Author: stlrenwench

Rating: NC-17

Warnings: violence, sex, het, some disturbing content

Summary: There's no such thing as destiny--there's only action and inaction, who takes the first step and who sits waiting, check and checkmate. Sometimes the worst part of the fight is the bracing breath before the first step.

Notes: When I first read the original Big Bang, Baby challenge fics, I loved them, and the concept behind them. I feel honored to have been able to participate this round, and despite the troubles I encountered and the lost sleep, hundreds of hours spent writing and stress over deadlines, I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. This fic was beta read by the absolutely wonderful Rowena.






When they find him, cold corpse curled on the autumn leaves, no one is surprised. With lips peeled back and twisted into a snarl-smirk, black staring eyes filmed over milky white, vivid bruises like dusky shadows lurking in the hollows of his sallow and impossibly pale skin, he looks every bit the hunted criminal he is. The leaves beneath him are soggy but crisp, spattered with rusty drops in a radius of about ten feet, as if he were a rag doll that someone has shaken so violently the stuffing has come out. He is curled on his side, hands clawing at the air in a feral, desperate clutch, knees tucked to his chin to hold in a warmth that is no longer there. There is a puddle of black around his head that is matted with crushed foliage and greasy oils, not all of it natural. The corpse smells of unnatural things, dark things, and the sour, dusty smell of spoiled dried asphodel wafts over the clearing, covering an even sourer, brutal smell. Severus Snape has been dead for approximately four days.

There is a barrier surrounding him, keeping the bugs out, and the leaves beneath him are untouched by the seemingly torrential rains around him. Mad-Eye Moody throws his coffee cup at the corpse, and the other Aurors watch it bounce off of the air.

“Damn it,” he growls, pacing next to the body.

His eye is rapidly scanning the forest around them for movement as they stare disbelieving at the corpse for signs of movement. The grove is silent—not even the birds twitter—except for the shuffling sound of Moody kicking the wet leaves.

“I think,” says Nymphadora Tonks, her face a peculiar shade of green that both clashes with and compliments her shocking pink hair, “I’m going to be sick.”

And she is.

::

Ronald Weasley has very few things in his life that he notices outright, much less notices enough to feel thankful for, but right now, sitting on a blanket under the wide night sky listening to the bonfire talk to him as he watches the light dance on Hermione’s face when he thinks she isn’t looking, he’s thankful. He’s glad that he’s here, and that she’s here, and that they’d been able to go to Bill’s wedding earlier that day. His mum is sitting on another blanket nearby, sobbing into his father’s shoulder about “babies” and “tarts”. The atmosphere is cozy, despite the two elephants at the party: neither Harry nor Percy bothered showing up. Percy, he can understand. Percy is a prat, has always been a prat, will always be a self-absorbed prat. Percy can go hang for all he cares. Ron is seventeen and is dating the prettiest girl at Hogwarts, and he can’t bring himself to care whether or not Percy feels like doing a bit of growing-up, himself.

What confuses him is Harry—Harry, who, Ron had thought, had managed to work through that hero complex and should have been here, dammit. Harry should have been here to ogle Fleur in her off-the-shoulder perfectly formed French silk gown with him, should have been there to cheer with Ginny after she caught the bouquet, should have been here to look sympathetic and suitably embarrassed when Molly threw her arms around Bill and cried, keeping him from leaving with Fleur until it was almost too late to catch their international portkey. Instead, Harry was off somewhere doing who knows what. It wasn’t even that those horrible Muggles he lived with were stopping him—he just didn’t want to come. Well, Ron thinks as Hermione reaches warm fingers to him and covers his hand with hers, if that’s what he wants to do, so be it. But he should at least be here for Ginny, though, if he isn’t for us.

The grasshoppers chirp happily in the grasses surrounding them, and Ron sinks back onto the blanket, staring up at the night sky and twining his fingers loosely between Hermione’s. As she leans back on him, her weight is comfortable and warm, and they stare into the smoke rising from the bonfire as though they are divining the secrets of the universe. The grasshoppers are getting louder as the smoke thickens, and Ron ponders whether the wood on the fire is green. It smells odd, as if there were a small bundle of cedar or pine hidden beneath the stacked fire, and the grasshoppers get louder and louder. Sitting up and peering into the smoke in the east, Ron realizes that Ottery St. Catchpole is on fire.

::

Harry Potter is not quite seventeen yet. It’s close enough that he can taste the freedom, but he still has a few weeks to go. He’s in his room, the floor littered with old and slightly yellowing copies of the Prophet, and he isn’t sure why he bothers anymore. Someone is intercepting his mail, cutting out articles and interviews and sometimes even pictures, seemingly at random and certainly without his permission. They do a sloppy job, and sometimes he can read “De…Convic…Brutal…9 Mu….” If he plays this morbid guessing game, he can tell there’s been a significant death toll over the summer. If it were only his newspapers, he would still be annoyed, but sometimes he finds whole sections of his letters magically erased, leaving nothing but blank paper behind. Yesterday he received a lovely sheet of blank stationary from Ginny, postmarked where she had been visiting the twins, he presumes.

He plans daily what he will do when he has gained his freedom. There’s number twelve, Grimmauld Place, of course, a run-down house that’s fabulously close to King’s Cross, but Harry isn’t sure he wants to base his choice on his return to Hogwarts—it isn’t home anymore. He feels sometimes, especially in the mornings as he looks over the bleak landscape of ticky-tack houses shrouded in dew and mist, like some secret, hidden part of him has been hollowed out and all of the important bits thrown away. He wants to find these pieces, but he has no idea where to start looking. He thinks he’ll try in Godric’s Hollow, but he has a sneaking suspicion they’ll be in Little Whinging.

::

In retrospect, it is obvious that he was not supposed to succeed. He doesn’t know why this information shocked him when he first realized it, but now it is understood—common knowledge—like the fact that Aunt Bellatrix has murdered members of her own family before and that his mother isn’t really mourning his father’s recent Kiss but rather the knowledge that she damned them all. He thinks remotely that the world would, in fact, be a better place without him, because his being alive right now is the thorn in both sides. Somewhere in the back of his mind he realizes that Snape probably knew this, and wonders how he could let himself be manipulated the way he was, even if it was Narcissa Black Malfoy who did the manipulating.

He thinks vaguely about what he will do this autumn when his friends have gone to school. Once—it seems many years ago—he could see the whole timeline of his life laid out before him. He knew exactly what would happen: graduation, marriage to Pansy Parkinson, a child—an heir, his mind supplies. He has no idea when this changed. Now the future swirls before him formless and fluid as smoke, and some days when he peers into its depths he thinks he can see those images, distorted and twisted, misshapen into grotesqueries of happiness. Sometimes he looks into the mists and sees himself bloodied and battered, spread across a stone slab a sacrifice to the snake lord. Sometimes he sees himself dead in his bed in the morning and believes wholeheartedly—he knows—that he’s seeing tomorrow morning and part of him is so glad he can barely keep his joy in. He’s always so horribly disappointed when he wakes up, staring blindly at the ceiling. He wakes before dawn and watches the darkness through his eyelids as it fades slowly and suddenly sharper until the bright shell-pink light forces him to acknowledge that he is still alive.

::

The moment he turns seventeen, Harry can’t immediately pack his things and leave the Dursleys. This isn’t any sort of reluctance, affection, emotional connection; he can’t leave a place he hasn’t been at for weeks. He’s living in a room at the Leaky Cauldron, third room on the left on the fourth floor. It’s got a great view of the Alley, but there isn’t really anything to look at. Over half of the shops are boarded up—Florean Fortescue still hasn’t been seen in over a year. The few people around scurry from shop to shop like beetles escaping a bright light. Of course, that’s only the people that actually come to Diagon Alley for what they need—most simply send away for it. It’s depressing to watch the Alley during the day, and he has nothing to do, no ties to the world around him. He finds himself drifting into a nocturnal pattern. By the last week before school is supposed to start, he finds his eyelids habitually drooping at eight in the morning and unable to close at midnight. He thinks perhaps he should worry about the effect it will have on his studies, but as he doesn’t even think the school will open this year he isn’t terribly concerned.

When Remus Lupin suddenly shows up outside his door looking harried and much, much older than he had the last time Harry had seen him, Harry is so unused to the presence of another human being that it takes him a minute to remember to invite him in. Remus looks tired, his already graying hair seems more sparse and thin, and he moves so stiffly that Harry could imagine he’s an inferati. He gratefully accepts the cup Harry offers, but despite the warm liquid some part of him still looked remote and cold. Sitting on Harry’s bed, he looks so small and alone that Harry is suddenly struck by the image of himself as an adult and Remus as the child. He finds the words he wants to say won’t come out; they’re caught in his throat, stuck.

“I assume you know why I’m here,” Remus begins after a long pause, “It was only the front page of the Prophet for a month.”

“I don’t get the Prophet anymore,” Harry interrupts, shrugging. “I got tired of getting more holes than paper.”

Remus’s mouth folds oddly, and Harry realizes it’s a sheepish grin. “Sorry about that, Harry. You know we were—”

“—Only doing it for my good, right?” Harry finishes wryly. “Yeah. So what did I miss?”

There is a tense silence as Remus tries to work out what to say. “Well, you know…” he trails off. He stares at his hands in thought before looking Harry in the eye. “We found him.”

“Found…?”

“Snape. We found Snape.”

::

When Tonks picks up the report, her hands impulsively go slack. She can barely focus her eyes on the folder because she’s so tired. This is the third night in a row she has been sitting here at her desk in the Ministry office past one in the morning, always analyzing the Snape case. Her hands are shaking and she knows that if she has to look at those pictures again, she will just fall apart. She will shudder to pieces and cry for days. She’s seen death before, even deaths of those she loves—Dumbledore, a voice in the back of her mind whispers. She shoves it away brusquely. The point is, she reminds herself sharply, that she has never seen so obviously violent a death quite so close up. Even…even that death was clean, somehow. Ugly, cruel, and horrifying, but clean. And even though she believes with all her heart that the bastard deserves whatever it is he got, she doesn’t like being the one in charge of figuring out what that was.

The photos are the hardest part. There are photos of Sn--…the victim, she reminds herself, curled up in the barrier. Her first deduction is that whoever placed him there wanted him to be found. There was enough respect—respect? She could never respect the man who killed one of the greatest wizards ever born—that the killer had wanted to protect him from nature, but beyond that…. The milky eyes glare up at her in nothing more than righteous anger. It’s obvious that he knew the killer, probably felt superior to him—considering, of course that Sn—he has always felt superior to whomever he was speaking. She remembers those eyes, unwillingly, staring at her in potions with an unreadable look as she sat on her stool. A Gryffindor, especially one who should have been a Slytherin…he had obviously wanted to fail her. His contempt for her and all her family stood for sizzled in the air as he tried to pin her to her seat with his gaze and force her to fail. Once, near the last month of her seventh year, she fancied she finally saw understanding in his eyes—he said she was stubborn and pig-headed, but would probably make an exemplary Auror—and she fancied herself with a crush on him for all of two days, until she heard him congratulating a Slytherin on “beating the Mudblood scum” on their recent coughing draught. She thinks she might have seen a bit of self-recrimination in his eyes as he saw her, but it is gone quickly, dismissed as a trick of the memory.

