Chapter 55: The Victor
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
It couldn’t be.
Viktor was seventeen, and young, and he laughed like a lion, and he flew like a poem, all that talent and verve and fire — and he was a pureblood; not that it mattered, not that it could possibly fucking matter, but the men who killed him were supposed to care — you couldn’t kill someone like that, it wasn’t right. He was supposed to be one of the best. That was supposed to keep you safe.
Runcorn was speaking.
“—happened to him? Potter! Answer! Who did this?”
He reached for Harry. Draco tensed, and he wasn’t the only one; Narcissa made a noise, and reached for her wand.
McGonagall stepped in between Harry and the Minister.
The Minister of Magic stumbled back, and for a fleeting moment, Draco saw an entirely new expression cross McGonagall’s weathered face. He realized, in a surreal moment, that all he had ever thought he knew of McGonagall’s anger had in fact been the sunlight zone of a trench so deep the bottom was only theoretical.
In the meantime, Dumbledore put his hand on Harry’s shoulder. “I apologize, Harry. Understand that you are under no obligation to answer that question. I know you are experiencing extraordinary grief, and we will have time to speak of this later.”
“No.” Harry lifted his head. An angry ring of red circled his tear-swollen eyes, but he spoke evenly, without doubt. “I’ll tell you who it was. Voldemort.”
Narcissa hissed a little, at the sound of it, like someone had burned her.
Hermione said, “No, but — it couldn’t,” and her voice was thick with something that wasn’t even fear, it was beyond it. It was the place where fear didn’t matter, because the worst was staring at your back, and you were soaring toward something so bleak you had never even thought to worry about it. And there was a strange, black peace in that, the knowledge that even the worst couldn’t happen now, because it already had.
The world was upside-down. Draco closed his eyes. It didn’t help.
“Dumbledore, enough of this farce. The boy is mad.”
“I was not aware you were a medical expert, Albert,” said Dumbledore loudly. “I am amazed and delighted that you may be of such service to us, in this very dark hour.”
“The Portkey took me to a graveyard,” said Harry, speaking over the din, “and there were Death Eaters — forty or fifty of them — and there was a potion, and Wormtail was there, and he cut off his hand and — and put it in the cauldron, and then they said my blood would make him stronger than if he’d used someone else’s. He said the protection my — my mother left in me — he’d have it too. And he was right — he could touch me without hurting himself, he touched my face.”
Hermione was crying. Draco reached for her arm without knowing why, or what he could possibly do about it — it was above him, all of it, the upside-down world — and then, somehow, he was holding her, and she was clinging to him, her face buried in the front of his shirt. He put his head against hers and shut his eyes and then the world wasn’t upside-down, merely crooked, irreparably crooked. Cracked down the middle. Cracked around a word in Harry’s shaking voice.
Lord Voldemort. Lord Voldemort. Lord Voldemort.
Narcissa gripped his hand.
“And then I — I got my wand, and he tried to kill me, but something happened, and then some people came out of his wand — and it blew up, and I used the Portkey—”
“And you are prepared to accept this story, Dumbledore?” said Runcorn coolly. “You are prepared to believe that the Dark Lord has returned? On the word of a dead man and a boy who has just watched his friend die?”
McGonagall scoffed.
“Look, I saw Voldemort come back!” Harry shouted. He tried to stand up, but McGonagall grappled him back down. “I saw the Death Eaters! I can give you their names! Peter Pettigrew! Brutus Travers! Orpheus Greengrass—!”
Narcissa made a sudden movement toward Harry, but when Dumbledore cleared his throat, she fell still.
“You are raving,” said Runcorn calmly. “You have experienced an extraordinary trauma tonight. Your mind has confused Lord Greengrass with a person you saw in that graveyard. But I assure you, he has spent the whole night at the Ministry.”
“Macnair!”
“Whom we shall find at home with the same bout of Spattergroit he has been battling for two weeks. Would you like to Floo his wife and ask her?”
“Avery — Crabbe — Goyle—”
“You are merely repeating the names of my staff,” snapped Runcorn. “I am sure you found those names in the papers. You are looking for scapegoats, and finding them in men who have long since acquitted themselves through service to the Ministry of any crimes they might have done.”
“Minister, what is the point of this?” hissed McGonagall. She patted Harry’s shoulder, as if to comfort him, though Harry did not seem to need comforting anymore; what he needed was someone to stop him from jumping up and clocking the Minister in the face. “Have you no heart? After all that has transpired, you would question a boy’s credibility to his face?”
“My point is simple. Harry Potter should be taken to St. Mungo’s, where he can be treated properly for whatever psychiatric problems he may or may not have manifested in the wake of this understandably troubling evening.”
Narcissa inhaled sharply.
Hermione tore herself away from Draco’s chest and rounded on Dumbledore. “Veritaserum,” she exclaimed. “Harry’s not lying. He’s not, he wouldn’t. Professor Snape said he had Veritaserum — it’s simple—”
“Thank you, Miss Granger, but Harry has been through an extraordinary night,” said Dumbledore patiently. “I will refrain from dosing him with anything except a sleeping potion, for the time being, though your suggestion is not unheard. As for yours, Albert, I would prefer I could unhear it; you may take your leave with Lord Nott, or stay and confer with us, but if you attempt to compel a student into medical custody without a court order, I will defend him with the full force of my authority, as a headmaster, a wizard, and a human being.”
Alarmed, Runcorn touched his wand. Dumbledore folded his hands and smiled.
“No, I like Hermione’s idea,” said Harry, and then broke into a fit of coughing. “I can — I’ll prove it — give it to me — I’ll prove it’s the truth.”
“No one is asking that of you, Potter,” snapped McGonagall.
Runcorn was shaking his head. “I don’t know what you and your staff are playing at, but I have heard enough. I have no more to add. I will be in touch with you tomorrow, Dumbledore, to discuss the running of this school. I must return to the Ministry.”
He levitated Nott’s body alongside him to the Floo grate, where he paused. He turned around and walked over to Harry’s chair.
“Your winnings,” he said, taking a large bag of gold out of his pocket and dropping it onto Harry’s lap. “One thousand Galleons. Paid in full, to the victor of the Triwizard Tournament. Use—” He made a short, acidic expression, very near a smile. “Use it in good health.”
He straightened his cloak and walked into the fire, which signaled his exit in a flash of green.
Harry made a strangled noise, like he’d been burned, and shoved the gold off his lap. The coins spilled across the floor like a bloodstain.
“I don’t want them,” he said. “I don’t want it, that’s horrible. It’s Viktor’s money, I don’t want them, I don’t need them—”
With a sweep of her wand, McGonagall scooped the coins up and punted the bag safely onto Dumbledore’s desk. “Quite right,” she said. “Dumbledore will hold them until such a time as you desire.”
“No, no. You don’t understand. I don’t want him to hold them, I don’t want them, do you get it? I don’t want that gold, I didn’t win anything!”
