They Do Things Differently There 1/2
Pairing: Harry/Draco
Summary: The night Harry returns to Hogwarts for one last year, he and his companions are thrown into chaos. Draco comes face to face with himself time after time and has to decide who he wants to be.
Warnings: None, I think
Word Count: 19,825
Written for hd_holidays. Thank you very much to celestlyn for beta reading.
Another silence fell in the carriage. Not a bad one, despite everything - warm and heavy, mingling light and dark like the evening air outside. It felt odd to be heading towards Hogwarts for another year, but probably not as odd as it would have done had they not spent much of the summer helping to repair the castle. Harry hadn’t felt that he could say his goodbye to Hogwarts and leave it in that state. Over the weeks people began to talk more about the school year to come than the year just past, until Harry found that his own participation in it was taken for granted. Harry was not one who could not extricate himself from commitments vicariously assigned to him, but he found himself agreeing with Ron and Hermione when they tentatively said, “It seems right, doesn’t it?”
“It’d be good to feel that we finished ourselves and not that we finished when we had to,” said Harry, and after that it was agreed.
Not that everything was agreed or being done the neat, proper way, thought Harry again as he looked at Ginny and Ron and Hermione, ignoring Neville and Luna for the present. Neither he and Ginny nor Ron and Hermione were really together, nor yet absolutely, permanently apart. Things had seemed to come together directly after the Battle, for at least a couple of weeks, but then there came a change. Ginny started saying things about how she knew it sounded strange, but she didn’t know if she wanted to be with him, right now, as much as she liked him.
“How much can you like me if you don’t want to be with me?” Harry had asked at last.
“I just - I don’t want to have to think about someone else as much as you have to think about someone who’s your boyfriend. I’m probably hexing myself in the foot for later, but my head feels so busy.”
In the end, they decided to agree that perhaps Ginny’s head would get less busy relatively soon.
Then Ron and Hermione started muttering about how their friendship was the most important thing. So they were all going to play it by ear, see how things went over the year. Harry felt as though he was entering a kind of tank, a romance development tank, in which the results would be observed. He found this an uncomfortable idea.
“I this will be rather an interesting term,” said Luna. “People will have so much to talk about.”
“Or not talk about,” said Harry.
“People will probably be quite annoying for you, won’t they, wanting to talk to you all the time?” asked Neville.
“Well. I did actually ask Professor McGonagall if she thought it might be a good idea for her to say something about treating me like a normal student. But there’s things people will want to talk to all of us about,” Harry said.
“Last year will make things very awkward,” said Ginny suddenly. “The people who were the most terrible won’t be there, but I bet there’ll be quite a few who behaved pretty badly.”
“Yeees. On the one hand they need to know very thoroughly that things are different now, and on the other hand we don’t want vigilante justice running riot in the corridors. Lots of tricky line-drawing ahead,” said Hermione, who after some deliberation had accepted the offer of Head Girl.
“Draco Malfoy may come back. His parents would encourage him to show that he knows things are different now,” said Luna.
“You think they’d let Malfoy back? Really?” asked Harry, amazed not only by her suggestion but the prospect, however vague, of its being correct.
“They’d never. People wouldn’t stand for it,” said Ron.
Hermione looked doubtful. “It probably won’t happen, but I can just about see some people convincing Professor McGonagall that they ought to try and stand for it. As a gesture of moving on. But even if he is there, he’s hardly important anymore, if he ever was.”
*
The Sorting Feast was a long, mostly mournful one, though Harry found that he didn’t exactly mind it. It felt good to be here with everyone in the candlelight, the Great Hall looking almost as it should, and it was a while before Harry remembered to think of those who’d gathered around their dead here months before. There were a lot of speeches. About the dead, about moving forward, information as to the state of the castle, how in many ways the houses had united in the end to work together at the Battle, and how Professor McGonagall knew the school would continue in this way and improve. About how Harry Potter was not to be pestered and how, at the other end of the scale, she hoped everyone would be strong enough not to pester Draco Malfoy either.
Most people had spotted Draco Malfoy at some point prior to his being brought up - quiet, head down, rarely looking directly at his fellow Slytherins or Professor McGonagall - and though there had been angry exclamations, the mood was subdued. Harry, too, hoped they would all be strong enough to carry things off gracefully. He wanted this year to have grace, for people to show their best selves after having seen so much of the worst. He still felt tired. He thought that might partly be why he was here, instead of turning to new challenges in new places.
Few lingered in the common room after leaving the feast. The towering grandfather clock in the entrance hall, floors below, began to strike midnight not long after Harry lay down in bed, his mind already drifting free. He couldn’t hear the chimes, of course, but nevertheless they reached him, in their way, as they wafted through the corridors, through the flagstones and floorboards, filling the whole school.
Nine… Ten… Eleven… Twelve…
Time stood still for a long moment, as tense as an animal preparing to pounce. The transformative release of tension wasn’t violent, though. Light bled into the darkness, and rest soaked into the tired bodies filling the castle. The sleight of hand had been accomplished, and even if someone had been watching intently, they would not have been able to spot the trick. Change came to Hogwarts already familiar and well-worn, the backstory tidily coiled into everybody’s heads.
*
It was morning, already. Some people were up and doing, combing their hair in the mirror, performing ironing charms on their robes, venturing into the Great Hall for breakfast. More were just waking up, or determined to slumber for a while longer. Some of those just waking up would perhaps have been in the second category if they hadn’t expected an intriguing day ahead of them. For there were more students waking up in the castle on this morning than there had been for years, and though in some ways the new students were welcome, in other, probably more ways, they were not.
The new students themselves were unsure, full of discomfort and trepidation about their transfer from Durmstrang or home schooling to Hogwarts. Grindelwald had made an alliance with Dumbledore against Voldemort, and as a vital demonstration of this he had lifted his embargo on parents sending their children to Hogwarts. They were to join the children of Muggles and steadfast and intrepid Dumbledore supporters. The potential for discord was obvious, and rather than feeling reassured by the strength of this alliance, many of the students were perspicacious enough to feel daunted by the power that had made it seem desirable to those two foes.
Harry’s pyjamas were plaid rather than striped, and his hair had recently been cut. He was fifteen. These things did not at any time strike him as unnatural as he got out of bed and parted the curtains in time to see Dean’s cautious glance at Seamus Finnigan, the unfamiliar presence in their dormitory. He felt a strange sense of doubleness centred round the sandy-haired figure putting on his shoes, as if he had seen just this sight before and it should not be new to him. He dismissed the moment of meaningless déjà vu.
“I hope I’m not behind, you know, when we get to class,” said Seamus, straightening up from tying his shoelaces and looking back at Harry and Dean for a moment. “Me mam’s done her best, but I don’t know if it’s the same.”
“Oh, I’m sure everyone’ll know it’s all different and new to you,” said Harry. “Snape, the Potions Master, will be a bastard though, so remember not to take him personally.”
“Cheers.”
*
Slytherin had more new students than any other house. Here, it was those who had always been here who might have been in danger of feeling shyly outnumbered, though they kept their end up well. It was warmer here than Durmstrang, and it was good to be in the common room and know his ancestors had passed their school days here, and there was doubtless far more amusement and fellow feeling at the situation than in other houses, but Draco wasn’t happy.
He knew his parents had been unsure what to do with him and were still unsatisfied that they had made the safest choice. Grindelwald’s British Knights of Walpurgis were feeling insecurity in the air. They were beginning to think of themselves as on the defensive rather than the offensive, and it was not a position they had signed up to take.
Blaise, Daphne, Theo and Millicent, the Slytherin students in Draco’s year who’d always been at Hogwarts, were used to that position of resistance, comfortable and proud in it - though Draco was pretty sure from a coy intonation in Theo’s voice and an allusion or two from his classmates that Mr Nott was a supporter of Voldemort, making Theo a different kettle of fish altogether. Draco’s aunt was one of Voldemort’s followers too, Draco knew, though his parents would rather he was unaware. So this wasn’t a new thing to him, he told himself, though his parents didn’t have much to do with Bellatrix.
“I like to feel there’s a challenge for me to get my teeth into, and one way or another, there will be,” said Blaise had said last night. “But you must have expected things to be always very easy if you’re so shocked to be here.”
He was looking at Draco. Draco was ruffled by the idea his shock had been undisguised, and even as he wanted to say something that made him look tough, he was unable to get his teeth round the lie that he too wanted the world to be unsure and challenging.
This morning he was sullen and determined to face down the day. He felt this was necessary, though he had Crabbe and Goyle and Pansy around him, the same as ever. Pansy kept throwing deliberately unimpressed little glances around her as they emerged from the dungeons.
Over breakfast, Blaise and Daphne pointed out to them some of the old students of other houses. Draco had known of course that he’d be going to school with Muggleborns, but it was a shock to find himself so close to them in the here and now. “We’ll be having Potions with Dean Thomas and Hermione Granger first lesson,” said Daphne, to bring it home to him. “Granger is really annoying but Thomas is alright.” Was he to be expected to find Muggleborns “alright”? “And also there’s Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, have you heard of their parents?”
“In the Order of the Phoenix, yes, I know,” said Draco. He felt more and more as if he’d entered an alternative universe.
Potions was interesting though, in a way he hadn’t expected. Professor Snape was elaborately horrid to everyone, but after a while it was possible to detect subtleties and different depths in his horridness. The bottomless pit of it was reserved for Harry Potter, in a way that would have seemed embarrassingly revealing on Snape’s part if he hadn’t been so intimidating. Revealing of what, Draco couldn’t quite decide. He’d half formed a crude scenario of forbidden lust, sublimated or disguised, but got side-tracked by a couple of references to Potter’s father, which were received with gritted teeth and attempted resignation. Theo Nott got off with some almost light-hearted facetiousness. Snape bombarded the new students with questions, and Draco found that his own answers were accepted, where Snape had otherwise almost always some subtlety to bring the student up smartly on.
Did Snape’s interests lie, perhaps, with Voldemort? Did he know that Theo Nott’s father was involved with him, or that Draco’s parents would not be unwilling to involve themselves if given reason? It interested Draco, to think that the power struggles of the moment penetrated everything here, and that he himself might take part from a classroom, but then it also slowed his thoughts. Lord Voldemort, still a shadowy figure, seemed to have become a little more sharply defined, in a way that made Draco wonder whether he liked shadows.
Grindelwald was fierce and formidable and uncompromising and had cowed completely several nations, but he was a man of theory as well as action. Draco was used to feeling that his power extended to the classroom, in that many of the ways he had been taught at Durmstrang to interpret magic and the world was based on Grindelwald’s writings. Everything about Voldemort that Draco had heard was more uncushioned by drowsy afternoons over textbooks; a simple choice between annihilation and elevation. He was new, essentially. He wasn’t the establishment. Draco wasn’t sure yet which he preferred.
*
In his office, Dumbledore sighed, his head lowered in thought. It ought to be a right, joyous thing to fill the school with students again, but he was unable to tell if treating with Gellert was a sign of strength or if he was only falling again to his first temptation. Was Voldemort any worse? Had Gellert truly learned, as he claimed, something like humility? Nonetheless, the new students learning to mix with those they had been taught to spurn would do them good. Wherever they went when they left Hogwarts, whatever they did, they would know that Muggleborns and Blood Traitors had names and faces. He had wondered sometimes whether in offering Hogwarts to those who dared accept it he was offering them more danger than he should let them accept, but now those at risk, and those at risk of being a risk, had at least the protection of that chance.
