The Patronus

Chapter 73: The Patronus

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

“The Patronus Charm,” said Harry, “is a simple spell.”

“He says that about every spell,” Hermione said under her breath.

“Usually he’s right,” said Draco.

“This one isn’t.”

“Well, he assumes it’s simple because he can do it. You have to respect the logic.”

She covered her face in her hands, partly to hide her smile.

Harry had summoned the Room of Requirement that day. The Defense Club gathered in a suspicious and hesitant semicircle around his plinth. Gryffindor tapestries hung from the walls and a healthy fire crackled in the grate; silver instruments tinkled overhead, evoking the Transfiguration classroom.

“We’re starting off easy, with exercises, and we’ll try it with a boggart next month,” said Harry. “Course, patronuses aren’t for boggarts, they’re for dementors, but my boggart is a dementor, and the main thing is test whether you can cast it scared. That a hand, Seamus?”

“Yeah, thanks. Where you getting the boggart?”

“Fair question. The Room can’t make things that are alive, so Ron and I are gonna have to try and nab the one in the staff closet. Accepting volunteers to help with that, by the way. Ginny…? Oh, volunteering. Thanks.”

“Fred, put your hand down,” said Ron.

Harry pointed. “Yeah, Padma?”

“George, put your hand down,” said Ron.

Padma leaned forward. “What does the patronus do, exactly? Obviously it wards off dementors, but dementors can’t be killed except through a ritual enchantment, so what’s the patronus for? Is it incorporeal, or does it have mass? Are you summoning it or conjuring it? Or is it an illusion?”

“Lots of questions,” said Harry, nervously. “Good questions. Wow. Hermione—?”

“They’re great questions,” said Hermione brightly. She stepped up beside Harry, who yielded the floor with gratitude. “It’s an incorporeal familiar. It can also take messages and execute simple tasks. The base of the Patronus Charm is a powerful anti-Dark countercurse, but it’s conjured into a moving ward, which is given shape by a reflection of the user’s magical signature; hence, the memory—”

“Not that this isn’t important,” said Ron, “but why don’t we give it a go, and do the theory later?”

“But the theory is indispensable.”

“Gotta be kinda dispensable, though, if I can manage it,” he said. “Expecto Patronum.”

A terrier with high, pointy ears leapt into the air and did a prancing circuit of the room, evoking delighted giggles from the younger children. Victoria Frobisher leapt up and cried out covetously, clearly wanting ten of them. Ron led it around by wandpoint, grinning broadly, and cast a look over his shoulder at Hermione. “See?”

“Yes, everyone can see it,” she said curtly. Ron’s smile faded. He ended the spell.

Hermione’s inability did not stem from reluctance. By all appearances, she was trying as hard as she could. She had asked Harry to explain it perhaps a dozen times, and practiced the spellwork often enough to become a master. She could have taught the Patronus to any wizard on the face of the planet. But she could not, to save her life, conjure one herself.

Which meant that, as the lesson went on, she sank into a morass of frustration that drew her away from the group, while Harry and Ron centered a growing flock of silver animals, crowing at each victory.

It didn’t help that Luna did hers effortlessly on the first try. With an eerie trill of “Expecto Patrrrrrrronum,” her wand blossomed silver, and a bird nearly as large as the girl herself swept into the air over the room, did a wide circuit, and landed in the rafters. It had a beak like the point of a rapier, and its eye was nacreous as an oil spill.

“It’s an egret!” she said delightedly, rocking up and down excitedly on her heels. It was a very young gesture, and it brought home her fourteen-year-old self, which tended to vanish sometimes in the mysticism and the extravagant hats. “Egrets have loads of magical symbolism. They’ve got lovely connections to power and foresight — oh, I’d hoped it’d be this! But this means I was right!”

“The form of your patronus isn’t symbolic,” said Hermione. “It almost always takes the form of an animal that’s significant to you. There are studies on it. If you like egrets, that’s probably why it’s an egret. It doesn’t mean you’re like an egret, and it certainly doesn’t mean you’ve got special egret-y abilities—”

“Let her have it, go on,” murmured Ginny, leaning on Hermione’s shoulder. “Look at how happy she is.”

“But it isn’t correct.”

“Your mum’s not correct. Hey, Luna, what’s my patronus?”

“A horse, I should think,” Luna said dreamily. “I saw it once in Divination. A great beautiful lady-horse, with a mane like a flag. And Hermione, yours is a bird, though I don’t know what species — I only saw it a little, because it was flying so high — am I right? What is it?”

“No idea,” Hermione said shortly. “Nor have you. You’ve never seen my patronus, because nobody has. For your information, I suspect it’s an otter. Why don’t you and Ginny try practicing with the boggart?”

Luna, who seemed immune to offense and tact alike, drifted peaceably away.

Draco twirled his wand. He’d not tried to make a patronus in some time, and he didn’t fancy making the effort in front of the whole group. So he kicked Neville’s footwork into better position and shoved Lee Jordan’s wand in the direction of the window, a policy adopted for collective safety, traded a nod with Cedric — whose pine marten was draped cheerfully across its master’s shoulders — and then allowed himself to be wrangled into a few pester-and-answer sessions with the Creeveys.

Daphne took several tries to make a corporeal, which finally spooled out of her wand in a glabrous smear, landed on the floor, and rubbed itself haughtily against her legs. It was a Persian longhair, astonishingly corpulent, with a crumpled face like McGonagall in distress.

She had come back from the Hospital Wing with several vials of Pepper-Up Potion and a prescription for something else, which she had refused to show; when Draco made a polite inquiry about the possible resurgence of a blood condition, she sniffed and made an oblique remark that it was ungentlemanly to be over-curious about a lady’s health. That implication well-scalded him off the subject, and he had stalked off in some haste, with a parting snarl at Lavender for giggling.

But she seemed as strong as ever; she continued to power up and down stairs at the same double-step as Fred or George, and to hoist up corners of the Gryffindor couch in search of Parvati’s lost bracelet; but she wearied quickly, and increasingly could be found napping around the common room in the middle of the day, shrouded in wool blankets, despite the proximity of a roaring fire.

Lavender suggested that “a girl’s time” manifested in different ways. Hermione had, for her part, inquired about the medical linkage between menstruation and fever; Lavender said something dismissive about modern medicine; Hermione had, predictably, vaulted prodigiously off the handle, and the resulting row shook the Tower tapestries.

“Absolute darling,” Daphne exclaimed now, and attempted to scoop her patronus up. The patronus, being incorporeal, could not be cuddled. Both creatures regarded this as a tragedy. “Look at the blessed thing! I can’t order her at a dementor, she’s too precious!”

“That must be the most toffee-nosed patronus I’ve ever seen,” said Draco.

“Pooh! What’s yours, a cockroach?”

“Psht. Mine would eat yours for breakfast.”

“You’d never!” she said. “I bet it’s a hedgehog. A prickly, shy little lump— oh!”

Ginny’s patronus, a mare, cantered over and nosed at Daphne’s neck. She laughed and ran her hand along its back, her fingers showering stardust from its incorporeal skin. Ginny came running over after it, and in a flare of light from a passing cloud, the red hair flying behind her head flashed the same white as her patronus, her laughter a halting bray. One of George’s jackals came nipping at her heels, teasing her, and she jumped up on a chair to avoid it — ducked a dive-bomb from Luna’s bird — and whipped her wand around to cast another silver mare, which collided with Seamus’s wolverine in a small fission of white.

Laughter dappled in the vaulted roof as a scuffle broke out; Ginny was tackled to the ground by a wronged Katie, whose dart frog she had stomped into nonexistence; Michael Corner leapt to defend her honor and was tripped by a mischievous Dean; silver animals collapsed in a great sigh of white steam, and the pileup grew into a merry scuffle of limbs and good-natured shouting.

“Ow owowow ow you’re pulling my hair!”

“Cut it out or I’ll tell Hermione!”

“Not if I tell Hermione first!”

“You cut it out or I’ll tell Malfoy.”

“You wouldn’t dare!”

“Would!”

“Don’t be a narc, Dean!”

“Malfoy, Ginny’s got my wand and won’t give it back!”

“If you’re fool enough to let her have your wand, you deserve whatever she does with it,” called Draco. Hermione shot him an exasperated glance. “Get it back from her, if you can. Don’t start fights and call prefects to end them.”

“HA! Eat my shorts, tosser—”

“Easy, Ginevra.”

“Sorry. Eat my shorts, respectfully.”

She pitched Dean’s wand across the room. She had a great arm; it bounced off the window and beaned Neville on the head.

Hannah Abbott, who had been trying to help him, sent Ginny an exasperated glower and snatched up Dean’s wand to return to him; Ginny replied with a guilty grin. Draco took the chance to draw Neville aside, a move with which Neville complied, somewhat anxiously, rubbing his head.

“Am I doing it wrong?” he said at once. “That last one looked kind of like a toad, if you squinted—”

It hadn’t. “This isn’t about your patronus. Here.”

Neville almost doubled over from the weight of the book tossed at him.

“Oof. Er — okay? I… uh, I already have a Potions textbook? Thanks, though?”

“Get rid of it.”

“Why?” complained Neville, rubbing his abdomen a bit churlishly. “It’s the same book.”

“Not by half. That’s my textbook. I expect it returned perfectly intact.”

Neville immediately held the book at arm’s length, like it might detonate. It was much nicer than his copy; Draco bought his books new, and Neville, though he did the same, abused his enough with spillage and combustion to disguise it.

“This is yours?”

“Yes. I don’t need it anymore, I’m well into the sixth-year curriculum. There are exercises in the back of the book. You’ll report to me at the next meeting with how many you’ve brewed correctly. Where there are corrections, follow the handwriting, not the print. And you’re going to register to sit the O.W.L. in Potions.”

“I’m not going to pass Potions!”

“Incorrect. You need at least a N.E.W.T. in Potions to become a board-certified Herbologist. Isn’t that so?”