Back in the photos, the Squad of Impenetrable Defenses, SQUID, is drifting in and out of the frame nervously. Tonks flips through the pictures, shuddering as the scene reveals itself: SQUID, taking the complex spell off of the corpse; various Aurors looking on in horror as the body begins to decompose…rapidly; the bridge of Snape’s nose sinking in; the corpse putrefying; the flesh liquefying; the insects blooming out of the body cavities to spill in writhing, wet puddles next to the corpse; even Moody looks disturbed as the body dissolves into the ground. It is apparent that although beneath the spell the body seemed fresh, Severus Snape had been lying in the woods for far longer than initially thought.

::

I don’t care where you go but you can’t stay here, Draco thinks to himself, eyes hardening as he looks at the little house on Spinner’s End. The Ministry hasn’t declared the corpse found yet, but he knows it is only a matter of time and he wants to move on before the lot of them is caught. His mother is still sick with grief—yes, grief, he says sharply to the voice that taunts him in the back of his mind. The voice sounds startlingly like Aunt Bellatrix, and it whispers rude things to him whenever he thinks of his mother in the house on Spinner’s End—she cannot move. Some mornings he finds her curled up in a ball next to the fireplace, her face wild and her hair pale, eyes rimmed in red like kohl and fingernails bitten to the quick. She reminds him of the bean sidhe, and the sound of her mournful wails at night chill his blood. He knows the power in names, and imagines that this is why she never calls out for his father. It’s not, the voice says silkily.

Bellatrix has taken over the house. She complains daily that it’s no place for the last hope of the “most ancient and noble House of Black.” She sleeps in his bed, she eats his food, and most insultingly, she uses his ingredients. Boomslang Skin, bicorn horn, leeches, he watches her take them all out of the carefully ordered cupboard. She has been doing this every day for a week, and though he prefers to pretend he doesn’t know what she’s doing, he finds himself compulsively cleaning up after himself—he leaves no hair or fingernail behind himself, not even an eyelash, for fear that someday he’ll wake up not himself.

As he stands outside the house in the cold early morning, he feels as if he’s been bewitched. There is a distinctly unreal feeling about what he is doing. Other children may have been tempted to run away, but he was always too…good. Loyal. Something. Maybe, he realizes, he was just too stupid to think of it, or too unimaginative. He squarely ignores the thought of what his leaving might do to his mother, already near-mad with the loss of the other man—men, Aunt Bellatrix whispers in his head—in her life. Perhaps if he doesn’t think about it it won’t be true. All he knows is that it doesn’t matter where he goes; he can’t stay here.

::

Standing here, on the top of Stoatshead Hill overlooking the remnants of Ottery St. Catchpole, Hermione feels as if she’s drowning in place. She’s never in her life been so horrified, never seen anything so dreadful or bloody. An entire village is completely destroyed—both Muggles and Wizards alike. She wonders sometimes if what saved the Weasleys wasn’t perhaps the bonfire that made the house look to be on fire already, or maybe it was just the invitations to the wedding, which stated that they would all be in Ireland. Her back feels stiff and cold at the thought that they might have been saved by the assailant’s desire to kill them all in one go.

Ginny hasn’t stopped crying since the mark appeared, and Molly is so tense she’s snapping at everyone, even the twins who’ve been kind enough to put them up for a while. Hermione knows that perhaps she had best go home, stop taking up so much bloody room, but she’s afraid—deathly afraid—that she will be followed. She has not told her family where she is despite the knowledge that the aftermath of the event was televised. She doesn’t want an owl marked to her to be the clue that causes the killer—or is it killers?—to find her. There’s so much Gryffindor courage running through her veins right now that she muses she may very well be Hufflepuff. After all, she’s showing stunning loyalty, isn’t she?

Some people deal with trauma by getting angry, some sad. Hermione’s own mother baked sweets for a week when she heard about Voldemort’s return, which is quite out of place for a dentist. Hermione, though, studies. She studies daily, for all of the day and a good bit of the night, often straight through meals. She’s already finished memorizing the first seven chapters of her advanced ancient runes book, and is wondering if she mightn’t be able to ask to test out when school begins. Though she’s promised Ron and Harry that she would hunt horcruxes with them, she imagines that without Harry around, the point is probably moot. She also cringes to herself when she remembers Professor Dumbledore’s withered, blackened arm and that it was the result of horcrux hunting. I could never take my NEWTs like that, she thinks, and is immediately abashed that she would be so petty.

Ron doesn’t understand her at all. The past few weeks have been an enormous strain on their tender new relationship. She feels as if all of the spider-threads holding them together—Harry, her mind supplies—are slipping away, leaving her awash in emotions that books can’t explain. She’s losing it, she thinks, and “it” is any number of things: Harry, Ron, her childhood. Ron is so angry right now. He thinks that everything’s Harry’s fault, as if Harry were responsible for all of the destruction. Hermione knows that he thinks that Harry could have stopped them; he puts entirely too much stock in Harry, and far more responsibility on his shoulders. Ron expects that Ottery St. Catchpole might not have been destroyed had Harry been there. Hermione tells him this is rubbish, and he slams doors for an hour, shouting about how she doesn’t understand. She knows he thinks she can’t because she’s Muggle born, and she tells him so once. His face turns sour and he storms away looking more like a pureblood Wizard than she has ever seen him.

“It’s not close to your home, Hermione!” he shouts at her later.

“It is, though!” she replies. She wants to tell him, “I’m afraid to read the Prophet because my parents might be dead! I haven’t talked to them in weeks!”

Instead, she says, “You are my home, and your family, and when it’s close to you, it’s close to me.” That’s Hermione Granger, always showing her kind side. Ron hugs her close to him, sobbing in her hair and she lets him touch her later, as if the fight had never happened.

London in the summer—it’s so humid and warm that Hermione feels she might misstep and swim off into the sky.

::

It’s one of his kind, Vernon Dursley thinks, watching the fat little man scurry down the street. Potter’s sort. The man is squat and his hair is tatty. His clothes are long and mud-colored and he looks as if he’s never seen a good dentist in his life. He’s carrying some sort of tin can, the metallic sheen of it glinting in the light of the fading sun. Figures, he muses, that their sort would be reduced to begging. He reads his newspaper in his favorite chair, waiting for Petunia to finish the pasta and sausages that she’s making for supper. She’s got the recipe off of her favorite show, and Vernon wanted a roast with oniony bits and lentils, but Dudley needs to bulk up for the coming season, so carbs and protein it is. There’s a ghastly bit in the paper about some tacky little town somewhere going up in flames, terrorists or something like that, and Vernon skims it quickly so he can make the required, “Oh, read about that in the papers. Yeah, how terrible. Great loss of life, that,” sentiments at the water cooler tomorrow. He glances over the edge of his paper to see the grotty man staring at him through the window, his hand cupped around a leering face. Vernon jumps slightly, but puffs his shoulders up and stares back evenly. With a calm exterior, he folds his paper and rests it on the table next to the lamp.

Standing, Vernon turns to the kitchen to see if Petunia’s got dinner ready yet. As he passes the boot cupboard, the door creaks open slowly, and he grabs the handle to close it again. The grate is open, and as he slams it closed, Vernon is sure he can see that boy’s eyes inside. It’s that awful article, he thinks, shrugging his collar against the hairs prickling on the back of his neck. Got everyone in a tizzy. It’s that crazy man standing on the front lawn got him all upset. As he steps into the kitchen, he hears the comforting sound of Petunia giving Dudley his pre-dinner snack, and the dark fuzzing in at the corners of his mind recedes a bit.

::

“What do you mean, you found him?” Harry had asked. He has been sitting on the edge of his bed for three hours now, trying to answer himself. Snape, the bastard. The murderer, murdered. Just the thought makes Harry’s insides shake with righteous rage, and he feels ill with regret that he wasn’t the one to do it. No, he wasn’t, but he suspects he knows who did.

He’s been a coward, he suspects. All he’s done this summer is think about himself. He lied, lied straight to Ron’s face, and Hermione and Molly, Arthur, Bill, Fleur and Ginny. He’s lied more these past three months than he suspects he ever has before in his life. He’s hidden himself away and pretended that the world could just keep spinning around him. Apparently they couldn’t manage even that.

Remus told him about the catastrophes in Oxford, Devon, Wiltshire. Ottery St. Catchpole in flames. Something sharp rolls in his stomach at this, and he presses a fist against it to make it stop. The Weasleys—all of them, including new and almost-Weasleys—were put in hiding, and Remus refused to tell him where. It’s for his own good, of course.

For their own good, too, Harry muses. If anyone knows, he does: the anti-Midas is Harry’s curse. All that glimmers turns to ash in his hand. The weight of his touch crushes hopes, the fog of his breath tarnishes gold. The most casual flick of his eyes causes whole buildings to combust. This is a curse that no finite could end.

Harry is tired. Hopelessly tired of the world and war and Voldemort, that serpentine motherfucker who can’t just do his job and kill a teenage boy. He wonders aimlessly what he would do if that bogeyman were to walk into his room right now.

“I’d tell him to fuck off,” Harry’s voice is clear and slightly startling in the room where no voices have been heard in days. He smirks, closing his eyes against the candle light. One hand drifts down and he finds his fingers tugging sharply at the curls at the base of his cock. This, he sighs and burrows deeper into the pillows beneath him, is really why he left the Dursleys. Fuck them and their slave labor, he ran away so he could wank in peace.

He shoves his hand into his pants, sliding his fingers under his cock and feeling his pulse dance on his fingertips. “I’d…fuck—” his breath catches as he grips slightly, “Maybe I’d tell him to suck me. Can’t die a virgin, can I?” His hand moves faster, slipping slightly in the precome pooling in his belly button. “I’ll,” he moans, long and slow, “I’ll make you put it in your mouth. I’ll hold your head so you can’t get away. I’ll,” a gasp, frenzied panting for air through clenched teeth, “I’ll make you fucking choke on it! And when it’s over, I’ll paint you with my come.” Harry’s eyes fly open with the force of the vision that this statement brings. His back arches and his calves cramp, knees locking and toes splaying, then curling, rhythmically. “Oh, fuck, Malfoy!” his scream is torn so violently from him that it sounds more like a sob.

::

Where to go when you’ve got nowhere else, Draco muses, is one of life’s greatest conundrums. He knows most people will never have to worry about this sort of thing. People like Weasley, they’ll never have to wonder where they’ll put their hat next. There will always be some hovel, some hole in the wall labeled clearly “home.” Hell, Draco admits after brief consideration, there are probably Weasleys scattered to the four winds, and just as many “homes.”

