Chapter 70: The Ghosts of Grimmauld Place
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Christmas morning found a stack of presents at the foot of his bed. From Dobby, who had wrapped it in sandwich paper and glitter, came a tin of olive-and-pepperwort ice cream with a small wooden spoon that appeared to have been carved by Dobby himself, as it gave him four splinters. The rest were from his mother. He left them where they lay.
He dressed for the Weasleys. Black tie was custom for a Christmas luncheon, but from a desire to not be pilloried on sight, he chose a gray dress shirt with French cuffs. His signet slid comfortably onto his little finger, and he stole a dark blue formal cloak from his father’s wardrobe, made of silk so fine and thin that it shimmered like liquid where it sloped gracefully down his shoulders. The mirror offered up a smaller, slenderer impression of a man seen often gazing out of a portrait in the gallery.
He exchanged the lounge jacket for a green jumper with a white lion on it, which was pilly and mothball-scented and only slightly less oversized now than in 1993. The result was not mistakeable for any image of Lucius Malfoy that existed.
Standing on the parlor hearth, he took a lingering look at the drawing-room: the twelve-foot Christmas tree, the grand piano, the silver garlands laid thick as icing over bay windows. The chandelier chimed in the draft. He got the queer feeling he was waiting for something.
Something in him was waiting for Narcissa to come striding out of the hallway, yawning in her dressing-gown, and tell him Dobby had made cocoa.
Which was absurd, because Dobby hadn’t lived there in three years, and his mother hadn’t spoken to him since their fight. When they encountered each other, she glided past with a deep nod and eyes that seemed to float over him, lifted high and distant, fixed on some point that neither of them could see. He lacked the reason or tolerance to apologize and the endurance to risk another fight, so he moved past in identical silence, with an identical stare.
He threw some Floo powder on the coals, snapped: “Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place,” and the drawing-room vanished in a green wash of heat.
Stepping out of the fireplace, the first thing that registered the noise.
Grimmauld Place sounded like someone had trapped an angry cat in a bag with several other angry cats, sewed it shut, and lobbed the bag into the House of Commons. A whole percussive section of slamming pots and pans, thundering footsteps, and tinkling glasses swelled behind the strains of a vocal clamor so great it seemed fit to wake the whole of London, and over it all, the conductor’s voice cut clear and shrill as a banshee’s wail:
“OUT! OUT! IF YOU’RE A MAN NAMED WEASLEY, OUT OF THE KITCHEN! GINNY, GET YOUR BOOTS OFF THE TABLE! WHERE’S SIRIUS? TONKS, GET HIM — AND I KNOW THAT’S YOU, YOU’VE GOT BILL’S NOSE WRONG — AND RON, PUT A SHIRT ON, YOU’RE NOT A BARBARIAN— ”
BANG!
“FRED!”
“I’m George!”
“YOU’RE FRED IF I SAY YOU ARE! PICK UP THIS MESS—”
“Kid’s innocent, Molly, that was one of mine.”
“—CARE IF YOU’RE OF AGE, YOU’RE UNDER MY ROOF — oh, Chrissakes — I SAID NO TRAPS IN THE KITCHEN, ALASTOR!”
“Then stop opening the damn window!”
“I CAN’T! BECAUSE THERE’S NO! VENTILATION! IN! THIS! HOUSE!”
“Mum, I can’t find my Holyhead jersey! You didn’t wash it, did you?”
“It’s an undefended point of ingress—”
“SIIIII-RIUUUS,” bellowed Tonks. A fist pounded a door. “REEEEEEE-MUUUS!”
“It’s a bright green jersey and I left it right on my bed and I told you not to touch it because it’s hand-wash only —”
“Oi! Mum! Can Harry and I go on a chippy run?”
“IT’S CHRIIIIIIIIIIIIIST-MAAAAAAAS—”
“—the point of even having wards if you keep the bleeding window open, it’s a glaring invitation—”
“I DON’T CARE IF IT’S OPEN! YOU THINK YOU-KNOW-WHO’S GOING TO CRAWL IN AND HIDE IN THE MASH?”
Draco chuckled softly, brushing ash from his jumper.
The parlor of Grimmauld Place was decorated for Christmas, though in such a way it would’ve likely given his grandmother conniptions: the tree was scrappy and plump, stuffed with ornaments like someone upended a box of sweets on it, while popcorn garlands and ropes of holly the size of an arm dangled from the tarnished chandeliers. Live fairies drifted around the lures hanging from the eaves, jingling faintly and winking their little lights. The radio in the kitchen was playing muggle rock music, and warmth and smoke piped from the kitchen, while outside, the snow rose ever higher on a dark London street.
A footstep stirred the doorway, and he turned to find a small, elfin woman with silvery blonde-hair and a slightly crooked nose. She was carrying a tall stack of presents.
“Delacour?” he said, surprised.
“Oh,” Fleur exclaimed, dropping her cargo unceremoniously. “You! Ça fait longtemps, dis donc! Ça roule, mon chou?”
“Ça rampe. What are you doing here? I thought your family was in France.”
“Ah, yes, but I — well. I am working in London, these days,” she said. Her accent had faded; her were consonants crisper. “And the Ministry is not making it easy for us with the work visa, you know, to come and go, and — anyway, Bill worries it would be hard for me to come back if I leave. And I am not knowing many people in England, so the Weasleys are being very kind, and inviting me here for Christmas.”
“…I was under the impression that you and Bill didn’t get along.”
She shifted her weight and glanced over her shoulder. It was needless; the din from the kitchen made it impossible that they were overheard.
“Bill is being very gracious,” she said delicately. “Especially when it is possible I am not always giving him — oh, what is it? — bonne foi.”
He tilted his head, smirking. “Rien de tel qu’une petite fraternisation sur le lieu de travail pour s’ouvrir l’esprit.”
Fleur gasped. “Chut!” she said. “You are a ’orrible brat.”
“Mais oui.”
Doors slammed. “WE’RE UP,” Sirius howled, “WE’RE UP, BLAST YOU! STOP KICKING MY DOOR!”
“—IIIIIIISTMAAA— oi, Sirius! Happy Christmas! Oh! Hi, Remus!”
“Good morning, Tonks. Happy Christmas.”
“CAN’T A MAN GET A MOMENT’S REST IN HIS OWN HOME WITHOUT SOME DEGENERATE COUSIN DRAGGING HIM UP AT THE CRACK-O-DAWN—”
“It’s eleven-thirty!”
“It is eleven-thirty, Padfoot.”
“THAT’S IRRELEVANT,” said Sirius. “TONKS, STOP GAWKING. HARRY, DON’T RUN ON THE STAIRS—”
THUMP.
“Shit!”
“TRAITORS! HALF-BREEDS! MUDBLOODS! SCUM!”
“Portrait’s off again,” shouted Ron.
“Where’s my jersey?” wailed Ginny.
“SPLENDID!” roared Sirius. “GREAT TEAM EFFORT. MERRY CHRISTMAS, MUMMY!”
“FILTHY, FILTHY CREATURES, STINKING UP MY HOUSE! OUT! OUT! BURN THEM OUT!”
“WILL SOMEONE SHUT THAT BINT UP?” Molly bellowed, storming out of the kitchen. Her hair formed a fiery lion’s mane around her flushed face. “PAINT A GAG ON HER, IF YOU HAVE TO — Merlin’s bones, Draco! How long have you been here? Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. Come here.”
He by now could tell the difference between volitional and mandatory Weasley embraces, and this was of the mandatory sort. He complied forthwith and bent down to be throttled.
Her fiery hair smelled of bacon, and she was hot as a coal stove. It was not awful.
“I’m so glad you’re alright,” she murmured, while her arms did their level best to cave in his ribs. “Months under that awful woman… We’re all so very glad you’ve come. Happy Christmas, dear.”
It was hard to look her in the eye. Perhaps it was too much, after the Manor’s long silences, to have so much attention all at once — like dropping frostbitten fingers into scalding water.
“Happy Christmas, Mrs. Weasley. I apologize for arriving early.”
“Do shut up, dear. And it’s Molly, you know that. Fleur! You’re awake! Would you fetch Bill for me? You know where his room is, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said nervously, “but per’aps better for one of his brothers—”
“Thank you, sweetie. Draco, you sit there and don’t touch a thing, we’ll be having breakfast in a minute — really it’s more of a lunch — and presents. It’s just the family, of course, and Sirius and Remus; and Fleur, who Bill invited — which I’m not allowed to comment on, apparently — and Alastor and Tonks, who practically live here anyway, couldn’t have it without them.”
