Chapter 59: The Old London Place
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
In a wealthy neighborhood perhaps an hour’s walk from the Ministry, there laid a row of aged brownstones, bearded with ivy. As they passed under a street sign, the little black letters rearranged themselves from ‘PAGET STREET’ to ‘GRIMMAULD PLACE.’
They stopped at the gate between Eleven and Thirteen, waiting for something, and just when Hermione’s impatient fidgeting suggested she was about to bite the bullet and order someone to explain something, a towering black door swelled out of the brick.
A wall followed it, studded with deep wide windows and ribbed ornaments of sandstone, crested with a flotilla of chimneys, and a shabby cloak of dark shingle. The door sat lofted on a porch four or five stairs over the street, hooded by a pillar and a balcony, and as Arthur hurried them up the stairs, a silver knocker shimmered into place on the door.
Arthur tapped his wand on the door, and several deadbolts shuddered out of place at once. The door creaked open a very small fraction, and Arthur had to muscle it aside, as if it weighed several tons.
“Damn thing’s sticky,” he murmured. “Sirius’s doing his best — he can force it to let me in, but he can’t force it to like me.”
“It’s alive?” said Hermione, fascinated.
“Every house is alive,” said Arthur, panting, “that’s what — people living in it will — do for you — but this one — is rather more alive — than perhaps we’d — eughr— like.”
Draco sighed.
“Excuse me,” he muttered, and steered Arthur aside. He pressed on the door, lightly, with his fingertips.
The door glided open as if it were made of air. A small welcome mat flung itself hastily at his feet.
“Well!” exclaimed Arthur, mopping sweat from his brow. “Well! That’ll do it, I suppose! Thank you, Draco!”
The interior of Grimmauld Place was like someone had taken a set of luscious Victorian architecture photographs and desaturated them. Everything was handsomely rendered and furnished, a veritable catalog of brocade wallpaper, wood paneling, silk upholstery, tasseled curtains and Turkish rugs, but age and dust had stained the portrait, leaving it a sepia echo of splendor in blacks and grays and cool browns. The chandelier above him sputtered to life, their light dappled by an infestation of moths that took up buzzing around the bulbs when they turned on.
He shrugged off his transfigured cloak and held it out; the coatrack lunged forward and lifted it obligingly from his finger.
“Blimey, it’s never done that for me,” said Harry, wriggling out of his robe, as the Weasleys piled in.
“You’re not a Black,” he said idly, adjusting his cuff.
“Oi. Neither are you.”
“The house disagrees,” he said, with a self-satisfied shrug.
There were hurried footsteps and Remus emerged from a door at the end of the hall, followed by Sirius. At the sight of Harry, he broke into a beam and shoved ahead of Remus on the stairs.
“He’s off! He’s off, look at the smirk, you know he’s off! That’s my boy!”
He seized Harry and waltzed him around, evoking many vocal sounds of teenaged embarrassment.
Remus started forward, smiling, but then he noticed Ron, who was still scowling as his mother hissed inaudibly at him. He also saw Draco and Hermione, who couldn’t have been looking altogether pleased. Draco’s brain was still a record struck on Nymphadora , and Hermione was fretfully nibbling her thumbnail.
“Er… mixed news, is it?”
“Percy’s a rat bastard,” spat Ron.
“Bad luck,” said Sirius at once. “Bound to happen, in a big family. Mine had eight.”
“Ron!” Molly snapped. “Language! You, too, Sirius!”
“He’s not wrong, though,” said a voice from above. Fred and George braced their arms on the banister overlooking the parlor. Ginny leaned on George’s shoulder, grinning. “It’s a medical condition. Our dear brother’s got chronic rattus bastardia, and we fear it’s terminal.”
“Hello, you lot,” Fred added, thumbing his nose. “Welcome to the hidey-hole. Mind the troll leg, you’ll wake the portrait.”
Hermione frowned. “Is that some kind of code?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“You’ll see,” said Ginny.
Arthur and Sirius drifted into a debrief in the sitting-room. Remus shut the door behind them. “Will you all be staying with us for long?” he inquired. “We can have rooms made up.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to make everyone squeeze—”
“Won’t, trust us. This place is honking big, it takes up the whole row,” said Ginny. “We’ve got our own rooms. It’s aces.”
“Even Fred and I, and we didn’t even want them.”
“There’s enough to sleep the whole Order, come to that! Plus more we think nobody’s seen, because the house keeps shuffling them around. Our theory is it wants to hide them from the blood traitors—”
“So we figured we’d strap Draco to a metal detector and wheel him around a bit,” said Fred.
Draco lazily flipped him off. Fred and George fired back a double.
“The Order?” he inquired. “Is that what you’re calling your family now?”
“No, tosser, ‘of the Phoenix,’” said Ginny. She wiggled her eyebrows. “Cool, innit? We’re soldiers.”
“You’re a fourth year,” corrected Remus, and she pouted. “Of all of you, only Fred and George—”
“Are seventeen! Right you are, Remus!”
CRACK. Fred Apparated into the parlor and draped an arm on Harry’s shoulder. “But enough about us. Let’s hear from Britain’s Most Wanted. Folks, I’m here today with Harry James Potter, sexiest seeker in a century, current enemy of the state, and holding a very respectable third place for ‘most points lost by a current member of Gryffindor House,’ widely expected to inherit the title; but today, the question on everyone’s mind is, simply: ‘prison??’ Let’s hear it in his own words.” He held his fist in front of Harry’s mouth like a microphone.
Harry leaned in.
“Not prison.”
Fred punched the air. “NOT PRISON!”
“NOT PRISON!” bellowed George and Ginny.
“Everyone, quiet,” cried Molly, “you’re going to wake her!”
“Who’s ‘her’?” said Hermione, but was cut off by a bloodcurdling screech.
