Chapter 58: The Ministry of Magic
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Once, as a boy, Draco’s father had taken him to work. He hadn’t a clue why; he couldn’t see what use a child would be in an office, but he’d been happy enough to tag along at the time, making himself a botherance to the secretary, demanding pumpkin juice and lemon scones, and being suitably solemn whenever his father introduced him to somebody, as if any amount of scowling could hide the fact that he was six.
The Ministry had been bigger then. He had fit snugly against his father’s legs in the telephone box, which sank slowly into the ground beneath the London street, the pavement rising like a black curtain over the glass. The slow, grinding descent into the earth had seemed like a passage to another world.
When he stepped into the Atrium, the deja vu turned his mind crooked, and he half-turned, expecting his father — who would now have to be eight feet tall in order for his head to be in the place Draco’s mind seemed to expect — and finding only Hermione Granger. She clasped a binder stuffed to bursting with papers she’d razed from the Manor library on a crazed all-nighter. He hadn’t helped — he’d been busy trying to haul Gatz out of a corporate merger in Australia — and so he didn’t know what combination of information, rhetoric, and threats she’d wrangled together, but it was likely fearsome.
He wore a silver-blue suit with a white silk waistcoat and an attached ice-blue cloak, hung jauntily over one shoulder, with his wandsheath displayed in a line of rich mahogany at his hip. The fact that he couldn’t use it didn’t matter; it was his father’s going-out suit, the suit he wore to meetings with the people he didn’t sneer at. It was a suit to be taken seriously. Or so he hoped.
Hieronymous Gatz, emerging from the lift behind them, wore an electric pink suit and a tie patterned with what appeared to be human skulls. Someone recognized him at once, and hurried over to shake his hand, whereon he exchanged a smile of no less than four gold teeth.
Down the hall from the lifts and the Floo hearths there was a vast antechamber, filtering sun through a sunlight of frosted white glass. Gleaming black tile unrolled under his feet, ushering crowds of witches and wizards into the Atrium, where a gold statue of a witch, a centaur, a goblin, and a house-elf spurted water from various orifices into a wishing-basin, roughly three times life size.
Through the Atrium, past flocks of wizards in purple robes who thronged and read newspapers and hurried their briefcases with performative haste from doorway to doorway, a pair of golden gates warded off the far lifts. Queues obligingly formed at each security station, where wizards with busboy caps swept golden rods over and around each incomer’s body. As Draco watched, one rod let off a shrill whistle, and the security agent ushered the wizard into a sideroom while he complained loudly.
He sidestepped the end of the queue and walked briskly up the line, ignoring the dirty stares of dozens on his back. Hermione made an aggrieved sound and followed him.
“We’re cutting,” she muttered.
“I prefer ‘expedited ingress.’”
“I prefer not to cut.”
“Well, then, you can sit there by the fountain and make wishes, and I’ll go see to Potter’s hearing—”
“Don’t get huffy, I’m not objecting, I just don’t like getting nasty looks.”
“Give them nastier ones,” he suggested, and demonstrated. The witch scowling at him ducked her head.
The agent turned inquiringly as they approached.
“We’ve urgent business,” he drawled. His father always spoke as if any movement of the lips was an insufferable demand on his time. “I’ve a room to be in at nine o’clock.”
“Name?”
“Draco Malfoy.”
“Right. Sorry, sir. Know you next time, sir. Step here.”
The rod passed harmlessly over his front and back, and then he passed his wand into the agent’s meekly extended fingers, where it was settled on a small brass scale. A strip of parchment rattled out of the scale’s base.
“Ten inches, hawthorn, unicorn-hair core, four years in use…”
The wizard impaled the parchment on a brass spike and waved him through, sweating. Hermione was next, and Draco said sharply: “She’s with me,” which visibly hastened the agent’s security sweep, and he nearly fumbled her wand on its way to the scale.
“Ten and three-quarter inches, vine, dragon heartstring. Four years’ use. Thank you, madam. You may keep this. Wizarding line?”
Hermione stopped. “What?” she said quietly.
“Wizarding line?” said the attendant, flashing nervous looks at Draco. “The, er… the name, ma’am. The name of the closest wizarding relative. For record-keeping purposes.”
Hermione pressed her lips together. “And am I to assume,” she said, in a very light, very dangerous voice, “that I can’t enter, if I don’t produce one? Hypothetically.”
“No, ma’am, of course you’ll be let in, but we’re to track who goes in and out. For security. It’s just policy—”
“It’s policy,” she said, even lighter. “Of course it is.”