“Indeed.”
The doorbell chimed.
“GOT IT,” Ron shouted. He slid down the bannister and jumped into the foyer, and Harry hopped down behind him. They were both still in pyjamas. Harry was more relaxed than Draco had seen him in months: hair rumpled, grin wide, shoulders straight.
“Draco! Happy Christmas.”
“Happy Christmas, Potter.”
Ron hauled open the door. “Oi, it’s you!” he said delightedly. “Everyone, it’s Hermione! Come in.”
Draco twitched, and then tried to sort out whatever his pulse was doing.
Hermione whisked into the foyer carrying a train of snowflakes, brushing frost crystals from her sleeves. She thrust a pair of voluminous bags into Ron’s arms and then wrenched the scarf from her face, panting.
“Hold those,” she announced — the classic Granger greeting of a command — and began the industrious business of shucking her outer layer of clothing. “They’re presents. Don’t peek.” She wriggled out of her overcoat, revealing a red jumper, muggle jeans, and pink socks. The red clashed with the pink. Her scarf was orange. These and other sartorial choices suggested her stylist was a color-blind street urchin.
He lifted his eyes, and tried helplessly to find it anything but endearing. His heartbeat was a dry rasp in his chest.
She really was lovely, hopelessly lovely, in a terrible outfit and dreadful muggle trousers and hair seven different kinds of wild, and so there was nothing for it but to stare.
“Sorry I’m late, it was absolutely stupid out there. I saw Mum and Dad off, and then I had to get here myself from St. Pancras, but I forgot the Tube doesn’t run on Christmas, so I had to take a cab. But I couldn’t come straight here because I didn’t want the driver to know where I was going, so I had them drive me on to Charing Cross and then walked, but I forgot it was snowing so it took twice as long and I couldn’t see anything and I had to stop every five minutes to check the map—”
She breezed on like a locomotive while she peeled off her gloves.
As if they had nothing better to do than listen to her enact a stream-of-consciousness relitigation of her day. It was an irritating habit. He tried to be irritated, and found a horrifying lack of will.
Ron, fortunately, obliged him.
“By the way, Draco’s here,” he said, gesturing. Hermione’s head snapped up. Her cheeks, already flush with cold, turned darker.
They regarded each other across the foyer. The noise of the house dimmed.
Hermione cleared her throat, like he was supposed to say something.
“Happy Christmas,” she said.
He nodded to her, politely. “Happy Christmas, Hermione.”
She winced.
He hadn’t meant to sound petulant. It had been as much grace as he’d been capable of offering with half the nerves in his body on edge.
A pause of miserable longevity. Harry and Ron looked like they were watching two wild hyenas circle each other.
“I like your jumper,” she said bravely.
“Thank you. It’s custom Weasley, 1993.”
She gave a surprised little laugh. The sound offered some hope that everything good in the world was not soiled past recognition.
Or, at the very least, that no one had to say so just yet, on Christmas morning.
Molly rescued them all by barrelling out of the kitchen in a maelstrom of needless urgency. He could have kissed her feet in thanks.
“SIRIUS! REMUS! TONKS! IN HERE, NOW! EVERYONE TO THE DRAWING ROOM, WE’RE DOING PRESENTS! Ginny, would you check on Bill and Fleur? Lord, it’s Frank and Alice all over again — and Ron, remember to — HERMIONE! Why does no one in this house ever announce themselves!”
Once the whole house had been herded into the drawing-room like vociferous cattle, Molly served a lunch of corned beef sandwiches. The table setting was being preserved for dinner, so they ate from plates in their laps. Arthur and Remus took prize seats on either side of the couch, and acquiesced with grace to Sirius’s insistence on wearing paper crowns. Fred and George perched on the arms of Ginny’s chair, sniggering together; Charlie sat on the sideboard, heels swaying. Bill and Fleur came down ten minutes later than everyone else and stood on opposite sides of the room.
Mad-Eye presided from a deep armchair, nursing a cup of tar-black coffee. When Draco sat down by the hearth, the old Auror sent him a sidelong eye and lifted his mug, and Draco decided that if it all weren’t too frivolous for Mad-Eye, it needn’t be too frivolous for him.
Sirius paraded a stereo into the room over his head, and he was met by mixed cheers and dismayed cries.
“Bang on! Oi, Sirius, let us pick a song—”
“No, let me! Pick me! I’m your cousin!”
“A very weak argument, historically,” said Sirius. “All of you shut up! You’re missing the music!”
“Jesus wept,” Remus murmured into his tea. Then he grinned when Sirius kicked him.
“She studied sculpture at Saint Martin’s college…”
“Can’t we have some nice Christmas music?” sighed Arthur. “Why is it always the rock and roll?”
“Dad, please,” said Ginny. “Try not to be uncool. It’s Christmas.”
“Good haul this year,” announced Ron, flopping down on the hearth beside Draco. “Nice call with the whistle for Harry, but you’ll regret it when he’s getting us up for six o’clock quidditch practices. That from Remus? Bet you anything it’s a book. Sirius and Remus got them together.”
“Which means Remus bought books, and Sirius signed his name on the card.”
“Eh. Mum and Dad do that all the time. Anyway, he can’t very well pop out to the shops.”
Draco eyed his cousin, who was dancing with Harry and Ginny as if he had ants trapped under his unmercifully tight trousers. He seemed to be in high spirits: he laughed loudest and longest of anyone in the room, and there was a slightly manic affect to his glee.
“Rent a flat above a shop! Cut your hair and get a job! Smoke some fags and play some pool… Pretend you never went to school…”
“Hermione got us homework planners,” Ron continued, and he made a valiant effort to sound happy about it. “Yells at me every time I open it. At least it reminds me of her, eh? Anyway, there you are. Merry Christmas.”
He dumped a package in Draco’s lap. It was wrapped in torn clippings from Quidditch Weekly.
Draco stripped them off. Inside there was a long, thin knife of burnished silver, marbled with tarnish, with an opal on the crossguard and the Black crest engraved on the pommel.
He was shocked into silence. The weight was solid, heavy, fine. It was likely more expensive than anything Ron owned. Or everything he owned, put together.
“I didn’t buy it,” Ron said, perhaps guessing his thoughts. “If that wasn’t obvious. We were mucking out one of the upstairs bedrooms and I found that stuffed in a closet. It’s a dueling sidearm, isn’t it? That’s what Sirius said. I guess he might’ve been having me on, come to think—”
“It is.” He ran his thumb over the dark, soft leather of the grip. “You hold it in your offhand. If you lose your wand, in theory, you’d… but nowadays, they’re mostly ceremonial.”
“Reckon that’s perfect for you, innit? Old, poncy, dangerous,” said Ron cheerfully, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Right, that’s that settled. I won Christmas! Nice try, good run, see you next year. What’d you get me, some socks?”
“That one’s for you.”
“Sure. Hey, what did Hermione get you? Bet it wasn’t a homework diary. She always gets you muggle stuff, right? What’s the de— HOLY SHIT!”
“Ronald Weasley!” Molly cried. “Language!”
“HOLY SHIT! HOLY SHIT! IT’S A BROOMSTICK! A FIREBOLT! THE NEW ONE!” He sprang to his feet. “THANK YOU! BLIMEY! THANK YOU, MUM, THANK YOU— I — Mum?”
Molly and Arthur had frozen with awkward, terrible smiles plastered on both their faces. Ron turned, lowering the broomstick, as an embarrassed flush pooled in his cheeks. He hid it with a quick, stubborn grin, the well-worn expression of someone so used to the chip on his shoulder that his very spine had adjusted to the weight.
“Blimey,” he said weakly. “That’s… really generous.”
He felt, with a prickle of heat, the room’s attention glide unerringly toward himself. It was rather less pleasant than he thought it would be. Molly was picking at a thread on her skirt, and Remus was carefully stirring his tea. Hermione’s eyes were boring holes in the side of his skull. Ron was holding the Firebolt like it might at any moment transform into a venomous snake.
Draco cleared his throat.
“You’re welcome,” he said to Arthur. “I told you he’d like it.”
Arthur’s mouth parted. Draco rolled his eyes. “What is it with old people and Comets?” he said to Ron.
“Hey,” said Arthur weakly. He regarded Draco with a heart-rending alchemy of relief and grave, soft respect. Draco avoided his eyes, skin crawling. “Back in my day, the Comet was sexy.”