“We understand, Harry,” said Dumbledore quietly. “Put it out of your mind.”
“Good!”
“In the meantime, Minerva, could you take him to the Hospital Wing? He has some visitors that I believe will be growing—”
A door slammed in the hallway.
“OUT OF MY WAY!”
“Never mind,” said Dumbledore.
The voice came through the door, still ajar from the Minister’s entrance, and rattled the floorboards. “WHERE IS HE?”
Harry’s head snapped up.
“Narcissa, please step away from the door,” said Dumbledore.
“WHERE DID YOU PUT HIM? GET THE HELL OUT OF MY WAY — MOVE — THERE HE IS! HARRY!”
The door whipped around and slammed the wall. Dumbledore stepped to the side, and McGonagall hastened behind him — cleaving a path for a red-faced Arthur Weasley, who burst through the doorway like he had a battalion at his back.
He crossed the room in three long steps and ripped Harry out of his chair.
Harry stumbled, gasping for a breath he choked on, and tried to lean around Arthur to see the body in the hallway, but Arthur would not let him.
He barely got out: “Victor—”
Arthur heard no more. He hauled Harry into his chest and buried the boy in his arms so tightly that Harry all but disappeared.
“It’s alright,” he said. “It’s alright, son, it’s alright. You did the right thing. It’s alright.”
“But he, he, he’s — he’s d-d-d—”
“I know.”
“He died—”
“I know. I know. I understand, son. You don’t have to tell me.”
Harry choked twice, three times, and then started to cry. In the hallway beside them, Ron, Molly, Bill, and Charlie huddled together, their eyes like a small coterie of blue planets.
“It’s alright,” said Arthur. “It’s not your fault. You understand? Listen to me, Harry. It’s going to be alright. It’s not your fault. You’re a good boy, and you did the right thing.”
Harry gasped and clung to him, and they stayed that way, knotted together on the floor, rocking back and forth together, like the child he’d been, once before, in a different world than this.
And Draco was sympathetic — he wasn’t heartless, he was glad that Harry had someone to do it — but in the grungy corner of his mind, he wondered where his own slice of comfort would come from. Where was his Arthur Weasley, to come and hold him, and tell him that he was good? Only gone. Not coming back. Never coming through the door.
You’re ruining your life for the approval of a dead man.
He hadn’t understood it until now. He saw that there was no version of Arthur Weasley that wouldn’t come for Harry. It didn’t matter what he’d done or not done in the graveyard. Arthur would find him, hold him, and tell him he was good.
Which, of course, were three words that Lucius Malfoy would never say.
Hermione’s arm was tight around Draco’s waist, and she was still half tucked under his elbow, hoarded against his chest. She made a small sympathetic sound, might’ve been pity, might’ve been gladness. He ran his thumb over her shoulder and felt the involuntary shudder go down her spine, a reflex, a wave like a bird arching its back before flight.
He might have cared, in any other universe, that his mother could see it. But this wasn’t any other universe. There was a dead boy in the hallway and a dead man on the floor, and he was allowed to hold Hermione Granger if he wanted to.
And he had to. If he couldn’t, he couldn’t see a way of getting through this, any of it — the next minute, the next five minutes, the next fifty years. The rise and fall of her ribcage under his palm was one of the few remaining vital organs of the world.
So he was allowed. He was a Malfoy, and it meant he could have what he wanted, and he wanted this. Her. Alive and next to him and closer to him than anyone else.
If nobody else had been there, he might have said as much to his mother, who kept looking at him from the corner of her eye. Pointedly. As if he couldn’t read her. He was half her, of course he knew what she wanted to say.
He put another hand around Hermione’s head and ran his fingers into her hair, and that was a pleasure, itself, the reliable spring of her curls at his touch. There were some things that didn’t change. This was something real — the texture, the smell, the color. It would get everywhere, and he would be peeling long brown hairs out of his shirts for weeks, and that was good, that was another real thing. The next few weeks would still happen. The world hadn’t ended, just lost direction.
From the doorway, Molly, Bill, and Ron hurried inside, collecting around Harry, forming a kind of human shell. For Draco it would’ve been a nightmare, that many persons trying to get personal at once, but Harry drank it in like water for the parched.
A terrible voyeurism flooded him, pity and discomfort, the jangling unease of something he wasn’t supposed to watch. He turned, but the other things to look at were not much better: his mother’s long accusatory stare, Dumbledore’s quiet conference with McGonagall, a dead body, or the unconscious one-eyed man.
And Hermione, who was scrubbing out her eyes, and he found that was best. She had teartracks like railroads splitting her freckles and she was trying to rub them out before anyone could see, but new ones kept spilling down involuntarily, even as she tried to hide them.
It occurred to him that her father wasn’t coming through the door, either. Her father was a hundred miles away, probably sleeping beside his wife, and had no idea that his daughter was crying, or why.
He understood it. How hollow it felt, how lonely. It was a different kind of orphaning, but it couldn’t feel all that different, could it? It was the same for both of them — it didn’t matter how hard they yelled or cried or hurt. Their fathers weren’t coming to save them, couldn’t. They would never even really know how great they were, would never look on them with the same pride that Arthur might Harry or Ron; for all that Hermione’s muggle father must have loved her, it didn’t matter, because his daughter was no longer any order of creature he could understand. And no matter how long Hermione waited, Herbert Granger would never be coming through that door.
He suddenly wished that they were alone, so he could tell her that he understood. He’d tell her—
He’d tell her that he’d come for her. Through the door. And any other door she’d care to stand behind, anywhere in the world, always. They could do that for each other, couldn’t they? Who said it had to be a parent? They could do it themselves. Find each other. Tell each other they were good.
His father had already given him the most important things he’d ever need, which were the name and the blood, and the rest of it — the rest of it he could do on his own. With her. He could be Draco Malfoy, the scion of the two greatest houses to ever live, un-fucking-touchable, and he could have her, too, and if anyone told him he couldn’t, he would make it their problem. Immediately. Violently, if necessary. Vincit semper.
“Draco,” said his mother.
He startled. The situation reasserted itself: Arthur was escorting Harry out of the room, cocooned by Ron and Bill; Dumbledore and Molly were talking in low voices together, their expressions identically businesslike and firm. Dumbledore was talking quickly, and making some kind of list; Molly was doing a lot of nodding. McGonagall had knelt over Moody, and resumed Snape’s work tending to the fallen man’s eye.
And Narcissa had one hand on his shoulder, with the same grip a sailor might apply to a rudder.
“A word,” she said.
“Fine.”
She looked at Hermione.
Hermione said, “Oh,” quite embarrassed, and started wriggling out of Draco’s grip. Draco didn’t let go.
“What,” he said.
“A word alone.”
“Perhaps later.”
“Draco.”
“No? Then speak.”
