Chapter 78: The Golden Hours
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Draco would remember the rest of that afternoon, and the night and the day following, as a revolving drill of questions and appointments. An iridescent barrier laid over the entrance to the battered Great Hall, where two of the tables lay lopsided and several of the chandeliers over pools of broken glass. The doors were hauled away for repairs. The Hospital Wing filled its beds and Madam Pomfrey, short of nurses, sent student aides out to the common rooms with Pepper-Up and Soothing Draught and poultices for bruises and scars. Rumors moved in swift dark currents through the hallways, though they always dissipated when pressed to the source. Someone said they had seen Rufus Scrimgeour and Alastor Moody dueling in the entrance courtyard; the other said the Head Auror had fled to the ward boundary, and Apparated. Some authoritative-sounding person said that Cortwaite and Robard had ambushed McGonagall, only for her to jinx them into stone; and the appeal of this account led to the percolation of a story that she had personally dispatched the whole auror patrol, with gory flourishes keyed to the author’s preferences.
Ron and the twins collided with Bill and Charlie on the first-floor landing. Ginny launched herself from the bannister to tackle Arthur. All day the halls resounded with a liberation carillon: weeping, shouting, crying for relief. In Gryffindor there were toasts and speeches in Harry’s honor; in the hallways, students jeered at each other for falling on rival sides of the fight. Colin Creevey took to holding court in the oral tradition for those unfortunates who had fled before the Order’s arrival.
“The windows blew out. CRASH! There was this flash of light — BANG! — and then Dumbledore was standing there with all of these people, the Weasleys and the Diggories and the Boneses—”
“—don’t forget the Abbots, and Mad-Eye and the other one with the pink hair — and then CLAP! — he does this thing with his hands and all the stairs stop moving, somehow, and everyone freezes and it’s like I can’t feel my legs—”
“—and he shouts — never heard anything like it, ripping loud — ‘DOLORES,’ and the patrolman holding me passes out on the spot—”
“He did not, Colin.”
“Okay but basically he does. And then he disappears again and the other people come in and start pulling the patrolmen off us, and Moody drags them out of the castle, I don’t know where—”
“Probably lasered them to death with his eye. I heard he can totally do that.”
“That’s true, actually, I heard it from Katie. And Pink Hair says, ‘we’re the Order of the Phoenix, and we’re here to help you.’”
“And some prat said he was gonna call the aurors,” Dennis added, “but I don’t know if he did. Maybe he did call them, but they never showed.”
“They won’t come now, we’ve just beat them. But they’ll come,” said Colin grimly. “They’ll come soon. I hope they come while I’m here, so I can fight them. I didn’t hardly get any licks in, against the patrolmen.”
Colin excepted, the student body regarded the Order with supreme wariness; a year of the Prophet’s editorials had sapped dry their reservoirs of trust. It had helped greatly that most of the Order members Dumbledore had brought were parents, whose children could vouch for them; even so, the attitude of suspicion was not dispelled easily. Many blamed Harry for the violence, as was inevitable. There were as many versions of the riot as there were witnesses. Some said they had been involved when they hadn’t. Some said they hadn’t, though they were. Still others had to learn about the change of administration second-hand: Astoria Greengrass had been recovering from a blood transfusion, and missed it.
The rumors grew to fill a vacuum of information. Hogwarts remained a zipped pocket of the world. No word came from the Ministry. The Prophet ran on as if nothing had changed, and if the pictures were reused from previous issues, few noticed.
Owls flew at last from the Owlery, but the letters they brought back were sparse and brittle, full of obvious occlusions. By and by it occurred to him that no one in the real world seemed to know what was happening, either.
As the status quo spun out, hour after restless hour, it grew upon Draco that the feeling he had expected — the one he had wanted and imagined for months, the relief from fear that Umbridge’s departure would bring — had never arrived. The fear had come from somewhere else, and found in her only a face. Now faceless, it swelled out like an infinite desert in the doldrums of his quiet, bleach-bright, endless afternoons.
Dumbledore arrived in the headmaster’s office not long after Tonks and Bill, stepping around them on the staircase as they evacuated an unconscious Umbridge. He wore robes of midnight blue, hemmed in dust as pale as bone, and the ends of his beard bore singes. He moved aside to allow Bill and Tonks to evacuate an unconscious Umbridge, but he closed the door behind him, and took in the room with a faint sigh of regret.
“I hate to impose more difficulties on you, in what has been an invariably difficult day,” he said, “but you would brief me on the goings-on in my absence, it will spare you the trouble of my bothering you again on the subject.”
Hermione spoke first and longest. She told him how they had unlocked the Floo, which made it possible for the Order to come in through the castle hearths. She told him about Cassius Warrington and Theodore Nott. Then, squaring of her shoulders, she told him that they had tried to escape once before, unsuccessfully; she told him, haltingly, what she had done to Cho Chang.
Dumbledore listened, behind loosely laced fingers, without any expression. Almost a minute passed before he spoke.
“Was she sworn against giving any information concerning Mr. Potter, or merely information concerning your organization?”
“The second.”
“And she never previously reported anything to Dolores Umbridge, I presume?”
“I… doubt it. The spell was strict—”
“Strict with respect to the information you specified,” said Dumbledore, quite calmly. “But not with respect to anything else she might have gleaned from Harry.”
“You mean information about the Order?”
“I am curious about the scope of her confidence. I would ask her myself, but as it happens, Miss Chang is no longer the expert on what she does and does not know.”
Hermione folded her arms. Her expression shuttered.
“I botched it,” she said, in clinical tones, like she was grading an exam. “That’s why she lost a year. It was a horrible thing for her to experience, I’m well aware. But if you want to expel me for it—”
“Do you think you should be expelled for it?”
“There’s a reason people don’t sit in judgment on their own punishments,” she said, a clipped sidestep of the question. “Expulsions are at the final discretion of the Hogwarts Headmaster. So if you are — considering it — then you should know that the spell was intended only to eliminate memories that put other people in danger.” She bit her cheek, and added: “I wasn’t being vengeful or petty. It was supposed to protect people. I was trying to protect people.”
“How would you evaluate your attempt?”
Hermione flinched. “At least there was an attempt,” she said, and Dumbledore paused his slow circuit of the office. Draco tensed. “And if you’ll forgive me, I’d rather get expelled trying—”
“Miss Granger, it was not I who brought expulsion into this conversation.”
He stooped to pick up a piece of shattered porcelain, regarded it forlornly, and settled it back on the mantle. The effect, in the wrecked room, was hilarity.
“Assuming the school will still be open,” said Draco. “Will it?”
“The doors of Hogwarts will always be open to those who need it,” said Dumbledore. “That mistake I have made only once.”
Hermione darted Draco a querying glance, but Dumbledore continued. “The school will operate through the summer, and next year, for all those who return to it. However, since I have no intention of leaving, I doubt that many parents will permit their children to return. My reputation has seen better days.”
“The school has seen better days,” said Draco, and Dumbledore did a thing with his face that seemed painful.
“The school will endure,” he said. “Miss Granger, what you did to Miss Chang, however unconscionable, occurred outside of my tenure as the Hogwarts Headmaster, besides which I do not believe I should pass judgment on sins too similar to my own. I remand you to Professor McGonagall, who will decide your punishment moving into the next year.”
“But she won’t expel me,” said Hermione, her voice uneven. “You won’t take my wand.”
“No. No, Hermione, I will not take your wand.”
Something in her punctured. She braced herself subtly on the desk, but a tremble of relief betrayed her.
Draco moved to touch her. His hand found the small of her back, and she hiked her breath before she spoke.
“Thank you,” she said. “Whatever McGonagall wants, I’ll do. I’ll do anything. I’ll — I’ll give up my prefect badge, if she wants.”
Dumbledore smiled to himself and placed another piece of china on the mantel, considered the effect, then moved away. “It’s a curious role,” he said. From nowhere: “Were you aware that Victoria Frobisher requested to be made a prefect?”
Victoria’s chief hobbies were swinging a beater’s bat and threatening violence far outside her capability to perform. She was also abysmal in most classes. Draco registered his surprise with a polite silence.
“She can’t,” said Hermione. “She’s just finished first year.”
“I didn’t ask what you thought of her prospects. I asked if you were aware, and, moreover, if you were aware of why.”
“No idea,” said Draco. The day had extended him far beyond his appetite for tiresome pedagogy. “The job’s thankless tedium. I don’t recommend it to her.”
Dumbledore studied him intently over his glasses.
“She said she wanted to protect her friends,” he said.
Draco hated him for saying it. Something in his chest unfolded against the limits of his ribs, painfully.
“Why didn’t you do anything?” he said, and he marveled at his own vitriol even as he contemplated striking the old man across the face.
A thin whistle in the eaves voiced the wind’s opinion on the subject. But Dumbledore did answer him, with a clipped gravity.
“I judged it too great a risk,” he said. “Better, at any cost, to appear weak… to appear incapable of resistance… She wasted a year of rule on petty inquisitions and indulgences. And yet there are secrets at Hogwarts of which Dolores never scratched the surface.”
“Do you know the costs?” said Hermione, raising her voice. “Do you know what happened to Harry? What it did to him? What it is doing to him, now?”
“Does he still struggle with Occlumency?”
“The Dark Lord has a window into his brain,” said Draco. “It’s not clear Occlumency can stop it, if he could. Speaking of which. Where’s my godfather?”
Dumbledore did not react. “Severus is wherever his business takes him,” he said. “I rarely know his location precisely.”
“Your business, you mean.”
He did not deny it, either.
Draco found himself raising his voice, too. “Say that Snape didn’t betray the Order. He went to Umbridge on your instructions.”
“To what purpose?”