“See? See what age does to their brains, Ronald? He wanted to get you a Commodore model, which is wrong for a keeper, because—”
“Because Commodores are endurance brooms, and Firebolts are sprinters,” said Ron automatically. He stared at him intently, with the sharp blue eyes that had accused Draco over a hundred losing games of chess. It was clear to him, as to anyone who knew him, that Ronald Weasley was nobody’s fool. “Thanks. You’re a real mate.”
“Bet that I won’t be, if I see you letting any quaffles through on that.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Ron roughly. “Blame the keeper because you can’t hold the quaffle. Classic chaser bullshit.”
Harry laughed. The burble of the room picked up again, and everyone else found something else to look at, which in Draco’s opinion they ought to have done in the first place. They were, each to each, a pack of dull nosy busybodies who were far too used to living completely in each other’s pockets.
Draco stuck his head into his gift from Sirius and Remus, The Subsistence Potioneer, and pointedly ignored them all.
By and by, Hermione picked her way through the battlefield of wrapping-paper and sat next to him. She didn’t speak. He didn’t, either.
He could feel the space between them like a physical object.
When she drew breath, it was a relief for all of a second, until she started speaking.
“Hello,” she said. “Happy Christmas.”
“Hello,” he said, wondering if the word could possibly contain any more feeling than she had fit in it.
Hermione hesitated again.
“This,” she said, lifting a small vial of silver fluid, “is extremely expensive.”
He returned to his book. It was easier to look at. “Is it?” he said.
“I tried to buy some earlier this year.”
“Quite practical of you.”
“This is at least a thousand galleons.”
“I hadn’t looked at the invoice.”
“I know that’s a lie,” she said, and her familiarity made him strangely warm. “And it’s too much.”
“I’ve spent a thousand galleons on Potter’s legal fees alone. You didn’t mind that, I remember.”
“To keep him out of prison. For his safety. This is—”
“For yours. Do you imagine it’s worth one galleon less?”
“No, and when the Ministry arrests me, you’re welcome to spend a king’s ransom on my lawyers. But phoenix tears? Real phoenix tears? What am I supposed to do with these?”
“Well, you don’t bloody well drink them. Best results come from topical application—”
“On what? Have I got a mortal wound I don’t know about?”
“On your hand, simpleton,” he said impatiently. She twitched her right hand, which someone had wrapped in proper bandages to replace his handkerchief. “Unless you’d prefer to keep the scars. I personally would rather be rid of them; I assure you, they don’t suit you at all.”
Her indignation was cratered by surprise. “Bbut that’s a monumental waste.”
He glared at her, welcomely reminded of what it felt like to be irritated by her. Good to know he hadn’t lost the knack.
“Do they bother you?” she said quietly. “The scars?”
He inclined his head.
“Would you like me to cover them up?”
“The look of it isn’t the problem.”
She bit her cheek in thought. He watched her, tracking the process of her deliberation by the depth of the wrinkle in her brow.
When it was all but smooth, she said: “It’s not fair that I should get rid of my scars when everyone else has to keep them.”
Hang ‘fair,’ he wanted to say, but that wasn’t an argument she would hear.
“It’s not fair that some people have castles and Firebolts,” he said. “And if you think Brown keep your scars for the sake of fairness, you’ve badly underrated her.”
The abuse of her cheek continued. At length, she said, “No, I don’t think she would.” She dropped a package in his lap by way of changing the subject. “Here’s yours. I’ll just tell you, because I don’t want you to have any nice expectations — it’s a new music player. It’s called a discman. The one you have is a bit old, frankly. And there’s a few CDs in there, too. Those are from my parents — to thank you for checking in on me. ‘Violator,’ that’s from my dad, and the Pink Floyd. I picked out the rest.”
“Thank you,” he said, watching her.
She fidgeted. “Yes. Well. You’re welcome. I know how much you like to have — the nicest of everything.”
“I do.”
Music tinkled from the stereo. Ginny squawked as Fred spilled a mince pie in her lap.
Hermione nibbled at her lip. Abruptly, her hand darted out to find his, all but buried in the spilled wrapping-paper. Her fingers folded through his tightly.
“I missed you,” she said, her eyes low.
Her hand was warm and firm in his. He let her slide her fingers between his own, knitted so tightly he doubted he could pull himself free even if he wanted to. The feeling was like a homecoming.
“Granger—”
There was a commotion by the sofa. Molly had opened an unremarkable package in brown paper wrapping, and promptly broken into tears. They could have been joyous until he saw the expression worn by Bill, who stood at her shoulder.
“What a shithead,” he said coolly. He picked up the package and carried it away, though Molly continued to cry into a handkerchief. Arthur tucked his arm around her.
Ron opened his mouth. Fred clapped a hand over it.
“Percy sent back his Christmas jumper. Don’t say anything.”
“Why’d she even make one?”
“Search me. Told her he’s a fat load of rat droppings.”
“You’d be surprised how attached you can get to a fat load of rat droppings, when you changed its nappies,” said Sirius. He slapped Ron on the shoulder. “Scram, will you? Go make some trouble and let the grownups clean up your mess.”
Ron got up, rolling his eyes, and gestured for Harry and Draco. “That means they want to talk Order stuff.”
“George and I are grownups,” Fred piped up.
“Yeah? Great stuff. You’re on dish duty.”
“On second thought,” said Fred.
The seven of them — Draco, Harry, Hermione, and the four youngest Weasleys — were unsubtly shepherded upstairs and the doors to the sitting-room swung closed on Sirius’s grinning face.
“There’s not a way to eavesdrop on the sitting-room, is there?” said Hermione.
“Nah. They boarded up our secret passage, the bastards,” said Ginny. “Sirius fought for us, though, said he’d have done the same thing… he’s on the side of the righteous. What’s that you’ve got, Harry?”
He’d lagged behind the group on the stairs. He held a present, half-unwrapped, evidently just opened.
“Mad-Eye’s Christmas present,” he said tightly. “It’s… a photograph.”
“Come and show us, then,” said Ron, and they huddled around to inspect it.
The film was grainy with age. A crowd assembled in the drawing-room of Grimmauld Place as if for an unusually large family portrait. A caption jotted in the corner read: THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, 25.12.1979.
Harry brushed his fingers over a redheaded woman and a dark-haired man near the center of the frame. They waved at him.
“There’s rather a lot of them,” Draco remarked, for want of anything better to break the awkward with.
“Yeah, there were,” said Ginny. “Gosh, the gang’s all here. That’s Mad-Eye, there; see his nose isn’t broken yet? And that’s Dumbledore, he’s always the same, innee… the Longbottoms, know them anywhere, Neville’s the spit of them… Emmeline Vance, she’s my godmother… Dorcas Meadowes, she was Bill’s, but she’s gone now. Lot of them are, since… yeah.”
Hermione inhaled. “Because they all…?”
“Not all of them,” said Ginny hesitantly. “Sturgis Podmore… well, he didn’t die in the war, anyway… think I met John Dawlish once at a party… oh, and there’s Hagrid! Mad to see him without a beard. Plus Amy Bones — bet you’ll meet her, she’s been around a few times — and that’s Uncle Gideon and Uncle Fabian, right next to her. Both, um… but Mum’s right, they really did look like the twins.” She stepped back and spoke gruffly. “You know the rest, I think.”
He didn’t, actually — there were two faces she’d rather pointedly left out — but he could wager a guess. James and Lily shared the middle of the sofa; at James’s right sat Peter Pettigrew, pulling a silly face at the camera. Sirius stood behind them, younger, short-haired, radiantly handsome, and every ounce a Black. He’d slung his arm around Remus, who save for a few wrinkles was largely the same: brown curls, scars, a crooked smile. The four of them made a tight little square at the heart of the photograph.
The group smiled and waved, a checkerboard of the ghosts of the living and the ghosts of the dead.
He drove his nails into his palms. Turned to inspect an oil portrait of his Uncle Cygnus, which nodded somberly back at him. He breathed through his mouth and out through his nose.
“I’m in this photo,” said Harry suddenly.
Ron squinted. “Well,” he said, trying to be tactful, “I do reckon you take after your dad, I guess.”
“No, this is Christmas, 1979,” he said. “Mum’s pregnant with me. I’m right there.”
He pointed at the redhead’s stomach. She wasn’t showing; she was so early on even she mightn’t have known.
“Family portrait,” said Harry.
Ron put his hand on his shoulder. Harry cringed, though, as if that made it worse, which Draco could imagine it might. It certainly would, for him.
Ginny said, “Last time you ever looked good in a photograph.”
