Chapter 71: Auld Lang Syne
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
When he woke, his heart was racing, and the room was dark. Vestiges of a dream frittered away in his periphery: a train car, a dead sprint, a wall of white masks, and a thatch of brown curls receding into the mist before him.
It was cold now that the fire had gone out. Hermione had curled up in a ball to sleep, and someone had draped a blanket over her shoulders. Harry was a dark lump on his bed, and Ron slouched in the armchair, head buried in the crook of his elbow.
Draco blearily lifted his arm, and found it buried under another blanket.
He shrugged it off and stood up. The clock was tolling two.
A jolt of panic sent him stumbling to the door. His mother would have expected him back.
Then he remembered he wasn’t on speaking terms with his mother, and he lurched against the doorframe, grinding the heel of his palm into his eye. He felt tired and miserable in the way one could only be at two in the morning, when one was far from one’s bed.
The stairs creaked on the way down.
It was a relief not to creep past the first landing, now that Walburga’s portrait had been replaced with a wide, splintering maw in the wall; all the same, the hole was somewhat unsettling. He trotted past it and into the drawing-room, picking his way through the papery detritus of Christmas morning.
A moonless night pressed flush to the windows; frills of frost around the eaves. An owl crooned.
He fumbled through the darkness for the Floo powder, lamenting his want of a Summoning Spell, or even a miserly Lumos. When his fingers located the jar, they also brushed a fold of paper.
Moony,
Don’t be angry. Back in a jiff. Keep the Floo open.
—Your Padfoot
He stared at it for a second. It was very strange, how time moved then: he could feel each beat of his heart as if minutes elapsed between them, horrible pauses crawling past between each detonation in his chest. His mouth parted; he fumbled for a name, and in a white blear of panic, it seemed to take him years.
“REMUS!”
The door slammed against the wall. He tore through it and up the stairs.
“REMUS! ARTHUR! MOLLY!”
Lights blazed.
“What?”
“Who’s that?”
“What is it?”
He took the last three steps in a single jump and whipped around the banister. He almost slammed into Arthur, who stepped into his way and seized him by the arms, wrenching him still with surprising strength. Arthur wore a dressing-gown, and behind him, Molly was hurrying out of their bedroom, fumbling the tie on her robe.
“Who’s that?” she cried. “Is that Ron?”
“No, it’s Draco — what the devil’s the matter, son?”
He didn’t have the time. He shoved the paper into Arthur’s hands, tore himself away, and raced up the stairs.
“REMUS!”
Fleur swept down the stairs and nearly speared him in the eye with her wand. “Est-ce que quelqu’un essaie de nous tuer?”
“Oui, il s’appelle Sirius Black, alors dégage de mon fucking chemin, s’il te plaît, where the fuck is REMUS?”
“I’m going after him,” cried Arthur, voice winnowing down the stairs, “I’ll take Tonks, Bill, and Fleur, Molly, go get them—”
“Yes, and Alastor, take Alastor!”
“No! Best people stay with the children! You and Alastor stay with the children!”
“God damn it!” She didn’t argue, but hurtled up the stairs, brushing past Fleur. “Fleur! Code seven! TONKS!”
Remus staggered out to the landing, gaunt and horrified, his nightshirt flapping open around his ribs. “What’s happening? Is there an attack?”
“Sirius is gone.”
“Where?”
“No idea,” shouted Tonks, “he might’ve gone to the Ministry—”
“Godric’s Hollow,” rasped Remus, interrupting the answer to his own question. Then he raised his voice: “I know where he is. He’s gone to Godric’s Hollow.”
“Godric’s Hollow,” Bill shouted, sprinting past on the stairs. “Great! We’ll use Bagshot’s Floo — Fleur, n’y pense même pas, you’re staying here!”
“Je t’emmerde, Rouquin, my left thumb is twice the duelist you are!”
“Telling, not asking, kid, and this isn’t a dueling tournament!”
“Ne m’appelle pas ‘kid,’ petit con, I am le grand prix in spellcasting at Beauxbatons, five years, and you are barely getting — what is the name, fucking stupid English tests—”
“Maybe you can write a paper at them!”
“She’s right, and shut up about it,” roared Tonks, erupting from her room. Her hair was black again, choppy around the shoulders, and her nose was a large, lopsided, very un-Black ridge of knobs. She flipped over the railing and soared down to collide with a house-shuddering rattle on the ground floor. “Delacour eats your charmwork for breakfast, she’s coming. Arthur!”
“Gone!”
“Damn! Alright, I’m after him!”
The sound of slamming doors and footsteps thundered through the house. The twins Apparated onto the landing with a one-two crack-crack. Charlie gave a shout and came pounding down the stairs with his wand in one hand and a nail-studded beater’s bat in the other.
The Floo howled. Remus sagged against the wall, ashen and limp like a used sheet. Draco took a wary, nervous step back.
“Why?” Remus mumbled.
“If it ever mattered, it doesn’t now. Come, you’ve got to help Moody ward—”
“Isn’t he going to,” he said, blinking glassily, and he gripped the wall as if seeking a hold on the surface of reality. “He’s— they’ll kill him, won’t they. Sirius.”
“Lupin.” He gripped his wand, ten useless inches of hawthorn wood, dead to rights, while the man who could use his appeared to be visibly dissolving. “Professor Lupin. Take hold of yourself.”
Remus’s gasp trembled on the thin verge of a laugh and a cry. “The Dementors. If they find him. He hasn’t been able to do a Patronus in six months. The others don’t know. It’s the Kiss on sight, if they find him, and he can’t do a Patronus.”
“Listen to me. You need to help Moody ward the house.”
“Oi.”
It was Ginny. She stood in the mouth of the hallway, wand drawn, hair a riot of disturbed sleep. She elbowed him away from Remus and took her old professor by the sleeve. “He’s having a panic attack.”
“You say that like I failed to notice!”
“Bugger off and do something useful,” she ordered, eerily calm. “Go find Harry, make sure he doesn’t run off.”
“He’s not a dog,” said Draco uneasily, but he swept away from the shivering man, and the last he saw of them was Ginny kneeling to help Remus sit down.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione leaned over the second landing, a triptych of terrified bewilderment. When Hermione saw him, she let out a small sound, and then clapped her hand over her mouth, sagging against the railing. She clung to it, wild-eyed.
Draco looked up at them, at a loss for words, and drew a deep breath. As his mouth parted, the scream cut open the air.
It came trembling out of the bottom of the house. Ron reacted first, probably because he was the first to recognize it as Molly.
He and Harry shot down to the ground floor. Draco followed them into the drawing-room.
The pulsing strains of the scream made the room unreal, uncanny, like a dream or a vision; he almost floated in, with a calm, vivid clarity that he was about to witness something awful and inevitable.
In the drawing-room, Molly sank in front of the hearth, her hands clutching her chest, as if the scream were something coming out of it involuntarily, an angry creature pouring out of her body and swelling to suffocate the room. Bill and Fleur knelt with their arms wrapped around her shoulders, bracing Molly upright; through thick tears, Fleur was babbling in an inaudible slur of French.
In the hearth, Sirius and Tonks braced up the body of Arthur Weasley, whose chest shone red from the gash in his throat.
A pale blue sunrise was swelling over the London skyline before any of the Weasleys returned from St. Mungo’s.