*
Draco had realised that those other students were human. It took a while, but only a short one, during which he tried not to stare too much. But they were just ordinary people who got up his nose. They were so smug. He hated their patronising overtures, their assumption that he was in the process of realising everything he’d ever learnt was wrong.
It was so clear that as far as they were concerned, they were, not only physically, in the right place, and would never have to move from it, whereas hard work and squeezing himself into a round hole was his role. It took him another while to feel comfortable being himself and stop automatically assuming the façade of what people here wanted him to be. He and his friends stopped worrying about the implications of the political situation for them and began to feel disaffected and satisfyingly weary.
Draco in particular liked jibing at other students, trying to get them to see what morons they were to take themselves so seriously. Well, he liked jibing at some of them. Some of the Hufflepuffs cried, getting their Hufflepuff friends involved, who blustered, puffed and flushed, which was amusing, only they didn’t shut up and go away once it’d stopped being amusing. The Ravenclaws would argue that they didn’t take themselves seriously, or argue their reasons for doing so, and that got tedious too.
The Gryffindors were definitely the best, in a worst kind of way. They were the ones provoked to genuine outrage when Draco or Pansy said how stupid the Order of the Phoenix was. They all had relatives and things who had fallen in battle, and somehow when he was around them Draco found himself wanting to make them feel they’d died for nothing.
It was a weird, wriggling kind of glee that he felt when he saw Potter’s and Weasleys’s faces crumple with rage. He didn’t let Granger puncture it when she said his childishness disgusted and astonished her. He had what he needed in her friends. Potter was the best, somehow. There was something more tightly contained about him. He was not actually harder to stir up than Weasley, but it seemed like it should be.
Sometimes, or at least, once or twice, Draco admitted to himself that he envied Potter a little. He seemed less bored and more sure than Draco, and while Draco had always been satisfied with the amount of glamour in his own background, Potter had a share of a different kind, with his defiant, daredevil relatives, who he would join when he left school. Not to mention that thing with a basilisk Draco had always refused to hear the details of. Draco had always looked forward to getting his foot on the ladder, beginning some rungs up, at the Ministry of Magic. Nothing seemed quite satisfactory these days.
*
“I don’t know why you don’t ignore him. Surely you can see that roaring with rage makes him happy,” said Hermione.
“He doesn’t really get to me,” Harry assured her.
Hermione looked disbelieving.
“No, not really,” he repeated. “It’s practice, isn’t it? He reminds me what’s out there, and it reminds me how petty and worthless it really is. An encounter with him fills me with faith for the future.” It was easy to get complacent when you were surrounded by like-minded people who were always assuring themselves and you that the other side was no match, and all that was needed was for a new generation to launch a new attack. He was glad he was having this exposure.
*
For all Harry’s congratulating himself that he was preparing himself as well as possible for the reality of evil, he hadn’t learnt to expect the unexpected. He was scuttling down a long winding staircase, on his way to Herbology after Snape had delayed him, when a younger boy, Peregrine Cartwright, Harry thought his name was, called to him from the top. He almost pretended not to hear in favour of plunging on, but his better self prevailed and he looked back towards the top of the stairs.
“I was coming to fetch you,” Perry panted. “Professor McGonagall wants you - not just you. You’re all to wait in one of the attics in North Tower. I think she wants to talk to you without anyone knowing.”
Harry didn’t know what he expected. Some sudden, obscure difficulty she wished to consult certain of her students with, privately? The flimsiest wisps of suppositions flitted through his mind, as he hurried after Perry, like trying to recapture a dream. Peregrine trotted always ahead of him, so that Harry had to keep his wits about him not to lose him round corners, and couldn’t ask him anything further.
As promised, Peregrine led him to one of the attics, large but not often used, where people were already waiting, craning forward curiously as the door opened, and relaxing again as they saw it was Peregrine and Harry. Harry caught Ron’s eye and they greeted each other with happy surprise. Harry made his way over to sit next to him, and noticed that there was an odd selection of people in the attic. What did McGonagall want with Draco Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson, for a start?
Harry and Ron exchanged no more than a couple of words before breaking off to look at Perry Cartwright, swishing his wand about and dramatically declaiming the words of a spell, almost ferociously affecting a cloak-swirling suavity that came oddly from him. He relaxed after that though, plumping himself down on what looked like a giant tortoise shell, and looking alertly towards the door in a way that made Harry think of a happy mouse sniffing the air.
“What was that for?” Blaise Zabini called, but he wasn’t answered.
“Is he supposed to wait as well, then?” he asked Ron, who shrugged.
“Did Professor McGonagall give a particular time, Perry?” asked Ginny Weasley.
“Just that she’d see us here as soon as she could,” Peregrine said.
Harry hoped Professor McGonagall had a good reason for depriving them of education like this. Some people were looking very worried, Harry saw as he looked around. Most of the Slytherins looked bored, swinging their legs and twitching their hair in some cases, or simply sunk deeply into themselves.
There were several stages to waiting. For quite some time, the group in the attic remained in the first stage, that of confident assurance that they had only to wait to be rewarded. Then waiting seemed like a burden punishing their muscles as they struggled under its weight. Did Professor McGonagall really expect them to spend the afternoon sitting in an attic? No matter the circumstances, she could show some consideration, couldn’t she? She couldn’t be much longer, could she? Had she changed her mind?
Draco Malfoy had remained in much the same catatonic state throughout this, but he finally roused himself. “I’m going. If the old bat wants me she can come and get me,” he said.
Those watching him were not entirely unsupportive. It seemed as if it would be so typical of Malfoy to leave just before Professor Mcgonagall got there that it made her arrival seem more imminent, and in any case, they could give up themselves without having to be the first to break away. These thoughts were swiftly broken off when Malfoy began to swear, tugging at the door.
All at once, Harry knew, positively flooded with bitter, belated acuteness. “It’s a trap,” he muttered, standing up.
“You,” said Malfoy, turning on Peregrine and shaking his finger at him in a way that Harry noticed with amused contempt even now. “What the fuck are you playing at?”
Perry looked as if he had a bad migraine, his hand rising to cup his temple, his brow screwed up. Then he backed away from Malfoy, who hadn’t even begun to reach for his wand or make to physically grab him, and screamed, a good rich, committed scream, his eyes shut.
“What is wrong with that kid?”
“Is he ill? Or jinxed?”
Perry opened his eyes and looked at his hostile audience, pale and shaky. “We just have to wait. That’s all. Professor McGonagall said so.”
The story had already begun to shake, and was quite shattered after his display, and Draco’s discovery of the locked door.
“Perhaps it wasn’t Professor McGonagall,” said Susan Bones. “Perhaps it was someone pretending to be her.”
“I think he always knew he was lying,” said Harry.
He moved forwards and gripped Perry’s shoulder, trying to look into his face and discover what was wrong with him. He seemed to Harry to be caught between two states, which made him wonder if he was struggling under Imperius. Harry didn’t know what he was looking for. Peregrine’s eyes looked back at him, fearfully, and blinked.
Ron came forward to try Alohomora on the door himself, not trusting Malfoy.
“We’re trapped. We’re seriously trapped in here,” he told Harry. “You’ve taken us hostage,” he told Perry, who had sunk back onto the tortoise shell, his legs tucked under him.
He looked tragically resigned, as if a weight he knew would fall on him had fallen, and squashed him, as he knew it would. Something about him had an off-putting effect. He was surrounded by furious and frightened people who only stared at him instead of demanding answers or begging to be let out.
Perhaps no one wanted to know what plan was at work in this attic with them, Harry thought, finding himself racking his brains for something to do, rather than silently stare.
Ginny set the furniture banging itself against the floor (most who had been sitting on it got off, but not Peregrine, who let himself be jogged up and down) and enhanced her screams of “Help” with Sonorus. Everyone joined in, while Peregrine stared ahead.
*
It was strange to remember that stage later, when things had been made clear. The time for this was not deemed right until everyone was worn out with despair.
Harry looked up as he heard a foot tread on the creaking floor. Everyone did, and was held by the sight as if it had them by the throat. Peregrine Cartwright was curled up on the floor, and, seeming in some troubling way to be standing in him, rising out of him, was an older boy, dark and sleek, looking around him with pleasure and confidence.
“I thought your minds might be more at rest if I introduced myself,” he said. “The unknown is said to be the most frightening of all, and I don’t want to be needlessly unkind. I am known at this time as Tom Riddle, but I do prefer to be addressed, with more formality, as Lord Voldemort. Yes, you are tiresomely incredulous,” he continued. “But it is indeed ‘really me’.” Pansy Parkinson flushed violently. “There is more of me than there is of other people. That is all you need to know.”
“You’re not quite all here, though,” said Harry. “So there’s not that much of you.”
“Ah yes, the Potters’ son. I’m sure you felt very brave when you killed the basilisk. And I’m sure you’re very proud of your brave parents. Fortunately for both of us, they will feel less brave at the prospect of your death.”
“They won’t,” said Harry, foolishly, really. He knew they would, but at that moment he wanted them to be inhumanly calm, prepared to give up their son rather than yield in any way to this pompous boy, and the wizard out in the world who still contained him.
Looking around him, he could see that many of the students had been strategically chosen; people like Draco Malfoy whose parents were quite likely to be interested in joining Voldemort but could do with a push, and people like himself, whose parents would never consider it and whose submission would therefore be a great coup. If his parents refused to treat with Voldemort, he could kill Harry and still call it a good day’s work. It was disaster, and the lives of those in the attic had become forfeit even if they were allowed out of it alive.
“We have to think of something,” Harry muttered to Ron.
Ron took a moment to respond. He nodded slowly. “A plan. We need a plan,” he said numbly.
So that was all arranged.
*
The whole Peregrine Cartwright/Tom Riddle thing was awkward. For some of the time, Perry was just Perry, almost the same slightly odd thirteen year old Harry vaguely remembered. If he’d always seemed morose, he was even less cheerful now. He seemed to feel the strain less of the prospect of an early death than the pressure of concealing the exact role he’d played in events while he tried to join the ranks of his fellow victims. He’d been possessed, he said, and that much seemed obvious, but possessed how, and for how long, and whether he could have done anything about it, he chose not to make clear. Even if the others could have felt friendly and trusting towards Perry being just Perry (and some of them felt sorry for him, and tried) this was made much more difficult by the fact that Tom Riddle was quite frequently lurking in there. It was quite easy to tell when this happened, once they’d familiarised themselves with Just Perry’s mannerisms, but that did not compensate for the suddenness.
The attic wasn’t really big enough to leave Perry in isolation for most of the time, but when they saw Riddle in him they would shrink instinctively, finding themselves on the other side of the room without conscious memory of getting there. Riddle did not take on his own form again, but Harry thought that was choice rather than inability.
“I can’t really picture him just sitting around with us. I suppose it would take away some of the glamour,” Ron whispered.
*
“I thought things would happen quite quickly,” said Harry. “I thought something would happen.”
“I didn’t think we’d have to worry about starving to death,” said Ron.
Harry thought two more days passed after this. They were very unpleasant, and he had to keep reminding himself that he’d always expected to have to deal with unpleasantness. Then Tom Riddle also brought up this concern that this were not going as expected - or so it seemed to the onlookers who were not privy to the conversation that was taking place in Perry’s head.
“No!” Perry finally shouted with triumphant tones, lying, sweaty, on the floor. “I didn’t leave the message. And you never noticed I didn’t because I was too clever for you. I am a brilliant Occlumens. My mind is as strong as steel. So no one knows we are here.”
“And that’s good because…?” asked Pansy Parkinson, looking as if she was considering kicking Perry.