“Correct, but—”

“So you must pass it. Ergo, you will. Simpliciter.”

Neville was aglow in hopeful bemusement. He held the book to his chest. “This — it’s really g-g-good of you, Draco, b-b-but — did Snape say s-s-something ag-g-gain?”

Draco flicked a bit of lint from his sleeve.

“If you drop Potions, it’ll be a waste of years of my teaching,” he said. “It’s a shame to let good work go to waste. Don’t embarrass me.”

“I won’t. I swear. I’ll really t-t-try—”

“Merlin’s sake, don’t get soft. I know you will,” said Draco irritably. Neville continued to radiate forty volts of intense, watery gratitude. “I’ll have you scrubbing cauldrons if you don’t. And stop jerking your wand up on ‘Patronum,’ you’re dashing the spellwork.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“So you should be.”

Across the room, with her back to the door, Cho was working hard to little avail. She kept blowing gusts of silver fog from her wand, and her frustrated expression deepened further and further into the kind of scowl behind which few happy memories could flourish. Marietta extended a tender hand to help her and was swatted away with a word as quiet as it was unkind. The floating carnival of silver animals left a sheen on the beaded flush of her face, and eventually, Harry stepped in to help her. Then she lowered her wand and spoke to him in a quiet, low voice, something that was inaudible, and she slumped as though her strings had been cut. Harry touched her hand, and she leaned her head against his chest, shoulders low.

He found Hermione at the back of the room. She was perched on one of the sofas, ankles folded neatly beneath her, with a spread of papers levitated in the air before her as a makeshift desk.

“An otter?” he suggested, by way of greeting, and leaned his hip against the sofa’s arm. She glanced up at him, and her gaze did a gratifying flicker up-and-down. “Didn’t know you liked them.”

“They were my favorite animal when I was seven,” she said, dropping her quill in a floating inkwell, “and my father bought me a stuffed one as a pet. I slept with it for six years.”

He counted on his fingers.

“Shut up. Yes, it came to Hogwarts, no, it isn’t here anymore, and no, you will never, ever see it.”

“Did it have a name?” he said delightedly. “Never mind — you’re you, of course it did. Something long and mockable, naturally. What was it? Xenophon? Machiavelli? Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus?”

“Like you have a toe to stand on. ‘Ulysses.’”

“What sort of obscure muggle figures was the infant Granger obsessed with? Famous dentists? Warrior queens?”

“Peter,” she said, clearly and begrudgingly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, go on.”

“Peter?” He was gleeful. “Thucydides, Crookshanks, and ‘Peter’?”

She dotted an i that punctured the parchment. “You know, I think Romilda’s form is off. Why don’t you go help her?”

“Good effort. Who’s ‘Peter’?”

“And that boy Alfie’s been trying to impress you for an hour. You should stop him before he hurts himself.”

“Some snot you fancied in primary school?”

“I didn’t fancy anyone in primary school,” she said, in rising tones, “and I miss it more every day.”

His heart beat powerfully and pleasantly in his chest. He laughed and stole one of her quills from midair.

“Draco Malfoy, give that back! And quit being such a pill!”

“I’m not. I’m trying to — don’t kick me, witch — learn about your muggle childhood. I’m expressing an — ow! — healthy interest in multiculturalism—”

“Multiculturalism! Oh, you’re such a—”

“ —spurning my effort to understand the muggle world, rather hypocritical of you, after you’ve go on and on about respect for your culture—”

“‘Respect,’ don’t make me laugh—”

“I do respect it, in fact.”

“Expect points for that, do you?”

“Doesn’t one usually?” He leaned on the armrest of her sofa. The light of the windows was to his back, and she shaded her eyes judiciously at him.

“Expect points? For harassing me about childhood toys? You must be often disappointed.”

“No,” he said. “For resisting temptation.”

She leaned forward, her bright little face a wry beam of smugness. Her hands crossed the book in her lap, forgotten. “Not really your specialty, is it?”

“On the contrary. I’m very, very good at it.”

Hermione opened her mouth, still smiling — a little helplessly — and covered her eyes with her hands. “You’re still being a pill.”

“I think I’m being perfectly tactful.”

“I think you’re being perfectly something.”

“Drop the last word, you’d be right.”

“Mm. And humble.”

“Humble? What for? Have you seen me?”

“‘Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,’” she quoted, “‘being made beautiful overmuch, may consider beauty a sufficient end.’”

“God, Yeats was such a dull old codger,” he said dispiritedly.

Faintly gloating, she murmured: “‘Helen, being chosen, made life flat and dull…’”

“I’d hardly say her life was ‘dull,’ no matter what else it was. And if you’ll suffer another excerpt, dear: ‘An intellectual hatred is the worst, so let her think opinions are accursed.’”

She sniffed. “Well, he couldn’t be right about everything,” she said, and reopened her book, declaring victory.

He smirked at her, which backslid disastrously into a real smile, with teeth and everything, while she wasn’t noticing; when she continued to pretend not to pay attention to him, he prodded her leg with his boot. She kicked him with real force, and his knee buckled.

“Sorry! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry — actually, I’m not sorry. This is your fault!”

It took her six words to pivot from high-pitched apologia to accusatory venom. He cracked his eyes at the ceiling and wondered what crimes in a past life now condemned him to like her so much.

Her skirt had ridden up when she kicked him; he revised his opinion on prior crimes.

“It takes two,” he said.

She smoothed her skirt down. He looked at her legs, on principle. “I’m not sure I should dignify that.”

“The question of dignity here seems moot.”

“You’re always dignified,” she said resentfully.

“No comment.”

He straightened, and made eye contact across the room with Ron.

Ron didn’t pretend not to look. He saw and unabashedly kept seeing, with an expression that Draco had seen sometimes as they walked past the quidditch shops, in the impoverished light of a reflected glow.

Harry floated up from the murky subterraneans of something you could, supposably, call a conscience: He fancies her!

And so he did. What of it? And it wasn’t his fault that Ron had the common sense to do it. It wasn’t his responsibility to manage Ron’s feelings, any more than it was Hermione’s responsibility to requite them. Draco couldn’t be obliged to indulge them; and it wasn’t as if Ron had some special entitlement to have his feelings protected, either.

Still, it wasn’t as though he didn’t know how it felt. Standing on the other side of the room.

Draco slipped his robe back over his shoulders and smoothed the lapels. His heartbeat jarred the front of his ribs in an abhorrent rhythm. The feeling of her hands on his shoulders lingered like a tight brace over his collarbones.

The wintry sun, sliding through the windows in long silver blades, gave everything a frosted and finely carved look, as if the scene were cast in marble. Shadows puddled under the furniture. The heat of attention seemed to still prickle on the back of his neck, and he found himself restless for the lesson to end; it seemed likely, if not inevitable, that the students were watching him, and drawing insipid conclusions behind the masks of their patently un- reassuring smiles. He leaned against the wall by the door, Transfigured an inkwell into a white mouse, and spent the rest of the lesson practicing Incarcerous, with increasing efficacy and diminishing vindictiveness, until the clock tolled six.

By Hermione’s edict, the members of Defense Club left in small clumps, so as to avoid the suspicion of traveling together in a large pack. Draco was among the last to leave, usually being delayed by questions about dueling from the more bellicose students. When he finished, he found he was almost alone save for Ron and Hermione, who were chatting in low tones by the door.

When he approached, they broke off. Draco raised his eyebrow and gestured to the exit. Ron set his teeth and rocked back on his heels, bouncing.

Abruptly, he jerked his head at Draco.

“Word, mate?”

“What?”

“Can I,” he said, over-enunciating, “have. A word.”

“About what?” Hermione said shrilly. “What do you want with him?”

“Easy. Merlin. I’m not gonna eat him. Just want to chat, s’all.”

“About what?”

“If I wanted you to know, I’d have said it to you, Mione.”

Hermione stiffened. “There’s no need to be rude,” she said, gathering herself. “I can make myself scarce. I’ll see you two in the common room.”

Ron indicated the room. With a sigh, Draco dropped his bag and stepped back, allowing him to close the door.

They stood under the circling silver instruments while the torches guttered lower and lower in their sconces. Ron was pacing. Draco shifted his weight against a table and folded his arms while Ron worked whatever was in his mouth out of it.

“So what’s the deal with you?” Ron asked cordially, addressing the ceiling.

“Thank you for asking. I’m ankle-deep in an esoteric conversation, and the water’s rising. Yourself?”

“Yeah. Okay. You know what I mean, though.”

“I’ve found that whenever someone feels the need to say that to me, it usually means the opposite.”

“Mate, if you need me to spell it out for you, I will,” he said, “but I don’t reckon either of us would like it.”

Draco folded his fingers over his wand-hilt and was drumming them restlessly. He bit out: “You want to discuss Granger?”

“Sure. You know what, that’s a start. Why d’you call Hermione ‘Granger’? It’s been five years. You even stopped calling me ‘Weasley,’ eventually.”

He was irritated by the mere sound of her name in Ron’s mouth, and the fact that he felt perfectly idiotic for it failed to help.

“I call Potter by his surname,” said Draco, evasively.

“And Daphne, yeah, I noticed. But you call Nott ‘Theodore,’ and ‘Parkinson’ was ‘Pansy’ for a while,” said Ron, unblinking, “and Ginny got promoted to ‘Ginevra’ this year, so can you decrypt this a bit, man? I’m trying to understand if I should be pissed at ‘Ronald’ or not.”

“You shouldn’t be.” He flexed his knuckles on the hilt of his wand. “I can call you Weasley, if you prefer. I warn you, it’ll be miserably confusing in the Tower.”

“Draco—”

“I call her ‘Granger’ because that’s what I call her.”

“That’s a joke, right?”

“Because that’s what I call her,” he said, “and no one else.”

Ron broke off, frowning, and turned back to the lake.