Narcissa pursed her lips. She murmured, “If I have done something to offend you—”
“I don’t know,” he snapped. “It’s possible. What do you think? Vanishing for a year, no announcement, no explanation, shipping me off for the summer, three letters in as many months, all but ordering me away from the Manor, and forcing me to beg Severus for answers to make sure you hadn’t died— does that strike you as offensive?”
“We will discuss this at length. I promise you. There are apologies,” she said, haltingly, “to be made. But here—”
“No, we’ll do it here,” he snarled, “because you’re the one who decided we needed to speak now, when you were perfectly content to leave me in the dark for months as long as it suited you, but when you’re asked to wait a fucking hour—”
She had nothing for that, but her eyes were sharp.
Hermione cleared her throat and gingerly extricated herself from under his arm. His side turned cold without her. “I actually wanted to go visit Harry,” she said, in low tones. “They’re taking him to the Hospital Wing, and I want to speak to him without… I want to speak to him. And I still have to get this looked at, so.”
She gestured to her burned arm. Narcissa made an appreciative noise of discomfort. Draco’s stomach twisted.
“Do you need help?”
“They didn’t burn my legs,” she said.
They stared at each other. She gave a shrill giggle.
“God, I don’t know why I said that,” she said. “I, er… I think I might be in shock. Actually.”
“Quite reasonable.”
“I’m going to talk to Madam Pomfrey,” she said faintly, nodding to herself. “I’m going to… I’ll find you later. Alright?”
He nodded. She touched his wrist — furtively, like she wasn’t sure she was allowed — and then left, skirting a wide circle around Crouch’s body, and her heels crunching quietly on the broken glass.
He’d walked these halls for four years now. He knew them as well as the Manor, or near enough. So he chafed at the way his mother took lead of him on their way downstairs, her steps ringing on the stone like some kind of military fanfare, as if he needed the instruction. He was a week short of fifteen years old, and he needed no one to lead him. He lived on no one’s leash.
So it was no small amount of pettiness that he overtook her on the grand staircase, and cut ahead, taking advantage of a newfound edge in height and speed. He took her destination for the Great Hall, or perhaps the dungeons, which was why it surprised him when she turned off only at the seventh floor, passing halls upon halls of study rooms and crossing through a narrow channel walled on either side with windows that cut away to a dizzying drop below. This was a part of the castle he hadn’t visited, though he was vaguely aware they were close to Ravenclaw Tower, since he remembered streams of students in blue ties always toddering off this way at the evening’s end.
With a rustle of black skirts, she swept around the last corner and came upon a dead end. She marched up to the wall and began pacing in front of it, her hands behind her back, dainty brow knit in concentration.
“Mother?”
“In a moment, Draco.”
That stung a part of him he thought he’d lost years ago. When he was nine, he’d found a way to jimmy the lock on his father’s broom collection without tripping the alarms, and made off with one of his antique Thunderbolts, selected chiefly because the solid bronze dorsal fin flaps were, in a nine-year-old’s estimation, ‘really sodding cool, Mum,’ and ‘not tacky at all.’ He wasn’t found out in his theft so much as caught hovering about five feet north of the chimney stacks — though even then, he likely could have beat the charges if he hadn’t resisted arrest, forcing Dobby to scamper around the Manor roofs like a foxhound while he bobbed and weaved between the wrought-iron embellishments, sometimes pretending — and this was the thing that did it, probably, he could admit — to spear himself on them; a pantomime which he acted out, for his mother’s benefit, with bloodcurdling screams.
He still got phantom tingles from the aftermath of that episode, sometimes, in his eardrums. That or tinnitus.
Nostalgia prickled, deeply and dissonantly out-of-place in a miasma of horror and grief. The first year without his father had been horrible, and he hadn’t made it easier, but his mother’s frustration had been something familiar and old even then, a trustworthy constant, just as her forgiveness would be, ten minutes after it was over. It felt the same way now that it had then.
Now he was older and taller and smarter, and he understood his mother like few other things in the world, beside the wand at his hip and his own face in the mirror, and knowing that she would forgive him in ten minutes didn’t help anymore. It didn’t make him worry less.
Narcissa stopped. “There,” she said, with satisfaction.
The bricks rippled, peeling back to reveal a tall door of dark wood, crosshatched with iron deadbolts.
“What—?”
“Not here,” she hissed, glancing down the hallway, and she ushered him inside.
If the ornate door had raised his expectations, what laid beyond it quickly punctured them. It was a wide stone room, half the size of a quidditch pitch, absolutely resplendent with dust. Whoever had touched it in the last half-century had not done so with a custodial affect. Its windows bore clouded smears of age, and chandeliers cloaked in sheets. A fireplace glittered weakly at the far end of it. It was completely empty, save for a small table and a pair of chairs near the fire, and a coat rack by the door.
The door closed behind him with a dull creak.
Draco ambled curiously around the room, peering into some of the windows, scuffing his shoe on the ancient blue carpets.
“What is this room? I don’t know it.”
“It’s called the Room of Requirement,” she said briskly, stripping her coat and gloves. Both floated onto the rack with a twitch of her wand, and the rack, if he wasn’t mistaken, seemed to bend over slightly to accommodate them. “In my time, at least. It goes by several names. Some of the Slytherins called it the Come and Go Room.”
They sat down at the table. Narcissa snapped her fingers, and a tea set shimmered out of the aether, crafted in the same bronze as the teaware in the common rooms and the Great Hall. She reclined, and he poured her a cup.
“That’s helpful,” he remarked. “Is there a trick to that? It would save me a lot of time in the library.”
“It’s not a spell. The Room isn’t just a ‘private place.’ It responds to the needs of the person who calls it. You remember how I take it?”
“Don’t insult me.” He dropped a single lemon wedge into her tea and slid it across the table. “Under what limitations?”
“Theoretical ones,” she said, lifting her teacup to her lips. “Space and time are constants.”
“Obviously. I understand that the laws of magic don’t change here.”
“Don’t get lippy. I tolerated your cheek earlier, because we were in company, but I’m not your little muggle-born friend. And you’ve grown rather loose in your manners all around.”
“Do you mean Hermione Granger?” He dropped his cup onto the table with a bit too much force; it rattled. He sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. “Because I’m almost certain you know what her name is.”
Narcissa gave him a flat look.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Her look continued, but harder.
“I’m offering,” he continued, blithely, though he was approaching the level of anger that jittered. “I’m glad to talk about it. Perfectly delighted. We can have it all out, right here. Spare us the trouble later on.”
“I doubt anything needs to be said,” she said stiffly. “You know what I think—”
“As does everyone you’ve ever met,” he said sharply. “Granger included. I told you we were friends; I thought that might buy her a modicum of courtesy.”
“You are asking far more than you know of me, Draco.”
“No,” he said, now sailing past the jittering point, and straight up in volume. “Because you think I’m asking you to accept her, and I’m not. Frankly, I don’t give a damn whether you like her, or whether it bothers you that I keep her company. I’m asking you to shut up and pretend, in the same way I have—”
“Draco!”