“Filth! Scum! Byproducts of dirt and vileness! Half-breeds, mutants, freaks…”
Remus sighed. “There’s a portrait of Sirius’s mother on the second-floor landing,” he said, “and she is as opinionated in death as she was in life.”
“Can’t you shut it up?” Hermione complained, plugging one ear.
“We usually cover it with tarp, but when there’s a lot of noise…”
“Bint wakes up,” said Ron.
“Bint wakes up,” agreed Remus. “And it’s quite something. Anyway, you’re all welcome to stay.”
“Thank you, but we’ll be heading back to the Manor,” said Draco coolly. “My mother will wonder where I am.”
“‘We’ll’ be heading back?” said Ron.
Draco would have thought better of himself if he enjoyed the ensuing awkwardness less. That being said, there was something to watching Hermione, of all people, try to scramble her words together.
“Well, yes,” she said, “I only meant — I’ve been visiting.”
“Oh,” said Ron, like he’d been clubbed. “Since…?”
Fred broke into quiet snickering. Ginny smacked him.
“His mother’s there,” broke in Hermione, hotly, folding her arms. “It’s not an empty house. And… the maids.”
“Right,” said Ron. “Must get pretty tight, I reckon, with all those maids running around.”
Draco snickered. Hermione looked at him like she wished him to die a swift death by eye lasers. Walburga Black howled herself hoarse.
“Well,” said Remus, clapping his hands, “if you’d like to stay for dinner, Molly’s cooking, and it’s no trouble at all to set another two places. Just say the word.”
“Thank you, that would be lovely,” said Hermione emphatically. Ron said nothing. Harry also said nothing, but did it less loudly.
Ginny took pity on them, flipped her leg over the banister, and slid downstairs, landing with a hop.
“C’mon,” she announced, taking Hermione’s arm. “Show you around. We’ve been cleaning for our keep, these few weeks; you’d think Mum meant to host the Queen for Christmas.”
With dismay, Draco realized that he had made the grave error of accepting the hospitality of Molly Weasley, which obligated him to at least twelve hours of hard labor. Bugger him for a fool.
They scaled the stairs in a squadron of rolled sleeves and muttered excuses. Past the veiled tapestry on the second landing, past the dank corridors that sprawled out seemingly forever under the sickly glow of dusty-clad chandeliers, up through vaulted rooms dressed in green and black, around the top of the landing, where large boxes and crates and rubbish-bags gave evidence of the considerable work invested to make the place livable again. Fred and George skived off at once to go draw mustaches on the oil portraits, which left Harry, Ron, and Ginny to give Draco and Hermione the tour: a dawdling circuit of the house that involved rather more “And here’s this place, bit of cool stuff in it,” or “this one’s got a piano,” than helpful trivia about the architecture. Many of the rooms had been cleared out and resettled as operational spaces for the Order; one had a wide, flat table engraved with a map of Britain; another, a glass case of antique melee weaponry, which Harry resentfully reported they were forbidden from touching.
One had several double-beds shoved together in rows, like barracks, which he found to be a perplexing choice in a house with so many rooms until he noticed the apothecary cart.
“Medical wing,” said Ginny quietly, and closed the door on it.
It was a military headquarters. It was hard to keep that in his head, because the rooms were so ornate and evidently lived-in; but every now and then they’d stumble on a fallen chandelier or a blast-hole in the staircase, and he’d remember that the last time anyone lived here, there had been a war on.
Ginny cleared her throat. “C’mon! There’s a room back here with a bunch of fancy old stuff, and Sirius ordered us to steal anything we like.”
They ensconced themselves in a gabled bedroom near the top of the house. Dusty furniture encircled a four-poster bed, and a bookshelf boasted some long-lost tenant’s personal library: Milton, Keats, a selection of Romantic poets, and one or two satirical novels. Not much furniture, compared to the rest of the house; there was only a bed and a desk and a wardrobe, and a single sofa, wedged aside of the window, beyond which a short and probably non-functional balcony jutted over the street below.
Ginny flung open the doors of the wardrobe and began flinging out lavish waistcoats and silk shirts in floral variety, gilded belts, silk stockings, giant shearling coats. Hermione withdrew a book from the desk’s attached shelf and cracked the spine with a small exclamation of dust. Draco migrated to the bed, and traced the lettering etched into the post: R.A.B.
It wasn’t Sirius’s room. He’d suspected, but it still felt odd to be sure.
Harry hopped onto the desk and took out a pocket snitch, fiddling with it. Ron fell gracefully onto the sofa, kicked up his legs, and caught the silk necktie Ginny tossed him, which he tied around his forehead like a sweatband.
“So,” drawled Ron, lacing his fingers behind his head. “Prefects.”
Hermione’s hand stilled while turning a page. She closed the book, which he noticed was a very old, annotation-besieged copy of Paradise Lost.
“Congratulations,” he added, gamely. “Not gonna turn into narcs, now, will you?”
“Of course not!”
“Only for you, Ronald.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m just saying, it’s pretty good it’s not Harry or me,” he added, “because then the twins might stop inviting us to stuff. Kill our social life stone-dead, and everyone knows fifth year is the party year.”
“Alicia was a prefect, and they always invited her to everything,” Hermione said, slightly sullen. “And Roger Davies still managed to have quite the social life, if you believe Cho.”
“Oh, ’course. But I dunno if people would look at us the same way, right? Sort of makes you less approachable. That’s what Charlie said, anyway. So Draco, mate — seriously, I’m glad it’s you. Curse dodged.”
“You’re too kind,” said Draco testily, leaning against the bookshelf. “I do hope you didn’t lose sleep over it.”
Hermione sent him a Look. Harry made a tricky catch behind his back and knocked over an inkwell.
“Hey, Ron, tell them what you told me yesterday,” he announced. “About the quidditch team.”