Perry was back on the “mind as strong as steel” track, and Harry almost wished she would. It was like watching embarrassing amateur dramatics with the knowledge that there was something very disturbing driving the histrionics. But then Riddle seemed to give him a good talking to, and Perry’s body language gradually became more subdued. Everyone eyed him very warily as he slowly got to his feet. Perhaps Riddle would get impatient with Plan A and skip to Plan B: killing them all. They weren’t expecting Perry to open the door. No one’s reflexes were especially quick, though Pansy managed to rush forwards and might just have made it if there hadn’t been some kind of force field around the door that she bounced off of.
“I suppose you can tell how he got where he is,” said Draco Malfoy. “He doesn’t use magic like other people.” The cold looks sent his way seemed not to disturb him.
“If he comes back, we need to ask Perry what the fuck he’s been playing at,” said Ron. “Were you as weird when you were possessed, Gin?”
Ginny shrugged. “Just about,” she said. “I think Perry thinks he can have his cake and eat it. Have Tom’s company and the excitement of it without letting himself be just a tool.”
Harry thought that the excitement must surely have changed into something darker and heavier by now. He wondered if it mattered, whether Perry still had (if he ever had) any power to stop playing if he was no longer enjoying the game.
“It must make it different for him,” said Harry, “Knowing who’s possessing him - more like having an imaginary friend who’s real, if you see what I mean. You never got to understand what was happening to you, so I guess you weren’t as likely to think you were in control.”
Ginny looked as if she was going to say something, but got distracted.
Perry came back, which they had not been sure of. They weren’t glad to see him, though neither did they feel abandonment could have improved the situation.
“We’ve got food,” said Perry. He was speaking as Perry, yet they could feel Riddle, cold and sardonic, present somehow even in words that were not his.
“But does anyone know we’re here? Didn’t you see anyone?” asked Susan wistfully, obviously imagining Dumbledore coming across a Voldemort-possessed student and sorting the whole thing out at once.
“No one saw me,” (Not the same as him seeing no one, Harry noticed) “but I did leave the note this time. So probably all your Mummies and Daddies will be along soon, which is what you wanted.”
“So it’s really like we’ve just been kidnapped,” said Draco, looking cheered. The eerie waiting, with its hunger headaches, had somehow been cancelled out, apparently, leaving him, more than ever, one of the more content with the situation.
“I bet they’ve already guessed what’s happened. I mean, even if they didn’t get a message, obviously we’ve been missing. And they’ve probably told our parents, I mean they should have done. So they’ll probably all already know what they’re going to do,” said Pansy. She made it sound simple. Harry envisioned students being calmly plucked out of the attic one by one, like chocolates from a box, the children of the stonily strong-minded left behind, unappealing. He could not really believe there would be any stony, strong-minded parents.
“So why didn’t you leave that message the first time? If you could manage not to do that, maybe you could have managed not to get us all up here. How can this be your idea of fun?” asked Ron.
Perry looked at Ron with determined scorn. “Why does anyone do anything?”
“I’m asking why you did this.”
“To see what happened?” said Perry, asking rather than telling. Harry thought they should remember that, quite apart from the obvious fact that Perry didn’t want to talk about his inner workings, Riddle was present. If by chance there were things Perry had managed to keep from him, and it seemed like there might be, he didn’t need to be told about them.
There was food, Perry reminded them by slightly raising his laden arms, and food, they were willing to admit, was really what they cared most about now.
In a little while, Harry told himself, he must try and make a plan, if only to pass the time. Surely there was a bright, clever, daring plan in the ether, just for him.
If he had been moving oddly slowly towards it, weighed down by the very thing that necessitated it, Ginny had been moving even slower. Having started earlier, during the surreal nightmare that had been her first year at Hogwarts, she got there first. She had spent her time in the farthest corner of the attic from Perry, but now she wandered gradually towards him, taking her time, having genuine conversation with the people between them, so that no one noticed her progress.
Harry noticed it when she was behind Perry, her back turned to his, leaning down to get another sandwich. Hunger or deliberate bravery, he noted in passing. She ate the sandwich, and drifted past Perry. People began to pay attention when she suddenly seemed to have dashed back. Some of them had a vague impression of her hand having flicked out and snatched something from Perry. Perry would have pounced on her but Anthony Goldstein had instinctively held him back, and Ron joined him.
Harry was looking at Perry, kicking and biting and struggling to get to his wand, and wondering if he too was needed to restrain him. He didn’t see what Ginny was doing, but only heard the whoosh and felt the warm wind that swept the attic. Fiendfyre: always a good way of destroying Horcruxes and anything else. Harry looked away from the fireball and Ginny’s set, hypnotised face to Perry, in time to see Riddle leave Perry. Perry looked startlingly soft and young; Harry had been used to seeing him edged with Riddle and had forgotten what he was really like. Riddle was now screaming in the midst of the fireball. Why would he want to go and be in there, Harry wondered stupidly.
“Aguamenti!” screamed Susan. The water had no effect on the flames that had taken hold. Harry, driven like the others to the edges of the room, realised that they were all going to die.
*
The universe shook itself impatiently.
*
The universe stood still for Draco as he stood on top of the tower with his wand raised, and he knew he had to make up his mind before it began again. No more burning rooms, he thought nonsensically.
“Where can I be safe?” he asked.
Dumbledore told him. Draco tried to fix it in his mind. He lowered his wand. If this was what he was doing now, what came next?
He didn’t know why Dumbledore had bothered to plead with him, because it was too late. Snape came up to finish him off before Draco could even make up his mind to go back to the original plan and have one last go himself. And then they had to run for it and everything seemed so wasted and pointless. He couldn’t carry out his mission and he couldn’t join the other side. He felt so weak, and he’d wanted to feel so strong. He didn’t understand how things had ended up this way.
*
Draco didn’t feel any better, or not much, once the night was over. The Dark Lord had chosen Malfoy Manor for his quarters, but this seemed to confer less power and privilege on the Malfoys than Draco would have thought. He could see that his father was not getting quite what he’d expected and wanted, either.
What they really wanted, Draco realised, was the quiet, prosperous life, complete with Muggle-loving fools to complain about, that they’d had in the Dark Lord’s absence. They’d made a mistake.
Draco didn’t want to be here, where it was only becoming clearer that he was the worst, most useless Death Eater, taken seriously by no one. Perhaps it was not too late to find somewhere else to be. Like Number 12, Grimmauld Place.
He had to talk to his mother.
“Mother, when I was on the tower with Dumbledore, he said there was somewhere I could go if I didn’t want to do it. He said you could come. He told me where it was.” Draco was too ashamed of what he was proposing to actually propose it, but he had made it clear. It was too late to take it back, but he didn’t think his mother would be angry with him. Unless this time he’d really shocked her. He became convinced in the silence that he had.
“I can’t come,” said Narcissa at last. “I can’t leave your father, and he will not want to leave. Not yet, at least. Also, if I came it would look more serious. A teenager running away alone is different. He could be anywhere, and could have gone for a number of different reasons. If I went, it makes it look more sensible, more planned, I think. More something to quash. I will understand if you leave. But you had better understand that if you leave, they will look for you and kill you if they find you. Don’t tell me about your plan. But think about it very carefully.” She had sounded almost abstracted for much of this, calmly considering, but became more fervent, wanting Draco to understand exactly what she meant.
Draco didn’t even have a plan. His mother hadn’t really added to his peace of mind. Not only was she staying behind, which he had half expected, but she had not made him feel either of his options were validated. He got the idea she wanted him to have a plan to leave here, and would be disappointed if he continued trailing around here, but thought the plan should be a proper guarantee of safety. He felt more unsafe about staying or going than before. And there seemed something unattractive about leaving his parents like a rat off a sinking ship. He would surely not be able to contact them once he left. They would be on opposite sides of a war. Why had his mother not told him it was a terrible idea?
He never did make up his mind in the end. He just went.
*
He screamed. Dumbledore was back, demanding something of him. He covered his head so he wouldn’t have to see, hoping the running feet he could hear would do something about it. He dared to look up some moments later, when he felt his wand being snatched out of his sleeve. He would have liked to enter with it in his hand, but he’d known it wouldn’t send the right message. Remus Lupin was looking at him coolly, holding him at wandpoint.
“We knew Dumbledore gave you the address,” said Lupin. “So though we have not been able to use the place as a safehouse, we have been checking it every day.”
Draco wondered if he should apologise for keeping them waiting, but was distracted by being magically bound and levitated into a dining room. He’d expected it, he told himself, as Lupin summoned members of the Order (the Order he was hoping to join, God, this felt so unnatural) to interrogate him. He hadn’t expected them to be nice to him, unsuspicious and welcoming. He hadn’t expected it to feel quite so much like letting himself in for being taken hostage, though.
They gave him Veritaserum. So there went his plans to appear noble. Draco wished Veritaserum made you feel drunk or something, so you wouldn’t mind hearing your own voice telling people things you didn’t want them to know, and looking at their faces while they were listening.
“I think he’s harmless,” said Sturgis Podmore. “But he seems to be coming to us like we’re a charitable institution. I suppose we have to take him, but it’s a bit of a burden.”
“I’ll try and be useful,” said Draco. “I will.” He hated the taste of sincerity in his mouth, like soap, like humbleness, and would have liked to slip into comfortable irony and impudence, that committed him to nothing, but a wiser part of him knew what was appropriate.
“The problem is he’s so likely to switch sides; I can foresee all kinds of situations,” said Hestia Jones. “It’s a shame we can’t get him to take an Unbreakable Vow.”
“I might take one. You could tell me what, exactly, you’d like me to vow,” said Draco.
There was a long silence. “No. It’s not you that means we can’t, it’s ourselves,” said Hestia.
“I don’t think we’ll be involving you in much for a while. We’ll have to have a think about how we can best use you. We are glad you’ve come here,” said Lupin.
Draco smiled thinly, unconvinced. They turned to immediacies, like what was going to happen to him right now. The answer seemed to be “Get on with whatever else they’d been doing that day and leave him here,” though it obviously felt lacking.
“We can use the place again now. So there will be people coming and going. And I think soon we’ll need somewhere to offer as a refuge. I’ll just go and tell Kreacher to get some shopping in,” said Hestia.
There was some more going through was he really, really in earnest, with the members reminding themselves of the more reassuring things he’d said under Veritaserum, and then Draco was left alone in an empty house. It was a lonely anti-climax. He comforted himself with the thought that they were obviously all shitting themselves about whether he was going to sell them down the river. If Dumbledore had still been around, he’d probably have been better able to convince them that he was a reformed character. Draco tried to like the idea of himself as an icy chill within the Order of the Phoenix, but now he was in the Order he wanted it to be something warm and strong and secure that he could join to make himself feel right again. But he’d brought himself with him.
*
It got better, or at least, for whiles at a time he’d think he was beginning to settle in before realising that no, it was still strange and horrible and wrong for him. Draco was bored for so much of the time, but when people were there it was usually difficult. He felt they never forgot he was a Malfoy. It was like he was playing a part in a play that he wasn’t sure whether to make eye-catchingly innovative or a lineless crowd member. All that he did know was that he mustn’t be himself.
At first they would have him make the tea, to test his willingness as a humble junior not-really-member, and then go away without hearing the meetings. Draco didn’t try to listen anyway; he had no appetite for knowledge these days. Soon, however, they steeled themselves, and opened up, just in time for most of what Draco heard to be about getting Potter safely to the Weasleys. He’d almost forgotten that The Other Side was essentially Potterland, though now he didn’t know how he could have. Some of them were going to disguise themselves as Potter and act as decoys in case of attack. So risky, thought Draco, and remembered that self-sacrifice was what he’d signed up for.