“To distance himself from you. To prove his loyalties to the Dark Lord.”
“Potentially,” said Dumbledore, blithe. “What purpose would you infer, if you were correct?”
“That you want a spy in his inner circle. That he needs absolute trust.” He paused. “Snape isn’t coming back next year. Is he?”
The twitch of Dumbledore’s mouth stirred his white beard. “Why would that be a poor idea?”
“It would be spending too much time around you. He would infer you still had sway over him. The Dark Lord assumes that people bend to the nearest source of power.”
“Severus Snape is an accomplished Occlumens. Shouldn’t that fact assure his master?”
“Snape shouldn’t want the Dark Lord to know that,” said Draco. His brain flitted along the line of thought, forking, checking corners, jittery with something almost like excitement. “The Dark Lord is a Legilimens. The last thing he wants in his inner circle is an accomplished Occlumens.”
Dumbledore inclined his head. “So what should Severus do?”
“Burn bridges,” he said. In the corner of his eye, Hermione turned her head. “Scorch the earth. Give him as many secrets as you can afford to lose. Start now. He shouldn’t have waited until—” His mind raced ahead of the sentence and abandoned it; he vaulted fast into another, angry now in earnest.
“Unless he didn’t wait, did he? If he started last summer. You were both planning this as soon as you knew the Dark Lord had returned.”
Dumbledore blinked. His eyes were the luminous color at the heart of a glacier. “It was a shame to lose Mundungus Fletcher,” he said, and he seemed to mean it. “For once in his life, I think he was making an honest effort to do the right thing.”
“You let Moody hound him out for nothing?” Hermione was struggling; her tone was not accusatory, but of one failing to understand. “To protect Snape? That’s it? You could have quashed the investigation to begin with—”
“Alastor Moody loathes spies,” said Dumbledore simply. “He must believe that his people are loyal, no rival claims to their fidelity, no kernel of treason in their hearts. He has known too much of betrayal to abide it… and I have known too much of hearts to agree with him.”
His robes moved soundlessly over the floors. The door to the office opened soundlessly at his approach, untouched.
“Your mother is well, Draco,” he said, as the shaded stairwell swallowed his face. “She asks that you return home for the summer. And she will expect you at Platform Nine and Three Quarters.”
Then the door closed over the weary hunch of his shoulders. And they were alone, at last, in a shattered room.
The castle post bellum was a castle undressed: near the grand staircase, portraits listed from their hooks, and marble dust seized in froth-white whorls under each step. Evening glowed in bronze fragments on the broken glass under the windows. Thick, warm air stirred the corridors, motion without relief. It accrued in Hermione’s hair, turning her face pale, and her robes shimmering gray. Where it flickered through the fallen glass, Draco’s reflection was colorless. They climbed down a broken stair, which had been dislodged in some skirmish between the Order and aurors; when she listed on her ankle, she fell into his shoulder, and stayed there for a moment. The weight of her kept him from feeling as if he might float up through the surreal dream of the day, and wake, panting, on the first morning of September.
They went on.
A crowd had assembled in the Hospital Wing antechamber to the Hospital Wing. Ron leaned against the doors, encircled by siblings. Padma and Parvati sat together on a bench, sharing earphones, distinguishable only by their ties; Luna dozed with her head in Padma’s lap. Dean, Seamus, and Katie were playing Hearts with one of Fred’s trick card decks.
Hermione moved into the light, her hand drifting over Draco’s elbow. She did not let go of him, not quite. The conversation dimmed to greet them, and there was a slithering susurrus of whispers.
Ron had straightened at the sound of their footsteps; at the sight of them, he was in motion. “Hermione,” he shouted. “Draco—”
He shot forward and scooped her up in a single movement, so quickly that a wheeze was her only objection. His arms wrapped tightly around her waist and he wheeled her around, and she gave a shout less angry than surprised, clinging to him.
“Ron! Ron! Put me down! I’m fine! I’m fine— put me down, you’re mad!”
His tolerance ratcheted to its limit, tipped, and broke. Seeing Ron’s head buried in Hermione’s neck had made him less irritable on days far more deserving of his patience. It didn’t help that Hermione had started to giggle, infected, no doubt, by the intensity of his joy, as of course she would be, which was the reason that Draco withstood precisely three more seconds of it than he thought really decent, considering that she didn’t belong to Ron.
“That’s more than enough, thank you. You can put her down.”
Ron did not care. He gave a breathy guffaw of relief and dropped her, clasped her shoulders, her head, her waist again, and rounded on Draco with a grin that was so electrically bright it half-threatened to seize Draco and give him a whirl, too. He settled for punching him in the shoulder, and Draco let him. The ache flickered almost pleasantly through the sore muscles of his wand-arm.
“You son of a bitch,” Ron breathed. “I’m sorry I didn’t see it. Tonks said you had her out cold when they found you. Did you get her good?”
“You mean Umbridge, I assume?”
“Or any other old bints you knocked off on the way,” said Ginny. She clambered upright, flipping dust-clumped hair out of her face. “Hopefully not too many.”
“I think McGonagall’s sore she lost the pleasure,” said Fred. “You saw her going at it — reckon she nearly took off a limb, never seen her so mad as all that—”
“Most morale I’ve felt in years,” said George, “she should’ve beat someone to death on the first day of Transfiguration, I’d have aced the N.E.W.T.”
“Euan was worried she’d get off easy, Order being humanitarians,” said Ginny. “I told him: ‘Are you joking? It’s Malfoy and Granger. They’re gonna use her to ruin a hardwood floor.’”
Dean and Seamus jeered appreciatively. Hermione began to look uncomfortable.
“Where’s Potter?” said Draco, ignoring them.
“In there.” Ron jerked his head. “Collapsed when we were fighting Scrimgeour. Don’t think a spell got him, only—” He pointed at his forehead. “You know.”
The relief fell out of Hermione’s face in a tragic sweep. “Are you sure? He’s never fainted from a vision before.”
“Yeah, I dunno. Pomfrey’s got him. Mum, too. We’re just waiting for her to let us in.”
“Mrs. Weasley is here?”
“Yeah, ’course. Came with the rest of the Order. And Dad, of course, but she didn’t leave much for him to do—”
The doors parted. Neville stepped out wearing a nurse’s apron and stripped off a pair of blue gloves. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, and the ends of his fringe were damp with sweat.
“He’s fine,” he said, before anyone could accost him. “Pomfrey’s cleared him. No curses, no major problems. She’s holding him overnight to monitor, but she expects to release him in the morning. I’m supposed to take four of you—”
“Four!”
“That’s not fair, we’ve been out here for ages—”
“Neville, have a heart—”
“Four,” said Neville loudly, “and I’m allowed to take less, if someone gets s-saucy about it — if you don’t have an injury, go back to your common room, and if you do have an injury, come and see me. Ron, p-pick three.” He promptly turned and retreated behind the doors, deaf to a sweet chorus of whining.
“He’s been spending too much time with you,” Ron muttered to Draco.
“I can’t be credited with every competent act in this House. Only most of them.”
“I could leave you out here, you know — alright. Ginny, Hermione, you’re with me and Draco.” Ron swept his gaze over the assembly with a polite dictatorial air. “The rest of you piss off until tomorrow morning. Thanks for waiting with us, I’ll let Harry know you came. Fred and George keep their liquor in the false bottom of the broom cupboard—”
“Thanks, Ronnie,” exclaimed Fred, “last time I clock an auror for you.”
“—so go mad with that. Or don’t, er, if you’re like, twelve. Anyway, good job.”
“Thank you, Ron,” said Luna. Her voice was very un-Luna-like; it was flat and plaintive with tiredness. “Please tell Harry I’m sorry about the Grim.”
Hermione lifted her eyes to the ceiling, opened her mouth, and closed it on a long exhale.
“Consider him told,” said Ron.
The Hospital Wing sat pale and crowded under the warm descent of dusk. Each bed carried someone nursing a bruise or a split lip, and the chatter of them filled the room with a liquid ripple of inaudible voices: somewhere here complaining of an auror’s curse, another there of a sprain. The windows hung open to stir the stagnant summer air and heavy linen drapes, hung from the distant ceiling, moved like the slow wingbeats of a descending swan. It smelled of disinfectant, copper, and sweat. Pomfrey swept from bed to bed with the gravity of a descending peregrine, plucked, patched, dosed, or cut, and darted on to the next bed, while her attendants followed in a retinue of compresses and glass vials.
Harry’s bed had been sequestered by a translucent screen. He lay under a sheet as pale as shrouds, his knees propped up like whitecaps.
Molly Weasley was knitting at his bedside, though she looked remarkably unlike herself. She wore a plain black raincloak that hung like a poncho around her shoulders, a fitted tunic of midnight blue, and laced leather boots with mud up the sides. Her hands deftly operated the knitting needles while encumbered by a pair of fingerless gloves. An auror’s wandsheath ran up her left forearm.
If it had not been for her hair — frayed, sabled auburn curls, like fading leaves of the last flush, bound back tightly with a headband — he would not have recognized her. But the impression came back with a force when her children came in, for she stood and snapped out her arms with a brisk and familiar demand. Ron lurched in to hug her, and she nearly lifted him off his feet.
Harry turned as they came, his whole body quickened in bright relief. He sat up clumsily — a golden thread trailed from his wrist to a levitating bag of saline at his shoulder — and clutched Hermione’s hand as she rushed to his bedside.
He gave a ragged, hapless laugh, as if he could not quite think what to say. She swallowed and did not say anything, either.
“Alright, Hermione?” he rasped.
“Fine,” she said. “Draco and I—”
“I know. You saved us.”