Ron sat up, somewhat mollified. “Oh. Right,” he said, turning pink. “I’m, er… well, I thought I might try out.”
“Really!” Hermione’s cry landed between exasperation and despair. “Quidditch! All three of you!”
Draco caught her eye and lifted an eyebrow.
“Fantastic,” she said, stilted. She sat down in the desk chair and gripped her book like a bludgeon. “What a good, safe, healthy activity. I’m sure you’ll be wonderful, and that you will definitely avoid most major injuries.”
Ron was smiling at her crookedly. “It’s alright, Mione. Let her rip.”
“No, I’m happy! I am! Just because it happens to be the one club at the school that’s sent multiple people in this room to the Hospital Wing doesn’t mean that it’s not, you know, a perfectly serviceable way to make friends, or induce blunt force trauma to any part of your body that you please—”
“And I’d do it again,” announced Harry grandly.
“Fine! Go ahead! Enjoy your cognitive faculties while they last, because believe me, you are all going to have so much brain damage from having anything to do with that nightmarish invention. Each one of you will get CTE before age twenty, and I am going to say ‘I told you so,’ every. Single. Time.”
“And you’ll even pretend not to enjoy it.”
“Shut up, Draco.”
“So,” said Ginny, pointing her toes at the ceiling. “Who’s the new Defense professor, d’you think?”
“Isn’t Moody staying?” said Hermione curiously. “He’s easily the most qualified yet.”
“Can’t, he’s working full-time for the Order,” reported Harry, kicking his foot up on the desk. He had some sort of pathological aversion to sitting in chairs normally. “I voted to bring back Lupin, but he’s still wanted by the Ministry.”
“Hard to find good’uns who aren’t, these days,” added Ron.
“I’m worried about that,” Hermione said seriously. “We can’t afford a second-rate professor with the O.W.L.s are this year. Speaking of which: I was thinking about a study club—”
“No, no, and no,” said Ron, jabbing his finger at her, “and not until I set foot on the Hogwarts Express, Hermione, we have a policy for a reason.”
“Honestly—”
“Policy! Eep! Zip!”
Ginny peered at him. “What d’you care, Ronniekins? You don’t want to take most of the N.E.W.T.s, anyway.”
He groaned. “See, Hermione, and now we’re talking about it. This is what happens we don’t stick to the policy, is I have to go in and think about—”
“It’s a test, not a dementor!”
“—how hard I’ll get reamed when Mum sees my O.W.L.s. She’s counting on me to bring the family average up, after the twins. She’ll have to disinherit me to keep us over an E-median.”
“You’ll do fine in Defense, at least,” said Harry helpfully. “I think we went through most of the fifth year Defense curriculum, anyway, for the Tournament.”
Draco snorted. In point of fact, they’d gone through what Hermione Granger personally deemed the most useful parts of the fifth year Defense curriculum, because she’d known damn well Harry wouldn’t read the textbook; but the claim was still fair.
An owl clattered at the window. Harry hurried to let it in. For reasons unclear, Ron broke out sniggering. Draco watched with some amusement as Harry tried to both shield his postage from view and throw the owl out at the same time, though it kept battering him for a treat.
“Harry, who’s writing to you?” Hermione asked curiously.
“Nobody.” His face was rosy. He stuffed the letter into his back pocket. The envelope was wondrous thick. His correspondent was apparently something of a novelist. “Friend from school.”
“Friend from school?” crooned Ron. “Special friend?”
“You know what, Weasley, I reckon you’re gonna get what’s coming to you one of these days—”
“Bring it on, loverboy, I’m getting old!”
Hermione sighed. She turned to address Draco directly, as if her attention had a maturity threshold.
“It’s Cho?”
“Obviously.”
“I suppose it’s nice of her to write, although, Harry, you really should be trying to limit your correspondence with people outside of the Order; you don’t want to give away where you’re staying, and if anyone has her owls followed, they could find you.”
Harry broke off a bout of mild slap-boxing with Ron and sheepishly rubbed the back of his neck. “C’mon, it’s Cho,” he said defensively. “She’s really cool, and she gets it, and everything. She doesn’t ask me to tell her anything that’s a secret. She’s not, you know, nosy.”
“Love is real, ladies and gents,” said Ginny dryly. “‘She’s not nosy.’ Potter, you casanova.”
She was oddly calm. From the quick interplay of nonverbal signals among the four that followed, it became clear that no one had expected this.
“Tell you one thing, though,” she said suddenly. “Go easy on her on the pitch, and you’re a dead man.”
Harry laughed in relief. “You’d better try out, to keep me straight.”
“Yeah? Deal.” She gave him a sunny smile, all teeth and freckles. “Better go practice, then. Don’t want anyone saying I got in off nepotism.”
She rolled to her feet and sauntered to the door, flicking a wave goodbye over her shoulder. “Catch you later, olds!”
“Bye,” Harry called, while Ron blew a raspberry at her.
Hermione discreetly put her hand to her temple, bracing her head on it, and slid her eyes to Draco. A twinge happened on his spine when she caught him staring. He flicked his gaze away, but soon returned it, because it seemed like she’d meant to tell him something, and it just felt — horrendously pedestrian, to care about looking or not looking, which meant precisely fat nothing, it was pedantry, it was soppy, it was jejune. But she was in front of the sun from the window, and it came around her like it was trying to take its time touching her, running its fingers through her hair, tracing the soft blade of skin under her jaw.
Then he caught her staring, probably because he’d started acting like he had the palsy. He scowled at her, and she recoiled. Turned back to Ron and Harry. That was great. Grand. Allowed him to rekindle his composure, that was something.
He was losing his mind. He wished she’d give it back already, it wasn’t like she didn’t have her own.
