Chapter 63: The Hogwarts Resistance
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
It was a bright cold day in Hogsmeade, and there were patrolmen at the gates.
Sometimes they would call one of the students aside and ask for a permission slip, or to see their wand; other times they would stand there with dull beefeater stares, eyes lidded under the flat brim of a patrolmen’s hat, as if they could walk through over you without turning their head.
Their presence quelled the natural chatter of students approaching their first Hogsmeade visit. Even the third years dropped their voices to a whisper, and through the gates, the streets were thinner than usual, students electing not to do their usual noisy loitering where someone of the law might apprehend them. It looked as though someone had taken an eraser and blotted out odd parts of a normal Hogsmeade visit: not all of it, and nothing in particular, but perhaps a group of girls chatting here; a trace of laughter, there; a stray firework erupting from Zonko’s, in violation of ordinance, or some cheerful purple-haired ruffian marking up the walls behind Madam Puddifoot’s. It was an unfinished scene.
A clock tower tolled. He turned up the collar of his cloak to keep the wind from biting him, but it whipped and snapped at his ankles in recrimination. Spinning skirts of brown leaves and airbound dust rose from the cobblestone and bobbed beside them like a detritus ballet.
“How awful for Pansy,” said Hermione. Her hair was twisted up in a businesslike knot that had a half-life of perhaps twenty minutes, since parts of it were already escaping in furtive strands around her temples and neck, which fluttered in a very engaging way whenever the wind blew at her.
A length of gauze trailed from one of her woolen gloves.
She had her journal in one arm and her schoolbag in the other, and had subjected both unhappily to search by patrolmen at the gate. Harry and Ron strolled behind them at a distance, for covertness; Hermione said it was something they did in “spy movies,” and he didn’t mind the privacy, personally.
His jumper was navy blue, and his fur mantle swept the pavement behind him with an auspicious whisper, and made people sidestep out of his way. He took her arm to escort her up a tall shelf of pavement, and then he kept it, idly, on the pretense of keeping cover. The patrolmen didn’t tend to stare when they were walking together.
The patrolman on the corner even nodded at him as they passed, and he felt idly irritable. He increased their pace and drew her down an alley onto a thinner street, pressing her close enough that she was almost hidden behind his shoulder.
He was aware, however reluctantly, that he was crowding her, but she seemed too distracted to notice. She was back to touching him, now, and he was finding all sorts of ways to take advantage of it; when she leaned on his shoulder to adjust her shoe, he touched her waist, casually, not indecently, but in a way as to provide a chaste support for a dear friend as she removed a pebble from her sole. He touched her shoulder to keep her from opening a door — though that was chivalry, naturally, as was a hand offered to help up a set of steps, or assistance in removing a stray leaf from her hair.
If she noticed, then she allowed it, and did them both the courtesy of not remarking on it. She had been subdued since her detention, and no one could blame her, but if it made her less inclined to mind the limits of friendly conduct, he wouldn’t be the one to bring it up.
“Granger, I didn’t know you cared for her.”
“I don’t. I still don’t want her to marry Cassius Warrington,” she said briskly. “No woman deserves that. I’m also frankly horrified that Daphne’s parents tried to arrange your engagement without asking you first. What a nightmare. Thank God your mother said no.”
“I, also, would have said no,” he said, a mite tetchy. “To marrying Astoria Greengrass. Let’s establish that.”
She paused. Her tone was light. “Could she make you?”
“My mother? No. She has the power to contract a betrothal, since I’m underage, but she wouldn’t.”
“Are you sure?”
“Reasonably. Apart from any considerations of my happiness — which mothers have been known, on occasion, to harbor for their sons — she can’t force me to marry someone, and if I refuse a match, it’s embarrassing for everyone concerned. The bride’s humiliated, her family’s slighted, my mother looks weak, and I look rakish. There’s no reason to put us in that position.”
“Does she know that?”
“Know what?”
“That you’d refuse,” she said, frowning.
As they passed Zonko’s, something from inside gave a maniacal cackle, and a firework popped. He recalled his mother’s face when Hermione had stepped through the Manor door; her slow, costumed entrance from the grand stair.
“I think she suspects,” he said vaguely. “Anyway. Can you imagine it? The Greengrass-Malfoys of Wiltshire?”
She glowered.
“A joke, dear.”
“That’s revolting. You’re both far too young. And you’d be a terrible husband for her.”
“Would I?”
“Yes. You’d irritate her.”
“I don’t think Daphne finds me irritating.”
“And that’s just one more reason it wouldn’t work. At least one partner should be able to see past their own nose.”
“Maybe I ought to have you draw up a candidate list. Happen to know any nice girls, Granger?”
Points of color appeared in her cheeks. “None that deserve what you’re suggesting. Are we close, by the way?” she said briskly, lifting her head. “We’re late.”
“No, you’re late. I’m arriving precisely when I said I would, which is when I feel like it.”
“Pithy,” she said. “Cute. Some of us, however, said we would be there at one o’clock.”
“Then you’re fine. Daphne will assume that means one-thirty, and Neville’s probably still trying to find his socks.”
He turned into a side street that shambled up to a battered inn. Under a facade of soiled moss and splintering wood, pockmarked with the holes in the plaster where something had taken a bite out of it, there crouched a dingy wooden building with windows black from grime. It was crowned with a rusty hanging sign of a hog’s head. A skinny billygoat wandered about the tundra of a yard, bleating.
“This was where you wanted to meet?”
“You said you wanted discretion.”
“Ah,” she said. “Yes. Well, it has that.”
The billygoat screamed. Hermione’s mouth did something suspicious.
“I was following instructions—”
“No, no, it’s very good! It’s definitely good.”
“I don’t lark around places like this in my free time! I have a mansion! I don’t slum it for kicks—”
“I mean, does it smell? Yes, it does. I feel that we have reached a point, as friends, where we can be honest with each other that some buildings do, in fact, have smells. We can accept that.”
“‘—get an island for your pet kneazle’ rich, you understand, not just tea at the Ritz and a flashy watch—”
“Though I’m hesitant to mention it, if you really haven’t noticed. I have to assume you weren’t aware.”
“—could clear the dining room at the Salazar Club and tell the waiters to have a ballet choreographed before I get there — I don’t know if you actually understand how rich I am, is my point, because otherwise you wouldn’t be implying that it’s my fault we’re here. Would you like me to do something impressive? Is that what you’d like?”
“Oh, no! I’m very impressed.”
“Really.”
“Mmhm.”
He glared at her. She was officially losing the battle against a smile. A humiliating defeat for both of them.
“I’m getting you a house for Christmas.”
He stalked up the path.
She laughed, and then stopped laughing.
“Wait. What?”
The door shrieked when he swept it open, and she hurried after him.
“Don’t, though. Don’t? Don’t do that. Draco. You’re joking, aren’t you? You are joking.”
“In France,” he added, and she made the loveliest sound.
It was the same it had been last year; no one had so much as swept it since. The bar was filmed in grime, and the candle-stubs on each sticky tabletop drooled wax into grimy saucers. A certain spongy texture of the floor leant the impression of packed straw, and the stairs leading up to the second floor were rickety wood.
“Aberforth,” said Draco to the bartender, and the man peered out from behind a sheaf of white hair. His eye was electric blue, and the only bright color in the room. “We’re going up.”
“There’s more of you?”
“Only a few.”
The barman grunted. “Password?”
“Trois Glorieuses.”
Harry came in behind them, hastily stuffing the Invisibility Cloak back into his bag. Ron whistled quietly at the state of the place.
“They’re with us,” Hermione added.
“On you go, then,” grunted Aberforth, jerking his head at the stairs. “You paid for it. Don’t need my invitation.”