“Not alone,” she said weakly, with a hail-mary glance over her shoulder; Draco raised his eyebrows to indicate that she was without help, and she promptly punished him. “Draco dueled Cassius Warrington by himself. And won.”
“Fuck’s sake, Granger—”
“You did what?”
“It’s true,” she said, with a silken note of proprietary pride. “It didn’t take him fifteen minutes.”
He scoffed. “Not a fair fight. Warrington’s a poppet. Cut his strings, he falls over.”
“Nope, too late,” croaked Harry, and reached for him. Draco rolled his eyes and, with as much reluctance as he could telegraph, outstretched his hand so that Harry could take it. “Thank you, too.”
“Had half the school outside,” said Ron, jerking his thumb. “Ginny had to sell a kidney to get in. Neville’s let the power go to his head.”
Harry smiled thinly. “Good for him,” he said. “Tell him to start cutting me in on these deals. I’m sick of being the Elvis in this relationship.”
Ginny wriggled her way between them and hopped onto the mattress beside Harry.
“You missed out,” she said. “I totally kicked Warrington’s arse, too. You just didn’t see it, ’cause you fainted like a girl.”
“You know me. Had to make a dramatic exit.” Harry smiled, and it made the crooked bridge of his glasses lilt askew. The flat, angular, planes of his face hung shadows under them, and in the light his eyes were eerily pale, almost colorless.
Sometimes I play a little game, and then I lie a little more.
“The Order have Umbridge in custody,” said Draco.
“Where?” said Ginny dangerously, fingering her wand.
“No idea. Fancy an expedition?”
“God, you’re my favorite prefect. Can we go now?”
“Neither of you are doing anything of the sort,” said Molly pleasantly, looping a new strand of yarn around her forefinger. “You’re to stay away from that woman for the rest of her natural-born life, Ginevra. Draco, I can’t rightly tell you what to do, but I doubt your mother would disagree.”
She took his mother for a far more forgiving woman than she was, by his lights, but he laid the point aside from distraction. Hermione had lowered herself into one of the visitors’ chairs. The moment her weight left her heels, something wilted in her spine, and her eyes closed, briefly.
Years’ experience informed him she was minutes from falling asleep wherever she happened to be standing, sitting, or reading, and he would have moved to take her back to the Tower; but Harry had started to relax for the first time they’d come in, and he knew she wouldn’t leave. He placed a hand on the back of her chair, and she flicked her fingers in a tired gesture that meant she would push through, regardless of convincing.
The doors to the Hospital Wing cleaved and a pale head bestrode the gap. Daphne slipped through discreetly, though the effect was thwarted by the full attention of the room on her. She wore a navy-blue cardigan over her uniform, which happened to hide her Slytherin tie.
“Hello,” she said hesitantly. “I heard that Harry was here.”
“He’ll be out in the morning, dear,” said Molly, firm, but not unkind. “He isn’t seeing visitors.”
“S’fine. Just Daphne,” said Harry. He waved her over, and she trotted in with the sly contentment of someone being permitted to breach a rule.
“Duck behind me, if Neville comes,” Ron told her.
“I shall vanish entirely.” She noticed Molly, and half-folded herself in an uncharacteristically awkward curtsy, which a less tired Draco would have found the words to mock. “Oh, you’re — why, hello, Lady— Mrs. Weasley.”
“This is Daphne Greengrass,” Molly said, politely. “From the stories?”
“You do talk about me,” Daphne murmured, pleased.
“Yeah, to complain,” said Ron. “Anyway, she’s cool, Mum. Stood up for Harry, in the Great Hall. Only Slytherin to do it.” He smiled at her, perhaps urging some show of pride, but Daphne hesitated.
“That’s not quite true,” she said. “A few of the very young ones did, too… admittedly, I think they just wanted to stand on the table, I’m not sure they quite knew what was going on. Anyway, I wasn’t really fighting, like you — I mean, Ron punched one square in the neck—”
“He gets his aggression from his father,” said Molly haughtily. Ginny gaped at her in disbelief. “I raised him better than that.”
“Mum! You punched Cortwaite in the d—”
“And I raised you better than to use that language in front of company!”
“It’s Harry’s company,” said Ginny irritably. She chafed against her mother’s tone, her shoulders creeping up, and Draco remembered their fight from St. Mungo’s. “Not yours. Let him say if he doesn’t like my language.”
“I’m his guardian for the time being,” said Molly sharply. “I’ll look after him. Now—”
“But you’re not,” said Ginny, with an equal and opposite streak of flinty stubbornness. “His guardian’s Sirius. Where is he?”
“Ginny,” rasped Harry. “Don’t—”
“Drinking, I expect,” said Molly, quite bright and quite cold. “So whatever your preferences are, young lady, I’m sorry to say you’re stuck with me.”
Ginny sucked in her cheek and rolled her jaw mulishly to stare at the floor. She did not apologize to her mother, but she didn’t prosecute the argument, either. Molly set down her needles and scowled at her hands.
“How’s Dad?” said Ron suddenly.
Molly took up her needles again, shaking out her wrists with a sharp gesture. “He’s fine,” she said curtly. “He’s searching the castle for traps, with Mad-Eye. The Healers expect him to regain some of his voice by September.”
“How much is some?”
“Less than all,” she said, and pulled tight the loop.
Daphne averted her eyes. Draco thought someone ought to breach the awful silence. He said, “What’s that you’ve got, Greengrass?”
Her gratitude was spelled in her sharp intake of breath. “I brought some things for Harry.” She began digging parcels out of her knapsack. She was obviously trying to play it off casually, but the parcels were wrapped in pink tissue paper and tied in satin ribbon, and he had rarely seen her put so much effort into anything except her hair. “Whenever Tori and I were in hospital,” she added, “we’d bring each other handsoaps, because hospital soaps always smell like bleach, it’s dreadful. And some dry shampoo, and toothpaste — Scouring Charms just never feel clean, do they? And a silk pillowcase, so your hair doesn’t get mussy on those awful cheap sheets.”
“Tell me about it,” said Harry, “those cheap sheets,” and Hermione pointedly jogged the leg of his bed.
“And some Turkish delight, just for a treat. Hospital is a fine chance to gorge yourself without anyone telling you off.” Daphne placed the box in his lap and patted it. Then she stepped back awkwardly, her grace vanquished without a task to perform; she seemed suddenly adrift, waiting for someone to give her a heading.
Ron was staring at her. She glanced at him furtively, twice, and sighed: “Oh, God, he’s allergic, isn’t he? Don’t tell me, I’ll jump out a window.”
“No,” said Ron oddly. “He’s — he’s fine, eat mud if you let him. Why’d you come?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It… seemed like a nice thing to do.”
“Well, it was,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
He nodded, averting his eyes. She clasped her hands behind her back in a posture of elegant uncertainty.
“Don’t get much of them,” he said. “The fancy sweets. Bit rich for our blood.”
“Oh, Turkish delight isn’t expensive. Honeydukes has a deluxe box for ten galleons.”
Ron blinked.
“Which is a lot of money,” she blurted. “Quite a lot of money, for most people, in fact, and actually, I think I’ll see about that window—”
“I’m having you on. I’ve had Turkish delight before. I’m not, like, homeless.”
“I didn’t say you were homeless,” she gasped. “I would never say that. Or think it! And if I did, which you can’t prove, then it was for a brief period early in our acquaintance, and I should not be held responsible for it.”
An owl broke through one of the open windows of the Hospital Wing, its raven-black feathers gilded in the last veins of sunset. It settled on one of the other students’ bedside, drawing Draco’s eye to the only other bed in the room that had a screen. Emerging from the screen to receive her owl was a short, dark-haired girl in a Slytherin uniform. She slit the twine with her wand and fed the owl a treat from her pocket, flipped open the letter, and skimmed it, her snub-nosed face pursed in concentration.
Sensing that she was being watched, Pansy glanced up at him. She folded the letter into her robe pocket and turned to say something to the person behind the screen. Draco harbored few doubts as to who lay there. Daphne followed his gaze, choked on air, and fell silent.
With a bellicose square of her shoulders, Pansy crossed the ward, her steps long and brusque and graceful. Her presence was neither unnoticed nor welcome by Ron and Ginny, the latter of whom removed her wand from her pocket. But Molly disarmed them with a lift of her hand, and she rose at Pansy’s approach.
“Hello, again,” she said, and Pansy hesitated — caught off-guard, perhaps, by the familiarity in it. “You’ve changed your hair.”
There was something he had forgotten. The last time they had seen each other, Pansy’s hair had been splinched by Theo. A hairdresser of preternatural skill had rearranged it into a French bob, tapered at the back and rounded at the front with a long fringe, and it hung so low it gave her the impression of a perpetually uplifted glower.
“Yes. My mother cried,” said Pansy, in a clipped tone that was almost cordial. She turned to Draco. “I assume you caught Umbridge,” she said, “since Granger’s still got her wand. Bien joué. I hope it was satisfying.”
“What’s it to you?” snapped Ron. Molly laid a hand on his arm.
Pansy curled her lip. “I’m doing reconnaissance,” she said. “I’d like to know what plans the Order has for me.”
“For you, personally?” inquired Hermione, with a sharp edge of amusement. “Are you under the impression that they’re thinking about you?”
“If they’re not, they bloody well should be. Theo and Cassius are already gone. You should be more careful with your hostages.”
“Hostages!” said Molly scornfully. “My days. You’re not a hostage, dearie.”
“I am, in fact. In effect, if not by intention. Daddy will never attack the school while I’m here. Congratulations! You have all once again failed catastrophically upwards,” she said. “But if Dumbledore intends to let his leverage walk out the door, I won’t stop him.”
“The Order of the Phoenix does not fight wars with children,” said Molly.
