Heroes

Chapter 79: Heroes

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

By nine o’clock on the day of the train, Gryffindor boomed with the traffic of students packing far too late: hollering for socks, bellowing about lost Sneakoscopes, first years pleading for Cramming Charms from fifth years far too busy squirreling away their contraband to notice. Draco lifted a pack of cigarettes from Seamus, some suspicious-looking turquoise plant from Katie, and delivered both in an anonymized box with the rest of Fred and George’s liquor to McGonagall, who greeted them with a surprising lack of astringence.

Her office was a round stone room walled in glass bookcases, carpeted with a thick layer of Turkish brocade, with leather armchairs of rich red leather so old there were sun-bleached stripes in the same pattern as the windowpanes. It smelled of old things, must and books and dust and sweetness, and the earthy tang of tea from the pot on her desk. McGonagall was packing a set of fifth-year Defense textbooks into a box. Its kin lay in stacks along one wall.

“What’s going to happen to her? Umbridge.”

McGonagall’s glasses glinted as she turned her head. “She will await justice until such a time as Professor Dumbledore feels prepared to give it to her.”

“How long will that be?”

“Until Albus feels like it. So it will behoove Dolores to delve deep in her stores of patience. In the meantime, she will not suffer for want of food and water; of course, she may not find the decor of the dungeons to her liking, but lacking a wand, I suspect there is little she can do about it.”

To hear the castle dungeons being used as actual dungeons reminded him that the castle was, in fact, a castle: a fortification. Built for warfare.

“What if someone comes looking for her?” he said, though the idea of her rotting in a cell under the earth did not fail to suit.

“For Dolores Umbridge?” Her mouth twisted. “For all the allies she purported — for her Ministry contacts, her important connections, the friends she so liked to tout — I doubt anyone will notice she is gone. You may leave that here.”

He placed the box of contraband on her desk. McGonagall surveyed it with a strange, unguarded expression.

“This belongs to the Weasleys,” she said.

“Not all of them. I’m sure Ginevra has her own supply.”

She nodded. After a moment, she pushed the box away and balanced her fingertips on the desk.

“The twins have submitted to join the Order of the Phoenix,” she said. “Moody intends to accept them. Their parents have not been able to dissuade them from joining.”

“It would be somewhat hypocritical if they did.”

“I understand that.” When she dipped her head, her horn-rimmed glasses sat low on her nose. The wrinkles around her eyes seemed to sink deeper into her face, and he perceived for a moment that behind the screen of raw indomitable authority, McGonagall was not a large woman. He was taller than she was, and twice as broad.

It was a terrible thing, to see great creatures made small. It ought never happen. It filled him with a volatile, unsettled sort of grief.

She still had not spoken. He said, “Professor?”

“Four years ago,” she said, “Fred and George Weasley celebrated their thirteenth birthday by turning the third-floor corridor into a swamp.” She added, with a thin, alarming note of approval: “It was a remarkable piece of Transfiguration.”

He waited for elaboration. She did not seem to expect him to reply.

A watery echo from third year: It’s tall for you. Choke up.

“Potter still uses your broomstick,” he said. “The Nimbus. It’s the sole possession he hasn’t damaged.”

She sniffed and pushed her glasses up her nose with a delicate adjustment of thumb and fourth finger. “It’s an excellent model,” she said. “His father preferred a Comet. His seeker, Marlene McKinnon, preferred the Nimbus Six. Florian and Gideon Prewett had mint-condition Starsweep Tens.”

McGonagall lifted her head. Her expression cleared. “Have a good summer, Mr. Malfoy,” she said.

Clouds feathered a sky of perfect blue. The highlands shone red and purple and green, slit through with the silver ribbon of a river. Those going on the train would depart in the afternoon, but the goodbyes started early, as some students were leaving by portkey in Hogsmeade and going directly to their family homes. Most were purebloods; many, but not all, were from Slytherin. It was lost on few that not everyone would be coming back, and not everyone knew who they were, so every goodbye took on an apocalyptic aspect.

Neville set off in the next wave, a knapsack tucked over his right shoulder, Trevor perched on his left. “I’ll be back in August,” he assured Harry, “don’t worry, won’t hardly seem like a minute. Gran is c-coming to join the Order. Says she’s taking her scalping knife out of the attic.”

Harry winced.

“No, she’s glad,” hurried Neville. “I mean, not glad, but — she’s really good with it. She was so p-pleased I passed Potions she offered to give it to me, but I couldn’t take it, really.”

“We’ll get you your own,” Ron agreed, slapping him on the back. “Safe travels, Nev.”

“Thanks. See you, Harry — see you, Draco! I’ll be practicing!”

“You’d better,” Draco called. “If you fail next year, I’m telling Frobisher to use that toad for target practice.”

“Ha, ha! Nice one, Draco. Okay! Bye!”

He waved furiously, walking backwards down the trail. The wind ruffled his hair, and his rucked-up sleeves showed a bevy of stains, but his crooked teeth winked cheerfully from his freckled face. Then he spun on his heel, and striding at a brisk clip, he caught up to the other students trailing down to Hogsmeade.

“It’s no fun to threaten him anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” said Daphne consolingly. “There’ll be plenty of nice people to threaten next year.”

“Yes, but it won’t be the same as it was, with Longbottom.”

Luna came not long after, wearing a yellow blouson, ornamented with moths that flapped their wings when she twirled. She carried a trunk larger than she was, and stood on tiptoe to kiss Hermione on the cheek, at which Hermione made an expression like one getting one’s face licked by a small dog.

“Thank you for teaching me the Patronus,” she said, clasping Harry’s hand. “Daddy heard what happened, and he’s ever so pleased. Let me know if you ever want an interview in the Quibbler.”

“I’m pretty much done with print media, I think, Luna.”

“You’re very right to be! Daddy’s been trying to invent publication by astral projection for years. Now there’s going to be a war, he thinks it’s really important for us to communicate without leaving traces.”

Harry cracked a smile. “Let me know when he figures it out.”

“I won’t have to! That’s the point, Harry.”

“Oh, God, right. Sorry, my mistake.”

Luna kissed his cheek, too, and Ron’s, though it made her stretch on her tiptoes. To Draco, she dipped a curtsy. Then she sailed down the path like a kite, with the gliding gait of one intending to fly home.

The Slytherins came up last, when the crowds had thinned. Pansy and Astoria came last, long after Blaise had sauntered down the path with Tracey Davis, and Millicent Bulstrode had sneered past on the arm of Vince Crabbe.

Pansy carried a leatherbound case. She wore fitted cigarette trousers and a black lambskin jacket whose shine and texture suggested eyewatering expense. Her finger sparkled from her engagement ring.

Astoria wore an argyle skirt, and her pale hair was plaited, and she set her jaw like she had stopped in at the abattoir on her way from finishing school. They were holding hands like they were the first two children to think up friendship. Harry and Ron shifted to let them pass into the entrance courtyard.

“Hello, Pans,” said Daphne, very quietly. “Hi, Tori.”

“You’re still going to marry him, then,” said Hermione.

Pansy’s reply lagged a beat while she looked at Daphne, but gamely, she flipped her hair and smiled like a double-shot of Dreamless. “At speed, too. What can I say? I liked the way ‘war bride’ rolled off the tongue. Why wait, after all, when you’re deliriously in love?”

“You’re fifteen,” said Hermione incredulously. “He’s barely nineteen, for that matter, but you—”

“Yes. I’m fifteen. And in Britain, where I have to assume you live, the age of marriage is sixteen. Which I will be in November. Hence.”

“Will Theodore be attending your festivities?” interrupted Draco, partly of curiosity as to the boy’s whereabouts, and partly to stop Pansy from hammering on Hermione’s visibly fraying patience.

“One hopes. He’s the best man.”

“Oh, Pansy,” said Daphne. “I’m so sorry.”

Pansy twitched. After a moment, she said: “It’s nothing, really. Would have happened anyway. Don’t pity me.”

“I don’t. I don’t pity you, darling, I worry for you, but—”

“Worry is pity with a hat on!”

“It’s not! It’s sad with a hat on, Pansy, I don’t like what you’re doing to yourself, I don’t like what Theo’s making you do—”

“Theo doesn’t make me do anything,” Pansy snapped, dropping Astoria’s hand. “Please. You used to know me better than that.”

That was a hit below the belt, scored and salted. Daphne flinched like she felt it, too, and lifted her hands to ward it off. The crowd through the doors had bottlenecked, the burble in the courtyard quelling under the hot sun.