There were hours of waiting, in the awful, eerie darkness of morning. Moody had closed the Floo, for safety’s sake, and warded the doors. Tonks made coffee, cleaned up the wrapping paper, checked the wards, went for a walk — twice — and then paced around the room juggling her wand until Moody snapped at her. Fleur sat in silence, her hands folded over her pendant.
Draco sat with his back to the cold glass of the window, letting the icy line against his neck keep him awake.
Hermione came down over and sat next to him, staring dully into the middle distance. He looked at her, and then at her hand, which had fallen on the seat between them.
She moved it closer to his, and then — still without looking at him — shifted along the bench until she leaned against him. Her head tipped against his shoulder.
He considered her hand, which had burrowed its way into his. Her fingers were so small, and her skin was so cold. Her nails were bitten short and uneven.
It was an awful endless morning, and the modicum of comfort was her weight against his shoulder, a stark contrast to the cold glass.
He flipped her hand over, raised it to his mouth, and pressed his lips to it. She gave a hard shudder.
There was a knock at the door. Sirius scrambled to get it.
When Bill stumbled through the door, the room rose to its feet.
“Dad’s alive,” he rasped.
The knot in Draco’s chest slackened. Hermione gave a quiet, powerful: “Oh,” and sank back down into the couch, clutching her head in her hands.
The twins slouched in behind Bill and wordlessly climbed the stairs. Charlie came in behind them and shut the door.
“How bad is it?” Moody asked gruffly.
“No idea. Bad,” said Bill. He rubbed his eyes. “Mum’s got a cot, and they’re letting the kids stick around… we’ve told them Harry’s a cousin, so he’s ‘Lancel Prewett,’ if anyone asks. Ron’s idea, and thank Merlin he was quick… Mum was so out of it she almost put him down in the guestbook as Harry Potter.”
“Disguises?”
“Glamoured birthmark on the scar, Hair-Lengthening Charm, and he took off his glasses.”
“What’d you tell the healers?”
“He tried to break up a street duel on Knockturn.”
“Any aurors come looking? Unspeakables?”
“Fleur Obliviated the ones who saw us.”
“Good thinking,” Mad-Eye muttered. He shook Bill’s hand. “Well done, boy.”
“Thanks,” said Bill, without joy.
“Thank God for you, and your luck,” whispered Sirius. He made to take Bill’s hand, too, but Bill didn’t acknowledge him.
“I’m exhausted. I’m going to sleep,” he muttered. “Wake me up if the house is burning.”
And he left Sirius empty-handed in the foyer.
Time stretched and ribboned out in strange ways over the course of the next few days. It seemed like he had been at Grimmauld Place for weeks, picked at a dozen breakfasts of burned toast and watery porridge, while Charlie and Tonks clucked over the coffee pot; as if he had stumbled a dozen times into a spare bedroom, collapsed on the coverlet, and slept without removing his shoes; and a dozen times arisen, bleary, when the sun had nearly set again, for a small, somber tea with Moody, Fleur, and Sirius in the drawing-room.
Harry and Ron returned from St. Mungo’s the next day, followed by Ginny and Molly the next, and all of them prowled around the house in a state of tense, fretful shell shock. The twins said little and laughed less, and their faces became almost unrecognizable without their usual smirks. Fleur prayed, often, with her hands clasped around the pendant of her necklace.
None of Arthur’s children would speak to Sirius. Molly would, if needed, address him in clipped tones about some odd job around the house that wanted doing, but usually communicated using Harry as an envoy. Fred and George refused to sit at the same table as him; Bill and Charlie would leave any room he entered; Ron never crossed paths without sending him a nasty look. Of all of them, Ginny was the most forgiving; though she had dutifully adopted her siblings’ vow of silence, she seemed conflicted about it.
Draco preferred even this dour, eerie Number Twelve to the Manor as he’d left it. For Twelve was never silent, not even under the shroud of Arthur’s injury, and there was always something to do to take one’s mind off the obvious: namely, cleaning. The mansion contained an inexhaustible hoard of cupboards to be emptied, windows to be wiped, cobwebs to be cleared, silver to be polished (though he pointed out, somewhat waspishly, that there was piquant irony in being ordered by Molly to polish his own family silver).
He wrote to his mother, telling her he would stay a few days more with the Weasleys, but did not write why. No answer came, so he adopted her silence as consent, and if it put him in a foul mood to hear nothing from her, then he was in plenty of company.
The work was good for all of them; it gave them something to do, especially Ron, who took to it with a focus he usually reserved for chess games and quidditch, and not labor of any sort. The boy who loped around Gryffindor Tower with a crook in his grin and a joke for everyone was sealed now behind a hard line of a mouth and a dull, muttered answer to every question. Harry stuck close to him, as did Hermione and his brothers, but the more people tried to comfort him, the more he pulled away — offended by their comfort because it reminded him of what he had to be comforted for, and in so doing dragged him headfirst back into consideration of what he had to be afraid of. Resentment at this curdled any gratitude for their comfort — one tending to resent, rather than savor, the need to thank someone who had rendered an unhelpful service — and so he became snappish and withdrawn. It seemed to Draco that the best thing to do was to afford him the privacy he needed to pretend that nothing was happening, for as long as he needed to, until he could face it head-on — self-deceit in the face of tragedy being, in his experience, not cowardice, but a chance to marshal one’s strength.
He found Ron once curled on the window-seat in his bedroom, head bent against the glass in obvious contemplation, and though Draco had been sent to bring him down for dinner, Ron’s posture made it obvious he had no interest in food nor disturbances. Draco made at once to retreat, but Ron noticed the movement of the door, and called out to him.
“That you, Draco?”
Draco reluctantly revealed himself. Ron sat with his shoulders hunched over his drawn-up knees, and he seemed withered and shrunken, his great height reduced to a boyish size.
“Can I ask you something?” he said apprehensively.
“You can ask. I may even answer.”
“Right. Okay.”
His jaw worked with the effort of formulating the question. Draco shut the door behind him.
“When your dad died,” Ron said, “would you have wanted to know as soon as it happened? Or would you have wanted them to hold off on telling you as long as you could, so it’d be like — he was alive a bit longer, you reckon?”
Draco did not reply at once. The snow on the window left a pale glow on the carpet, reflected light from a thin London sun.
“My father was murdered by my aunt,” he said. “Our situations differ somewhat.”
“Yeah, but hypothetically — and I’m sorry for bringing the shit up, but I don’t know anyone else whose dad’s died.”
Draco raised his eyebrow.
“I can’t ask Harry,” Ron said quietly. “He doesn’t remember his dad. S’different.”
Draco acknowledged it, and set his brow in consideration.
“When I was eight,” he said, “freshly eight — perhaps a month or two after my birthday — my mother took me into the study and told me what happened to my father. I don’t remember what she said precisely, or when. It wouldn’t have mattered. In the long run, it’s only the beginning.”
“But—”
“It takes months for the idea of it to settle in,” he said. “And years before you stop forgetting.”
“When’d you manage it?” said Ron. “When’d you stop forgetting that he was — you know?”
He shrugged. “Fathers are long in the dying,” he said.
Ron swallowed. “I see,” he said, and turned back to the window.
Draco felt that he had failed to render a vague but important service.
