out the pain, let him stand up and fumble a clumsy duelist’s stance, as Flint came sprinting down the line with a Knockback Jinx. He parried, shot back with Stupefy, Diffindo, Bombarda.
Lights flickered over the undercroft like a pair of dancing birds.
It was bound to happen: Flint’s backhand caught him in the arm. He was a half-step slow because of the knee and he only noticed when the right side of his sleeve erupted in red — hardly painful and far worse than it looked, it only just broke the skin, but that didn’t stop his hindbrain’s gorge of panic — and more importantly, the distraction stopped him from blocking Petrificus in the leg. He dropped to a knee, Goyle’s pipe whistled, and then something in his ribs happened that really shouldn’t have, structurally, which his body politely informed him by setting every nerve inside it summarily on fire.
He moved on instinct. With a voice thin from breathlessness — he wasn’t actually sure he could inflate one of his lungs — he lashed his wand at Goyle and cast Levicorpus. The boy was hoisted into the air by his ankle, and snarling, Draco hauled him into the column. His head smacked against it like a ragdoll and went still. The pipe clattered to the ground. Draco dropped him, and he fell twenty feet with a dull thump .
“Greg?” Flint bellowed. “Greg! You alright?”
Draco had no idea how badly he’d hurt Goyle; he was approximately one-tenth anger and nine-tenths eye-watering pain, and in absolutely no temper to care. He swiveled his wand around at Flint and cast a clumsy Stupefy, scattering red against the wall behind him.
“Malfoy—”
Draco replied with an inarticulate snarl. His knee hurt worse than anything in recent memory and his chest pinched like a knife was going in every time he tried to breathe, and his head was still dizzy from the pain that ebbed in his wound, and when he cast the spell it was through a clean red slate of anger, at Flint, at Goyle, at Colin fucking Creevey for getting himself in the situation, and at himself, for being in the dungeons and leaving the castle in the first place, for going to Hogsmeade and talking to the brainless Sirius Black, for getting it wrong, for being on this side, the one that got bloodied and beat-up on because they were weaker and he couldn’t stand that, being weak.
“Bombarda maxima.”
Everything happened slowly. Flint wheeled away as the spell came arrowing for his heart. It clipped his arm — started to detonate as he spun away — and flourished fully when it connected with the marble. Light blossomed; the pillar exploded like it was home to a newborn star. A full column of the undercroft erupted and sprayed shrapnel like a wave breaking on sand, and Draco threw himself sideways, slid between Colin and the explosion, and cast Protego as a wall of grey dust and white splinters descended like hail. The castle gave a great groan, like he’d wounded it, and he briefly feared that the whole undercroft was about to come down over them.
Out of the smoky rubble came Marcus Flint, cradling his arm, which — Draco’s stomach turned — did not so much resemble a limb as a string-tied assortment of raw meats. His face loomed down through the fog like the snarl of a wild boar, deaf to reason, fed on rage.
He fumbled his wand into his off-hand and pointed it at Draco, who tried to stand and found his knee had finally given out, once and for all. Two spells missed him by a hair, but the momentum of dodging spilled him over onto one side, where he caught himself on his hands, trembling with the effort of bracing himself.
Another Blasting Curse detonated inches from his face. He rolled away, but Flint stepped into his path and kicked him in the gut, driving him into a fetal shell.
Draco snapped his teeth shut around a groan. He couldn’t stand. If he couldn’t stand, he couldn’t duel. Flint was playing with his food.
“Cru—”
“Draco!”
Another voice skittered from the tunnel. There was someone at the grate. Flint whirled around, his wand aloft.
With a groan and a screech and what sounded like an enormous effort, it ratcheted up a few feet, its black teeth sinking into the wall above it.
Hermione ducked into the room. She pocketed a white piece of parchment; a scuttle of moving ink vanished from its face. The Marauder’s Map.