Potter likely won’t ever have to search for a safe place to sleep, either, he thinks. Between the Weasels and the werewolf, various and sundry professors to hole up with, not to mention the vast array of Aurors seemingly at his beck and call, Draco doubts there’s a house in Britain that Potter couldn’t sleep comfortably in. Not like Draco, who stands under a disillusionment cloak, staring up at the sign for the Leaky Cauldron with wide, nervous eyes.

Right now, Draco thinks he would give just about anything to not be standing in the mud with rain pelting down on him. He is soaked to the skin, his messy hair dripping fat drops of water on his nose. There is mud slimed halfway up his tall dragon hide boots from walking in the filthy streets and his pants and shirt cling to his skin uncomfortably. The glamour on his hair is poorly done without a mirror and streaks of silver blond show through the mousy, greasy mess on his forehead, making him look almost as greyed as a younger Professor Lupin, he imagines. He feels disgusting, anyway, and cannot help but hope that he will be allowed to bathe at the inn.

The check in goes better than he dared to dream and Draco carefully counts out four of his last seven galleons. It’s only enough for room and board for a month, but just this minute, he isn’t terribly certain what will happen in the next minute. He is led up to a small room on the fourth floor and left there alone, a key in hand and his cloak bundled under his arm. There is the satisfying snick of the lock unbolting and the door swings open to reveal the most beautiful thing that Draco has ever seen: a bed, with real pillows, blankets, towels, and a bathrobe. Barely suppressing a whoop of joy, it is all he can do not to hurl himself at the bed and bury himself inside.

::

A friend in need and all that, Ron thinks to himself as he sprawls on the cot he’s been loaned by the twins, is complete bullshit. It is his last day at the shop; soon he’ll be packing up and heading to Order headquarters. He really hates number twelve, Grimmauld Place, he thinks, because of the doxies. And Harry. And Kreacher. And Harry. And that portrait of Mrs. Black. And Harry. Honestly, right now Ron thinks that he could open today’s edition of the Daily Prophet to an article detailing Harry’s death at the beaks of enraged hippogriffs and he wouldn’t care. Well, maybe not much. He’d be concerned at least a little for the poor hippogriffs. Hermione seems altogether too worried about Harry, really. The prat deliberately skipped Bill and Fleur’s wedding, after all, and then to top things off hasn’t even bothered coming back to comfort Ginny. He wasn’t there to calm Hermione down, or help get Mum to bed after she sat in the chair and sobbed all day.

He hadn’t been there when no one could find Bill and Fleur, or when their hotel said they’d never arrived, or when their bodies were found three days later by a pair of Muggle hikers. The bodies had been in such terrible shape, the pain of the fire too sharp and fresh, that Fred isn’t planning on telling everyone until things have calmed down. The only reason Ron knows is he was there when the solicitor called and Fred swooned. He’d caught his brother and clung to him as they both shook and cried.

The solicitor said that the bodies had been flayed alive. Layers of muscle were shaved back to expose raw nerves, little bundles of string so delicate that breath caused agony. They’d been burned over and over again with hot needles stuck in them. Bill’s scars had bled fresh where they’d been traced with a knife and Fleur’s pretty blue eyes had been decimated by a fine tipped tool. According to reports, there had been more blood on the ground around them than in their veins.

Of course he can’t tell his mum. How do you tell someone their baby, the one you’d just seen get married, the one that was supposed to live happily ever is now so much destroyed, spoiled meat? How can he tell Ginny that the closest thing she’s ever had to a sister was blinded and vivisected while her husband of two hours was forced to watch? It’s a hard secret to keep, though. When Ginny and Hermione talk about happy times—like the wedding—and they gush over Fleur’s pretty silk dress, Ron feels like it’s his own nerves that have been exposed to the harsh sun. He’s snapped at Ginny and made her cry four times in as many days, and he’s stormed out of three discussions with Hermione, all of them about Harry. When his mum goes watery about how at least, wherever they are, Bill and Fleur missed the carnage at Ottery St. Catchpole, his gorge rises and it’s all he can do not to vomit. Rom has never felt as ill in his life as he did at dinner the night before, between Mum reminiscing on their childhoods and how Ron had always seemed to take after Bill and Dad assuring her that they were fine, surely, and perhaps they’d had to change hotels but were too busy to call? The slightly forced wolfish wink at the “men-folk” at the word busy had made Ron retch. When Hermione started talking about how gorgeous Ireland must be at this time of year, with all that green, and how she would ask Fleur how it looked—mightn’t she and Ron take their honeymoon in Wicklow, too? She asked, a pretty blush tinting her cheeks—Ron had to leave. He was violently ill and felt weak as a newborn when he finally stood up. His knees shook and knocked so hard that he’d have fallen if Fred hadn’t been there to catch him.

“I know it’s hard, Ron,” Fred had muttered under his breath, “but you were always off in your own world. You didn’t even really know them. Imagine how hard this would be for Mum or Ginny.” Ron still doesn’t know if it was the statement or the sentiment, but Fred is still trying to get the vomit stains out of his shirt.

::

It takes Harry a week, because of his odd sleeping habits, to realize that he is no longer the only one living on his floor. His first clue is quite sudden—a wet towel, wrapped around a slim pair of hips currently attached to a young man standing in front of him. Eyes, a strange color that seems somewhere between brown and green but occasionally shift suddenly to almost grey, peer at him in amusement from behind a fringe of greying brown hair.

“Can I help you?” the boy asks, and his voice sounds smooth, with a slight lilt.

“Er,” Harry supplies hopefully, and he feels his cheeks flush as the boy laughs quietly. “Who are you, and why are you naked?”

“Alexandre,” the boy offers, clutching his towel with one hand and offering his other. His chest is streaked with angry looking pink scars. “I’m trying to hunt down the house elves. They’ve got my clothes.”

“Alexandre?” Harry’s tongue feels thick as he tries to wrap it around the unfamiliar syllables.

“Yes,” the boy supplies, the lilt cementing itself in Harry’s mind as a very faint French accent that sounded nothing at all like Fleur, really. “I’m visiting from Nantes, and this place seemed to be the cheapest inn in town.”

“Er, yes,” Harry blushes as he notices the towel slipping further. “Well, I’ll just…um.”

“Wait.” Alexandre’s eyes harden slightly, and Harry is certain he sees them go completely grey before they meet his own. “You haven’t shaken my hand yet. That’s not very nice. After all, I’m the one standing here naked with my hand out. All you have to do is take it.”

Harry feels suddenly odd, like déjà vu or like he’s dreaming through Voldemort’s eyes. Smiling uneasily, he grips Alexandre’s hand in his own. It is cool, slightly damp, and buzzing with magical energy.

::

This is the way it happened: Narcissa Black Malfoy woke up one day, and then the next she didn’t. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened, with the corpse smelling like bitter almonds and her brittle nails broken off, bleeding at the cuticles. Her hair was dull and ugly, broken and snarled, her skin greyed and scaly looking, and her eyes wide and white.

No, the question isn’t what had happened to her but why the corpse was covered in pennyroyal and daisy petals, that was the puzzle. It’s hard to understand, and between this case and the Snape case, it certainly seems to Tonks that the Death Eaters are really claiming their own. She’s slightly concerned that this case has ended up on her desk, but not terribly. She finds that even if she wracks her mind, she can’t find a single positive memory of this distant aunt of hers, whose corpse was found only a month after that of the man who owned the house she was found in. In fact, the only memory Nymphadora Tonks has of her aunt is her cousin’s birth announcement and the way Narcissa Black Malfoy had managed to look at her as if she were a bug to be stepped on, all the way from Wiltshire.

What concerns her is the strong feeling that these cases are related, and an even stronger feeling that she’s missing an important factor here. But she’s already spent too many late nights on the Snape case, so much time that she can’t honestly remember the color of Remus’s favorite shoes or the color of the front door at number twelve. The whole Weasley brood has moved in with them, now, and she knows that Remus hasn’t gotten the nerve to tell them that he’s found Harry, but she’s not had the time to scold him properly for it.

When Younger, the energetic young intern, comes bustling in with a thick packet of papers, she is so lost in her thoughts that he has to cough twice, progressively louder, for her to notice. “It’s another D.E. attack,” he says, pronouncing each letter, dee-ee, with a pause in between, “Worse than any before.” He coughs importantly, but when she stares at him, changing her eye color rapidly between yellow, green, purple, and orange, he takes the hint and leaves with a huff. Tonks leans back in her chair and opens the file. Surely it can’t be the wo—

The first words in the folder are: “This morning at approximately two a.m., number four Privet Drive was blown up.”

::

When Dudley Dursley leaves the house at midnight, slipping out to go sneaking into the naughty pink films with Piers Polkiss, he does not imagine that pornography will save his life. He only knows that when he watches the rhythmic movement on the screen and hears the pants and moans, he gets a woody, and sometimes if he presses that woody against the palm of his hand, it feels really good. Piers calls this jerking off, but Dudley only knows it’s brilliant, and when he says so, Piers laughs and says it’s that, too.

Dudley isn’t thinking on his walk home that the dark smear of smoke on the horizon is his house. All he can think of is how after the film he has this enormous burst of energy in him and how he wants to use this energy to beat someone up. He wishes that Evans kid were around this time of night, because he cries so nicely after a few good punches, or even Harry, though Dudley is a little afraid of Harry now that he seems to have snapped. When he left almost two months ago, Harry took out his wand and waved it in Dad’s face, and Harry said, “Oh, you bastard,” and, “I’m leaving forever!” and, “If I never see you again it’ll be too soon!” He shouted ugly things at Mum, too, about her awful sister and how embarrassed Granddad and Grandmum must be, just turning somersaults in their graves. Somersaults, he said, because of what a shoddy aunt Mum had been, and then Mum had cried and Dudley had wanted to just kill him, that nasty boy. But Harry had turned that pointy stick on him and all he could remember was that feeling…that awful feeling like nothing would be alright again. He’d backed into the wall then, and he and Dad and Mum had watched as the nasty Potter boy walked down the stairs and out of their lives.

Piers is clinging to Dudley’s arm and he is about to make a funny comment about Piers and, “Oh, I never realized you felt that way,” when he sees what Piers sees before them. There, standing tall against the burning ruin of most of Privet Drive, is a whole stand of bogeymen, their grinning skulls peeking out from tall hats and dark, black clothes. He sees shadows dancing in the fire and realizes that they are awfully close to the fire, but are not a bit too warm. In fact, Dudley feels more than a bit too cool, and then the bad thoughts come back. Piers has frozen in place, staring at the grinning skulls as they walk closer. One of them in the back has begun to laugh, a high, terrifying laugh, and Dudley finds he cannot move. The embers from the fire are beginning to pop, like corn, and one hits him in the thigh. This is all that is needed to wake him up, and he grabs for Piers, but the other boy will not move. Piers’ eyes are glazed slightly and his eyes reflect the fire as if he were a doll. Even Dudley tugging with all his might cannot budge him, and Piers throws him away from his arm with what seems little more than a casual twitch of his hand.