“She’s my guest,” Draco said curtly. “Put her through. Or would you like to hear me recite my pedigree?”
“B-B-But— never mind, sir. Yes, sir.”
“Thanks,” she muttered, and snatched her wand back. Then it was Gatz, who flashed some sort of pass at the agent, and was waved through without a screen.
The queues to get into the lifts were monstrous, so he ignored them. He grasped Hermione’s hand and hauled her into the first one that arrived. Gatz manifested behind them like a shadow attached at the heel, and the golden grill ratcheted shut.
No sooner:
“That’s absolutely barbaric—”
“Steady.”
“—patently obvious pretext, my God; ‘record keeping’—”
“Settle.”
“—should go back there and burn the whole bloody stack of them,” she spat.
“It wouldn’t help,” he said.
The tension went out of her. That was even worse.
“You don’t think I know that?” she said quietly, and there was more sadness than anger in it.
The lift lurched, and the next level brought with it a fleet of paper airplanes in pastel colors, which hovered above their heads on the slow crawl to the next. Hermione gave a coo, abruptly liberated of her administrative scorn, and caught one overeager memo that zoomed into the wall, crumpling its nose.
“Memos?”
“Cleaner than owls.”
“Hm,” she said, thoughtful. “I suppose you can’t use email.”
“Who the hell is Emile?”
The lift lurched sideways. Draco, who had been expecting this, leaned gracefully on the railing; Gatz, who had too, squared his stance and folded his hands; but Hermione, who had not, went soaring into Draco and flattened him against the wall.
“Ow!”
“Ow yourself, witch, the hell—”
“It moved sideways!”
“Well spotted!”
“Why?”
“Why shouldn’t it?”
“Because you can walk!”
“I can climb stairs, too, but it’s not always convenient,” he said, nonplussed, as she furiously gathered up the scattered pages of her binder, which had burst open on impact with his kidney. Gatz cleared his throat and pointed his wand, and they went shuffling neatly into her waiting arms. He rubbed his chest where she’d collided with it and dourly reflected that it was the most she’d touched him in days, which was alarming chiefly because it revealed he’d counted.
Then the lift shuddered again, and they were plummeting, air whistling through the holes in the grate, floors rushing past in a blur of hanging lights. When it finally slowed, the doors parted over a bare black hallway with walls in the same glossy tile as the floor, and a single black door at the end of the corridor.
“Level zero. The Department of Mysteries.”
He led them out of the lift, turned right, and descended a short flight of steps. The black door passed out of sight.
“What’s that?”
“It told you.” They cut through a narrow hall with walls of lightless gray, lit only by bars of dangling fluorescents overhead. “The Department of—”
“Yes, I heard that bit, actually. I meant: What do they do there?”
“If we knew, they’d have to name the department something else, wouldn’t they?”
He turned a corner, and a passel of men in double-breasted black uniforms swept past, one of them bearing a familiar coif of oilslick hair. He paused, following the man over his shoulder, and recognized him: it was Prescott Parkinson. He was chatting with the other men, and someone must have said something funny, because they erupted in a bray of laughter.
“…ugly it’ll scare him into retirement…”
“…stand her personally… ruthless bitch, but you have to admit…”
“…sweet on you, Scottie.”
Did you hear Parkinson announcement? P in great distress.
He turned around, but Hermione caught his arm.
“What are you doing?”
“That’s Prescott Parkinson. Pansy’s father. Daphne said something happened to her, but didn’t say what.”
“Ah,” said Hermione. “Pansy. Well, I do hope she endures.”
“You know, she did us a favor by giving us that warning from Theodore, last year.”
“Which is to her credit,” Hermione agreed lightly. “If you look past the fact that it didn’t work, I suppose. Nor was it her idea. Nor did she know, in fact, that she was helping us—”
“Point taken.”
They rounded another corner and found a wide set of black double doors, before which gathered a large collection of people out of uniform, and one of them had a shag of black hair that would shame porcupines.
“Harry!”
He spun around at once at the sound of Hermione’s voice, then melted with relief at the sight of them. He tripped forward and hugged her.
“I can’t believe they would do this,” she hissed, her voice harsh and furious against her teeth. She was rapidly escalating to the levels of anger she’d reached when he’d told her — accidental magic crackling in her hair, fists balled, she’d shattered a teapot from the Ming dynasty at a distance of thirty feet, it would’ve been a magnificent thing to see under any other auspices — and it did not seem to comfort Harry, who was saggy and gray with woe. “It’s cruel and downright goddamn heartless to do this after what you went through, it’s ludicrous, it’s obscene, to say nothing of how disrespectful it is to V— to his memory. Did they even say what they thought had happened? Don’t answer, it’s not even worth talking about.”