“I see,” he said. “So it’s like. A pet name.”

“Something like that.”

She was Hermione to her fellow students, and Miss Granger to her teachers. Granger, in Gryffindor Tower, meant he was calling her name. And when he paid attention, he could see her posture change when it was him calling: a spine straightened, a habitual glance in the direction of his call.

“So when you guys are like, alone together, in the common room,” Ron said, apropos of nothing, “when we all come back from dinner, and you’re holed up at one of those desks in the window, or whispering over something in the library — or like, when you two come back from patrol, and you’re snickering together about something — what are you two talking about?” He swallowed. “Is it prefect stuff?”

“Sometimes.”

“But not always?”

“We do have recreational conversations. For practice.”

“About what?”

“Quoting an esteemed intellect: that’s a joke, isn’t it?”

“I mean in general. Like, whenever there’s a plan, it always seems like you two have sorted it out yourselves beforehand,” said Ron, aggrieved, “and got on the same page about it, and then you both come in on the same side of the argument, and then you win. So I have to assume you’re talking about all that when you’re off by yourselves, right? Like, are you working on Defense Club stuff, or homework…?”

“We talk about a number of things. She and I spend quite a bit of time together.”

“Yeah,” said Ron, “see, I’d noticed that.”

Two drops peeled from one of the candles and splattered on the flagstone, forming a quivering lemniscate.

“Are you together, then?” Ron said bracingly.

“No.”

It was a truth only by technicality, and it must have sounded like it, for Ron’s mouth flattened.

“But you want to be, don’t you?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“For fuck’s sake, Draco. Just answer the question.”

“What’s between her and me—”

“Is as confusing as it is bloody obvious. So why don’t you do us a favor and be straight about it, because if you’re messing her around—”

“Messing her around?”

“—I’ll box your ears for you. I’m serious! What are you playing at?”

“You’re far out of line—”

“—turning it on and off with her all the time, like you only fancy her when people aren’t looking—”

“If you were anyone else, I would hex you blind for the insult of saying that.” He wanted to; he could scarcely hear over his heartbeat in his ears. “If you were anyone else, I would have terminated this conversation long, long ago. I’ve endured it, because you have a claim on far more of my patience than most, but even that claim has limits.”

“Why, thank you, sire, for the great gift of your patience! I didn’t realize it was so trying for you to just bloody say you liked her!”

“I warn you again that you are wildly out of line.”

“You can’t. You actually can’t, can you? That’s hysterical. You’ve been welded to her side for years, and you can’t even stand on two feet and say you fancy her. I can’t fucking understand it. Are you trying to have it both ways? Is that it? Do you actually fancy her, or are you just faffing around with her while you sort out what you want?”

He surged forward, carried on the blind wave of an urge to grip Ron by his collar and shake him. Ron stepped back from instinct, but steeled and held his ground.

“Shut up. You haven’t any idea what you’re talking about.”

“No? Because I know what it looks like. It looks like you’re all over her until someone asks you what you’re actually doing, and then it’s mum’s the word, and frankly, mate, she deserves more—”

“I refuse to let you instruct me on what she deserves.” His hand coiled around his wand, tight to the point of pain.

“Why not? It’s not hard! She deserves someone who’s proud to be with her, same as anybody—”

His wand snickered out of its sheath and angled at the ground between them. Ron stared at it.

The part of his mind responsible for eloquence had departed to join the part that was shrieking giddily for violence.

“Shut the fuck up,” he said, less evenly than he would have liked. “My regard for Hermione Granger, if you’d like to know — pride doesn’t — it hardly touches the surface of it.”

“Yeah? Great! You’re mad for her. What’s your problem, then?”

“Presently,” he said, sneering, “it’s that you think you’re entitled to know what’s between us. And that you’ve interpreted your confusion as a right to berate me for not making it simple enough for you to understand it.”

Ron wheeled on him. “Right! There it is!” he shouted. “Because I don’t get it, do I? That’s me! Ron doesn’t get it, he’s too slow and common to reach the glorious heights of you and her—”

“Spare me the tears of Saint Ronald the Martyr. Do you ever tire of playing the victim?”

“Maybe I am! You ever think of that? Or of me, at all? After five years of living my sodding life two steps behind you, have you, Draco Malfoy, even once stopped and thought: ‘Wow, I wonder how Ron feels’?”

“Why wonder, when you so readily make it everyone else’s problem?”

“Because you two are so preoccupied with each other you wouldn’t notice if my head exploded!”

“Like fuck. You love feeling sorry for yourself; that’s what this is, and now you’re being an arse over nothing—”

“That’s a lie!” shouted Ron. His eyes blazed like blue fire. “But that’s a lie, and you know it is, you know it’s not ‘nothing’—”

“And what if it’s not?” he spat. He took a savage pleasure in the way Ron recoiled. “Whose business would that be but hers and mine?”

“Because you’re not the only one here with feelings!”

Draco opened his mouth for a denial, but it was stifled by a swell of anger that rose, unbidden, from a deep well inside himself he hadn’t even known. “If you’re talking about yourself,” he said, with strained evenness, “then yes, it’s obvious that you fancy her. What isn’t obvious is why you think that has anything to do with me.”

“Come off it.”

“Do you imagine that if it weren’t for me, she’d be fawning over you? That I’m standing in your way? As if I’ve somehow — what, absorbed the feelings that ought to have been for you? By existing? I do hate to tell you, but if all that stopped her from requiting your feelings was the existence of another person in her orbit, it seems even your wildest fantasies can’t imagine her feeling much for you.”

“Fuck off!”

“Alternatively,” he said, with a mounting edge, “you might think that I’ve spoiled your chances. Did I prevent you from making a go of it? Have I stopped you from laying it on thick whenever she gives you a morsel of attention? Do you think it’s somehow my fault it hasn’t worked?”

Ron ducked like he’d been clocked on the jaw.

“If Hermione Granger wanted you,” said Draco, through the vise of anger in his chest, “then she’d have you. And either you’re just as much a coward as I am, or you already asked her, and she said no.”

Ron took a sharp breath and turned his back on him. The wind kicked up high and cold across the field. The trees moaned.

“So she did reject you, then.”

More wind whistled in the leaves.

“Is that why you’re angry at me?” he said, faintly mocking. “Oh, that’s very good. You know you’re not entitled to be pissed at her for rejecting you, so you’re going after the next acceptable target.”

“Shut up, Draco.”

“I’m right, aren’t I?”

“That’s not what this is about.”

“Don’t bother. I’ve been your scapegoat for years. I know what it feels like.”

Ron nodded, eerily calm.

“You’re a fat hypocrite,” he said, voice brittle. “You know that? You get up on your soapbox and tell me off like I’m this prize arsehole because I’m jealous over a girl I fancy. But you’re just as furious at me as I am at you. And you don’t even have a reason to be jealous, because you know she likes you back.”

“I never had any problem with you. You started the row.”

“You can’t stand the idea of me being competition for you.”

“You’re not competition for me. It isn’t a game.”

“Because it’s not enough for her to like you. It has to be bloody impossible for her to like anyone else. That’s how jealous you are. So you go off at me like I’m an idiot for thinking I could even be her second choice. Which I am, by the way.” His voice took on an edge. “You don’t know the half of what’s there, between Hermione and me.”

“I know most of it has to do with your ego.” Draco’s tone dropped to its chillest register. He ignored a wave of fascinated repugnance at everything that’s there. “The only reason you care about being ‘second’ is because it makes you feel superior. If it were a difference between having her and not having her, ‘second choice’ wouldn’t be any comfort.”

Ron jerked away from him. “Yeah,” he said bleakly. “Well. When you’re never first choice for anything, you have to take what you can get.”

Before Draco could formulate a reply, Ron had stormed out of the Room in a snap of robes.

---

February brought light snows, fierce winds, and a rainfall of articles in the Prophet about skirmishes in the North.

The terrorist organization calling itself ‘Order of the Phoenix’ continued to protest the Runcorn administration with attacks on muggles in Liverpool and Manchester; Thorfinn Rowle, Director of the DMLE, arrested no less than seven different wizards for connections with the group. A Special Commission for the Suppression of Domestic Unrest was formed, at Runcorn’s orders, under the command of Odin Davies, whose daughter Tracey enjoyed a few days of acute celebrity in the castle as a consequence. She was twice invited to the staff table to dine with Umbridge and Cassius.

Hermione read the papers and set them on fire in quick succession — somewhat dismaying the third year to whom they belonged. But to her visible frustration, she could not consign the whole school’s stock of newspapers to the kindling pile.

Nor, in Draco’s opinion, should she. “You won’t stop anyone by ordering them not to read it,” he murmured, watching her shred Daphne’s copy of the Prophet vigorously and in full view of some ogling first years. (Daphne whimpered, and Hermione begrudgingly surrendered to her the Style section.) “You’ll only make Potter seem afraid of the truth.”

“He’s not afraid of the truth. I’m afraid of liars.”

“Too bad he isn’t. I’ll tell you what: if you want to help him, make him stop defending the Order in public. He could stand not to sound like Robespierre every time the subject comes up.”

“Didn’t he basically bite your head off for suggesting it?”

“Oh, yes. I just hope he’s smarter than to try biting off yours.”

It would have been easier for Harry, Draco thought, if he would denounce the Order, or at least shut up about it. Instead, he said loudly and to anyone that would listen what he believed — that is, the truth — that the Prophet had used the Order for what were in fact Death Eater activities, and that none of the seven arrests were guilty of what the Prophet alleged. Because he could not provide any evidence for this without revealing Order secrets, he failed to be particularly convincing even to those few students that listened to him inquisitively and in good faith; and, failing to convince them, he began to appear in public increasingly like the devoted lunatic that the Ministry supposed him to be.