Astoria intercepted, calmly, by laying her hand on Pansy’s arm.

“The new transfusions are working,” she said. She gripped the side of her chair, white-knuckled, and in her face was the razor intensity of someone flying a broomstick, or playing a game of chess with half the pieces. It was the zealous focus of someone making a wild play on a thin margin, going all-in on a hand of junk. “I don’t sleep as much as I used to. I’m stronger. It turns out — now the doctors have it handled — I don’t need you.”

“Good for you,” said Daphne, clipped. “I hope they feed you more.”

“I’m eating plenty.”

“You’re a paperclip.”

“Mum says I haven’t come into my figure.”

“Well, I had more figure than that, at twelve.”

Astoria pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “Oh, my God,” she said, angry and wondrous. “You’re such a — sorry, Pans. You’re such a bitch, Daph.”

“At least I’m a natural. You became a bitch because Millicent Bulstrode told you to, which is frankly just embarrassing,” Daphne said coldly.

“Millie was nice to me!”

“Nice! She called me a half-breed, but all water under the bridgetroll; she’s nice to Tori, which is really the final measure of anyone’s soul.”

“I told her to stop,” Astoria said doggedly. A lacrimal glistening had painted her eyes. “I did. Why don’t you believe me?”

“Merlin, you still can’t lie without crying,” Daphne scoffed. “Your tricks don’t work on me, idiot, I taught you half of them.”

Astoria sniffed. The glistening faded, and she straightened in her chair.

“I did tell them, though,” she said plainly. “Millie said Odin Davis was going to hunt you down with the rest of your herd, and I told her if she said it again I’d do to her what she did to my sister’s cat.”

Daphne froze on the verge of a retort, her mouth a perfect round.

“I could have done it, too,” she said smugly. In the empty entrance courtyard, her boast skittered in echoes on the marble, stirring dust. “I’ve been practicing jinxes. I’m really good. And I’m getting clever with them. Mummy says I’m going to be the best in my year at Charms, like she was.”

“Mummy didn’t even N.E.W.T. in Charms,” said Daphne wearily. “She only says that to impress people. Darling, what do you want me to say? Threatening them won’t change their minds.”

“They aren’t the point. I am. I don’t need your blood anymore.”

“I know, thank you,” she snapped, “you said it already, you don’t need me for anything, you can lark off without me and never turn back — what do you want, my permission? Take it. Go flirt and drink and go to parties. Go be the only Greengrass girl that matters, Tori, it’s what you always wanted.”

“I don’t want to be the only Greengrass girl,” cried Astoria. She gripped the sides of her chair like the arms of a throne she had fought two wars for. “You said you loved me. Prove it. Come home.”

It was a truth behind a lie behind a truth. Exquisitely cruel; compellingly simple. He suspected there were more layers to it than that, even, things Daphne never told anyone about, and Pansy must have glimpsed some of them, because she was the first one brave enough to speak.

“Teddy found a healer,” Pansy said quietly. “Someone who says he can work with you. Orpheus wants to try it.”

“Try what?” snapped Ron. “Parenting?”

“Is the doctor reputable?” said Hermione, brow furrowed.

“Of course he’s not,” snapped Daphne. Her composure was a friendly memory. The set of her face was all panic, and the clench of her fists was a failing countermand. “There aren’t any. I’m sure Theo believes it, but Theo believes in grumpkins and snarks. I used to think you were equal parts victim and martyr where he was concerned, but now I think you might be merely gullible. He isn’t going to fix it, Pans. He threw in with Odin Davis and thought it wouldn’t matter I was infected; then he tried to estrange me, and when that didn’t work he tried to hide me—”

“Come home,” said Pansy, dreadfully. “He loves you. I love you. Come home—”

“Stop saying that!”

Her voice was high and ugly, and it made several people step back from her. No sooner did it leave her mouth than Daphne snapped it closed, cringing in self-contempt. Draco remembered that feeling clearly — of wanting to rip words out of the still-trembling air. “Don’t say it. Not when you know full well it doesn’t matter,” she said. “What did he tell you? That I would come back, and everything would be as it was, and he would protect us from the grumpkins and the snarks? Did he tell you all of us could be together again? Did he tell you he could cure me? Theodore lies.”

“He still talks about you,” said Astoria. “We all do. When we have your favorite pudding, or Teddy hears your favorite song. He asks me to play it for him on the piano, sometimes, when it’s raining.”

“You’re useless at piano,” Daphne said tightly, “so that’s his loss.”

“I learned,” she said. “I learned lots of things, while you were away. Like the Levitation Spell. And how to talk to mermaids. I’m very grown-up now, you see. Everybody says so.”

“Do they, now.” Daphne shot an angry look at Pansy, which made the other girl turn her face away in guilt. Astoria reached out, calmly, and touched Daphne on the cheek: the scarred side. Second blow.

“Come home,” she said, with the awkward coaxing of someone to whom nothing had ever come easily. “Now I’m a grown-up, I understand everything, and we can be friends for real.”

Observing the patent manipulation would not have helped; it would have been an insult to pretend Daphne had not noticed. It did not matter. The manipulation might have been what touched her most, in fact: that she could be the treasured object of such an arrant, vicious snare. Draco saw which way the wind had turned from the sink of Daphne’s shoulders, and the curl of her fingers over Astoria’s.

And the pureblood girls who never learn.

“It won’t be safe for you,” Hermione said flatly. “Living with them. If things get worse for you, medically—” She chose her words carefully, in light of their surroundings. “It’ll be very dangerous. Staying at Hogwarts—”

Daphne turned around. Her expression made Hermione break off, which was no small thing to do.

Pansy had begun to glow. “Daphne,” she said, “if you make me ask again, and say no—”

“I will. So don’t ask,” Daphne interrupted coldly. She rose to her feet. With unhappy dignity, she kissed Astoria on the forehead. “I’m not coming for you.”

“But you—”

“We’re not going to be friends again. And I don’t want anything to do with your little movement, either.”

“You won’t. I won’t let you.”

“I think it’s utterly hateful, what you and Teddy are doing,” she snapped. “You ran around all year for that awful woman. And if that was all you were doing, it’d be enough. She made little children bleed and you didn’t say a word. What happened to you? I thought you couldn’t stand unfairness, Pansy, I thought you were going to break all the rules, and — never mind. It doesn’t matter. I won’t have anything to do with it. I want your promise—”

“I promise.”

“I’m not finished. I want your promise on Teddy’s life that Astoria won’t have anything to do with it,” she said curtly. “Nothing. You leave her alone. No meetings, no youth clubs, no paramours. No more very grown up. You stop bringing her around Millicent and Tracey and all of those girls. None of them get to see her. And I don’t want to see Teddy, either,” she added curtly. “If you want to see us, you come to Meadowridge, and you come alone.”

“I promise,” Pansy said.

“Do you understand?” Daphne stepped up to her, and imposed on her a striking height difference. “I can’t stand to watch you befoul yourself,” she said bitterly. “You’re friends with foul, grimy people, you’ve let them put their grimy fingers on my sister. I can’t help you. I gave up helping Teddy long ago. But bring any more of it near her, I swear to you, I’ll tear you apart.”

Pansy set her jaw and nodded. Astoria, apparently dazed by her success, seemed far less credulous of the threat; she stared up at Daphne as if a corona had grown behind her head.

Daphne, however, did not see it, as she had turned to Harry.

“Hermione’s right,” he said. “I don’t mind if you leave, but you shouldn’t let them… this is really scummy. What they’re doing.”

Daphne smiled sadly.

Ron cleared his throat, and her smile disappeared. She took an anxious half-step away from Astoria, her hands spasming and flattening against her skirt. “Ronald,” she said. “You — you have a sister.”

“Yeah, I do.” His eyes flitted to Astoria, over her shoulder, and tightened. “She wouldn’t ask me to do this, though.”

Daphne gave a hard exhale and smiled again. “Lucky you,” she said. “Lucky her! You both have my undying envy and respect. Please tell her not to burn effigies of me in the common room, the smoke irritates Lavender’s pores.”

“She’s not gonna be mad at you,” Ron said. “Disappointed, maybe. No one’s gonna be mad.”

“Oh, don’t be nice to me,” she said bitterly. “You don’t have to be nice anymore. I know everything they’ll say about me. ‘Daphne Greengrass had her vacation, and then she ran home, just like the rest of them.’ I know it all.”