The dining room of Grimmauld Place was a lavish, gilded Fabergé egg of a thing. Bathed in natural light, stocked with buffet tables and candelabras and two fireplaces, tablecloths wholly spun from black Spanish lace, a table that sat forty, plus six chairs by the door for footmen, and crowning it all, over the hearth, a twelve-foot family portrait of the Blacks done by Hyacinthe Rigaud; at one time, it had been the thriving nexus of London social life, and engineered with the intention of leaving out absolutely nothing that one could want in a dining room; so naturally, the Order didn’t use it.
What they did use was the servants’ dining hall, a floor down and one flight of stairs closer to the kitchen, so that miscellaneous Weasleys could ferry trays of Molly’s cooking out to the long shabby table between lanes of brown hutches, navigating by candlelight.
They were instructed to laden their plates in the steamy, copper-lined kitchen, where the more-than-slightly stressed Molly Weasley directed them to sample from various bubbling pots directly instead of waiting. “There isn’t quite the room for it,” she said apologetically, “with everyone coming, Mad-Eye’s dropping in with Tonks, and your father’s invited Kingsley and Bill—”
“Shacklebolt?” said Draco.
“No, dear, Bill Weasley,” said Molly blithely, patting him on the shoulder, contributing to a growing suspicion that perhaps the twins hadn’t gotten it from their father, after all.
A burst of voices heralded some newcomers, and then Sirius, Remus, and Mad-Eye Moody squeezed into the kitchen. Molly squeaked and hurried to hug Moody, who grumbled a plaintive: “Constant vigilance, Molly,” but permitted her to kiss his cheek. Then he turned to Draco and demanded: “What were the names of the two Slytherins I brought with you to visit Albus Dumbledore?”
“Theodore Nott and Pansy Parkinson.”
Mad-Eye grunted and tucked away his wand. “Right you are. Good to see you alive, boy,” he said. “Still checking your corners?”
“Religiously, sir.”
The auror had recovered admirably from his bout with Sibelius Nott, with the exception of a silver eyepatch. It was unclear whether he retained the eye behind it, because he barked a greeting at the twins before they were remotely in view of the kitchen, and scared George into upsetting the soup tureen.
“Wotcher, Molly!”
And Draco went still.
But the woman who came in was so different he almost mistook her for someone else. Her cheekbones had softened, her jaw rounded out, and her hair was no longer Bellatrix’s wild snarl, but a pixie-cut shock of electric pink. When she spoke, a silver piercing flashed in the center of her tongue.
“Oh! Harry! Sorry about the confusion earlier. Couldn’t let on I’d met you, not in front of that Davis git. Had to make it seem like I drank the punch. And you lot! Glad to meet you! Here— do it properly, now—” She went around pumping everyone’s hands. “Nymphadora Tonks, pleasure! Friends call me Tonks, some call me Dora, only my mum uses the other. And you—” She turned to Draco, and hesitated. “Well, you call me what friends do. If it suits you.”
A faint challenge in it. He nodded stiffly.
“I’d heard about you,” she said. “Molly says you’re a Gryffindor, is that right?”
“Yes,” said Hermione, once his silence waxed awkward. “And you?”
“Nope! Hufflepuff,” she said, popping the -P. “But Gryffindor’s almost as good. Hey, you were almost the first Black not to make Slytherin! Save me and Lassie back here—”
“OI!”
“We’re a happy little club of trailblazers! Course, if you’d got Ravenclaw, we’d have a full set. Would’ve been dread boring, though.” She stuck her tongue out, good-naturedly.
Draco wet his lips. He kept hearing his mother’s voice flicker out of Tonks’s thick accent: a slightly heightened lift of a vowel, or a relish in the trill of a consonant.
“He speak English?” Tonks muttered to Hermione.
“Yeah, unfortunately,” said Ron. “Don’t tempt him. OW!”
“Enough!” cried Molly. “Everyone, out! Out there, there’s a perfectly good table!”
“Ah, but you’re in here, Molly,” said Arthur warmly, and came over to kiss her. Ginny bent and pretended to hurl.
“Alright! Well! Alright!” She was very red. “I’ll be out in a minute, you can all bother me then! Go!”
“Yes, ma’am. Oh, and I’ve brought Mundungus.”
“He’s very welcome, but tell him I counted the silverware before he arrived, thank you.”
The conversation moved away from them, and Tonks sucked air through her teeth, evaluating Draco with perhaps understandable concern.
“You’re Narcissa’s son, aren’t you?”
The obvious mistrust on Draco’s face must have been mistaken for an invitation to yes, please, keep talking. Tonks planted her arms akimbo and rocked on her heels in tense, restless movement. “Knew that, dunno why I asked. Mum, uh… She said she was sorry she didn’t go to the funeral.”
“Which?” he asked, frowning, because for a moment he’d forgotten. Then he twitched and went silent again.
“Your, uh…”
“My father.”
“Yup.”
“I understand.”
Her heels bounced. He tapped his foot.
“Was she really?”
“No,” Tonks admitted. “I don’t think so. Well. I think she was sorry she couldn’t see your mum, but she wasn’t sorry she wasn’t invited. I don’t think she… she never had much nice to say about Lord Malfoy.”
He couldn’t imagine what his father would have said about Andromeda Black, and still less about her half-blood daughter. Likely nothing. He wouldn’t have been caught in the same room to begin with.
“How much were you told about my family?”
“More than you were told about mine, I’ll bet,” she said. “Still not much. I didn’t know how old you were until I heard it from Molly you were in Ron’s year. It was a right shock to hear what happened with your Sorting. My mum didn’t believe it.”
“She knows about me?”
“Course she does. You’re a Malfoy, she’d know even if you weren’t her nephew. She still does read things, even if she doesn’t live with wizards anymore… And Sirius writes. I think they send letters sometimes, since he’s been out of Azkaban. Plus, earlier, at the Ministry, she, er…”
“She wasn’t pleased to see me.”