For a few weeks after his father’s funeral, Draco had been given to bouts of crying, and so he’d locked himself in one of the little house-elf cubby-holes under the kitchen, which were too small for grown wizards to enter. It had felt a great shame to cry, after his mother had asked him to be strong about it, so he’d tried to stop by pinching himself, and made Dobby promise not to tell.
He recoiled from the prospect of telling this to Ron; it would help nothing to suggest that Ron was the object of his pity or compassion, both of which he already received from others, and by all appearances resented. He also recoiled from the words that would have expressed what they both knew, which was that Ron faced the prospect of a shared tragedy, and Draco was the only person in the house who could lend credence to the lie Ron wanted to hear: that things would be alright, somehow, eventually, if Arthur died.
“Look, Ronald.”
Ron raised his eyes in a start: his posture, his shabby shirt, his raw-bitten nails, and the red lines trawling around his eyes, all begged for a better answer than the one Draco had given.
“For one thing, he may not die,” he said. “It doesn’t do to mourn before you have to. And when he does, it’ll be a question of courage. Between the two of us, you’ve more courage at fifteen than I did at eight.”
“I don’t have courage for that,” said Ron hoarsely. “I’m not you. I couldn’t — do whatever you do. To live with it. To just — lock it up, and push on, like nothing happened. That’s not the way I am.”
Unexpectedly, it stung. Draco crooked his little finger, pressing the band of his signet deeper into the skin. He thought of empty rooms, and empty doors, and a cold, rainy day where a man had gone into the earth forever. He thought of his anger walking into those rooms, and vanishing behind the wide black doors, or being swallowed by the dead wet earth, and suddenly it was easy to speak without emotion.
“Why do you think it’s the way I am?” he said quietly.
Ron paused. When he spoke again, it was thin and wavering.
“I don’t want to be like that,” he said. Like you, he didn’t say.
Draco dipped his head. His acknowledgement of Ron’s point was silent, and Ron’s plea to be disagreed with was silent, too.
“I would bet a monumental sum of money,” he said at length, “that so long as we live or endure in living memory, no one will ever remark that Ronald Weasley reminded them of me.”
There was a beat. Then Ron threw back his head and laughed.
“You’re bloody right,” he said. “Oh, you’re bloody well right about that, at least. You tosser.”
“Ingrate,” said Draco, which made Ron snort and laugh harder.
But it was a laugh of relief, not humor, and it did not last long.
Meanwhile, Remus had sequestered himself in one of the guest rooms, and would speak to no one. That included Sirius, who had after several excruciating days ceased trying to get Remus to talk to him, and now communicated through forlorn stares and deliberate, hopeful remarks addressed to no one, but pointed in Remus’s general direction. Otherwise, he floated around the house, haggard and cringing, when he wasn’t sleeping on the sofa in the drawing-room.
Harry took it, predictably, not well.
“Give it time,” said Hermione.
“But they don’t even talk to each other.”
“So?” said Ron brusquely, dealing out another hand of cribbage. Hermione was forcing them to learn muggle card games because she was sick of losing at Snap. “Serves him right. Fucker.”
Harry cringed. Hermione rubbed his shoulder comfortingly.
“He just wanted a bit of fresh air,” he muttered. “A bit of freedom. On Christmas.”
“Bet my father wants some fresh air,” said Ron, in light, clipped tones. “In St. Mungo’s.”
The conversation keeled over from the force of this blow, and did not recover.
“My parents fight, too,” Hermione said quietly to Harry. “Once fought for three months, actually.”
He folded his hand over hers, smiling weakly.
Draco couldn’t remember if his parents had ever fought. Surely they had tiffs; his mother aggressed obliquely over the soup course, and his father made a discerning implication over dessert; but fights, when they happened, had taken place behind closed doors.
He wondered what his father’s anger had looked like. If it looked like his own. If it had felt like his own.
He wondered how it would feel to know for certain that you had your father’s rage. Then he wondered if it weren’t better not to know.
“Bet it wasn’t over something like this, though,” said Harry.
“No. It was over sending me to Hogwarts.”
Silence descended.
“My mother said no. My father said yes. She was unhappy, but she came around to his way of thinking.” She shrugged. “In her defense, my life would’ve been less eventful if I’d gone to Cheltenham.”
“And mine would be a lot shorter,” said Ron. “Tell your dad thanks for me.”
She laughed. Ron practically glowed, and tried to hide his pleasure by dealing out the next hand with such vigor that a card ended up on the other side of the room.
“So,” said Ron, “you like your Christmas present? The perfume?”
“It’s nice,” she said hesitantly. “I’ve never had any before.”
“Well, good. You like the smell, though? I made Ginny pick it out, but she isn’t much of a girl.”
“She wouldn’t like you saying that,” said Harry.
“Yeah, which is why you won’t be telling her, Harry.”
“It’s a very nice smell,” said Hermione primly. “The perfume. It’s clean. Like soap. Thank you.”
She tapped her cards even on the floor and began organizing them. She avoided eye contact, including Draco’s, whose stomach twisted in a bitter, irrational way.
He despised this part of fancying her: the meagerness, the pettiness. Knowing that the feelings were reciprocated should have banished this sort of feeling — an aggression that verged on nervousness, as if Ron even looking at her in that worshipful way was a threat that needed to be dealt with. He hated the idea of her going around smelling like something Ron had given her, and hated doubly the fact that the idea of it so colonized the forefront of his brain, ineradicable, a permanent installation of discomfort. He hated most of all the way Ron sat there satisfied with himself, as if he’d won some sort of prize.
They played another hand, and Draco excused himself. Hermione looked up as he went, and he felt the weight of her uneasy stare follow him out the door.
If they had any time alone together, it might have been easier. But in Grimmauld Place, one was never more than fifteen minutes from their next encounter with a Weasley, and the four of them were spending so much time together that pulling her away for a private conversation felt like a public declaration of intent.
The closest they’d come to communication was a fleeting encounter when she was coming out of the room she shared with Ginny, near the bottom of Regulus’s staircase, and he met her on the landing; she had touched his forearm as he passed, her fingers grazing the curve of his elbow, and he stopped short, as if some invisible cord in his navel had wrenched him back.
“Are you alright?” she said in a low voice.
He found his heart in his throat for some reason. “Fine,” he said. “Better than most, I should think.”
“It’s a good thing you were awake to raise the alarm. I don’t know what would have happened to Sirius, otherwise.”
“I don’t know that we would have ever found out.”
She shivered. “It’s awful,” she said in a hard voice. “I can’t imagine what it would’ve done to Lupin. Or worse, to Harry.”
“Inconsiderate, to be sure, but paltry in comparison to what he’d have done to the rest of us.”
“What do you mean?”
“Suppose he’d led someone back to Grimmauld Place. He’s master of the house. If he brings someone through the wards, they could have brought the whole Ministry in after them. Not to mention he made us sitting ducks when he left the house — there are certain wards that only activate when the master’s at home. Black could have murdered us.”
“See, but I don’t understand why he has to be the master. He hates this place. Why can’t he just give it to someone else? To Mad-Eye, or Remus, even—”
“The laws don’t work that way.”
“You can’t sell property in wizarding Britain? How classically medieval. ”
“You can,” he said, mouth twitching, “but not a family seat. They’re magically entailed. It’s his until he dies, and then it passes to his lawful heir, or whomever he names in his will.”