Hermione, who was tapping her foot with the textbook rhythm of a held tongue, might have. But when she caught Draco’s eye in her periphery she folded her arms and shook her head in a way imperceptible to anyone else. It was less tact than tactical surrender: it was not her circus.

“Nah.” Ron slipped his hands in his pockets, shifting his not-inconsiderable weight. He was one of the biggest boys in the crowd: almost six feet of Weasley, barn-broad, dark-red fringe sideswept over his intent eyes. “Won’t.”

She twisted her fingers to the point of obvious pain. She stepped away from Astoria and Pansy, who followed her with her eyes.

“She needs me,” she said. “Nobody ever needed me, really except her. And nobody ever will.” She gave a bitter laugh. “And I d-don’t have anywhere else to go.”

There was a pause.

“Right, yeah, except for the great fancy castle where all your friends are,” said Ron. “Wouldn’t want to be too predictable, you.”

Daphne choked, once, and then swallowed her tears.

“You’re so nice to me,” she said. “It’s not fair. You were already tall! Why did you have to be such a nice boy?”

Whatever reply Ron would have made to that was erased from history by Pansy, who cleared her throat with a deafening trumpet.

“I am sorry to cut this maudlin dialogue short,” she said, “but we have a portkey to catch, and if we miss it, I have to sit through six dreadful hours on a train. If any of you have parting sniffles for me, I will accept them by post.”

The look Daphne gave her was anger cut with naked relief. The look Ron gave her was the same, without relief, and reserved in many cases for insects.

But when Pansy reached for Daphne’s hand, she gave it to her. And when she stumbled alongside Astoria’s chair, it was the only time Draco had seen Daphne move without grace.

They stared at each other, although in her case it was refracted through her watery eyes, and she was moving too quickly for it to hold for long.

Pansy wheeled them with fugitive speed down the path to Hogsmeade, and didn’t look back. Daphne did, of course, her whole shoulders twisted to the point of pain while her body was navigated assiduously along by the girls on either side of her.

When they were out of earshot Ron swore, quietly, and kicked the flagstones.

“Do you think that’s the last time we’ll see them?” said Harry, with a dull curiosity that raised Draco’s hairs. “Any of them. Not just Daphne.”

“Daphne will come back,” said Hermione, with a strange certainty. “She wants to save her sister. Either she will, or she won’t, and I think she has just enough self-preservation not to let that stop her from saving herself.”

Draco made a noncommittal noise, though somewhat reassured; Hermione’s belief on any given subject was as good as scientific evidence.

“Do you think she can?” said Harry. “Save her.”

“I wouldn’t have said so,” she said, “but then — Daphne often surprises me.”

The bell tolled eleven. A rasping shuffle of footsteps laved over the old stones, and the whispers diminished as more and more hurried downstairs to catch their portkeys.

Hermione cradled her elbows and blew out a long breath. “I think Draco and I should head to the train,” she said. “Walk us down?”

“No, thanks,” said Harry. His tone flinted. “Cedric’s portkey’s at noon, I promised I’d wait for him. You go on ahead.”

Hermione gave him an odd look. Harry shrugged, fidgeting with his hands in his pockets. She opened her arms, cautiously, and he cracked a little; he stepped forcefully into them, and hugged her tightly, while she put her nose down and tried furiously not to look verklempt.

“You’re sure you won’t come to the station?” she said thickly.

“I’ll see you before you know it. Don’t worry.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

Harry smiled into her shoulder, brittle, and withdrew. “Get yourself some other hobbies,” he said, not in bad humor. “Watch the telly. Go hang out in London. Take your boyfriend to the movies or something.”

Hermione colored and did a terrible job of not looking at Draco. “Harry,” she said curtly, as if her possession of a boyfriend was a national secret. “That’s really none of — I don’t know what you’re — I’m not going to respond to that.”

Draco interceded, noting the sudden interest Ron had taken in the flagstones. “Check your corners, Potter.”

“Watch each other’s backs,” said Harry, and shook Draco’s extended hand with a dignified solemnity. Then he hugged him, painfully, because it was still Harry.

“Well, I’ll go,” Ron said, somewhat pointedly. “Won’t see you tossers for three months, and a chat won’t kill me. Walk you down, c’mon.”

---

Steam from the engine twined over the singled roofs of Hogsmeade and lay in film over the hills, which receded flat and dim under a purpled thatch of midsummer clouds. Trolleys rattled over the stones, and shouts broke out as the departing reached down from their windows with grasping fingers to touch their friends for what might be the last time. Tonks trotted down the platform, counting heads, her magenta duster flapping behind in a batlike train.

Ron walked them to the prefects’ compartment, and stood awkwardly at the step.

“Say hi to Herb and Denise,” he said gruffly. “Draco, remember to change your gold out, the muggles use paper notes.”

The train screeched. A fresh skirt of steam unfurled from the undercarriage. Hermione flinched, and with a groan of worry, she launched into Ron’s arms.

“Don’t be an idiot,” she said, muffled.

Ron lifted her off her toes, rocking back on his heels. He screwed his eyes shut so tightly it pursed his whole face. Then he opened them and settled her down, carefully, like a delicate object he was liable to damage. He shoved his hands in his pockets.

Draco extended his hand. Ron hauled him in to slap his shoulder.

“Write,” he said. “Train. Stick together. Not that you two have any trouble with that, but. In case you need reminding.”

The glance he traded with Draco was unsettled in two directions. The whistle blasted again, and Draco stepped up onto the carriage. Hermione took his offered hand and climbed in after him. Ron stepped back as steam poured in earnest from the tracks.

“Hermione?”

She stopped on the stairs. Draco stilled with one hand on the carriage door.

Ron hesitated. “I love you,” he said, like he was afraid of it. “You know that, right? You know I was for real, even when I was a prick about it. It wasn’t a competition thing, or a shiny-toy thing, or a last-resort thing. It was you. For the right reasons, and not because of anyone else.”

Draco turned sharply, but Hermione touched his arm.

“I know,” she said bravely. “Thank you for saying that. I — I do love—”

“Don’t say it,” he said with a wince. “Sorry. Just don’t… say it, for a while, okay? Not until I mean it the way you mean it.”

Her lips pressed together. “Okay,” she said in a small voice. “I won’t. But I hope you get everything you want. And I really think you will, you know. You’re terribly easy to love.”

Ron’s mouth crooked. “Always, you two, with the dramatics,” he said. “You’re pretty great, Hermione, but I’m not gonna kill myself because you rejected me.”

“Sporting of you,” said Draco. “You would deprive Gryffindor of its keeper, and I would never forgive you.”

Ron laughed. “I’ll call you up,” he said finally. “You owe me a tour of your castle, prat. I haven’t forgotten.”

“Do, and bring others. It’s the only house in Britain large enough to comfortably host your family.”

“It’ll have to be, if it fits your ego.”

The final whistle piped over a near-empty platform. The steam had grown thick as fog. Hermione drew back from the carriage steps, but Draco found himself jumping back down to the last step, to hang from the rail, as the wheels ground to life.

“You’re the better pureblood,” he shouted back at him. “There’s your second-to-none, Weasley. If merit was pedigree, you’d outrank me.”

He was glad that he said it, even on impulse. First Ron nodded uncertainly, and then his lips twisted into a wide and incredulous grin, as if he had been given some hilarious secret that he couldn’t believe Draco would willingly part with. His red tie hung flapping in the breeze under his unbuttoned collar, and his shirttail hung out of his trousers, a too-short pair of Charlie’s that Molly re-hemmed, and he thought of Ron on the train to Hogwarts, five years before, fierce, game, and fearless, full of a terrible bitter pride, a lord’s descendant wearing tattered hand-me-down trousers. Son of Molly Weasley, grandson of Cedrella Black. Great-great grandson of Phineas Nigellus, whose last living heir was named Draco.

Ron waved at them until the train canted around a corner, and a hillside blotted out the dart of red against the rooftops.

The castle towers shrank into the neat spinnerets of a child’s dollhouse, and retreated behind reams and reams of craggy highland until the points of the uppermost spires bowed under the bristly trees. Then the train slipped into a tunnel, and a brief purge of darkness locked the whole valley out of sight.

He turned to Hermione, who was smiling in the great starry dazzle-eyed way she did when he fought a dragon for her. It wasn’t his fault for flushing.

“Put that away, you’ll hurt someone with it.”

“No,” she said, radiantly insouciant. “You can be so wonderfully decent, when you want to be. It’s this gorgeous talent you have, and hardly anybody knows about it.”