“What about Draco?” asked Bill Weasley. “He’s got to do something sometime.”
Everyone looked at him. Draco was recoiling, hopefully not too visibly. This was what he’d signed up for, he reminded himself again.
“He’d lose his head,” said Moody in the end. “We need to toughen him up. Then he can do something sometime. I never did get to teach Defence Against the Dark Arts.”
Oh joy. Moody had not been among those brought in to interrogate Draco; Draco suspected this was in case he frightened Draco back to the Death Eaters. Draco knew Moody had wanted to run all kinds of magical tests on him but had not been allowed - more because they were a waste of time and Moody’s crackpottery was not to be encouraged too much than to protect Draco.
*
Moody’s lessons were one of Draco’s dips into despair. It was like mental torture - it was mental torture. Moody was a vaguely more humanoid Dementor, whose presence made Draco feel his own hollowness. He had nothing to offer in response to Moody’s attacks, no strength or wit or comprehension. It was like Moody was his own nothingness. Realising that he had learned a little scraping of something, that he was quicker physically and mentally than he had been when he’d started, was one of his delusive periods of cheering up.
Then they all went off to provide Potter with his escort, and Moody was killed. That was a shock. The war that killed people rather than just making Draco miserable was more real than it had been since he came to Grimmauld Place. And if Moody, who had seemed so formidable, could be killed by the side Draco had abandoned… For once he didn’t have to pretend; everyone was a little stunned.
“Does Potter know I’m here?” Draco asked Lupin quietly, towards the end of the meeting.
“Not yet. I think, on the whole, he’ll be pleased.”
Draco wasn’t sure why he wanted Potter to know about what was, really, his submission to Potter. His “I give in, you were right.” But also, perhaps, his “Look at me.”
*
In what felt to Draco like no time at all, Potter, Weasley and Granger were living with him, finding themselves all of a sudden on the run. It wasn’t that much less frightening than the Dark Lord moving into the Manor, he thought. “It’s not that much less frightening than the Dark Lord moving in with us,” he said, to break the ice. They laughed a bit, but went back to looking awkward. Much awkwardness followed - much trying to include him in conversation and much going away to have conversations privately.
“There’s things we’re not talking to anybody else about,” Potter and Granger assured him earnestly.
If he hadn’t been on his best behaviour he’d have suggested they were off having threesome sex. Come to think of it, he envied their threesomeness. They seemed such a unit.
After a while, he began to see that they were not always a unit. Sometimes they were Ron/Hermione and Harry, and sometimes, when Harry was feeling this, he came to talk to Draco. Mostly about the weather, at first.
“I still have to actively work at not insulting you,” said Draco. “It’s like a nervous habit.”
“Oh, me too,” said Harry. There was a pause. “Do you regret the choice you made?” he
asked, bringing up the more serious issues in their minds for the first time. “I don’t mean it like scrutinising your loyalty,” he hastened to add; “I’m not asking officially, I just wondered how you were feeling.”
“I don’t know. I regret all available choices, I suppose. I think they’re all pretty shit.”
Harry nodded solemnly. “The argument for choosing us, of course, is that we’re working to
change that and give people more choices.”
“I’m not playing much part in that. Or any.” Draco didn’t mention that that was another
example of shit choices all around: play a useful, dangerous, difficult part or continue feeling awkward, disliked, distrusted, and extraneous.
“Yeah, I think we do need to find something real for you to do,” said Harry.
Draco was silent for a moment. “Do you think “we” are going to win this war?” He could not yet say we without ironic quotation marks.
“In the end we will,” said Harry. “But I don’t think you can do it, fight against Voldemort, I mean, just because you think you’re going to win and then everything will be easy for you again. You have to do it because being on his side is worse than losing against him.”
Draco nodded slowly, feeling as if he was being chastened. “But thinking about how you’re going to win and then everything will be great can help you to fight. Look at it this way, if you want Slytherins to be on your side, rather than dying nobly all alone, then remember we bring our Slytherin selves - and Slytherin strengths.”
“I know, I know, all that stuff about houses uniting. I didn’t mean to make it about that. Just, please, don’t get discouraged and go back to the other side. That’s what I wanted to say.”
“I wouldn’t dare go back to the other side. I’d be killed horribly, wouldn’t I? ? You’re stuck with me,” said Draco, only now fully realising this.
*
He didn’t entirely stop resenting Harry. He stopped hating him personally, and believing that when Draco couldn’t see him he rolled around in his fame and glory as the Boy Who Lived with the disgusting glee of a pig in a pig-sty. But Harry was still the centre of everything, the opposition against the Dark Lord. Whatever Draco did, he would never be as important. It didn’t matter if Harry didn’t like being important, or if being the person who had to bring Voldemort down was demanding and frightening. Draco did begin to think, though, about the separation he made between ideas of importance, fame and praise, and doing difficult and frightening things. Even in a habitually unfair world, Draco was beginning to see that it was illogical to covet one while instinctively rejecting the other. Perhaps, in envying the appearance of the thing, he had all along been fascinated by the thing itself.
Even to be Lupin, he thought, mortified, would be something. They had forgotten about teaching him things after Moody’s death, but Lupin remembered, and as well as giving him some lessons himself had said “You could go over a few things with him, Harry.” Lupin may have been hired out of pity but he was, Draco admitted now, quite good. To be good at fighting the Dark Arts was almost as glamorous as being good at the Dark Arts, and he’d already tried and failed that. He moped for a while. He suspected both of them, when it came down to it, were too real and nasty for him.
He tried, though, even while living in his failure.
“It’s great to try,” said Harry one day, alarmingly seeming to pick up on Draco’s inner monologue. “Neville is better than you when he tries than you when you don’t. In fact, he can be pretty good. So you’ve got no excuse not to do what you can. More than the other subjects, Defence is about what you are more than what you can do. I think that’s what I like about it.”
“But that’s what I worry about,” said Draco, not looking at Harry. “I can’t change who I am.”
“I think you can, in a way. I think you can change what you do with yourself. Like you can try at this instead of what you used to be doing, and I think that makes all the difference in the world.”
The problem with trying was that it meant feelings like this, as Draco tried to swallow his pride and his resentment of Harry being the one to give advice on how to be a better person. Trying meant admitting he wasn’t perfect already. It was hard and it went against the grain.
*
The others were especially busy discussing something secret these days. Draco didn’t exactly think they should tell him about it, especially as they claimed they didn’t talk to anyone else about it either, but it still made him feel a little hollow. Especially when they could not contain the momentous thing, whatever it was, and got to the stage of thinking of little things to contribute to their discussion when they were not alone, and would step aside for a moment to mutter, or pass a note.
“Maybe we should take Draco, to help,” said Harry, out loud, in the end.
Hermione and Ron looked at Draco, startled.
“I don’t think we should,” said Hermione. “Because of him as well as because of us. It’s not fair to take him to do something dangerous without telling him why we want to. Well, when I put it like that, I suppose people do that all the time. But we shouldn’t. We’re going to the Ministry,” she explained to Draco.
“I don’t mind if I don’t know exactly what you want to do there. I know that everything you want to do is really about one thing,” said Draco, his heart thumping. He felt as if he was on the verge of a great transformation, that he welcomed even as it did violence to him.
“No. It wouldn’t be a real choice. I don’t mean we have a goal that you wouldn’t agree with if you knew, but you might not agree with our way of going about it. And we can’t give you the chance to help us think of a better one. But thank you for offering,” said Harry, in a manner that obviously closed the matter.
So he didn’t go, and he was relieved, but then disappointed. That was the way to be a different person, he thought - to do different things, and think of little else besides the desired difference. He hoped when a real opportunity came he wouldn’t freeze like he had on the Tower.
*
Draco wandered around the house when they had gone to do their thing at the Ministry. Perhaps they would not return, or at least, not all of them. It was clear from what they had said that they were doing something not only dangerous but stupid, perhaps badly thought-out. If it was Weasley who didn’t come back, he must be careful not to show too clearly that it would be “only” Weasley as far as Draco was concerned.
They did all come back, but only for a second, and it was Weasley who, being nearest, shot out his hand for Draco just as Draco realised they were not alone, and they were gone again.
*
If his self of a few months ago could see him now, in a tent with Potter, Weasley and Granger. The drollness cheered him a little, but it was worse than sharing a house with Potter, Weasley and Granger had been, and not just because of the increased proximity. They claimed that their mission had gone well, mostly, but there was plainly something they were worrying about. Draco had expected them to contact the Order and ask where they should go now, but no, camping for the foreseeable future was the plan. He was a little thrown off too by the fact that he barely needed to whine about things like missing Kreacher’s cooking; Weasley and Potter apparently minded even more. He found himself having a lot of conversations with Hermione, who was clearly the one making the most effort not to succumb to sullen fractiousness. The sense that they were ignoring the dragon in the room made these conversations fairly unsatisfying, however.
Ron grew harder and harder to tolerate. Draco had to sit on himself hard not to show his irritation, because he was pretty sure that if he did Harry and Hermione would take theirs out on him. Abstaining from retaliating was like playing the saintly little boy in Snape’s classes to infuriate them, really, but in a more subdued note and more realistically.
Despite everything, it was depressing when Ron left. Draco wished he could point out to Harry and Hermione how annoying he’d been and have them agree that it was good to be without him, so the tent would be without this dreadful, dragging feeling of unease. But he knew it didn’t work like that.
A night or two later, he thought things over, absent-mindedly watching Harry’s side rise and fall across the tent. If Harry and Hermione could continue without Ron if they had to, then what possible use was he, who didn’t know what they were trying to achieve? Instead of trailing behind them without questioning, he should ask himself where the best place for him to be was. Surely it wasn’t really in this tent. Whatever happened in the end, he wouldn’t be able to claim he’d had a hand in it at this rate.
Now, he realised, suddenly still and breathless, was a good time, if ever there was one. Harry and Hermione were both asleep. The tent was quiet; only the sound of quiet breathing and the wind in the trees to be heard. It seemed suddenly a nice sound. If Draco was to slip away, he would have to leave them a note. Mysterious disappearances were really not what Harry and Hermione needed right now. He Summoned a piece of parchment and a quill and carefully slid upright, hoping the scratching of the quill wouldn’t waken them.
I’m going to go back to the Order. I don’t think this is the right place for me to be.
He put it on his pillow. If this didn’t work, he could just come back and replace the note with himself. He wondered what the other two would think, on seeing it.
Draco felt very brave, slipping out of his warm(ish) bed into the cold night. He scrambled through the trees, not looking back. He was still near enough to the tent to return in a matter of moments. He took out his wand. He’d never tried this before, though he’d been taken through the theory a couple of times. He hadn’t wanted to fail. Draco thought of the way he’d felt when he was ten, and thought he was a child flying prodigy, and the way he’d felt when he thought he was going to go to the Ministry on that mission. A mixture of fear and triumph, like the beginning of great things, that was what he wanted.
Thank God. He had a Patronus, a fox. It seemed beautiful to him; he wanted to pet it. He sent his message to Lupin, after some indecision, just because he was the Order member he’d seen most of, and leaned back against a tree to look at the stars and wait.
*
It was the right thing to do. He did brave things for the Order, went on perilous missions and fought duels and used his wits and cunning to lead on the other side and beat them. He never wanted the war to be over. He was the perfect Draco, a fighter after all.