“Who’s the lawful heir?”
He raised his eyebrows and smirked at her.
“You’re joking,” she exclaimed.
“Through my mother, but yes.”
“Is there anything your family doesn’t own?”
“We’re working on it.”
“There should be laws against that,” she said, aggrieved.
“What? Against me?”
“Yes, exactly. Against Draco Malfoy. An exile decree for gross accumulation of wealth.”
“Tsk. You’d be miserable.”
“I would get so much work done,” she said, with a distant gleam of longing.
He laughed. Her mouth twitched up, and she watched him with an exasperated sort of pleasure. She lifted her eyes, and drawn close in the dim torchlight of the landing, her proximity flickered through his awareness like a warm wave.
Footsteps battered the stairs below them. “Hey, Hermione?” called Ron. “Come help with something, would you? There’s some old runes on the silver we found in the basement…”
She closed her eyes in a fleeting, minute gesture of exasperation. Draco jerked his head in invitation, and she drew away, calling out: “You know, if you’d taken Runes, like I told you to two years ago, you could translate them yourself!”
“But I’m no good at them!”
“How would you know?” Her voice faded down the stairwell. “You never tried!”
That had been several days ago. Now, the same landing was quite empty, and Draco swept through it with the memory of their last private moment, fleeting as it was, itching in his head.
Rounding the corner, he nearly tripped over Sirius, who was taking a chisel and hammer to one of the mounted elf heads on the wall.
He was whaling at it ferociously. Sawdust clouds sprang up wherever the hammer landed, which was not always proximate to the chisel.
Draco stood back and watched him, slipping his hands into his pockets.
“Putting holes in my house, Black?”
“Not your anything. This is my dusty — old — stinking — shithole. Get your own.”
“Only until you’re dead. Based on recent events, I won’t have to wait long.”
Sirius missed the chisel, struck his finger, and swore loudly.
“Mad-Eye’s right. I really should see someone about a will.”
“You don’t want to do your dear cousin a good turn?” said Draco, mockingly. Sirius flashed him a look of warning.
“You’re set to inherit two haunted houses already, kiddie. It’s a kindness to spare you another.”
Draco leaned against the wall. “How did they find you?” he said coldly. “When you left. Where did you go?”
“Godric’s Hollow.” Sirius gave the hammer another swing. “Had some friends I wanted to visit.”
“Friends more important than our lives?”
The hammer paused. Sirius rolled his shoulder, face hidden under the long shag of his hair.
“You never knew them,” he said. “If you’d met them, you’d understand.”
“I doubt that very much.” He paused, and frowned. “Knew?”
Sirius smiled a terrible, bitter smile. “They’re dead, you see. My friends,” he said. “And there’s only one place to visit them.”
He swung the chisel. Wood snapped.
“But the Ministry’s got it under surveillance,” he added briskly. “Heat detectors. Caterwauling Charms. Two patrolmen on watch. Makes sense, I guess. First place I’d look for me, too.”
“A very foolish man once told me that dead men can’t be proud of you.”
Sirius barked a laugh.
“The difference between you and him is you’ve got a life ahead of you, lad,” he said. “And respectfully, your dead man wasn’t worth half what mine was.”
“Perhaps, but they’re equally dead,” said Draco coolly, and felt very little remorse when Sirius flinched. “And you’re thirty-six. You have a life ahead, too.”
“I had a life before,” said Sirius. “And it was very nearly perfect, for a while there.”
He hefted the hammer. A ribbon of tattoos stretched and pulled on the weathered skin of his arm. Then he swung the chisel again.
The elf-head broke off the wall in a firework of sawdust.
“There we are. One down, only nineteen… twenty… only twenty-two.”
“You’re surely not doing all of them.”
“All of them. Plus the severed hands in the master bedroom.”
“The what?”
“The master bedroom, I said. Then I’m taking down all the crests. And that tapestry of the muggle-born hunt upstairs.”
“Do you intend to refurbish your way into Lupin’s good graces?”
“I intend to make this house half livable. If I happen to blow parts of it up in the process, that’s a bonus.” He lined up the chisel on the next elf-head. “And don’t you worry about Moony. He and I have come back from worse than this.”
The stairs creaked. Harry, Ron, and Hermione appeared on the landing.
“Draco. There you are,” Ron clipped out. He gave no sign of acknowledgement to Sirius. “Dad woke up. Tonks is taking us to see him. You’re coming. C’mon.”
“I thought they only permitted family visitation,” said Draco.
“Yeah, and the Order’s got this really clever workaround for that,” agreed Ron. “It’s called lying.”
“You can be Pisscock Prewett the Third,” said Harry. “Hey, Sirius.”
“‘Lo, kid,” said Sirius, smiling unsteadily. “How are you, now?”
“I’m fine. Why are you covered in sawdust?”
“Renovating, boy-o. Gonna build you a bedroom that doesn’t smell like old dog.”
“Aw, but it just won’t feel like home.”
“Never mind. You can sleep in the house-elf cubbies.”
Ron cleared his throat. Sirius straightened up.
“How is he?” said Sirius. “Arthur.”
Any levity evaporated like fog in sunlight. Wordlessly, Ron turned around and went down the stairs. Hermione called out his name, sighed, and then followed with a lingering glance at Sirius.
“He’s okay,” said Harry, once he was gone. But it wasn’t clear whom he meant.
The Floo at St. Mungo’s was emergencies-only, so they made their way on foot through London — a fact that Draco wished someone had done him the generosity of mentioning before he agreed to the visit.
The rest of them were wearing muggle costume, concessions to Mad-Eye’s preference for subterfuge; somehow, only Hermione managed to make this seem remotely presentable. Draco had vocally rejected an offer to borrow Bill’s muggle jeans, and so his costume consisted of a coat borrowed from Sirius, a sweeping double-breasted leather thing that somehow felt both more and less pretentious than a cloak. It smelled of patchouli oil and cheap cologne.
He complained of the situation, in his opinion, a normal amount.
“It’s just the Tube,” muttered Hermione. “You’re not being made to crawl through the snow.”
“Nothing I have ever known about muggle transportation leads me to imagine I will enjoy one more than the other.”
“Stop being fussy. It’s an English institution.”
“As is the practice of hanging,” he said, and she laughed a little.
That laugh was some consolation, anyway. It was the first good one she’d given in a while, loud and un-self-consciously grating. It was snowing, and when she tipped back her head the snowflakes beaded in tiny crystals on her eyelashes.
The group ventured down a narrow, dirty stairwell that appeared to serve a double purpose as a public toilet, and into a wide underground cave with silver turnstiles. A train came screaming out of oblivion with a sound that Draco would have assumed meant the station was collapsing were it not for the other passengers’ indifference, and Tonks herded them all into one carriage. Draco ended up wedged against one of the poles, a stranger flush to his back, Hermione pressed into the space under his arm.
The whole thing was a real gallimaufry of sensations.
“Hold on to something,” said Hermione, elbowing him.
“I don’t need coddling, thank you.”
“Fine. Suit yourself.”
This light tone, from Hermione, was a sure sign that you were about to screw yourself over with power and efficiency; but he didn’t have time to follow up.
With a howl, the train lurched forward, and he nearly flew.