“It exhausts me. I saved up effort for that one for years.”

“I’m surprised it cost you so little,” she said, and her smile slackened into something more serious and thoughtful. “You know, if merit was pedigree, you’d still be you.”

The flush pitched hot, and he brushed it off. “Thank you,” he said. “I had in mind some order of monarch, but I’m not so far off it’s an insult. Let’s find a compartment.”

Her laughter was a passel of bells, trilling behind him, as he tugged her into the carriage.

In the prefects’ compartment, few remained of the cohort that had gathered in September. Padma Patil and Anthony Goldstein had also chosen to stay at Hogwarts, but Hannah Abbott was coming home to see her mother, a pharmacist in Leeds. Instead of the prefects’, she shared a compartment with Leanne Thomas, the tallest girl in her year, and Romilda Vane, who was sewing a patch in the shape of a lightning bolt into her denim jacket.

The afternoon passed like a dream. Voices in the corridors, rustling luggage, the chuffing of pistons underfoot. The clouds kept a woollen seal over the sky and washed pale the lakes and rivers that pooled in the space between hills. An owl followed their train for some time, shadowless in the grey light, vanishing now and then when they threaded a tunnel. There were few people on the train, and they were hardly an unruly selection. Bill, Fleur, and Tonks took periodic patrols down the long and soundless hallway between compartments. There were coronation chicken sandwiches for lunch, and Bott’s beans from the trolley, and watery builder’s tea in paper cups with single-serve creamers.

Draco sat with his back to the window and his knee thrown up on the seat, a book balanced on his thigh. It was Hermione’s, a Penguin paperback of Brideshead Revisited, its cover a photograph of a glass conservatory under snow. Hermione cradled Crookshanks in her lap, practicing charms under her breath on a pocket snitch that Katie had given her.

He marked his place with a finger — reeled back to my rooms under a starry heaven which swam dizzily among the towers, and fell asleep in my clothes as I had not done for a year — and tilted his head to watch her.

“I think you’ve mastered Verdimilious.”

“I lose my magic once we get to London,” she said, following the snitch with her eyes. “I should practice while I can. What do you think Daphne is going to do, if she transforms?”

He grimaced and made an equivocal gesture. “No idea. Her parents let Briarfield Hall, and I don’t know what facilities they have. I had thought she might use the Shrieking Shack, if she were going to be at Hogwarts, but I doubt she’ll have access, unless she can find a way from getting away from her parents on full moons.”

“Oh, that’s a good point. But I meant the Wolfsbane Potion,” she said. “If Snape isn’t here next year. Remus said once that Slughorn couldn’t do it, not to satisfaction. Do you think you could?”

He tried not to be flattered by the implication, and failed eagerly. “Likely not. It’s famously difficult to gather ingredients for, and—”

“Sprout gave Neville keys to the hothouses. He might be able to grow something, with notice.”

“Assuming I could even manage it, which is a gamble. There’s a precarious sequence of reactions you have to perform in order to temper the ingredients, and obviously, if you fail, you have a werewolf to deal with. There’s a reason it doesn’t appear on the Boards. Most people find it too technically demanding.”

Hermione muttered something like “two bonus points,” but let it drop. She nodded at his book. “How is that, by the way?”

“Maudlin,” he replied. “They’re all traipsing around like common drunks. It’s begging for a comparison to Wilde—”

“Dorian and Basil, without the portrait?”

“Or the psychological intimacy. But the jokes are funny, I’ll give him that.”

She smiled slightly. “Hm. How far are you?”

“They’ve just left Oxford.”

“Remind me to ask again when they’re on the ship,” she said. “Catch that for me, will you?”

Turning a page, he snagged the snitch casually with his offhand and tossed it to her. She was tucking it into her satchel when a tap came on the glass door of their compartment.

“Wotcher, you two. Coming up on London,” said Tonks. She had turned her hair black again, and it brought out the parts of her that resembled her mother: her pointed chin, her rounded face, her beetle-brown eyes. Full resemblance was held at bay by a boxer’s nose that looked to have been broken, and the careless way her pixie-cut spilled like a mop around her ears. “Remember to change into muggle gear.”

She caught him staring, and cocked an eyebrow. It was Narcissa’s expression. Draco’s head ached.

“My mother will be there,” he said. “I don’t know if you were warned.”

“Yeah, Dumbledore briefed me,” she said. “Cute of you to worry, though.”

“Tonks—”

“Kid, it’s fine. I’m a big girl. I never knew Mum’s family, and I don’t expect a tearful reunion.” Tonks grinned, a bit jagged. “You tell me how to play it. You want backup, or a wide perimeter?”

“She may not know you exist,” he said, with difficulty. “I would be wary of shocking her.”

Tonks snorted. “Yeah, she knows I exist.”

“I wouldn’t be sure. Mother would have forsworn contact after your parents’ marriage. She still won’t—”

“Mum was up the duff before she got married,” said Tonks, crinkling her nose merrily at his expression. Hermione stifled a laugh. “That was the whole to-do, boyo. They eloped and had a do-over ceremony with Dad’s family when I was five. Mum made me flower girl. Last time the devious wench got me in a skirt.”

“How old was she?”

Tonks rolled her eyes back in reminiscence. “Er. I’m January ’73, so she’s… what, eighteen? Nineteen, when she had me?”

Hermione startled. “She was in school,” she said, appalled.

“Yeah, and a prefect,” said Tonks, which elicited a minor noise of outrage from Hermione, seemingly on behalf of the position. “Not a great one, obviously, but still. Dad says the Slytherin Head was a pure slimebucket — both of Mum’s sisters made prefect, too. Apparently Slughorn was always wheedling for an invitation to one of their balls.”

“That’s abhorrent clientelism,” said Hermione, even more appalled than she had been at teenage pregnancy. As usual, her priorities were strictly organized, and inscrutable.

“That’s Dad’s line,” said Tonks. “Mum says it’s called a business relationship, and more people could stand to try it.”

She knocked twice on the doorframe and stepped out. “Jeans!” she said, in passing. “Jeans! Trainers! Et cetera. Step lively.”

“There is a pernicious and false equivalency,” said Draco, nobly, “between nonmagical culture and slovenliness, which I object—”

“JEANS! TRAINERS! ET CETERA!” faded down the hallway.

Hermione, being hard-hearted, failed to reward his valiant defense of muggle civilization. Unfolding from her seat, she drew the blinds with a flick of her wand, and stretched up on tiptoe to levitate her trunk down from the luggage rack. “You heard her,” she said. “You ought to go change. I think there’s an empty compartment next to ours.”

“I don’t see why I have to leave.”

He’d meant only that he’d as much a right to evict her as the opposite; but her mouth fell open, and he abruptly reevaluated.

“I didn’t mean that.”

“Didn’t you!”

“Though it’s no less than what you were wearing in the prefects’ bathroom last year. Ostensibly.”

“Those were extenuating circumstances!”

“You were still in your pants,” he pointed out, tipping his head back, and she colored fiercely.

“It doesn’t count,” she said, folding her arms firmly over her chest, as if to retroactively shield it from view. “I wasn’t looking at you that way.”

“You were looking a bit.”

“For pedagogy! We were talking to each other. It would have been rude not to look. But I certainly didn’t intend anything by it, and anyway, it was a public bathroom! We had a job to do! A highly unsensual context for disrobement! I was having platonic thoughts,” she finished, “the whole time.”

“Good for you. I haven’t had a platonic thought about you in years.”

Hermione’s face spiked to a temperature that could melt glass, exorbitantly lovely, and she made a strangled noise, flapping a hand over her shoulder. “I — that’s immaterial. Go change. All this to get out of wearing muggle clothes — you’re a complete diva.”

He laughed, rolling to his feet, and she had to press her knuckles to her mouth to stop herself from smiling. He dropped a kiss on her temple as he strolled out into the corridor.

Moors had given way to fields and pastures, knolls thickly trussed with farmhouses and shrubs. They had passed through the Midlands and started on into the fenced hillsides of the southern English country, faint sloping mounds of golden wheat crowned with furls of trees, and villages dotted here and there on the bank of a river or in the lee of a hill. The clouds thickened as they came upon London, and the light was flat and strange, like camerafire.

Draco found an empty compartment and snapped the blinds. His robes were exchanged for a pair of dark grey trousers and a cobalt shirt, which, if it failed Tonks’s instructions, at least plausibly passed for muggle. He folded his tie and prefect badge into the trunk with his robes and snapped the clasps.