Which might not have bothered them, if it had not diminished attendance at Defense Club. The loyal members came every week, through rain, shine, or detention; but some of the younger students from Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw had peeled off, deterred either by Harry’s own apparent fidelity to a terrorist organization or by Umbridge’s persistent targeting of anyone associated with him.

“You might,” Hermione said, hesitantly, “consider pretending — only for the others’ benefit—”

“But it wouldn’t be ‘for their benefit,’ would it?” said Harry. He did not lift his eyes from his reading. “It’d be for mine.”

“Well, yes. It might also make things easier for you. Is that really so bad?”

“I will not tell lies,” said Harry. He turned a page of his book.

It was nature: he was pathologically incapable of turning his back on anything that he loved. In return, the place he loved turned its back on him.

Crowds shifted away from him when he moved down the hallways. Conversations dwindled at his approach, or sank into whispers. No one sat with him, or even near him, except for those who belonged to the Defense Club — though because of the danger of being seen together, they would often pass him by. A small contingent of first years continued to wear Potter’s Army armbands until a new Educational Decree amended the uniform code to ban political symbolism. It was, the Decree concluded, a ‘distraction.’

One morning, an owl swept down over Harry’s breakfast and dropped a dead sparrow on the table. Its throat had been cut.

Cho screamed.

“What is that?” Hermione said sharply. She leapt to her feet and drew her wand. “Who sent it? Harry, don’t touch it, it could be jinxed.”

“There’s a note,” said Harry dully. He prodded a scrap of parchment tied to its leg with his knife. In jagged, almost illegible font, it read:

---

VIKTOR KRUM

---

Draco whipped out his wand and with a brisk motion set the bird on fire. The flames crumpled it quickly beyond recognition, but even as the creature withered to a heap of ash, the image burned healthy and well in his mind’s eye.

Cho was still shrieking, although it had broken into a sort of muffled sob into her hands. Harry stared at it, expressionless.

“Everyone’s scared,” said Ron.

“That doesn’t help. Ow.” Harry clapped a hand to his forehead.

“Harry? What’s wrong?”

“It’s fine,” he spat. “I’ll do more Occlumency. It’s fine.”

Cho said nothing for the rest of breakfast. But she came to the next Defense meeting, and the next, and the next. She focused on charmwork, which she was good at, and complex defensive enchantments, runic circles and so forth, the likes of which Hermione took great pride in. But her dueling skills remained weak. Even the broadest openings in an opponent’s guard failed to lure her on the offensive. In matches against Draco, she retreated by the tenth second, and surrendered by the thirtieth.

Like Harry, hers was a problem of nature: she was a seeker, nimble and fleet-footed, but not particularly aggressive. She wasn’t a beater, who played the whole game with an eye to causing harm; nor a chaser, who had to scramble and fight for control of the ball; nor a keeper, trained to stand her ground against enemies soaring at her at the speed of pain. She was trained to wait for the opportune moment, but if the moment didn’t come, she would hover forever.

When Harry asked after her mother, she bit her lip.

“She wants to pull me out,” she admitted. “Reckons it’s not safe here. In England, I mean, not just at Hogwarts. She wants me to finish out at Beauxbatons.”

“You’re leaving?”

“No. I told her I wouldn’t go,” said Cho stoutly. “Not even if she told me to. I — I’m not Zachariah.” The boy had stopped coming to Defense Club meetings after January’s spate of Educational Decrees.

“You shouldn’t stay just for me,” Harry protested. “If you’re not safe — if you’ve got anywhere else to go, Cho — you probably should.”

“You want me to leave?”

“No, I’d be miserable, but I don’t want you to row with your mum over me, and if she’s right—”

“So you and the Weasleys are the only ones who get to make sacrifices? I don’t see you telling anyone else to get lost!”

“I’d rather no one make sacrifices, actually!” said Harry angrily. “It’s not a contest to see who can hurt themselves the most!”

“Do you think I haven’t? Because this year hasn’t been a cakewalk, Harry!”

“Yeah! I noticed that! Believe it or not, I’m aware that being around me is a pretty raw deal! And if you were sick of it, I’d understand!”

“I told you, I want to stay, but I don’t want to stay if you don’t want me to!”

“Maybe I don’t want you to!”

“Fine!”

She snatched up her bag and stormed out of the Room of Requirement. Hermione sighed, and got up to close the door behind her.

Evening Potions meant the day’s last hours of sunlight were sacrificed to the subterranean darkness of the dungeons. They had a double block with the Ravenclaws, but Cho was noticeably absent, meaning that her usual Potions partner, Marietta, moved over to sit with Neville — usually by himself — instead. Neville was so glad to have a partner he seemed not to mind one who spent the block shooting glares at Harry.

Hermione cracked open the book and slid it over to her side of the desk without waiting for his say-so. He unsheathed the cleaver and sharpened it with a few whisks of the whetstone, giving its blade a hair-fine gleam.

“Powdered moonstone?” said Hermione, poking her wand at the burner. A neat jet of blue flames leapt the gap and took up a cheerful residence under the cauldron.

“Measured. Do you have the stirring wand?”

“Mm.”

He passed the silver cradle of moonstone over and placed it on her side of the desk, avoiding her outstretched hand. Hermione looked at him.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said, after a moment. She slipped an elastic from her wrist and began tying her hair up. The scent of her shampoo fell out of the dark rolls of hair, infecting the steam from their cauldron. He turned his head away and considered the far wall, where Harry and Ron’s cauldron had already begun to gush smoke like an industrial chimney. The smell failed to dissipate.

Their cauldron hissed and bloomed purple smoke, and she leapt up, swearing loudly, while Snape peered over from where he was siphoning Neville’s cauldron, and scorched the back of Draco’s neck with his stare.

The class concluded without incident, and Snape gave inspections for the few students who had completed their potions. Draco’s and Hermione’s received not one word of comment, which was incredible praise. Neville’s was the wrong purple, and issuing far too much smoke, but remarkably not, in fact, dangerous to ingest; Seamus’s had been Vanished to preserve the structural integrity of the classroom.

Last, Snape peered into the dubious contents of Harry and Ron’s effort.

“Tell me, Potter,” said Snape, “can you read?”

“So I thought, sir,” said Harry.

“Read the third line of the instructions.”

With exaggerated lethargy, Harry hauled open his book. He held it open in front of his face.

“Out loud,” snarled Snape, through a chorus of tittering. Draco massaged his temple, contemplating the difficulties of scheduling Defense Club if a quarter of its staff were dead.

“‘Add powdered moonstone, stir three times counterclockwise, let simmer for seven minutes, then add two drops of hellebore syrup.’”

“Did you do everything on the third line, Potter?”

“…No.”

“What was that?”

“No,” said Harry loudly. “But you know what, sir—”

Before he could finish this loud cry for punishment, the door creaked, and Umbridge stepped into the classroom.

Snape straightened.

“Dolores.”

“Severus.”

Hermione twisted around. “What’s she doing?” she hissed.

“Did I interrupt your class?” said Umbridge sweetly. “I had so hoped I wouldn’t.”

“Evidently not enough to consult a schedule,” said Snape.

Harry appeared to be wrestling with the moral dilemma of his lifetime.

“Goodness. How busy. Well,” said Umbridge, “I hate to say this in front of the class, but I am afraid that the Ministry regulations do not permit Potions to be taught in unventilated classrooms. We will be relocating you to the fourth fl—”

“Class is dismissed,” said Snape.

The screech of chairs and chitter of books swallowed whatever she was going to say. Umbridge glowered at him, which Snape returned with a dead-eyed stare.

Harry and Ron were lingering by the door, which clicked shut behind Draco and Hermione.

“What are you waiting f—”

Harry pressed a finger to his lips, and lifted one of the twins’ Extendable Ears.

“…inform him that you are deliberately preventing a Ministry employee from conducting Ministry business! Which is, as I am sure you know — given your previous acquaintance with the criminal justice system, Severus — is a misdemeanor!”

“You are asking for information that I do not have.” Snape’s voice was droll, slow, and condescended so severely it could have been addressed to an infant. “And if I did have it, I wonder that you mistake me for your informant.”

“You were more than happy to tell me before—”

“An anonymous article pertaining to the whereabouts of a dangerous man. Locating your headmaster, however, who keeps an office in this castle—”

Ron stifled a cough. Hermione whacked him on the arm, wide-eyed, her ear flush to the door.

“You deny, then, any knowledge of a connection between them?”

“I deny any knowledge of what you’re talking about,” said Snape dryly, with the intrigue of someone counting lint pieces. “I ‘deny’ any part in this conversation. I was inducted into it by your delusions, and they remain my sole connection.”

“You are lying! I know you are lying! Where is Albus Dumbledore? What is he doing when he leaves the school?”

“Savoring his limited time away from the faculty, presumably.”

“Don’t talk back to me, you— you—”

“Careful. I am not one of your students.”

Umbridge heaved for breath. “You are under my jurisdiction as Special Inquisitor. And in fact you will find it most convenient to do what I want, in any case, because otherwise,” she said, so eager she stammered, “otherwise—”

“Otherwise, you will relieve me of the post of Potions Master,” said Snape silkily. “Every night, I say a little prayer.”

“You doubt my nerve?”

“Worse. Your judgment. You know my students’ scores, Dolores.” It was matter-of-fact, indifferent. “You may find a replacement caretaker. Wilhelmina will undoubtedly surpass the mongrel’s efforts in Care of Magical Creatures. You might even succeed in replacing Sibyl, if you triumph over Minerva’s appeal to the Board; but these are soft subjects. Remove your Potions Master three months from the exam, and you may have the privilege of explaining to the Board why a full cohort has failed their N.E.W.T. in Potions.”

“You academics always think you are irreplaceable,” she trilled furiously. “You are cheap, overpaid, under-managed recreants who think the fact that you read lots of big books makes you special. But you are not special! And you are not important! Not you, not Minerva, not Filius, and not your little ringleader, Dumbledore—”

“The colloquial term is ‘employer.’”