She straightened up and dusted off her robes, which were wind-tousled and embroidered with dirt. Rain soaked the crown of her head and darkened her hair, drawing a sharp contrast to the pale rictus of her face. She was, in a word, furious: she clenched her wand like it was a murder indictment.
It was probably the head injury, but he had never been so glad to see anyone, bar none, in his life.
At the same time, he wondered why it couldn’t have been anyone else in the castle at all — literally anyone, except the single person that his animal hindbrain found it singularly intolerable for Flint to lay hands on, as he was assuredly about to do. Because now, on top of everything else, there was a fear so poignant it was like sickness, and the intense urge to order her out.
Flint twitched at her, and she startled back. The boy grinned.
Her eyes flit over the undercroft. They lingered on Draco, fretful, and she mouthed something to him, but he was too far, and too dizzy, to make it out.
Flint kicked Draco again, which was frankly just unsporting.
“Don’t touch him.”
It was hard to say who seemed more surprised at her: Flint, Draco, or Hermione herself, whose demand reiterated itself in defiant echoes as Flint turned away from Draco and began a leisurely stroll across the smoking undercroft.
“Is that an order, mudblood?”
“No, it’s a threat,” she said. Slightly tremulous: “Just so we’re clear.”
“It’s a threat, is it?” Flint was delighted. “Well, that’s just pure provocation, innit?”
He lifted his wand at Hermione, which was — no, that was worse, come to think of it — and Draco struggled upright, but his head immediately vetoed the act, because all the colors of the room swapped places.
Hermione squared her jaw. “For the record, I never liked you,” she said. “But if you’re going to attack me, it’s worth pointing out that I did save your life, or at least spared you quite a bit of suffering, and if you were a better man, that would matter to you.”
“I don’t owe you nothing, mudblood,” he said. “S’not your magic in the first place.”
Her eyes flickered to Draco.
“Come and take it back, then,” she said, a bit breathlessly. And she ran.
Flint shot after her, lashing his wand in a sloppy overhand. She slid behind a column and vanished as a glittering Bombarda sailed through the place where she’d stood, detonating a stack of crates. Novae of shrapnel erupted, sawdust blooming. Flint hurtled around after her and ran into a Stinging Jinx, roared, and then whipped back around the column, following her on a mad race over and through the shattered remains of the crate piles — she threw a Shield now and then over her shoulder, ducking the bright darts of curses as they peppered her shoulders — but she wasn’t fast, and she wasn’t agile, and she was half his size if she was an ounce, and it felt like everything in Draco’s body was a hollow vehicle for sickness and dread.
With a roar of laughter, Flint snagged her arm and wrenched her back. Hermione jerked so hard her shoulder almost popped out of its socket. She stumbled back, and Flint’s wand bit into her neck. With one arm, he pinned her.
“Do you know what they used to do to thieves?” he crooned. “They’d cut off their hands. Hard to use a stolen wand if you don’t have hands, ay, mudblood?”
Her chest rose and fell in quick breaths. She closed her eyes.
And then Hermione, who had never dueled in her life — who sometimes gave Draco palpitations because of how quickly she forgot her head under the slightest touch of pressure — thrust her wand over her shoulder, into Flint’s face — Merlin’s blood — and set him on fire.
Bluebell flames erupted over his head like a candlewick igniting, like an eruption of hungry fast-blooming freesia. Flint screamed in a way Draco had only heard someone scream once before, at the Quidditch World Cup — a scream not so much of pain as it was of shock and fear, a child’s scream, high and thick with the utter strangeness of hurting. He leapt away and rolled onto the floor, flinging his body this way and that, while smoke guttered from his clothes in thick rancid-smelling clouds.
Hermione walked forward briskly through the steam and pointed her wand at his head. Draining out his fear, through the pain, came a narcotic wave of pride: for here was his girl, a lovely, clever, brutal girl, with a steady hand and a cold clear eye, and if she wasn’t the most magnificent thing to walk the halls of that castle since Godric Gryffindor, then nothing good ever had.