*
The universe felt nauseated.
*
Part Two
Summary: The night Harry returns to Hogwarts for one last year, he and his companions are thrown into chaos. Draco comes face to face with himself time after time and has to decide who he wants to be.
Warnings: None, I think
Word Count: 19,825
Written for hd_holidays. Thank you very much to celestlyn for beta reading.
Another silence fell in the carriage. Not a bad one, despite everything - warm and heavy, mingling light and dark like the evening air outside. It felt odd to be heading towards Hogwarts for another year, but probably not as odd as it would have done had they not spent much of the summer helping to repair the castle. Harry hadn’t felt that he could say his goodbye to Hogwarts and leave it in that state. Over the weeks people began to talk more about the school year to come than the year just past, until Harry found that his own participation in it was taken for granted. Harry was not one who could not extricate himself from commitments vicariously assigned to him, but he found himself agreeing with Ron and Hermione when they tentatively said, “It seems right, doesn’t it?”
“It’d be good to feel that we finished ourselves and not that we finished when we had to,” said Harry, and after that it was agreed.
Not that everything was agreed or being done the neat, proper way, thought Harry again as he looked at Ginny and Ron and Hermione, ignoring Neville and Luna for the present. Neither he and Ginny nor Ron and Hermione were really together, nor yet absolutely, permanently apart. Things had seemed to come together directly after the Battle, for at least a couple of weeks, but then there came a change. Ginny started saying things about how she knew it sounded strange, but she didn’t know if she wanted to be with him, right now, as much as she liked him.
“How much can you like me if you don’t want to be with me?” Harry had asked at last.
“I just - I don’t want to have to think about someone else as much as you have to think about someone who’s your boyfriend. I’m probably hexing myself in the foot for later, but my head feels so busy.”
In the end, they decided to agree that perhaps Ginny’s head would get less busy relatively soon.
Then Ron and Hermione started muttering about how their friendship was the most important thing. So they were all going to play it by ear, see how things went over the year. Harry felt as though he was entering a kind of tank, a romance development tank, in which the results would be observed. He found this an uncomfortable idea.
“I this will be rather an interesting term,” said Luna. “People will have so much to talk about.”
“Or not talk about,” said Harry.
“People will probably be quite annoying for you, won’t they, wanting to talk to you all the time?” asked Neville.
“Well. I did actually ask Professor McGonagall if she thought it might be a good idea for her to say something about treating me like a normal student. But there’s things people will want to talk to all of us about,” Harry said.
“Last year will make things very awkward,” said Ginny suddenly. “The people who were the most terrible won’t be there, but I bet there’ll be quite a few who behaved pretty badly.”
“Yeees. On the one hand they need to know very thoroughly that things are different now, and on the other hand we don’t want vigilante justice running riot in the corridors. Lots of tricky line-drawing ahead,” said Hermione, who after some deliberation had accepted the offer of Head Girl.
“Draco Malfoy may come back. His parents would encourage him to show that he knows things are different now,” said Luna.
“You think they’d let Malfoy back? Really?” asked Harry, amazed not only by her suggestion but the prospect, however vague, of its being correct.
“They’d never. People wouldn’t stand for it,” said Ron.
Hermione looked doubtful. “It probably won’t happen, but I can just about see some people convincing Professor McGonagall that they ought to try and stand for it. As a gesture of moving on. But even if he is there, he’s hardly important anymore, if he ever was.”
*
The Sorting Feast was a long, mostly mournful one, though Harry found that he didn’t exactly mind it. It felt good to be here with everyone in the candlelight, the Great Hall looking almost as it should, and it was a while before Harry remembered to think of those who’d gathered around their dead here months before. There were a lot of speeches. About the dead, about moving forward, information as to the state of the castle, how in many ways the houses had united in the end to work together at the Battle, and how Professor McGonagall knew the school would continue in this way and improve. About how Harry Potter was not to be pestered and how, at the other end of the scale, she hoped everyone would be strong enough not to pester Draco Malfoy either.
Most people had spotted Draco Malfoy at some point prior to his being brought up - quiet, head down, rarely looking directly at his fellow Slytherins or Professor McGonagall - and though there had been angry exclamations, the mood was subdued. Harry, too, hoped they would all be strong enough to carry things off gracefully. He wanted this year to have grace, for people to show their best selves after having seen so much of the worst. He still felt tired. He thought that might partly be why he was here, instead of turning to new challenges in new places.
Few lingered in the common room after leaving the feast. The towering grandfather clock in the entrance hall, floors below, began to strike midnight not long after Harry lay down in bed, his mind already drifting free. He couldn’t hear the chimes, of course, but nevertheless they reached him, in their way, as they wafted through the corridors, through the flagstones and floorboards, filling the whole school.
Nine… Ten… Eleven… Twelve…
Time stood still for a long moment, as tense as an animal preparing to pounce. The transformative release of tension wasn’t violent, though. Light bled into the darkness, and rest soaked into the tired bodies filling the castle. The sleight of hand had been accomplished, and even if someone had been watching intently, they would not have been able to spot the trick. Change came to Hogwarts already familiar and well-worn, the backstory tidily coiled into everybody’s heads.
*
It was morning, already. Some people were up and doing, combing their hair in the mirror, performing ironing charms on their robes, venturing into the Great Hall for breakfast. More were just waking up, or determined to slumber for a while longer. Some of those just waking up would perhaps have been in the second category if they hadn’t expected an intriguing day ahead of them. For there were more students waking up in the castle on this morning than there had been for years, and though in some ways the new students were welcome, in other, probably more ways, they were not.
The new students themselves were unsure, full of discomfort and trepidation about their transfer from Durmstrang or home schooling to Hogwarts. Grindelwald had made an alliance with Dumbledore against Voldemort, and as a vital demonstration of this he had lifted his embargo on parents sending their children to Hogwarts. They were to join the children of Muggles and steadfast and intrepid Dumbledore supporters. The potential for discord was obvious, and rather than feeling reassured by the strength of this alliance, many of the students were perspicacious enough to feel daunted by the power that had made it seem desirable to those two foes.
Harry’s pyjamas were plaid rather than striped, and his hair had recently been cut. He was fifteen. These things did not at any time strike him as unnatural as he got out of bed and parted the curtains in time to see Dean’s cautious glance at Seamus Finnigan, the unfamiliar presence in their dormitory. He felt a strange sense of doubleness centred round the sandy-haired figure putting on his shoes, as if he had seen just this sight before and it should not be new to him. He dismissed the moment of meaningless déjà vu.
“I hope I’m not behind, you know, when we get to class,” said Seamus, straightening up from tying his shoelaces and looking back at Harry and Dean for a moment. “Me mam’s done her best, but I don’t know if it’s the same.”
“Oh, I’m sure everyone’ll know it’s all different and new to you,” said Harry. “Snape, the Potions Master, will be a bastard though, so remember not to take him personally.”
“Cheers.”
*
Slytherin had more new students than any other house. Here, it was those who had always been here who might have been in danger of feeling shyly outnumbered, though they kept their end up well. It was warmer here than Durmstrang, and it was good to be in the common room and know his ancestors had passed their school days here, and there was doubtless far more amusement and fellow feeling at the situation than in other houses, but Draco wasn’t happy.
He knew his parents had been unsure what to do with him and were still unsatisfied that they had made the safest choice. Grindelwald’s British Knights of Walpurgis were feeling insecurity in the air. They were beginning to think of themselves as on the defensive rather than the offensive, and it was not a position they had signed up to take.
Blaise, Daphne, Theo and Millicent, the Slytherin students in Draco’s year who’d always been at Hogwarts, were used to that position of resistance, comfortable and proud in it - though Draco was pretty sure from a coy intonation in Theo’s voice and an allusion or two from his classmates that Mr Nott was a supporter of Voldemort, making Theo a different kettle of fish altogether. Draco’s aunt was one of Voldemort’s followers too, Draco knew, though his parents would rather he was unaware. So this wasn’t a new thing to him, he told himself, though his parents didn’t have much to do with Bellatrix.
“I like to feel there’s a challenge for me to get my teeth into, and one way or another, there will be,” said Blaise had said last night. “But you must have expected things to be always very easy if you’re so shocked to be here.”
He was looking at Draco. Draco was ruffled by the idea his shock had been undisguised, and even as he wanted to say something that made him look tough, he was unable to get his teeth round the lie that he too wanted the world to be unsure and challenging.
This morning he was sullen and determined to face down the day. He felt this was necessary, though he had Crabbe and Goyle and Pansy around him, the same as ever. Pansy kept throwing deliberately unimpressed little glances around her as they emerged from the dungeons.
Over breakfast, Blaise and Daphne pointed out to them some of the old students of other houses. Draco had known of course that he’d be going to school with Muggleborns, but it was a shock to find himself so close to them in the here and now. “We’ll be having Potions with Dean Thomas and Hermione Granger first lesson,” said Daphne, to bring it home to him. “Granger is really annoying but Thomas is alright.” Was he to be expected to find Muggleborns “alright”? “And also there’s Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, have you heard of their parents?”
“In the Order of the Phoenix, yes, I know,” said Draco. He felt more and more as if he’d entered an alternative universe.
Potions was interesting though, in a way he hadn’t expected. Professor Snape was elaborately horrid to everyone, but after a while it was possible to detect subtleties and different depths in his horridness. The bottomless pit of it was reserved for Harry Potter, in a way that would have seemed embarrassingly revealing on Snape’s part if he hadn’t been so intimidating. Revealing of what, Draco couldn’t quite decide. He’d half formed a crude scenario of forbidden lust, sublimated or disguised, but got side-tracked by a couple of references to Potter’s father, which were received with gritted teeth and attempted resignation. Theo Nott got off with some almost light-hearted facetiousness. Snape bombarded the new students with questions, and Draco found that his own answers were accepted, where Snape had otherwise almost always some subtlety to bring the student up smartly on.
Did Snape’s interests lie, perhaps, with Voldemort? Did he know that Theo Nott’s father was involved with him, or that Draco’s parents would not be unwilling to involve themselves if given reason? It interested Draco, to think that the power struggles of the moment penetrated everything here, and that he himself might take part from a classroom, but then it also slowed his thoughts. Lord Voldemort, still a shadowy figure, seemed to have become a little more sharply defined, in a way that made Draco wonder whether he liked shadows.
Grindelwald was fierce and formidable and uncompromising and had cowed completely several nations, but he was a man of theory as well as action. Draco was used to feeling that his power extended to the classroom, in that many of the ways he had been taught at Durmstrang to interpret magic and the world was based on Grindelwald’s writings. Everything about Voldemort that Draco had heard was more uncushioned by drowsy afternoons over textbooks; a simple choice between annihilation and elevation. He was new, essentially. He wasn’t the establishment. Draco wasn’t sure yet which he preferred.
*
In his office, Dumbledore sighed, his head lowered in thought. It ought to be a right, joyous thing to fill the school with students again, but he was unable to tell if treating with Gellert was a sign of strength or if he was only falling again to his first temptation. Was Voldemort any worse? Had Gellert truly learned, as he claimed, something like humility? Nonetheless, the new students learning to mix with those they had been taught to spurn would do them good. Wherever they went when they left Hogwarts, whatever they did, they would know that Muggleborns and Blood Traitors had names and faces. He had wondered sometimes whether in offering Hogwarts to those who dared accept it he was offering them more danger than he should let them accept, but now those at risk, and those at risk of being a risk, had at least the protection of that chance.