“No, but you can’t expect her to be, can you? She doesn’t know you from — anyway, she was sorry she couldn’t come tonight, but she wasn’t quite up to a party. Too many people, she said. And she doesn’t go into the Wizarding World very much anymore—”
“I imagine not.”
“—and it kind of freaked her out, seeing you. But she said if I saw you again, I should tell you—”
“Yes?”
“‘Blue isn’t your color.’”
He recoiled.
“Blue isn’t my color?”
“Yep. Washes you out.”
He stared at her in annoyed stupefaction. “Have you perhaps forgotten the part of the message including a greeting,” he said, “a courtesy, or any sort of account for the past fifteen years? A kind word, possibly? A notice of regret for a multi-decade length of absence?”
“Nope,” said Tonks. “Just to burn anything blue in your closet. Trust me, if you knew my mum, this wouldn’t be surprising.”
“But I don’t,” he said frostily. “I haven’t, you see. And being that I don’t often take counsel from people who are, in fact, strangers—”
“Yeah, but that’s not her fault. It’s not like she’s the one who wanted to leave.”
“She made a choice.”
“So did you!” Tonks said, incredulous. “The same choice, by the way—”
“Then she and I might understand each other better than you and I do,” he snapped. “Though we aren’t to know, because the idea of meeting me appears to exhaust her.”
“Mate. Cut her a break. This has stakes for her that it doesn’t for you.”
“Do not lecture me on stakes,” he said, with a tone the likes of which even his father might have admired. “My mother and I have risked everything—”
“I didn’t mean that. Not existential stakes, personal ones. There’s history here you don’t even know the beginning of.”
“What history? What happened between her and my mother? Tell me.”
Tonks shrugged.
“Tell me. It’s my birthright as much as yours.”
“Yeah?” she said, eyes glittering with mischief. “Riddle me this, brainiac: if the story’s your birthright, wouldn’t your mum have told you already?”
“Maybe she has,” he replied coolly. “Maybe I’m giving you the chance to correct the account. Maybe I’m interested in a second perspective.”
Tonks shrugged again. “Yeah, that’s fair,” she said. “Wish I could tell you, too. But you’d have to ask Mum, and from someone who’s tried it: good fucking luck.”
“You don’t know?”
“No, I don’t know what all went down between Baby Mum and her bitch sisters. You think that’s the kind of thing she loves to talk about? You couldn’t get my mum’s favorite flower out with the Cruciatus, if she’d made up her mind not to tell you. Course, you could say the same thing about me. And Sirius. You can’t get a secret out of a Black on pain of death, they’ll just keel over and die from pure spite.”
He let out a small, commiserating exhale through his teeth, because — well, there was a thought he’d had before.
“It’s not mine, either.”
“My mum doesn’t look back.”
“Neither does mine.”
Tonks’ mouth twitched. “See, I think we’re both lying,” she said. “I think your mum bluffs just like mine does, and it doesn’t fool her kid worth a damn.”
He resisted the questions that he wanted to ask, and would have asked, if he had the time and trust to pose them: What did our mothers do to each other? Do you know? Do they?
“An interesting counterfactual,” he said stiffly. “Tell Andromeda that my mother happens to like me in blue. And that I take my mother’s word in all things quite seriously.”
He moved past her into the dining room.
Cross-currents of conversation all drifted overhead, and he could rotate through them, like flipping channels on a radio:
“…interesting that you say so,” Kingsley was saying to Hermione, “because there’s been a bill for house-elf regulation stuck in committee for years, we just haven’t had the chance…”
“But can’t the Department of Magical Creatures do anything without the Wizengamot? Do you really need legislative oversight for every little thing?”
He laughed deeply. “Democracies tend to.”
“…dreadfully sorry, Bill, I’m sure it must be frustrating to be stuck with a novice on your team,” Molly said, heaping another baked potato on his plate. Bill gave an uncomfortable laugh.
“I mean, she’s not… she’s really talented, you have to give her that. It’s not her fault she drives me mental, she…”
“—so rude to you the last time we met, you should ask to transfer—”
“No… I’m sure she’ll get bored and leave by the end of the year, and then it’ll be the same again…”
Dinner was wiry coils of fusilli pasta with sautéed prawns the size of mice, roasted cherry tomatoes with their skins blackened and split like raisins, kalamata olives, and a thick, smooth, basil pomodoro sauce, potato skins fried to sunflower brown with liquid snowcaps of cheddar cheese, smoked bacon, and diced green onions, and baked potatoes crested with sour cream, fat rounds of rustic bread the color of coffee grounds, and frosted bottles of butterbeer that clinked pleasantly amongst the chattering and the laughter and the scrape of plates.
“…never a prefect myself… my Head of House said I lacked certain necessary qualities.”
“Like what?”
“Decorum,” said Tonks, “and a sense for when to keep my clothes on. Exact words.”
“Really!”
“Genetic problem,” said Sirius. “Really serious. And I would have made a wretched prefect, I spent too much time in detention with James. Lupin was our good boy.”
“Do stop. If Dumbledore hoped I would be able to control my friends, I need scarcely say that I failed dismally.”
“Thank God. Anyway, Ron, that’s all to say you shouldn’t feel down about it, and besides, I never would’ve made First Beater if I’d been prefect.”
“And I would have put years back on my life,” Remus murmured.
“You were on the team?” said Ron. “What did you fly?”
Sirius sat up, preening. “Nimbus Seven. Naught to seventy in ten seconds, snappy as hell. Problem is, the Nimbus model had this issue with countersteering, which is fine for a beater but won’t be for you, a keeper needs to be nailing his hairpins. Here’s what the Comet does better…”
Draco would have liked to know what it was the Comet did better, but as he reached for his glass, he caught a snare of Arthur’s conversation from the end of the table.
“…real shame, I’m sorry, but I think we killed it for you, Tonks.”