He had. That was the worst part, too.
“No trouble getting into Hogsmeade, was there?” Hermione murmured to Harry. They climbed the staircase and crested onto a tiny landing with a single door. Draco checked that the hallway was clear. “Did you use the Notice-Me-Not, like I told you? And Muffliato? And the Cloak?”
“Yeah, yeah, we were careful.”
“We’re not doing anything illegal,” muttered Ron. “It’s a study club, not a guerrilla group.”
“I’d rather not find out where Umbridge thinks the line is.”
Draco opened the door and nearly jumped out of his skin.
“HEY! IT’S MALFOY!”
The room had twice more people than chairs, and twice as many chairs as it could fit. Neville and Daphne were there, in pride of place at the weathered old longtable, but so was the rest of the bloody castle: Ginny, Dean, Seamus, Lavender, Parvati and Padma, Fred and George and Lee Jordan, Cho and Anthony Goldstein and some Ravenclaws he didn’t even know, Katie, Angelina, Colin Creevey, Ernie Macmillan, Justin Finch-Fletchley, Hannah Abbott, Susan Bones, and some more Hufflepuffs from the quidditch team, including — wonder of wonders — Cedric Diggory, one of the few seventh years present, who stood at the back of the room with his arms folded, like a presiding king. He smiled and winked.
Half of them chorused variations on hello. The other half stared like they expected him to turn into a bat.
He turned to Hermione and lifted a finger. She raised an eyebrow.
He corrected himself, and then turned to Harry.
“Potter.”
“Okay, right, okay,” gasped Harry, squeezing through the door, “so, I have a good reason for this. Really.”
“How many people did you bloody tell?”
“And where’d you find the time?” marveled Ron.
“Oh, it isn’t his fault, really,” sighed Luna Lovegood. Perched in the window, she wore a large headpiece in the shape of an egret, which occasionally rustled its wings. “Harry was stung by a wrackspurt at the end of last year, and it makes you incredibly popular. People are drawn to it subconsciously.”
Ron hooted with glee.
“Thank you, Luna,” Hermione said, in tones of: for nothing . “Harry, do I even need to say…?”
“I only technically told Cho,” said Harry defensively. Cho had hurried over to kiss his cheek, but was now somewhat hiding behind his shoulder, not unreasonably, considering how Hermione was glaring at both of them.
“And I only told Marietta,” she said hastily, “but I guess she must’ve told Luna, too.”
“And I told Padma,” agreed Luna, “who told Parvati, who told Lavender, and she told Seamus, who told Dean and Ginny—”
“Who told Colin,” said Dean, wincing, “who told Justin—”
“Who told Susan, who told Leanne, who told Hannah, who told Ernie—”
“Who told Cedric,” added Cedric, grinning mischievously. Ernie blushed and muttered something about duress.
“—and Terry, and Sheila, and Mandy, and Michael—”
“Seriously, Abbott?”
“I thought it was a study group,” wailed Hannah. “She said Hermione Granger was giving a tutorial! I assumed we’d be doing homework!”
“—who told Zacharias,” said Luna, and heaved a great breath, “but I don’t know the Gryffindors, I suppose you’re all here on invitation.”
“Blimey,” remarked Ginny. “Good memory.”
“Yes, rather,” she agreed. “I can remember my mother’s womb.”
“No, you can’t,” Hermione said crossly.
“Oi!” Ron clapped his hands. “We’re all here now, and we can’t take it back to the store, so we might as well try it on, right?”
“This was supposed to be a discreet group,” Hermione whispered.
“You invited Neville,” muttered Draco. “How much discretion did you expect?”
“Let me introduce everybody,” said Cho quickly. “This is Marietta Edgecombe, my best friend, she’s really wonderful; and that’s Luna Lovegood, and this is Anthony, Terry, Michael— everyone, this is Harry, my boyfriend. Say hello.”
“Hello, Harry-my-boyfriend,” said Michael.
“Hiiiiiii, Harry,” crooned Terry. Harry seemed to be searching for a rock to crawl under and die with.
Colin wrestled to the front of the crowd, holding his camera. A press badge around his neck read OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHER, HOGWARTS ENQUIRER. He appeared to have made it himself.
“Picture, Harry?” he chirped.
“No, thanks, Colin.”
He saluted, replaced his lens cap, and turned to address the second year next to him. It was Dennis — who must have snuck out of the castle, since second years weren’t allowed in Hogsmeade. “No pictures,” he said sternly, and Dennis dutifully tucked a disposable camera back into his robes.
“Seamus,” said Ron. The many-piercéd boy was leaning against the back wall with Dean. He jerked his chin.
“Sup, Weasley.”
“Thought you didn’t believe Harry, mate,” said Ron coolly.
“A’might,” said Seamus, indifferently. “Or a’might not. What’s it to you? But if you’re gonna tell the English government to go fuck itself, you’re pure mad if you think I’m not with you.”
Harry blinked.
“Tell it to… what?”
“That’s what this is, isn’t it?” said Katie. “We’re here to fight Umbridge. It’s the Hogwarts resistance.”
There was a lull while Harry gathered himself. The eyes of the crowd accused him expectantly.
“No,” he said weakly. “It’s just a club. We’re trying to learn how to defend ourselves. Against the Dark Arts.”
“She is the Dark Arts, mate,” cried Lee Jordan. “She’s the institution! She’s the man!”
A lot of the sixth and seventh years seemed to find this tremendously rousing, and gave a sort of disorganized cheer.
“No — well, I guess, but — we’re not here to pick fights. I don’t know how we’d even — the point is, we’re just practicing.”
“For what?” said Marietta nervously. “If not her, though? What’s worse than she is?”
“What’s worse than her?” He raised his hands, slightly agitated. “I dunno — if Voldemort comes knocking—”
“OI!”
“Don’t say it—”
The room was filled with loud objections. Draco shifted his weight onto one foot and gave Harry a hard look.
Hermione waved her arms, trying to reel in the crowd.
“Excuse me! Excuse me! Order, please! I’ll go ahead and speak for Harry, since it was, er, my idea — I’m Hermione Granger, I’m a Gryffindor — I’m a Gryffindor prefect—”
The chatter, if anything, grew louder.
“We can answer your questions,” she cried, “sorry — if you could just be quiet—”
Her voice vanished under the din.
Draco was drawing his wand for Silencio when Ron hauled Colin’s chair out from under him, jumped up on it, and banged his fist on the ceiling.
“SHUT UP!” he roared.
It was swiftly done. Someone at the back of the room sniffled.
Ron gestured at Hermione, and hopped down.
Hermione cleared her throat.
“Thank you, Ron,” she said. “So — yes. We’re here to learn Defense Against the Dark Arts, on the understanding that we will need to use them at some point. I’ll let Harry explain the story behind that, but if you’re here then you probably already know it, and if you believe him and you still want to join, then you can sign this piece of paper.” She held up a scroll of blank parchment. “If you don’t, then you can leave, and none of us will say we saw you here today. But if you sign, you can’t say a word about it to anyone who wasn’t in this room. That’s important. Think of this like a — a magical non-disclosure agreement.”
One of Cho’s friends raised her hand. Hermione pointed at her.
“What happens if we do?” she said. “Tell?”
“Good question,” said Hermione pleasantly. “Anyone else?”
The mild ripple of impression and old-fashioned fear was, alas, incredibly attractive. He started to think about her smirk and the various things one could do with it, and had to stop it.
“Hannah, yes.”
“D’you think he’s back, then?” she said in a small voice. “V— You-Know-Who?”
Hermione hesitated.
“Yes. He killed Viktor.”