The Weasleys were there already. They had put Harry in his school uniform — a suit would have been more appropriate, but the uniform made him seem younger, which was probably the intention. Ron stood off to the side, also in uniform, though in his case merely because he lacked anything more suitable. He slouched upright and clapped Draco’s hand, then hugged Hermione, who returned it and then immediately set about rifling through her binder, whispering in Harry’s ear.
“Draco,” said Arthur hoarsely. He was tired, no surprises there, and he was holding a set of Ministry summons. “Good to see you. Who’s… er, who’s this?” He eyed Gatz uneasily. Gatz shook his hand, politely, and then Molly’s.
“This is Potter’s lawyer. Don’t mind him, he’s furniture. Have you obtained anyone else?”
“Haven’t had time,” rasped Harry. “They said I could represent myself—”
Gatz snorted.
“—or they’d find someone for me.”
Gatz snorted again.
“Potter, what happened? Were you in custody?”
“No — I mean, not technically, I guess. I was at — er — ‘the Dursley’s,’” he crooked his fingers, “and then Dumbledore showed up saying I had to report to the Ministry by tomorrow for an arraignment, or the Aurors would come and try to find me at the actual Dursley’s, which would’ve been…”
“Problematic,” said Arthur succinctly. Draco considered that Grimmauld Place was home to one escaped convict and an unregistered werewolf, and agreed.
“But Moony and Padfoot couldn’t come, obviously, so I wrote Ron, and then Molly and Arthur came to take me.” Harry tugged at his collar. He’d grown again over the summer, still trailing Ron and Draco, but there were new stripes of skin under his cuffs and hems. “Padfoot’s going mental, I think. He threatened to break in if things went wrong.”
He could only imagine.
“Right. They won’t. Potter, listen. It’s a preliminary hearing, not a trial. This is essentially a question of paperwork—”
“Oh, good,” retorted Harry, reddening unpleasantly, “that makes me feel better, doesn’t it, knowing my future’s a question of paperwork.”
“It bloody well should, because I happen to be very good at it. Anyway, you remember Gatz.”
“I do, actually. Hello,” said Harry. “You got new teeth.”
“There will be no need for you to speak,” said Gatz.
“Oh. That’s good.”
Gatz handed Harry a roll of parchment. “I have prepared words,” he rasped, “if you feel inclined to speak anyway.”
“Ah.” Harry scanned it and frowned. “This just says ‘I invoke my lawful privilege against self-incrimination.’”
“It is useful in a variety of contexts.”
The courtroom doors creaked. An assistant poked her head out and cried: “Harry Potter! Docket number one-two-one-four-seven-three-three, Harry Potter?”
Harry turned. “That’s m—”
He broke off, wheezing; Gatz had hit him on the back.
“My client is present,” said Gatz.
The assistant eyed him up, then shook her head. “Merlin keep him,” she muttered, “but bring him in.”
Molly wrapped her arm around Harry’s shoulder, gave Gatz a frigid side-eye, and made to enter, but the assistant stopped her.
“Only family, ma’am.”
Harry, still wheezing, swatted at Gatz’s arm and made a thumbs-up.
“My client’s guests qualify for that status,” said Gatz smoothly.
“Close family, sir. I’m sorry, but we don’t allow visitors. It’s a courtroom, not a playhouse.”
“You expect to send him in alone?” demanded Molly. “With only — that for company?”
She pointed at Gatz, who seemed bothered not at all.
The assistant sighed and pinched her nose. The door creaked again.
“Mafalda, honestly, you had one job— Mum?”
The newcomer was a very harried Percy. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. “Never mind, there’s no time. You, Mr. Potter! Come quickly! You’re late for your trial! Everyone’s here, they’re waiting!”
“Hello, Perce,” said Arthur roughly.
There was a beat like a dropped plate. Ron cleared his throat. Molly made some sort of cross between a sniff and a whimper.
“Hello, Father,” said Percy, at length. “I suppose I might have expected you to drop by.”
“Why, because Harry’s been charged of murder?” said Ron rudely. “I dunno, it’s the kind of thing a family might do for a bloke.”
Percy eyed him with distaste. Draco felt strains of a previous, unwitnessed conversation running under this one, tangled and thorny.