He would have, anyway, if there had been any room in the carriage to fly. As it was, he was vaulted almost horizontal to the floor, caught himself on the pole, and headbutted someone in the shoulder. They gave him a look he would personally have reserved for someone engaging in vigorous public sodomy.
Hermione was visibly wrestling with herself.
“Don’t say it.”
“I’m not.”
“Good.”
“I’m not!”
“And that’s good.”
“But if I were to say it—”
“Here we go.”
“I mean if someone, hypothetically, were to have told you so—”
“You get one more warning.”
“—then that someone would be me. Telling you so. Because, as it happens, just a few seconds ago—”
“Before you speak, remember that at some point in the future, you may find yourself a passenger on a broomstick I’m operating,” he said, “and I advise you to choose your words with the level of grace you expect to receive.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” she said gaily, and brushed past him on the way out of the carriage with a smirk.
He followed her, strongly resentful of the fact that the universe let her win so many arguments, which was terrible for her ego, and even worse for his own.
They emerged from a station by Tottenham, and made their way up through the glut of shoppers and tourist crowds, winding a long, mostly ginger caravan through the bustling pavements of London. Billboards twinkled and automobiles whisked past in a blur of glittering lights and hammering, industrial sounds, the same old unnerving roar of life. Mist and falling snow bled the streets into astigmatic streaks of scarlet and yellow.
Hermione cut briskly through the crowd. There was a seeming logic to pedestrian city-travel that she and Harry understood, and so they drifted naturally to the front of the group, while the others trailed behind, buffered by the strange and seemingly unpatterned flow of harried shoppers charging up and down the streets.
Outside a shabby brick department store called Purge and Dowse, Tonks stepped up to the glass and began muttering something. Brown paper walled up most of the windows, and the sign on the doors read CLOSED FOR REFURBISHMENT.
As they waited for Tonks to finish whatever she was doing, a well-dressed muggle on the pavement ran headfirst into Mad-Eye, nearly toppled over, and then stalked off without apologizing, wearing a dazed expression.
“Real nice, tosser,” shouted Ginny, and was shush- ed by four people.
“Not his fault. Notice-Me-Nots,” growled Mad-Eye. “Not to mention muggle repellent charms. Can’t hardly see in front of his nose around this place.”
The glass panel of the windowfront gave a shudder and slid back, emptying a bath of warm air and yellow light onto the street. Whistling cheerfully, Tonks led them into the waiting room of St. Mungo’s.
Inside, past a dismal foyer populated by wailing miserables, fluorescent lights paved rows of checkered tile floors. Arthur’s bed was in the short-term ward, a marble chamber with frosted windows and a dozen beds separated by red curtains. Some of the other beds had curtains drawn, and from inside came the occasional rasp, wheeze, or moan that indicated the condition of its occupant. Arthur’s, in contrast, was silent. He laid back on a bed of shock-white sheets, his skin a ghastly, unrealistic shade of pale, with a thick collar of bandages around his throat.
Molly sat in a chair by her husband’s shoulder, holding his hand in a grip that could have resisted hurricanes. Her children filed in with uncharacteristic gravitas and stood in an awkward semicircle around the sickbed, exhibiting the range of expressions from stoicism to full-throated distress.
Ron made an involuntary noise. Harry put a hand on his shoulder.
Arthur stirred when they all came parading in, and his eyes slitted open.
“Hi, Dad,” croaked Ginny. She clambered onto the foot of his bed and sat on her knees, ignoring her mother’s hiss of discouragement. “How — how are you?”
Arthur smiled. With effort, he made a fist, thumb jutting upright.
“Yeah? Nice gig, eh? Having a good lie-in?”
He nodded.
“Nurses got you sorted? Are they all terrified of Mum yet? Blink once if she’s cussed them out.”
Arthur blinked twice, waggling his eyebrows, and then fumbled for some object on the side table. Fred hurried forward and passed it into his hands: a yellow legal pad.
Arthur carefully extricated his right hand from Molly’s grip. His fingers were shaking.
“What’s wrong with him?” Ron demanded. “Can’t he talk?”
“Ron!” said Molly.
“What? I don’t know! No one’s told me fuck—”
“Language!”
“The curse severed his vocal cords,” said Mad-Eye brusquely.
Ron choked.
At length, he said: “Well — are they — are they gonna grow back?”
No one answered him.
“We’ll see,” Bill said finally. “They’ve done some reparative spells, but we won’t know until it’s fully healed. He’s meant to wait two weeks before trying to talk again, to give it time to rest.”
“Oh.” Ron cleared his throat. “And — how do they like those chances? The healers?”
This time, not even Bill spoke up.
“Doctors tend to err on the side of caution,” said Hermione hesitantly. She qualmed when the attention of the Weasleys fell intensely on her. “In the muggle world. It’s far worse to be disappointed than pleasantly surprised.”
“Children,” said Molly, “why don’t you go—”
There was a loud collision of words and limbs by the door. Someone was trying to force their way into the ward, and the assistant healers were being rewarded for their diligence by getting verbally trampled by a bureaucrat.
“—know who I am? Senior assistant to the chief secretary of Lord Rookwood, that’s chief secretary, remember—”
“Oh, God,” said Molly faintly. “Percy.”
“Percy,” Bill said grimly. “Stay here. I’ll get him to leave.”
“Don’t! Let him in!”
“Let him in?” Ginny said. “Are you joking?”
But Bill stepped aside. Percy swept inside with great purpose, and yet stumbled to a halt before the crowd at his father’s bed.
George, of all people, was the one to break the silence.
“Afternoon, Comrade Weasley,” he chirped. “Shoot any good dissidents lately?”
Percy’s lip curled. “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to?” he said.
“No,” said George. “Not anymore, I don’t think.”
Everyone had been expecting a joke; the lack of one dropped like a stone and punctured the conversation, opening a black well of silence.
“George,” said Percy, affronted. “Merlin’s sakes. I— you — you would do well to mind your tongue.”
“Is that a threat?” Ginny snapped, scrambling to her feet, and Harry barely grabbed her in time to stop her from vaulting Arthur’s bed.
Percy sneered. “Molly, please inform your daughter that when she addresses a Ministry official, she should do so in tones of respect.”
“Don’t call her ‘Molly,’ you twat,” said Bill.
For a second, Percy’s sneer flickered, broken up by the cringing shame of a younger brother being castigated by the older.
And still, there was something unserious in the way Bill spoke: as if he couldn’t quite muster the same disgust or frustration that the others could. The way he spoke suggested he found nothing threatening or surprising about Percy at all — the third son, second even among middle children; the first to be no one’s favorite, too late to impress, and too early to be a darling.
Fred’s mouth twisted into a crooked, lightless smile. “Bless him, he thinks he’s important,” he said coolly. “You know, that always was your problem, Perce. You never could figure out how to make people care.”
Critical hit. Percy opened his mouth and nothing came out but a faint choking noise.
“Enough!” Molly cried. “Out! In fact, all of you, out! Percy wants to talk to his father!”
“Must have said that awfully quick, because I didn’t catch it,” said George. He hip-checked Percy on his way to the door. “Speak up next time.”
“Or don’t,” said Fred, jostling his other side.
Ron said nothing, but stalked past Percy with his hands in his pockets.
“Mum,” Ginny began.
“Harry, take Ginny and go, please,” Molly said brusquely.