He grinned at her, and she grinned back, her tongue between her teeth. Then she slapped his arm and mounted the stairs.
The group fractured. Ginny spirited Hermione off to her bedroom, where Hermione hurried gladly, without a backward glance; Draco was admittedly relieved when she left, although the party was smaller and less interesting without her. Harry disappeared into his room with the photograph; and Ron, Fred, and George went to test the new Firebolt in the gallery. They invited Draco, but he declined. He was itchy and restless, and he had a curiosity to satisfy.
The day was late, and the light was already thin in the windows when he found the small, gabled bedroom near the top of the house. The door parted at his touch, and he stepped into Regulus’s bedroom.
It was no different than it had been in August, down to the wrinkle on the coverlet where Ginny had sprawled. He realized only now that the last person to touch it before her had been Regulus.
The desk contained a datebook and an address book, both of a nice-but-unused character that suggested an ill-chosen Christmas gift. The bedside drawer offered nothing but owl treats and a pair of thick browline glasses, one lens cracked. Underneath the sofa cushions there were several sickles and a galleon, and a receipt for school textbooks from Flourish & Blott’s in 1973, so frail it crumbled at his touch. Nothing hid in the bottom of the dead boy’s wardrobe, his old coat pockets, or under the rug; nor in a hidden compartment under one of the floorboards, whose only secrets were a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
He sat at the desk, warm from exertion, and wondered how many people had ransacked the room before him. He wondered how long Walburga had searched the place for some secret symbol or clue her son had left behind. How long Narcissa had searched, if she had searched at all. Had they used magic? Had they rifled through with their hands, like he did, not because they had to, but because it was the only way to be sure? Or simply because it was something to do with their hands, because it was a chance to touch the things that he had touched?
The bookshelf was the same combination of uninspiring titles, but he pulled each one out anyway, and flipped through the pages. Not so much as a scribble in any of them.
He scanned the room again, settling on the bookshelf. Textbook, textbook, Evelyn Waugh, another textbook, Shakespeare, Paradise Lost. Collected poetry. Quite a lot of poetry, in fact. He hadn’t thought Regulus would be the type.
Draco pulled out one of the slimmer volumes. It was bookmarked in the middle.
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite
Draco had never much been one for poetry, to tell the truth. It was all a bit circumspect.
The bookmark was interesting, however. It was an envelope addressed to:
Mr. Regulus Arcturus Black IV
The Bedroom At The Top Of The Stairs
No. 12 Grimmauld Place
London, England
The handwriting was almost too elaborate to read. The crest, before it was broken, had been a stylized A in red wax.
He slipped out the letter. The edges were thin and translucent from wear, but the ink was still dark enough to read.
22 December 1970
Hogwarts Castle
Scotland
My dear and beloved Egg,
I’m already better today, my temperature hovers between 36.7-37, as I write this I’m lying in bed and eating chocolates. That sweet Cassie Greengrass brought them (please marry her so I may be near her always). Feeling mediocre; I think tomorrow I’ll be dead. But last night was sublime. I read “Cut” and “Elm” for the poetry society (small group, only 30 or 40) and it was glorious triumph. Then Evan spoke for half an hour quite thrillingly but said nothing at all I fear. Poor dear has got it in his head to impress me or bore everyone trying.
_On Sirius — forget it. He never hangs out in Slytherin anyway so it really isn’t anything to do with you. If he hasn’t written back by Christmas, tell me. I’ll bend him over and spank him in front of all the other naughty 3rd years (as prefect I am entitled to do this any time I please). On the subject, I strongly recommend becoming prefect, you get all the gossip before it happens. Yesterday I caught Robbie Carrow with his hand up Persephone’s skirt. I wanted to wait & see how far she let him go (all the way?) but I was patrolling with Edward (Ravenclaw mudblood cf. previous whinging) who is a stone cold grump. I must kill him and stash his body in the laundry I think. Will ask his girlfriend for help as I assume he has her in some sort of hostage arrangement (not a looker). _
By the way: I’ve chucked that last poem so please burn your copy. Have spent the whole day rewriting it and just now finished at half four, that death-black December teatime which always tastes lonely no matter where or how you are — but suddenly someone downstairs put on the Nutcracker and like magic I am home for Christmas and Bella is dancing for us like always and you and I are eating popcorn under the table (which is where it tastes best of course of course.) Why hasn’t Bella answered my letter? Go nag her about it. Cissy hasn’t either but that’s because she’s a slut. I miss you. I can’t wait for you and Cissy to come back. In the spring we will have a tea party on the lake and drink sparkling wine until our insides turn to butterflies and float up through the blue forever.
Temperature: 36.8. Remember me when I have perished of this ague — be my Horatio, my Orpheus, my Antigone — and most importantly, burn that poem. I will not be immortalized by amateur work.
Love love love love you Eggy, you charming weevil, you sad hedgehog, you silly little absolute cheese, you. Merry Christmas.
Your (almost) sister,
_ &E _
The letter was dated two years before Andromeda had been disinherited.
How long had it hidden there? Since it was opened? Had Regulus stuffed it there after finishing it, closed his book, and simply never touched it again? Or had he returned to it, when she left, and made the conscious decision to keep it? That was even more interesting, and more strange.
He wondered if Andromeda knew Regulus had kept her letter. If she ever thought about him.
He supposed he could always ask Tonks if he could speak to her.
But the idea of talking to Andromeda spent a spider of dread crawling down his neck. It still carried a specter of taboo: it was anathema to imagine calling on his aunt casually, as any ordinary loving nephew might, to speak freely and casually about a past he had been forbidden to know.
Draco pocketed the letter and left the room. He shut the door behind him.
He descended no farther than the second floor before there was a splinter and a shriek and Tonks staggered onto the landing, holding one end of a brass portrait-frame. Draco flattened himself to the wall, being taught by five years of cohabitation with the twins to Get Out The Bloody Way first and ask questions later. Tonks dropped the frame with a THUNK that rattled the floorboards and wiped her forehead, grinning maniacally. The portrait was wailing bloody murder (and a good bit worse).
“Wotcher, Malfoy!”
“…Tonks. Is that who I think it is?”
Sirius’s head appeared at the bottom of the stairs. “The Queen Mother?” he suggested happily. “Lilith the She-Demon? The Wicked Bitch of the West?”
“My great aunt, you mean?” said Draco, dry.
“Bingo.”
“How on earth did you get her down?”
“Oh, she held out, but she came in the end,” he said. “Took a piece of the house with her, though.”
The edges of the portrait-frame were charred. Tonks had singe marks in her hair.
“You blew a hole in the wall?”
“A small hole,” said Tonks. “Improves the whole room, really. Great feng shui down there.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t bring the roof down!”
“Wouldn’t have done,” said Sirius briskly. “I’ve brought down a building before, and it’s harder than you’d think.”
The letter in Draco’s pocket seemed to heat against his skin. He tried to imagine what he would think of his mother if she disowned him, but it was impossible to do, it was inconceivable; she simply wouldn’t, and that was that. Even in the distant, foggy fields of the hypothetical, he couldn’t imagine speaking with a fraction of Sirius’s vitriol about her. Disinherited, distanced, or dead, she would be his mother. He had clenched her hand on his first trip to Diagon Alley and fallen asleep in her lap at a hundred boring parties. Anyone who kicked her portrait would be volunteering themselves for acquaintance with the vicious end of his wand.
“What did she do?” he asked, abstractly, before he thought better of it. Tonks sucked through her teeth.
Sirius shrugged.
“Didn’t win any parenting awards, did she,” he said. “Yelled a lot. Made me eat lentils. One time she kicked me down the stairs—”
“On purpose?” Draco said sharply, with a glance at the portrait. Beady dark eyes squinted back at him with uncomprehending scorn. “Why?”
“Can’t remember. Think I brought home a muggle. Might’ve been a boy. Probably did it to piss her off, in fairness.”
“You can’t remember?”
“Mum told me everyone was afraid of her,” volunteered Tonks. “Like living in a dragon’s cave, she said. You had to whisper all the time, or it’d wake up and burn everything.”
“Kind of,” admitted Sirius. “Only sometimes the dragon woke up anyway. Nothing you could do about it. S’the way dragons are. So you and the other guy in the cave, you teamed up, and worked out how to get it back to sleep, and you got pretty good at it, after a while. And so now the dragon’s sleeping a lot, but it’s still a fucking dragon, you know? And then you finally get out of the cave, and your brother’s all, ‘how could you do this to me, I thought we were cave buddies,’ and you’re like, ‘kid, we can still talk, just come out of the cave,’ but he doesn’t want to, because he wants to spend the rest of his life putting it to sleep — thinking like, maybe if he just holds out, one day he’s gonna wake up and it’s not gonna be a dragon anymore — like that, only there’s a war on. Oh shit, sorry, Mum.”