Then Percy sniffed at Harry. “You’ve been at the Burrow, have you?”
Which meant Percy hadn’t been. Interesting.
“I invoke my lawful privilege against self-incrimination,” said Harry.
There was another beat.
“We’re here for support,” said Molly, in a much smaller voice than Draco had ever heard before. “It’s a hard day.”
“I imagine it was a much harder day for Viktor Krum,” said Percy crisply, and Hermione went stiff as glass. “Anyway. Come along, Mr. Potter. The rest of you — well, come on in,” he added, with an awkward glance at his mother, “but sit in the back. And do it quietly.”
“Gee, thanks,” said Ron sourly, but they filed inside.
Courtroom 10 was a vault of black stone, walled in benches, shaped in a hemisphere around a single stone chair and a podium beside it. Harry was ushered, with some difficulty, out of Molly’s arms and into the center of the room. When he sat in the chair, blue runes blazed to life all over the stone. Draco made out one for ‘truth,’ and ‘holding,’ though the others were too small to make out. The chains dangling from the sides, however, were perfectly unmistakable.
The Weasleys filed into a row near the back, and squeezed in. Hermione sat next to Ron and squeezed his arm, reassuringly; with her other, she reached for Draco, perhaps seeking a bit of reassurance herself. He drummed his fingers on his knee and watched Gatz stroll forward to take the podium, exchanging some words with Harry that he couldn’t hear.
It was a small hearing; most of the benches were empty. A set of eleven wizards in robes of plum silk and sky-high miters sat along one row, while the presiding officer was a waxen-faced man with long brown hair and a short stump of a goatee, altogether unimpressive, and something about him gave Draco vague confidence.
“The accused being present,” he said, in sepulchral tones, “let us begin. Are you ready, Mr. Weasley?”
Percy bobbed up to his side and plopped himself down to his right. “ Yes, Lord Selwyn.”
“Selwyn?” hissed Ron. “He’s buggered, absolutely buggered.”
“Don’t be hasty.”
“That’s a Death Eater!”
“Former,” said Draco, tightly, “mind you, and a member of the Wizengamot.”
Selwyn cleared his throat. “The matter before the Court at this time: the case of R v. Potte r . Interrogators: Salazar Selwyn, senior member of the Wizengamot; Lemarcus Gibbon, Crown Prosecutor for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement; Dolores Jane Umbridge, Senior Undersecretary to the Minister; and, to my left, the Judiciary Committee of the Wizengamot. And my assistant, acting temporarily as Court Scribe, Percy Ignatius Weasley.”
A man rose from the bench and buttoned his jacket, descending to stand opposite Gatz. He had a craggy face and a long, elaborate beard, and a pair of dark red glasses that sat jauntily on the tip of his bulbous nose.
“Lemarcus Gibbon, on behalf of the government,” he called. “Good morning, Lord Selwyn.”
“Good morning.”
Gatz placed a gnarled hand on the podium, his battery of gold rings flashing. “Good morning, Lord Selwyn. Hieronymous Gatz, on behalf of Mr. Potter.”
“Good morning,” said Selwyn mildly, peering up from his papers. “Hello, Hero. Didn’t think I’d be seeing you today.”
Gatz shrugged.
“Very well. We will begin presently. The charges against the accused are as follows: that between the hours of eight o’clock and eleven o’clock P.M. on the evening of May 24th, 1995, Harry James Potter committed manslaughter in the second degree against Viktor Iliev Krum. He stands before us today, this twenty-seventh of August, 1995, in order to hear the charges and make a response to them. Mr. Potter, how do you plead?”
Harry opened his mouth. Gatz interrupted.
“He pleads not guilty, sire.”
“Fine. It is so noted. Now we will hear from the prosecution. Mr. Gibbon?”
Gibbon stepped forward and cleared his throat.
“On the twenty-fourth of May,” he began, in a snide drawl, “Mr. Potter and Mr. Krum both vanished from the Hogwarts grounds, pursuant to the completion of the Third Task of the Triwizard Tournament. When the Task collapsed, neither were to be found. One hour later, Mr. Potter returned to the grounds by way of Portkey, holding Mr. Krum’s deceased body — which bore no traces of any accident, misfortune, or otherwise natural cause that could serve as evidence against the use of the Killing Curse. Unlike Mr. Krum,” he said significantly, “Mr. Potter returned in possession of his wand.”
The committee members mumbled auspiciously.