“—faithfully pretended to like everyone you’ve ever asked me to, which incidentally is not a short list, and exercise some level of dignity and forbearance in the face of someone who, whatever else you think of her, is at least graceful enough to look past the fact that you want her dead.”
Narcissa blanched. She put her teacup down hard on the saucer, and the crack was loud.
“I don’t want her dead.”
He gestured at her irritably. “See? You’re doing it already.”
“I don’t.”
“I told you, I really don’t care. All I’m asking for is an old fashioned grin-and-bear it. The rest, you can hammer out with whatever deity that cares.”
“I don’t want them dead,” repeated Narcissa, in a voice that was thin but firm. “I’ve never been one of those people. You know that.”
“You just married one.”
Crack.
She set down her teacup.
“I married your father.”
“I’ve gathered,” he said.
“Do you want to talk about him?” Her tone was velvet.
“Not really,” he said. He felt belligerent and restless. “Apart from my having spent the afternoon being traumatized and hunted, it strikes me as the sort of conversation that keeps.”
She smiled.
“I know it makes you sad when I mistake you,” she said, “and I don’t mean to. But there’s a reason. It’s not just the hair and the eyes.”
He stared at her. She had never admitted, in so many words, that she was mad before. Her episodes had been an untouched invisible thing that sat over their heads, while he fretted over them, and she pretended that the world above was nothing but sky.
It was a relief.
“How?” he said, trying for ‘casual,’ and ending up at ‘concussed.’
“A certain affect,” she said. She was fidgeting with her signet ring, spinning it around and around her third finger, the same way he did with his. “A way of speaking. He showed me this room, you know.” She paused, glanced at him, and quirked the corner of her mouth up. “The Come and Go Room. If you will.”
He gave a horrified start.
“Mother.”
“For Merlin’s sake, darling, you’re nearly fifteen.”
“I’m sitting here!”
“It’s been twenty years. I’m sure whatever remnants that prior occupants have left behind—”
“Will haunt my memory forever, thanks to you! Merlin’s beard!”
“And that’s another thing you two would have in common, you’re prudes,” she remarked, and sipped her teacup.
“I wish it was something you and I had in common,” he said disgustedly, and escorted his tea back to the table, as far away from him as possible. His stomach had violently submitted its resignation.
Awkward silence sank in like nightfall. Dourly, he raised his eyes to meet his mother’s, and found her watching him with a fond but tentative sort of expression, as if she were seeking something she didn’t know if she’d find. Probably she was frightened. She’d never had these kinds of conversations, either.
“What was your business with Theo?”
She frowned. “What business?”
“You wrote him letters. You’re not obligated to tell me, but I’m curious.”
“It’s no particular secret,” she admitted. “I only thought he seemed like he needed a bit of affection. And he’s a good boy, under everything. He reminds me of a boy I used to know, I… a boy who would have profited from having a better kind of mother.” She sniffed. “I imagine Theodore would have, too.”
His throat tightened, but he didn’t chase the point.
It was a principle of their family — which, he was now realizing, might have been erroneously instantiated by people with very different problems than themselves — that they didn’t talk about everything that was wrong with them. The general theory being that there was no point, because the things that were wrong with Blacks and Malfoys couldn’t be fixed.
“Uncle Severus said that your condition deteriorated. Over Christmas.”
Then again, he was the head of his family. He decided what they would or wouldn’t talk about.
She considered.
“It didn’t,” she said.
“I gathered.”
“I gave license to Severus to speak on my behalf.”
“I assumed.”
“He was attempting to find a pretext that would not alarm you.”
“He failed.”
She pressed her lips together. Abruptly, she vanished the tea set with a wave of her hand, and leaned over the table on her elbows.
“Draco.”
“What? What is it?”
“I am taking you into my confidence. I require your oath on our house that you will not discuss the contents of this conversation with anyone except Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape.”
“Albus D— why does he get to know?”
“I require your oath before I can answer that question.”
“Mother, it’s me,” he said incredulously. “I’m your son. I’m not going to gossip—”
“I am sure it has not escaped your notice that Harry Potter and Hermione Granger are not included on the list of people whom you will be permitted to take in confidence. If that is a problem for you — if you feel unable to commit yourself to that promise, knowing that it may be difficult to harbor secrets from them — then I urge you, now, to refuse me, and I will tell you as much of the truth as I am able.”
“But not all of it,” he said, after a moment.
“No.”
He sighed.
“I swear secrecy. On the copious land, the spotless blood, and the dread name of my father, Lucius Malfoy, which is now mine, and ever will be, I swear to share confidence in this with none but Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape.”
“Thank you.”
“Whatever. Now you’ve promised, so talk,” he said, flicking his hand at her. “This had better be worth it, because if I learn you’ve been pub crawling with Aradia Burke—”
“Do you remember when there was a break-in at the Manor? In your second year.”
He blinked. “It was one of the more wretched nights of my life. I have the main points.”
“They were former Death Eaters. Corban Yaxley. William Jugson. They stole a book from your father’s library, a Dark artifact.”
“I recall. Yaxley wanted it,” he said, frowning. “He said it was of use in… something or other, for the Dark Lord.”
“Yaxley was a fool, but he was correct.” She fidgeted restlessly with her ring. “That book… the diary, rather… was created by the Dark Lord himself.”
He sat up straighter. “What was it doing in my father’s possession?”
“Being protected,” she said. “Hidden. Kept, I believe, for some point in the future, when your father would either require leverage with Dumbledore and the Ministry, or…”
“Or?” He paused. “Or what, Mother?”
“Or proof of loyalty,” she said. “If he decided to go back.”
“That’s not possible. Nobody thought it was possible for him to return.”
“It was,” she said quietly. “Your father was one of perhaps ten people who knew it was possible. Who survived the war.”
“What on earth do you m—”
“The Dark Lord is immortal,” she said.
His head shook. It was a tiny movement, not voluntary, just instinct.
“Immortality is impossible,” he said, reflexive. “Even through the use of magic.”
“Is it? Is that a law, that it’s impossible?”
“No, but it’s — it’s the Peverell Paradox, right, no amount of living can prove immortality, but whereas one death proves the converse—”
“What about a resurrection, then? What does that prove?”
His jaw snapped shut. Quiet descended like a shroud.
“The Dark Lord has split his soul among several vessels,” she said calmly. “His body being only one. When the body was destroyed, he subsisted in transient forms, as a revenant, until he found a vehicle that could carry him to power. That creature found its way to Hogwarts, where Harry Potter killed him, and in so doing almost certainly saved your life, as well as the life of everyone who witnessed his weakness; the Dark Lord cannot permit evidence of the machinery he uses to survive.
“The number of the Dark Lord’s vessels is uncertain, but Dumbledore believes, as do I, that it may be seven; it would be traditional, and we have reason to believe that he would honor tradition, all else being equal. The diary was one. It was given to your father upon his ascent to the highest rank of Death Eater, the innermost circle, to whom less than ten people, living or dead, were ever made party. They were his lieutenants. His knights, some called them.”