Red light zipped into Flint’s temple, and he was still. She drew her wand over his body, and the flames guttered out, like she was sealing them back into a pocket in the air.
In the lingering quiet, there was only the creaking whinge of the undercroft; the smell of burned cotton; smoke, dust, shrapnel, and Hermione Granger, standing in a wreath of all three.
She visibly gave a little intake of breath. Then she spun on her heel and sprinted across the room, dropping to her knees, and scrambling to him in a clumsy landing of limbs that was very much at odds with the image she’d been a moment ago: much more juvenile, more like a girl who’d only been twice on a broomstick and almost fallen off both times.
“You came,” he made out, before she came down like a thunderstorm of elbows.
“And you’re an idiot!” She was breathless with rage. “Of course I came, you vacuous skrewt-brained pigheaded git of a boy, you ran off in the rain and made me cry thinking I’d scared you away, and then you went and did this, I hate you, oh my God, I could cry—”
“But you — were angry at me.”
“I’m a lot angrier now!”
“That’s — apparent — scared me off?”
“What was I supposed to think? Sirius said it was something to do with your dad and I thought, oh, good job, Hermione, really nice, because everyone really loves when you shout at them — and I was actually ready to apologize, even though I was right and you know it — but then you were gone. I was so mad I almost didn’t even come looking for you, so you’re really lucky I was so angry, if you think about it—”
He gave a delirious laugh.
“This isn’t funny. You left, and I thought you hated me. And have I mentioned, by the way, I hate you so much—”
“I’d never hate you—”
“You could’ve! You ran off in the middle of the visit, what was I supposed to think?”
“I needed a moment!”
“Then ask!”
“That’s beside the point! But good to know if I don’t announce my intention to leave a social occasion, you’ll take it as a declaration of everlasting loathing, thank you for telling me—”
“You arse,” she spat. She shoved him. “Stop it. How would you have felt? If I vanished and showed up like this.”
He veered away from that thought, which felt like several buildings collapsing on top of each other at once. It was easy to ignore; breathing felt like putting his ribs through a woodchipper.
“Ribs — broken—”
“Shit!” She scrambled back, scrubbing at her eyes, which had a bright wet affect that made him feel like death. “Sorry! Sorry!”
“Alright,” he said, and her hands flexed clumsily on his shoulders. He put his head back on the tile and closed his eyes and the cool kiss of stone bore like an edge through waves of hot headache. “Not your— not… ow.”
“What’s wrong? Where are you hurt? Are you alright? Obviously you’re not alright, that’s stupid — I’m stupid, this isn’t the time, I’m sorry — oh God, your knee.”
“Don’t tell me, whatever it is,” he said, his eyes screwed shut against the light. “I haven’t looked.”
“What happened?”
He flopped a hand ineffectually at Colin. Hermione made a sound of panic, like she hadn’t actually noticed him before.
“What happened to him?”
“Flint… and Greg… having a bit of fun.”
“And you intervened?”
He flourished his fingers: Evidently.
“But that was stupid,” she said, and his irritation was so poignant he actually cracked an eyelid.
“And you would’ve done different, would you?”
“Yes! Or — maybe! You could’ve gotten a teacher! Or a prefect! Instead of dueling them yourself!”
“You try doing that when someone’s screaming in your ear, and by the way, I’ve a head injury the size of Wales, just now, so if you could keep your voice down—”
“Sorry! Sorry. Sorry.”
She drew her hands down his chest and patted softly down his side, hitching her breath where he flinched, then did the other. Her fingers were light and shuddery. He realized she was terrified, and the irritation in his chest folded up and Disapparated, leaving a soft velvety ball of something helpless and warm.
Sucking in a breath, she pressed her wand to his arm and cast Episkey, and it felt like running water was coursing over his skin, sealing it up, leaving only a soaked red sleeve and a slightly itchy patch of skin over the new scar. He rolled his arm and flexed it.