“He went on to claim,” cried Gibbon, “that Mr. Krum had been killed by none other than He Who Must Not Be Named, risen again from the grave — miraculously, after fourteen long years. A likely possibility!”
“Objection, sire, speculation.”
“Upheld,” said Selwyn drolly. “Mr. Gibbon, please refrain from opining on the plausibility of Mr. Potter’s account.”
Gibbon sniffed and kept speaking. “Mr. Potter was subsequently given medical treatment for wounds sustained during the Triwizard Tournament,” he said, “into which he was entered, against his will, by known criminal Ludo Bagman — a degenerate gambler who placed Mr. Potter in peril so that he might line his own pockets—”
“No mention of Nott,” she muttered. “Who’s currently in Azkaban, not that they care, I suppose.”
“For murdering Crouch,” he muttered back. “Not the second coming of the Dark Lord. No one saw what happened in the graveyard except Potter and the other Death Eaters.”
“Not true. Theo knows,” she said suddenly. “He could testify. He had a deal with Moody and Crouch — why isn’t he here?”
“Because the truth incriminates his father on charges of conspiracy to the Dark Lord. And we’re the only ones who knew his part in it, besides Moody, who—”
“Who resigned as an auror, I know, Harry wrote me, too. But t here is this thing,” she muttered tautly, “called Veritaserum.”
“Ruthless, Granger.”
“It’s not like I’m suggesting torture,” she muttered, defensive. “Torture is unreliable. It’s cruel, and it doesn’t work. Veritaserum is painless, it’s temporary, it’s reliable, it lacks long-term side effects—”
“All true.”
“And with certain procedures in place, it could be administered in a way that’s minimally invasive.”
“You’re aware that the same could be said of the Imperius Curse.”
“That’s — different.”
“So different that you’d let the Ministry use one, but not the other?”
She opened her mouth and then closed it, frowning.
“I didn’t say I disapproved, by the way.”
“Well, you wouldn’t,” she muttered, but without venom. She turned back to the trial, arms folded tightly over her chest.
“…indicating serious degrees of mental and physical trauma,” Gibbon was saying, “consistent with the typical signs of a psychotic break; mental hardship being nothing new to Mr. Potter, of course, second year, he was witness to a series of brutally violent attacks…”
“Objection, sire. The prosecution cannot possibly speak to the defendant’s mental state years before the incidents of the case,” Gatz snapped. This was a well-timed interjection; Harry was turning shades of red heretofore known only to fruits.
But as it turned out, Selwyn never had the chance to reply. A jangling bell pierced the air. Several members of the Judiciary Committee leapt to their feet, hurrying to the door. An aide hurtled into the room, his robes a ridicule made by haste.
“Lord Selwyn!” he cried. “Emergency vote on the floor — all hands—”
“We are somewhat preoccupied!”
“Yes, sir, but— but— Dumbledore’s flipped—”
“What?”
Committee members raced past the aide in a battery of bureaucrats, jostling him back and forth. “Yes, sir! Come quick, we’ve got a lift waiting—”
“What am I to do with Potter?” Selwyn bellowed. “I cannot simply leave him here, Anderson!”
“Not to worry, sir — here, Mr. Gibbon, sir — I have communications — a note—”
Gibbon snatched it up. Whatever he read curled his lip like a rind of lemon. He tossed it away.
“The government withdraws its case,” he snapped, and raced out of the room after the Judiciary Committee.
“What!” Selwyn was white and veiny with anger. His eyes bulged. “You cannot — Gibbon! If you withdraw, Potter cannot be charged! ”
“He knows that, I believe, Lord Selwyn,” said Gatz, and offered the judge the very humblest of grins.
“Fine,” spat Selwyn. He stamped something on the paper in front of him and shoved it gracelessly at Percy. “The hearing is terminated for want of grounds. In consequence of this profoundly, irresponsibly, disgracefully unorthodox abdication of prosecutorial duty, I dismiss the case.”
He stood up, slammed a book shut, and stalked out of the room. Harry leapt up and gave a thoroughly confused, half-wild little cheer; Molly whimpered, and sagged heavily onto Arthur’s shoulder. Ron and Arthur stumbled over themselves in a hurry to embrace him, but Hermione was frozen, caught between happiness, bemusement, and worry. She turned to Draco, frowning, and he intercepted her.
“Dumbledore—”
“Just did something unwise? Yes, I gathered.”
“But it’s Dumbledore. Wouldn’t he know what he’s doing?”
“I don’t know that he had any wise choices left,” he said tautly, and stood. “He bought Potter’s freedom. How much do you think it cost?”