He slowly raised his hand to his temple and massaged it, head throbbing.
“The night Yaxley stole the diary, Severus brought me to Hogwarts,” she said solemnly. “Dumbledore revealed to me his theory about the vessels — a theory that was confirmed, at the end of that year, when the diary came back into his possession. Severus and I helped him to destroy it. What I saw that night — I cannot speak of it — but it made clear that he was correct in his assumptions, and that whatever creature lurked in the diary, it was not only a fragment of the Dark Lord, but a work of magic more vile than anything your father ever conceived of, even at the height of his powers.”
This was the first good news he’d heard in what felt like years.
“They can be destroyed?” he croaked.
“Not easily. A soul is a resilient thing, as you may imagine. Fiendfyre was our third or fourth attempt, and it took considerable ingenuity on Severus’s behalf.”
“What’s fiendfyre?”
She flicked her fingers dismissively. “There’s theory to it, which I never bothered about, but the essence is a kind of necromancy. You summon a revenant—”
“Oh, good, so it’s easy, then.”
“—and bind it to a magical fire, which gives it a sort of corporeal form, though of course it’s a devil to get rid of, now you’ve given it a permeable floating vessel — I’m sorry, this was never my area, you should ask your godfather. But he did it, and the thing… died, I suppose, or whatever you can even call it, and then Dumbledore asked me to swear an oath.”
“And you refused him.”
She said nothing.
“Mother, you didn’t.”
“I made a good bargain.”
“What did you give him? What on earth did you get?”
“I swore to provide him with any and all services he may require in his efforts to kill the Dark Lord,” she said, without one ounce of regret.
He stared at her.
“You swore your service. Full stop.”
“In a very specific capacity. I am not a house-elf.”
“For what? What could possibly be worth that?”
“Albus Dumbledore has promised to keep you safe,” she said, and it was rich with triumph. She thought she’d won, he realized; he thought she’d swindled him, Albus Dumbledore, the great pigeon himself, the latest in fifteen generations to be manhandled into the losing side of a deal with a Malfoy.
She was an egomaniac. He didn’t know why that surprised him, she was his own mother.
“To keep me safe.”
“Correct.”
“You’re joking.”
“Why do you say so?”
“Because he’s not very good at it!”
“He raised his own concerns about your growing appetite for danger. We negotiated broad parameters.”
“Is ‘broad’ closer to ‘alive’ or ‘well’ in this context?”
“He is sworn, specifically,” she said, with cool satisfaction, “to protect your life, health, and happiness, in that order, insofar as he is able, and to do whatever he must, in the pursuit of his objectives, insofar as it does not cause you significant or avoidable pain; to which the only exception, in any instance, is an act that may through its direct and immediate consequences bring about the death of the Dark Lord.”
She folded her hands in her lap, awaiting judgment.
“I see.” He paused. “Did you get Gatz to draw that up?”
“I obtained counsel.”
“Merlin.”
“That was a joke. You’re allowed to joke, but your mother isn’t?” She arched her eyebrow, amused. “It’s not so grave as you make it sound.”
“It’s a suicide pact. It’s exactly as grave as it sounds.”
“It’s a formalization of an arrangement that we would have held anyway. We have each other by the throat, you see.” She settled back in her chair, still distinctly proud. “If I betray him to the Dark Lord, then he will know that Dumbledore has learned the secret of his power, and will act swiftly to secure his vessels, erasing what little progress we have made in discovering them. If Dumbledore allows harm to come to you, meanwhile, I will find him and kill him, and the Dark Lord shall reign eternal on a throne of muggle bones.”
His stomach turned. She tilted her head and said, “Well— not bones, exactly,” in a tone that was grotesque, frankly, in its abstract consideration of something all too clearly remembered — and he found his voice.
“‘We’ have made?”
“Hm?”
“You said ‘progress we have made.’ Implying that you’ve been involved.”
“Yes. I have been hunting them for him,” she said. She ran her ring up and down her finger, rolling the stone here and there in the light. “I believe I may have found one; but I have yet to find a witness who can confirm it. There are not many alive who harbor such information.”
“That’s what you were doing in Romania.”
“Yes.”
“You were hunting his… vessels. Because you thought he might have hidden one there.”
“Correct. I no longer believe so,” she admitted, “but Dumbledore wanted to be sure. He argued that it would be tactically superior, in abstract, to disperse the fragments as widely as possible. Which is true. But it does not fit with the custom of the Dark Lord. He would never permit them to be so far from Britain, his homeland, his magical terrain… Severus and I are of one mind on this.”
“So Severus is in on this, then.”
“Don’t use such pedestrian phrases, Draco, it wants for an understanding of how I hate them. He is not ‘in on’ anything. We are parties to a confidence.”
“Fine. Alright. Do you know what the… ‘vessel’… you’re hunting will look like?”
“No.” Narcissa slipped her ring back into place on her knuckle and folded her hands under her arms. She leaned on the table, weary. “In the old days, there was a certain… ceremony involved, when he raised a servant to the highest rank. He would offer them a gift of some sort, a rare jewel, a historical artifact, a personal item… Something they were to protect. With their life, if necessary. I don’t remember now what all they were — I wasn’t there, you understand, I learned all this through your father, and we agreed that I wasn’t to know everything… But there was a gilded chalice, once. For Roddy.” Her expression was distant. “A necklace, for Regulus.”
“And were they told what it was?”
“No. I don’t know if anyone realized what, exactly, they were protecting… Even your father never knew, in so many words, although he came to understand that it was more than a test of loyalty. But it was important, they all understood that much.”
“Who else had them?”
“Not many. Your father was one. Bella. Regulus. Rodolphus, too, though I always suspected he rode there on Bella’s coattails… Those were the ones I knew. Others, I’m sure, now dead or missing.”
There was a lot of ache in him. Mostly in his head, which was in levels of discomfort both physical and mental, as he tried in vain to wrap its weary corpus around yet another set of facts far too enormous for reason or sense. His body was going to be sore probably forever. The lines on his forehead were soon going to be geologically classified as caverns and be studied by anatomists for years.
He struggled to keep his tone even. Narcissa’s hand found his across the table, and he let her take it, too stunned to deny the simplicity of a minor comfort.
“You turned coat,” he said, which was not what he’d meant, but it was the first thing he could haul out of the flaming office system in his brain.
“No.” She was calm, and it was grounding. He wondered why his mother could never have been like this, in the moments after she resurfaced from her episodes — cool and still, a pillar of something harder than steel. “I never swore an oath to the Dark Lord. I made no promises.”
He hadn’t known that, actually.
“You understand that he won’t care,” he said. “You do understand that, though. That if — when. He comes. He won’t care what you did or didn’t say.”
She nodded with dignity and acknowledgement. “I do. And he will hear the truth: that with your life in the balance, I had no choice.”
“What? So it’s my fault?”