“Nah. He didn’t like me off the bat,” said Tonks, in low and unusually sober tones. “He could tell I wasn’t one of them… he asked a bunch of questions about my pedigree, and I couldn’t answer them.”
“What about Andromeda’s contact?” grunted Mad-Eye.
“That’s the only reason I got as far as an interview.”
“So it’s Plan B?”
“Later,” whispered Tonks, and then tipped her head down the table. Then she turned to Draco, and winked at him.
Draco stiffened, ears warm, and swept his attention back to the other end, where Sirius and Remus were describing a mythically grand fifteenth birthday party. Before he could catch the thread of conversation, however, there came a tap on his shoulder.
It was Molly. As he turned she slid a pair of dessert plates in front of himself and Hermione.
“For you two,” she whispered. “I’m sorry we didn’t have a proper celebration — I thought it might make the other boys feel bad — but I didn’t want either of you to think I’d forgotten.”
Each plate held an enormous red velvet cupcake frosted with a dollop the size of a turnip. The letter ‘P’ was iced atop in swirling red buttercream and gold sprinkles.
“Congratulations, dears,” she whispered.
“Thank you, Molly,” said Hermione, all wobbly.
Speaking soon would be essential to avoiding unforgivable rudeness, but he simply couldn’t find the words.
It occurred to him, with awful, cringing clarity, that he wasn’t Molly’s son. He was a random child who kept turning up on her doorstep, at her dinner table as one more hungry mouth among dozens. Not only that, but the fact he’d made prefect had taken a laurel away from her real son, who had no great richness of his own laurels to begin with — but if that had occurred to her, it was the furthest thing from her mind now, as she hurried to cut everyone rounds of lemon gateau.
“Rude,” said Hermione, elbowing him. He elbowed her back, but his mind was elsewhere.
“Pot, cauldron.”
“She was only trying to be nice. I’ll eat it, if you don’t want to.”
“No,” he said immediately, pulling his plate away. Given an inch, her sweet tooth would take continents. “It’s mine. You have your own.”
“Mine’s smaller than yours.”
“No, it isn’t!”
“It is. Yours has a hair in it, actually, I think. Let’s swap—”
Her spoon dive-bombed, and met the flat of his fork, a spar that devolved into a discreet wrestling match under the table. She ended up smudging frosting on his blue silk suit, and his cry of outrage was muffled by her yelp when he pinched her waist. She was wriggling around against his side and in the intense heat of combat he lost track of what anyone else was doing.
It seemed to be many a skirmish later that the plates were emptied, and the scrape of chairs declared the end of the meal. While wax sank from stubby candles, and the last dregs of butterbeer wine dwindled in their glasses, it was hard to miss Sirius rising from the end of the table and slipping out of the dining room, especially when he was soon followed by Arthur, Mad-Eye, Kingsley, and Tonks. Remus stayed, but as soon as he left the table to take his plate in, Ginny checked that the kitchen door was closed and then lurched over the table.
“C’mon,” she whispered. “I want to hear the news.”
“What?” said Hermione distractedly, licking a stripe of frosting from her hand. He lost the ability to hear what Ginny was saying.
“…catch them at it, but we’ve got to do it before Lupin comes back. Run!”
And then everyone was running, Ginny and Harry and Ron and Hermione, in a great quake of chairs and scrambling footsteps, for reasons unfathomable, but he wasn’t about to be sat there languishing his own idiocy while they did, so he threw back his chair and stalked after them. At the foot of the staircase Ginny mashed her finger to her lips and crept up the side on tiptoe to avoid creaking, sneaking past the veiled Walburga, and on the second floor she beckoned Harry to help her shove aside a large cabinet of expensive porcelain. Two pieces of Draco’s birthright tipped over and cracked.
Behind it hid a thin door, too narrow to fit any of them front-on, and it swung forth to reveal an equally narrow servant’s passage running between rooms. The walls were unfinished wood and snowy with what was probably asbestos. Ginny plunged in without reservation, followed by Harry, Ron, and Hermione, while Draco took a moment of silence for his father’s suit. Then he clambered in and closed the door behind him.
In the creaking, drafty darkness, it smelled thickly of sawdust and varnish. Voices wobbled through the thin walls, growing louder the farther they plunged into the passage, resolving gradually into full sentences:
“…ask Dumbledore, first.”
“That isn’t wise.” Kingsley’s voice was unmistakably deep. “We’re to minimize contact, remember? He’s under Ministry surveillance.”
“He’s also our leader.” That was Bill. “You have to admit, some help would be nice.”
“Information makes you dangerous.” It was Mad-Eye’s hushed growl. “No one can compromise everyone. That’s Dumbledore’s way, and it’s for our safety.”
“Fine. My point is, Dumbledore is on the Wizengamot, so he must have permissions—”
“Not for long.”
“What do you mean?” Sirius demanded. “What’s happening to him?”
“Polls say we’re going to lose about ten seats in the next election,” said Kingsley. “We aren’t going to put him up.”
Exclamations abounded. Hermione hitched a breath, though Draco didn’t consider this half as grim as some of the other things he’d heard today.
“Do you think it was my idea?” Kingsley was measured, but firm. “He flipped on the Umbridge bill. I’m glad he did it, if it helped Potter, and I understand that he’s never been playing for the same reasons as the rest of us, but there are a lot of people in my party he didn’t consult, and who wouldn’t have agreed to it if he did. He’s not a politician, he’s a chessmaster.”
“Make your point,” said Bill.
“Fine. Is it not obvious? He’s not a team player. My party doesn’t like him. And I’m tired of running around apologizing for him every time he sneaks off and strikes a deal without asking us.”