Susurration of doubt and fear, wrestling for conviction of the room. Hermione lifted her voice.
“He’s a man,” she said calmly. “He’s only a man. He was killed once, and they’ll kill him again. In the meantime, we ought to all try and do our part.”
He hated to hear her talk that way, as if she was joining an army.
It was one thing to fight Dolores Umbridge, up-jumped bureaucrat, and the Hogwarts administration. But they weren’t joining the Order. They weren’t putting themselves in the Dark Lord’s path. Neither Hermione nor anyone in the room — with the possible exception of Harry — could know what that would bring, and a gorge rose in his throat at the idea of them finding out.
He lacked the means to show them that to live meant you had to run. Let the people stronger and older and wiser raise their wands in defense of the good fight. Let them stand in the line of fire, their faces to the foe, and have poems read at their funerals. He’d take his friends alive.
He needed Hermione, in particular, alive. And she was standing there with her feet apart, fists at her sides, aglow with terrible purpose, as if she intended to make him fight tooth and nail for it.
“Yes, Ernie.”
“What’s wrong with your hand?” he said brusquely.
Her face shuttered. She glanced at Draco, who shook his head — what right has he to know? — but she replied, with steely candor: “Umbridge.”
“She hurt you?” cried Cho.
“Yes, she—”
“But she’s a teacher!”
“What did she do?”
“Did she cut you herself?”
“Did you tell McGonagall?”
“Did you tell Dumbledore?”
“Is it because you’re—”
The din crested, teetering on the knife-edge of panic.
“Would you all shut up,” snapped Hermione.
The room did. Ron, who had been opening his mouth for a reprise, peered down in impressment. Draco’s mouth curved.
“Yes,” she said thinly, “she hurt me. Yes, it was bad. I did tell McGonagall, and she was angry, and… said she would speak to Dumbledore about it, but… she’s not optimistic. She said Umbridge isn’t properly a school employee, you see, and even if they fired her, she would still be around — only angrier, and with less to do, and — there’s politics involved. Anyway, I’m not going to talk about it, except to say that I would try to avoid detentions.”
Colin swallowed and sat up straighter.
“I don’t know what she’ll do if she catches us at this, so I’m not going to find out. This club is going to be a place for us to help each other learn, and figure things out, and not… have to worry about being punished. Because we’re classmates. We’ve been here for five years — longer, some of us — and we’ve got to count on that. Each other. If anything.”
She paused, and seemed somewhat surprised that everyone was still listening to her. Her face turned the golden pink of tea roses. “So,” she said, “yes. Well. Thank you for that, and, er. Sorry for snapping.”
Ginny whooped and applauded. Several of the others broke into confused applause, as well, including Ernie Macmillan, who stood up and started whipping his hands together like she’d announced a run for Minister.
Hermione reddened at once from rose to tomato and gestured, flailing, at Harry. “Now-Harry-tell-them-about-You-Know-Who!” she blurted, and sat down next to Ginny. Ron hunkered down beside her, thumping her shoulder, and Ginny leaned over to elbow her gleefully. She received celebration with bemused embarrassment.
Nervously, with occasional glances at Hermione for support, Harry had started to talk. The tale of the Third Task cast a hushed pall over the room, and the cheer of Hermione’s exhortation dwindled away, replaced by grave fascination. Even Luna Lovegood had cast off her dreamy stupor, and was staring at Harry intensely, a faint line growing between her eyebrows.
Daphne leaned over to Draco. “How rousing,” she whispered. “I feel inspired to go burn a brassiere or something. Hoorah.”
“You’ve gone native.”
“Ecstatically. I love a good zeitgeist.”
“There’s a saying, you know, about your friends jumping off bridges.”
She clutched her chest. “Why? You haven’t jumped off any bridges without me, have you?”
He rolled his eyes. She chortled to herself and patted his arm.
Ron was leaning over to say something to Hermione, speaking close in her ear. She tilted her head at him, frowned, and nodded, turning to speak back into his. They were rather cozy.
He tapped his foot. She had functional hearing. He didn’t need to tongue her ear.
Ron said something that made her break into a giggle, touching the back of her hand to her mouth.
Draco tapped his foot faster.
Hermione rolled her shoulders out of her peacoat, wriggling, and Ron reached over to help tug her out of it, his hands brushing her shoulders, her back, helping tug a bit of her hair out of the buttons. There was no reason for him to be touching her hair. There was no reason for anyone, ever, at all, to be touching her hair, as if they had any right to it.
Draco felt cold and hot at once, uncomfortably caught between extremes, skin prickling. At the bottom of his stomach there was an oily pool of dislike and it was growing in temperature. He had an idea of going over and sitting down next to her, and making her look at him. And he could lean in and put his mouth to her ear, and help her with her jacket, and sit with his hand somewhere on her chair, and if anyone looked over at her or her hair or the clever curl of her mouth, they would understand that those things weren’t for them. They weren’t for anyone. But if they were going to be for anyone, it wouldn’t be them.
Hermione turned to say something to Ron again, touching his arm to get his attention, and Ron leaned his head in without taking his eyes from Harry. They were chatting in the quiet shorthand of people who knew each other too well to bother with full sentences, a half-language of grunts and nods and glances at the front of the room, as if they were old partners going in on a venture, and the venture was Harry.
Ron fancied her. This had struck him over and over again, and yet he was surprised each time. As if it was any particular surprise that Ron would fancy her, spending as much time with her as he did; as if he could help it, seeing her stumble down the girls’ stairs every morning with her useless hairties and her horribly abused bookbag, the big wild breathless smiles, the way she arched her neck back over the chairs when she stretched, the perfect tie knots, the tiny ridge of scars from biting her bottom lip— it wasn’t to be helped. Not when Hermione was sitting there with her legs crossed, giving quiet little laughs that tugged at him like she held a cord that ran right into his stomach.
Her laugh could make a very smart man want to do stupid things, like walk over and tip back her chair and ruin a friendship.
His mouth tasted bitter and metallic, and he held his tongue between his teeth to keep it still.
No one would be surprised if she fancied Ron, either. They were a matched set: Harry’s girl and Harry’s boy, brains and brawn, bookworm and man-about-castle. It fit. They’d match.
And she’d get the Burrow, too. That was a part of it. The Weasleys were a large, cheerful, friendly family already half in love with her by headcount, and she could slot right into it, as she’d already done once, and never worry if Molly Weasley approved of her, or if an errant grandparent would denigrate her from behind a tapestry. It would be a magical home, just what she’d wanted. It would enfold her seamlessly and love her passionately, and she would deserve it.
He was acutely, painfully unhappy, so much that it startled him to realize that he could feel this bad when he’d been fine only a moment ago. Nothing had happened except that he’d looked over and thought about her being in love with Ron, and then his heart had started to cannibalize itself.
Harry finished his story, fidgeted in silence for a moment — wincing, as if preparing for a hit — and then was almost bowled over by a tide of applause.
“What,” said Harry weakly, “so you all — believe me, and everything? Because I know the Prophet hasn’t, it hasn’t said the most — flattering things—”
Cedric stood up.
“I believe you,” he said. He held the attention of the room effortlessly, and when he spoke, even the sallow Hufflepuff pricked up his ears. “I wasn’t there,” he continued, “but I know you’re not a liar. You’re a good bloke, and Dumbledore trusts you. If you tell me that Voldemort’s back, why wouldn’t I think it’s true?”
“Yeah, but I — Cedric, hang on — aren’t you Head Boy?”
Fred and George gave a hiss.
“Sure. Supposed to set an example for the younger students, aren’t I?” Cedric smiled the smile that had stolen, somewhat uselessly, a hundred girls’ hearts. “So here I am.”