The shirt rode high on his wrists. Nice as it was to be taller, it was exasperating to keep having new things fitted. He slipped his wand down the pocket of his trousers and stepped back into the corridor, folding back his cuffs.

As he drew the compartment door shut behind him, the loo at the end of the hallway rattled open and shut. Nothing passed through it; it merely swung free of its own accord, paused, and latched behind itself neatly. Draco frowned at it. His eyes narrowed.

He approached, drawing his wand. Another compartment door unhitched discreetly beside the loo, and he caught it before it closed. The compartment itself was empty, but Draco stepped inside and slammed it behind him. After a moment, he raised his wand, and he said, “Show yourself.”

Nothing happened. The farmland streamed past the window in a twining braid of green.

“Hominem revelio.”

The charm rippled through the compartment, and flashed briefly over a silhouetted shape of a boy standing in the middle of it, four inches from the point of Draco’s wand. He lowered it, and snarled.

“Potter.”

Harry tore the Cloak down around his shoulders. His eyes were massive with self-explanatory guilt, which dismissed any reservations Draco might have had about being furious with him.

“I have to see Sirius.”

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

He scrambled in front of the compartment door, Draco nearly side-checked him into the wall. “I’m going there, and I’m coming straight back. They’ve closed the Floo, but I’ll take the train—”

“You’re supposed to be at school!”

“—use the Cloak, nobody’ll see—”

“You thought you could fuck off and no one would notice? That you’d swan in and out as you like, no responsibilities, no one liable to wonder—”

“I keep dreaming he’s dying!” Harry scrambled to stop him from grabbing the compartment-door. “Draco, hang on — I keep seeing him getting tortured, he’s at Grimmauld Place and he’s — and I told Dumbledore if they’d just let me see him, just once, but he told me to keep doing Occlumency, which, sorry, doesn’t work on Voldemort—”

“—whole Order is in fucking Scotland right now for your protection, three of them here just for Hermione, and you’re bloody—”

“—won’t tell me where Remus even is, and they expect me to sit there and wave everyone off, meanwhile Sirius is rotting in a house he hates! It’s cruel! It’s cruel, and I don’t want to be cruel, I told myself when I came to Hogwarts I never would be— I told myself if I ever had the power to stop someone feeling that way,” said the boy who had lived eleven years of his life in a cupboard, raggedly, “I would stop it, I wouldn’t let it happen, I wouldn’t be one of the people who walked past and let it happen to me!”

“—pitching a fit because you’re not inside-track on Mad-Eye’s agents — the difference between an eleven-year-old and a thirty-seven-year-old man demeans us both to state. For fuck’s sake. I don’t know where you come by this idea that everyone in your life suffers at your whim, waiting for you to save them.”

“MAYBE I HAVE TO! NOBODY ELSE WANTS TO BLOODY DO IT!”

“The world is not your remit! Sirius Black is not your remit!”

“I say he is.” Harry stood to his full height, and Draco clocked nearly half a foot on him; he had been left behind in the year’s dissemination of growth spurts. “He’s my godfather. Without Lupin, I’m the only person he’s got.”

“So what, I don’t know where my godfather even is, or if he’s alive, and nobody else gives a damn, why don’t I just blow up this fucking train—”

“Because I’m his family! Because Lupin left him! He’s got one person, one, and it’s me. I thought you of all people would understand!”

“Because my father’s dead?” he snapped. “Because Lucius Malfoy was murdered, I should understand what tempts you to join him? Think again. Severus Snape never had any delusions about who my father was, and if he did they weren’t the sort that would send me running after him to death’s doorstep. He certainly never fed them to me under the pretense of connection—”

“Sirius isn’t like that—”

“—or intimated they would be worth the cost of catastrophic danger. To myself or others. Did you imagine what the Order would think when they noticed you were gone? If you didn’t come back? They’ll come looking for you, you realize, as soon as they notice. At no small risk to themselves.”

“Nobody knows where I am. Alright? I didn’t leave a note. I took the Cloak, my wand, nothing else. He’s my godfather, nobody’s risking their lives for him but—”

“Then I take it back,” he said icily. “I do understand. You’d rather the dead for company than the living.”

Harry lunged at him. Draco didn’t resist. His back slammed against the compartment door, rattling fixtures. Harry’s face loomed close, twisted in a snarl, eyes slitted and dark like raw tide-laved glass.

“Apologize,” he said. His grip flexed on Draco’s shoulders, digging into the muscle. “Apologize for that, you shithead. Come on.”

“James Potter is never going to tell you he loves you,” said Draco, with soft contempt. “Not if you spend a lifetime running after Sirius Black.”

“Maybe not,” said Harry, tightly. “Maybe I’ll keep waiting for that my whole life, Draco, you’d certainly fucking know. But my dad loved him. He’s the last thing in the world I know Dad loved. And he doesn’t have anybody else. So I’m going to save him.”

He shoved him back, and Draco let go.

He had mistaken the tenor of Harry’s relationship with Sirius. It was both more selfless and far more treacherous than he had reckoned with. Before he could recast it, however, the door rattled back.

Hermione barged into the compartment with her wand up. She had changed into muggle clothes, jeans and trainers, and maroon polo with golden stitching at the breast pocket, her hair confined strictly by a headband and a few sleeking charms. When she saw Harry, her face dropped at once into the pitch of a thunderstorm.

“What’s going on? I heard Draco— oh.” She forced her hand down and breathed, “Oh, I’m going to kill you.”

“Good, right, perfect,” said Harry savagely. “Hi, Hermione. I’m not having this argument again—”

“How nice of you to decide in advance!”

“—so you just assume Draco already read me whatever riot act you’re preparing, and bin it, please.”

“Right!” she said brightly. “What happened? Did Sirius run away again? Or did you have a nightmare?”

“You say that like it isn’t real!” Harry exclaimed. “Like he’s not actually out there, doing things I can see — you think I can’t tell the difference between his memories and mine?”

“So you think he has Sirius,” she said, “and you decided to run away, alone , without telling anybody, letting everyone else on this train drive straight into what could well be a trap—”

“He’s not in London.” Harry was curt. “He’s in northern Scotland, actually, best I can tell. Coast of the North Sea. Nobody knows I’m coming.”

“Except Voldemort,” she snapped, ignoring Draco’s exhale of displeasure at the word. “If you know he’s in Scotland, he absolutely knows you’re in London.”

“I have the Cloak, and once I get behind Grimmauld’s wards—”

“Bully for you! What about the rest of us?”

“You’ll have Tonks! And Bill! And Fleur!”

“You think they’d leave you?” she said, her words jagged around a knot of anger in her throat. Magic did a lightning-skitter around the fist that clutched her wand. “Really? You think if it was between me and you, the Chosen One, Nymphadora Tonks would protect me?”

Harry stopped short, blinking, his chest rising in quick, deep bursts. He lowered his shoulders, and the Cloak slithered to his feet.

“Nymphadora Tonks is a jolly person,” Hermione said tightly, “so a lot of people forget she’s Alastor Moody’s deputy. Second-ranking field agent in the Order, de facto ranking officer on any mission without Moody — she was top grade in her cohort at the Auror Academy, and they don’t give marks for tender-heartedness. Did you know any of that? If you think she lacks the guts to decide between us, you’ve fallen for her cover. And I’m sure she’d feel badly about it, but it wouldn’t stop her, and personally, I don’t begrudge her that decision one bit.”

“I would never run away from you,” he croaked. “Hermione, I would let them kill me before I—”

“Why isn’t it enough?” she demanded. “All the Weasleys, and the Order, and Dumbledore, plus our friends. Everyone is at Hogwarts. They moved the whole Order. Partly for you! Everyone but the one person you think you have to have to be happy! Why isn’t it enough?”

“I don’t know,” he said tiredly. “It just isn’t. No matter how many people love me, or tell me they’re with me, it doesn’t feel different. And it’s not because you’re not enough, you are. It’s not you. I think I just. That when I was young, or — maybe last year, or — always. I reckon. I don’t know.” He broke off and lifted his glasses carefully back onto his nose. The bridge was taped together. “I’m just broken, I think,” he said, quite calmly. “I never feel the way you’re supposed to feel. That safe thing, the bit where you want to stay, and let them… do whatever parents are for. Molly and Arthur, and Hagrid, and Remus. When they leave a room, a bit of me goes: ‘That’s it, that’s the last time you’ll ever see them.’” He added, “Sometimes I’m right, and that doesn’t help, either.”

Hermione recoiled, startled. She hesitated.