“We’ll get Madame Pomfrey to fix that,” she said, lightly touching his ribs. She did something on his thigh that made a cool numbing sensation drip down his leg, easing the pain, and he let go of a long breath; he hadn’t realized how much of his pain was coming from the leg. “I’d try, but it’s bones and tendons, and those are the hardest to fix if you get them wrong… I can try to numb it up a bit, though.”
The anesthetic in his leg had improved his situation so dramatically that he might have been riding a dopamine high. “Sure,” he said, closing his eyes, and rolling his head back against the pavement. He luxuriated in the newfound pleasures of not having one million knives in his leg. “Whatever you want.”
“Draco? Draco. Dra-co.”
A sharp smack landed on his cheek, and he popped his head up, glaring.
“What?”
“Don’t go to sleep!”
“I wasn’t, damn you,” he said irritably, bracing himself up on his elbows. “I’m not going to nod off with a head injury, I’m not entirely thick.”
“Evidence notwithstanding,” she muttered, poking her wand intrusively under his collar to inspect for bruising. He lifted his chin up and away and allowed it, glaring, because he frankly shared her concern. She picked around to the back of his head and saw something that made her flinch, but then her wand probed the sore spot, and more cool pinpricks washed over his head, bringing a euphoria of relief. He rolled his head back into her hand from instinct, luxuriating in it. The tension seeped from his body like a poison.
“That’s excellent,” he said. His tongue felt large and cumbersome. “Did you learn that from Molly?”
“Yes, but it’s not advisable to do it twice,” she said, shaking out her wrist. “I thought I could make an exception, under the circumstances. You’ll have to walk, I can’t levitate you and Colin at once.”
“Bet you could,” he mumbled. The world was blurry through his small, spinning window of it, and he lolled his head back at the stone-carved ceiling. “If you tried.”
“You’re nice when you’re concussed.”
“I’m always nice to you.”
She snorted, a little bit more loudly than he strictly deserved.
“Did you really set him on fire?” he inquired, watching her through one slitted eyelid. “Or was that a pleasant hallucination?”
“Technically, I set his clothes on fire,” she said coolly, tucking her hair behind her ear. She was faintly embarrassed. Adorable. “The bluebell flames are synthetic. They’re much easier to control, and they don’t leave deep burns.”
“Deep burns, or any burns?”
“…Deep.”
He closed his eyes and smiled absently. “Good.”
“I didn’t… I wasn’t quite thinking.”
“Do you hear me complaining?”
“I didn’t mean to hurt him. Badly. I really didn’t.”
“We’ll work on it.”
“Draco,” she said, a touch sharp, and jabbed an Episkey into a scrape on his palm.
“What?”
She withdrew and folded her hands neatly over her wand, like someone completing an examination. It was woefully endearing.
He was concussed. That was the sort of thing he was allowed to think, when he was concussed. He had just decided, on the grounds that it made him feel better, and everything hurt, so he deserved it.
“Can I—”
She fingered her wand. She said, in a brusque, stony sort of way: “Carefully, I mean, but—” and jerked her head at him, which took him about three full seconds to understand, because he was, see above, concussed.
“Oh. Carefully, yes,” he said, “if you must.”
Hermione hugged him. It was not a comfortable hug, being, like all of Hermione’s hugs, absurdly warm and full of hair, and she was driving her knee into his one intact rib, and the floor of the Hogwarts undercroft was an inhospitable locale for any sort of intimacy. Her arms were around his shoulders in a tight vise and her head locked into the spot on his collarbone where it went under the Invisibility Cloak, a place that she seemed to have elected on despite it being not even slightly comfortable for him, and like all hugs it was uncomfortable and too much contact and his emaciated sense of propriety was announcing to all parts of his brain in audience that this was highly inappropriate.
He wrapped an arm around her back. Fuck appropriate.
“I thought you were hurt.”
“Well spotted.”