Fred and George stopped hissing, though they remained wary.
“Right,” said Hermione, relieved. “On to scheduling! I drew up a chart of the week, and I’d like everyone to fill in where they’re busy and where they’re free, so we can optimize for when the most people are open— there’s at least one, two, three quidditch practices we’ll have to negotiate, so please only mark yourself busy if it’s an unavoidable commitment, as opposed to something you’d prefer to do! Mealtimes are on the table, so be advised that you may have to skip lunch—”
She unfurled the chart on the table and handed out quills, gesturing with the inspired fervor of an artist at her many beautiful color-coded charts. She was having the time of her life.
She was lovely. Ridiculous, also. The parts of his brain responsible for compartmentalization were all on fire.
“Our first meeting will be sometime in late October. If your name’s on the list, we’ll make sure you hear about it — and don’t write, we’ll come and find you. The Ministry watches owl post, you never know what they’ll pick up.”
The crowd congregated to add the last signatures. Hermione folded up the list of names and the schedule and placed both into the back of her journal, which she tucked under her arm.
“Thank you all,” she said quietly. “I think this is going to be really, really good. I honestly do.”
Ginny hooted and clapped. The group followed her example, with varying enthusiasm. Lavender rolled her eyes, but she’d signed her name, too.
“Oh,” Hermione exclaimed. “Well. Thanks, I guess. For that. Er, you can leave now. Please. Thanks.”
With titters, everyone clambered to their feet and filed out. “Bang-on, Madam Chairwoman,” said Ginny, clapping her on the shoulder.
They marched out into the cold pale sunshine, and the stream of students spilled out in many winnowing groups across the cobble. Owls rustled overhead, and the day was late, but there was a pleasure in the sort of hush over the street now — a sense of something contained, a captured secret, a silence taken by choice, not held by force.
Cho lingered behind. She laced her arm through Harry’s, who startled, and held his elbow out awkwardly, as if he had never seen anyone walk with a lady before. Draco despaired of him.
“That was really well done, Harry! You’re a great storyteller.”
“Er, thanks.”
“I mean, the part where you fought the spiders in the Maze? That spell was really brilliant, can you show me how to do that?”
“It wasn’t… I mean, Hermione taught me how to do most of the magic in the Triwizard Tournament,” he said, with a silent appeal for help, but Hermione folded her arms, amused. “She’s the brilliant one. I just do what she tells me.”
“And you drilled for it with the bloody wall, did you?”
“And Draco throws chairs at me, sometimes,” he amended.
Disclaimers notwithstanding, Cho whipped up an excited torrent of praise on their way down the hillside; apparently Harry’s speech had done a number. Harry himself continued his transformation into a turtle. Draco would have considered it wildly outside of his business to say so, but he didn’t think that Harry was much enjoying it, and he wondered frankly whether it was giving Cho any joy to say so, either — it read as a little nervous, as if she was being graded on her ability to recite Harry’s accomplishments in chronological order.
At one point, Cho remarked on the number of girls who had showed up to the meeting, and Hermione gave a derisive snort.
“Most of them were younger than me,” said Harry, strangled. “And I have a girlfriend.”
“I don’t see what difference that makes,” Hermione said. “You play quidditch and you spent last year all over the papers. You do have a reputation.”
“Half the school thinks I’m a lying murderer!”
“Reckon that does it, for some of them,” said Ron, slinging an arm around his shoulder, though he appeared not to notice Cho’s look of distress. “It’s the James Dean thing. Look at you, with the hair and the inscrutable sadness. Beat ’em off with a stick.”
“I’m not James Dean!” Then, passionately: “I am not inscrutably sad!”
“Quite the inscrutable thing to say,” murmured Daphne. “If you ask me.”
“Oh, yeah. Can’t scrute a knut out of this guy.”
“One might even consider us… scruteless.”
“Unscruted as hell,” said Ron. She gave an ugly shriek of laughter, clapping a hand over her mouth. The two of them were far too pleased with their mediocre joke, and continued to snigger to themselves; Draco atoned, not for the first time, for introducing Daphne to the Weasley brand of humor.
“Scrute my ass, perhaps,” said Harry entreatingly.
They were passing the Three Broomsticks, with its glimmering lights that flushed the sidewalk gold, and couples crowded together over tankards of froth in the windows. It was less full than usual, but even so, the warmth and sweet smells spilling out of its doorway were like a window into a different Hogsmeade, from last year, or the year before.
“Harry, d’you want to have a butterbeer?” Cho said.
“Oh — actually, I reckoned I might have a chat with these three—”
“They can come, too,” she said eagerly, with a glance at Marietta, who was hi “ ding behind her shoulder. Hermione snorted with unusual emphasis.
Great!” said Harry, with uncomplicated delight at how things had worked out for him. “Ginny?”
Ginny, who had been uncharacteristically quiet for the journey down the hill, glanced over her shoulder and gave a small smile. “Nah,” she said. “Got a date.”
There was a rousing show of solidarity from the female contingent. Cho gave the whistling firework-screech that girls sometimes used to greet good news or perhaps a very small dog. Luna gasped: “Oh, that’s why your aura’s all yellow.”
“Who is it?” demanded Ron — not angry so much as bemused, like someone had announced the nuptials of their pet gerbil.
“Michael Corner.”
“Michael?” Cho cried. “Oh, he’s lovely! I hope you like him.”
“I, er… hope so too.”
“Handsome,” offered Marietta.
“It’s true,” agreed Daphne. “If a bit short. But then, Ginny’s ripping tall, it can’t be helped.”
It was true; like all of her clan, Ginny had popped up over the summer, and was coming into her final form as a lamppost. She was already the same height as Harry, who said, with a bit of lingering surprise: “Oh, well — have fun, then, Gin.”
“You, too, loverboy.”
There was a beat where they stared at each other with different flavors of apprehension: Ginny, apparently waiting for someone to say something, though from her expression perhaps not even she knew what it was; and Harry, regretting not knowing.
With a short nod to Cho, she took off trotting across the street, her red hair flickering like a trail of coppertips in the wind.
“She’s really cool,” announced Cho, when she was out of earshot. “I like her.”
“Yeah, she’s a mate,” said Harry. “Anyway. Drinks?”
Inside the warm pub bustled and clattered, full of glasses and light. Tables suited to their party’s size were hard to come by, and though Draco was content to evict some of the third years, Harry forged on to the back of the barroom, where one group had taken off and left the detritus of their meal to stave away vultures.
The crowds obscured, until it was too late to avoid them, the Slytherins tucked in a booth across the aisle: Tracy Davis and Millicent Bulstrode, along with Goyle, Pansy, Theo, and a short, yellow-haired girl in a chair. Theo was leaning against the window, his forehead balanced on the glass, watching Millie and Goyle laugh about something with weary fondness. Pansy had her ring back on, and she was smiling with the first sincere glint of happiness he’d seen her wear all year. She reached for some of Theo’s butterbeer and he swatted her away. Astoria giggled, wearing a white curl of froth on her lip, and Tracy dabbed it off with a handkerchief.
He felt himself on the outside of something warm and closed-off, and consulted his feelings for any tightness or misery — but it wasn’t there. A residual pang, perhaps, the echo of something, but mostly there was a great weariness, as if bracing for the ordeal that might happen if they noticed him. Then again, perhaps they wouldn’t. They were preoccupied with their own conversation, and he was being ushered into the booth alongside Hermione and Daphne, while Harry bobbed off with Cho to get drinks.
That possibility vanished, however, when Daphne saw them.