“I’m not talking about your job.”

A pause.

“Are you… attempting… to accuse me of something?”

“Only that you spend more time with Albus Dumbledore than anyone alive. Anything a jury would believe of him,” she said, with relish, “and anything they believed of Sirius Black, they would happily believe of you.”

“I rather doubt it,” said Snape blithely. “Sirius Black is a murderer and terrorist. Besides, to convict him, you would have to lay hands on him. Which, in candor, is not something I am convinced your administration can do.”

“No thanks to you!”

“I have twice offered you information on his whereabouts. It is not my fault you cannot seem to make use of it.”

Harry made a noise. Hermione clapped her hand over his mouth.

“Those leads were cold,” she snapped. “As I begin to suspect you knew! Fletcher knew nothing. His mind was gone.”

“I did warn you about the dangers of overusing Veritaserum.”

“He never had any! His memory had been tampered with! By whom, I do not wonder!”

“Then you should have been subtler in approaching him,” said Snape sharply. “The Order is not a group of fools. They are as capable of memory charms as anyone else.”

“So are most spies,” spat Umbridge. “And I suppose you would have the most reason to use them. After all, who knows what Fletcher might have revealed about you, Severus?”

Snape did not reply at first.

At length, he said: “Would you permit a question, Dolores?”

“I would.”

“If you believe me to be the traitor you suggest,” said Snape softly, “may I ask why you consider it a good idea to threaten me?”

Hermione shivered and tightened her grip on Harry.

The click of heels was their only warning. They scrambled back around the corner as Umbridge burst from the Potions classroom, her shoes making a swift staccato of rage up the steps.

The echoes had scarcely faded when Harry gave a strangled cry, and Ron seized him by the elbow. “Private,” he blurted, “we’ve got to get somewhere private—”

“NO! Gerroff me, I’m going to the Owlery—”

“Bloody well not, you idiot, they’re watching the post—”

“Then the Floo! Or I’ll go to Hogsmeade—”

“They shut the Floo, and don’t be a moron — Hermione, we need to get him a room—”

“The undercroft,” she said. “Here.”

In the torchlit vault, Harry was hustled in and shoved down on a makeshift chair of a barrel covered in a dusty sheet. Hermione hauled the door close and swept a route of protective enchantments over them, her Muffliato simultaneous with Harry’s shout.

“He told her! Slimy, filthy fucking snivelling snake, he told her about Sirius—”

“We don’t know that, Potter.”

“He said so! Do you want it in writing?”

“He only said he gave her information,” Hermione cut in urgently, “which could mean anything. It could be lies—”

“She said his name! ‘Sirius Black,’ you all heard her—”

“She could have been making a point!” she cried. “She could have been — extemporizing!”

“No, I reckon she’s right,” said Ron, his voice even despite the considerable effort it was taking to pin Harry down. “It tracks. Snape fed her information about him — because, no shit, he fucking hates him — and she suspects Dumbledore’s working with Black, so now she’s plumbing him for stuff on Dumbledore.”

“Yes! Exactly! Thank you, Ron, now get the hell off—”

“But you still need to have a sit and think, mate.”

“Fuck sitting here! I’m going to warn him he’s been betrayed — betrayed again—”

“He might not be. You don’t know what he told her. Snape’s a double-agent,” Draco said, his voice breaking loud and harsh over the din. Harry glared at him, chest heaving. “Spreading false information is his job. I’ll bet you my last galleon he was instructed to feed Umbridge false information to throw her off Dumbledore’s scent.”

“Yes, and Harry, think about it,” Hermione added eagerly. “What about Mundungus? Remember? Mundungus Fletcher, who disappeared? Moody himself said he was probably the mole! The only thing we really know is that Umbridge suspects Sirius and Dumbledore both of being involved with the Order, which Dung easily could have told her.”

“Dumbledore trusts Snape,” said Draco.

“I’m not Dumbledore!” Harry roared. “I don’t know why he does things, or what he wants — never explains himself to anyone, definitely not to me—”

“Because you’re fifteen,” Hermione cried, her worry overwhelmed now by exasperation. “God! I love you, Harry, but why would he explain to you? You’re a fifteen-year-old! A student!”

“Don’t pretend any of this is normal, Hermione!” he shouted back. “I’m not ‘some fifteen-year-old’! Dumbledore stuck me in a safehouse because he didn’t trust the Dursleys to protect me from people he knew wanted me dead, but he won’t explain why he keeps one of them in his fucking pocket—”

“But you know why! Be sensible! He keeps Snape around because he’s a double-agent, and even if he wanted to get rid of him, it’d be far too dangerous, considering how much he knows about the Order! Which Dumbledore must have assumed you would understand without being told, seeing as you’ve been living with spies for months now, and in the off chance you didn’t Not to mention there’s a perfectly decent chance that Voldemort can quite literally read your mind!”

“Don’t say it,” said Draco and Ron, sharply, at once. They glared at each other. Hermione rolled her eyes.

“Fine. ‘The Dark Lord’ might be able to read your mind. Making you, frankly, the last person anybody should tell their war secrets. And if you try to contact Sirius now, the Ministry will follow you straight to the Order.”

“Snape wants him dead,” Harry said doggedly, ignoring her. “Sirius. You know he does. He’s tried to kill him before. Am I the only one who cares about that?”

Ron made a noncommittal sound and shifted his weight, looking at the floor. Harry set his jaw.

“Were you under the impression that everyone in an army had to like each other?” Draco said curtly. “Severus Snape has been a faithful and useful servant of your cause for sixteen years. Would that Sirius Black could say as much.”

“Sirius is my godfather.”

“Snape’s mine. Which by any accounting ought to privilege my opinion about this over thirty seconds of eavesdropping.”

Hermione crouched in front of Harry and took his hands. He gazed down at her with a wild guilt.

“I understand,” she said calmly. “You want to protect him. But tearing off to find him will draw attention, no matter what you do. You have to find a way to trust Snape.”

“I don’t trust him.”

“Then the whole Order’s shot,” she said, without missing a beat, “and we might as well give up, shall we? Seeing as Voldemort knows everything.”

With an answerless groan, Harry bent and pressed his forehead to their clasped hands.

“He’s going to die.”

“He’s not going to die.”

“He’s going to get himself killed.”

“No, he won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

Hermione drew back her hands, forcing him to look at her.

“Harry Potter, I happen to know everything,” she said, in a nasal, shrill register. “I read all about it in Hogwarts: A History.”

Harry hung his head and broke into a weak laugh, bracing his elbows on his knees.

“If he hurts Sirius,” he said, “I’m gonna kill him.”

Hermione glanced at Ron. Something passed between them. Ron moved his head at her and gestured shortly with his hand.

She read something in his movements that answered her question, because she smiled a small and reassuring smile.

Draco turned away and folded his arms, stinging with a resentment that had no object, for envy of something he couldn’t even name.

“I hope it won’t come to that,” said Hermione. She stood up. “The best thing you can do for Sirius right now is to focus on your Occlumency.”

Harry grunted an unenthusiastic response. But he clambered up and followed the others from the undercroft, quiet, as per usual.

---

With night opaque and mirrored on the window-panes, Draco descended into the dark well of the Entrance Hall. Echoes of the bells sounding a nine o’clock curfew faded into the drafty fathoms above him, and torchlight made rippling masks of the oil paintings that walled the stair. He lit his wand and leaned on the banister at the foot of the stairwell. The many Educational Decrees sprouted above and around the notice-board like a white and flaking skin of mold.

Hermione was ten minutes late for patrol. He cast Nox and practiced his impression of a patient man.

He heard her footsteps before he saw her. She came whirling down the stairs with her hair wrenched up around a quill, lilting perilously from its hold.

“Sorry! Sorry, sorry. I had to change.”

“You changed your shirt,” he said, “for a patrol?”

“Yes.” She stuck her wand between her teeth while she finished pinning up her hair. Strays drifted around her temples, charmingly tousled, an effect her flush did nothing to help. Her face was shiny.

“May I ask why?”

“Spilled on it.” She rolled up her cuffs, revealing a pair of dainty wrists, a bandaged hand. “Ron knocked over one of my Everfull Inkwells, and you can imagine the mess.”

“Why was he using them?”

She glanced at him oddly. “He wasn’t. We were just talking. Anyway, I hope you don’t mind the delay. I know you don’t like to be kept waiting, but I was really covered in it—”

“I was hardly going to code you for an inkstain.”

“I wasn’t worried,” she said, stilted, “about being coded. It’s just that I like being — presentable.”

He let the point drop with a shrug of his shoulder. Hermione plunged a hand elbow-deep in her bag and emerged gripping the soft, aging folds of the Marauder’s Map. “I have an idea,” she said triumphantly.

The corner of his mouth pulled up. “When don’t you?”

“I was trying to think of a way to spy on Theodore Nott — and Warrington, ideally — when I remembered that we already had one. The Map tells us at a glance whether they’re on school grounds, and if so, where they are, albeit with the exception of places the Marauders didn’t plot, like the Room of Requirement, but how many of those can there be? Anyway, I borrowed the Map from Harry and spent a few nights going over it before I went to sleep—”

“Define ‘sleep.’”

“—and what do you know?” she said, fiercely satisfied. “Theodore Nott is almost always out of bed after curfew.”

He tilted his head, immediately ill-at-ease. “Based on your tone, I don’t suppose he’s dutifully executing his Inquisitor patrols.”

“Alone?” she said smugly. “At two in the morning? In the same place every night? Impossible to say.”

His intrigue sharpened. “Where is he going alone?”

“That’s the funny part. He’s not meeting anyone. He just floats around the second-floor corridor. See? He’s there now.” She leaned close and pointed to the Map. A black dot labeled THEODORE NOTT was trundling steadily up the page, footsteps winking swiftly in and out of sight. He followed its trajectory, but the corridor ahead of it terminated in a wall.