It was muttered without thinking: he’d stubbed his toe on the side of the frame, and Walburga had given a frightened little yelp. He patted the frame in absentminded reassurance.
Draco stared at him.
“You’re a real piece of work, Black.”
“Best piece of work this place ever did,” Sirius agreed, massaging his foot.
“Second best,” said Tonks, not unapologetically, “on account of Mum.”
“Your mum was a snoot.”
“Andromeda,” said Draco suddenly, turning to Tonks. “Was she close to Regulus?”
Tonks shrugged and looked to Sirius. “Never mentioned him,” she said. “But she didn’t mention most of you. No offense.”
“Offense unheedfully taken,” said Sirius, “and the more your loss. Tyke, Andy was close with everybody.”
“Not Bellatrix, surely.”
“Especially Bellatrix,” said Sirius absently, eyeing the staircase in a calculating manner. “That was the mad part. Against all odds, growing up in our house, Andy was actually halfway decent — not all there up top, maybe, but decent—”
“Oi! That’s my mum!”
“—and still managed to like that demented hag of a woman more than just about anyone living. Until she didn’t, I s’pose.”
Draco frowned. “What changed her mind?”
It was Sirius’s turn to shrug and look at Tonks.
“Never said exactly,” said Tonks. “Just that she didn’t fancy being told what to do.”
“That’s it?”
“Made enough sense to me,” said Sirius. “Where is Andy, anyway? Thought she might be around.”
“Spending the hols with Dad’s family in Leeds,” said Tonks, a bit guiltily. “They’re both cross I’m not there. Molly invited them both here, but Mum turned it down.”
“S’ the house, I expect,” said Sirius, with a quick glance at Draco. “I don’t blame her one mite there. I’d rather spend a decade in Leeds than a weekend in this place, and that’s for certain.”
But whether Sirius meant it or not, the implication still seemed clear to Draco: It isn’t about you. Which, of course, meant that it was.
“I’d like to speak to her,” said Draco suddenly. Hearing himself, he pushed back a wave of apprehension, which, he told himself, was unreasonable. She was only a witch, and having a conversation with her wouldn’t break any rules. None that applied to him, anyway.
Tonks blinked. “Sure, yeah,” she said. “If I can get her down. I mean — she’s not avoiding you, mate, you just—”
“We haven’t customarily been in correspondence,” said Dracl, with a thin cordiality. “I understand. I’m attempting a change in custom.”
“She don’t go into wizarding society often,” corrected Tonks. “She keeps to muggle life, mostly, Mum does. Hardly even uses magic around the house. Only went to the Ministry with me because she didn’t trust me to handle Davis on my own. And fair enough, I’m no diplomat, but she’s not much of one, either.”
“Andy’s idea of diplomacy was pitching a fit until someone did what she wanted,” said Sirius, with great fondness. “Won every argument she ever had. Bless.”
“Save one,” said Tonks.
“Yeah. Well. Save one.”
The shadow of the past loomed and then receded like the coming of tide. The moment passed. Tonks inhaled and clapped the dust from her hands.
“Speaking of which, we’ve still got to lug this thing up to the attic. Hey, Malfoy! You’re not busy, are you? How’d you feel about getting elbow grease on your blouse?”
Like she honestly thought after five years in the company of Weasleys he’d never had to use his hands before. As if he was going to keel over and faint at the idea of disturbing an heirloom.
“I didn’t realize you were starting the party early,” he drawled, and tugged off his jumper. “Allow me to show the noble delegates from the House of Black how a Malfoy handles his business.”
Later that night, on the far end of a three-way intergenerational wrestling match with a slab of wood, when Walburga had been slotted in the attic between a fanged victrola and an old set of bagpipes — when the scent of Molly’s cooking wafted in thick, smoky strains through the house, and the table had been mounted with every piece of crockery in Sirius’s name, when Arthur, Bill, and the twins were singing “Blue Christmas” — their pitch altered by a generous serving of cognac — and when the dining room gleamed from the light of a hundred candles mounted here and there and floating around the chandelier like a choir of stars around a full golden moon, Grimmauld Place hosted its first Christmas party in at least thirteen years.
They ate steaming roast pork until each guest was porcine by weight, and passed bowls of supple roasted chestnuts spiced with cinnamon and brown sugar. There was a Christmas cake the size of a beehive, drenched in enough brandy to float a barge of pirates, and mulled wine and butterbeer and bourbon and crackers, paper hats on every head, and then a recess to regroup, and then ice cream and gingerbread and more cake and wine, and everyone drifted around nibbling for hours after the meal formally ended. Everyone was overfed, over-drunk, and overdressed: Draco had come down in a hot flush of triumph from his bout with the portrait, tie lost to the fray, and so fit more naturally between Charlie’s leather duster, Bill’s frayed suede jacket, and Ginny’s outsized Holyhead Harpies jersey. Every so often he looked up from his plate and found Hermione looking at him, her gaze drifting over from where she sat between Ginny and Molly, like a warm cloak settled on his shoulders; when he caught her, she would flit her eyes away, a silent admission which, if anything, only sharpened the warmth.
Ron spilled the soup. Fred put the empty tureen on his head like a silver knight’s helmet. George and Bill arm-wrestled for the uneaten half of Harry’s pudding, and Tonks did an imitation of Moody that made Arthur roar with laughter. They were all useless rascals stacked shoulder to shoulder at a table too small despite three Engorgement Charms, jeering and pounding their goblets like the many Knaves of the Round Table. It was a good party.
After dinner, a caravan of dishes trundled into the kitchen. In what her children called an outstanding show of favoritism, Molly unexpectedly exculpated Draco from dish duty when he gave a put-upon sigh. He was surprised as anyone, being unused to put-upon sighs getting him anywhere in the domain of Weasley.
“So as you don’t dirty your nice shirt, dear,” she said assuringly, patting his shoulder. “We don’t need all those people in there, anyway. Why don’t you put out the candles and put away the silver?”
Ron, laden with plates, rolled his eyes. “Misses Percy,” he muttered to Harry, but not subtly enough to prevent Draco hearing; nor, perhaps, Molly — though she said nothing, and swept into the kitchen.
Disarmed, Draco moved about the newly empty dining-room, pinching out the candles, reducing the room into a smoky dusk, while the kitchen bustled from next-door with light.
Hermione came in as he was finishing, and stood hesitantly in the doorway. He was aware of her almost without looking, by the shift of her step on the hardwood, and the way she drew breath when she had something to say. So he waited until he had finished the last candle to turn and look at her.
She had rolled up her own sleeves for the dishes, and her hair was pinned up with her wand. She watched him put out the candles on the bureau. A veil of smoke hung thin over her face.
“Did you have a good time?” she said. The quiet seemed strange after the loudness of the dinner-table, and the kitchen’s noise all but swallowed it.
He nodded.
“Sirius said that you helped them move Walburga’s portrait,” she said. “That was nice of you.”
“It was a bother to everyone in that stairwell.”
“I can’t imagine what it must have been like, growing up with her,” she said. She walked around the table, drawing her fingers idly over the tablecloth. “My parents hardly ever shouted.”
“Portraits take liberties,” he said. “They exaggerate the qualities of interest to the painter.”
“And that painter was interested in her prejudice?”
“Or her house pride. It was commissioned after her death. By her husband, likely, or a relative.”
“How do you know that?”
“She’s in mourning clothes. It’s her funerary portrait. I’d wager her husband’s is at Witherfell. It’s odd; usually they’d be hung together.”
“Witherfell?”
“The Black seat. Large estate in Cornwall. Abandoned since Regulus’s death, for obvious reasons.”
“They aren’t obvious to me,” she said thoughtfully. She peeled off a bit of wax from the bottom of a candelabra. “Why wouldn’t your mother take it?”
“It’s enough trouble maintaining the Manor. Anyway, supposedly it’s cursed.”
“Cursed?”
“That’s the story,” he said, flicking his hand carelessly, to indicate his lack of credence in the idea. “The curse of the Blacks. Five heirs — one imprisoned, two disinherited, one dead. And four parents dead in a decade: accident, heartbreak, sickness, grief.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t know any of them. I met my grandmother, once or twice. Druella Rosier. But she died when I was young.”
“Of what?”