“You mean you won’t employ them,” Pansy snapped. “Which is bully for your kids. But your enemies don’t share your inhibitions, and I somehow doubt you’ll risk your children’s lives for mine. So I would be careful, if I were you, about acting too sanctimonious. The next time we see each other, you might not have quite the reach for the moral high ground.”
With a delicate step, she disengaged from their circle, cutting a wide berth around Daphne, and strode forthwith out of the Hospital Wing. Neville, who had been watching at a distance, stepped in front of her at the doors — she recoiled and reached for her hip — but he merely took the handle and drew one back for her, his expression shuttered, if not unsympathetic. She said something to him, short and inaudible. His reply was brief; she stepped around him, giving him a wide berth, as her robe flickered out of sight.
Harry’s heartclock murmured up into the forefront of the silence. Hermione sheathed her wand with an unsteady hand. Ron and Ginny were having some sort of unreadable silent communication, and Molly was saying something about letting Harry rest, her brisk manner sweeping the conversation mercifully into the past. People were staring at them, each the wide unembarrassed stare of someone with a reason to. A crawl ran over Draco’s skin and it occurred to him, for a second time, that this was what winning felt like.
Dumbledore held an assembly the next morning. Ongoing renovations on the Great Hall sent them to the lawn. Because there were no tables, it was difficult to see who had turned out for it, and which, if any, Houses had abstained. It told them little they didn’t already know: that Hogwarts would stay open, for the summer and the year beyond; that the Ministry, whatever was left of it, would be ousted from the school’s administration; that the students not eager to stay would be permitted to leave, as usual, on the Hogwarts Express, which would arrive for them on June twelfth. Hermione intended to go with it. That was fine. She had agreed for a member of the Order to go with her.
She had not agreed, despite efforts, to stay at Hogwarts for the summer, or indeed to do anything else that might lower Draco’s blood pressure.
Most of the Order had stayed. Moody prowled the battlements of the castle regularly, and Draco overheard the tail-end of a heated conversation between him and Dumbledore about the remaining Slytherins. The Boneses and the Diggories, reunited with their children, stuck closely together, although Amos enjoyed informing strangers about his son’s role in single-handedly starting the Hogwarts resistance, until Cedric dragged him off by the heels. Arthur and Molly had been given rooms in the guest wing of the castle, and held tea services for students seeking information about the Order of the Phoenix. Tonks, Bill, Fleur, and Charlie ran patrols at Moody’s behest along the exterior of the castle and grounds, checking the secret passageways and tunnels of the Shrieking Shack, but their reports came back clean.
The students fell into wary rhythms with the new police force, in form not so different from their old one as to upset routine. The suspicion mellowed over time, as their new freedoms expanded, and more students were allowed to go home. Alfie Chrissenpoffer flagged Draco in the Transfiguration corridor to address it.
“Malfoy,” he said, nearly whispering, “these Order people — they are the right sort, aren’t they?”
“What?”
“I mean, we can trust them? They’re behind Harry, and everything?”
At twelve, Alfie had failed to grow into his hair, the ruddy mop of which still draped in his eyes. Draco sighed.
“Trust them absent reason to do otherwise,” he said. “As a rule, you needn’t fear them. They’re reasonably domesticated.”
Alfie nodded firmly. With an experimental air, he snapped off a salute. It was a striking imitation of how Bill and Tonks signed off to each other.
“Don’t do that,” he snapped, queasy. “You’re twelve. It looks ridiculous. Two points from Gryffindor for public embarrassment.”
Alfie nodded again, half-started another salute — winced, aborted — and settled on two rigid thumbs-up. He scurried into a secret passage behind a tapestry and was gone, leaving Draco roiling with nameless unease.
Three days after the riot, Lupin still had not come. Harry said, “He’s probably with Sirius,” but Draco sensed his apprehension, and dispatched himself to ask Mad-Eye on a discreet occasion.
“Classified,” said Mad-Eye. He glared around the corner of the alcove, though they were alone, and Draco cast a Muffling Charm . “Classified, boy, and I wouldn’t tell you if it weren’t. Are you dull?”
“Potter won’t accept that answer.”
“It’s not Potter I’m talking to,” said Mad-Eye. His lone eye pierced the locks of lanky, gray hair in his face. He seemed ages older than he had been last year. “You don’t know what kind of information you’re asking for, Malfoy. Much less how much of it you want.”
“Fine. I won’t ask, I’ll give it to you: Potter wants to see him. Earlier this year, the three of us had to talk him down from running back to Twelve in the middle of term just to see him alive.”
“That was damn foolish.”
“I know. So let him see his godfather. Or Lupin.”
“Can’t be done,” said Mad-Eye grimly. “Twelve’s too valuable. And Lupin’s out of play.”
“Hogwarts is ten times a better safehouse than Twelve. What do you mean by out of play?”
“I don’t mean as a safehouse, boy,” he snapped. “Christ, you’re a Black, you ought to know. It’s the seat of an ancient house. Bound and kept by the Laws of Blood, consecrated with the magic of twenty dead generations. Of dead tyrants. Padfoot doesn’t know the half of the evil in that place, and it’d be worse in the hands of the Dark Lord.”
The chill of this infused him while Mad-Eye muttered on. “No telling what could happen to it. No telling where the enemy even is. Could be London. Could be Oxford. Could be Edinburgh. He’d change his seat in the day… made a game of it, I would’ve sworn to you, he slipped us clues. He liked to dance. I’d let him. We made a secret of our power, and let good men die to keep it… Never asked if Albus forgave me. No! I played a game of whispers when to breathe the truth was sin. Now he won’t give us the facts. Prophet won’t report them. Even those who know won’t last, Kingsley found two explosives in his Floo powder… When they write the history of this war, they’ll ask the winners what was true.”
In alarm, Draco watched the old man’s rheumed eye slip into the middle distance, sharpen, and swivel back to him. It occurred to him that Mad-Eye had the twin of Dumbledore’s pristine, grieving silences: this muttering, fervent conscience, which crawled out luridly in idleness, practically begging to be unburdened. He wondered if it were possible for it to be any other way. He could not decide which was worse.
Mad-Eye’s face did not soften, exactly, but a new chisel opened in the rock. He clapped Draco on the shoulder with a blow that could have crippled a smaller man. It surprised Draco, the collegiality of it.
“Ah, boy. I’m not cruel,” he muttered. “Potter’s had a hard go. If I can have Moony brought here, I will. But Padfoot’s out of the question.”
Mad-Eye left him in the alcove, his leather duster sweeping the ground.
Harry noticed the absence. He noticed it even when Arthur Weasley came to visit him in Gryffindor, his smile broad and strained, speaking in the softest of half-whispers, little more than a rustle of air at the back of his throat. They spent an afternoon conversing over a piece of parchment they traded to and fro over the table. At the end of it, Arthur left with Bill, and Harry curled himself into one of the window-seats, fending off efforts to draw him into conversation with polite muttered denials.
He was surrounded by family again: Weasleys aplenty, McGonagall and Tonks, all of Gryffindor, all of them at his beck and anxious to please. But for want of Sirius Black, Harry’s victory turned to ash in his mouth. He wrote long letters that he burned un-sent. In the evenings Draco came down to see him lingering by the fireplace, long after the others had come to bed, watching the embers with his knees tucked under his chin.
Draco would be the first to say he found it irrational. He found it maudlin, and more than that, he found it a waste of Harry Potter, whose affection seemed too high a thing to bestow on someone who could reward it so poorly, with such a twisted, reckless kind of affection. Someone who had known him so briefly, and loved him too ferociously, for that brief time, to believe that love belonged to Harry alone. It was love borrowed on credit, and borrowed things demanded to be repaid.
The creditor wasn’t hard to guess. But he remembered Tonks’s eavesdropped exchange, at Christmas — my little fucking spy assessment currently finds that the ward master of the Order headquarters — and it wasn’t like he hadn’t seen it, hadn’t heard it even, the wild edge of Sirius’s voice when he was drunk, the cinders of rage smoldering under thirteen years of insouciance and grief. To be alone in Grimmauld Place did not seem a pleasant prospect. He did not seek to imagine what Sirius Black was doing to himself without anyone to watch him.
Four days after the riot found him with Hermione on a window-seat in the boys’ dormitory. The stone chamber flooded with sunlight: it pooled in sheer white boxes on the floor, speared the eye where it caught random bits of glass and mirror, and set the gilt on the leatherbound volumes at his bedside aflame with rare brilliance. It inflamed Hermione’s hair from beneath with a volcanic warmth, the hints of gold and red lifted up amongst the unpinned chestnut coils. She was annotating something with runes; Draco laid on the bed, paging through a book Remus had given him for Christmas about potions. The Cure’s Disintegration album thrummed statically from her earphones. Her quill moved in rhythm with the sound.
Through the window, the grounds soaked up the light like a latticed spill of jewels. The Whomping Willow twitched its fingers in the dry, still air. Harry was flying overhead, an incongruous dart of jet against the blue slate of the sky: someone in the Order, probably Bill, had fetched Umbridge’s keys and unlocked the Gryffindor quidditch room. Ron and Ginny made smaller, less ambitious loops in the sky beneath him.
The carceral days of May seemed to belong to a different season, a different year. June crawled to them on its belly, hot and flat, practically stifling. A single sluggish cloud strained across the southern horizon.
He wondered when he would start feeling happy again. It was taking more time than he had expected. It was a great relief, of course, to have Umbridge gone, and it was a greater relief to have the weight of custody off his shoulders — it was the Order, now, who pried students apart when they squabbled, who jinxed bullies from their quarry, who kept the peace by being omnipresently around the corner. A vast weight had lifted to hover a few inches from his shoulders, a shadow without force. It was not his outlook any longer to ensure that the many students of Hogwarts Castle did not tear each other to pieces under the strain.