“What’s he visiting on the second floor?”

“My first question,” she agreed. “At first I thought he was using a hidden room, and that’s why the Map didn’t show him leaving, so during yesterday’s lunch I went to have a look—”

“One of these days you might spend a meal period actually eating.”

“Terribly inefficient things, meals,” she said brightly, “never really got into them. Anyway, I conducted a thorough search for passages behind all the portraits and tapestries — let me tell you, some of them did not fancy being moved — but unfortunately most of it’s useless. The only way out besides the staircase is a passage behind the tapestry of Witch Lingad the Pink, and I doubt Theodore’s interested in it.”

“Why? Where does it go?”

“Gryffindor Tower,” she replied. “A possibility I dismissed for obvious reasons, and judging by your expression, I expect you agree — unless there’s something going on between him and Daphne?”

Draco did not know what his expression did then, but Hermione laughed awkwardly.

“Right. Er, no. I didn’t think so. I just remembered that she fancied him, for a while, and you mentioned he might have been a bit soft on her—”

“They’re not romantically involved. They are also not, strictly speaking, platonically involved,” he said, quelling the instinctive nausea of discussing Daphne’s love life. “She hasn’t talked to him in months. And she hadn’t a clue about Warrington.”

“I thought so, but I had to check. You’d be surprised how clever she can be about keeping secrets. Anyway, the only other place I can think he’d go is the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom.” She pointed to the tiny indicated door. “To meet with Umbridge, you see. But she isn’t there. So I’m forced to conclude he’s doing something else.”

“And you,” he said tiredly, “want to go find out what it is.”

She was already tucking the Map into her pocket. “It’s an unmissable opportunity, Draco. The castle’s empty, we know exactly where he is, Harry gave me the Invisibility Cloak, and if he tries anything, there’s two of us. Besides, don’t you want to know what he’s doing?”

“Have you ever contemplated the phrase ‘looking for trouble’?”

“Yes, often,” she said primly. “I understand it to be the definition of ‘patrol.’ Are you coming?”

He was, though not without grievances, which he made known by pointedly taking the Map from her. He also forced her to wear the Cloak by herself, so that their joined volume would not lift the hem, which drew a predictable slew of objections.

On the second floor he put out his wandlight and cast charms to muffle the sound of his feet, then crept in the sliver of shadow directly beneath the torches, where darkness pooled in the edges of the halls. A Disillusionment Charm was always helped by poor light, and his Disillusionment wasn’t quite as good as Hermione’s: a fact she had no reservations about pointing out.

“…reason you ought to wear the Cloak, I can practically see you. Your refraction index is atrocious; this is just silly—”

“Do keep your voice down, Granger dear. You’re the loudest spy I’ve ever heard.”

“First, not true, we’ve both met Tonks,” she retorted in a very loud whisper. “Second, it won’t matter if he hears me, because he’s going to see you coming up the stairs—”

“And what do you want me to do about it?”

“Put the Cloak on! And let me cast a spell we both know very well I’m better at!”

“No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because then he might see you.”

She gave an irritated huff that was so Hermione he could practically see the motion of her lips.

“You’re sneaking up on a man who works for a Death Eater,” he muttered. “Indulge me in the fantasy that you’re taking it seriously.”

He checked a corner, first with the Map, then with his own eyes, and stepped around it carefully. The second-floor corridor branched off from the mouth of the staircase. Moonlight from the castle windows carved pale ellipses on the stone. A row of tapestries depicting the wizarding theater of the English Civil War wafted gently in the evening chill. The Map dutifully reported Theo’s location in a small room behind one of the doors on the right.

“I do take it seriously,” she said, in a different tone. “I have to. I just don’t want to be scared of everything.”

“Then I’ll have to do it for you,” he said tautly, and held out the Map wordlessly. Her thin hand, dappled in torchlight, appeared disembodied from the gloom to take it; she hesitated, and then the hood rippled back, revealing her small bright face in a shrine of curls, floating.

“Why?” she said. Her eyes searched his. “I mean it. Why? Between this, and the phoenix tears, and what you said on the train, about it being easy. Why?”

He stared at her.

“You know why.”

“No. I mean, I know what you mean. But that’s not an answer,” she said, brows furrowing. “Lots of people fancy someone, and that isn’t… that. It’s a different thing.”

“I wouldn’t know the difference,” he said.

Her brows furrowed more, but there was a sharp noise behind him and he whirled around. It came again: a muted BANG, metal on metal, followed by a muffled shrill of a woman’s voice.

“Who’s he with?” Hermione hissed, whisking back against the wall. “Who’s that woman? I didn’t see her when we were coming.”

“I don’t know; check the Map. He’s in that room there, you can see the light under the door.”

“But he can’t possibly be in there, it’s a girls’ bathroom, and — oh, idiot!” She was vehement. “Idiot, idiot! I’m such an idiot!”

“What, for Merlin’s sake?”

“That’s Myrtle’s bathroom!” she whispered, showing him the Map. “She’s in there, too!”

A dot labeled MYRTLE WARREN floated next to, nearly intersecting, THEODORE NOTT.

“Wonderful, explains everything. Why the fuck is he talking to Moaning Myrtle?”

“Probably because she won’t bloody leave him alone. As for the bathroom, it’s the least-traveled room in the castle. Remember when we brewed a potion in there for a month and nobody cared?”

Another loud noise jarred them. Hermione brushed past Draco eagerly and pressed close to the door. He grimaced and followed her. The voices from inside the bathroom pitched into earshot.

“…horrid little boys barge in here and bash it all to pieces! Some thanks for helping you…”

“You haven’t,” said Theo, his voice ragged. “You haven’t helped me. If anything, you’ve made things worse.”

“Don’t say that,” cried Myrtle. “You asked me… I told you the answer… I’ve only been helpful…”

“Oh, choke on it. The one helpful thing you ever did for me was die, and you’re still fucking useless, at that.” Another BANG. Something shattered.

“Don’t be mean,” she wailed. “I’ve got it bad enough already… at least you’re alive, you can leave… in fact, leave me alone, why don’t you…”

“Did your brain die with the rest of you? Does it look like I want to be here?” Footsteps crunched over something; shards, probably. “I’m done for tonight. This place had better not be fucking flooded again tomorrow, Warren. Or I’ll give you something to really cry about.”

Draco recognized what was about to happen with perhaps four seconds to spare. He wrenched Hermione away from the door, hauled her around, and pinned her against the wall. He ripped the Invisibility Cloak up and over both of them, drawing the hood tight over both their heads. Hermione gasped and he slapped his hand over her mouth.

The door to the bathroom burst open, and Theo strode out, the glow of a spell still fading from his wand-tip. His robe was missing, leaving him in shirtsleeves and a pullover, both of which were soaked. His hair stood up from its coif like raised hackles and his face, dripping wet, was set in a tight vise of fury. He checked the hallway with a short, impatient jerk of his head in both directions, then stalked off for the stairs.

Hermione exhaled. The hot air rushed over his fingers. Draco eased his hand off her mouth, palm hot.

“Sorry. Did that hurt?”

“No. It’s fine,” she said faintly. “Good reflexes.”

He nodded.

“We should,” she said. “Look in the bathroom. For evidence.”

“Right.”

Neither moved.

Inhaling, she laid her hands flush to his chest and gently pushed. He stepped back, letting the Cloak wilt from his shoulders and pool on the floor.

But the bathroom was a disappointment twice over. Inside there was nothing but a few chipped sinks, a shattered toilet, Theo’s ostensible victims, and a two-inch layer of water on the floor. A broken faucet sprayed. Myrtle was gone.

They probed around, trying to disturb as little as possible, before giving up and retreating to the hallway. Hermione shut the door behind her, wiping water from her cheek. “That was rather useless,” she murmured, clearly upset about it. “We hardly got any information. Except that Theodore apparently spends his nights berating ghosts.” She shook out the cloak and folded it over her arm to tuck it back in the bag.

“That’s not strictly true. We know he asked her something. And he didn’t like the answer.”

“Yes, but what did he ask Myrtle?” she said absently. “I suppose we could just ask her, couldn’t we…? But then she might tell him we did, and I don’t want him knowing we followed him.”

“I agree. And I strongly suspect he asked how she died.”

She blinked at him. “How do you figure?”

“Because it’s the only interesting thing that ever happened to Myrtle Warren,” he said, ignoring her disapproving noise, “and because he said it was the only helpful thing she ever did for him.”

“But Myrtle doesn’t know how she died,” said Hermione thoughtfully. “No one does. She’s listed in The Ghosts of Hogwarts Castle, seventy-fourth edition, under ‘unknown cause of death.’ The section on her just says there was a ‘tragic accident’ in 1943 — oh, relax, I didn’t memorize it. I looked her up when she kept bothering us in third year.”

“Thank Merlin.”

She smirked and lifted her chin. “Could’ve fooled you, couldn’t I?”

“Appalled me, more like.” He leaned his forearm on the wall beside her.

Hermione grinned wider. Then her eyes shifted down his face, and her grin faded. She wet her lips, as if to say something, and didn’t. The torchlight rippled over her skin like the shadows of tide underwater.

He wanted to kiss her so badly it was dizzying. To snog the haughtiness out of her, however many years it took.

“What you said on the train,” she said timidly, interrupting his thoughts. “Did you still… want… to talk about it?”

He looked at her. She was staring pointedly at his chest and twisting the strap of her bag within an inch of its life.

“That depends,” he said slowly, “on whether you still think I shouldn’t say certain things to you.”

“I do.”

“Then this is going to be difficult.”

She nodded, dropping her chin.

“I just don’t think,” she said, “that there’s any room for… I mean, it probably wouldn’t… for one thing, we don’t have the time.”

“Don’t have the time?” he repeated disgustedly. “Granger, you don’t sleep. Neither of us do. It isn’t about time.”