The call bell kept clanging, even as they emerged into the hallway, harried and clustered together, while aides and legislative assistants raced back and forth in a flurry of fruitless shouting. Arrowhead formations of memoranda soared overhead. At the far end of the hubbub a man in midnight blue robes was cutting effortlessly through the flock, and there was a long current of white hair. Dumbledore hastened down the stairs from the Department of Mysteries, walking at the greatest speed possible without losing decorum, and zeroed in on Harry in an instant.
“Harry! Are you alright?”
“Yeah,” said Harry, bewildered, “sort of — they let me off! Did you do—”
“Cleared of all charges?”
“Yes, sir—”
“You were not asked to appear again? There was no suggestion of ‘reduce’ or ‘delay’?”
“He’s cleared,” said Arthur, “but even so—”
“Professor, where did you just come from?” said Hermione intently.
Dumbledore paused, looking at her with rare and almost disarmed intensity. He placed a hand on her shoulder.
“Excellent to see you, Miss Granger,” he said. “Please accept my fondest congratulations on your new post. Gryffindor is lucky to have such a worthy prefect. And you as well, Mr. Malfoy.”
Draco startled; so did Ron, whose jaw dropped.
“Prefect?” Harry demanded. “You prats! You never said anything! When were you gonna tell us?”
“Oh, Harry, I’m sorry, we weren’t trying to keep secrets, but there just never seemed a moment—”
“When, in the time between ‘trial’ and ‘now,’ would I have possibly occasioned—”
“—thought it’d be a nice way to celebrate, if you got off, and of course it wouldn’t be apropos if you didn’t—”
“—‘sorry about the prison, old chap, but did you hear I made prefect?’ Merlin’s bones. Buy an etiquette manual.”
“With my sincere regrets, I must leave you,” said Dumbledore, over the din. “I apologize for the opprobrious exit, but I am being summoned, quite insistently, and by people who have severe opinions on tardiness. Arthur, will you escort him home?”
“Yes — of course — but Albus, what the devil is going on?”
Dumbledore smiled. It was, as usual, completely opaque.
“Something that would have happened anyway,” he said. “Good day. I will see you all soon.”
In a whirl of velvet, he spun and swept up the stairs.
There was a festival air about the party as they returned to the Atrium. Harry’s newfound freedom put a spring in his step, and concern about Dumbledore’s potentially auctioning off the institution of democracy for his benefit failed to stop him from upending his coinpurse into the Fountain of Magical Brethren, as a gesture of goodwill. Whatever act the vote had been for, it was not announced before they left, nor did Arthur permit them to contemplate “wandering up” to the Wizengamot and checking. He steered them all sternly and directly to the exit, which for once required him to wrangle Hermione more than Harry or Ron, because she kept trying to sneak off into offices and find out what was going on. Draco, who found this both useful and endearing, assisted her by providing distractions to Arthur and Molly — “I say, Mr. Weasley, I’m just desperate to hear what you’re doing on that car” — and finally they had to be separated by Molly, who stuffed Hermione’s arm firmly in her own and ushered her ahead of the group, muttering about automobiles.
Next to him Harry floated with a dazed expression and sometimes laughed at nothing at all, cutting himself off when he heard it, as if his brain and his lungs were in disagreement about whether he should be happy.
When the lift creaked open over the Atrium, their paths collided with a pair of wizards in dress robes. One was a gnarled man with a bowler hat and a deep facial scar that included a shudder-inducing scratch on his right cornea. The other was a woman in dark duelist’s leathers and a long black duster that flourished in her wake. A mass of black hair tumbled free from the back of her head like she had just alighted from the deck of a ship, wind-battered and salt-stiff, and when she glanced down the hallway, the lovely diamond shape of her face made a pale frame for a pair of searingly dark eyes, wild and bright as boiling tar, to match the black paint on her smirk. His mother’s smirk.
It was Bellatrix Lestrange.
His wand was out and up before anyone could move. He had shoved past Arthur and Ron and Harry and with absolutely pristine footwork had advanced three long steps up the hallway, a curse on his tongue, before the woman turned, and he saw her face in full, and it was — wrong. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t her. The nose was wrong, or — or not the nose, but the mouth, or the position of it, or something, it was — it wasn’t his aunt.
Hermione skidded up beside him, wand drawn, and gave him a quick once-over. He could have kissed her for that, for her short nod of affirmation, which seemed to buttress the newly unstable pillars of reality.