“It’s a bad idea.”
The dorm was empty: Dean and Seamus were downstairs in the common room, by the faint pulse of music on the floorboards, and Neville was still helping Pomfrey on the ward. Most of the Tower was out attempting to wring every drop from its freedom. His voice rebounded from the stone walls, vanishing into the wood rafters.
Hermione finished drawing a rune, made a critical survey, and blew on the ink. It flashed gold and blazed into the paper, vanishing. “You lost this fight the first three times,” she said, “so perhaps we ought to skip the fourth. I’m getting bored of winning it.”
“Try losing it, then, for a change. Here, I’ll let you: it’s not even so much that it’s a bad idea, it’s that I don’t believe you have an idea for it at all.”
She capped her inkwell and shook out her wrist. “The train arrives,” she deadpanned. “I get on the train. I get off the train.”
“I object. You discover compound sentences.”
“I — ha, ha — fine. I see my parents, I show them I’m not dead, and the reason I couldn’t write them since January wasn’t because I’m a terrible daughter, although considering what else I haven’t told them, they probably shouldn’t waive the charge.”
“And you have to do that in Hampstead Garden?”
“You say that like it’s Clapton,” she said mildly. “It’s a suburb. I live next to a church.”
“What about the Manor?” He tossed the book on the table and lowered his legs from the window seat.
“We talked about this.”
“It’s a practical compromise. It’s warded, it’s remote, it’s comfortable. It’s far from London.”
“I agree with you.”
“And I’d be there.”
“Yes, I’d hope so.”
“Then do it,” he said. “Say yes. It isn’t hard.”
“I have to see my parents,” she said, in the singsong of one repeating herself.
“Bring them.”
“The Manor has muggle-repelling charms.”
“I’ll deactivate them.”
“You don’t know how to do that.”
“I’ll learn how to do it. Or I’ll buy a house in the area and put them up. Be a damn sight easier than letting you walk around London alone.” He pushed off his bed and prowled to his bureau. The bruises on his torso were still healing, and they twinged stiffly when he rolled his shoulders. He tapped Ulysses’s cage, and the owl croaked at him in a distinguished, reproachful manner.
Hermione’s robes rustled as she drew her knees down from the window-seat. She tugged out her earphone and wound it neatly around the little grey Discman. “I’m not going to be alone,” she said, truthfully. “Tonks is coming with me.”
“Thank Merlin. Dark armies of hideous strength are arraying against us, and you’re taking a twenty-something with a tongue piercing.”
“Tonks is perfectly capable, you admitted it. You’re just recanting because you don’t like the plan—”
“I admitted nothing like it.” He used his wand to fill the cage’s water trough. Ulysses nipped at his fingers in gratitude, breaking the skin; he daubed his index in his mouth to stop the bleeding and shut the cage. “I said I preferred her to Charlie. Who also, I believe, has a tongue piercing. And for the record, ‘perfectly capable’ isn’t good enough.”
She threw up her hands in exasperation. “Well, I’m a bit ‘capable’ myself. If it comes to it, I’ll have my wand, and I’ll be fine—”
“No, you won’t,” he snapped, turning on her. “You can’t use magic—”
“Neither can you!”
“—until your Trace comes off in September. Until then you’re a walking beacon—”
“The Dark Lord’s armies aren’t going to target a pair of dentists.”
“Don’t be coy. You think the Dark Lord doesn’t know who you are?”
She blinked, her eyelashes shuttering slowly over her cheeks. When she opened her eyes they were hard, intent. “Stop trying to scare me,” she said crisply. “I’m quite good enough at it on my own.”
He gave a short exhale and paced. Ulysses crooned in concern. Hermione stretched her ankle, twisting the joint in an exaggerated pronation, flashing the blueberry stain of a bruise under her heel. When she tested her weight on it, her calf flexed, and she padded to the bed, where her satchel was, to root for some of the poultice Neville had made her. Absently, she nudged some of her hair out of her face, and it spilled over her shoulder, twining threads of rust on ivory cotton. Her bottom lip caught between her teeth, and she pressed a faint divot in it. Habitual overbite, orthodontically corrected. Muggle braces. Off by fourth year. She’d asked him how they looked, because it had mattered to her. Though she hated the idea of how she looked mattering to her, and she hated feeling like it should matter. Never wore jewelry but for a leather-banded watch, her grandmother’s. Code-perfect uniform, no accents. Makeup, sometimes, if she had a spot. Anything she could use to restrain any amount of her hair. He remembered so much about her sometimes it overwhelmed him.
“Fine. I’ll come with you.”
“You w— I—” Her cheeks warmed. “You’d be very welcome to meet them, but I’m not talking about a short visit. I can’t just swing by, tell them what’s happened, and catch the eight o’clock train back to Scotland. I’ll have to convince them to let me come back to school. Again.”
“We’ll make them understand.”
“It isn’t that simple. How would you explain that you wanted to come back?” It was a touch, perhaps, uncertain. “What sane person would?”
“Because it’s your inheritance,” he said immediately. “Because it belongs to you. Because you belong to it.”
Her mouth worked. He dropped his eyes to it. Her lip folded softly under her teeth, edging a raw dark line of red at the swell.
“Well,” she said flippantly, “if that’s what your mother told you about magic, it would explain a lot.”
She was too late to dodge as he clipped a Lasso Jinx at her ankles, a skittery and harmless that made her squeak and fall on the bed. No one stood above the sacred rite of petty vengeance. Hermione, laughing in surprise, retorted at once by snatching her wand out of her hair and Disarming him, snaring his wand towards her with a canny twist of her wrist. It was a short-lived scuffle. His reflexes still ran jittery and quick from overuse, fried nerves smoldering at noises around corners. Hers were sharper than they had been before.
Both their appetites for scrimmage were wanting. She folded too quickly to make it any fun, and levitated his wand with a lazy swish of her own, which he caught and pocketed as an olive branch.
“The only thing I’m heir to is a dental practice,” she said, laying on her back. Her hands laced over her stomach. Her skirt rode up, drawing like a curtain over a stretch of soft sun-neglected skin that reached perilously high. “And I think they plan on giving it to the cousins.”
“That’s not true,” he said, leaning against the bedpost. Dissonance frissoned at the sight of her in the boys’ dormitory, not because she hadn’t been before — she made episodic invasions on Christmas, or whenever Ron or Harry overslept — but because usually, when she had, it was full of other people. “You’re more witch than anyone alive.”
“Magic isn’t something I inherited,” she pointed out. “And I live in the muggle world. I can’t just leave it, and I wouldn’t want to. Draco, before the Order came, did you ask Ron to take me on the run with the Weasleys?”
The flank attack on the topic was a characteristic maneuver. “He offered first of his own accord,” he said, noncommittal.
Hermione sat up, radiating furor. “You did. Where were you planning on doing?”
“Finding my mother. Getting her out of her oath to Dumbledore. Fleeing the country,” he said. “Past that point, I hadn’t bothered to think.”
“You were planning to do that without help?”
“Not by choice, but with others gone—”
“If you stayed in Britain I’d stay with you, you dolt,” she said, reckless and intent. “You’re my — you’re you. If you were here, I’d be here. I would stay if they hauled me in front of a tribunal and snapped my wand and posted a warrant for our arrests. I’d stay if they pulled down the towers of this castle, looking for us, and I’d dig you out from underneath them.”
He shifted upright, standing over her. Hermione reached up and palmed his jaw, hot pressure, like she was trying to infuse her point through the skin.
“I’d find you if you ran away,” she said, with destined certainty, “and vanished from the earth, hid yourself somewhere no one else would think to look. I’d come looking for you. And then, when I found you, I’d make you regret it.”
It was not a question. It was not last year: Please, please stay. Love had not gentled her. If anything, the opposite.
His fingers grazed the soft underside of her chin.
“You know,” he said, to swerve the danger of saying something with significantly more emotion, “you’re distinctly lovely when you’re threatening me.”
That knocked her off her guard well and far; Hermione loved the warpath, but she waded into intimacy with the bewilderment of a small and developmentally challenged deer. It was hopelessly predictable of her to twitch. Gamely, however, she grappled her hesitation and said: “I could keep going, if — you’re enjoying yourself.”
It must have registered to her at the same time that there was no one around, and no one likely to come looking for them. That they were without work and without chores and without pretexts to distract each other. For the first time in months, they were totally and indefinitely alone.
He grabbed her and kissed her.
She swayed back from the force of it with a muffled yip of surprise.
He shoved his hand greedily into her hair and wrapped his hand around her waist, slanting his mouth over hers with a bruising force. She tasted of tea and lemon and the whole fucking field of sugarcane she always put in it, like a raw lick of honey.
Her leg slipped over his and then, with a short little tug on her waist, she was sliding half on top of him, and he carried her weight back onto his elbows, still kissing her in hard, hot rhythm, her mouth fixed to his like a singing nerve of raw pleasure. He couldn’t stop. He couldn’t remember why they’d stopped in the first place, when this was what it felt like.
Her hum was a perfect, little catlike sound that vibrated through the back of his skull. Her shirt bunched under his fingers, rising out of her skirt, and he slid his fingers inside to glide over miles of soft skin, riding up the faint ridge of her spine, tracing the thin rounds of her vertebrae. Her hair was warm and soft under his fingers and it shrouded his face, spilling over his neck, his chest, everywhere.
She pressed flush to his chest and sighed again, breathy with a light, vapid sort of pleasure, and he gave another tug at her, senselessly. She gave a pleased chirp, and her knees tightened on either side of his hips, and then there was an electric bolt of something moving through his body and he broke off kissing her to gasp.