“Does Sirius make you feel… that? The way you’re — supposed to feel.”

“No,” said Harry. “He’s not a great parent, really. I know that, I don’t know why everyone acts like I don’t.” He sank his hands in his pockets. Then, “I don’t know why everyone acts like it matters.”

A serene chime from the train broke through his words. Footsteps in the corridor pitched them into silence until they receded.

Harry caught Hermione’s arm. She turned back sharply, her lip curling, and he tightened his grip.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “For doing this. I am. You think I don’t take the war seriously, but I do.”

“Now, Harry, really isn’t the time—”

“I do,” he repeated. “I take it seriously. And I know you’re not doing it for me. It’s your magic, and your war. It is. When Viktor died, it was your friend they killed. I haven’t ever forgotten it.”

The train eased to a halt in a bath of steam that flushed the windows white. The doors sprang open with an echoing shudder of metal, like an unsealed vault.

Harry slipped up the hood of his cloak and vanished. Draco stepped in front of Hermione, checked the corner of the door, and they descended through curtains of mist to the platform.

It was cold. The steam from the tracks ought to have warmed the stone, and the June air ought to have helped it, but the gusts that rose to meet him were chilled, and left condensation trails on his skin. He frowned and scanned the ceiling, but the glass ceiling was grey and dry, untouched by rain. The clouds behind it rolled, a dark wave unknitting from the underbelly of the storm.

Children began to drop from the carriages, a skeletal crowd compared to the usual. They streamed out to meet their parents and had bleary reunions behind veils of mist. Hermione stepped down behind him, and a rustle at her back meant Harry had done the same.

Low chatter issued from family reunions, coalescing like islands in a sea of silhouettes. Dean and Seamus were ushered off with a pair of besuited professionals that must have been the Thomases. Katie’s mother, a foot her junior in height, was bemoaning her new piercings. He tapped his wand restlessly on his thigh.

From the mist, anyone might have been his mother. He could feel with unusual clarity the toll of his heart against his ribs, but he still craned his neck to find her, as if any stranger in the mist might turn and reveal a French twist of pale hair at her nape, or cut the crowd with vulpine grace.

“There she is,” said Hermione suddenly. For there she was.

Narcissa stood at the entrance to the platform, dressed in a flowing, high-collared summer robe of green organza, the wide brim of her hat drawn so low it almost hid the crimson-painted curve of her lips. A wandpurse of black lace dangled from her wrist, matching the thin netting of her gloves, her signet a large and lightless swell on her third finger. The way she wore the finery it all seemed eminently natural, as if she’d been born clad for a party to which everyone else had shown up tragically underdressed. There she was, his mother, exactly where she needed to be, on time and well-dressed, and she brought with her a world of rules and order, with impregnable walls.

She flitted through the crowd with weightless grace, and then she was in front of him, smiling with a slightly brittle hope, lips parted in an apprehensive show of teeth.

“Draco,” she said. When she spoke, her voice was low and reedy with effort, as if overused.

The parting of her arms was tentative. There was no time for it, but he did it anyway: he stepped forward and embraced her. Startled, she touched the back of his head, and then her arms slid around his shoulders. “Darling,” she said. “Oh, I’m sorry. Come and hug your mother that loves you.”

He braced his head on her shoulder. She smelled of clean soap and perfume: jasmine grandiflorum, saffron, woody and warm.

And there were so many things he could not say to her. And Hermione stiffened a bit, when Narcissa touched him, as if perhaps fighting the wish to intercede. But she was his mother, and she was real, and he had been away from her so long he had forgotten how much himself he felt when she was near.

Narcissa drew back, keeping her hand braced on his neck. The comfort cooled. He turned back.

Hermione cleared her throat. “Hello, Mrs. Malfoy.”

Narcissa’s mouth twitched to the side in a crooked not-smile. “The singular Miss Granger,” she said. Hermione’s cheek twitched.

“Mother.”

She flicked her fingers in a dismissal. “I can be trusted,” she said lightly. “If the mouth ‘speaketh from the abundance of the heart,’ I wager I can still manage a conversation without coming to arms. Under a certain baseline of respect.”

“The one thing that makes you remotely respectable is the fact that Draco loves you,” Hermione said tightly. He turned to her, startled, and she was staring at his mother like she might draw on her. “The only thing I ever respected about you for a fraction of a second was the fact that you raised him.”

Draco stared at her as if he had been clubbed over the head, because he felt like it.

Narcissa noticed it. Her eyes flit up, and she inhaled through her teeth.

“You’re fearless,” she said, a compliment soured by defeatism. “And very angry.”

“Quite, yes,” said Hermione. “I am also — sorry — in a bit of a hurry, so if you don’t mind, I have to see an auror about a boy.”

The situation did not give her time to introduce it. It came hurtling across the platform in a flourish of leather and robes. Nymphadora Tonks was marvelous at top speed: high spots of color in her cheeks, her duster skimming high like a duck’s wing, her shoulders rolling with the weight of each step, her wand a seamless extension of the line of her arm.

“Draco!” she barked. “Where’s Lightning?”

“Lightning?”

“Here,” Hermione said quickly, throwing her hand behind her to check for him. “He’s here, Tonks, he’s wearing the Cloak—”

“Great, thanks, Hermione. Kid, wherever you are, grab my arm and run when I tell you. We need to get off the platform to Apparate.”

Harry did not reply. Hermione whipped around, her hand sweeping through the air, and it met nothing. Her eyes glazed with panic.

“He was here,” she snapped. “He was here just as second ago—”

Tonks did not waste a millisecond on dismay. “Done a runner. Got it,” she said. “Aiming for Number Twelve, innit?”

“—but he knows how dangerous, and he told us he did, and I told him why—”

“Don’t kick yourself,” she said calmly. “He’s not thinking about you. He’s not even really thinking.”

“Oh my God, is that supposed to make me feel better?” Hermione snapped, tearing her wand from her satchel. “That he’s forgotten us?”

Narcissa had not moved. The back of her hand sealed up her mouth.

“Hullo, Lady Malfoy,” Tonks added. “Nymphadora Tonks. Lieutenant Commander, Order of the Phoenix. Don’t fuss about the title, Moody made it up. And I’m pretty sure Mum made up the name, so don’t fuss about it, either.”

“Nymphadora,” said Narcissa, roughly.

Draco’s neck ached from the speed he turned. Tonks blinked, her fingers stilling on her laces.

“Your name is Nymphadora,” she repeated, with difficulty, as if each word were being carved into her skin. “You were… named… for a virgin martyr of Bithynia.”

Tonks blinked again, her eyes wide, and slowly straightened. “Okay,” she said. “Very neat. I have to—”

“One of three sisters. They fasted together in the wilderness. The older two were tortured to death,” she said, “and their bodies made examples to the youngest — your namesake — but she refused to give up the faith. She died with them. They burned together, on the pyre, and were martyred.” Narcissa tried to breathe deeply, and it caught. “Your mother,” she said, “was always — an abominable sentimentalist.”

It was the first time he had ever heard her invoke Andromeda of her free will. It made his skin crawl. He stared at her.

“Cool,” said Tonks, indifferent. “Tell her you said so. Er, hate to run, but it was nice to meet you. Hermione, stick with Bill, I’m going after—”

Thunder broke over the platform. A downfall opened on the roof, loud and harsh. It was too harsh for rain.

A hundred faces tipped back to watch the volley of hail pelt down on the glass, a shadow rolled down the platform in a long sweep.

The clouds were moving swiftly and strangely. They congealed into a roiling, swirling, eye. Draco grabbed Hermione’s arm.

Black smoke dropped from the eye like ink through water. Coils ribboned through the darkling sky.

“BRACE!” roared Tonks, and tackled Hermione to the floor. Draco dropped with her, landing flat on his palms, and the ceiling of King’s Cross shattered above them.

Glass poured like rain, pieces shattering into brilliant starbursts near his head. He dropped his head and a stinging hail prickled his scalp, retreating when the last of it broke to glittering dust around them. He leapt up with a roll of his shoulders and found himself under the glowing hemisphere of Shield Charm. It had spared Tonks and Hermione from the brunt of the glass.

Narcissa held its stem on the tip of her wand. She flicked it out, but her attention locked on the sky. Her wand arched forward and down, in the duelist’s position. Smoke descended over the ragged maw of the station’s ceiling, and tatters flared from its edges.