“Tori?” said Daphne brightly. She waded over to their table, and Draco hissed in irritation, but he stood up to follow her. “Tori! What are you doing here? First years aren’t allowed in Hogsmeade!”
The question was cheerful, but there was a beat between here and first, and it was coupled with a lingering look at Millie and Tracy.
“Daph,” said Theo, sitting up. “Hello. Hi. How a—”
He saw Draco appear over her shoulder, and broke off. The color washed from him like a bit of linen in rain.
Green light, and the sound of a body when it hit the floor. Always the same sound, the one-two, shoulder, then skull. Crouch had gone down fast; he’d dislocated his shoulder, not that it mattered, since he’d already been dead when he was falling.
He closed his eyes. A hard shudder started, and he suppressed it, grounding himself with a hand on his wandgrip. Panic buckled his knees. Not here. Not in front of everybody, not in front of Gryffindor and Slytherin and the people who needed him and the people that he did not like but still, nevertheless, could not afford to have think him weak. There were people who needed him not to be weak.
Hermione was behind him, he could feel her watching. Bright-eyed and upright and perfectly alive, and he was standing with his hand on his wand between her and the door. It was fine. He had it handled.
When she caught his eye she touched her wand, questioning, and he shook his head. But his heart rate was slowing. His brain became reacquainted with the present, and not a moment too soon.
“We showed her the tunnel by the Jenkins statue,” said Pansy. She flicked back her hair and tried for a smile, holding out her hand. “Did you see my ring, Daph? It’s horrible, isn’t it?”
“What? Oh, dreadful, just,” said Daphne, with an indifferent glance. “Makes me sick. Tori, did you get my invitation? Lavender has tea and music on Fridays, and we talk about everything, truly everything. You must come.”
Astoria shifted. “Sorry. Couldn’t make it. I’ll try next week.”
“Lovely,” said Daphne, after a beat.
“Wonderful,” said Astoria. “Grand.”
Another beat.
“Tori,” she said curiously, “have you… made friends?” She cocked her head at Millicent.
Millie curled her lip. “What’s it to you?”
“Well,” she said, “I’d just be surprised — seeing as you didn’t think much of my family, before.”
Astoria was begging with every line and feature on her face for her sister to stop.
“Your family is fine,” said Millie. “Your family is perfectly respectable. Your family isn’t the reason you ditched us.”
Daphne shrilled in fine, high, terrible laughter. “I ran away because you killed my cat, you perfect bitch.”
“I’m the bitch? Me? You hit Tracy’s father because you couldn’t take a joke, you loon—”
“Daffy,” hissed Astoria, “Daffy, please, I’m sorry, I’ll come next week, could you just—”
“Could I just what?” said Daphne shrilly, staring at her. “Leave? You want me to leave?”
“No! It’s just — we’re out of seats—”
“There’s not a seat?” Daphne’s next laugh was even worse than her first. “You think I came over so I could sit with them? Millie ‘Mono’ Bulstrode and the castle broomstick?”
“OI!”
“Daph,” said Pansy, startled.
“Go sit on a skrewt. Everyone knows you’re shagging someone in Gryffindor anyway,” said Tracy, and her eyes did a mean little swivel at Draco. “That’s why you’re always staying nights.”
“I sleep in the girls’,” Daphne interrupted, breathless with anger. “And that’s — that’s some implication, for someone who’d open her legs for a house-elf if it played quidditch!”
Theo was still watching him miserably, his mouth a seam of unhappiness.
“Hey,” said Hermione coolly, appearing at Draco’s shoulder. “What’s going on? Why’s everyone shouting?”
“Oh, look,” said Tracy shrilly, waving at her, “what a surprise, rabble to the rescue! Tori, take a look — it’s the Gryffindor special, half-breeds, mudbloods, and blood tra—”
“Langlock!”
Daphne’s wand had somehow found its way into her hand. Tracy’s jaw sealed shut and stayed there, despite her shrieking and fumbling.
“I’m a Slytherin,” said Daphne, in the lull of heavy breathing that followed. “I am a Slytherin.”
Millie turned slowly from Daphne to Astoria, who was curled up in her chair as if she wanted to be anywhere else in the world.
“As you can probably tell,” said Millie, “there’s more than one kind.”
“Millie,” said Theo, “heel.”
Millie spat, but she shrunk down in her seat, silent.
Astoria sniffed. Daphne stared at her, then gave a incoherent cry of anger, and stormed out.
Hermione stepped out of her way. “Ten points from Slytherin,” she said, after the door jingled shut.
“What!” Astoria sat up, indignant. “We didn’t do anything! And Daphne’s a Slytherin, too!”
“You may not know this,” she said coolly, “but using inappropriate language for other students is against the Hogwarts handbook. Not to mention a bad idea, in general, if you want to make friends. And you should be kinder to your sister. She’s the only one at this table trying to help you.”
Tracy said something sharp and probably unfavorable, but her jaw was still welded together.
Astoria trembled. “I don’t even know you! Why don’t you just stick your nose out?” she said furiously. “Nobody asked you!”
Hermione looked down at her and said nothing. Something in her gaze cut through Astoria, who quaked, lifted her shoulders, and after a few, searing moments, dropped her eyes to the floor, a blotchy flush consuming her cheeks.
“Right,” said Hermione. “Okay. Well, I could take points for mouthing off to a prefect, but I have a sneaking suspicion you don’t really mean that, and I’m sorry to say that I can’t help you more.” She paused, and turned to Pansy. “Congratulations, by the way.”
Pansy’s face did an unpleasant thing.
Hermione raised an eyebrow. “On your engagement?” she said, fluttering her left hand. “Congratulations. He’s very wealthy, and I know that was important to you.”
Pansy took a long breath, which seemed almost certain to precede something nasty, but all she said was a hollow: “Thanks, Granger.”
Hermione nodded, and turned away from the table. Draco cast Theo a cold sneer and went with her.
She was talking under her breath before they were even out of earshot. “I think she was headed for the gates,” she murmured, striding quickly to the door. “I’m not sure where, Harry always has the Map, if she’s gone back to the castle—”
“Greengrass?”
“Yes! Daphne, obviously! Keep up,” she said absently, pushing out the door. “I didn’t see where she went — do you want to split up, check the side streets? If she’s gone into a shop, we can still find her—”
He was slightly surprised.
“You’re being kind to her,” he said, as the wind started to rip and pluck at their clothes again, out on the open pavement. The bell clattered behind them as the door to the Three Broomsticks swung shut.
“Hardly. I’m being decent. And I do care — I mean, she’s a bit condescending, but I’d be a hypocrite if that bothered me, I suppose — do you think she went up this way? She can’t be far. It’s a small village, and Daphne isn’t the type to cry in the woods.”
Draco caught her arm. She stopped, gazing curiously at him, another string of orders caught half-formed on her lips.
“Granger—”
In the cold, her cheeks and her mouth turned the same shade of floral pink, like the beads of red at the heart of a tiger lily. Her breath steamed a cloud around her face, stained golden in the late afternoon.
“I happen to like Daphne,” she said, almost stubbornly, as if rebutting a point no one had made. “She’s a nice girl. Well — not really, all the time, but I’m not, either, and — I feel bad for her. She should find better friends.”
“She has a few.”
“Yes, but she still wants her old ones. You know how that feels.”
“I recovered.”
“It’s different. You were so young. How would you feel now, if you were tossed out of Gryffindor?” she said absently. “You’d miss me—”
Like air.
“—and Harry, and Ron—”
He replied, dryly: “I’d hope I could still talk to you. Unless you select Potions partners by House.”
“Oh, obviously. I mean, you’re not getting rid of me, I’d hunt you down if you transferred to Durmstrang— I’m not doing Potions without you, I can’t stand butchering.”