She gave him a look full of sorrow and reproach. His knee was starting to jog, his hands twitching, and actually, hang tiredness, hang soreness, he wanted to run somewhere. He wanted to strike and throw curses and feel like he was bigger than something, like the world wasn’t one great totem of cruelty that he’d never understand.
“You aren’t going to understand this, and in fact you’re going to find it rather patronizing,” she said quietly, “because I found it to be extraordinarily so, when my mother told me; but someday, Draco, you will hold your first child in your arms, and you will find yourself capable of almost anything.”
He gave it the consideration it was due.
“You’re correct. I do find that patronizing.”
She smiled slightly. She stood up. Her chair vanished, and it was as good as a dismissal.
“I love you,” she said, quite seriously. It did not sound like a happy statement. He didn’t know how to feel about that. “From any distance, from any height, from any disappointment, from every betrayal, just as I have loved everything that was ever worthy of it.”
“Mother,” he said, wishing fiercely to shuck his own skin and temporarily vacate it for less humiliating pastures.
Then she smiled at him, warm and twinkling, like it had all been an excellent joke. And perhaps it had been. Perhaps it could be, her smile said, if they wanted it to.
They were Malfoys. The past was what they wanted it to be, between them. If they made it so.
Except. Except.
He rose. Table and chair vanished. Now the room was empty, and they were alone in it.
“Come home tonight,” she murmured. “You’ll be happy at the Manor.”
Which was true, on the one hand. But then, on the other.
I’ll find you, Hermione had said.
She was going to be looking for him. And he had a promise to make her.
Through any door.
“I’ll be home in a week.” He offered her his arm. “You’ll have me for the summer.”
“A mere instant.”
“So you think. I want to try the Thunderbolt again,” he said. “I think I’m big enough for it, now.”
Her slender fingers pinched his arm, punishingly, but she was laughing when they left the Room of Requirement. When he looked over his shoulder, the last thing he saw was the pale brick curling back over the iron lattice, walling it up, sealing the echoes of what they’d said inside.
Somewhere amidst the horror, the night must have passed, because inconceivably, it was morning: a dull cyan pigment that stained the sky and stripped it of blackness like paint thinner, letting the black furrows of the Forbidden Forest gradually swell into existence against a softening shade of blue. Ghosts and torchlight flickered over the vacant halls as he and Narcissa crossed the castle, out of ancient stone passages and past classrooms of rich dark wood, moving into the airy chambers of the Hospital Wing.
Hermione sat on one of the long benches outside it, cross-legged, reading from a copy of Defensive Magical Theory. A quill and leatherbound journal levitated close within reach, and a pair of ink pots orbited her head slowly, like binary stars.
Their footsteps made them known. Pots, quill, and journal all settled to the bench, and she closed the book, lifting her head. She had been cleaned up, her face was clear if deeply tired, deep circles under eyes raw with bloodshot and crying. She had changed out of her uniform, and wore what were obviously someone’s spare clothes: a baggy cardigan with sleeves cuffed thrice, a pair of brown muggle mud boots, a paper hospital band still encircling the smooth, healed skin of her forearm.
She stood up.
“Don’t tell me,” he said. “He’ll survive, but he’ll lose the baby.”
It was gratifying that she smiled, even if it had all the humor of Mad-Eye on a bad morning. “We’re still deciding how to tell Ron.”
“Don’t fret, he’ll have other chances. Is the full clan in attendance?”
“Yes. The Weasleys are all there. And a few others.”
She held something up. It was a flap of old parchment, weathered to hell, and it was bare, so it took him a moment to recognize it as the Marauder’s Map. Which meant Lupin and Sirius.
Narcissa was examining one of the oil portraits of old school nurses.
“I’m sure Madam Pomfrey wouldn’t welcome more company, then.”
“She’s been dropping hints.”
“Hints such as ‘get the hell out of my ward’?”
“Loud commentary about the difficulty of working in crowds.”
“Subtle.”
“She’s a light touch.”
He laughed. Hermione snickered, and then wiped something out of her eye.
“Granger, you remember my mother.”
He extended a hand to Narcissa, who floated back into the conversation with the grace of someone who had never been outside it.
“Miss Granger,” she said. She was staring down her nose at Hermione as if the secret to eternal life was inscribed on her forehead in a language she didn’t speak. Draco had never been so miserably aware of being powerless to do anything about his own problems. He felt like a child crushing two puzzle pieces together, wanting them to adhere, even as the wood splintered.
“Hello, Mrs. Malfoy,” said Hermione.
“I beg your pardon, dear one; I assume you have not been informed, and so I entreat you not to think me rude, but the title of a Malfoy’s wife is ‘lady.’”
She was back in the formal register, the soprano flute of parties and dinners, a voice that carried between clinking glasses and humming violins. He ought to have been grateful, but what he found instead was a profound disgruntlement, and a lonely sort of melancholy.
Hermione tilted her head. “That would imply Draco was a lord,” she said skeptically.
“It does, by law. Custom forestalls the use of that address until his seventeenth birthday.”
“Is that a formal holding, or only a title?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m asking if you have vassals, Lady Malfoy.”
Somewhere along the line, she’d picked up Harry’s knack for making a title sound like a silly headdress.
“Not quite so many as we did two years ago,” said Narcissa, and then Hermione gave a cold little smile.
“I see.”
“Mother—”
“Does Binns still teach History of Magic?”
Hermione went frozen. She looked like someone had jumped her in a dark alley with a pop quiz, and her wariness was warring with her natural instinct to rip out a quill and ace it.
“Yes?”
Narcissa sniffed. “Has he reached the life of Emeric the Eminent?”
“Mother: what?”
“Do you mean Emeric the Evil?” said Hermione, somewhat pointedly.
“Apparently not. I will educate you. Emeric was a great wizard of the middle ages, and he drew many followers,” said Narcissa. “One Yuletide, two followers came to him with a white stag, and both claimed the right to make a tribute of it in their liege’s name. Emeric gave judgment: he would sever the stag in half, with one stroke of his mighty wand, and a half would pass to each claimant. To share the tribute. And the first follower said: ‘Lord, I yield claim. The tribute of half a dead thing is no tribute at all.’”
The notes of condescension were neither missed nor ignored by Hermione, who on her most patient days did not ooze restraint.
“I know what this is,” she interrupted. “It’s just the story of King Solomon. Two women bring a baby, both saying it’s theirs, and he offers to cut it in half, and the one who objects is the real mother — did someone adapt it for wizards? Because the Bible’s much older.”
“And Emeric replied,” said Narcissa stiffly, ignoring her, “‘it is true, half a stag is no fine tribute; but it is better to destroy one’s enemies than to give them succor, even if in the pretext of nobility.’ And he cut down the first follower, for weakness, while the second follower received the tribute and his favor.”
Hermione blinked, aghast.
“What a horrible story,” she said. “That’s a terrible way to treat your followers. His retention must have been awful.”