Dudley watches in terror as Piers moves forward slowly, stepping into the fire. He cannot help but stare as his best friend is consumed in flames. Piers says nothing, and Dudley thinks how terribly brave he seems. As Piers’s hair burns, the stench of burned flesh fills Dudley’s nose and he has to swallow reflexively to keep from throwing up all over himself. When Piers’s face begins to melt, Dudley can take no more and he runs away, as fast as he can go. At the end of Magnolia Crescent, he doubles over in the bushes and up comes Mum’s dinner of cabbage rolls and pork. He is sick until his chest aches and nothing else can come up. His fingers shake and he drips sweat, tears, spittle and stomach acid. He’s never imagined anything as horrible as Piers’s silence as the flames licked at his blistered lips, while his glassy eyes reflect nothing.

::

So much nothing has happened in the past month that Harry finds himself stunned to realize that the school term should have begun four days ago. He’s shocked that he could have let himself forget. Without anything to keep his time against, he has slowly drifted away from reality and almost any sense of time, slowly unmooring himself from the real world. He discovers that Bill and Fleur’s wedding was five weeks ago, and five weeks ago Ottery St. Catchpole was razed to the ground. Snape’s corpse was found just over a month ago, battered and beaten in a grove not terribly far from Godric’s Hollow. He moved out of the Dursleys’ about two months ago, and he left school for what he now understood to be the last time shortly over three months ago. Dumbledore has been dead for three and a half months, and though it still stings as if it were yesterday when he thinks on it, he is appalled to realize that he hasn’t been thinking of it at all, really. He has been drifting in this dreamy half world of endless nights alone.

Only now his nights aren’t alone. Well, they are in the literal sense: he’s had no visitors since Remus two weeks ago, but he can hear other people in the building now, an odd feeling after his isolation for so long. He can hear Alexandre walking in his room just a few doors down, and he can hear the other boy dressing and undressing. He can hear through the walls as the other boy bathes for hours every few days, and the heavy, muted sound of fabric that has just slid down legs to land on the floor. Harry imagines that if he were to listen hard enough, he could hear the rasp of zippers or the popping sound of buttons slipping through thread ringed holes.

One thing he hears a lot of is wanking. He doesn’t know if this is just his overactive imagination, but he can hear the other boy groaning, the old bed in his room groaning, the wood floors groaning, and it makes him hopelessly hard. Alexandre himself doesn’t turn Harry on—he finds the boy odd and more than a little bit creepy—but the humanity of hearing someone else wanking just seems to work for him these days. Listening to Alexandre get off makes him hard, so he wanks, too, and as he lies in his own bed, sweaty bed linens nested around him and his fingers trailing through puddles and streaks of come on his belly, he imagines Alexandre getting hard from listening to him, too.

Mostly, though, what he hears are perfectly innocent, innocuous noises, like a body moving quietly in the distance or the low buzz of the boy’s voice as he talks to himself. That’s one of the odd things about the French boy: he talks to himself often. There have been more than a few times when Harry goes into the hallway expecting to see him talking to another guest or the proprietor, only to find him sitting in the hall outside his door talking to himself. Alexandre’s odd eyes light up at the sight of him, and often Harry finds himself badgered into another conversation with the boy about something or another that Alexandre has encountered during the day. He always falls for this, Harry thinks, and he wonders if it’s because he secretly wants to talk to Alexandre or if he is so desperate for someone other than himself and the odd boy to talk to that he will try every chance to replace him. Harry never really listens to the boy with more than half an ear, anyway. He suspects Alexandre makes his experiences up, or at least their inherent non-French qualities. Alexandre makes him feel uncomfortable, and he cannot help but be on his guard around him.

::

It’s a calm sort of feeling, Draco realizes, to be sitting on the floor of a decrepit inn room drinking tea with your worst enemy. There’s liquor in the tea, and the combination of Potter’s conversation and the tea fills him with a warm glow. He can feel the goofy smile on his lips, can taste the bitter leaves of poorly brewed tea on the back of his tongue, can hear the other boy’s throat working as he gulps the tea back. Potter’s crude and ill-mannered and the tea is terrible, but he finds him occasionally interesting and certainly better than no one. The dull fug that filled Draco’s days before his forced friendship with Potter is all but gone now, and it’s easy to forget that he’ll be out on the streets again in less than two weeks.

The pub below them is loud enough to be heard on the fourth floor, and Draco is startled to discover that this is the first time he and Potter have been awake during the Leaky Cauldron’s operating hours. Potter has been avoiding those hours because he doesn’t want to see people. Draco has been avoiding them because the smell of food makes him hungrier than he already is. It’s been tempting to spend some of the last of his money on food; it would be too easy to go down to the market and waste the last of his gold. Hungry as he is, it’s possible that he’d lose it all on nothing but one large meal. Instead, he waits for tea with Potter.

Potter is casual about it, in a way that must rankle with Weasley: after the first few awkward days, when Draco abstained from the tea as long as he could before his stomach growled, the tea is always half consumed before he gets there. Potter always tries to fob the “remains” off on him, but every day there are a few more biscuits or scones than the day before. Draco always tries to pretend he’s not hungry, but when he looked in the mirror yesterday he could see the smears of shadow between his ribs like zebra stripes. He looks like a prisoner of war, and he imagines he is, in a way.

Their conversation is always light. Draco tries to remember what it was like to visit Britain the first time from the family home in Nantes and makes up his stories based on that, but Potter doesn’t really seem to listen, anyway, so he doesn’t try too hard. And if his accent slips a little bit every now and then, Potter never catches him on it, so eventually he begins to let it fall to his own real accent rather than the ostentatious slur he’d originally put on. He finds himself relaxing around Potter, and often has to bite his tongue these days to keep himself from talking casually about Spinner’s End. It takes him longer and longer each time to remember why he shouldn’t talk about it, and this worries him. He finds it would be entirely too easy to slip into the life of this French boy he’s made up.

::

Ginny knows it’s bad to hate, but she can’t help it. Her hatred is irrational; she knows this, too. She has no reason to look at her and see crimson creeping in on the edges of her vision. She isn’t supposed to hate her best friend—the only friend she has, really, since the other girls think she’s creepy after that diary.

Hermione cried for two hours in the loo yesterday, and Ginny doesn’t know if it’s because she found the moldy cheese she’d hid in Hermione’s trunk or because she overheard Ginny telling Molly about the condoms in her purse. Ginny doesn’t even know why she said anything. She feels torn in twenty different directions, crammed into this house with her family and Hermione. There’s no privacy in the place except the bathroom, and even then your privacy is bought in ten minute increments.

The close quarters are affecting all of them terribly. Ron is tense, as if there is a spring within him that is being wound tighter and tighter. His face is grim, and his eyes flash dangerously over petty problems. The chess set has already been set afire, the plaster walls behind every door have fist-sized holes, and the light bulbs have channeled so much incendiary magic that half of them are burned out.

There is a slow drizzle of rain trickling down the only window the family is allowed near—it faces the back lawn and looks to be boarded up from the outside—but Ginny has been staring out of it for hours. She has her transfiguration textbook on her lap because Mum insists that she must study even though she can’t go to school, but she hasn’t opened it all day, not even to read the Quidditch book she has hidden inside. It sits on her leg, a comforting weight as she thinks silently about the world outside. She knows she’s been in a bit of a mood recently, and not even the twins will have anything to do with her.

Tonks and Remus supposedly live in the house, too, but it’s the full moon on Thursday and Tonks has been absorbed with work recently. Ginny wishes halfheartedly that she could talk to them. It doesn’t matter which; she just wants to see a face not topped with ginger fringe and spattered with freckles, and since she has decided to hate Hermione, Remus and Tonks are the only ones available. She feels strange in this dusty old house, like a porcelain doll that has been left behind.

::

The first time it happens, Harry’s convinced it was an accident for a full hour. It’s like this: Alexandre is laughing, his greyish hair almost falling into the teacup he’s holding. Harry is beginning to suspect he’s added too much booze to the tea, because he feels giddy, too, and there’s a hysterical laugh building in his chest as he watches the other boy. Sighing, he throws himself at the floor but misses and jostles Alexandre’s knee. There is a searing moment of pain as the tea spills onto his shoulder and Alexandre mutters, “Oh, shit!” before giggling and leaning over him. He has a handkerchief out and Harry notices something vaguely wrong with it before Alexandre is suddenly on top of him, his very warm lips pressed against Harry’s. Alexandre smears his mouth eagerly and drunkenly across Harry’s face and, stunned, Harry simply stares up into messy brown hair. There is a sharp nip of teeth on his chin that draws a noise of pain from him and reminds him of what’s happening.

“Alexandre,” he says, shoving ineffectually at the boy with his shoulder. “What are you doing?”

The boy above him stills awkwardly, then pulls himself into an upright position. His cheeks are flushed, and Harry can’t tell from Alexandre’s expression if it is passion or drunkenness. Alexandre skitters back, laughing, but stands up and excuses himself to go to sleep. It takes Harry almost a full hour to remember that he’d not added anything to the tea that night.

::

Draco sleeps fitfully for three days before he decides it’s okay to visit again.

::

When Alexandre shows up a few days later looking half sick from hunger, Harry could almost kick himself. When the boy moves so nervously around him that he almost trembles, Harry feels an odd twist in his stomach and almost trips over the tea set he’s already laid out on the floor. He’s set it out every day since it happened, and his heart has panged every time with the knowledge of how comfortable he has become with the other boy. He misses Alexandre immensely, even as he stands in the doorway, blushing and standing on the sides of his feet. Harry’s mouth goes dry as he looks at this boy—not his friend, but somehow grown indispensable.

“Come in,” he says, “Please.”

Alexandre’s cheeks flush slightly and he nods his head a little, following the movement of Harry’s hand toward the tea set. Ten minutes later they are sitting side by side, so close that their knees brush when Alexandre reaches for the lemon. The air is tense, and Harry can feel the weight of it on his shoulders, pressing him to the floor.

“Er,” he begins, “So what did you do in London today?”

Alexandre pins him with a steady gaze. “You’re not an idiot, Harry. Neither am I. I didn’t go into London today.”

Something in Harry’s stomach flips at the information so bluntly acknowledged. He stares at his tea for a minute, wishing he remembered how to divine steam. I knew that, he thinks. I didn’t care, he realizes. I still don’t. The tea leaves drift in lazy circles at the bottom of his cup. “What would you have done? If you’d gone to London, I mean.”

Alexandre looks at him with an unreadable expression on his face, but his eyes are perfectly clear: the irises shift, thinning as the pupils dilate. Acquiescence. “I’m not sure. Perhaps Trafalgar?” Alexandre takes a long, measured sip from his cup. The tension is broken as Harry’s unspoken apology is accepted.

“I’ve never been,” Harry admits sheepishly.

“That makes two of us,” Alexandre replies with a wry twist of his lip.

“Where are you really from?” Harry asks, turning to face him. Their faces are close enough to kiss, and after a minute they do. This kiss is entirely different from the one before, most notably because this one is being reciprocated. There is a lot of fumbling as Alexandre grips his shoulders, perhaps to keep him from bolting. Their teeth clack together and Alexandre draws back, breathless.