“The moving dedication one feels for a prehensile carving knife.”
“A very nice prehensile carving knife. And you know what I mean. If I moved into Ravenclaw, it’s not like we’d stop being friends.”
“If you move into Ravenclaw, you’ll take me with you, and that’s final. You’re not leaving me with these people.”
“I’m not exposing you to Marietta,” she said darkly.
“Do I detect a concern for my virtue?”
“Wh— no,” she said, flustered, “I don’t care if you — and if you did want to, I’d — but I’d be shocked if — you never seemed to want to do anything, with—”
“Do what?”
“Anything non-perfunctory!” she announced, addressing a passing cloud. “Unless you did. And you haven’t said as much. Which, obviously, you don’t have to say to me, we don’t talk about that kind of thing, which is fine. You’re at liberty to — with anyone. But I can’t imagine you would find very much that’s edifying about Marietta Edgecombe. My two cents.”
“Naturally.” Then: “There hasn’t really been anything to talk about. You know.”
“Right,” she said quickly. “I know. Not that — not that I know, or assumed, I didn’t — but none of the Gryffindor girls said anything, and someone would’ve mentioned if you did. And people would notice if it was another House. Not that they’re snooping — which they are — but also, it’s just — noticeable. Parvati was seeing a Hufflepuff for three months last year. She was always suggesting trips to the kitchens.”
“Right.”
He went silent in the rustle of the falling leaves. Suddenly, he turned.
“Do you all talk about me?”
The door to the Three Broomsticks jingled. Ron hurried out, wrestling his jumper back on; it was hard going, since it was on backwards, and he had his head halfway through a sleeve.
“Oi! You lot! Where we going? What happened? Where’s Daphne? What’s the problem?”
He popped his head back out the right way and blinked at Draco, who was still holding Hermione’s arm, and standing close enough that their breath was the same mist.
He let go of her arm. She straightened her coat — his coat — with a little tug.
“Gone,” said Hermione briskly. “The other girls were awful. We should just go looking and tell Harry later, I don’t want to interrupt him and Cho.”
Ron grinned. “Harry won’t mind an evacuation,” he said. “Marietta keeps asking what a dementor smells like.”
“You go on, then, and let’s meet at the Hogsmeade gate, ten minutes to curfew. Good?”
“Yes’m,” he said, grinning, and snapped off a salute. Hermione laughed and tossed off a little salute, herself, and it was harmless.
Draco turned on his heel.
“Ten to curfew,” he called.
“Yes! At the gates, remember!”
“Seeya!” chirped Ron, which was an embarrassing reminder that he hadn’t the slightest idea what was going on in Draco’s head.
The wind washed his face, ruffling his hair, and the last warmth from the Three Broomsticks whiffed out. He chose a corner at random, turned it, and then stepped with his back to the wall, taking a moment to wrestle himself back to composure.
It took three. Then he swept down the alley, Vanishing a host of rubbish that stood in his path. It reappeared about twenty feet behind him, but then, his concentration was off.
At the far street, emerging on a somewhat dingier road populated mostly by residential cottages, someone called his name. He stopped walking, but didn’t turn around. He threw a glance over his shoulder.
Theo stood on the other end of the alley, a small black silhouette inside a crevice of light. His hands were in his pockets. He was flat of mouth and dead of eye, as if he were half asleep, despite having just called his name.
Draco turned back around and kept walking.
“Draco!”
He turned right and headed in the opposite direction he’d seen Daphne go. No need to lead the wolves to her doorstep.
“Listen to me — just give it a go, would you?” Footsteps sounded on the cobble behind him, hastening when he failed to respond. “You can still hate me afterward, you prat, I promise.”
He was on the verge of responding to that when he caught himself, and sealed his mouth.
“There’s a certain element of irony to this, you realize,” Theo called, scrambling up the hill after him. They were trailing out of the commercial center, through a road of sparse houses and sparser cobble, near the place where pavement became dirt. Burnished leaves fluttered through the air like a shower of copper coins, glinting in the sun, a fortune of the cheapest order. “Me? Chasing you? Desperate for a word? I mean, how the tables turn, don’t they?”
“I was never desperate.”
The footsteps stopped. He turned around, and found that Theo looked amused.
“Thought that might get you,” he said softly. “Predictable.”
He said nothing. Theo inhaled, halting, and looked down at his feet.
“Why is it,” he said, “we always have our uncomfortable conversations in Hogsmeade? Is it the climate? It’s a cheery place, I don’t know why we do these things here.”
“Because if you were ever honest in front of your friends, you wouldn’t have any.”
He waited for something caustic to come bouncing back at him, but none did. The barb slipped cleanly through the air between them, landed, and stayed there.
“I’m not so sure about that,” said Theo, at length. “They’re worse people than you give them credit for.”
“Daphne isn’t.”
“Does she still count me as a friend? That’s actually a relief, thank you.”
“I wouldn’t hold out for Pansy.”
Levity vanished. “Don’t talk to me about Pansy.”
“I was surprised you let it happen with Warrington, frankly.”
“We’re going to get her out of it.”
“Will you? Happy hunting.”
“Your insincerity is noted and rejected. Have you seen this thing?” He flipped up his sleeve and showed Draco a seamless band of braided silver, like a cross between a manacle and a wristwatch. “It’s custom. Won’t find this at Moribund’s. Sends up an alarm and pings every patrolman in a five-mile radius if I breach the castle grounds. Plus I’m banned from Floo and owl post — they’re worried I might contact my father, or go through a middle-man. Thicknesse takes security seriously, I’ll give him that.”
“Right.”
The sky was turning gray. Not cloud-gray, but the dull gray of a winter’s evening, when the sun had been so bright and cold that it seemed to scour the blue out of it, leaving the whole landscape a shade of tinsel. Alternating shadows coursed over the ground in reeling waves.
“You killed someone.”
“Fuck off,” said Theo immediately, panicked. “No, I didn’t.”
“Barty Crouch—”
“Died at the hands of my father, who’s in Azkaban for it, thank you, justice done.”
“Your father shot a Killing Curse at an unarmed man.”
“And where you get the gall to judge, I certainly don’t know. Do you think your father made Death Eater with his hands clean? What would Lucius Malfoy have thought about what happened that night?” Theo flung wide his arms. “He would have — he would’ve shaken my hand!”
“No, he wouldn’t.”
This was a blind lie, in fact. Theo was probably right.
But Draco would rather die than let him believe it, because he didn’t know what Lucius Malfoy would have done, and he never would. And it was vile to invoke his father’s memory against him, as if Theo had any idea what it was like to be the last of his line, any inkling of the waters he was drawing from.
He was the last Malfoy. That legacy belonged to him. No one had the right to invoke it. Draco decided what Malfoys did and didn’t do.
“I didn’t kill Crouch,” Theo snapped. He was talking almost unintelligibly fast, getting in three words for Draco’s every one. “Listen to me. I didn’t kill him. Can you get that through your head? Stop looking at me like that. I didn’t.”
“Your father—”
“Acted on the orders of the Dark Lord, and what did you want from him? Was he supposed to die? Was I supposed to die? Is that what you wanted? You wanted me to die on an altar I don’t believe in so you wouldn’t have to feel bad when you looked at me?”
“—killed an unarmed man—”
“Who would’ve done the same, and I respected Crouch, I did, but men don’t just stop being your enemy because you respect them!”
“Why was he unarmed, Theo?”
Leaves on the breeze cracked and broke into a shatter of brown dust over their heads.
“Why was he unarmed?”
Theo wet his lips. He dropped his head, and the surrender was totally, humiliatingly complete. It was a white flag planted on a dead body. It was very nearly pitiable.