*
Draco had realised that those other students were human. It took a while, but only a short one, during which he tried not to stare too much. But they were just ordinary people who got up his nose. They were so smug. He hated their patronising overtures, their assumption that he was in the process of realising everything he’d ever learnt was wrong.
It was so clear that as far as they were concerned, they were, not only physically, in the right place, and would never have to move from it, whereas hard work and squeezing himself into a round hole was his role. It took him another while to feel comfortable being himself and stop automatically assuming the façade of what people here wanted him to be. He and his friends stopped worrying about the implications of the political situation for them and began to feel disaffected and satisfyingly weary.
Draco in particular liked jibing at other students, trying to get them to see what morons they were to take themselves so seriously. Well, he liked jibing at some of them. Some of the Hufflepuffs cried, getting their Hufflepuff friends involved, who blustered, puffed and flushed, which was amusing, only they didn’t shut up and go away once it’d stopped being amusing. The Ravenclaws would argue that they didn’t take themselves seriously, or argue their reasons for doing so, and that got tedious too.
The Gryffindors were definitely the best, in a worst kind of way. They were the ones provoked to genuine outrage when Draco or Pansy said how stupid the Order of the Phoenix was. They all had relatives and things who had fallen in battle, and somehow when he was around them Draco found himself wanting to make them feel they’d died for nothing.
It was a weird, wriggling kind of glee that he felt when he saw Potter’s and Weasleys’s faces crumple with rage. He didn’t let Granger puncture it when she said his childishness disgusted and astonished her. He had what he needed in her friends. Potter was the best, somehow. There was something more tightly contained about him. He was not actually harder to stir up than Weasley, but it seemed like it should be.
Sometimes, or at least, once or twice, Draco admitted to himself that he envied Potter a little. He seemed less bored and more sure than Draco, and while Draco had always been satisfied with the amount of glamour in his own background, Potter had a share of a different kind, with his defiant, daredevil relatives, who he would join when he left school. Not to mention that thing with a basilisk Draco had always refused to hear the details of. Draco had always looked forward to getting his foot on the ladder, beginning some rungs up, at the Ministry of Magic. Nothing seemed quite satisfactory these days.
*
“I don’t know why you don’t ignore him. Surely you can see that roaring with rage makes him happy,” said Hermione.
“He doesn’t really get to me,” Harry assured her.
Hermione looked disbelieving.
“No, not really,” he repeated. “It’s practice, isn’t it? He reminds me what’s out there, and it reminds me how petty and worthless it really is. An encounter with him fills me with faith for the future.” It was easy to get complacent when you were surrounded by like-minded people who were always assuring themselves and you that the other side was no match, and all that was needed was for a new generation to launch a new attack. He was glad he was having this exposure.
*
For all Harry’s congratulating himself that he was preparing himself as well as possible for the reality of evil, he hadn’t learnt to expect the unexpected. He was scuttling down a long winding staircase, on his way to Herbology after Snape had delayed him, when a younger boy, Peregrine Cartwright, Harry thought his name was, called to him from the top. He almost pretended not to hear in favour of plunging on, but his better self prevailed and he looked back towards the top of the stairs.
“I was coming to fetch you,” Perry panted. “Professor McGonagall wants you - not just you. You’re all to wait in one of the attics in North Tower. I think she wants to talk to you without anyone knowing.”
Harry didn’t know what he expected. Some sudden, obscure difficulty she wished to consult certain of her students with, privately? The flimsiest wisps of suppositions flitted through his mind, as he hurried after Perry, like trying to recapture a dream. Peregrine trotted always ahead of him, so that Harry had to keep his wits about him not to lose him round corners, and couldn’t ask him anything further.
As promised, Peregrine led him to one of the attics, large but not often used, where people were already waiting, craning forward curiously as the door opened, and relaxing again as they saw it was Peregrine and Harry. Harry caught Ron’s eye and they greeted each other with happy surprise. Harry made his way over to sit next to him, and noticed that there was an odd selection of people in the attic. What did McGonagall want with Draco Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson, for a start?
Harry and Ron exchanged no more than a couple of words before breaking off to look at Perry Cartwright, swishing his wand about and dramatically declaiming the words of a spell, almost ferociously affecting a cloak-swirling suavity that came oddly from him. He relaxed after that though, plumping himself down on what looked like a giant tortoise shell, and looking alertly towards the door in a way that made Harry think of a happy mouse sniffing the air.
“What was that for?” Blaise Zabini called, but he wasn’t answered.
“Is he supposed to wait as well, then?” he asked Ron, who shrugged.
“Did Professor McGonagall give a particular time, Perry?” asked Ginny Weasley.
“Just that she’d see us here as soon as she could,” Peregrine said.
Harry hoped Professor McGonagall had a good reason for depriving them of education like this. Some people were looking very worried, Harry saw as he looked around. Most of the Slytherins looked bored, swinging their legs and twitching their hair in some cases, or simply sunk deeply into themselves.
There were several stages to waiting. For quite some time, the group in the attic remained in the first stage, that of confident assurance that they had only to wait to be rewarded. Then waiting seemed like a burden punishing their muscles as they struggled under its weight. Did Professor McGonagall really expect them to spend the afternoon sitting in an attic? No matter the circumstances, she could show some consideration, couldn’t she? She couldn’t be much longer, could she? Had she changed her mind?
Draco Malfoy had remained in much the same catatonic state throughout this, but he finally roused himself. “I’m going. If the old bat wants me she can come and get me,” he said.
Those watching him were not entirely unsupportive. It seemed as if it would be so typical of Malfoy to leave just before Professor Mcgonagall got there that it made her arrival seem more imminent, and in any case, they could give up themselves without having to be the first to break away. These thoughts were swiftly broken off when Malfoy began to swear, tugging at the door.
All at once, Harry knew, positively flooded with bitter, belated acuteness. “It’s a trap,” he muttered, standing up.
“You,” said Malfoy, turning on Peregrine and shaking his finger at him in a way that Harry noticed with amused contempt even now. “What the fuck are you playing at?”
Perry looked as if he had a bad migraine, his hand rising to cup his temple, his brow screwed up. Then he backed away from Malfoy, who hadn’t even begun to reach for his wand or make to physically grab him, and screamed, a good rich, committed scream, his eyes shut.
“What is wrong with that kid?”
“Is he ill? Or jinxed?”
Perry opened his eyes and looked at his hostile audience, pale and shaky. “We just have to wait. That’s all. Professor McGonagall said so.”
The story had already begun to shake, and was quite shattered after his display, and Draco’s discovery of the locked door.
“Perhaps it wasn’t Professor McGonagall,” said Susan Bones. “Perhaps it was someone pretending to be her.”
“I think he always knew he was lying,” said Harry.
He moved forwards and gripped Perry’s shoulder, trying to look into his face and discover what was wrong with him. He seemed to Harry to be caught between two states, which made him wonder if he was struggling under Imperius. Harry didn’t know what he was looking for. Peregrine’s eyes looked back at him, fearfully, and blinked.
Ron came forward to try Alohomora on the door himself, not trusting Malfoy.
“We’re trapped. We’re seriously trapped in here,” he told Harry. “You’ve taken us hostage,” he told Perry, who had sunk back onto the tortoise shell, his legs tucked under him.
He looked tragically resigned, as if a weight he knew would fall on him had fallen, and squashed him, as he knew it would. Something about him had an off-putting effect. He was surrounded by furious and frightened people who only stared at him instead of demanding answers or begging to be let out.
Perhaps no one wanted to know what plan was at work in this attic with them, Harry thought, finding himself racking his brains for something to do, rather than silently stare.
Ginny set the furniture banging itself against the floor (most who had been sitting on it got off, but not Peregrine, who let himself be jogged up and down) and enhanced her screams of “Help” with Sonorus. Everyone joined in, while Peregrine stared ahead.
*
It was strange to remember that stage later, when things had been made clear. The time for this was not deemed right until everyone was worn out with despair.
Harry looked up as he heard a foot tread on the creaking floor. Everyone did, and was held by the sight as if it had them by the throat. Peregrine Cartwright was curled up on the floor, and, seeming in some troubling way to be standing in him, rising out of him, was an older boy, dark and sleek, looking around him with pleasure and confidence.
“I thought your minds might be more at rest if I introduced myself,” he said. “The unknown is said to be the most frightening of all, and I don’t want to be needlessly unkind. I am known at this time as Tom Riddle, but I do prefer to be addressed, with more formality, as Lord Voldemort. Yes, you are tiresomely incredulous,” he continued. “But it is indeed ‘really me’.” Pansy Parkinson flushed violently. “There is more of me than there is of other people. That is all you need to know.”
“You’re not quite all here, though,” said Harry. “So there’s not that much of you.”
“Ah yes, the Potters’ son. I’m sure you felt very brave when you killed the basilisk. And I’m sure you’re very proud of your brave parents. Fortunately for both of us, they will feel less brave at the prospect of your death.”
“They won’t,” said Harry, foolishly, really. He knew they would, but at that moment he wanted them to be inhumanly calm, prepared to give up their son rather than yield in any way to this pompous boy, and the wizard out in the world who still contained him.
Looking around him, he could see that many of the students had been strategically chosen; people like Draco Malfoy whose parents were quite likely to be interested in joining Voldemort but could do with a push, and people like himself, whose parents would never consider it and whose submission would therefore be a great coup. If his parents refused to treat with Voldemort, he could kill Harry and still call it a good day’s work. It was disaster, and the lives of those in the attic had become forfeit even if they were allowed out of it alive.
“We have to think of something,” Harry muttered to Ron.
Ron took a moment to respond. He nodded slowly. “A plan. We need a plan,” he said numbly.
So that was all arranged.
*
The whole Peregrine Cartwright/Tom Riddle thing was awkward. For some of the time, Perry was just Perry, almost the same slightly odd thirteen year old Harry vaguely remembered. If he’d always seemed morose, he was even less cheerful now. He seemed to feel the strain less of the prospect of an early death than the pressure of concealing the exact role he’d played in events while he tried to join the ranks of his fellow victims. He’d been possessed, he said, and that much seemed obvious, but possessed how, and for how long, and whether he could have done anything about it, he chose not to make clear. Even if the others could have felt friendly and trusting towards Perry being just Perry (and some of them felt sorry for him, and tried) this was made much more difficult by the fact that Tom Riddle was quite frequently lurking in there. It was quite easy to tell when this happened, once they’d familiarised themselves with Just Perry’s mannerisms, but that did not compensate for the suddenness.
The attic wasn’t really big enough to leave Perry in isolation for most of the time, but when they saw Riddle in him they would shrink instinctively, finding themselves on the other side of the room without conscious memory of getting there. Riddle did not take on his own form again, but Harry thought that was choice rather than inability.
“I can’t really picture him just sitting around with us. I suppose it would take away some of the glamour,” Ron whispered.
*
“I thought things would happen quite quickly,” said Harry. “I thought something would happen.”
“I didn’t think we’d have to worry about starving to death,” said Ron.
Harry thought two more days passed after this. They were very unpleasant, and he had to keep reminding himself that he’d always expected to have to deal with unpleasantness. Then Tom Riddle also brought up this concern that this were not going as expected - or so it seemed to the onlookers who were not privy to the conversation that was taking place in Perry’s head.
“No!” Perry finally shouted with triumphant tones, lying, sweaty, on the floor. “I didn’t leave the message. And you never noticed I didn’t because I was too clever for you. I am a brilliant Occlumens. My mind is as strong as steel. So no one knows we are here.”
“And that’s good because…?” asked Pansy Parkinson, looking as if she was considering kicking Perry.