Narcissa said, “The man who forsakes his claim easily is not worthy of it. Nor any other kind of service.”
Hermione made a skeptical sound like a creaking hinge.
“Fine,” she said. “Literarily, that isn’t really — but sure. What I don’t understand is this: you’ve implied the stronger wizard was willing to let Emeric kill the stag.”
Narcissa inclined her head. As near a thing to surprise as she ever showed in public.
“You disapprove?”
“Of course I do,” she said. “Apart from the fact he’s evil—”
“A simple word for simple-minded people.”
“No, it’s actually, literally, true in this case — but apart from that, I don’t see how the kind of man who thinks ‘cut it in half’ is any kind of equitable solution to the problem of limited indivisible resources could be worthy of tribute,” she said, mildly indignant. “And there’s two of them. They ought to just kill Emeric, and let the stag go.”
Draco’s face did something entirely unlicensed and probably unremarkable, or at least not the sort of thing he’d want in print.
For her own part, Narcissa looked like Merlin had just swaggered up and taken a knee.
“Interesting idea,” she said, her voice wooden and odd. She rolled her signet ring around her knuckle, pensive. “You’ve an innovative mind. I hear you are somewhat formidable with a cauldron.”
“Or without it,” said Hermione, who never could take a caveat lying down.
It was a sign of who he was dealing with that he wasn’t sure if the interaction was going well or not.
His mother turned away from Hermione and took his face between her hands. She gave him a kiss to the top of his head, like a crown. It felt nice, but also vaguely pointed; perhaps it would have been less so if she had ever done it in public before.
But he didn’t mind it, either. Especially because she bookended it with a cryptic murmur of: “Remember to come home, darling.”
Her palm cupped his cheek. She cut a glance at Hermione, wordlessly turned her back, and walked away.
On the way out of the Hospital Wing, another figure hobbled into the hallway, and gave a cry. It was Filch, his ratty coat flapping at his hips, his keyring jingling with the quake of his wizened shoulders when he saw her.
“Lady Black,” he gasped. And — Draco squinted, sure that the night’s terrors had at last broken his powers of perception — without reservation, he swept into a deep bow.
“Hello, Filch,” said Narcissa, and in her tone was a startling warmth. “I know it’s after hours.”
The caretaker gave a toothy grin. “Never did give an old man no rest.”
“Goodness, no, darling. Time enough for that when you’re dead. How fares the Widow Norris?”
“Still kicking. Just here, in fact. ’Spect she remembers you.”
“I should say. No creature of taste has ever forgotten.”
Narcissa bent, and held out her fingers to the aged cat, who mewed and shoved its head into her waiting hand. He had never seen the creature take kindly to anything before, much less permit itself to be touched.
Filch stepped out of her way, ushering her down the stairs, and she swept ahead of him. He followed two steps behind, hobbling along like the world’s oldest living footman.
Hermione made a curious sound. They both stared after his mother for a moment, reconfiguring their assumptions.
“I didn’t think Filch liked anybody,” she said. Her voice was small and echoing in the wide corridor.
“No. Nor I.”
In the windows, the blue had thinned to watercolor, streaked with paper-pale veins of clouds, and the lavender light of morning spilling out in the east. There were voices now, in the castle, murmuring from behind the doors and in the creak of staircases shuffling from landing to landing. The Beauxbatons carriage caught the first sparkles of sunlight on its spire and twinkled. The masts of the Durmstrang ship were a dark forest of crosses on the lake.
Hermione brought her arms around herself and held tight, as if an internal entropy was driving her apart at the atomic level.
“I spoke to her.” It was important that she knew this. This was the first thing he thought she ought to know. “About the— blood issue.”
“Oh, God, please d— I’m sorry.” She broke off, cringing. “That’s just — I can’t take it. Not tonight, please? I don’t care. Or, rather, it’s not that I don’t care, but it isn’t… If the resolution wasn’t ‘I’m forswearing your company forever and camping in Slytherin,’ then let it wait, please.”
“Do I act like a man who’s forsworn you?”
She went thoughtfully still.
In the silence, he could hear everything he wanted to tell her.
The Dark Lord is immortal. He’s split his soul, my mother is Dumbledore’s agent. They’re hunting him. He was never dead, not really.
Dumbledore has an Unbreakable Vow to keep me alive.
My father was the highest kind of Death Eater there is. You were right about him. He’d likely have killed you.
I wouldn’t let him.
“It doesn’t feel real that he’s dead,” she said, by and by. Lost in the fugue of thought, he very nearly mistook her for speaking about his father, and in that haze he almost agreed. “He can’t be. I keep thinking that he’s going to… to wake up. That I’ll see him again. Like he’s gone on some kind of vacation.”
At first, he thought she meant Crouch.
“I’m sorry, Granger.”
What an awful distance there was between the word itself and what it tried to convey.
“It’s alright. No. Sorry— no, it’s not. Actually, it might never be alright,” she said, oddly calm. “He’s dead. I keep trying to think about it, because I hate it whenever I forget, and then have to remember it again. You’d think remembering would be easier. But it’s just as bad as learning it all over again.”
“I know.”
“His family was here earlier. To collect him. And Dumbledore spoke to them, first, because I… I didn’t want to. Isn’t that horrible? I didn’t want to speak to them.”
“You’re not awful, Granger.”
“But Mrs. Weasley said I should, and I did, and they were… they were so kind. They invited me to the funeral. Harry’s coming, too. And Ron, I suppose. You can—” She broke off. She could not look at him. The place between her shoes was hoarding all her attention. “You could come, too, if you wanted to. I mean, I would invite you, and I don’t think they would… I didn’t ask, but I’m sure you could. Oh, God, that’s terrible phrasing. Who wants to come to a funeral? Never mind. I don’t know what I was—”
“Of course I’m coming. Don’t be stupid.”
She might have had the decency not to look so hopelessly relieved.
“Thank you.”
“You and Potter don’t seem to understand this principle: you don’t have to say thank you for that.”
It occurred to him that Hermione had brutally exacting standards in almost every area except the way people treated her personally, where she had almost none. Or perhaps that was unique with respect to him.
“He has a little brother,” she said hollowly. “Had.”
“Etiquette dictates that you can table issues of verb tense until after the mourning period.”
“What?”
“I knew what you meant.”
“He was — he was seventeen,” she said, “and— and he said he liked talking to me, because he’d never had a real friend before. And he took me to the ball, and now he’s— he’s dead.”
“I assure you, the two events had nothing to do with one another.”
She hiccuped a laugh, and promptly started to cry.
“Oh, hell. That wasn’t meant to be flippant. I meant it sincerely. Survivor’s guilt, and that rot, you know.”
“I’m such a twit,” she said thickly. “When Molly and Arthur and Bill and the Krums all came and they were nice to me, and I couldn’t stop crying for ages, and then you come here with your stupid accent and you say something utterly stupid—”
“Go on then, blame a man for trying.”