“I…” His eyes are dark, pupils almost completely obliterating the iris around them. Harry leans back until he is lying on the floor and Alexandre follows him, turning on his side to face him. His long lashes, some of which are as white as snow, flutter over his cheeks and they revel in the comfortable silence.

“Let’s play a game, Harry,” Alexandre says at last. “The rules are: I’ll tell you three things. Two are true and one is a lie. You have to guess which one is untrue.” His eyes are cool and guarded as Harry turns to look at him. “One: I went to Hogwarts. Two: I’ve killed someone. Three: I was born in France.”

The uncomfortable tension is back as Harry is silent. Something inside of him cheers in vindication, but the rest of him aches with the knowledge that whatever it is he has with Alexandre will be forever different. He holds his breath for a moment, composing himself, then answers, “Don’t do this…”

Alexandre’s eyes go hard. “Guess.”

Harry pleads, “Draco…”

A few days later, when Draco hasn’t come back but Harry can hear he’s still there, Hedwig brings Harry a letter from Remus. It’s as good an excuse as any to get out of this room that’s grown uncomfortably close, so he takes it.

::

Ginny looks in the mirror more than she ought to, Molly says. It’ll make her vain. Ginny doesn’t see how, really, because she’s quite ugly. Her eyes are fever bright as she catalogues her face: her eyes, listless, brown; her cheeks, fat and speckled with brown dots; her lips, bitten and chapped with cold; her skin, pale and wan with lack of sun; her jaw, slowly growing large and horsy and hideous. There is no one in the house to impress, really, but this doesn’t stop Ginny from standing in front of the mirror for hours, carefully applying smooth cream foundation and pearly coral rouge. She slicks her lips with waxy lipstick until she looks just-kissed and dewy. She paints a watery blue on her eyelids and coats fluttery ginger lashes with thick black mascara.

When her makeup is done, she carefully unwraps the long stockings, unfolding them so slowly that sometimes it takes as long as twenty minutes just to pull one free from the paper. She tugs on her satin gloves, smooth so they won’t snag the gorgeous stockings, and gingerly pulls the silk up her legs one at a time. After making sure that the seams are razorblade straight, she carefully clips her garters to the tops, smoothing her hands slowly over her legs. Then she lifts the pretty white bra from her bed. It’s simple, with a little rosette between her breasts. She slides the straps up her arms, then scoops up the mounds of flesh on her chest and rests them in the cups as she reaches behind herself to close the hooks.

Ginny stands in front of the mirror examining every angle of the stunning image. The girl in the mirror isn’t her; the girl has shimmering liquid copper pooled over her shoulders and spilling onto her breasts, barely restrained by a lovely scrap of white lace. She has a thin, flat stomach that leads the eye fluidly to her wide hips that frame a delicate pink triangle covered lightly by wispy curls. Her legs fall for miles and miles encased by sheer white that hugs her curvy body all the way down to pretty pink toes that cause the fabric to blush the palest pink. She looks like the most beautiful girl in the most expensive fashion magazines.

Ginny, on the other hand, has scraggly orange strings hanging from her head like a rag doll. Her hair sticks to the sweat gathered between her breasts, pinched in a bra that is too old by far and ill-fitting. Her stomach is emaciated, and her ribs and hipbones jut sharply from her pasty stomach. She has an enormous arse from sitting around all the time, and her legs look silly, like sausages bursting in their casings of silk. Her cunt is furred over with a ginger forest of curled wire. She will stand in the mirror for an hour, touching herself until the girl in the mirror shakes with pleasure, and then she will carefully deconstruct the beautiful picture. She takes off the stockings slowly, then the bra and makeup. Then she dresses up like Ginny Weasley again, her crisp shirt covering her breasts and the dowdy skirt ghosting her knees. The girl in the mirror goes away until the next time Ginny comes to visit her.

One day, as she and Ginny shudder together, there is the glimmer of eyes in the doorway. Ginny flushes pink, her cheeks and forehead going hot with shame and embarrassment, but the girl in the mirror meets his eyes evenly. She looks beautiful, shaking and blushed with sensual pleasure, and he flees from her knowing eyes. That night, Ginny wears her makeup to dinner. Fred and George laugh at her, Hermione looks at her pityingly, and Molly tells her to go wash her face because she looks like a tart. Even as she stumbles into the hall, hot tears of mortification streaking down her cheeks in blue and pink and black lines, she can feel his eyes hot on her.

::

When Draco, mollified by time and hunger, knocks on Harry’s door again, it is opened by a fat man in a ghastly night cap. He stands there numbly as the man berates him for bothering him at this time of night then goes back to his room. He has three more days left in his room, and he spends them sitting in his bed pretending he’s waiting for tea time.

::

The sightings begin to pour in the closer it gets to Halloween: Death Eaters in Dorset; Bellatrix Lestrange on Knockturn Alley, buying potions ingredients; Malfoy blonde spotted in Muggle London in the subway. After Tonks bursts into tears over the Black Malfoy case, she is assigned to these hoaxes, reports filed by little old ladies who see bogeymen lurking in every darkened corner. She knows it’s the job they give the Aurors who have little breakdowns like hers, but it means she can spend more time at home with Remus.

When she goes home for the first time, she is surprised at the sheer number of people living in the house. She knew academically that the Weasleys had moved in, but the sheer number is still overwhelming when she wakes up late the first morning and staggers down the stairs to the kitchen in one of Remus’s old shirts to be confronted with the embarrassed grins of four young men. When she heard footsteps behind her and turned to greet her boyfriend, Arthur Weasley had been adjusting his tie. After seeing her state of dishabille, he’d raised an eyebrow but cheerfully greeted Molly and accepted a cup of coffee. Finally Remus had come in, and by that time she’d been so thoroughly embarrassed that she’d rounded on him fiercely and stormed out of the room to get ready for work.

Even remembering it made her cheeks flush. She knew that what she’d done had been horrible and out of her norm, but she’d been so out of sorts recently that she secretly feared she was becoming slightly unbalanced at best, completely unhinged at worst. When Remus told her that he’d encouraged Harry to come stay for a week or two, she’d had to suppress a shudder, as she did now. She hasn’t yet told Remus about her aunt’s death, and she imagines he’d think her recent behavior was because of it, but she knows that isn’t true. At least, it’s not completely true, she reasons with herself. Most of the problem is as simple as this: she’s late, and it’s illegal to mate with a werewolf.

::

The reception he gets when he moves into number twelve is cool at best. Grief makes Molly distant, Fred and George are busy working on new Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes, and Ron can’t look at him without light bulbs popping like corn. Bill and Fleur must still be on honeymoon, Harry thinks, but a niggling feeling in the back of his mind tells him that no, they’re not. After the first day, his stomach ties itself into knots and he finds he cannot sleep. When Remus greets him in the morning, he goes half-hard at just the sight of the man’s hair and has to spend thirty minutes in the loo having “personal time” with his left hand before he’s able to join decent society again.

The house creaks and groans in odd ways, sighing here and there in a way he doesn’t remember from two summers ago. There aren’t any doxies anymore and Kreacher is long gone, but late at night as Harry lies on his back staring at the bed curtains, he can hear little feet running down the halls, giggles, and muffled words. He wonders if there is a brownie in the house, and begins to leave milk and bread out on the hearth in his room, but it is never touched. Then he remembers that it should be oatmeal and switches, but food is tight in the cramped quarters and he stops after less than a week because he feels guilty.

He tells himself that he only misses Alexandre, not Malfoy. Alexandre was charming, in his own way, but Malfoy is a prat and Harry thinks somewhere in the back of his mind that the worst thing Draco Malfoy has ever done is not try to kill Dumbledore but instead try to make Harry fall for him. Which he didn’t, Harry reminds himself, but it’s impossible to believe that he didn’t like the made up boy just a little when he finds his cheeks growing hot every time he sees Remus. An icy cold stab of jealousy grabs him one morning as he sees Tonks leaving the room she shares with Remus and he can’t help being touchy and irritable for the rest of the day.

Ron still won’t talk to him. He seems to be funneling all of his attention through Hermione, and the first time he catches them together—Hermione, spread out on the desk like a book with a cracked spine, Ron’s fingers squelching loudly and wetly between her legs—Harry all but runs away from the scene. It’s not intimate at all; Ron is attacking her with such violence that Harry can’t even imagine it would feel good and Hermione is sitting dispassionately on the edge of the table apathetically looking down at Ron’s shiny fingers, looking for all the world as if he is using someone else’s body. When her eyes catch his in the doorway, Harry feels sick to his stomach and has to leave. The image won’t leave his mind but he can’t be sick because someone is in the toilet for twenty minutes. It turns out to be Ginny, who is still flipping the pages of her fashion magazine, several years out of date, as she walks out.

Harry wonders how he ended up through the rabbit hole.

::

Bellatrix is beautiful, haughty, and rich. She has never had anyone deny her anything, and she isn’t about to start, so when the little shop keep at the potions shop refuses to give her service, her hand shakes with the desire to scratch his eyes out with her long red nails. She shakes so much in her fury that she must clutch her elbows, but her voice is deadly level.

“You will sell me those ingredients,” she informs him, a chill hanging in the air from her tone. She pulls a bag heavy with gold taken from the stack Narcissa kept in the drawing room and lets it fall to the counter with a clink.

“Are you trying to bribe me?” the boy asks, and Bellatrix recognizes him as a Slytherin, class of 1994. Flint, or something like that. He’s got a money-hungry expression and she almost twists her lip up in a sneer at his eagerness.

“I am prepared to pay,” she weighs her words carefully, “handsomely for these items.”

“Ma’am,” Flint simpers, fluttering his lashes in a way that could be called coy in a girl, but on him merely looks ridiculous, “I’ve been instructed not to allow, erm, ‘his’ people to purchase anything. I could lose my job.”

Resisting the urge to roll her eyes, Bellatrix turns on her most syrupy voice. “What will it take to make it worth your while?” she asks, already counting out how many galleons she can afford to pay before it becomes ludicrous.

“Well,” Flint seems to ponder for a moment, but his eyes glitter triumphantly. “Ma’am, I don’t think I could take money under the counter like that. It’s just not fair to all of the other people I’ve had to turn away.” Bellatrix’s mouth drops open slightly, stunned. She turns on her heel sharply to leave, but Flint grabs her sleeve quickly. “But Ma’am,” his tone is smooth as silk, “if you don’t mind the compliment, you’ve got fabulous tits.” This is how Bellatrix ends up on her pureblooded knees sucking cock like a two sickle whore in a storeroom on Knockturn Alley, but it’s also how she ends up with three months’ worth of bicorn horn.

::

One day, as Harry is lying in bed after a long wanking session, feeling the sweat cool in his armpits and the come congeal in his belly button, the doorbell rings. This is odd because he has never known anyone to ring the doorbell to number twelve before. In fact, he hadn’t known there was a bell. He uses a dirty sock to wipe himself clean and tugs on his jeans, heading down the stairs to see who it is. The familiar shock of blonde hair surprises him as Remus opens the door, and Ron rushes forward to shove Draco back into the street. The fierce push unbalances him and suddenly Draco’s sprawled on the front step all bones and dirt.