Perry was back on the “mind as strong as steel” track, and Harry almost wished she would. It was like watching embarrassing amateur dramatics with the knowledge that there was something very disturbing driving the histrionics. But then Riddle seemed to give him a good talking to, and Perry’s body language gradually became more subdued. Everyone eyed him very warily as he slowly got to his feet. Perhaps Riddle would get impatient with Plan A and skip to Plan B: killing them all. They weren’t expecting Perry to open the door. No one’s reflexes were especially quick, though Pansy managed to rush forwards and might just have made it if there hadn’t been some kind of force field around the door that she bounced off of.
“I suppose you can tell how he got where he is,” said Draco Malfoy. “He doesn’t use magic like other people.” The cold looks sent his way seemed not to disturb him.
“If he comes back, we need to ask Perry what the fuck he’s been playing at,” said Ron. “Were you as weird when you were possessed, Gin?”
Ginny shrugged. “Just about,” she said. “I think Perry thinks he can have his cake and eat it. Have Tom’s company and the excitement of it without letting himself be just a tool.”
Harry thought that the excitement must surely have changed into something darker and heavier by now. He wondered if it mattered, whether Perry still had (if he ever had) any power to stop playing if he was no longer enjoying the game.
“It must make it different for him,” said Harry, “Knowing who’s possessing him - more like having an imaginary friend who’s real, if you see what I mean. You never got to understand what was happening to you, so I guess you weren’t as likely to think you were in control.”
Ginny looked as if she was going to say something, but got distracted.
Perry came back, which they had not been sure of. They weren’t glad to see him, though neither did they feel abandonment could have improved the situation.
“We’ve got food,” said Perry. He was speaking as Perry, yet they could feel Riddle, cold and sardonic, present somehow even in words that were not his.
“But does anyone know we’re here? Didn’t you see anyone?” asked Susan wistfully, obviously imagining Dumbledore coming across a Voldemort-possessed student and sorting the whole thing out at once.
“No one saw me,” (Not the same as him seeing no one, Harry noticed) “but I did leave the note this time. So probably all your Mummies and Daddies will be along soon, which is what you wanted.”
“So it’s really like we’ve just been kidnapped,” said Draco, looking cheered. The eerie waiting, with its hunger headaches, had somehow been cancelled out, apparently, leaving him, more than ever, one of the more content with the situation.
“I bet they’ve already guessed what’s happened. I mean, even if they didn’t get a message, obviously we’ve been missing. And they’ve probably told our parents, I mean they should have done. So they’ll probably all already know what they’re going to do,” said Pansy. She made it sound simple. Harry envisioned students being calmly plucked out of the attic one by one, like chocolates from a box, the children of the stonily strong-minded left behind, unappealing. He could not really believe there would be any stony, strong-minded parents.
“So why didn’t you leave that message the first time? If you could manage not to do that, maybe you could have managed not to get us all up here. How can this be your idea of fun?” asked Ron.
Perry looked at Ron with determined scorn. “Why does anyone do anything?”
“I’m asking why you did this.”
“To see what happened?” said Perry, asking rather than telling. Harry thought they should remember that, quite apart from the obvious fact that Perry didn’t want to talk about his inner workings, Riddle was present. If by chance there were things Perry had managed to keep from him, and it seemed like there might be, he didn’t need to be told about them.
There was food, Perry reminded them by slightly raising his laden arms, and food, they were willing to admit, was really what they cared most about now.
In a little while, Harry told himself, he must try and make a plan, if only to pass the time. Surely there was a bright, clever, daring plan in the ether, just for him.
If he had been moving oddly slowly towards it, weighed down by the very thing that necessitated it, Ginny had been moving even slower. Having started earlier, during the surreal nightmare that had been her first year at Hogwarts, she got there first. She had spent her time in the farthest corner of the attic from Perry, but now she wandered gradually towards him, taking her time, having genuine conversation with the people between them, so that no one noticed her progress.
Harry noticed it when she was behind Perry, her back turned to his, leaning down to get another sandwich. Hunger or deliberate bravery, he noted in passing. She ate the sandwich, and drifted past Perry. People began to pay attention when she suddenly seemed to have dashed back. Some of them had a vague impression of her hand having flicked out and snatched something from Perry. Perry would have pounced on her but Anthony Goldstein had instinctively held him back, and Ron joined him.
Harry was looking at Perry, kicking and biting and struggling to get to his wand, and wondering if he too was needed to restrain him. He didn’t see what Ginny was doing, but only heard the whoosh and felt the warm wind that swept the attic. Fiendfyre: always a good way of destroying Horcruxes and anything else. Harry looked away from the fireball and Ginny’s set, hypnotised face to Perry, in time to see Riddle leave Perry. Perry looked startlingly soft and young; Harry had been used to seeing him edged with Riddle and had forgotten what he was really like. Riddle was now screaming in the midst of the fireball. Why would he want to go and be in there, Harry wondered stupidly.
“Aguamenti!” screamed Susan. The water had no effect on the flames that had taken hold. Harry, driven like the others to the edges of the room, realised that they were all going to die.
*
The universe shook itself impatiently.
*
The universe stood still for Draco as he stood on top of the tower with his wand raised, and he knew he had to make up his mind before it began again. No more burning rooms, he thought nonsensically.
“Where can I be safe?” he asked.
Dumbledore told him. Draco tried to fix it in his mind. He lowered his wand. If this was what he was doing now, what came next?
He didn’t know why Dumbledore had bothered to plead with him, because it was too late. Snape came up to finish him off before Draco could even make up his mind to go back to the original plan and have one last go himself. And then they had to run for it and everything seemed so wasted and pointless. He couldn’t carry out his mission and he couldn’t join the other side. He felt so weak, and he’d wanted to feel so strong. He didn’t understand how things had ended up this way.
*
Draco didn’t feel any better, or not much, once the night was over. The Dark Lord had chosen Malfoy Manor for his quarters, but this seemed to confer less power and privilege on the Malfoys than Draco would have thought. He could see that his father was not getting quite what he’d expected and wanted, either.
What they really wanted, Draco realised, was the quiet, prosperous life, complete with Muggle-loving fools to complain about, that they’d had in the Dark Lord’s absence. They’d made a mistake.
Draco didn’t want to be here, where it was only becoming clearer that he was the worst, most useless Death Eater, taken seriously by no one. Perhaps it was not too late to find somewhere else to be. Like Number 12, Grimmauld Place.
He had to talk to his mother.
“Mother, when I was on the tower with Dumbledore, he said there was somewhere I could go if I didn’t want to do it. He said you could come. He told me where it was.” Draco was too ashamed of what he was proposing to actually propose it, but he had made it clear. It was too late to take it back, but he didn’t think his mother would be angry with him. Unless this time he’d really shocked her. He became convinced in the silence that he had.
“I can’t come,” said Narcissa at last. “I can’t leave your father, and he will not want to leave. Not yet, at least. Also, if I came it would look more serious. A teenager running away alone is different. He could be anywhere, and could have gone for a number of different reasons. If I went, it makes it look more sensible, more planned, I think. More something to quash. I will understand if you leave. But you had better understand that if you leave, they will look for you and kill you if they find you. Don’t tell me about your plan. But think about it very carefully.” She had sounded almost abstracted for much of this, calmly considering, but became more fervent, wanting Draco to understand exactly what she meant.
Draco didn’t even have a plan. His mother hadn’t really added to his peace of mind. Not only was she staying behind, which he had half expected, but she had not made him feel either of his options were validated. He got the idea she wanted him to have a plan to leave here, and would be disappointed if he continued trailing around here, but thought the plan should be a proper guarantee of safety. He felt more unsafe about staying or going than before. And there seemed something unattractive about leaving his parents like a rat off a sinking ship. He would surely not be able to contact them once he left. They would be on opposite sides of a war. Why had his mother not told him it was a terrible idea?
He never did make up his mind in the end. He just went.
*
He screamed. Dumbledore was back, demanding something of him. He covered his head so he wouldn’t have to see, hoping the running feet he could hear would do something about it. He dared to look up some moments later, when he felt his wand being snatched out of his sleeve. He would have liked to enter with it in his hand, but he’d known it wouldn’t send the right message. Remus Lupin was looking at him coolly, holding him at wandpoint.
“We knew Dumbledore gave you the address,” said Lupin. “So though we have not been able to use the place as a safehouse, we have been checking it every day.”
Draco wondered if he should apologise for keeping them waiting, but was distracted by being magically bound and levitated into a dining room. He’d expected it, he told himself, as Lupin summoned members of the Order (the Order he was hoping to join, God, this felt so unnatural) to interrogate him. He hadn’t expected them to be nice to him, unsuspicious and welcoming. He hadn’t expected it to feel quite so much like letting himself in for being taken hostage, though.
They gave him Veritaserum. So there went his plans to appear noble. Draco wished Veritaserum made you feel drunk or something, so you wouldn’t mind hearing your own voice telling people things you didn’t want them to know, and looking at their faces while they were listening.
“I think he’s harmless,” said Sturgis Podmore. “But he seems to be coming to us like we’re a charitable institution. I suppose we have to take him, but it’s a bit of a burden.”
“I’ll try and be useful,” said Draco. “I will.” He hated the taste of sincerity in his mouth, like soap, like humbleness, and would have liked to slip into comfortable irony and impudence, that committed him to nothing, but a wiser part of him knew what was appropriate.
“The problem is he’s so likely to switch sides; I can foresee all kinds of situations,” said Hestia Jones. “It’s a shame we can’t get him to take an Unbreakable Vow.”
“I might take one. You could tell me what, exactly, you’d like me to vow,” said Draco.
There was a long silence. “No. It’s not you that means we can’t, it’s ourselves,” said Hestia.
“I don’t think we’ll be involving you in much for a while. We’ll have to have a think about how we can best use you. We are glad you’ve come here,” said Lupin.
Draco smiled thinly, unconvinced. They turned to immediacies, like what was going to happen to him right now. The answer seemed to be “Get on with whatever else they’d been doing that day and leave him here,” though it obviously felt lacking.
“We can use the place again now. So there will be people coming and going. And I think soon we’ll need somewhere to offer as a refuge. I’ll just go and tell Kreacher to get some shopping in,” said Hestia.
There was some more going through was he really, really in earnest, with the members reminding themselves of the more reassuring things he’d said under Veritaserum, and then Draco was left alone in an empty house. It was a lonely anti-climax. He comforted himself with the thought that they were obviously all shitting themselves about whether he was going to sell them down the river. If Dumbledore had still been around, he’d probably have been better able to convince them that he was a reformed character. Draco tried to like the idea of himself as an icy chill within the Order of the Phoenix, but now he was in the Order he wanted it to be something warm and strong and secure that he could join to make himself feel right again. But he’d brought himself with him.
*
It got better, or at least, for whiles at a time he’d think he was beginning to settle in before realising that no, it was still strange and horrible and wrong for him. Draco was bored for so much of the time, but when people were there it was usually difficult. He felt they never forgot he was a Malfoy. It was like he was playing a part in a play that he wasn’t sure whether to make eye-catchingly innovative or a lineless crowd member. All that he did know was that he mustn’t be himself.
At first they would have him make the tea, to test his willingness as a humble junior not-really-member, and then go away without hearing the meetings. Draco didn’t try to listen anyway; he had no appetite for knowledge these days. Soon, however, they steeled themselves, and opened up, just in time for most of what Draco heard to be about getting Potter safely to the Weasleys. He’d almost forgotten that The Other Side was essentially Potterland, though now he didn’t know how he could have. Some of them were going to disguise themselves as Potter and act as decoys in case of attack. So risky, thought Draco, and remembered that self-sacrifice was what he’d signed up for.