The aftershock of the feeling left him wired and filled with an aching, restless sensitivity. He shifted his hips back into the mattress, which did precisely shit, because Hermione apparently wasn’t inclined to offer a morsel of fucking help; she made another contented little sound and leaned down to kiss him again, drinking the gasp from his lips, and he canted into mouth before he had thought about it. This was the wrong move. She took the inch and stole planets; with her arms draped over her shoulders, she pressed flush into him, driving him down, so soft, and so very warm, and her hot mouth driving out any consideration of why he shouldn’t be running his hand up the hem of her skirt.
She went still. A half-inch of distance appeared between their mouths, and she opened her eyes. Hesitation stilled his fingers at the top of her thigh.
“Right,” she said, nonsensically, and licked her lips. He could have whined at the unfairness. “Okay. I didn’t mean to do that.”
He had no idea what to say to that.
He offered: “Which part?”
She laughed a bright, shy little laugh. Then she eased herself upright. Her weight rolled back, and down.
“Fuck,” he said.
“I meant the conversation. I didn’t mean to have an argument and then snog about it. Although it is, admittedly a lot better than just having an argument,” she admitted, with characteristic brilliance and wisdom, “and for preference, really, very strongly in favor of this approach — but it does have costs, vis-a-vis our conclusions—”
“Fuck. Fuck, stop—”
She was still reciting analysis at an anxious speed. “—specifically, that it’s rather easy to get carried away. Again, not to complain. Very good and all that. But I don’t, I mean I didn’t intend to — I mean that I wasn’t thinking—”
He seized her hips.
“Granger. Stop moving.”
She went still. She looked down, looked at his face, and a blush rose steadily to her cheeks.
“Oh,” she said, in a faraway voice. “You.”
“Right,” he said, nonsensically, to this nonsensical statement. “So.”
“I should — sorry. Sorry. I don’t mean to — make you uncomfortable.”
“I wouldn’t say uncomfortable, precisely,” he said, with diligent focus on the ceiling.
She made a noise somewhere between a trill and a gasp. That absolutely wasn’t helping, and he would have shot her a dirty look for it, if he’d been capable of looking at her.
She still wasn’t moving.
“What… is it like?”
He let out a very loud bark of hysterical laughter.
“You were sent here to kill me, I think,” he said to the ceiling. “Incredible work. My compliments to my enemies, they’ve outdone themselves completely.”
“You’re rather dramatic,” she said, with a blasé and eyewatering hypocrisy. “It’s an honest question. Of pedagogy.”
“What’s it like for you, then?” he shot back. “Of pedagogy.”
She blinked. The mental image that conjured did nothing at all to help him. It in fact made his life several times better and worse, in a complex way, along multiple dimensions.
“Point taken,” she said. The red in her cheeks had suffused down her throat, making a glowing line into the V of her blouse.
She could rule any country she wanted, probably, if everyone could see her like this. He would, unfortunately, have to kill them all, but the reign would be brief and glorious.
“I’m going to move,” she said, “and — sit next to you. Instead. To help with — everything.”
“You might consider leaving the country,” he said. She twitched, and spoke thickly.
“You can’t flirt, either. That’s not fair.”
“That wasn’t even flirting, I was just saying something—”
“Saying things. In that voice. Counts.”
He squinted at her. “It’s my voice.”
“It’s a voice of yours,” she agreed.
He lifted his head, intrigued. “Do you like my voice?”
“In fact, I don’t. No. I find it incredibly distracting.”
“You do.”
“You said something about going to another country,” she said haggardly, clambering off of him. Draco was having such a good time he almost didn’t mind.
“You like it,” he preened. “You find it ‘incredibly distracting.’ Do I often seduce you by accident?”
“This was a mistake,” she said, resigned. “I see that now. I have made, it occurs to me, many mistakes—”
“We’re well past that, dear. Let’s return to the part where you’re seduced.”
“No,” she said primly. “The moment’s passed. I’ve decided to live a life of chastity and contemplation.”
Typical Granger, taking vows to avoid snogging him. He laid back down, dispirited.
She made the world normal. That was partly the reason, he decided, that the details stuck: they were his accounting of the indispensable facts of the universe, the things which were silly and human and true, and which could be relied upon to re-orient him, come the worst. They were a collection of keys cut to evoke a particular kind of happiness. They were his to have, and his only, as long as he lived.
For a moment they laid there, parallel lines on red quilting, no sound but the restless shuffling of the boys’ familiars in their cages. Then Hermione reached between them and found his hand, pried it open somewhat sharply, laced their fingers and placed them together on her knee. She held it loosely, with a dignified sort of presumed authority, but her palms were clammy, and an itch in his fingers made them fidget. One would be forgiven for finding something embarrassing in it. The helpless fatalism of desire. The cruel tyranny of the body, wanting.
Abruptly she said, “You can come home with me,” and then: “When I go, I mean. You can meet my family. We don’t have a spare room, and they absolutely won’t let you share with me, so you’ll have to sleep on the couch. But if you’re alright with that, and driving in a car, and dressing normal and going to Tesco and so forth, you can come and stay.”
She said the words like a rehearsal. They were slowly chosen and carefully pronounced. She said them like a declaration of contract, read drolly and firmly and finally into the record of a court for signature and seal.
It was all really quite romantic.
He tugged on her hand. The scars on it had healed to a stiff, shiny ripple of taut skin. Her pen had left calluses on her third finger and thumb. On impulse, he sat up to kiss her, and she kissed him so fast it rocked his head back. It was instinct, not reason, that made him grip the back of her neck in his hand, run his thumb along her curls. Probably it was instinct that made her grab a handful of his own, although that might have been Hermione, too, with full knowledge and intent, digging in her fingernails so hard it’d leave cuts.
He hoped she would. He hoped the feeling would cut deep and stay there, so he’d remember what it felt like, laying here with her, in the sunlight and the silence. The taut line of something yet to be discovered between them, the moment before something happened — the moment where it was sure to happen, but not yet. One thing left, at least, to run towards in earnest. Past and future strung out like a line, and between them the tightrope walkers, dancing, dancing.
The train would leave soon. There was still a little time.
There was time for quidditch skirmishes in an empty pitch, Katie and Ginny and Harry and Angelina, weaving red ribbons across the iridescent sky; for Fred and George’s product showcases, fireworks from the Astronomy Tower, Filch’s mournful shrieks, and little vaudeville shows with Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder and Screaming Yo-Yos; for betting games of poker and Snap with the Weasleys, who all cheated so diabolically and brilliantly that the odds were practically fair; there was time to bicker over who used up the hot water and left their socks on the floor. There was time for the Room of Requirement, and sparring bouts against Ron, or Harry, or Ron and Harry, or Ron and Harry and Ginny, or Harry and Ron against Draco and Ginny, or Draco against Ginny and Dean and Seamus and Katie, and permutations; for midnight trips to the kitchens, to let Dobby foist off as many bottles of Ogden’s as he could get away from his supervisor, while flaunting Hermione’s present of a mateless (she had been busy) hand-knit sock; for them to return, thereafter, to an approving common room full of boys without ties and girls in uniform code violations, and for Seamus to throttle the volume on Music for the Masses until it rattled the casements.
McGonagall had taken a few days to scour Umbridge’s office, and discovered there the Ministry exam results for sitting fifth and seventh years. Customarily posted by class rank in the Entrance Hall, to vomit-inducing effect, she instead announced that they would be delivered discreetly, by house-elf, to each recipient’s dorm by the next day. “In order,” she concluded, “to ameliorate the emotional effects of the scores, which come — it is acknowledged — on the heels of a considerable ordeal.”
“Bless her,” said Ron, as they went up. “I didn’t even take half of them. If I fail, Mum can’t say shite, because I did it to fight the fascists.”
“What about those of us who expect an ‘O’?”
“That’s fine, Mione, you just lack my vigor for the cause.”
The blow was swift, and left him cackling.
In the common room, the rustle of parchment concealed a buoy of half-glad whispers. It was of no consequence, really, who did well on exams. None of the fifth years would be barred from coming back, and in any case, for the seventh years, it hardly mattered. Fred and George ripped theirs apart without opening them, and gave the pieces to first years to practice fire-setting jinxes.
Some cared, despite the stakes, of course. He had noticed Ernie Macmillan body-check Cedric into a wall in his haste to get back to Hufflepuff. Hermione had picked hers up, tentatively, and held it like a breakable bit of glass.
Draco found an alcove and broke the seal with his wand, bisecting a purple ‘M’ in wax. At the top of the sheet was printed DRACO MALFOY.
ARITHMANCY (O) - 100/100
ASTRONOMY (O) - 100/100
CHARMS (O) - 100/100
DEFENSE AGAINST THE DARK ARTS (O) - 101/100
HERBOLOGY (O) - 94/100
HISTORY OF MAGIC (O) - 100/100
MUGGLE STUDIES (E) - 82/100
POTIONS (O) - 102/100
TRANSFIGURATION (O) - 100/100
RUNES (O) - 100/100
Wordlessly, he held his parchment to Hermione, who snatched it and shoved him hers. He’d beaten her by one point in Potions and two in Defense, lost out to her in Herbology, Muggle Studies — no shame in that — and Runes, where, inexplicably, she’d picked up a bonus point. Probably she’d gone off on a screed about the Romans and bewitched the examiners with her trademark brilliance and possession of irrelevant facts.
Hermione was trying to dislocate his arm.
“Two bonus points! In Potions!” she exclaimed. “I could kill you! I only got one!”
“That ‘E’ in Herbology is a joke. I only slipped up once in the practical, and that was because I didn’t pot the mandrake in one go — would’ve hocked the bloody thing like a quaffle if I knew I was being graded on speed—”
“One hundred and two! They don’t give extra points on Potions exams! Most people don’t even finish them!”