The woman blinked at him, quizzically, and then cocked her head, which was an expression so unlike his mother or anyone she’d ever shared blood with that the resemblance almost fully disappeared. And then the other woman stepped out from behind her, and his stomach gave a seizure.
It was his aunt. But it wasn’t Bellatrix.
Andromeda Black pressed her small white fingers to her mouth, her small round face a wide rictus of something beyond horror, beyond fear, beyond any way that any person had ever looked at him at all. She looked at him as if she had just watched him kick open his own casket, sit up, and stroll out of the funeral parlor.
He stared back at her in just the same way.
“Davis,” greeted Arthur, stepping in front of Draco. He and the auror greeted each other with cool nods. “And Nymphadora. Good to see you. What brings you to the Ministry?”
“Wotcher, Artie,” said the woman in a chipper Brummie, dispelling the last hint of Bellatrix. “And just Tonks, wouldja? Job interview. Wish me luck.”
Andromeda was still staring. Her head moved soundlessly from left to right. She clutched the other woman’s arm.
“Mum?” The woman turned, frowning. “Eh? You alright?”
Mum?
His mouth drifted open, and he was aware that he looked affected, but his dignity was off somewhere in the waiting room with his sense.
“Er. Okay.” Nymphadora raised her eyebrows at Arthur, who shrugged, and then stepped forward, sticking her hand out gamely. “Well, nice to meet you, whoever you are. And you’re Harry Potter, right? Artie mentioned you were in for a hearing this week. Bad luck with that Tournament business, but, er…” She caught Davis’s eye, and shrugged. “Rules are important, you know?”
Draco couldn’t parse this for a knut, but he didn’t have time to, because Harry objected.
“Tonks, what are you talking ab—”
He grunted. Ron had stepped on his foot.
“Sorry,” he said thinly, massaging it under his robes. “Thinking of someone else.”
“Must’ve been,” she agreed blithely. She stepped away and snapped a lazy salute. “Well. Seeya never, kid.”
Nymphadora was a Black name. That had to mean something, it couldn’t not.
“Draco Malfoy.”
Tonks lurched to a stop. Andromeda touched her parted lips.
Did his mother know about her? That she existed? Did she know that her niece had a Black name, and the Black eyes, and the face of a woman seven years gone?
There was a moment in which he swore Andromeda was going to speak, and then commotion erupted behind him. He spun: it was Ron, caught in the middle of an intense finger-pointing competition with Percy, who was squashed against the wall by Ron’s looming.
“Say it! Say you think he did it, go on—”
“I never said that!” screeched Percy. “I said he wasn’t proven innocent, which he wasn’t, because Lord Selwyn dropped the charges—”
“Big bloody difference! You think you’re so smart, don’t you, with your fancy job and your Cavalier boss— hey, by the way, have you changed party yet? Better clear that up before you’re up for promotion, wouldn’t want anybody doubting your loyalties!”
“Unhand me! Now! Or I’ll call security!”
“Yeah? Report your own brother, would you?”
“You’re the one harassing your own brother,” Percy shouted, “and it’s not my fault that you’re sore; and I’m sorry you’re jealous—”
“Jealous! Jealous?”
“Yes, jealous!” Percy wrenched himself free and then immediately wasted said freedom by shoving his finger right back in Ron’s face. “None of you — not you, not Mum, not Bill, Merlin knows not the twins — none of you cared what I did at work before! It didn’t matter! So long as I was striving, you were perfectly content, because that’s Percy! Dull, boring, silly old Percy, why, he’s no fun, he might be Head Boy but Bill did it first , so who even cares! He’s not some exciting bastard, like the rest of us! Let’s go have an adventure without him, let’s all talk about how much we hate him when we know he might hear— well, I heard! You hear me? I heard!”
“Get over yourself, would you please,” Ron snarled. It was impressive, if not faintly frightening. Draco had been the subject of Ron’s anger before, his disappointment and his disgust, but this was a new dark, boiling species of anger — betrayal. “Are you sad nobody invited you to parties? You’re upset we didn’t kiss your boots for making Head Boy? What did you want, a biscuit? Welcome to the Weasleys, tosser! Nobody puts themselves out telling me I’m special! I didn’t make the quidditch team, either, but you don’t see me stabbing my family in the back—”
“You all thought I was nothing until I had this job! And once I did, it was all no, Percy, don’t , Percy, we all care what you think, now, Percy! But you don’t! You never cared what my opinions were until they were inconvenient for you!”
“Yes we did!”