His ears rang from distant screaming. Down the platform there were students on their knees. Blood eddied on the asphalt. The crowd crushed tight to the entrance to Platform 9 ¾ and fought and clawed at each other to get out and his heartbeat was high and fast in his ears. Tonks sat up and Hermione scrambled out and she caught his hand to pull herself up. She was bleeding from scratches on her arms but she was alright, she was fine, and she was looking at him and shouting something and he only heard it over the sound of his heartbeat when the shape of her mouth clearly spelled YOU.

A hand clamped down on his shoulder. Sound cut in.

“Run when I tell you,” Narcissa whispered.

Smoke coalesced. Ragged coils of it unfurled and creatures pried themselves from the rippling cord of it like some horrible birth. The desiccated hands prying through the air. The black hole of a mouth, the wretched, rasping howl.

The chill over the platform turned subthermal. He knew what this was, he had seen it before. A dementor sank from the group and fell like a diving hawk on Tonks and with her wand in the air she shouted an incantation he knew very well.

A silver jackrabbit tackled it to the side, and it fell to the tracks bleeding ribbons of white. She lashed two more out with a cleaving forestroke-backstroke, the tip of her wand a white scythe in the air. The swarm broke apart, but then there were still dozens; the screaming and the rasping coalesced into a terrible chord and cloaks gloved the slate-dark sky.

Down the platform, Bill cast a wolf that bounded up and batted one out of the air. Fleur shielded a group of children under an enclave. Her fox ripped through the billowing folds of the dementor that trawled down the platform to meet her.

He needed a patronus. He needed to cast a patronus, to help them, to save them. They needed help, and he knew the Patronus Charm, and he could do it, it was a simple thing that he could do. He had done it at thirteen, under a moonlit sky.

But it was so cold that he was numb. And the sky was falling. And he was bleeding and Hermione was bleeding and there was nothing happy in the world and there had never been.

Narcissa grabbed his elbow and she was pulling him inexorably and he stumbled after her, and Hermione was shouting again. Narcissa’s wand streamed ribbons of white, a full shield of it, but it was diluted, not a full corporeal, and her face was drawn with the strain. The screaming turned dull under the deafening rasp of the dementors’ shrieks.

They had followed Harry. Or they had attacked them all the same, on the chance he would be there.

Hermione tore free of Tonks and took off running down the platform without a backward glance. His heart leapt up his throat and he ripped his arm away from his mother, running after her, shouting her name, and for a half-second his fear-stalled mind fumbled through bafflement at where she was going and then he understood.

Her parents. She was going to find her parents, who were waiting with the other muggles beyond the platform entrance.

Hermione shoved between a pair of cowering children and raced, at the top of her speed, but he was faster than she was. When she hurled herself through the platform wall he was behind her, a heartbeat behind, his heart in his throat.

Outside, thousands foamed over the plaza and surged outward towards Pancras Road. The cars, locked in standstill traffic by the charge, blared a compliment to the symphony of panic. Trees flushed green dripped icicles in the middle of high June. People tripped over concrete benches set into the plaza and crawled over each other in screaming masses of hands and boots. A whisper on the back of his neck was the only notice for him to duck as a dementor swept overhead, the icy tail of its cloak whipping his ear. Hermione broke out of the crowd and made a dead sprint for the row of cars parked roadside, where she collided with a couple that were running against the current of the crowd — running towards her, to greet her.

The details of them registered at a subconscious level, slipping under the presiding dominion of fear: Older, both of them; fifties, greying. Her mother’s hair in dark ringlets, eyes blue, Hermione’s freckles scattered over her cheeks. Something of Hermione in the horrified set of her face, in the way she held her jaw. Her father, with one arm braced in front of his wife, short hair in retreat over a narrow face, clean-shaven. He had her eyes. Hermione had her father’s eyes. Herbert and Denise, she’d told him that. He hadn’t forgotten it.

Hermione had muggle parents who loved her like breathing and who had parts of her studded all over them like geodes in rock. She had her mother’s freckles and her father’s eyes and it made something inside him twist to the point of strain, and when she leapt up so her father could catch her in his arms it broke and he remembered what a crooked thing it was to love a parent who couldn’t save you. To leave parts of you behind, far away, and all the pieces scattered over the country like so much shrapnel.

The moaning rasps swelled as more dementors poured from the broken ceiling. Hermione was trying to drive her parents away from the station, one-armed, with her wand-hand braced for a patronus. The Grangers didn’t understand; they were all shouting at each other and her frustration was patent in the way she shoved her mother back towards the car.

A dementor came slithering out of the crowd, its claws scuttling over frosted ground, and Hermione’s mother screamed. Hermione shouted and brandished her wand, but the otter she cast was translucent and flickered out after a futile snap of its teeth. The dementor swept up to avoid it and dove back for another try, and her father grabbed her shoulder to drag her behind him, his face pale, while Hermione thrashed against the movement with the fury of someone who knew how futile it was.

Draco shoved his shoulder through fleeing muggles and slipped over one of the benches, landed with the ease of sliding a bannister. His wand arced a white line in front of his face, gleaming with a prefigurative current of magic, and the words on his tongue moved seamlessly, as if they had been only waiting for him, like it was easy, like it had always been easy.

A white owl the size of a thestral tore free from the misted air and plunged its claws into the dementor’s back.

The wretched shrieking must have been the creature’s pain. It bucked and rose, wrestling together with the white wings of the patronus until the twin trails of smoke and mist bloomed grey against the sky. Its kin were regrouping over the rooftops as the crowd flooded out into the streets and cleared the plaza. The owl harried it off to join its flock, howling.

Draco skidded to a halt. The air rasped cold against his throat. The Grangers were staring, their arms latched tightly around their daughter — who was also staring at him, flushed and panting, her eyes bright and aghast and relieved.

“Draco Malfoy,” he said, when it became clear she wasn’t going to introduce him. “We’ve corresponded.”

Denise Granger opened her mouth, soundlessly, and closed it. She looked at Hermione. Hermione’s expression gave her a sharp, unreadable instruction, and she pried herself free of them.

“That was a magical creature,” said Herbert, remarkably calm. He smoothed his hair with a hand that was almost steady. “I thought they weren’t supposed to interact with us.”

“They’re not,” said Hermione shortly, sweeping her wand over her arm. Her cuts sealed under the watery glow of Episkey. Her mother blanched at it. “Those are dementors. They guard the wizard prison. They’re not supposed to leave unless ordered.”

“And why were they ordered here?” said Denise, her voice rising. “This is London. It’s a normal place, it’s not one of their places. They aren’t supposed to come here, you said.”

“Because — I don’t know. I think they’re looking for Harry, but—”

A shout interrupted her. Tonks, Bill, and Fleur strode across the plaza at a clip. Behind them, Narcissa glided over the frosted concrete with a snap of green skirts.

Tonks broke into a run and closed the distance with a barking laugh of relief. “Thank Merlin,” she shouted. “They’re regrouping to the east. Reckon they figured he’s not here, and wretched things go by scent, so they’ll trace him. Hermione, take your parents and get as far away from Islington — sorry, you lot, I’m aware you’ve got no idea who I am or why I’m giving you orders, but if you trust your daughter you’re gonna take them anyway. Bill, Fleur, and I are going after Harry—”

“I’m coming with you,” Hermione cut in. Tonks pinched the bridge of her nose. “Sorry. I am. You don’t have time to argue with me.”

“Hermione,” muttered Draco, and it was thin, half a groan. But no one noticed except, perhaps, Narcissa, whose breath caught.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated steadily. “I am coming. You’re only three. I have a wand. I’m not running away.”

“What? No,” said Denise, high-pitched. “No, you’re not. You’re not going towards those things.”

“It’s up to you,” Hermione told Tonks. The fist of her hand drew tight the ribs of her scars, and at sixteen, she was far too young to sound so old, to speak with such contempt for others’ hesitation to sacrifice her. “It’ll waste your time to call my bluff.”

Tonks sucked her lips inward, pensive, and glanced at Bill. He shook his head.

“Right, okay,” she said. “Fuck. Sorry, Mrs. Granger. You want your daughter to stay, you make her do it.”

She took off at a sprint. Bill and Fleur followed at her heels. Hermione tried to do the same, and father caught her arm; she threw a Stinging Jinx behind her. It was perfect form, flawless, even done backhanded and under her own elbow. Herbert gave a cry of surprise, and let go.

Freed, his daughter took half a step and then stopped and turned back to look at Draco. The wind threw a cluster of curls over the dark stare. She reached her hand back for him, with the thinnest flicker of uncertainty.