Green light. The sound of a body. He wondered if Theo could hear it, too.
Nearly pitiable. Only nearly.
“Because you disarmed him,” he finished, when it became clear Theo wouldn’t. “Can you possibly believe that Crouch would have died if he had been able to defend himself?”
“As if you wouldn’t have done the same thing,” spat Theo. “For Narcissa.”
His wand whispered out of its sheath.
I ts point was at Theo’s neck before he could flinch.
“Keep her name out of your mouth.”
“Say you wouldn’t. Say you’d let her be killed, I’ll call you liar. I’ll call you fucking hypocrite. I’ll do that anyway, come to think.”
“He wasn’t going to kill your father.”
“As if you’d know!”
“The Dark Lord was mostly dead himself before your fool of a father started meddling, and Pettigrew is a shred of a man—”
“Are you sure?” he demanded, stepping forward, until the point of Draco’s wand nearly brushed his forehead. “How sure were you? If it was Narcissa, how sure would you need to be? Before you ran the risk?”
“If I thought you gave a single damn about your father, that argument might have an ounce of weight. But you hate him. It’s not equivalent.”
“Of course I hate him,” said Theo slowly, as if Draco were speaking Greek. “But he’s my dad.”
“He hit you.”
“That’s speculation.”
“In third year. Do you remember? He hit you, and it nearly got your neck broken on the quidditch pitch. George Weasley saved you. Do you remember any of that?”
“He’s my dad.”
“He made you learn to Apparate at fourteen. Merlin knows how many times you splinched yourself, but I bet it wasn’t just the once with me and Pansy. That was your blood on his hands. He didn’t care.”
“Correct,” said Theo. “He’s also my dad.”
“Fine. Put the violence aside. He’s put you in an impossible position. You see that, don’t you? He made you a pariah. He made you a criminal. He put your life in mortal danger—”
“He’s my dad. He’s my dad. He’s my dad—”
“He won’t protect you. He doesn’t care for you. He’s not there. Nothing you do is going to change the fact that he doesn’t love you—”
“Shut up!”
“Listen to me.” He was shaking with a rage that he barely understood. “He doesn’t love you, you — you idiot, you prize fucking fool. How much proof do you need? You’re throwing your life away for nothing, for a man who barely knows you and wouldn’t want to if he could—”
“He’s my dad, he’s my dad, he’s my fucking dad, are you listening to me?” He shoved Draco’s wand away and stepped close. “He’s my father. Now till ever. I’m his son, I’ve always been his son, I’ll always be his son, I can’t just decide — it’s not like — I don’t have any choice. I don’t have any choice!”
“Tell that to Viktor Krum’s parents.”
It was a clean hit to the jugular, wide spray, horrible mess. It took Theo apart on an atomic level, leaving him wild-eyed and distant.
“Remember him? There were two people who died that night,” he said. “Not to mention Potter, who, by the way, almost died himself, not to mention the Dark Lord has returned. Which means that you and I both might also die, and that’s no matter what we do, because the thing about wars, Nott, is that people don’t fight them with Stunners. So I regret to say we are well past the point at which I could give a fuck about your lack of choices.”
“It’s not my fault.”
“If you really find that convincing, I’d be surprised, but suit yourself,” he said coldly. “Just don’t suppose that I do. Because I don’t. And if I end up dead in what’s coming, I don’t want you to imagine for one moment that I’d have forgiven you. I wouldn’t. I won’t.”
“You’re fucking cruel, Draco, you know that? You have everything in your corner, everything—”
“Everything? Everything? The phrase ‘blood traitor’ is about to become a death sentence, and you think I’m cruel?”
“I had no choice! Are you joking? You’re Lord Malfoy! A real boy, with real parents, a real life! Saint Draco of Gryffindor Tower, always sneering, always lording over the high ground! First man in history to get Snape and McGonagall wrapped around his fucking pinky, with your perfect marks and your prefect’s badge and your do-gooder pals — you’ve had a good life all but shoved down your throat, and you still think you have the right to talk about hard choices? Sorry to trouble you, sir, but I’m Theodore fucking Nott, and I broke the world. And you’re free. So don’t talk to me about death sentences.”
A flock of crows leapt from the trees, shrieking, roused by the bellow of voices from the street below. The flutter of their wings dappled shadows on the street.
You’re free. You’re free. You’re free.
He stared at Theo for a long time. It would be lying to say the thought hadn’t occurred to him, but he had never in a hundred years thought he would hear it coming from someone else’s mouth.
At least not someone wearing a green tie.
“You had a choice,” he said finally, “not to disarm Barty Crouch.”
“You’re not listening,” said Theo tiredly. “You don’t care. Of course you don’t. Who would? Running question of my life.”
“You had an out.” He spoke clinically. “Crouch gave you a plea deal. Witness protection.”
“You’re hilarious.”
“The two greatest living aurors swore to protect you. You went back on it. Don’t ever tell me you didn’t have choices.”
“It didn’t feel like a choice.”
“It was.”
“Right. Like a choice between drinking piss or hemlock. Or between hemlock and a noose.”
“Those are still choices.”
If Theo was surprised to hear that, it was nothing compared to how surprised he was at himself.
“I don’t understand why you’re so angry at me,” Theo rasped. “I didn’t hurt you. I was careful not to. I even — I even saved Potter for you.”
Draco was sincerely and completely astounded. He had to give it to Theo for that, he really did. It was the one thing he couldn’t have possibly expected to hear, because it was patently untrue.
“I told you about the Cup,” he added. “I told you. I tried to tell you, anyway.”
A beat passed. He stood like a child holding a broken toy, nervously awaiting reprimand.
Draco took a breath, fully prepared to argue it to the last — and stopped.
The sun was low, and the bells were tolling. Curfew. He’d missed their rendezvous at the gate. He’d have to catch up with them at the castle, explain where he’d been. One more exhausting conversation.
And what did he want? Nothing. What did he ever get from Theo, except more exhaustion, more frustration, more knives in his back. Perhaps it hadn’t been his hand on the wand; perhaps he hadn’t wanted to; but it wasn’t a question of wanting, of intention. They were past the point where it mattered whether they liked the choices they were making.
“You’re right,” he said quietly, and wondered what his face must have looked like, for Theo to turn so pale. “Thanks.”
He stepped around Theo and started walking.
“Draco?”
His voice was high and thin. “Draco, what are you doing? Come back.”
“For what?”
“We’re not finished!”
“Yes, we are.”
It hung in the air like a withered leaf, trembling on the breeze. He walked away before Theo could disagree with him, and if he tried, it was too late for Draco to hear.
He didn’t return to the Tower immediately. He went instead to a room tucked in the lofty floors near Ravenclaw, and when he had made certain that he could still find his way there, he crossed the long breadth of the castle back to Gryffindor, which had the added benefit of giving him time to burn out the residual anger on the grueling enterprise of approximately ten million stairs.
When he reached the Pink Lady, the torches gave more light than the windows. He’d missed dinner. Almost missed curfew, too. Students milled here and there on their way back from the Great Hall or the library, but their steps were quick, and they moved without leisure, all in more or less the same direction, murmuring quiet prayers for the stairs to cooperate and keep them out of Filch’s reach.
“Mimbulus Mimbletonia.”
“Cheer up, dearie,” she whispered, winking at him. “Hot toddies inside. Don’t let the bastards get you down.”
He could have laughed. He really could.