“‘Grief.’ Which I have always understood to be a euphemism for an overgenerous dose of Dreamless Sleep.” He paused. “My mother blamed the Rosiers’ house-elf.”
“…For murdering her?”
“Manslaughter by inattentiveness, I suspect, if you pressed her. Druella more or less stopped eating after her husband died of dragonpox. She lost almost two stone in a year, and dosing Dreamless Sleep is difficult even for a trained wizard. Placing such a task in the hands of a house-elf was not the act of a witch with a powerful desire to live.”
“There are worse cases to be made for a family being cursed,” she said after a moment.
She had come to stand at his side. They watched the wax move in slow braids down the silver sconce. He felt her nearness so keenly it was almost its own kind of touch.
“If the Blacks are cursed, it isn’t because of magic,” he said.
She turned to him curiously. “Do you think you’re cursed?” she murmured.
He chose not to answer the question. Instead, he shifted to lean on the wall, regarding her upturned face through the smoke-silver dim.
“I’m a Malfoy,” he said. “Malfoys aren’t cursed, merely dead.”
She stepped forward, bringing them so close he could have touched her by shifting his weight. “Except for you.”
“Except for me,” he agreed.
She pressed her lips together. When she spoke, her words took him by surprise.
“Is it lonely?”
He took his time finding an answer to that.
“It used to be,” he said.
Her smile was a halting flash of hope. Her eyes found his, and then lowered.
“I just meant that it’s a big house to be alone in,” she said. “I’m — glad you’re here.”
“Yes.”
She was very close.
“Oi, Hermione?”
Ron’s silhouette blacked the kitchen doorway, bracing the door ajar with his arm. Hermione moved away quickly.
“Mum says we need another hand to move the table,” he said. “Not interrupting anything, am I?”
“No,” she said brusquely. “Of course. We’re happy to help. Draco, will you—”
“Oh, he’s alright,” said Ron. “We only need the one pair of hands.”
With a fleeting backward glance at Draco, she followed Ron into the kitchen. Ron met Draco’s eyes over her shoulder, and with an unreadable expression, he shut the door.
The candles were all extinguished. Draco slipped his hands into his pockets and retreated to the drawing-room, quelling a strong twinge of bitterness.
There were voices in the drawing-room, low and heated. He slowed on his way past the door, and a murmur escaped with the sliver of lamplight through the crevice.
“—best fighter you’ve got, don’t deny—”
“—wards on the house! All of us—”
“—in and out, three hours, they’ll never notice—”
A shadow dimmed his view. He shifted out of the light.
“It’s my decision.” That was Sirius.
“Not as long as we’re under this roof.” And that was Molly.
“Half of you won’t be! That’s the point!”
“Fine. Not as long as my children are under this roof.”
“Alastor’s here, they’ll be fine — and anyway, between you and me, this ‘master of the wards’ business from Dumbledore always sounded funny.”
“He’s got a point.” Tonks. “You can’t make him stay here.”
“No, but I can.” Remus was not apologetic at all. “Padfoot, listen to me. You’re not leaving this house. The risk is greater than we can accept. The conversation is over.”
“It’s a holiday! The Ministry will be closed! It’s never been safer!”
“Emergency staff still comes in on New Year’s, and you said yourself we’ve no idea if the Unspeakables take holidays—”
“Which hasn’t stopped the rest of you!”
“The rest of us can afford to be arrested.”
“Really? Not worried about Azkaban, are you? Well, why would you be, you’ve never been!”
“I didn’t say that. I said we could afford it.”
“Yeah? What happens when they book you and don’t find your name on a certain registry?”
There was a beat. “I’ve never been formally charged for that,” said Remus, his tone flinty, “and in any case, being an unregistered lycanthrope isn’t a capital offense. I’d go to Azkaban, but at least I’d be alive.”
“I’d rather the other.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“I would,” said Sirius, raising his voice. “I’d rather the other than go back there, or see you in it. Or live in this fetid, godforsaken temple to barbarism for the rest of my days. I didn’t break out of one prison for another—”
“A prison! A prison, really? That’s what this is, for you?”
“Yes!”
“Food on the table and a roof over your head? Friends at every meal?”
“Yes, it is!”
“Waking up somewhere you’re loved, that’s prison? Why, I should’ve liked some years in prison, too! To think,” snarled Remus, “how much suffering I could have avoided—”
“You wake up here because you choose to! I don’t!”
“Because I’m flush for options?”
“Yes! You could leave, if you wanted to!”
“To do what? Go where? I’m not free either — you put me in the same position when you came to Hogwarts—”
“I did? I did? Jolly good, Moony, this is just like old times! Something’s wrong, let’s blame Sirius!”
“I was complicit from the moment I set eyes on you, and you needed me, and you know perfectly well I was never going to walk away!”
“Yes! Yes! All my fault, isn’t it! Poor little Padfoot needed minding, so Mummy had to step in! And now you’re stuck with me. That’s you and me, isn’t it, you puttering around after my fuckups with a mop, and getting pissy when I didn’t kiss your feet after—”
“And it just killed you, didn’t it, to need it? You never complained of a mop when it was necessary, you just assumed that it’d show up, like it always does, and whinged when it wasn’t sufficiently expeditious or grateful for the chance to be of service to the great Lord Black—”
“And thank God for you, Saint Remus,” said Sirius savagely. “How would we poor lepers do without? Read my lips: I never asked you to stay. I never told you to lock yourself in here with me. And if you ever wanted out, I would be the last person to try and stop you.”
A chair screamed, its feet ripping across hardwood.
“Fine.”
Several people tried to speak at once. Another shriek of wood.
“Don’t touch me, Sirius.”
Quick footsteps. Draco threw himself out of the way, backpedaling back up the hallway. His back collided with something hard and short, and someone yelped.
“OI! Where d’you think you’re going?”
It was Harry. He caught Draco before they both toppled to the floor in a rictus of stupid.
“You alright?” he said, bewildered. “What’s wrong? Look like you saw a dementor—”
“Quiet! They’ll hear you. This way, come on.”
The door to the drawing-room banged open, and Remus stalked out. For a jumpy heartbeat Draco thought he would turn and see them huddled at the end of the hall, but instead he wheeled in the opposite direction and stomped up the staircase.
“Merlin,” said Harry angrily. “What’s up everybody’s arse? It’s Christmas.”
Draco raked a hand through his hair, nerves still jangling with the proximity to being caught. “Get the other two,” he said shortly. “Meet me somewhere private. The Order—”
“Can wait. Hey, you have a second? Great.”
Harry seized his sleeve and hauled him into the nearest door — notwithstanding an exclamation of complaint — which happened to be a pantry. The light snapped on at the yank of a cord, and they were blinking at each other in a cramped wooden closet full of jars, smelling of sawdust.
Harry shut the door and pivoted, guarding it with a stern expression. Draco brushed himself off indignantly.
“Listen. I’ll make this quick. I don’t know what’s been going on with you and Hermione—”
“And I’m astounded you feel any entitlement to,” said Draco, outraged and unsettled in equal measure. He had no positive inclinations about where this sort of conversation with Harry might be going.
“—but you’re not subtle, alright? Neither of you. For months now you’ve been at each other’s throats or in each other’s pockets, and I know you’re going to say that’s the way it normally is, but it’s different. And I know you, tosser, I notice these things.”
Draco offered a withering stare for an answer.
“And based on how you are, and everything,” he said awkwardly, “I reckon there might be — stuff going on. Maybe. Between you two. I notice her being all — touchy with you—”
“Granger touches her friends.”
“Not the same way she touches you,” said Harry. Then he muttered: “Thank God.”
The satisfaction was sharp enough to burn.
“Perhaps. What of it?”
“Because if it is — you know, like that— and mate, it’s none of my business—”
“Wholeheartedly agree.”
“—you have to let us in on what’s going on, alright? You have to sort it out. Because if it’s not, and the two of you are just — I dunno, having a weird phase or something — you’re going to hurt Ron. You already are. Hurting him. Not that he’d ever tell you that, because he’s a mate, but I will, because I’m sick of everybody being stupid and walking on eggshells around each other. The three of you need to sort out who fancies who and who doesn’t, or I’m going to lock you all in a broom cupboard together.”
Draco stiffened.
“Hurt Ronald,” he repeated.
“Yeah,” said Harry, pointedly. “Ronald. Who’s fancied her for ages. And if you’re not like that, and you’re really just mates, and don’t fancy each other— you should, y’know, back off a bit.”