“It’s mere recitation,” he said, unwillingly pleased. “The formulas don’t change. Half the answer’s embedded in the question. They don’t ask for a show of genius.”
Hermione waved this off haphazardly, flitting over to check Harry’s and Ron’s. Triumph eddied swiftly from distraction. Neville had flipped his sheet open and had sat down hard in an armchair, his face pale and shiny.
“Longbottom.”
He could not quite strike the tone of indifference he wanted. In truth, he did not know. Neville seemed to him adequate to pass; but the markers in Potions were notoriously demanding, and Neville’s worst enemy was the feeling of being watched.
Neville jumped and twitched the parchment to his chest, which induced a sinking feeling. “Draco,” he said. “Hi. Er.”
ASTRONOMY (A) - 71/100
CARE OF MAGICAL CREATURES (O) - 96/100
CHARMS (E) - 83/100
DEFENSE AGAINST THE DARK ARTS (O) - 90/100
HERBOLOGY (O) - 100/100
HISTORY OF MAGIC (E) - 85/100
POTIONS (E) - 89/100
TRANSFIGURATION (A) - 67/100
“Remarkable,” said Draco, quietly.
Neville choked on air. “I — well, really, it’s not an ‘O,’ or anything—”
He thrust the parchment back at Neville’s chest. A constrictive feeling wrapped around his ribs. “I was referring to myself. All you did was pass an O.W.L. I’m the finest Potions instructor born on English soil. Anyway, you were only off by a point.”
“I don’t know how,” Neville said, as if he really expected better of the Potions examiners. “I didn’t add the powdered starkbulb in time for the Cure for Boils to reach full coloration, and I had to k-kill the heat before it reached full simmer—”
“You passed. Who cares?”
Neville gaped. “Well — sorry, but— you do,” he said tartly. “And Snape requires an ‘O’ for the N.E.W.T. class, so, him.”
“Snape isn’t coming back next year,” he said, ignoring a twinge in his chest, and Neville’s face carefully flattened to polite concern. “I don’t know who’ll replace him, but the standard benchmark for advancement is ‘E.” You should speak to McGonagall about it.”
“I’m sure she has other things on her mind, and anyway, I-I-I’m — I’m sorry he’s not coming back.”
This was unlikely. Few students had more reason to celebrate his disappearance than Neville, who would have gladly traded his Potions class for an hour on the rack.
“You don’t have to say so.”
“I am, though,” he replied. “He’s your godfather. You liked him. And he liked you, I think. In his way.”
Draco snorted. In his way. Whatever that meant, for someone whose personality consisted in liking just about nothing at all.
Ginny trotted over, flushed from celebrating Ron and Harry’s ‘O’s in D.A.D.A., and peered over Neville’s shoulder. Her eyes became lunar in size.
“Holy shit, Nev. You passed Potions.”
“Don’t say it s-s-so loudly,” said Neville nervously, but Ron had overheard, and his head snapped up.
“He passed it?”
“You’re joking!” said Harry, sitting up straight.
“Good job, Neville,” exclaimed Hermione, “that’s really lovely. After you worked so hard.”
“After he worked so hard,” said Draco. “Of his own initiative, I suppose—”
“I should think you’re proud enough of yourself for both of us!”
“I’m sure they c-curved it,” Neville said, raising his voice.
“They don’t,” said Ron. “Someone would have assassinated Hermione ages ago.”
“Honestly,” said Hermione mildly, tucking her results into a secure pocket. “I’d like to say not, but I think Ernie might.”
The mood of the room had lightened into a taut, tentative sort of relief.
Ginny latched her arm around Neville’s shoulder. “Do you know what I want?” she said.
“What?” said Harry.
“Another crack at Auror Robard,” said George.
“Seven minutes alone with Michael Corner,” said Fred.
“Visible biceps,” said Ron.
Warmly, Ginny fired her middle fingers in a slow battery around the room. “Fuck you all! When I’m ripped, you’ll still be single. Harry, ask me what I want.”
“I thought those were good guesses,” he said innocently, and she swiveled one middle finger with ease from Ron to Harry.
Draco would be loath to disclose it, but even among Weasleys, one had favorites.
Ginny wanted a party.
It was one of those bejeweled June afternoons where sunlight dripped like liquid gold over the green labyrinth of the forest, which enclosed like an emerald-studded circlet the clean, flat mirror of the lake. Flowers foamed promiscuously from the ferns and the grasses and the rushes on the lakeside, heather and Scotch thistle, iris and crocus, butterfly orchids like knotted stripes of white silk, butter-yellow buttons of celandine and primrose, tyrian foxgloves like royal spears. An orchestra of swallows decorated the afternoon with their piping. The tawny pelt of the hills shone and rippled under the twin waves of sun and wind.
Fred and George smuggled teapots full of Pimm’s from the kitchens, and splashed it in porcelain teacups between plates of lemon tarts and fruit galettes. Luna and Neville went blackberry-picking in the forest and came back, grinning and thorn-scratched, with four whole bucketsful; Hermione charmed the ice cream to stay cool. At the end, the kitchen envoys unveiled from beneath a large silver cloche a two-tier chiffon cake with strawberries and turrets of buttercream frosting, which said ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’ in crooked red piping. It was walked in a grand redheaded procession three times around the willow tree where they picnicked, and ultimately delivered with much pomp and circumstance, to Draco, whereon he was shouted at until he consented to put out the candles — a compromise he secured by flicking his wand at them and casting a Wind Spell.
It was a sign of the times that it startled Draco to see it. He had almost forgotten: it was June. He was sixteen.
Harry gave him a pack of sweets from Honeydukes, and Ron hocked him a puck of broomstick polish, to “keep you from griping about me using yours up, pissant.” Daphne presented him with a silk handkerchief whose embroidery was only slightly wobbly, and crowded him impatiently until he complimented it. Neville admitted, under some duress, to making the cake.
“Thank you,” said Draco, and George made a show of pretending to faint. Draco ignored him. It failed to spoil the moment, which was otherwise quite adequate, being fully concentrated on celebrating him.
When the Weasleys began singing, however, Hermione had to stop him from absconding up the tree.
It was a good day. The sun was full in the leaves. There were children on the shoreline. In the distance, there were Order members with their hands on their wands, watching the horizon, which was good, because it meant he didn’t have to do it. Seamus and Lee huddled together in the effort of reconciling an unavoidably muggle CD player with immutably magical amplifiers. He looked around at their faces, under the dappled shade of the willow — Ron tussling with Ginny over seconds; Neville laughing at something Luna was reading from his palms; Lavender braiding Daphne’s hair; Harry, spread on the blanket with his hands laced behind his head, his eyes closed, the sunlight washing out the faded white forks of his scar.
The scene should have left him content. It sent nausea rearing up his throat. War — the likelihood of death, the certainty of suffering. The number of them. Statistically poor odds. Impossible that anything should ever happen to them, these people, who had done nothing wrong really, who had been kind and he had not been — not always — and they were here, even so, all the same; impossible also that he could stop anything from happening to them. There was time left — yes, time — but not much.
When he was younger, it had been so easy to write off everything and everyone that did not belong to him. He tried to imagine the way that had felt, that shell of ice, and failed.
“Alright, Draco?” Harry slitted one eye open.
“It’s nothing.” The dissonance passed. The present stubbornly edged out the future: heat, grass, dew, breeze. “It was good of you to remember.”
Harry’s lip twitched. “You don’t have to say thank you for that,” he quipped. “Have some self-respect.”
It twigged Draco’s memory, and he narrowed his eyes at him.
“You are an ass, you know.”
“I don’t know why more people don’t notice,” said Harry, snuggling deeper into the blanket. “Look at who I hang out with.”
Seamus’s yelp of success prefigured a splutter of the Ramones through a gutter of washed-out static. No sooner had the pair of them rushed to get their share of cake than Bill wandered over from the Order patrol and switched it out for Springsteen, which he called a diplomatic concession to Moody, to avoid a noise citation; but Draco rather suspected he just liked it more. Ginny threw off her robe and raced down the shoreline wearing only code-breaching shorts and a shirt for a band called Elastica, sleeves shorn, baring her freckled arms to the sun.
Her brothers took off in chase, a pack of tall fire-haired teenagers racing fast and gangly and golden through the afternoon sunlight, and collided in the water with splashes that glazed the water white where it rose in the sun. Behind them the darkest head made quick work of scrambling down and jumped after them, whipping off his glasses and robe on the beach, staggering in with his trousers rolled up. Daphne stood primly on the beach, and after repeated exhortations, relented to delicately remove her socks and shoes, fold her jumper on the rocks, and tiptoe into four inches of water. Something there must have touched her foot, because she screamed and leapt like a frightened cat onto the nearest freestanding object, which happened to be Ron. She refused to relinquish her grip on his neck, despite being plied with assurances, and a compromise was reached wherein she changed position and rode around on his back, directing him judiciously and often where she wanted to go.
Draco and Hermione ambled down in their wake, picking their way leisurely over the moss-strewn pebble beaches, and sat cross-legged on a round flat stone that protruded over the water. The lake stretched out from his ankles to the distant hills, a massive plane of glass-bright water, scintillating.
Hermione fidgeted with her fingers. “I have a present for you,” she said, by and by. She unearthed from her robes a small package neatly wrapped in brown parchment-paper. “Sorry it isn’t pretty. I didn’t have time to get any tape or ribbons, and Moody wouldn’t let me go to Hogsmeade for it.”
“Some people have no sense of priorities.”