“—and you make me feel better, which is horrible,” she said, savagely. “I’m not supposed to feel better. I’m supposed to be miserable. Because he’s dead, and I’m — I was his only friend, and — it hasn’t been a day, and I’m laughing. I’m a bad person.”
“I beg your pardon,” he said, as his concerns multiplied in dizzying arrays.
“I lead him on. Rita Skeeter was right—”
“Are you joking? You’re crying over a muckraker who’s approximately two thirds plastic?”
“Don’t make me laugh!”
“That was a factual statement, one, and two, and if I can’t have irony, then the enterprise of this conversation is simply sunk. You vastly overestimate my emotional range.”
“I’m serious.”
“Fine. What would you prefer?”
“I should be crying!”
“You are crying,” he pointed out, and she froze, full of mixed dismay and surprise.
He was tired. It had been almost twenty-four hours since his head had touched a pillowcase and his body was triggering every alarm that told him so. His arms were full of ache and his brain was still riding out aftershocks from several consecutive earthquakes in reality, and he had no more patience for this nonsense, when he wanted her sensible and bright and present.
There was a dead boy in the room. Not present, physically, but he was still there. It dawned on him with some fear that there might always be a dead boy in the room.
“Granger.” He cut through whatever the hell she was saying about him, and eased himself down on the bench beside her. Merlin, but it was good to sit. “You’re tired.”
“I’m a bad person,” she said, very quietly, with terrifying certainty.
He scrubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger, straining for something that would make her understand. Abruptly, he turned to her.
“No, you’re tired,” he said flatly. “The fact that you’re upright speaks to an ungodly level of stimulants being wrung from your pituitary gland, and I simply will not think about your cortisol levels for the sake of mine. I’ve never known you to be this stupid about anything in your life, and you should be religiously grateful that it’s only me to witness it, because if it were anyone else they’d mistake what you’re doing for some sort of tearful emotional catharsis — instead of what it is, which is a raw biochemical punishment for your brilliant life plan of fighting everything evil that moves, ever. And then you’d have to kill them, so the secret doesn’t get out that you’re mortal.”
She shook her head, still crying silently into her hands.
“You’re a good person,” he said quietly. “Krum knew that, it was part of why he adored you.”
“He didn’t know me.”
“I do.”
“You could be wrong.”
“Not likely.”
“You don’t know what I’m thinking,” she said thickly. “I tried to save Harry, and I couldn’t. I failed him, and I failed Viktor, and now I can’t even mourn properly. I was relieved when Harry came back with his body — do you know that? Relieved. Viktor is dead, and I was relieved, because it wasn’t Harry. How can you do that to someone you called a friend? What kind of horrible — thing — feels that way? I didn’t deserve his friendship. I don’t deserve anyone’s friendship, I’m hateful—”
“If you were anyone else, I’d have their tongue out for saying that about you.”
She scoffed, wetly.
He consulted the truth, found he had nothing better, and deployed it warily, without any particular expectation that it would work. It rarely had before.
“If you’re hateful, then nothing in the world is anything but,” he said tiredly. “I’ve destroyed three hundred years of tradition just so I can sit here next to you, Granger, don’t go telling me you’re not worth following.”
She wrenched her head out of her hands, stared at him, and made a sound of inchoate rage and incredulousness.
He didn’t quite understand where the rage was from. He thought it was a perfectly normal thing to say, if admittedly somewhat saccharine. Perhaps she thought it was overdone.
Then there was a blur of motion, and he reeled back in alarm as something warm and wet slammed into his collarbone. She’d scrambled into his lap.
“Granger—”
“Don’t.”
“I said one word.”
“Too much.”
“Excuse me?”
“Shut up,” she said, clearly and calmly, though still crying quite furiously. “You’ll ruin the moment.”
“It’s my moment, too.”
“So don’t ruin it, then.”
She was holding his chest as if she had to protect it from a band of chest-thieving ghouls.
“You annoy me,” he told the top of her head, which was nestled firmly against his collarbone.
“You,” she told his sternum, “make me feel murderous,” and her breath washed through his shirt.
He touched her waist, a recollection of the waltz position, fingers spread over the plane of her back.
“Better than anyone else, and never you forget it.”
It wasn’t a hug, exactly. He had by now experienced enough of them to make an authoritative judgment. It was more of an informal, etiquette-to-the-wind, thank-God-we’re-not-dead type of grapple. Of which he had also experienced more than one, but few like this.
Her head fit neatly under his chin, and it was easy to dip his head and be lost in her hair, which was always so wonderfully warm, even in a cold castle, even when the rest of him was prickling numb. The points where they were touching were pleasant anchors to the physical world. It was nice, for a change, to want to be in his body, to feel the things he was feeling, and not to escape them.
The door to the Hospital Wing creaked. He turned his head.
Ron stepped through the crevice in the door and stared a stare of such distance it could be charted in lightyears. For a moment he thought he was going to comment on how it looked, the two of them, toss off a sneer and a sour remark that would spike the memory of the whole occasion with a bad aftertaste.
Just then, on the heels of the night he’d had, Draco was fairly certain he would start a firefight in the hallway if he tried.
But Ron shut the door, folded his arms and firmly addressed the eastern window.
“Can come in now,” he said. “Pomfrey’s waiving the limit, now Harry’s awake.”
Hermione breathed out, long and slow. “How is he?”
Ron shrugged. “Better than before,” he said. “You?”
“Not very good,” she said.
His mouth crooked. “Yeah,” he said. He nodded at Draco. “And you?”
“I’m still here.”
“Right. That’s something, isn’t it.” He reached for the door, to pull it back, and Draco realized that there would be a whole crowd of people on the other side of the door. The identity of the people didn’t strictly matter; it was overwhelming by itself. He wished that everything would have the common fucking decency to stop happening for five minutes, so he could get it all straight, and sort things out with Hermione. He was fairly certain they could cobble together a ten-step plan to set the world to rights, if only they could get five invulnerable minutes.
Four and a half, with Ron.
“Ron—”
With one hand on the door, he stopped, and looked at Hermione — a queer, furtive thing, out of the corner of his eye, like he didn’t really want to see her.
“Does anyone know what’s happening?” she asked, in one breath, like an exorcism.
“No. And I reckon they won’t, not for a long time.”
“But did Dumbledore say anything to your parents? About what’s going to happen to the Ministry, or to Nott?”
“I dunno. Maybe. He’s been coming and going a lot, and he and Padfoot and Moony went into a room with her and Bill and Dad, and they talked for a long time. But they didn’t let me or Charlie in.” He nodded at Draco. “What about you, do you know anything? Did your mum let on if she knew what’s coming?”
He could hear the question under the question. They were both watching him in sad vain hope of an answer, and he had two answers on his tongue, one a lie, the other a broken promise, neither one of which would satisfy.
What’s going to happen to us?
“Nothing,” he lied. “I don’t know.”
The next chapter, and the last of book 4, will be called “They Shall Not Grow Old.”
Thank you — for everything.
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