“What about Draco?” asked Bill Weasley. “He’s got to do something sometime.”
Everyone looked at him. Draco was recoiling, hopefully not too visibly. This was what he’d signed up for, he reminded himself again.
“He’d lose his head,” said Moody in the end. “We need to toughen him up. Then he can do something sometime. I never did get to teach Defence Against the Dark Arts.”
Oh joy. Moody had not been among those brought in to interrogate Draco; Draco suspected this was in case he frightened Draco back to the Death Eaters. Draco knew Moody had wanted to run all kinds of magical tests on him but had not been allowed - more because they were a waste of time and Moody’s crackpottery was not to be encouraged too much than to protect Draco.
*
Moody’s lessons were one of Draco’s dips into despair. It was like mental torture - it was mental torture. Moody was a vaguely more humanoid Dementor, whose presence made Draco feel his own hollowness. He had nothing to offer in response to Moody’s attacks, no strength or wit or comprehension. It was like Moody was his own nothingness. Realising that he had learned a little scraping of something, that he was quicker physically and mentally than he had been when he’d started, was one of his delusive periods of cheering up.
Then they all went off to provide Potter with his escort, and Moody was killed. That was a shock. The war that killed people rather than just making Draco miserable was more real than it had been since he came to Grimmauld Place. And if Moody, who had seemed so formidable, could be killed by the side Draco had abandoned… For once he didn’t have to pretend; everyone was a little stunned.
“Does Potter know I’m here?” Draco asked Lupin quietly, towards the end of the meeting.
“Not yet. I think, on the whole, he’ll be pleased.”
Draco wasn’t sure why he wanted Potter to know about what was, really, his submission to Potter. His “I give in, you were right.” But also, perhaps, his “Look at me.”
*
In what felt to Draco like no time at all, Potter, Weasley and Granger were living with him, finding themselves all of a sudden on the run. It wasn’t that much less frightening than the Dark Lord moving into the Manor, he thought. “It’s not that much less frightening than the Dark Lord moving in with us,” he said, to break the ice. They laughed a bit, but went back to looking awkward. Much awkwardness followed - much trying to include him in conversation and much going away to have conversations privately.
“There’s things we’re not talking to anybody else about,” Potter and Granger assured him earnestly.
If he hadn’t been on his best behaviour he’d have suggested they were off having threesome sex. Come to think of it, he envied their threesomeness. They seemed such a unit.
After a while, he began to see that they were not always a unit. Sometimes they were Ron/Hermione and Harry, and sometimes, when Harry was feeling this, he came to talk to Draco. Mostly about the weather, at first.
“I still have to actively work at not insulting you,” said Draco. “It’s like a nervous habit.”
“Oh, me too,” said Harry. There was a pause. “Do you regret the choice you made?” he
asked, bringing up the more serious issues in their minds for the first time. “I don’t mean it like scrutinising your loyalty,” he hastened to add; “I’m not asking officially, I just wondered how you were feeling.”
“I don’t know. I regret all available choices, I suppose. I think they’re all pretty shit.”
Harry nodded solemnly. “The argument for choosing us, of course, is that we’re working to
change that and give people more choices.”
“I’m not playing much part in that. Or any.” Draco didn’t mention that that was another
example of shit choices all around: play a useful, dangerous, difficult part or continue feeling awkward, disliked, distrusted, and extraneous.
“Yeah, I think we do need to find something real for you to do,” said Harry.
Draco was silent for a moment. “Do you think “we” are going to win this war?” He could not yet say we without ironic quotation marks.
“In the end we will,” said Harry. “But I don’t think you can do it, fight against Voldemort, I mean, just because you think you’re going to win and then everything will be easy for you again. You have to do it because being on his side is worse than losing against him.”
Draco nodded slowly, feeling as if he was being chastened. “But thinking about how you’re going to win and then everything will be great can help you to fight. Look at it this way, if you want Slytherins to be on your side, rather than dying nobly all alone, then remember we bring our Slytherin selves - and Slytherin strengths.”
“I know, I know, all that stuff about houses uniting. I didn’t mean to make it about that. Just, please, don’t get discouraged and go back to the other side. That’s what I wanted to say.”
“I wouldn’t dare go back to the other side. I’d be killed horribly, wouldn’t I? ? You’re stuck with me,” said Draco, only now fully realising this.
*
He didn’t entirely stop resenting Harry. He stopped hating him personally, and believing that when Draco couldn’t see him he rolled around in his fame and glory as the Boy Who Lived with the disgusting glee of a pig in a pig-sty. But Harry was still the centre of everything, the opposition against the Dark Lord. Whatever Draco did, he would never be as important. It didn’t matter if Harry didn’t like being important, or if being the person who had to bring Voldemort down was demanding and frightening. Draco did begin to think, though, about the separation he made between ideas of importance, fame and praise, and doing difficult and frightening things. Even in a habitually unfair world, Draco was beginning to see that it was illogical to covet one while instinctively rejecting the other. Perhaps, in envying the appearance of the thing, he had all along been fascinated by the thing itself.
Even to be Lupin, he thought, mortified, would be something. They had forgotten about teaching him things after Moody’s death, but Lupin remembered, and as well as giving him some lessons himself had said “You could go over a few things with him, Harry.” Lupin may have been hired out of pity but he was, Draco admitted now, quite good. To be good at fighting the Dark Arts was almost as glamorous as being good at the Dark Arts, and he’d already tried and failed that. He moped for a while. He suspected both of them, when it came down to it, were too real and nasty for him.
He tried, though, even while living in his failure.
“It’s great to try,” said Harry one day, alarmingly seeming to pick up on Draco’s inner monologue. “Neville is better than you when he tries than you when you don’t. In fact, he can be pretty good. So you’ve got no excuse not to do what you can. More than the other subjects, Defence is about what you are more than what you can do. I think that’s what I like about it.”
“But that’s what I worry about,” said Draco, not looking at Harry. “I can’t change who I am.”
“I think you can, in a way. I think you can change what you do with yourself. Like you can try at this instead of what you used to be doing, and I think that makes all the difference in the world.”
The problem with trying was that it meant feelings like this, as Draco tried to swallow his pride and his resentment of Harry being the one to give advice on how to be a better person. Trying meant admitting he wasn’t perfect already. It was hard and it went against the grain.
*
The others were especially busy discussing something secret these days. Draco didn’t exactly think they should tell him about it, especially as they claimed they didn’t talk to anyone else about it either, but it still made him feel a little hollow. Especially when they could not contain the momentous thing, whatever it was, and got to the stage of thinking of little things to contribute to their discussion when they were not alone, and would step aside for a moment to mutter, or pass a note.
“Maybe we should take Draco, to help,” said Harry, out loud, in the end.
Hermione and Ron looked at Draco, startled.
“I don’t think we should,” said Hermione. “Because of him as well as because of us. It’s not fair to take him to do something dangerous without telling him why we want to. Well, when I put it like that, I suppose people do that all the time. But we shouldn’t. We’re going to the Ministry,” she explained to Draco.
“I don’t mind if I don’t know exactly what you want to do there. I know that everything you want to do is really about one thing,” said Draco, his heart thumping. He felt as if he was on the verge of a great transformation, that he welcomed even as it did violence to him.
“No. It wouldn’t be a real choice. I don’t mean we have a goal that you wouldn’t agree with if you knew, but you might not agree with our way of going about it. And we can’t give you the chance to help us think of a better one. But thank you for offering,” said Harry, in a manner that obviously closed the matter.
So he didn’t go, and he was relieved, but then disappointed. That was the way to be a different person, he thought - to do different things, and think of little else besides the desired difference. He hoped when a real opportunity came he wouldn’t freeze like he had on the Tower.
*
Draco wandered around the house when they had gone to do their thing at the Ministry. Perhaps they would not return, or at least, not all of them. It was clear from what they had said that they were doing something not only dangerous but stupid, perhaps badly thought-out. If it was Weasley who didn’t come back, he must be careful not to show too clearly that it would be “only” Weasley as far as Draco was concerned.
They did all come back, but only for a second, and it was Weasley who, being nearest, shot out his hand for Draco just as Draco realised they were not alone, and they were gone again.
*
If his self of a few months ago could see him now, in a tent with Potter, Weasley and Granger. The drollness cheered him a little, but it was worse than sharing a house with Potter, Weasley and Granger had been, and not just because of the increased proximity. They claimed that their mission had gone well, mostly, but there was plainly something they were worrying about. Draco had expected them to contact the Order and ask where they should go now, but no, camping for the foreseeable future was the plan. He was a little thrown off too by the fact that he barely needed to whine about things like missing Kreacher’s cooking; Weasley and Potter apparently minded even more. He found himself having a lot of conversations with Hermione, who was clearly the one making the most effort not to succumb to sullen fractiousness. The sense that they were ignoring the dragon in the room made these conversations fairly unsatisfying, however.
Ron grew harder and harder to tolerate. Draco had to sit on himself hard not to show his irritation, because he was pretty sure that if he did Harry and Hermione would take theirs out on him. Abstaining from retaliating was like playing the saintly little boy in Snape’s classes to infuriate them, really, but in a more subdued note and more realistically.
Despite everything, it was depressing when Ron left. Draco wished he could point out to Harry and Hermione how annoying he’d been and have them agree that it was good to be without him, so the tent would be without this dreadful, dragging feeling of unease. But he knew it didn’t work like that.
A night or two later, he thought things over, absent-mindedly watching Harry’s side rise and fall across the tent. If Harry and Hermione could continue without Ron if they had to, then what possible use was he, who didn’t know what they were trying to achieve? Instead of trailing behind them without questioning, he should ask himself where the best place for him to be was. Surely it wasn’t really in this tent. Whatever happened in the end, he wouldn’t be able to claim he’d had a hand in it at this rate.
Now, he realised, suddenly still and breathless, was a good time, if ever there was one. Harry and Hermione were both asleep. The tent was quiet; only the sound of quiet breathing and the wind in the trees to be heard. It seemed suddenly a nice sound. If Draco was to slip away, he would have to leave them a note. Mysterious disappearances were really not what Harry and Hermione needed right now. He Summoned a piece of parchment and a quill and carefully slid upright, hoping the scratching of the quill wouldn’t waken them.
I’m going to go back to the Order. I don’t think this is the right place for me to be.
He put it on his pillow. If this didn’t work, he could just come back and replace the note with himself. He wondered what the other two would think, on seeing it.
Draco felt very brave, slipping out of his warm(ish) bed into the cold night. He scrambled through the trees, not looking back. He was still near enough to the tent to return in a matter of moments. He took out his wand. He’d never tried this before, though he’d been taken through the theory a couple of times. He hadn’t wanted to fail. Draco thought of the way he’d felt when he was ten, and thought he was a child flying prodigy, and the way he’d felt when he thought he was going to go to the Ministry on that mission. A mixture of fear and triumph, like the beginning of great things, that was what he wanted.
Thank God. He had a Patronus, a fox. It seemed beautiful to him; he wanted to pet it. He sent his message to Lupin, after some indecision, just because he was the Order member he’d seen most of, and leaned back against a tree to look at the stars and wait.
*
It was the right thing to do. He did brave things for the Order, went on perilous missions and fought duels and used his wits and cunning to lead on the other side and beat them. He never wanted the war to be over. He was the perfect Draco, a fighter after all.
*
The universe felt nauseated.
*
Part Two