“Respectfully, fuck your party,” said Sirius pleasantly. “For one, the Wizengamot’s been a joke since Runcorn’s election. For two, Dumbledore represents the Order. He represents everything that stands against the Ministry. Boot him and it’s a declaration against us. Boot him and he looks weak, unsupported. Here’s an idea: why don’t you do your job, and get your party in order, instead of firing the one man who might be able to prevent another war?”
“Much as I appreciate instruction on how to run an office I’ve had for ten years from a man who spent seven of that in prison,” said Kingsley, with a glassy, pleasant baritone that conjured images of interminable committee meetings, “I would ask for some grace. Do you really imagine I’d do this if Dumbledore hadn’t already told me to?”
There was a beat.
“Well, there’s the second piece of shit news in two hours,” said Tonks, bleakly. “Because I botched the interview. So I can’t get us into the Department. Sorry.”
“Not your fault.”
“Happens to the best of us.”
“Besides, I couldn’t swing it, either.”
“Yeah, but you’re in Muggle Artifacts. It’s not your fault you don’t have platinum clearance.”
Hermione mouthed something more insistently.
“Doesn’t matter. We all knew we’d probably end up at Plan B, we said so when we started.”
“I’m still not convinced we’re out of luck on Plan A,” remarked Bill. “Seven grown wizards at a table, and none of us know someone with a badge? Mum, Dad, I can’t believe Mad-Eye’s the only auror you know.”
“They cleaned us out after the war.” Mad-Eye was gravelly. “That department’s a ghost town for Order members, lad, you don’t want to know the kind of people they’ve got in it.”
“What about admins, then? Not everyone with clearance is a cowboy or a spy.”
“Arthur,” said Sirius, “didn’t you say one of your sons was at the Ministry? What’s his name — the one who’s not around much? Peter? Perry?”
“Percy,” said Molly.
“Percy! Can we try Percy?”
“No,” said Arthur.
“…No?”
“No.”
A long beat. Draco shifted. His muscles burned from bracing himself up against the wall.
“Alright,” said Sirius. “Er — seriously, who here is friends with nerds? Does no one know a single bureaucrat?”
“That Malfoy boy probably does.”
Surprise forked up his spine at the sound of his name.
Mad-Eye croaked, “Putting it out there. If we’re talking freely.”
“Not that freely,” Arthur snapped. “We’ve had this argument. I’m sick of it, to tell you the truth.”
“They’ve already faced Death Eaters—”
“And you’ll go through me before you send them to do it again. They’re my children.”
“Not all of them.”
“Yes, all of them!” cried Arthur. “Those children came to us in the faith that they would be protected, that they would be taken care of—”
“They have fathers, Arthur! Mind your own children, they’re your lookout—”
“Their fathers can’t be here to fight for them, so you’ll deal with me!” roared Arthur. “Every child that needs me is my lookout! Every one! A father has a duty of care!”
There was a creak of furniture, a rearrangement of chairs.
“Let’s table the question of fighting,” said Sirius. “For now. I agree, fifteen is… fifteen’s quite young. But that’s not the only thing they can do. For instance, I think Harry should be let in on these meetings.” He cleared his throat. “As Harry’s godfather, I know that’s what James would have wanted.”
Molly gave a loud snort.
“I — sorry. Molly?”
“Nothing,” she said tartly. “I’m sorry, but it’s just— if you think for one moment that James would have let his son within a league of the Order, then you’ve forgotten him.”
Hermione winced. Harry was scowling.
“I’ve forgotten nothing,” said Sirius, with soft venom. “Harry brought it up with me the other day. Actually.”
“Of course he did.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing!”
“It’s not nothing, spit it out. You think I’m lying?”
“No! But honestly, of course he’s asking about the Order; I’m surprised it took him this long, with you carting him around everywhere like a pet—”
“I do not cart—”
“You do, you hardly let the boy alone! He’s not had a minute all summer without you filling his head with stories about the Marauders’ glory days! Half of which involve you all almost getting yourselves killed! What is he supposed to take away from that?”
“Because those were the only days his father had!” Sirius bellowed. “The glory days! That was his life, and Harry has a right to know about it! He has a right to know who his father was! And James has — had — would have had a right to tell him those stories!”
“Don’t pretend this is about James!”
“Of course it’s about James! Who the hell else would it be about?”
“Harry!”
“Both of you, pipe down. The boy is James Potter’s son,” said Mad-Eye. “If he’s got a savior complex, we all know damn well it doesn’t come from Black.”
“Thank you,” snapped Sirius.
There was a pause.
“Maybe not!” said Molly brightly. “Maybe not. But I happen to remember both James and Lily voted against recruiting children.”
“They were hardly more than children themselves. Sixteen years old, was Evans, when she signed on with me.”
“And I hope Harry can forgive you for that, Alastor, I really do.”
What ensued was like the moment before a falling glass struck the ground: that taut, quivering heartbeat before cacophony.
Hermione took a sharp breath. Draco’s stomach was trying to pulverize itself, and he was only eavesdropping. He couldn’t imagine what it must have felt like inside the room.
He couldn’t see Harry’s face. He didn’t want to.
There was a screech of chairs.
“Molly—”
“None of you have children. None,” she said. “None of you understand what you’re asking.”
A flurry of footsteps.
“Mum.”
“Molly, dear, it’s alright.”
Hermione stared at Draco in consternation. Her knuckles pressed tight to her mouth.
She whispered, “Do you—”
The door opened.
Light flooded the servants’ passage, followed by a man’s long shadow. Draco slowly stood up, blinking away blindness.
“My goodness,” said Remus. “And here I was worried I’d bored you.”
After three unconvincing denials, two suspiciously intricate excuses, and one beast of a chewing-out in tones paternal and length unbearable, they withdrew downstairs to make their goodbyes.
“So,” said Ron, “they’re up to something, for sure, then.”