Something in his face must have registered surprise, because Harry rolled his eyes and said, “C’mon, you’ve absolutely noticed.”
“Obviously I’ve noticed,” he said coldly. “But it isn’t requited.”
“Give him a chance to see about that, would you?” said Harry. “Reckon she might like him more than you think.”
“I rather doubt it.”
“Well, if you don’t fancy her, it doesn’t matter, does it?” he shot back. “All the same to you, right?”
“Of course it matters. They’re not suited.”
“Says you!”
“Says Granger.”
“Not to Ron,” said Harry firmly. “And she should say it to Ron, then, because he really cares about her, and it’s prattish for you to put him off if you’re not actually interested.”
Satisfied that he had said his piece, Harry turned to open the door. Draco, who was loathe to prolong the conversation, ground out anyway:
“Suppose that I was. Interested.”
He had been girded for the worst — dismay, disappointment, cringing repulsion. It did not come. Harry instead carded both hands through his hair, with an expression of aggravation, but not surprise.
“Fine. Just… don’t make it weird, okay? Whatever happens, you still have to play quidditch together.”
“Excuse me?”
“You can’t quit. I won’t let you. And I won’t let him quit, either.” He paused. “So I don’t care what you do with her — well I do care, don’t mess her around or anything, obviously. She’s my best friend — not that you’re not, or that I don’t, but I’ve got to kick someone’s arse, so — but the real thing is, you — someone has to think about Ron.”
This last was, it seemed, the only thing in the speech that he was certain of, and he believed it fervently.
“So don’t make it weird,” he ordered. “Be nice to him. Be nice to her, too. Be nice to all of us! We all bloody need it. And… I dunno. Good luck with all that, or whatever.” His shoulders drooped. “I hope… you get what you want. Whatever that is.”
He lifted his hands as if dropping an invisible object of some weight, stepped back from it, and began walking away. Ginny followed him.
“Shouldn’t you hope Ronald does?”
Harry paused.
“Get what he wants,” he clarified. His stomach twisted at the thought.
“I have this really irrational thing,” said Harry dully, “where I hope everyone will be happy at once. I get that the universe isn’t really on board with this idea; it seems to get pissed whenever someone asks. But I don’t hope for things because they’re rational. So yeah, I hope you get what you want.” He took a deep breath. “Alright. What was it you wanted to tell me about the Order?”
Harry’s bedroom was a dark paneled room on the second floor. A chicken-scratch sign on the door read PROPERTY OF S.B.!! NO TRESPASSING!!!, along with several others, all lavishly festooned with exclamation points.
Draco threw himself into an armchair and brooded while Harry vanished downstairs. A few minutes later, he reappeared with Ron and Hermione, who crowded in and shut the door behind them. Harry locked it.
“Tell them what you told me,” he ordered. Ron sank onto the bed warily. Hermione folded her arms and stood stock-straight in the middle of the room like a pillar.
“They’re going to break into the Ministry.”
“We knew that already,” said Hermione at once.
“They’re going to break into the Ministry imminently. And it’s almost certainly the Department of Mysteries.”
He related what he’d overheard. Harry and Ron were unsettled, and Hermione started pacing in thought.
“We knew all that, too,” she said. “We’ve known they wanted the Department of Mysteries ever since your Occlumency lesson. They’re trying to get the ‘special artifact’ you told us about. What I don’t understand is why Sirius is kicking up such a fuss about going — it’s going to be heinously dangerous, and if he’s caught, he’ll get the Kiss, if not worse — and why?” She lifted her hands, acidly. “Because he wants a bit of fun? Then he’s a selfish arsehole, and Remus has every right to be angry with him.”
“No, because he’s been cooped up here for six bloody months,” said Ron. “Because all the other grownups are swanning off to do a heist on the government, and he’s supposed to sit on his arse at the kiddie table. Six months of that and I’d flip my nut, too.”
“Personally, I’d love to have it that easy,” Hermione said thinly, “since the rest of us don’t get to say we’re helping the war effort by breathing. And all of us have it worse than he does, living under Umbridge, but no one asks us if we’re sick of being cooped up in Hogwarts.”
Harry’s shoulders crept up by his ears.
“S’different,” said Ron. “C’mon.”
“How!”
“It’s not like we couldn’t leave Hogwarts.”
“Not this again.” She massaged her nose.
“What?” said Draco.
“Ron, you just want to get out of taking your O.W.L.s.”
“I told you, that’s a bonus!”
Draco sat up straighter. “No one’s leaving Hogwarts.”
“No, but hang on, give it a think.”
“Fine. My thought is: no one is leaving Hogwarts.”
Ignoring him, Ron counted points off on his fingers. “Grimmauld is safer than Hogwarts these days. We’d be protected by the whole Order. We could spend all our time training — I mean, seriously, Hermione, do you want me spending my time on Divination homework?”
“You don’t do your Divination homework anyway!”
“There you go! No great loss! And anyway, I’ve been working on bringing Mum around, all she needs is a hard press — she’s already thinking about letting the twins skip their N.E.W.T.s if things get any worse. And Harry’s legal guardian is Vernon Dursley, who couldn’t give a fuck if it hit him in the nose.”
“You’re serious,” said Draco, aghast. “You’ve thought it through.”
“You call this ‘thinking it through’?” Hermione muttered.
“What about you?” he shot at her. “Have you considered it?”
“Of course not! I’m sure there’s nothing Umbridge would like more than my vanishing off the face of the earth, but she won’t get the satisfaction,” she said indignantly. “I’m getting my O.W.L.s, and I don’t care if I have to break down the door of the exam room.”
He relaxed slightly, his hackles lowering. “Good.”
“Easy for you to say,” muttered Ron. “You still get to walk around like you own the place.”
Draco stood up. Ron stepped back, startled.
“And do you imagine that I enjoy that privilege?” he said coldly.
“Draco,” said Hermione.
“Is that what you think? My life is a draught of Felix Felicis? When my knee still hurts from where Goyle shattered it last year? When my godfather lives under the thumb of the Dark Lord? When my mother is out there doing God knows what at Dumbledore’s beck and call, and barely talks to me even when she isn’t? When I spent most of this holiday alone in an empty house? Would anyone,” he said, “like to switch with me?”
“Done,” said Harry.
There was a long, oily smear of silence.
“Yeah,” he added. “Thought that’d shut you all up. Are you three done yelling at each other, or should I pop down and put the kettle on?”
The smear widened.
“There’s no point in arguing over who’s got it worse,” said Hermione carefully. “No one gets a prize for having suffered most.”
Harry moved his head equivocally, but a hard look from her cured him.
Ron nodded shortly. “Sorry,” he told Draco. “Didn’t mean that. I know it’s rough for you, with your mum, and everything. I do… get it, you know.”
“It’s fine.”
“And don’t think I’m going after you for being cosseted, either. I mean, you are, but I saw you ask Umbridge for the quill, I haven’t forgotten—”
“It’s not necessary to pursue this further.”
“I’m attempting a manful show of respect over here.”
“Try a manful show of shutting up, next.”
Ron barked a laugh. Draco’s mouth twitched and he eased himself back into his chair, aching unreasonably in muscles he hadn’t even used.
“Did you ever tell them about the mole?” Hermione asked Harry, who blinked at her. She sighed. “The one who’s leaking information about Sirius and Remus?”
“What? Oh, yeah. Moody said he wagered it was Mundungus,” said Ron eagerly. “Apparently, Dung disappeared on a scouting mission around November, hasn’t been seen since. Sirius revoked all his ward permissions, so he won’t be able to get back into the house.”
“Why was he allowed into Twelve in the first place?” said Hermione crossly. “He’s a petty criminal with a record. hardly a freedom fighter.”
“You don’t win wars with saints,” Draco remarked, crossing his legs.
“You don’t win them with pickpockets, either,” she retorted.
“He had good information,” said Ron. “Connections everywhere, lots of intel. Plus, you need someone who can report on the criminal underground, since Lupin won’t go undercover—”
“What?” Harry said sharply. “How did you hear that?”
“Overheard Mum and Bill talking about it. Apparently, Moody wanted him to go back in with the werewolves, but Lupin wouldn’t—”
“Of course he wouldn’t,” snarled Harry, “what a foul fucking thing to ask—”
“—and Sirius threatened to revoke Moody’s ward permissions if he pushed the point, so he didn’t mention it again. But you still need an ear to the ground on what’s happening down Knockturn Alley, so to speak — so they got Dung. Suppose Lupin feels a bit guilty about it now, too — if he’d been willing to work as a double agent again, we’d never have needed to bring in someone else, and there wouldn’t have been a mole in the first place.”