“Like hell!” The two of them were identical shades of red; it clashed identically with their hair. “Like hell you did!” shouted Percy. “You never asked about my politics — you never read my reports—”
“So you became a fascist?” roared Ron. “Because no one talked to you about bloody cauldron bottoms?”
“PERCY! RON!”
Arthur came rushing down the hallway, followed by Molly. They were trailed by a pair of men in robes similar to Arthur’s; they had drifted off to chat together, but came running at the sound of their sons’ altercation. “Stop it,” snapped Arthur. “Ron, let go.”
Ron threw up his hands and stepped back, panting visibly, but giving every gesture of good-faith surrender. Arthur seized his arm and hauled him even further away.
“Apologize to your brother!”
Ron jerked his head. “Sorry,” he muttered, in the universal tone of a child executing a parental order.
“Now you, Percy,” said Arthur.
Percy sneered at him. Ron cleared his throat.
“Percy,” said Molly, her voice broken. “Percy, please, dear. Apologize to Ron.”
He worked his mouth.
“Speak up, prat,” snapped Ron, “Mum’s talking to you,” and Percy flinched so hard it knocked his coiffure out of place.
“I’m sorry,” he said icily, in a tone Draco knew very well, and he was already bracing himself for the rest of the sentence when it landed: “I’m sorry that you can’t handle my success.”
“Percy!”
“Stop it, son.”
“But it isn’t my fault that you’re not as good as I am at this.”
Harry gave a furious hiss.
“And it isn’t my fault,” said Percy, spittle flying like acid, “that you’re angry at me for it. You, too, Father. With your judgmental looks, and your letters — I’m sick of it! I’m sick of you trying to make me feel guilty for not wanting to be weak and poor.”
Ron tore free of Arthur’s grasp.
There was a wet crunch, and then Percy bellowed, clutching his eye. Shouts erupted. Bedlam asserted itself. Arthur shouted and wrestled Ron away, but Ron went willingly, easily, letting himself be hauled across the Atrium with a stone-faced refusal to look back at his brother, who was bleeding from the rosy crest of a fresh black eye.
Wizards swarmed Percy, helping him to his feet. He was gasping as if he didn’t quite know what to do with himself; Draco thought it more than probable that he’d never been hit before. His expression wasn’t pain so much as it was juvenile shock. It was the poignant terror of a child skinning their knee for the first time— a realization that the world could hurt, very badly, and that right of the bottom of said ruthlessly hurtful world was you, stuck in a small, tender body that was abundantly vulnerable to pain.
Harry raced after Ron, and so did Hermione. The Weasleys bundled themselves out of the Atrium in varying levels of shame. But Draco paused in the Atrium before leaving, watching Percy blubber and bleed into his handkerchief. He noted how all the people around him stood awkwardly by, with empty hands and empty words, shuffling their feet in uncertainty of what to say; and how, when they touched Percy, it was a tough pat on the shoulder, a brisk slap on the arm, or an elbow to the ribs, the tentative violence of men trying to comfort each other. That was how Draco left him: sniffling and mopping his face in that big room under the ground, alone with the bruising, loveless kindness of strangers.
Oh my God. The reception for the last chapter has been incredible, astounding, jaw-dropping, I really don’t know what to say except that old inadequate cry: thank you! And I hope not to disappoint. Polishing off a few notes that cropped up in the comments:
-Updates will be at the same time for this book as the previous! Every Friday.
-I want to thank several people who went through and commented on every chapter, especially, because — holy shit. I spent about three hours this morning just sitting at my computer and giggling like a hysterical clown. The stuff that dreams are made of, you are.
-Some have expressed concern that this may not be a “kissing book.” I cannot promise anything except that I will do my best to make everyone happy, and I know that some people have been waiting for a very, very long time.
-Simultaneously: philosophically, it is my stance that pining should feel like someone is rattling your heart around like a maraca. When i think “pining” i think about myself being so strung-out and brain-wormed that i would start hooting like a lunatic whenever the characters so much as look at each other. i went to the Long Game school of setup and payoff. I shipped Draco and Hermione since I read Prisoner of Azkaban, friends. I can live in delusion for as long as it takes. I’ve been here for a million years. i’ll be here for a million more. and all along I believed I would find you—
-ANYWAY. Profuse kisses to you each who commented, individually, with as much intimacy or passion as you desire. Or, failing that, a very solid muggle fist-bump, complete with a really cool handshake.
-Next chapter’s up in a week: “The Old London Place.”
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