“Fine. It’s about functionality, then. It’s about making sure that, that, that we can be functional, and won’t get stupid about each other whenever there’s a problem, which is often, and—”

“If you don’t want something,” he said, with an acrid bitterness in his mouth, “have the courage to come out and say you don’t want it. I’ve known you too long for excuses.”

Her head snapped up. “It’s not an excuse,” she said angrily. “It’s a very real, very compelling reason we shouldn’t start anything together.”

“Oh, well done, then, not starting anything.”

“I hadn’t! You did!”

“On the train?”

“That was you.”

“The first time.”

She flushed dark red. “Fine, that was me,” she agreed levelly. “Which I apologized for.”

“I don’t want your apology.”

“What do you want, then?”

“Nothing you’re willing to give. And that’s fine. You never were obligated to feel anything.”

“It isn’t about what I feel! If it was only about what I wanted, we’d have done something like this ages ago!”

Something tight coiled in his chest. He hated the sour little line of unhappiness in her mouth, the furrow between her eyes.

“Would we? Really? Because when I asked you, we were friends and then we were ‘friends,’ and then we were friends that kiss each other, and finally ‘complicated friends,’ whatever that means—”

“It takes two people to have a conversation!”

“And you told me you needed time to think.”

“Is that wrong? Is it so terrible of me to want to reflect before I destroy our friendship?”

“Destroy? Are you serious? Do you really think I would?”

“No! I’m afraid of messing it up!” she snapped. “I don’t want to fail! I told you that, you just didn’t listen, because you couldn’t believe that everything might not be totally about you!”

“‘Fail’? It isn’t an exam!”

“I know that,” she snapped, blazing, “because if it were an exam, I’d be good at it, wouldn’t I?”

She stepped forward, and he caught her by the hips. She was so warm. Even through the cotton of her skirt, her skin was warm.

Hermione was still scowling at him. Her scowl faltered when he drew close enough to throw a shadow over the torchlight on her face.

“My God,” she said, “see? We can’t even talk about this without bickering. We’re both total nightmares. We’d tear each other apart.”

He didn’t listen to her. She was probably right, but he didn’t care.

“You told me to ask. Fine. I’ll ask,” he said. “What do you want, Granger?”

Hermione’s chest rose and fell. Her teeth edged her bottom lip.

“Obviously, you,” she said. It was waspish, but sincere. “As always. Regrettably.”

He kissed her. She kissed him back, angrily, with a brief clash of teeth where she seemed to be trying to bite him and kiss him at once; the white-knuckle grip of her hands in his shirt made him weak in the knees.

He had to shove himself away from her to do what he needed to do. It was quite possibly the hardest thing he had ever done, and that included flying around a dragon enclosure.

“Alright,” he said, through a buzz of want. “We’re not doing this here.”

“Not doing what? Shouting at each other? Because I’ve bad news about that,” said Hermione, with a sweet condescension that made him want to kiss her again, wretchedly, for some reason. “We’ve been doing it for the past five minutes. If there’s someone down there, they’ve had their share of evening entertainme— what are you doing?”

He tugged her by the hand up the hallway. For all her fussing, she never tried to free her hand, and by the time they reached the seventh floor, she was almost walking alongside him, keeping pace with a double-stride for each of his. The Room of Requirement bloomed from the flat wall in silent answer to his need, iron curlicues swirling around a silver doorknob that rose to meet his hand.

“What are we doing here?”

“Talking. Privately.”

“Is that it? Do you know how many broom cupboards we passed?”

“I’m not doing this in a broom cupboard.”

“Doing what?” She sounded nervous, though not half as nervous as she was cross at being left out of the loop. In this, as ever, she was utterly herself.

He hauled the door open and swept her inside. It clanged shut behind them with a safe, assuring rattle of metal.

It was his dueling chamber again, with its vaulted ceilings, and panels of floriate stained glass. The Room was a different space in the evening, a calmer one. The fire bled yellow into the room’s vault of deep blue shadow. The windows were inked in navy, laced by silver filaments of rain.

With a breath that felt like about a douse of cold water, he drew his wand and walked into the center of the room. Hermione made an angered and bewildered noise, slightly bereft, as if she had been cut off in the middle of something.

“Cast a Patronus.”

She gave a strangled noise.

“What?” she said. “Now?”

“You didn’t cast one at the meeting.”

“Because I can’t,” she muttered. “It doesn’t work when I do it. I don’t know why.”

“Let’s fix it, then.”

“What, now?”

“Draw your wand, Granger. I bet you can.”

“This is embarrassing.”

“I know,” he said. “Do it anyway.”

Tight-lipped, she drew her wand and lifted it.

“Expecto Patronum.”

Wisps fluttered from her wand like cigarette trails. She gestured with frustration.

“There. See? I did everything right, the spell was perfect, I don’t know why it didn’t work. Can we go back to what we were talking about, please?”

He circled her in slow, measured steps. She pivoted to watch him, hesitant and suspicious. Her footwork was perfect, as was her spell construction. There was nothing wrong with her form. She wouldn’t have allowed it. Harry and Ron could offer nothing to correct her on, nor, frankly, would she let them. There was merely the indelible fact that it didn’t work.

“Which memory do you use?”

She twitched and glanced away.

“Transfiguration class,” he said resignedly. “The library. No. Worse. It’s marks, isn’t it? Exams? Prefect meetings.”

“My Prefect letter,” she said hotly, and continued, over a trumpet of triumphant laughter: “And there’s nothing wrong with being proud of myself—”

“No, but you can’t make a Patronus out of pride. There’s a reason Potter and Ronald are good at these.”

She rolled her eyes and swished her wand absently, scowling, throwing sparks. “That’s wishy-washy and you know it. For a spell this useful, it’s not good design to put this much stock in whether or not you get the feeling right. Magic should operate on the grounds of predictable, controlled phenomena. Scientifically, that’s all a feeling is, anyway.”

“Maybe,” he said, privately disagreeing. Predictable and controlled did not, in his experience, tend to apply. “But you might also say that it’s an animated creature, and animation requires passion. The word ‘spirit’ etymologically descends from the Latin word for ‘breath.’ The moving bellows of the body. The part that stirs.”

“It’s so colossally unfair,” she said, “that you were tutored in Latin. It’s just ridiculous.”

“Structural injustice is not the reason you can’t do a Patronus. Think of something that moves you.”

“Hm. A train.”

“A piece of music, for example,” he said, refusing to concede his amusement. He continued to circle, and she turned her head to watch him, following curiously from her periphery. “Your parents. That beastly cat. I don’t know. Remember a moment you wanted to keep. Something you were glad to be alive for.”

She tilted her head, considering. At length, she lifted her wand and, hesitantly, swished it.

“Expecto Patronum.”

A wiggly mass of something leapt from her wand, swirled through the air, and was lost. Hermione startled.

“That was— did you see—”

“Much better. Try again.”

“But it worked,” she said, almost cross. “It shouldn’t have worked.”

“Technically, it didn’t. Do it again. Try another memory.”

“It can’t be that simple.”

“Typical you, wanting it to be harder.”

“Expecto Patronum! Oh, did you see that? It was almost there!”

“Better. Try again.”

She rolled her shoulders, feet fidgeting. Her brows tightened infinitesimally, as if she were almost in pain.

“Expecto Patronum.”

Silver unfurled from her wand in a slow billow, swirling together as if stirred by an invisible hand. A head resolved from the mist, crowned by two small, round ears; it wriggled out of the primordial fog, followed by a long, sinuous body, four short limbs, and a long, lashing tail.

“Look at that. You were right.”

Her eyes flared open. She gasped and covered her mouth.

The otter hopped across an invisible series of shelves, climbing a circuit in the air, and then dove as if through water, its body undulating in a smooth glide.

“That’s — I did it.”

“Yes.”

“That’s my Patronus,” she said softly. She was staring at it with a starstruck expression that she reserved for the increasingly rare pieces of magic that, in their wonder, overwhelmed her natural sensibility of pragmatism. “An otter.”

“As you suspected.” He twirled his wand, feigning decorum, though the corner of his mouth was bent irreparably into a smile. They watched the otter frolic cheerfully around the chandelier. “A shame Lovegood was wrong.”

“Thank you,” she said, still soft, and her head still upturned. “We are — going to be truly, horrendously late for patrol, but — thank you.”

“Do I get to know who ‘Peter’ is, now?”

“No.”

“Fine.”

The otter swirled around her shoulders, shrouding her in white mist. She giggled a little, and reached up to stroke its back, her finger passing through the silver like gossamer.

There was tension in his shoulders. He cut deep into his reserves of courage, which were usually shallow, but now opened for him beautifully, easily, as if they had been holding their contents in reserve for this moment.

He called upon a memory of heat on a wide lake in summer, lemonade pitchers in crystal glasses, her laughter, a warm breeze, a place where nothing could hurt them.

“Expecto Patronum.”

A thread of white issued from his wand, swirled, and knotted together in a weave. From this nebula of white, a pair of wings sprouted, as did a short, angular beak, and finally the twin curves of a high, heart-shaped face.

The barn owl beat its wings, twice, and then alighted into the ceiling, carving a long, glistening circuit around the room.

Hermione made a sound. He lowered his wand without looking at her. He knew the expression on her face — wide open with wonder, backlit by joy. Her expression for all magic.

“It’s lovely.” Her voice was velvet. He twitched.

“Thank you,” he said brusquely.

She couldn’t understand — could not have known, could not have been expected to know — what it meant to say so; the etiquette of patronuses wouldn’t have been taught to her. She had learned them as weapons and tools, not as social gestures.

“It’s… an owl,” she said. “I recognize the species, I think.”

He drew his handkerchief and began cleaning his wand, mechanically.

“You should,” he said. “I bought you that owl. I’ll be quite put out if something’s happened to it.”

There was a pause. The heat of her attention warmed the side of his face.

“It’s my owl?”