“It’s something at the Ministry,” murmured Harry, leaning in and glancing over his shoulder, to check for Remus. “I’ve heard them talking about it before. Tonks was just the last part of it, they’re trying to break in. Can’t tell what they want or why, though.”
“Might be the auror office? Doesn’t make sense, though, Mad-Eye worked there for years… why break in now…”
“Or the Department of Mysteries,” said Hermione, nibbling her thumb. Ron broke off.
“Well — cheers,” he said, bemused. “How’d you come up with that?”
“Whatever they want requires platinum clearance,” she murmured. “That’s the highest level. Reserved for high-ranking aurors, political leaders, and Unspeakables. And Tonks said she was sorry she couldn’t get them ‘into the Department,’ so it’s either the Department of Mysteries, or another one that’s very classified.”
“That’s correct,” said Draco, mildly impressed. “Of course, it could be something else, you know. Information, or something from the Minister’s desk. The Department of Magical Law Enforcement, for example.”
“But you don’t need platinum clearance to get into the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.”
“Some branches.”
“That still doesn’t explain—”
“Found it!” Remus called, strolling back in with a gilded goblet. He found them in a state of suspicious silence and attentiveness. His eyes narrowed.
“To refresh your memory, I grew up sleeping two beds down from Sirius Black and James Potter,” he said. “You must understand that I know what it sounds like when people are scheming.”
“We’re not scheming,” said Harry, which was a promising start that he ruined with: “We’re talking about— stuff.”
“Yes,” said Hermione fatalistically.
“Yeah,” said Ron loyally, with heart.
Remus’s eyebrows entreated them to stop digging. He folded his arms and pressed his lips together, losing pathetically in his wrestle with a smile.
The scorch of paternal exasperation was starting to leave a char on Draco’s pride. It called for diversionary measures. There came a time in every man’s life when it became necessary to make hard calls, and do what must be done.
He pointed at Harry.
“Potter has a girlfriend.”
“Fuck OFF!” exclaimed Harry, as Remus burst into laughter that shook the whole house.
“You’re getting to that age, I s’pose — ha — I’m sorry you didn’t feel you could tell us—”
“I didn’t feel like telling ANYBODY,” said Harry, loudly, “and I still don’t! Because my life is full of GITS and RATS!”
It was, and Draco was amused that it had taken this long to notice; but it also successfully distracted Remus. He deposited the Floo pot and wandered off, chuckling to himself.
“Great,” Harry snapped, once he was gone. “Now I’ve got to go tell Sirius, because if he hears it from Remus, I’ll never live it down. Thanks a lot.”
“You’re welcome,” said Draco, quite sincerely pleased with himself. Remus’s laughter was still echoing from the foyer.
After allowing him a bit more disconsolate muttering, Hermione cleared her throat, and conscripted Harry into a bruising hug goodbye. Harry acquiesced with grace and a softened expression.
She stepped back, brushing herself off, and gave him a small smirk. “Try not to get arrested again, Harry. I know it’s just a few days, but you can do it.”
“Thanks, Hermione. And thanks, Draco, for the lawyer. And for coming.”
“See Granger,” he said. “Except for the bit about believing in you; my over-under is forty-eight hours.”
“You know, from you, that’s really sweet.”
They retreated to the Floo grate, stacking wood together to make a fire — doing it the muggle way, by necessity, and so involving several heated debates between Harry and Hermione about kindling formation — and in the middle of their work, someone hollered Harry’s name. Grumbling at Draco in particular, he left in a hurry, and Draco, Hermione, and Ron finished preparing the grate.
Ron muttered, “Are you lot… alright, you know? With… everything?”
Draco, who had been massaging his temple in anticipation of another threat to Harry’s life, was pleasantly surprised and flattered by Ron’s question. Hermione picked at her fingers, apparently unable to answer it.
“What?” she said, in a steady, if high-pitched voice. “Me? I’m fine.”
“Yeah,” he said, “but with Viktor, and the summer, and everything. That muggle doctor. He help any?”
She gave an unconvincing smile. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’ll be fine. Don’t you worry about me.”
“Fat chance of that.” Ron turned to Draco. “What about you?”
“Exhausted, thanks for asking,” he said immediately. “Besides which, my knees hurt, I’ve a stress headache, two blisters, and a splinter.”
“Don’t care, take it like a man,” said Ron. Then, lower: “But seriously.”
He contemplated what to say to this. Finally, he settled on: “I’ve been worse.”
Ron nodded and brushed himself off, adopting a tone of brittle confidence. “Great,” he announced. “None of us can lie for shit. Good to know.”
-Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
-Okay. If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me, so… thanks for the well-wishes. I really appreciated them. You are the sweetest, kindest people, and I can’t tell you how many times over I would have lost faith if not for your support. This is a group project, seriously.
-I’m alive(!), more so than I have been, and I’m back in a place where I can post. I, uh, would like to promise that it won’t happen again? But for health reasons I can’t necessarily do that, so instead I’ll say: I’m not dead! And I have invested simply way too much time into this story to abandon it. Can’t keep a bad dog down, and all that.
-This version of the Wizengamot is a representative body that’s roughly adapted from the way proportional representation works in the U.K. Basically, the Wizengamot system is that each party runs on a single ticket, and then gets a number of seats proportionate to their vote. Because wizards are so geographically diffuse, it didn’t make sense to me for them to have single-member districts, since nowhere would be concentrated enough to really have common interests; instead, I think they’d run a full vote for the country, and just have representatives from the party choose amongst themselves who sits the Wizengamot. This also explains why someone with a lot of notoriety, like Dumbledore, could maintain a seat for a long time (the duration of the original series) while other members come and go.
-Thank you, Gatz Nation, for continuing to make me happy.
-All you fans of Kreacher out there, don’t worry: I haven’t forgotten him.
-Hey. Don’t worry about it.
-Next chapter: “Rumors on the Hogwarts Express.”
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