“I mean really, irreparably hurt. I thought— it was my fault, at the Shack, I’d yelled and you ran away—”
“Holster your apologies before they hurt someone. And stop acting like I’m some consumptive waif, it’s emasculating. I’m not going to die in a duel with Marcus bloody Flint.”
“—and I was thinking, well, that’s what I get, isn’t it, for being awful to you and Lupin. That’s my fault, he’s practically dead and it’s because of me.”
“You’re never awful,” he said, which was probably a lie, but he was still concussed, so he was allowed to say it.
She gave a little twitch, and he could feel her heartbeat change, under his fingers on her back. “I shouted.”
“Oh, yes. There’s a special place in hell, you know, for shouters. They call it Gryffindor Tower.”
“I threw Daphne in Lupin’s face.”
“He’s had worse in it.”
“I shouldn’t have implied that he was dangerous.”
“It’s not an insult to call someone dangerous,” he said, which they both knew very well was besides the point; she snorted and shook her head. He shifted her leg slightly, so it didn’t rest so heavily on the tender bone of his hip. “Dangerous people are helpful to know. You’re dangerous, and thank Merlin you are, frankly.” He nearly said Thank Merlin for you, but his tongue slipped in a fortunate place, and the head injury compensated for the rest by slurring it, so he didn’t think she necessarily heard.
Then he said: “You were right.”
“What?” she said, distracted by his injuries. “I mean, yes. But on which thing?”
“Muggle-borns.”
She frowned.
“Head injury,” she decided. “That’s not good.”
“It’s not — okay, funny, but also irrelevant. I meant.” It was hard to remember what he meant. His thoughts were a kaleidoscope that rearranged every few seconds. “I meant. I didn’t like… you were right about what’s going on. It’s dangerous for you, and it isn’t for me. You think I don’t see it, but obviously I do, I just don’t like it. So I said it wasn’t true. I do that. Have you noticed?”
“I think danger finds you just fine,” she murmured, but there was a touch of satisfaction in it. She smiled at him, quickly, and he relaxed. She understood. She always did.
“I don’t like thinking about it,” he said, idly, mostly to the undercroft ceiling. “You. Danger. It isn’t fun.”
“I don’t like you being in danger, so let’s start there,” she said mildly, feeling around the back of his head. Her fingers carded through his hair, and he leaned back, sighing.
“I’m good at not thinking about things, you know. I’m very good at it. Some would say I’m one of the best.”
“I’ll say.”
“Or I used to be good at it, anyway.”
“Hm.”
“What, ‘hm’?”
“You have dilated pupils,” she said. “Are you sure you’re lucid?” At some point she had shifted her leg over his other hip, settling herself gingerly on his stomach. She didn’t seem to realize she’d straddled him. She was holding his shoulders and peering quite closely in his face. Her expression was clinical and curious and not sentimental in the least, which was exceptionally lucky, because the rest of him had absolutely no sense of decorum whatsoever, and the whole front of his chest was burning.
She smelled like flowers and rainwater. Earth, but not dirt, just the fresh scent that sighed off the ground when it rained. There was a tiny drop on the fringe of her lashes, maybe sweat, maybe a tear. His hand still cradled her knee where he’d moved it. Her mouth was a soft pink thing very close to his face and she wasn’t moving or speaking anymore and he wanted to touch it, with the fervid, simplistic want of the entirely illucid.
She breathed deep. He could feel the motion all down her body, from the rise of her chest to the infinitesimal movement of her hips. He moved his thumb absently over the swell of her knee.
Then he did the very best thing he could have done, or the worst, and looked into her eyes. They were as wide as telescope lenses, dark and shining.
Everything in the whole world, especially her, was warm.
There were things he wanted, and the things had names. He couldn’t do them, but he could think about them.
She hauled herself off him like she’d remembered an urgent appointment with any other place in the universe, and he elicited a groan as his organs rearranged themselves.
He was stiff as a fossil and every joint in his body was filing a lawsuit against his cerebellum. The painkilling spells were pulling their weight, but the rest of his body had taken the absence of mind-ending injury as an invitation to submit its own complaints.