Climbing through the channel brought with it a blinding tide of firelight, and when it cleared, he was in the warm smoky common room, just the same as it had ever been, with the same coterie of students doing homework, reading, giggling over games of jacks and gobstones. Some of them waved to him. One of them — known first as Shrimp, since introduced as Alfie Chrissenpoffer — popped up his head and eagerly invited Draco to watch as he successfully demonstrated his first mastered spell, a Levitation Charm. It was perfectly acceptable, and Draco informed him of as much, which made the poor hopeless swot-in-training beam all out of proportion with his face.
At the fire, a pair of armchairs were drawn close together, and he recognized the shadows. He crossed the common room, gliding almost noiselessly through the murmuring commons, and the pair of faces rotated into view, washed yellow and warm from the light. It was Hermione and Ron. Their heads were bent together, and they were speaking in low serious voices about something, the subject inaudible, but its severity writ in the firm line between Hermione’s eyes, the gentle slack of her mouth, as if she were absorbed entirely in it.
Her bandaged hand was extended on the arm of the chair, and Ron was holding it.
His breath encountered something jagged and thick in his throat. He revised his opinion, after a moment of nauseated staring: he wasn’t holding her hand. He was cleaning her cuts, although for some reason his body didn’t seem to think that was much better; her hand was still splayed on his, and Ron was daubing at the cuts with a little cotton bulb, making her twitch and wince now and then. When this happened, Ron would grimace and squeeze her hand, as if to say, Hang on, and she would nod bravely and carry on talking in that soft low voice that meant she didn’t want to be overheard.
Draco was outside himself and inside himself at once, hot and cold all over again. He opened his mouth to say something, and felt it coming up fast and hot from somewhere in his chest. He knew what to say to make them jump apart. It was something oily and subtle and it would burn them both in the right places at once, like thumbing a button. He could carve a swath of distance between them, and it wouldn’t hurt anymore. It was so easy. It was one of the few things he’d always been good at.
What he did instead was not that. He took his tongue between his teeth, carefully, and then bit down until the taste of blood washed the acid out.
Once upon a time, he’d said a word that ripped apart the conversation under it, and then he’d nearly done it again, and he wouldn’t . He wouldn’t. He wasn’t Theodore Nott. He wasn’t shackled to anything, not even cruelty, not even himself.
He breathed in and out, and to give his mind something to do, he counted; but the counting didn’t help, so he did sums, arithmancy problems, integrals and multivariable derivatives, the numbers spinning until his head was full of the clean clockwork of numbers against numbers and not feeling, not oil, not heat, nothing that could burn anyone but him. And to a mild, pleasant surprise, the acid receded, and the feeling went down. And he was still himself. And he had said nothing that anyone would have to forgive.
He considered his own hand, latched unconsciously on his wand. He pried the fingers off and flexed them, ignoring the twinge of pain in the tendons, from too much clenching. Pain was easy. Pain was a mantle he’d been wearing since he was eight years old. This was — this was nothing. A girl he fancied was leaning into someone else’s hand, smiling at someone else’s jokes, liking him or loving him, and it didn’t matter if he felt slightly like dying, or what one might suppose dying to feel like, if one had never felt death, or this, any time previous.
It didn’t matter if it was Hermione Granger, the only creature of her like the universe had ever made, or would; it didn’t matter if she had a string tied to something at the center of his chest and could pull him around with it, tug on it, reel him as she liked, with the laughter and the eyes and the raw-bitten lips. She could still pull him anywhere. What she wanted — whatever she wanted — if it wasn’t him, in that way, it wasn’t his business. She still had the string. He was still hers. She’d still promised — she’d still promised to keep him, if it came to that.
Hermione didn’t break promises.
He was acting like a fucking fool. He laughed a little at himself, rubbing his thumb and forefinger into his eyes, and Hermione heard it.
“Draco? Is that you?”
“Oi, mate, there you are,” said Ron, standing up.
Hermione stood up, almost tripping over herself in haste. “Finally! We were going to go out with the Cloak, in a bit, if you still weren’t back. Well — Ron and I were, Harry’s over in Ravenclaw with Cho — it’s a shame you weren’t here, everyone made fun of him, you would’ve loved it — but you’re alright, aren’t you?” She stumbled around the chair and gave him an unsubtle sweep with her eyes, as if expecting to see him down a limb.
“Perfectly. Sorry to trouble you.” There was some pleasure in the irony, at least. “Ran into Theodore Nott. Had a nice chat.”
“Him? What did he want?”
“Merlin knows.”
Hermione frowned. “I hope he’s not up to anything,” she said, slipping the bandages back over her hand. Draco averted his eyes. “I don’t suppose he do much with his father in prison, but still.”
“Wouldn’t put it past him,” Ron said. “Slimy bugger. What’d he say?”
Their silhouettes were twinned against the fire, two figures of a painter’s study in shadow and light. He wondered what he looked like, in the shadows.
“Nothing important,” he said curtly. “Daphne?”
“Sleeping. Seemed pretty wrung out when we found her. Didn’t say much.”
“Alright.” There was a good deal left to sort there, but he was too tired to care. “I’m going to bed.”
“It’s half nine.”
“And we have quidditch practice at six, so you’d be well-advised to follow my example.”
It was too sharp. He touched his tongue to his incisor, hard, and then corrected himself: “But stay if you like. Potter doesn’t sleep but after midnight, and he’s the star player, so clearly it can’t be all that important. Enjoy yourselves.”
Hermione said his name, but he pretended not to hear it.
It was selfish, but he didn’t want to see her try to explain it, or hear what she might say, especially if, God forbid, she tried to be honest with him. He was at his upper limit of honesty for the day. He could bear no more of it. If she looked him in the eye and tried to tell him, with her stubborn magnetic insistence of a voice, exactly what she and Ron were talking about in such tender, private tones, he might very well lose his mind.
So he ignored her. It was selfish, but he could indulge in a trifle of selfishness, privately, where it wouldn’t hurt anyone. He was a selfish person. She knew that perfectly well.
He climbed the stairs and went into the dorm, where he shut the door behind him, leaned on it, and slid down to a slow rest at the base, his head tipped back to the cold wood, letting the cold leech all feeling from his limbs.
-An author I admire greatly once said that the key to writing strong side characters was to remember that everyone experiences life as the protagonist of their story, but sometimes their story is taking place in a different genre than yours. Anyway, in my outline document there’s a little footnote by Astoria’s name, and it reads: “while everyone else worries about incipient fascism, Astoria is living out a fucked-up wizard version of Mean Girls.”
-This one goes out to another absolute banger from the soundtrack, Dumbledore’s Army. Thank you to my lord and savior, Nicholas “Daddy” Hooper, conjurer of jams that kill writer’s block stone dead.
-Shoutout also to Michael “Short King” Corner, who has now, I realize belatedly, canonically pulled not one, but two of the coolest girls in Gryffindor. I can’t say that was on purpose, but I’ve written it in and I’m keeping it. Frankly inequitable rizz.
-A lot of chapters in this act of Book 5 got renamed and reshuffled during a huuuuge restructuring that happened in the second draft. I spent more editing, rewriting, and cutting together the six-chapter span of writing between September 1995 and December 1995 than I did writing Books 1 and 2 put together, and let me tell you, it was an Experience.
-For everyone who commented saying something kind — especially the people who write Those Comments, and you know who you are — you are the reason I have sat at my desk with my head in my hands, giggling and making strange, horrible noises far too late into the night for my neighbors’ consideration. I hope that your trains run on time and your bus pulls up to the stop precisely as you get there; or, failing that, that the seats in your car are already warm when you get in.
-Next chapter: “The Room of Requirement.” It will feature: Narcissa Malfoy’s unexpected contribution to her son’s advancing career in juvenile delinquency; a lot of nerd shit about duels; and a salient piece of architectural trivia.
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