“Oh my God,” Molly’s soft cry is audible upstairs as Malfoy’s sleeves fall up, revealing knobby elbows that look like parchment stretched over bones too large for his body.

“Cor,” Ron mutters when Malfoy’s shirt slips to reveal a sharply jutting collarbone lined with dirt, bruises, and dark shadows. It has been almost two weeks since Harry last saw Malfoy, but it looks like a hundred years. Draco is ushered in, despite Ron’s protests, and given a cup of tea while Molly looks for something to feed him with. It’s another mouth to feed—another stretch to their already thin menu—but Molly doesn’t care as she gives him the broth she’d been planning to cook dinner with. After eating only half a bowl, Malfoy asks to use their shower and Molly takes his filthy clothes. They’re stained and the stench coming from them reminds Harry firmly of the stink of dead things mixed with the smell of Mrs. Figg’s house.

He runs into Malfoy in the hall outside the shower and he watches a drop of water fall from the other boy’s earlobe, tracing its path down his shoulder and across his chest with his eyes. Malfoy clutches a towel around his hips and they can hear Molly and Arthur arguing downstairs. The muted whisper-shouts are interspersed with words like “Death Eater,” “Snape,” and “Dumbledore,” but Harry can see clearly that his forearm is not marked. Malfoy won’t meet his eyes, but Harry leads him to his own room, where Charlie has transfigured the bed into two beds and Molly has left an old set of clothes, hand me downs from Ron’s third year. Draco doesn’t turn away to drop his towel and dress and Harry doesn’t look away. Greyed cotton pants are pulled up over skeletal hips. A pair of faded school slacks follows, the charcoal color flattering nicely the color of the greenish bruise on a concave stomach. The shirt is no longer crisp and the robes are ragged at the hem from being passed down for more than ten years, but the jumper that Molly left for him puddles around his elbows and Draco looks like a small child playing in his big brother’s clothes.

“Draco,” Harry says. Grey eyes flash quickly up to meet his and the room is tense again. Draco turns on his heel to go downstairs.

::

The air is beginning to frost over and Halloween has come and gone without any of the dire predictions made by blue haired biddies coming true. Tonks is still at work sorting through dozens of false reports when she comes across one that’s odd. The witness, a squib cousin of one of Tonks’s roommates in school, claims she saw Severus Snape in Yorkshire. The whole incident has left the woman very shaken up, and Tonks suspects that there may be someone out there polyjuicing themselves into the intimidating—and currently very dead—Hogwarts professor, but when she reports the case to her supervisor, she gets a noncommittal noise and a nod of the head, quickly followed by a soothing smile. She is growing frustrated with her job, but can’t bring herself to talk to anyone about it because she knows that all of her secrets will pour out once she opens her mouth.

She has come home early to tell the Weasleys that they can go home now, but as she walks in the door she sees her cousin sitting in the parlor. His hair gleams in the gas lights and the portrait of Mrs. Black seems pacified by the presence of a true pureblood in the house because she only calls Tonks the product of a whorish Muggle lover rather than anything truly awful. Her cousin looks ill, but he has always been far paler and thinner than he should have, so she supposes it is relative to his previous poor health. His Weasley jumper has a large letter ‘G’ on it and Molly is standing protectively over him as the others sit around with various expressions of distaste on their faces. Ron looks as if his face might cook an egg he’s so hot with anger, and Ginny has a placid doll-like expression of slightly bored apathy on her face as she stares at her feet. Hermione is curled away from Malfoy as if his touch is toxic, and the twins are eyeing him warily from the divan. Harry and Remus have twin expressions of warded concern in their faces, but Malfoy is deliberately avoiding meeting his eyes with Harry’s studious gaze.

Tonks has learned long ago that with this group she should never be surprised by anyone who shows up, but since the last she’d heard Draco Malfoy was missing—presumed dead—she can’t help the twist of confusion that must show on her face. Remus smiles apologetically at her and comes to take her arm, saying, “He came by today looking for help. He’s been homeless since…well, you know,” he says, making a lame gesture with his hand. “He was more than half starved when he showed up, and Molly’s been feeding him every few hours since he got here. He was in the middle of telling us what he knows about,” he pauses, “the case when you came in.”

A bird has gotten caught in her chest as she looks at the boy on the couch with new eyes. “He was there?”

“No,” Draco’s voice is fragile and Tonks is forcibly reminded that despite everything, he is only seventeen. “No, but…I heard it. What happened. And then they made me help them move the,” he chokes slightly, “corpse.”

“They?” Tonks’s tone sounds sharp, even to her own ears.

“Yes.” His eyes close slowly, and then open just as slowly. They move to her, watching her face. “My mother and Aunt Bellatrix.”

::

It has been a long day, exhausting. Ginny is curled in her bed on her side, dozing and thinking over the events and discoveries of the day. Her hair is sticking to her skin as she tries to sleep, but her mind is racing too fast for her to rest. She feels anxious, but she doesn’t know why. She suspects she feels unsafe with Malfoy in the house, but in the state he’s in, he couldn’t even dream of hurting her. Between her fat arse and the sticks he has for thighs, she could see herself pushing him down the stairs if he threatened her. He’d probably shatter.

She caught him staring at her today, her admirer, staring with those eyes he’d used to watch her visiting the girl in the mirror. He’d been watching her arse and the way her skirt moved. She pretended not to notice, but the feeling of his eyes on her had made heat pool in her belly. Hermione is out of the room, probably whoring herself out to Ron, so Ginny lets her fingers slide between her thighs. She whimpers as they touch sticky wetness and there is a groan from the door. Behind her, there are heavy, masculine footsteps and a warm body slips under the blankets with her. He captures her wrist and pulls her fingers, gleaming in the moonlight, toward himself. She can feel his hardness pressed against her arse and her eyelids flutter. They both groan as he licks her fingertips, sliding his own calloused hand over her belly to her panties. His fingers toy with the bow on the front before dipping in to scratch through her damp curls. They seek out her clit like they’ve been here before. Ginny opens her thighs slightly and rides the wave of pleasure coursing through her body. He pants behind her, grinding his cock against her. She knows when he comes: he clutches her whole mound with his hand, pressing fingertips in almost painfully against her pubic bone as he shudders against her. Hot, wet pulses squish in the fabric of her nightgown and she lets out a soft moan. His hand slips away, smearing slime up her stomach as he pulls his fingers out of her panties. Shaking, he stands up and presses a kiss to her forehead from behind and sneaks out of the room before Hermione can get back. With her thighs quaking and her legs slipping against each other, Ginny tries to force herself to sleep.

::

Draco soon learns that there’s no privacy at Grimmauld Place. Anything you can be walked in on doing, you will. The first time he runs into Potter on the stair, just coming out of the toilet with his eyes bright and his cheeks flushed, his whole body screaming, “I just wanked!” he is stunned, then mortified. As he listens to Ron get his from Granger, the bedsprings creaking and groaning almost as loud as the huffing and puffing of the weasel’s breath as he thrusts into her, he wishes wholeheartedly that he were deaf.

The first time he walks in on them, with their kinky ritual of mirrors and silk stockings, he knows he’s finally seen something wrong. The weaslette is only sixteen, but she is on her back, moaning and writhing as her lover pumps into her. Her long legs are wrapped in pretty silk stockings and decorated with silk bows. They look for all the world like they should belong to a bride instead of a teenaged girl, and there is a little rosette on her bra, the same color as her cinnamon nipples that are being pinched between the man’s fingers. All he can think is, that man shouldn’t be doing that. He should know better. This is wrong. She sees Draco’s gobsmacked expression in the mirror and screeches, clutching to her lover. Draco realizes she is orgasming and runs as far away as he can. He hides in his room under Harry’s bed and shakes in disgust until dinner, when Harry comes to bring him to eat. He won’t tell Harry what happened, and Harry stops asking as they walk into the dining room.

After dinner, Draco stays to help Molly with the dishes so he doesn’t have to see them again, but the weaslette sits on the kitchen table, watching him. Her eyes are so blank and doll-like that he feels ill and wonders vaguely if she even cares what she is doing. Eventually all of the dishes are clean, the counters wiped down and everything put away. Molly makes him a cup of chamomile tea because he tells her that he hasn’t been sleeping well and she sends him out of the room. As he leaves, Ginny stares at him silently. He heads to the room he has been sharing with Harry as quickly as he dares, but in the dark hallway he finds himself grabbed by the collar and slammed into the wall. His tea splatters wetly against the floor and the cup shatters. In the kitchen, Draco can hear Molly get up to follow the noise, but a pair of lips are growling next to his ear.

“Don’t tell her anything. You didn’t see anything,” the man snarls at him and he stares at the glint of light reflected off of a dragon’s tooth as he is shoved to the floor. Ginny minces up the stairs and into the hallway. She looks down at Draco, who babbles nonsensically about not seeing anything, and then she goes into her room. The man follows her and Draco’s stomach turns. He is dry heaving in the floor when Molly, who is all terrycloth dressing gown and fuzzy slippers and smelling faintly of burned sugar, finds him sobbing sickly in a puddle of his own snot and bile. She helps him to bed and brings him more tea, and when Harry asks him what happened, he turns over and pulls the blankets over his head.

::

Harry is lying in bed when he realizes that he doesn’t understand how Malfoy knew how to get to Grimmauld Place. He knows the Fidelius charm has expired, but the house is still unplottable. He thinks about asking, but when he looks over to Draco’s bed, he sees that he isn’t there yet. There is a sudden clatter of pandemonium in the hall, and Harry rushes to see what it is. The door won’t open, he finds, but if he presses his ear to the old wood he can hear faintly the muffled thud of a body falling to the ground. When Molly enters a few minutes later with a weak looking Malfoy on her arm, it’s all he can do not to demand with whom Ferret-face has started an argument. Then he sees the dark shadows under pale grey eyes and the almost arthritic shaking of too-thin limbs and realizes that not even Malfoy would pick a fight when he’s this ill. He watches Molly put Malfoy to bed and waits for her to leave before asking what happened, but all he gets is sulking for his trouble. He thinks of asking Molly, but it’s late and he knows she will only send him back to bed, so he rolls over so he can keep an eye on the tiny bundle beneath the coverlet in the next bed.

The next day, there is an odd tension in the house. Ginny is nowhere to be found, as usual, but Charlie is watching Malfoy like a hawk. Harry wishes that Charlie would see that the boy is simply too sick to do anything—besides, who has he got to turn to, anyway?—but Charlie’s eyes won’t leave the pale figure that staggers through the parlor skittishly. Even the twins are affected by the general malaise of the day, and their constant jokes seem to have hit a lull. Ron and Hermione seem to be having a bit of a tiff. Hermione is in the library reading—Ron jokes that she has been memorizing her textbooks—and Ron has been sniping at Malfoy all day.

“Come on, then!” Ron taunts from his seat on the plush sofa, “Tell us how your Death Eater friends killed Snape. We know it was you, anyway.”