Ginny rounded on Harry with an expression that told him very clearly what a bad idea this would be, and his expression assured her that he believed her.
“Now, young lady! Out!”
“No!” Ginny shouted. “He’s a pig!”
Percy flinched.
“Ginevra! Percy, don’t listen to her—”
“Don’t apologize to him! He’s a traitor! He works for the people who killed Viktor Krum! He might as well have cast the curse himself — and you would’ve, wouldn’t you, Percy? If your beloved Minister asked you to? Viktor Krum or any other little boy—”
“Ginny,” Bill said. “Don’t.”
She faltered for only an instant. “Fine! Here’s what he did do: he sent back his jumper! One week ago, he did that! No note, nothing! No? Not enough? How about this: he called Harry a murderer!”
“Don’t,” said Harry. “This isn’t about me, don’t — not for me.”
She whirled on him. “Yes, for you,” she said furiously, “always, deal with it, I don’t care what you want or what you think — nobody gets to — no one — and anyway, he hates us! Does no one else care? Why is he still here? Somebody listen to me!”
Molly was the color of her husband’s hospital bed. “Ginny Weasley,” she said, “if you don’t lower your voice, so help me Merlin, you will be headed straight home, and you will stay there until you go back to Hogwarts.”
“You’re kicking me out? Me? Me! Not him!”
“Your brother isn’t the one causing a scene!”
Hermione caught his arm, and they began to slip out of the room.
“He hasn’t even apologized, and you’re letting him slither back in like he’s brought the sodding cavalry! You want him to like you so much you don’t even care that he hates us, all of us, because we’re not the rich, prissy family he wanted! Because you’re not the rich, prissy mum he wanted! You get that, don’t you? He doesn’t like you! Letting him treat the rest of us like rubbish he can pick up whenever he wants won’t make him love you, it’s just — it’s fucking pathetic!”
Arthur slammed his fist into the bedframe. It rattled.
Percy made a noise like he’d been slapped. This was nothing compared to Molly’s silence, however.
Ginny broke off, her whole body heaving. Very slowly, Arthur set his jaw, and shook his head at his daughter.
“Never mind,” Ginny said bleakly. “I’m leaving.”
She ran out. Bill reached for her as she went, but she brushed him off.
It was something of a scramble to catch up with Ginny, who was moving like someone on a footrace out of hell. Harry was the fastest, and caught her arm as she slammed open the door to the stairs. They vanished, and the door had nearly closed before Draco caught up with them.
In the high, echoey chamber of the stairwell, he caught Harry’s and Ginny’s voices trailing up from the staircase below.
“—won’t do any good, seriously—”
“—do a lot of good, actually, to pop him one—”
“Ginny, c’mon. It’s Percy.”
Draco paused with his foot on the first stair. Hermione came skidding into the stairwell, and he held out his arm, freezing her.
That was the last he heard, and he was glad of it. The door to the stairwell clicked behind him, louder than he would have liked, and he had only just teed up a suitably apropos change-of-subject when the door to Arthur’s ward opened — opened was an inaccurately pacific word, but ‘exploded’ implied some kind of dynamic force — and unleashed a hurricane of bureaucrat into the hallway. There were voices, far too many to pick out, but in the same shrill frustrated overlay of people running verbal trains right past each other, and listening not at all.
“—can tell your Lord Selwyn to kiss a dementor, while he’s at it—”
“I shouldn’t have wasted my time!” Percy slammed the door behind him — but, thinking better of it, he spun back around, ripped the door open, and emptied his lungs into it. “Do you think I came because I didn’t have anything better to do? Do you think I rescheduled four meetings, two lunches, and tea with the Undersecretary of Law Enforcement so that I could have the pleasure of enduring your lectures?”
“Sir, you’re disturbing the other patients.”
“Hang the other patients! You shouldn’t have put my father in a ward with them anyway! Do you know who I am?”
A triage of shouting rendered itself indistinct.
The lift whispered open, and Hermione tugged Draco inside. She jabbed two buttons at random, and the doors closed on the sight of Percy shouting at a pair of nurses, his face nearly purple.
Hermione took a hesitant breath, and glanced at him. Her expression revealed a great depth of thought, but no great eagerness to speak. He nodded in agreement. The affairs of the Weasley family, though inescapable in such close quarters, remained a matter in his view best handled by Weasleys, and he lacked both tools and appetite to dissect them. They turned forward again in stony silence.
He had thought to visit the ground floor — upon leaving, he had vaguely identified a destination of ‘anywhere the fuck else’ — but the lift deposited them in a large, airy space filled with the pale light that poured from a clouded skylight. It bathed an interior of thick greenery, feathered with ferns and trawling vines, clambering up and over the buttressing walls of planters each grand enough to fit Hagrid’s garden entire, with runnels of palm and dogwood latticing over the centerpiece of a wide, sculpted marble fountain. An alabaster wizard poured water from each of his outstretched palms, and a pair of stone house-elves crouched at his feet, weeping four more streams that traced the contours of their sculpted rags. A brass plaque by the doorway identified it as the Parkinson Family Reflection Garden.
In the shadow of the fountain, a girl sat in a chair. She was small and slight, with yellow ringlets that hung in a thick dandelion fluff around her ears. She was wearing a blue hospital gown, and her tiny white ankles protruded from the gown’s hem like a pair of bony bird feet.
Hermione’s footsteps dappled the stone behind him.
“Draco, this isn’t — oh.”
Astoria sat up at the sound of voices. She executed the classic face-scrub of someone banishing tears.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded. “Are you ill, Draco?”
Hermione, whom Astoria could see perfectly well, made an exasperated noise in her throat.
“He’s fine,” she said. “We’re both visiting.”
“Oh,” she said. “Who?”
“An acquaintance. What are you doing here?”
Astoria held out her arm and revealed a long, clear tube spiraling up a vein in her wrist. “I got a new bloodbag today,” she announced. “They’re testing to see if it’s a match.”
“…Bloodbag?”
“My house-elf,” she said. “They breed them so they can give me transfusions.”
Hermione went very still.
“It’s not easy to breed a house-elf,” she said.
“No kidding!” Astoria said passionately. “They’ve taken so much of my blood I bet that thing’s part Greengrass! Mum didn’t even want to do it, she keeps saying how they’re full of diseases, but the healers said they keep the elves really clean.”
Hermione’s nails bit her palms and kept digging until the skin turned white.
“I meant that it requires a great deal of labor and capital,” he said. “Which is unusual, since you already have a genetic match.”
“Oh! But they won’t let me take Daffy’s anymore,” she exclaimed. “She didn’t send you to spy on me, did she?”
Hermione made a high, thin sound that might have been a laugh, but her jaw was clenched.
“And why can’t you get a transfusion from Daphne?”
Astoria frowned. “Because she’s not doing good.”
“Is that how your parents put it?”
“No, but—”
“And what did they say?”
“That Daffy’s sick,” recited Astoria dutifully. “Very sick, and if she touches me I’ll get sicker.” Rubbing her cheek, she muttered: “And she only hit me because she got moonsick from the halfbreed.”