She sniffed. “It would have been fine,” she said, “but I digress. Go on, open it. It isn’t very nice, just so you know, it’s a small thing. I would have gotten you a proper present, but I couldn’t get to the shops, and anyway I can’t get my pounds exchanged at Gringotts anymore, so it had to be something I could do in the castle and there wasn’t any time and you’re horrible to shop for, truly, because there’s hardly anything you can’t buy for yourself. So it’s your fault if you don’t like it.”
“Would you like me to sign a waiver?”
“No. Fine! Just open it. Don’t be disappointed.” Her fingers laced and clutched, a nucleus of tension in her lap.
He counterspelled the Sticking Charm, and the package unfolded elegantly in his lap. Inside lay a framed photograph, of the wizarding type, colored and strained through the bleary soft grain of film. The photographer — Colin, it must have been — had shot them candidly in the Room of Requirement. Harry and Ron were standing on the dais, talking to Ginny; Ron had his arm slung around Harry’s shoulder, casually, and they were laughing. Fred and George lounged on the steps, as was Neville. Hermione sat on the steps, slightly apart from the rest; she was the only one who had noticed Colin, because she was glancing at the camera, and every so often the image of her would give a halting, nervous smile, or tuck her hair behind her ear.
It was a moment Draco did not remember, but must have participated in, because he was in it, too: almost hidden by the pillar at Hermione’s elbow, the image of him leaned on one hip, his wand twirling through his fingers, giving the camera an occasional nonplussed glance. It was strange to see his own face in motion. The boy in the picture was a tall, cold, impassive creature, a thing apart from the rest. A lurking presence in the corner. A shadow on the wall.
Hermione had filed a caption neatly on the bottom, in her own hand: POTTER’S ARMY. 03.17.1996.
“He didn’t want us to call it that,” he said, eventually.
“Harry wants to make a lot of decisions that aren’t up to him,” she said. “He’ll cope.”
Her voice revealed little. He thought of Cho Chang, and of Hermione’s conciliatory politeness around Harry, and a bitter, tangled history of things that they had all said to each other. The ties that bound were not always clean.
“This is very good,” he said, and her shoulders drooped in relief. “Thank you. How did you get it?”
“I helped Colin rig a darkroom in the spare Potions classroom. He’s actually rather good at chemistry. I told him he should try to O.W.L. in Potions next year.”
He snorted, tucking the photograph safely aside with his robes. “Dumbledore’s declared against the Ministry. There aren’t going to be O.W.L.s next year.”
She pursed her lips and looked down at her hands, which plucked at a loose thread on her skirt. “For class, then. McGonagall said they’re still going to operate as a school.”
“With what staff? Snape’s gone, Umbridge is gone, I’ll be shocked if Dumbledore even has the time—”
“Moody’s coming on again, as Defense professor,” she said, which was a pleasant surprise. “They’ll find someone for Potions. Snape wasn’t the only qualified wizard in the country.”
“I reserve my judgment.”
She huffed in amusement. “Have you heard from him?” she said, with a furtive glance. “Or your mother?”
He shook his head.
“Oh. Draco—”
“They’re fine. Owls are likely being watched. My mother will see me tomorrow, anyway.”
His stomach did an unpleasant thing at the prospect. It warred with his heart, which wanted to see her enough to walk to London, if he had to. The experience was strange, and impossible to recommend.
“I don’t suppose you could send a message,” she said reflectively. “To Snape, I mean. If he’s undercover.”
“I don’t know any Death Eaters.”
She hummed. “You know their children. And Theodore owes you.”
“I’ve done him no favors on purpose.”
“No, but Cassius Warrington is probably alive,” she said matter-of-factly, picking a reed from her skirt. “The memory cascade doesn’t kill you. It destroys organized long-term recall. I don’t know how Theodore plans to deal with that, but short of killing him, it’ll have to be drastic, and probably noticeable. It might even have been related to whatever he was doing in Myrtle’s bathroom,” she added, with a sharp twinge of interest. “I wonder if he was asking her about the effects of a Memory Charm. If her memory had been modified, it would explain why she can’t remember how she died.”
“It would take diabolically complicated magic to perform a Memory Charm on a ghost. I’m not even certain it’s possible. They don’t have ‘minds,’ as such.”
“I know,” she said, in frustration, “I know. It’s not a good theory. But I don’t have anything else.”
“Nor do I,” he said freely, “but I can think of better things to lose sleep over.”
She frowned and shook her head. Then she leaned over and kissed him on the mouth — catching him by surprise, too quick for the red-iron awareness of being in public to forge any resistance — and pressed there with a forceful sweetness, as if she were making a point about it, her ability to do it, her authority.
“Happy birthday, Draco,” she said. Once he had recovered from the freeze of it, he laughed slightly.
“You should’ve done that last year,” he said, mostly against her mouth. “Spared us both some trouble.”
“As if you would’ve let me,” she laughed. “You think holding hands in public is for libertines.”
“And it took you two months to kiss me without running away. If we’re debating who was more of an impediment—”
“At least I did kiss you. If it were up to you, we’d be prevaricating on hand-holding.”
“I deserve more credit than that. By some interpretations of the rules, I’ve already stolen your honor, and your father is allowed to duel me on sight. He’ll have to give you a fearsome dowry to make up for what I’m doing.”
Hermione laughed again, brightly, loudly, almost ungainly, like a bird battering the air with its wings before flight. She patted his shoulder and confiscated it as a cushion, as was her right. “Sometimes I can’t believe you say things like that,” she said, “and then I remember in a year you’re going to be a lord. What a silly world.”
He had not forgotten it, precisely, but the reminder slapped him like cold air after a long time underwater. On his seventeenth birthday, he would be Lord Malfoy, in the formal sense. The entail would descend on his shoulders. He would have command of the Malfoy estates. It was, ostensibly, the position for which he had been born. It was the reason he existed, in a not-insubstantial way.
His fingers found his ring, rolling it around the groove over his knuckle. A black garnet, the emblem of a double-headed snake. The band was stone; the Malfoys weren’t as showy as the Blacks, whose goblin-silver ring nearly swallowed his mother’s hand. He could always have it reset, he supposed, but he had grown rather accustomed to its weight.
Out in the waters, Ginny used her wand to slap a wave over Harry’s head, then led him on a merry chase through the shallows that left both of them soaking. Amends were made, somehow, in a game that involved her sitting on Harry’s shoulders, and wrestling with Luna on Fred’s. Ginny’s natural athleticism and hard elbows prevailed: Luna went sailing with a scream of laughter. Then George plucked Ginny off Harry’s shoulders and hurled her into the lake like a discus, kicking off a turbulent Weasley civil war.
In the aftermath, Harry came paddling up to the rock where Draco and Hermione sat, and they each took one of his arms to help haul him up. He flopped on the stone, breathing heavily, his face cracked open in a rare giddy grin.
“I could fall asleep here,” he said. One arm drifted up vaguely, his finger sketching an invisible shape against the sky. “Just like this.”
“It’ll be like this all the time, when the castle’s empty,” said Hermione. “You’ll have it to yourself.”
“Yeah, but you won’t be there.”
She hesitated, glancing at Draco. “No,” she said, “but we’ll be back before you really miss us.”
“No, you won’t,” he said, staring up and not at her. “No one ever is.”
Ron slipped like a dart through the water and emerged beside them, slicking back the burnt-umber strands of hair from his eyes. He lifted himself effortlessly onto the rock and dropped down beside them, splattering droplets.
“I won,” he said triumphantly, “if anyone cares. Harry, thanks for totally bitching out, mate, left me one on three against Fred and the girls.”
Harry laughed, closing his eyes.
The sun burned in its cradle of the western hills. A smoky purple rose on the trees, the first hint to the eye that the afternoon could end, though the rest of the sky remained an immortal blue. The slap and chatter of water on the lake quashed the song of birds and the rustle of wind that moved, like stirring cymbals, through the old trees. The castle above them had grown a trail that fell long behind it over the forest, a cloak of rippling black, shadow proliferating upon shadow.
“I’ll miss this,” said Harry. He did not say what he meant.
“It’s a touch cold,” said Draco.
“It’s a touch cold,” imitated Ron. “I’ll give you my jacket, you nancy.”
“You really oughtn’t swim in still water too often,” said Hermione, professorial, and Harry sighed.
Hermione rested against Draco’s arm, and the other two lay glittering as they dried from the lake, their blood high and clothes translucent in the searing eye of the aging sun. Shadows dug deep rivets on the earth, beneath the trees, beneath his own hands. Seconds of his life rolled out in a rout march under the murmur of wind and water. There were children dancing in the lake before them, their bodies young and strong and shining.
-That’s it! That’s the end of Lionheart! Thanks for reading, please like and rev— [sharpshooter nails me through the head]
-Just kidding. Wouldn’t that be horrendous?
-In OOTP, Dumbledore really is that tuxedo mask “my work here is done” meme. I get that he’s ignoring Harry for Plot Reasons, or possibly Character Reasons depending on your read, but it really is funny that he takes off in the middle of the book and then comes back at the end to have like a 30-second zoolander staredown with Riddle at the tail end of a huge battle that he’s shown up late to. this is not criticism. I love this extra old man.
-Another 15k chapter, because I have no self-control, and also because the last few chapters were A Lot to deal with and it’s time for some excess in a warmer direction.
-Everyone who commented or sent mail to my inbox on tumblr, you are a miracle, and this chapter is dedicated to you. Seriously. If you’re a repeat commenter in particular, I recognize your handle, and I am always so specifically and genuinely glad to see you. I appreciate it. Bonus extra shoutouts to cervidame and bluebellandpie, who are writing beautiful fics that make me tear up and want to lie down in anguish (affectionate).
-The next chapter will be up on a vaguely fortnight-y basis, and it’ll be called “Heroes.”
Bình luận
0