He reached for it automatically; he didn’t know what he was going to do except run after her, which was the only thing he could do, the only option left to him besides let her go and throw herself carelessly in front of someone’s curse — and then a hand closed on his arm and there was a jerk under his navel and the world twisted out of sight. His fingers slipped past Hermione’s without touching them.

They sprang into existence in a square up the street, a block of townhouses shading a fenced park. A thatch of trees gave them cover from passersby. It couldn’t have been far from the station; he recognized the knot of clouds in the western sky.

Narcissa dropped his arm, gasping from exertion, and he staggered away from her. The cold-water shock of betrayal made his gorge rise.

“What the hell are you doing?” His voice was louder, by far, than he had intended. “I didn’t say you could—”

“We’ll take the Knight Bus to Paddington,” she said, her voice firm and ragged. “We can be at the Manor by day’s end. Moody’s agent will alert the Order of the attack. She and her aides will secure Potter. We need not do anything more.”

“You’re fucking joking.” He tore a hand through his hair. His breath came fast and hard in his throat. “There’s four of them. Hermione—”

“Had the same opportunity you do,” she rasped, straightening. “She rejected it. Her bed is made. Do not martyr yourself to prevent her from lying in it.”

“That’s not your choice!”

“It is unfortunate, truly, that her parents lacked the strength to stop her,” Narcissa said, with surprising compassion. “A young witch without reins is a terrible thing. We must move quickly.”

“The dementors followed Potter. They don’t act without orders. Do you understand what that means? Someone far more dangerous knows where Harry Potter is, and wants him followed—”

“And cares nothing for the collateral of finding him. Take my hand.”

“ Listen to me! Hermione—”

“Is in danger, if you’re correct,” she snapped, reaching for him. “When the Dark Lord’s servants find her, there will be nothing you could have done for her.”

“Stop. Stop talking.”

“But Draco — you are so, so young. And I do not ask you to understand, but I beg you to believe — I swear it on my father’s name — you will thank me someday for not allowing you to follow her.”

The image spilled across the front of his mind, unbidden.

He pointed his wand at her. Narcissa jerked backward, her eyes falling on the tip.

“Don’t ever,” he said, unsteadily, “don’t ever — never say that to me again. It’s a lie. I wouldn’t. If she — I wouldn’t forgive you, for that.”

She watched the point of his wand. Her dark eyes flicked up. “You could not forgive,” she said slowly, “a mother saving her son’s life.”

“If she died today, and I wasn’t with her, it would be the last day I ever spoke to you.” His heartbeat muffled the sound of his own voice. “On my father’s name, I would not forgive you. Yes.”

“Don’t you dare use your father’s name to baptize this suicide quest, Draco Malfoy.”

“It’s not his name, actually.” The force of it tore out of his throat, venomous. “It’s mine. He gave it up. He died, and he left his name behind, and now it’s mine, and I decide what it means. I’ve decided Malfoy means I win. Malfoy means all my enemies are fucked. Malfoy means no one takes anything I want away from me, not now, not ever,” he snarled. “No one touches what’s mine. That’s what my name means. When I swear on it, that’s the promise I’m keeping.”

Narcissa scoffed, stepped forward, and shoved his wand off its line. He stepped back, wary of her, wary that she might grab him and try to Apparate him anyway.

For his tenth birthday, his mother had taken him to London under the pretense of visiting the Royal Wizards’ Ballet. When they arrived, dressed in finery, she had tugged him off to Diagon Alley, and loosed him instead on the inside of a toy shop with a cheque for a thousand galleons. Then she had bought them a pair of bespelled pints at Fortescue’s, and they had walked up Primrose Hill in the warm June evening and had ice cream for dinner, sitting on the bench atop the hill while she whispered Confundus Jinxes at any muggle he pointed out, and together they went to pieces laughing, watching them all stumble over each other.

It had felt impossible for two people to be closer, more content in each other’s company, than himself and his mother; he had understood, with a childish godlike certainty, that he would never love anyone so much, or perhaps anyone else at all.

When he was a child he’d known everything, doubted nothing, hesitated never. He had been king of a little world he imagined for himself, where no harm came to anyone, nor ever could, because Mother was there. It was his own mistake, believing it, but a part of him had still been angry at her when he discovered the mistake.

“My mother lost two of her daughters,” she said suddenly. “I was all she had left. Her least favorite — she would have denied that, but daughters always know. Druella Rosier. Drugged herself to death when you were three.”

The trees creaked overhead where their fingers twined together in the wind. A siren blared in the distance.

“They found my uncle’s body at the bottom of a cliff. For the sake of his dignity, they called it an accident. The last Lord Black of Witherfell,” she said, “and he died like a muggle. Of a broken neck.”

“Sirius Black is alive.”

“I had given him an heir,” she said, ignoring him. “But you wouldn’t have my name. He used to mock my father for not having sons, it was the one thing he could hold over him. Cygnus was the strongest wizard in the family, and Orion wasn’t even the strongest in his own marriage… He died knowing his legacy would fall to the lesser daughter of a cousin he loathed.”

“Do you hear me? Sirius Black is alive. Andromeda Tonks is alive. If you’d drop these wretched prejudices you’d realize how much of your family’s still with you.”

“I was never best of anything, among my sisters,” said Narcissa. “I was not the bravest, or the strongest. I was not charming; very few ever loved or admired me. But I was dutiful. I had no equal in that. The curse of the dutiful, of course, is that they cannot entice anyone to stay.”

His breath came like sandpaper in his throat.

“You’re far braver than we were,” she said, which pierced him. “Braver than Lucius, and he was the bravest man I ever met. Braver than Bella, and I never thought that was possible.” She paused. “I did that. Not them. I carried the glory of our house in our body, and I raised him to love better things than myself.”

He wasn’t; he was a coward, terrified at all times of how much could be taken from him, and what he did in the name of that cowardice deserved nothing like the honors of the brave.

“I’m not the glory of our house,” he said harshly. “I gave it up. And it is possible to love two things at once.”

The corner of her mouth curved. “Yes,” she agreed, “but it’s terribly painful.”

She held out her hand again. “Come with me,” she said, but though it was tender, it was not hopeful.

“I’m sorry,” he said, backing away, and he was. He could not remember being sorrier for anything in his life. He was sorry he did not live in a world where he could have come with her. He was sorry that neither of them were any version that the other could accept. It was a terrible thing he was doing, he knew that. It was only just less terrible than anything else he could have done.

Neither of them wept. They had both been taught not to. The wind was still, and the pavements were empty. The street was silent when Draco turned his back on his mother.

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-Merry Taylor Swiftmas, again. If you’re binge-reading this fic in the future, then yeah, it was really that long between chapters. The pit is a powerful thing.

-The age of marriage in Britain actually was 16 until 2023, when it was changed to 18. ‘Age of Marriage Act of 1929.’ Pansy’s right about the law; Hermione’s right about the ethics. The more you know!

-That copy of Brideshead Revisited is the 1990 Penguin Classics printing, and in my opinion, the most beautiful cover for a very beautiful book. It also has one of the worst sex scenes in all of classic literature, wherein the protagonist sleeps with the twin sister of the man he’s been catastrophically in love with since adolescence in such a staggeringly un-sensual way it actually doubles back around to being homoerotic again: “[T]here was a formality to be observed, no more. It was as though a deed of conveyance of her narrow loins had been drawn and sealed. I was making my first entry as the freeholder of a property I would enjoy and develop at leisure.” (mfw i’m sleeping with a girl because i’m in love with her brother and also probably her house and regard her as a transitory object of voyeurism. highly normal behavior.)

-Behemoth chapters are an end-of-book tradition. You have no idea how much stuff I cut from this bad boy to even get it down to this size. My scrap folder is through the roof.

-It’s been… I won’t lie, it’s been kind of rough. I took some hard knocks from a supervisor who’s not the most people-friendly person — not like a monster or anything, just likes to joke in ways that make me feel small. and then like if you object, he goes :( why are you hurting my feelings :(( so like you have to pretend you’re okay with this dude who is not your friend making sort of unpleasant or snide jokes at your expense, but you can’t actually make the kind of jokes about him that he makes about you, or he gets offended. you know? anyway, i had to deal with That Guy, so. your kind words have been a real-pick-me-up.

-in that vein, I couldn’t respond to all the comments i got on the last chapter, but they made me cry. you write such beautiful, hearty comments, I really don’t deserve it.

-Next chapter up in a week or two. Title: “As Though Nothing Could Fall.”

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