“And risk his life,” said Harry loudly, “yeah, that’s a totally reasonable thing to ask—”
“Everyone’s risking their lives, Harry,” said Hermione impatiently. “For goodness’s sake. It’s not like Moody asked Lupin for anything he wouldn’t do himself, if he could; and moreover, it’s not like he forced him to do it.”
Harry’s outrage was hardly quelled by this acrid infusion of reason. “Are you joking? Remus’s life blew up and he spent thirteen years living alone, and just when he’s got Sirius back, Moody wants him to turn around and go back to the werewolves — to be out there on his own, no one looking out for him, to be like Snape—”
“Yes, and you don’t seem to have a problem with it when it’s someone else’s godfather, do you?” said Draco coolly. Harry bit his cheek, his expression brittle.
“It’s still wrong,” he said, “and Snape did that of his own free will.”
“Well, so would Lupin!” Hermione said, exasperated. “If he chose to, which he didn’t! Honestly, Harry, you can’t be sore with Mad-Eye for voicing the option! It would help to have a trustworthy spy in the Death Eater camp, and I don’t think he’s wrong for pointing out the obvious candidate.”
“Snape is trustworthy.”
“Well — yes, I don’t deny it, but I mean a spy who’s loyal to the Order itself, not just to Dumbledore.”
“I can be sore with whoever I like,” snapped Harry. “For whatever reasons I like. It was a rotten thing to ask of him.”
“Worse than asking him to die?” retorted Draco. “Because that’s the whole point of the Order, you realize. They’re recruiting soldiers. What is it you think soldiers do, exactly?”
“There are things worse than dying,” said Harry shortly, and said no more.
The house sighed on its foundations like it was trying to soothe itself. Voices murmured dully from downstairs, comforting in their proximity and their indistinctness — a reminder that the adults, while out of earshot, were no more than a flight of stairs away.
“I want a break,” announced Harry.
Hermione cleared her throat. “Sorry,” she muttered. “We’ll give you some space.”
“Not from you. From the rest of it. D’you lot remember the last time we talked about something that wasn’t the Order? Or Defense Club? Or Umbridge?”
Hermione massaged her own shoulder, restlessly avoiding his eyes. “That’s a lot of things.”
“Yeah? But I miss you,” he said.
Her face crumpled, and the fight went out of her like a departing spirit.
“Just because we’ve talked doesn’t mean it feels like it. I miss talking to you. I miss you going off about how rubbish my Transfiguration essay is, and you and Ron fighting about Crookshanks. I miss talking about rubbish because it’s rubbish, and it doesn’t matter. I want to hang out with my friends, because it’s Christmas, and do — literally anything but think about this stuff, for a bit. I get that it’s stupid and childish, I do, but I’m still asking, because — I need it. I really need you. I’m sorry. I just do.” He swallowed. “Also I think I’ll go mad pretty soon, if you don’t.”
It was light, with a trifle of fear.
Hermione made a wounded sound, and hugged him.
Of course she did. For her, from him, the words I need you were a Summoning Charm.
Harry buried his head in her shoulder. Their closeness fused their silhouette into a single creature, one head, one shuddering chest. Two dark-haired children with parents nowhere near, grappling each other like it was possible to wring the wide universe of all they didn’t have from the little they did.
Ron cleared his throat. Draco averted his eyes from Harry and Hermione, who were still wrapped tightly in each other.
“Exploding Snap?” said Ron.
“Five galleon buy-in,” said Draco
“Of course you want to play for money.”
“I thought you’d leap at a chance to lighten my pockets.”
“Oh, I will, don’t you worry,” said Ron, flopping down on the carpet. He began to shuffle. “Might even let you keep your shirt as a Christmas present.”
“Whereas you couldn’t pay me to take yours.”
“Laugh it up, git, it’ll be twice as funny when you’re naked.”
The night sank into a slow, warm ending. Draco was the best hand at Snap by some margin, but Ron was better at cheating, and Harry and Hermione were both redundantly awful, so the game devolved. They ended up sprawled over the carpet, laughing at the charred bit of Ron’s fringe and picking ashes out of their clothes.
The cards drifted away, and the candles died in their brass berths, but the fire crackled on, and the grandfather clock was tolling, but nobody could say how many times. The boys pitched the pocket snitch around in a three-way game of catch until it knocked over a vase, which spilled a filmy and suspicious ash; Ron said, “Damn, there goes Draco’s great-auntie,” which everyone found unreasonably funny. Hermione tried — through vigorous, bemused heckling — to explain what a ski trip was, though when she began describing a ‘ski lift,’ she was shouted down for having them on.
She was leaning against the foot of the armchair with Harry’s head in her lap. Her fingers glided every now and then through his hair like she was petting Crookshanks. The conversation dwindled, turned a few times around the same subject, and finally laid down into a close, companionable silence. Harry’s snores joined the crackling of the grate as the only noise in the room. Ron held up longer, but surrendered at last, his cheek sandwiching the last of the Snap cards to the rug.
Hermione’s yawns grew in frequency until Draco turned to ask her something and found her eyes closed.
She lapsed toward him in her sleep, her head tilted back against the chair behind them. Her shoulder pressed against his arm, a weight that made him intently aware of every inch of the skin beneath it. Her hair brushed soft and fragrant on his cheek.
It was warm in the firelight. The room smelled of woodsmoke, varnish, incense, citrus. In his limbs was a thick warmth that moved slowly and viscously down his veins. The other boys were both asleep. He could count her freckles, locate them in their usual stations, and draw the usual constellations he liked to imagine between them, studying her face with a naked and unrepentant greed, free of the fear that someone — not least of all herself — would catch him looking.
Her mouth was parted slightly. Her breath feathered from a crease between bowed lips. It was so close that a slight movement of his head would brush it with his own; and when the thought occurred to him, her eyes fluttered open, as if she’d heard it too.
They were the only part of her that moved. From beneath her thick eyelashes, she studied him. Then her eyes dropped down his face, and rested on his mouth.
He felt pinned to the spot by an enormous weight, bearing down on every nerve at once. It pressed hard on the center of his chest, forcing his heart to beat.
With a slight movement of her chin, she lifted her face. He bent down the slightest distance, and their mouths touched. And then, as if by accident, they were kissing.
It wasn’t urgent as the train had been urgent. It was slow, and shallow, and he almost felt outside himself, watching his own body do something it had never been taught. He mirrored the cant of her head, bending to kiss her better, and each movement glided smoothly into the next. She tasted like cinnamon and the trifle they’d had for dessert; that was the second time she’d tasted sweet when he kissed her, and there was a giddiness in the thought that he could tell the difference.
And of course she tasted sweet. It wasn’t surprising at all. Nothing about kissing her was surprising. She did it the same way she did everything, which was to say, thoroughly, passionately, and extremely well.
The fire snapped, and Harry made a noise in his sleep.
Hermione drew back with a twitch. Draco tensed.
She didn’t run, this time, however. She gave him a small smile that was half-shy and half-pleased, searching his face for a sign of something.
She must have found it, because her smile widened. Then she folded her head against his shoulder, took a deep breath, and settled, her shoulders slackening into a posture of utter rest.
He tipped his head back on the chair, stared at the ceiling, and tried to breathe evenly. From the rate of her breathing, Hermione had fallen asleep, and a dawning weight on his eyelids suggested that the same would soon be true of him.
It had been so long since anything had been as easy as this. It had been ages since he hadn’t fallen asleep to a list of the several hundred things he had to worry about. He couldn’t remember worrying about anything, really, with her head on his shoulder, and her breathing slow.
-September! Happy Hogwarts season!
-We’re trying to do a semi-regular update schedule, but I’m not quite back at weekly-post levels of productivity yet — sorry about that! I’m doing better now, so that is progress in one direction.
-God, I love Black family drama. There’s nothing I love more than an old bitchy aristocratic house that’s tearing itself apart.
-Slow burn continues to slow-burn post-kiss, but in a positive direction. I’ve always maintained we weren’t fucking around with it.
-The previous chapter’s title was a riff on “In the Bleak Midwinter,” which is one of my favorite Christmas songs and belongs to the robust canon of “festive holiday tunes that happen to sound like a funeral march.” My bonus piece of paratext is that I imagine it being Draco’s favorite carol. That or “A Coventry Carol.”
-This is the halfway point of Book 5! Thanks for sticking with me.
-The chapter, “Auld Lang Syne,” will be up hopefully before too long (though not too soon).
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