“Ron!” Molly’s tone is sharp, and Harry can see the scowl forming on Ron’s face already at her perceived treason.

“Oh, come on, Mum! He’s been a Junior Death Eater for as long as I’ve known him. Surely you can’t ignore that!” Ron’s tone is sour, but not as sour as the ugly expression forming on Malfoy’s face. The twins are fidgeting slightly and Fred stands up to leave, but George stays, almost entranced. Fred tugs on his brother’s shoulder for a while, then gives up and leaves.

“Ronald,” Molly’s tone is warning, and her eyes flash dangerously. “There’s no need to bring up the past.”

“Mum, just because a snake licks your hand when it’s injured doesn’t mean it won’t bite when it’s well again,” Ron’s tone is sullen and whiny, and Harry suddenly can’t see how this creature could be his friend.

“Ron, that’s enough!” Harry stands, walking over to the chair where Malfoy is sitting, trying to catch his breath. Harry cups a bony shoulder in his hand and Draco’s head jerks up. He stares at Harry for a moment before pulling away and looking around nervously. His tongue flits out, licking cracked and drying lips, and his eyes settle on Ron.

“He’s right, you know,” Draco’s tone is conversational, and Harry is startled and half-hard at the sudden memory of Alexandre. “I was a ‘Junior Death Eater,’ as he called it. I wanted to serve the Dark Lord.”

“Voldemort,” Harry’s half-though correction slips through as a whisper, and Draco nods.

“Voldemort. I wanted to serve him and destroy the results of what I saw as the Muggle taint on Wizarding society,” Draco’s voice is soft, but grows in strength. Ron is sputtering indignantly, but not standing up, so Draco continues. “I was…angry, I suppose. Angry that such a disgusting breed of people could be allowed to breathe the same air as we could, study the same things we could, and that everyone seemed to have forgotten.”

“Forgotten?” Molly’s voice is hesitant. “What has everybody forgotten, dear?”

“The old ways. The way it was before when Wizard kin and Muggles got together,” Draco rubs his left arm, right over the Dark Mark that Harry knows isn’t there.

“Bugger the old ways, Malfoy. You lot just use that as an excuse as to why smart witches like Hermione shouldn’t be allowed to go to Hogwarts!” Ron’s voice is clear and sharp, cutting across the room. “You think that because her blood’s impure—just because she was born to Muggles—she’s not allowed to breathe the same air as you? You’re an utter bastard. Ten of you aren’t worth her.”

“Hermione Granger was not born to Muggles,” Draco’s voice is calm. Ron’s indignant cry is ignored as he continues, “Do you know how the old magic works, Weasley? How it runs in the veins like blood, and how every part of your body can feel it, from your toenails all the way up to the roots of your hair? Do you think that just happens spontaneously? There’s no such thing as a Muggle-born witch or Wizard, but there are loads of squib born people out there.”

“What do you mean?” George asks.

“There is no magic spontaneously created, only magic allowed to die, to rot in the furrows and disappear forever. For every one so-called Muggle born witch or wizard, there are ten ‘odd children’ whose parents either didn’t believe or never got their Hogwarts letter, who’ll never know exactly why strange things happen to them. There are children in Britain whose magic has been so bred out of them that they simply pass under the notice of the Ministry. These children will never understand why, when they get really angry, the sitting room’s window splits. They’ll never know what a gift they’ve been given by their ancestors that their parents have thrown away.

“I doubt there’s such a thing as a pure-bred Muggle anymore. Our bloodlines have mixed so thoroughly that almost every person in Britain has a magical signature. These people breed and they get the luck of the draw—sometimes, their child is born with enough power that he or she can go to a Wizarding school. Sometimes it is born so weak of magic that it dies at birth. Sometimes it is born a squib, with so little magical energy that it’s almost Muggle. Then these squibs with their low-level magic breed and the resultant child is even less powerful, until all that’s left is a tiny spark of power.

“People like Granger are extremely lucky. In her case, one squib line with a decent amount of power left in it—perhaps she’ll look back on one side of her family and find she’s got a grandaunt who was sent to a special finishing school and disappeared from knowledge shortly after, or her grandfather has no history before his nineteenth birthday. Either way, she’ll find magic in her line if she looks for it—those people married into a line that was dying. Somehow, her parents have managed to create a functioning witch, but half of her powers are…slow. They don’t work as well as other witches’ do. She can’t do charms, or transfigurations, or maybe she’s pants at divination and can’t fly a broom,” Malfoy turns his eyes to Ron, who’s staring at him with a mixture of loathing and reluctant admiration on his face, “as well as the other Wizarding students in her year. She’ll study twice as hard as a pure-blooded classmate and maybe she’ll be a better student than…her. But she’ll never have a tenth of the power that other student shows, and she’ll never be able to do all of the things her friends at school can, because her magic is so withered.”

“What complete poppycock!” Hermione’s voice is watery with tears of betrayal. She stands in the doorway and glares at no one as hard as she glares at Ron. “I’ve never heard such unmitigated racist propaganda in my life!”

“Hermione,” Ron starts, and she storms over to him. He grips her arm and tries to pull her onto his lap, but she struggles and for a moment Harry is sure she will punch Ron. She doesn’t, but she doesn’t sit down, either. Hermione stands stiffly next to him, her arm caught. “Just listen a minute.”

“Absolutely not!” she shrieks, suddenly clawing at Ron’s hand.

“What’s going on?” Ginny’s voice floats in from the hall, where she stands. “Is Hermione unwell?”

“How could you possibly believe that because I’m Muggle-born my magic is inferior to yours, Ronald Weasley?” Tears are beginning to leak from Hermione’s eyes and Ginny comes in to stand next to Charlie, observing the situation. Harry is sure that she and Hermione have been quarrelling again, and he’s unnerved by the gleam in Ginny’s eye as she sees Hermione’s frustration. “How could you believe that pureblood Death Eater propaganda shit?”

“Mind your tongue!” Ginny’s voice is clear and decisive, drawing heads around the room to look at her. Her face is suddenly flushed and she has shaken her hair loose of one of the blue bows she is wearing. It hangs limply, dangling from one strand to rest on her shoulder. “Not every pureblood is a Death Eater, and it would do you good to remember that!”

“Not every Death Eater is a pureblood,” Malfoy drawls, and everyone looks at him again. “Every Death Eater has his own agenda. He has his own reason for believing Voldemort’s lies, and you don’t have to be a pureblood to toady to him.”

“And why, then, do you? What’s your reason, Malfoy, for wanting me and my family dead? Don’t recite that ‘they’re killing magic’ drivel to me. Tell me the real reason,” Hermione demands, her face flaming with passion. Her hair is wild, and Harry can see in her both the shy English rose and Boudica, the warrior queen.

“My family has no history past the sixteenth century,” Malfoy begins. His eyes drift to his lap, where his fingers are toying absently with the bottom hem of the Weasley jumper he has borrowed from George. “Unlike a lot of the British Wizarding families, we can’t trace ourselves back to our Keltoi roots or claim that we were descended from the great Roman wisewomen. Before November 1523, we have no idea who our family was. We don’t even know the family name. It could have been anything, for all we know. We do know that there was a small manor house belonging to the family that is still standing; it’s there that I was born,” his eyes lock with Harry’s, and Harry feels his neck flush. “This manor is the only thing my family has left from those days because everything else was taken from us.”

“What do you mean?” the words escape Harry’s lips before Hermione’s disapproving scowl can stop them.

“Autrefois, il y’un garcon. Il etait un garcon jaune et beaux. Mais les heurs de la vie etait moments douloureux…” Draco begins. It sounds like he is reciting a well-loved poem or children’s story. He looks at Harry and begins to translate, “Once upon a time, there was a boy. He was a young boy, and beautiful. But his life was filled with sadness…”

::

There is a sudden pounding in the night that startles Lucien Leblanc from his sleep. His wife, Marie, is sleepily curled on his arm. Her nightcap has fallen loose from her head and for a moment the sight of moonlight on her hair is so captivating that he forgets why he is awake. Then Jehanne begins to cry and Clareta is running into the room to their little bed. Her little footfalls are almost completely overwhelmed by the raucous cries of people outside. Marie jumps up and races into the hall. Lucien follows her to the children’s rooms, and as he stands outside the opened door of his son’s room, he realizes two things quite suddenly: the air is choked by the smell of thatch burning, and Michel is not in his bed.

It is very much like Michel to be out flirting with the girls in town until it is far too late to be proper. It is not, however, very much like the family’s roof to be on fire. Jehanne is shrieking in terror now, and Clareta has thrown her arms around Marie’s neck, sobbing like the small child she is. There is nothing to do, Lucien reasons with himself, but to go out and face the crowd. He gathers his wife and daughters to him, clutching Jehanne’s tiny hand in his own and curling a protective arm around Marie, who has Clareta on her hip. They are all in their night clothes, but Lucien throws back the front door anyway. The sight that greets him is truly terrible; it seems the entire town is there, and they’ve all got murder in their eyes.

“Leblanc, your wife is accused of witchcraft and consorting with the Devil,” the ugly man standing at the front of the group states. His eyes are beady as they rake over the state of Jehanne and Clareta’s undress. Lucien pulls Jehanne behind him to protect her from staring eyes and the man bares rotted teeth at him in a sneer.

“What is the meaning of all this?” Lucien demands. “My wife has done you no harm. Nor have I.”

“Then you do not deny she is a witch?” Lucien feels as if he has turned to ice at the man’s words. The denial is on the tip of his tongue, but he cannot bring himself to speak against her family, who for many years tutored the both of them in the intricacies of the craft, coaxing them slowly toward the perfect potion making skills, the most delicate transfigurations, and the most fluid charms work. “You see?” the man goads the crowd, “He cannot deny it!”

“My wife is no consort of the Devil!” Lucien finds his voice as the townspeople laugh mockingly.

“What other name is there for a witch? Come now, pretty thing, and confess your sins,” another man, one Lucien remembers working in their plow fields last autumn, grabs Marie’s arm, tugging her to him. His eyes rake over her eagerly and he pulls at her night shift.

“Confess and you shall be saved!” someone else in the crowd calls and chaos breaks loose. Jehanne is torn from his hand, her screams echoing long in the night. Marie is lost to his eyes as the townspeople begin to swarm into their pretty little home, taking everything they can get their hands around. He stares in horror as Clareta is slapped roundly across the face by a crone.

“Be still, you stupid thing!” the woman cries, shaking the child, and Lucien sees white for a moment. When the haze lifts, the woman’s hands have fallen off and the people around her are screaming. Clareta has disappeared, as well, hidden by the throngs of people. The hag falls over in a faint and Lucien’s eyes dart frantically for his family before a crushing weight hits his skull and all is dark.

When he awakens, the first thing Lucien sees is Michel, strapped to a large block in front of a roaring fire. There is a rod of metal sticking out of the fire and the man from before, who Lucien now recognizes as Msr. Baudelaire, the man who tried to convince him to sell their pretty house last autumn, is standing next to Michel, his hand pressed firmly on the boy’s neck. In the firelight, Michel looks almost half of his seventeen years. His eyes are large with fright. He stares at Lucien as if he has seen a ghost.