“That’s not true,” Hermione snapped. Astoria jumped. “She’s perfectly safe to touch! And I should know, since I’ve shared a bathroom with her all year — which, just so you know, I would’ve done even if she did have lycanthropy, because I happen to have actually read about this disease your parents are so terrified of, and it’s transmitted through the bloodstream, not skin contact. Which, by the way, your parents almost certainly know, Astoria, because if I was them and my daughter came back with a werewolf bite, I’d have a lycanthropy specialist on my doorstep in an hour. And that’s another thing—”
“Stop yelling at me!”
“She hasn’t presented a single one of the five textbook lycanthropy symptoms besides heightened reflexes, which could very well be from the maladict going into remission, and chronic pain, which she had already—”
“I don’t know what that means!” wailed Astoria. “I don’t know what any of that means! Stop yelling!”
“—and in any case you have no idea how lycanthropy would interact with the blood condition because it’s a horrifically underfunded research area and there are! No! Studies! About cases like Daphne’s! And I should know! Because if your parents had any scientific basis for doing this to her, I would have read about it! Also—” She inhaled sharply. “Also: besides all that, Daphne is a very brave girl who’s been through a hell of a year, and she’s got it hard enough without her own family going around spreading lies behind her back.”
“It’s not my fault! She’s the one who doesn’t like us anymore!”
“Is that what Pansy Parkinson told you?”
“No! She didn’t need to! I know she hates us, everyone does!”
“She obviously loves you,” said Hermione impatiently. “She cried her eyes out after your fight in the Three Broomsticks.”
“Shut up! You’re lying! You just want me to forgive her.”
“For what?”
“For leaving!”
“For goodness’s sake,” Hermione snapped. “Leaving where? She’s still in Slytherin, she can’t very well leave it; she still takes all her classes with them, and I suppose she doesn’t sleep there, but you wouldn’t see her much anyway—”
“For leaving me!” Astoria shouted. “For getting sick of me! I always knew she hated me, I knew she hated coming back to our horrid empty house with her stupid baby sister, I knew she wanted to leave, she always did — I was the reason she couldn’t go to stupid France with stupid Draco, because I got hurt and she had to come back and give blood and she hated me for it, I know she did, I could tell from how she looked at me—”
“Astoria?”
“She wanted to run away and live with her pretty friends and forget all about me! I bet she wanted me to die just so she could finally go do what she wanted! She wanted me to shut up and lay down and die, she wanted me dead, she wanted to kill me—”
Astoria had shouted so hard she began to choke on her own spittle, and her tiny body trembled so hard it rocked the chair. But she slapped away Hermione’s efforts to help her with furious, violent strokes.
“Don’t touch me! Mudblood! Mudblood! Mudblood!”
Draco stepped between them and touched his wand.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Hermione quickly. “She doesn’t mean it. We should go.”
“Granger.”
“We’re upsetting her, and she won’t listen to me anyway. We should just go.”
She nearly dragged him back into the lift and jabbed a button. Astoria did not try to follow, but skulked back into the shade of the ferns, sneering at them as they left.
“She called you ‘mudblood,’” Draco said, by and by.
Hermione said reluctantly: “Yes, I heard her.”
“She shouldn’t have done that.”
His hand was still near his wand; she noticed it, and sighed.
“Well, jinxing her certainly wouldn’t have helped,” she said. “Though the thought is appreciated.”
“Jinxing her would have given her something to remember.”
“And it would confirm for her what she already suspects, which is that we hate her. Punishment only works if someone understands what they’ve done wrong.”
“Eleven is old enough to know what it means.”
“Eleven is also young enough to be forgiven for it.” Her look conveyed a stinging reminder. He narrowed his eyes.
“I was twelve, and you slapped me, if I recall.”
“Well, I shouldn’t have.”
“You should have done worse. Even I got off generously, but compared to Astoria Greengrass, the difference is stark—”
“I was thirteen, and I adored you,” she said tiredly. “Of course it was different. I cared what you thought of me more than anyone alive, and I couldn’t care less about what Astoria thinks of anything. I—”
The doors slivered open; he hit the button to stop them. The lift shuddered to a halt. Hermione frowned at him.
“What are you d—”
“Adored?” he demanded.
“Yes,” she said, faintly reddening. “Well, I told you that before— in the prefects’ bathroom, last year, you were my first friend, and I—”
“You said we were friends,” he said, blindsided. The world seemed to lilt on its axis. “You didn’t say that.”
“Oh. Well,” she said brusquely, “of course I had a bit of a crush. When your best friend is a boy, and he’s clever and top of the class, and a quidditch player, and he writes you lots of pretty letters, you can’t very well help — but it was a kid thing, you know, I was barely even a teenager yet, and I thought—”
“It would pass.”
“Yes.”
His heart slowed. “Did it?”
Hermione folded her arms as if bracing herself against a harsh wind.
“For a while,” she said.
“…And then?”
Her arms pressed tighter. She set her feet apart like a dueling stance.
“And then you came back in fourth year,” she said, “six inches taller and a bit less priggish. Shall we talk about something else?”
“Fine,” he said, and then they didn’t.
Hermione seemed about to compress herself into a single particle and blink out of existence. Her face was scrunched in the intensity of concentration that usually accompanied spellcasting.
“Would you consider,” she said, “perhaps, pressing the button—”
“You came back shorter and louder,” he said, “in fourth year.”
“I was not—”
“I kept thinking about your hair,” he said, apparently for dire lack of anything that wasn’t completely fucking insane.
Her shoulders slackened a fraction.
“My … hair?”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t sound like a terribly… appealing… thing to think about.”
“Shows what you know,” he said, with feeling.
“Right. Okay. I — okay.” Her chest rose and fell deeply. “But that was a while ago.”
“Several decades, by my count.”
“Alright, that’s not — you’re being dramatic, but that’s still—”
“It’s a desperately long time to want to kiss someone, by any margin,” he said. “We should get some sort of award.”
She gave a twitch so powerful it was more of a jerk.
“For what?” she muttered, though she was still fidgeting with an anxious, awkward sort of pleasure. “Mucking it up so thoroughly?”
“Personally, I think I ought to have one for every day I didn’t kiss you,” he said, “and two for every day I haven’t, after the first time.”
That shut her up good and well. She stared at him, her mouth ajar, her eyes shining with a beautiful dark softness.
“Draco,” she said, with a gentleness in his name that made it neither wholly a reprimand nor a question. She had such a nice way with his name: a stress on the first syllable that edged slightly into a drawl, as if she were lowering a great weight slowly and surely into place, and then a consonant cut crisply at the back of the throat, her mouth closed around the O in the shape of a kiss.
“There isn’t time,” she said, almost whinging. “We’re in a lift in a — in a hospital, and everyone’s here, and we can’t—”
“I know all that. You think I don’t know that? There’s never time for anything.”
“There’ll be time when we get back to Hogwarts. Once everything’s calmed down a little, and everyone’s not so much on top of each other all the time. Then we can talk about — the relationship.”
He stiffened. “Objection,” he said tautly. “Remark is leadingly amorous.”
“Seriously? After you just said you wanted to kiss me—”
“On the grounds that your standing order was to be friends,” he said, with a look that made her flush.
“Friendship is a kind of relationship,” she said stubbornly, “and regardless, we are going to just — have a very complicated one. For now.”
“For now?”
She cleared her throat. “For now,” she said briskly, and punched the button to open the doors.
He almost forfeited his awards for the day then and there, but the lift’s doors shuddered open, and they were back in the hospital, and reality reasserted itself.