“Can you walk?” she said, in a high crisp tone that strongly evoked McGonagall.
He wasn’t going to let her levitate him, not after that. He was considering a restraining order to ensure that he never had to deal with what happened to his body when she touched him, ever again. He gritted out some affirmative and struggled to his feet, one arm braced on the pillar. “Fine,” he snapped. “Great, even. Get Creevey.”
Her hands hovered like a pair of fretful birds. “You’re not really suited to walk. You’ll have to lean on me—”
“I won’t be doing that, thank you.”
“But you can’t—”
“You’ll find, as so many have before you, that I can do exactly as I please. Now get out of my way.”
She stiffened. “I was only trying to help.”
“I — I do know that,” he said, and tried to be less curt. “But certain persons with us have a greater need. I’m being selfless, really, you ought to be proud of me.”
His tone failed to convince her, but it was effective at waving her off. She sniffed and went to poke over Colin, who was whining through an unpleasant return to consciousness. Draco didn’t envy him.
With her attention diverted, he sagged against the column and dragged his hand over his eyes. He was in horrendous shape. He was in pain and irritated and he didn’t even have good cause to be in a snit with her, only he was, and she knew it, and never being less than game, she was gearing up to be in a snit of her own.
And on the floor were two boys who, in another universe not very far from this one, would have been his childhood friend and his quidditch captain, and he had very nearly torn both of them apart without any remorse.
And he still didn’t feel remorseful. He waited for it to happen, but it didn’t; when he reached for the place where the feeling should be, there was a picture of Flint holding Hermione up by the arm, her features twisted in a grimace of discomfort, prefiguring pain. The image followed his mind’s eye no matter how he tried to divert it, as if nothing else could occupy his attention, as if nothing else mattered. And perhaps it didn’t. But that didn’t make him feel a hell of a lot better, either. If anything, the opposite. Knowing what mattered didn’t help him like it at all.
“We should leave,” said Hermione. She was coated in dust and rainwater and tiredness in the extreme. “Go to the Hospital Wing. I want to get you looked at, and poor Colin… selfishly, I’d like a nap, but I don’t think I’ll get one.” She levitated Colin, who gave a moan and a twitch. “And someday, ultimately,” she said, wistfully, looking down at the film of dust and ash on her clothes, “I’d really fancy a wash.”
His life was fundamentally and unalterably bent in the wrong direction, and he had no idea how to iron it out, or even what the right direction would be, if he could unbend it.
“A wash,” he said tiredly, “would be lovely.”
-NEW ART posted on Tumblr: @coolmanchocomilk drew this breathtaking illustration of Draco and Lucius; and my dear recurring collaborator softkombucha offered a lovely rendition of this scene from Chapter 48! and certainly one of these days I will figure out how to stop thinking about either one, but it hasn’t worked yet.
-you are all so very wonderful I do not know how to handle it even slightly. the analysis the power the energy the eloquence. harold bloom wants what my comments section has.
-flora carrow is one of those girls who is just unrepentantly awful about everything. i have a lot of affection for her. not wise or reasonable affection. but still.
-shoutout to that person on tumblr who asked if Hermione still set Snape on fire in this AU. She didn’t, but fear not; she is still very much That kind of girl, obviously. this one’s for you.
-very bold of taylor swift to drop content on the same day as i do. only one week after i make a taylor swift reference also. crossover event of the century perhaps.
-you already know when the next chapter drops! it will take place on the eve of the Third Task, and it will have the conversation that a lot of you guessed would be in the last chapter, actually. It’s long as hell and half of it is a single interaction. in my outline, the margin says “this is the most drama the owlery’s seen in decades.” also known as Hermione Granger Officially Loses Her Shit. and she’s earned it.
-it’s called “The Insider.”
-I owe you everything. I hope the rest of your day has low humidity and a cool breeze.
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