“Or any other of the species Tyto alba. Meaning, literally, ‘white owl,’ making my rendition here somewhat literal.”

“But it’s my owl in particular. Tyto alba. The one you got me.”

He glanced up at his patronus, which was still making lazy spirals in the rafters. Her owl.

“That’s the one,” he said. “Theocritus, or what-have-you.”

“Thucydides,” she said softly. “Because I sent you History of the Peloponnesian War as a Christmas present. And you didn’t get me anything—”

“I didn’t know we were doing presents, mind you, no one said anything—”

“—so at the end of the year, you bought me an owl, because my parents wouldn’t. And you said you’d write.” She was coming closer to him. A tattoo drilled inside of his ribs. Her voice was unsteady. “I was — and I was so, so excited—”

“Little wonder. He was a thoroughbred.”

“—because I’d never had anyone to write letters to, before. No one else had ever wanted to — hear more of what I had to say. Most other children thought I said quite enough, actually. Which I probably did.”

This made him look at her. Her face was guarded and yet glowed, faintly, with some inner light.

“Do you know,” he said, into a silence that seemed deeper than all the oceans of the world, “the memory I use to conjure a Patronus with?”

“No. What?”

He did not answer, but continued to look at her. Her eyes widened.

“Not — you don’t mean—”

“I did try,” he said. “With other memories. Nothing quite does the trick.”

Hermione was staring at him as if he was something breathtakingly grand, cast from marble, and it made him feel about eight feet tall.

“You know very well,” he said, “that it isn’t friendship. For me. You’ve known it for some time.”

It was the first time he had said it to her out loud.

“I wanted things to be normal,” she said frankly. “I wanted nothing to change. I wanted — to go back to the way things used to be, you see.”

It was a shadow’s shadow of an apology, but he understood it.

“You can’t,” he said. “Nothing’s ever the way it used to be. You can’t have it back by pretending.”

“But I was close,” she said plaintively. “Sometimes, when it was just the four of us… it was close. I was good at pretending. We were good at it.”

“It wouldn’t last.”

“No,” she admitted, “probably not.”

She worried at one of her cuticles with a thumbnail, minute little fidgets of her knuckles.

“I told you this already,” she said, “but your letters were all I thought about, that first summer.”

She hadn’t put it that way. He would have remembered how he felt to hear it.

“I got up early every day to see if Thucydides had come back. I was worried he couldn’t find me in muggle London. I was worried he wouldn’t find you, wherever you were, or if he did you wouldn’t write back, because maybe you were just being nice, on the platform, or maybe you’d changed your mind—”

“Changed my mind?”

“I would remind you that you were a different person when you were twelve,” she said, “and so was I. But one day, I woke up and found him sitting on my window — and it was very early, and the sun was coming in. And Thucydides, you know, has white-and-gold coloring on his back, and the sunlight coming in behind him made him sort of— glow, everything seemed all shiny. It felt like magic. I know it wasn’t, not literally. But you can’t imagine how it feels, when you grow up in the muggle world, and then come here, and then you go back to it and you can’t bring any magic with you — you’re just back in the real world for the summer, and everything’s a little bit duller and slower and less interesting — and then suddenly there’s this piece of it in your house, waiting for you when you wake up. And you have a letter waiting for you from someone who understands everything. So it’s like this shiny piece of a dream fell into your lap while you were sleeping. That’s what you gave me.”

She ran her wand between her fingers, abruptly shy. “You were the only magic I got to keep,” she said in a quiet voice.

And: “That was the memory I used, just now. By the way.”

His patronus was forgotten. It disappeared, unobtrusively, in a whiff of white smoke.

“I was pretty well done for, at that point,” she said. “In retrospect.”

“In what sense?”

He already knew, but he was a liar, and she knew that, and she was going to tell him anyway.

She hiked in a breath and closed her hand around her wand. Lifted her chin. In her posture was the same blazing resilience she’d always had, which had to well from some deep furnace in the core of her. She had a kiln between her lungs. He could feel the heat when he stood near her.

“That I wanted you,” she said, with a panicked, dutiful bravery, as if she were confessing to a crime. “So much it left me sick, sometimes. And I can’t be your friend, I don’t think. Because, you see — the things I want, from you, have always been — larger than anyone else.”

The castle creaked. Her otter silently scattered into mist.

She took a breath. “You don’t have to say anything. To that. It’s just that I’ve been feeling this way for so long, and I thought it would stop but it hasn’t, and I did a lot of thinking about this and I’m pretty sure it’s hopeless. Friendship, that is. Based on the data, I mean. It’s the only plausible explanation for certain things. Like how I feel about your handwriting. And your hands. Or the way you say ‘Granger,’ and the way you do your tie crooked sometimes so that I’ll fuss at it, which I know you do, and you know I know you do, and I know you know I know you do, which I think is what I like about it, on some level, and Draco I know I said you didn’t need to say anything but actually you could say something, if you wanted to, any day now, really—”

He took her head in his hands and kissed her.

The surprise froze her for all of a heartbeat. With a high noise that could have been relief or pain, she buried her hands in his shirtfront and dragged him in to kiss him back.

His hand slid around the back of her skull, cupping her in place, tilting her head against his. Their mouths caught and dragged, clumsy, more urgency than skill, and the feeling was still blinding. The feeling still whited out the world. Why didn’t it wear off? It should have worn off. Nothing could possibly be this good forever. No one would do anything else.

She had a fist in his shirt and had snuck one into his hair and was pulling, insistent, like she wanted to fuse with him. Her lips moved against his in short quick brushes, never drawing away far enough to do more than breathe. He held her head in place and kissed her once, deeply, and she shuddered still and then kissed him back the same way, with a long, slow movement of her mouth that sent heat plunging through him like fever. She was pulling his hair hard and he was caught between two pressures, her mouth and her hand, heat blooming in two directions, her hand on his chest in a white-knuckle grip like she intended to let him go never, this thing of hers she’d caught for keeps. He caught her waist and pulled hard.

Hermione made a sweet, happy sigh against his mouth, and he opened it to her, letting her slide her tongue along the underside of his lip. The jolt of sensation swayed them. He did it again, and she shuddered and rolled her whole body up, front to front, pressure on pressure on pressure. There was a live wire running down the back of his spine, a jagged scar of white pleasure, throwing volts. Everything felt so much.

He made a sound, a cross between a groan and a sigh, when her fingernails grazed his scalp. She echoed him and the sounds twined together in the rafters, bounding back and forth on the wood.

She was soft everywhere. Soft in the curve of her waist and the plane of her back and the warm rose of her mouth. Her hair was soft where it tangled and spilled through his fingers. He could move her with it, twist her head back to kiss her, pull her in, hold her there. She didn’t object. When he tugged it her hand slid down his chest and pulled where the yield of the fabric ended, rucking it out of his waistband, almost petulant. Her hand skated across his skin and he broke the kiss to breathe out hard.

“Hermione—”

“Mm?” She leaned up and caught his mouth again, which stopped him from saying whatever the hell it was that had seemed so important.

Probably just fuck, and then fuck again, with gravitas.

He made a valiant effort, though. He lifted his head, trying to breathe evenly, and her mouth slipped down to his jaw.

The effort ended indecently and immediately. He was fucked. He was so profoundly fucked.

Heat poured from wherever her mouth went. The skin was sensitive and even more so where her mouth left it, wet and cool and warm where her lips went, and he was holding her hair too tightly and didn’t really know what to do with his hands, nor could think of it, nor could think. Nothing seemed connected to each other, it was just sensations outside of time, unrelated except in the sense of a gradual escalation, a slow rising burn in his sternum, a heat escaping from every tingling cell of his skin. Want, satisfaction, then more want. Not a logical progression. Would have to take it up later. With her.

He kissed her again to stop her from driving him mental, which didn’t work, but she seemed pleased enough. She wrapped her arms around his neck and arched up and slid their mouths together until the room spun.

At some point, she broke off and breathed against his mouth, ragged for air, and palpably frustrated by the need for it.

“I’m the only one who gets to do this,” he said.

“Obviously,” she said. She swallowed. “I’m quite plainly yours. In every respect. God help you for that. And you’re…?”

“Yours,” he said, “obviously.”

She considered him, her face a brilliant collision of giddiness and fear.

“Mine,” she said. Her hands tightened, impossibly, in his shirt. The rain trilled on the windows. “Yes. That’s right, isn’t it?”

Then she kissed him again, and finally, without reservation, without doubt, and without fear, he fell into her.

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-Another classic GT 15,000-word omnibus chapter, brought to you wholly without knowledge or intent. I didn’t realize this bad boy had gotten so big. I had a bit of ground to cover between “Deputy Special Inquisitor” and the next chapter, so I had to onboard a lot of stuff, and I thought about chopping it up. But I didn’t want to keep you waiting any longer, especially coming off the heels of a hiatus like the last one, and I really like big chappies as a reader. Means more stuff for the bus ride to work.

-Lord forgive me for how late I stayed up editing this. By which I mean Lord, please do not let me do it again.

-The plot and structure for Book 5 recently underwent a piledriver of an editing pass and the last act has been substantially revised in terms of chapter count; if you’re reading this from the future after Book 5 has completed, this affects your life not at all, freely disregard; but if you at some point saw a chapter title list floating around on my Tumblr, just know that it’s officially out of date now, and that the last act of Book 5 is officially 120% better than it used to be.

-I know Luna’s canon patronus is a hare, but I picked up one of them old creative licenses at the fanfiction store, and I’m using to drive this crazy train exactly wherever feels best and coolest. Also, egrets rule.

-If you left a comment on the last chapter, please know that I have read it, cherished it, and I hope you find a copy of your favorite book in a beautiful hardcover edition. Like those clothbound Penguin Classics, or an old burnished leather binding. And I hope it’s on sale.

-Next chapter (release date to be divined by your local haruspex upon consideration of the relevant entrails): “The Pureblood Sisters.”

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