Arthur’s cot was laden heavily with gingers. Ginny had curled under her father’s arm, her head pressed against his collarbone, folded up like a girl much younger than she was; Molly grasped his hand tightly, and with her other she clasped Bill to her side. Ron and Harry stood at the foot of the bed, shoulder to shoulder with a dark-haired boy that Draco did not immediately recognize as Neville. The boy wore neither muggle clothes nor a Hogwarts uniform, but a set of starched-collar robes typical of a pureblood, which must have been his usual daywear. It aged him considerably.
“Hey, look who it is,” said Ron. His raised eyebrows asked a silent question that Draco, with a short shake of the head, declined to answer. “Get lost, you two?”
“Afraid so,” said Hermione lightly. She moved over to the far side of the bed and planted herself between Neville and Bill. “Had a bit of trouble with the lift.”
“Get stuck?” said Neville sympathetically. “Happened to m-m-me, too. The st-t-taff said it was on the fritz.”
“To say the least. We ended up running into Astoria Greengrass in the Reflection Garden. The more I learn about that family, the better I think of Daphne’s luck. Also: hello, Neville. You’re not ill, are you?”
If tact were counted in galleons, Hermione would be in a debtor’s prison.
“Visiting my p-p-parents in the long-term ward,” said Neville.
“Oh,” she said awkwardly.
Ron glowered and elbowed her.
“Oh! I mean — are they — well, how are they?”
“Pretty g-g-good, thanks,” said Neville gamely. “Mum recognized me, so. Good d-d-day.”
“That’s… that’s great, Neville. I’m sorry for… I mean, I’m sorry that…”
“It’s okay,” he blurted. “It’s fine. Hermione. Thanks? But um, uh… it’s f-f-fine. Like, it’s not fine, but it’s fine? You know?”
“Yes. I — understand. Thanks. Sorry.”
“Nothing to b-b-be sorry for,” Neville said wistfully. “I just wish you’d got to meet them. It’s naptime now, but if you’d come by earlier, you could’ve said hello. They love v-v-visitors, I think they get bored with j-just Gran around… she comes every day, but she’s the only one — not that I’m glad you’re here, obviously.” He glanced at Arthur.
The fact of having one’s parents on a nap schedule, in the hospital where they lived, was difficult to reconcile with the blitheness Neville displayed in talking about it. It was also difficult to reconcile with the rest of his personality, which Draco had heretofore taken for granted as dispositionally peaceable and affectionate, and which by a single stroke of comprehension — by recognizing at last and in full what Neville’s childhood must have been like; how he had gone about every minute of every day of every year in Gryffindor Tower carrying the knowledge, for certainty, that his parents would never know or share in his victories, no matter how good he was, no matter how great; to weather mockery by his peers for a stutter and a slouch he couldn’t help, to accept blistering criticism for want of magical skill that his parents had never been able to teach him, and that his sole guardian had resented him for lacking; as if it was not Herculean endurance for him to plant his feet on the floor every morning and rise, let alone present the world with his earnest level best — when he gave everything he had to anything that was asked of him, and it was almost never enough — in short, recognizing the vast, complicated, existential fetters of grief that Neville had worn since birth — transformed the boy’s friendliness into a tremendous, stubborn, deafening assertion of inner strength.
Unless he had known it for a fact, he would have doubted it was even possible to endure growing up as Neville Longbottom had. Much less to grow up as Neville Longbottom and still be gentle. To still be kind.
Draco decided that Neville was going to pass his Potions O.W.L.
“We met them,” Ron piped up. “Prettiest bastards in the ward. Plus Granny Longbottom, who’s a riot, by the way. You should’ve heard her talk about Neville. You’d think she had a kid with Merlin. And then he had a kid with Merlin.”
Snow was falling outside the window, a silent, constant downfall of white flecks like the silver grains that trailed a Patronus. Draco followed it with his eye and shook the memory away. The room was turned pale and cool by the window’s light. Someone had set up a wireless radio by Arthur’s bedside, and the tinselly strains of Christmas carols commingled with the murmuring of visitors at other beds, and jingle of medical instruments, a busy hospital feeding a muffled drumbeat through the walls.
Without preamble, Arthur closed his eyes, and began to hum to the radio.
“Arthur! Arthur, stop that,” Molly hissed. “Don’t strain your voice. Arthur! The Healers told you not to!”
Next year, all our troubles will be miles away…
“Let him, Mum,” said Bill. “One song won’t make a difference.”
Until then…
When it finished, Arthur smiled at her, and pressed a kiss to her wrist. She sighed, wetly.
“…that was ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,’ by Frank Sinatra, and boy, it sure was. Looking like it’ll be a white New Year, too, speaking of which: the Minister of Magic will be coming on to deliver his New Year’s Address at five, that’s five o’clock, set your watches, you won’t want to miss it. In the meantime, here’s one more holiday hit, getting it in just under the radar, seven hours early— check on your champagne bottles, fire up the fireworks, and get ready to ring in 1996 with me, your friend, your host, Juvenal Jordan — right here! Right now! On BBC Radio ‘M.’ Hit it, Guy.”
A syrupy coalition of horns wept through the speaker.
Hermione lifted her head. “It’s New Year’s Eve,” she murmured. “I don’t know why that surprised me. I suppose I’d forgotten.”
“Reckon I did too, but that’s me,” said Ron. He nudged her. “You know me, I’d forget anything. I’d forget my own last name. When you start forgetting things, that’s when we’re in trouble.”
She tried for a smile and failed. He faltered.
“Joking! Only joking. Easy mistake.” Then: “And I didn’t actually forget, anyway.” Another pause. “Well, I did, but I remembered. That is, I remembered I’d forgotten. And then I remembered what I forgot.”
“That’s nice, Ron.”
There was a small susurrus of obliging, grateful laughter. Ron gave a crooked smile, and Bill ruffled his hair. Harry put an arm around his shoulder, and they leaned together, like three of a set.
Arthur was humming again, and his echoes trilled harmonies against the ceiling of the ward.
Through the window, against the blue-black square of the last December sunset, the year 1995 was ending in a thousand tiny white shards.
For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne; we’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.
- Happy (belated) birthday to Hermione Granger! My beloved 44-year-old teenager.
- One of my favorite bits of all time is when two characters are like:
- character A: “you know, the [INSANE THING] in the [COMPLETELY MUNDANE THING]?”
- character B: “The What Now”
- character A: “you know, the [MUNDANE THING.] anyway,”
- I don’t know what it is, but I will crack up every single time.
- Slight edit, for those of you with a keen eye: as of recent changes, Book 5 will now be 84 chapters instead of 81. The Table of Contents has been updated to reflect this fact. In other news, I blow through wordcounts like a municipally funded construction project blows through its budget, son.
- Settling cautiously into this biweekly update-schedule sort of thing; I’m still not confident enough in the editing process to commit to anything, but this feels good for now, at least until I’ve finished enough to go back to weekly updates. Thank you for being flexible and waiting with such good grace while I sort out what the hell it is I’m doing.
- If you’ve commented in the last few weeks, I hope that you get exactly as much sleep as you need tonight. If you’re coming back to school this autumn, I hope you find all of your textbooks on a discount.
- See you in the next chapter! “The Deputy Special Inquisitor.”
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