“Papa! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry; I’ll never stay out late again. Oh, God, Papa!” Michel cries, his fingers scrabbling against the wood as he tries desperately to worm his way out of Baudelaire’s grasp. “Please, Papa, make him stop. Make him let me go!”

A piercing scream forces Lucien to tear his eyes away from his pleading son. Clareta is being bounced on the knee of a grim old hag. She is reaching for her mama, who is bound nearby. Clareta starts to sob and the woman makes a noise of disgust, shoving the child at someone nearby. He shoves her back and Clareta cries louder, hurt by all of the rough treatment. A peasant woman backhands her and Clareta sniffles in the dirt—Clareta, the child who could never stand even flower pollen on her hands has got mud in her hair. Marie chokes on a sob and Lucien rages against his own bindings to comfort her. Marie’s white night dress is torn and bloodied, and he is wholeheartedly and selfishly glad that he was not awake to see why she has a large bruise on her calf in the shape of fingerprints. He cannot see Jehanne, but he can hear her screams and see the large crowd near Michel. He can see the way Michel will not look to the crowd, and Lucien realizes with a sickening lurch in his stomach that the boy has been placed to watch. Look at this, their actions say. This is what boys like you do to good girls. Lucien spits on the ground and is kicked in the stomach for it.

He does not see the exact moment that Clareta is pushed into the water to stifle her crying. He only sees as Marie fights against her bounds as violently as a she-wolf. He sees as the child is brought back out of the water and the cold thing is thrown at the feet of her mother, who sobs so brazenly that it seems her heart has broken. He sees as the crowd parts as Jehanne fights her way out of it, dagger in hand. As their tormentors approach her, he sees her eyes fly heavenward before she sheathes the dagger in her belly. Lucien tells himself that this is what the blood oozing down her legs is from. When the branding iron is pulled from the fire, it bears the words “of bad faith” and he cannot watch as the hot metal is pressed into his son’s forearm.

He can hear acutely the sizzle of the hair burning and the dull popping sound of blisters forming and bursting as the iron is pressed into Michel’s arm. The boy’s screams are truly horrifying and the sickly sweet smell of burned flesh fills the clearing. He can hear the boy vomiting and Baudelaire laughing. He still has his eyes closed tightly when he hears the whistle of a sword and the two meaty chopping sounds when it takes more than one stroke to silence Marie’s mad screams. His eyes are still closed as he hears Michel sobbing and panting for breath across the clearing and as he hears the murderer lift his blade again. His eyes stay closed.

When Michel is found three days later in the city of Rouen, half-mad and delirious with hunger, the scabs on his arm oozing blood and pus, he cannot remember his own name. All he can say, according to the milk girl that finds him wandering through the forest, is that he must get out of France. The townspeople suspect that he is a victim of the Inquisition, and they refuse to help him, but he is eventually taken to the lodgings of a pair of British wizards visiting the continent. They agree to take him back with them, but since he will not tell them his name, they call him by the name bleeding on his arm: Le Mal Foi.

::

Hermione says that the story is a pack of lies, that the Inquisition didn’t start until years later and that Malfoy has been reading too many penny dreadfuls. She says he’s making it all up and he only wants sympathy, but even Ron admits that it’s a horrible story, and maybe Malfoy isn’t so bad, after all, seeing as how he hasn’t started a fight in a while, anyway. Harry doesn’t know quite what to make of this assertion; he’s glad Ron’s willing to try to be friends—it keeps him from feeling sick when he thinks of Alexandre—but he’s still certain that Ron is the one fighting with Malfoy in the hall.

In the past few days, Malfoy has come in with a split lip, a broken nose, and bruises covering most of his pale, thin body. Though he has fleshed out more than he was when he first arrived, Harry is still concerned, and at Harry’s insistence, Charlie has been healing the worst of his injuries. Charlie has some sort of big brother sense, Harry figures, because he always seems to know when he’s needed. The injuries vary between scratches down Malfoy’s arm to horrible blotchy bruises on his legs and once a shoulder out of socket. When Draco staggers into the room one day, his eyes wide with shock and his face whiter than paper, his wrist broken and cradled protectively in his other hand, it is too much.

Harry bypasses Charlie in the hall, going straight for Ron’s door. He can hear Hermione in there, but for once he doesn’t care. He slams the door open to the sight of them, she with her face buried in his lap and he with his hands fisted in the sheets of his bed. Ron sputters angrily and Hermione mewls in embarrassment, pulling away and hiding behind the bed. Ron’s cock hangs heavy, red and wet in the space between them, and Harry’s eyes are drawn to it almost helplessly. Shaking himself, Harry steels his courage and strides over to Ron, punching him soundly in the jaw.

“You leave your hands off of Dra—Malfoy,” Harry snarls as his friend curls on his side, clutching his face. Ron leaps at him and wrestles him to the floor, kneeling over Harry and punching back. Harry can barely fight back as Ron pants above him, sweating and crying he is so angry.

Molly rushes into the room followed by Fred and George, who pull Ron off of Harry. Draco stands in the doorway silently as the scene unfolds. His eyes are cool and condescending, but they jump nervously between the various Weasleys in the room.

“What in the name of Merlin is happening in here?” Molly demands as Harry nurses a bloody lip and Ron tries to hide his nudity behind a pillow.

“Ron’s been picking bloody fights with Malfoy,” Harry accuses behind the monogrammed handkerchief Draco has pressed to his lip. The blond boy rolls his eyes and hides his injured hand behind Harry’s back.

“I’ve not effing touched him, Harry!” Ron’s cry is indignant and he almost drops the pillow when he tries to throw his hand up.

“You’ve started a row with him in the hall every night for the past week! You’ve busted his lip twice, almost broken his nose, and now,” a sharp kick to the back of his shin tells Harry that Malfoy clearly doesn’t want his injury declared. “Now I won’t stand for it anymore,” he finishes lamely.

“You’re batty! I’ve been with Hermione every night this week,” Ron asserts, despite the muffled squeak from behind the bed.

“What?” Molly’s yelp is barely a question.

“Ronald Weasley!” Hermione’s tone is recriminating as she stands slowly from behind the bed. Her blouse is unbuttoned and her hair is a mess, but she is dressed and Harry suddenly feels a pang of remorse for involving her in the situation. “Harry, what on Earth has gotten into you?”

“Ron’s been hitting Malfoy,” Harry mutters, turning his face away from his friends.

“He has not! Where would you get such an idea?” she demands.

“Have you…you’ve been…Ron, are you…active?” Molly sputters, and Ron’s ears go crimson. Fred and George laugh loudly and all attention is suddenly torn away from Harry.

“Mum!” Ron wails indignantly. “I’m never going to forgive you for this, Harry!”

Fred and George laugh even louder and Fred comes over to where Harry is standing. “Don’t worry about it, mate,” he grins, patting Harry on the shoulder on his way out of the room. Harry begins to follow him.

“Wait!” Draco grabs for Harry’s arm, but winces and Harry realizes that he has reached with his injured hand. He grabs the pale arm well above the wrist and leads Malfoy to Charlie, who pales slightly at the obvious swelling and odd angle of the boy’s wrist.

“Fix it, Charlie. Please.” Draco’s whole arm is trembling from pain and lack of treatment. Charlie’s lips are thin and white as he slowly shakes his head. “What do you mean, ‘no’? You’ve got to fix it! Look at him; it’s pretty fucking obvious his wrist is broken. It hurts so much he’s gone white!” Charlie stares at the arm Harry is holding, and then backs away slowly.

“I can’t. I can’t fix that,” Charlie gasps, unable to tear his eyes away from the injury.

Molly’s gasp is loud suddenly in their quiet discussion. Her voice is tremulous as she carefully touches Malfoy’s wrist and watches him wince. “When did this happen?” she asks.

“Today,” Malfoy’s voice is quiet. “I fell on the stair. I tripped,” his eyes are warning as he glances back at Harry.

“Ron pushed you,” Harry replies.

“Have things like this been happening often?” her voice is tight.

“No,” Draco says as Harry says, “Yes.”

“All the time,” Harry ignores Draco’s glare. “Usually black eyes, split lips, and such. Almost every day.”

“Every day?”

“No,” Draco says as Harry says, “Yes.”

It takes three hours and several favors called in by Arthur for Molly to find a way to get Malfoy to a doctor who is willing to keep a secret. The doctor shows them all how the bones in his wrist have been broken in three places. His arm has been twisted so fiercely that the tendons around the break are inflamed. It takes two different potions to stop the swelling so the doctor can even look at the damage, and after a dose of skele-gro and a pain relieving potion, Malfoy is sent back to number twelve under strict orders not to use his arm for a week. Molly blames the whole thing on herself, Charlie is subdued, and Ron refuses to talk to Harry, who won’t stop glaring at him. Draco is curled in the armchair in the parlor under the watchful eye of Phineas Nigellus Black, who harrumphs threateningly whenever the sleeping boy is approached.

::

Winter has hit and the worst of the cabin fever has come. Every day, Ron looks out of the family’s one window and wants so desperately to be at Hogwarts that his whole chest aches. It will be Christmas in a week, but he knows hopelessly that this Christmas will be different than any other in his life. At Hogwarts, Christmas means sleeping in late in a warm bed, not being woken up by your brother’s snoring as the icy wind whistles through the cracks around the windows. At Hogwarts, Christmas means feasting, playing in the snow, and games of chess and exploding snap in the common room. At Grimmauld Place, he and Hermione are quarrelling, Harry is being a prat, and his own brothers won’t talk to him.

Everyone is behaving oddly around him because they think he broke Malfoy’s arm. Ron thinks he should have listened to Hermione when she said not to believe him and that stupid story he made up about his family, and Ron feels like a moron for believing that Malfoy could have changed. Then again, the ferret-faced git seems to have completely fooled Harry. This bothers Ron more than he would like to admit, seeing Harry trail around after Malfoy like a lost puppy. He feels that something irreparable has changed in his relationship with Harry, and though he doesn’t know what it is, but he’s sure it’s Malfoy’s fault.

These days, it seems Malfoy has been communing with the house. He spends all day wandering in and out of all of the rooms, a habit that is fast annoying several members of the Wesley family. Already Charlie has threatened him at the dinner table for walking in on Ginny as she was dressing, and Ron thinks that all of his skulking around looks like he is plotting something. Malfoy avoids all of them, but none so fervently as Harry, who asks after him whenever someone walks into the room. It’s as if they’ve been playing a game of hide and seek that has been going on for days.

This is how he feels with Hermione, who won’t talk to him. She’s been completely humiliated, and everywhere she goes in the house she is jeered at. The paintings mock her loudly as she walks by them and Mrs. Black makes vulgar assertions about how Hermione is now even more unmarriageable. After the first time that the portrait in Ron’s room calls her a slut, she has refused to say anything at all to him, much less meet him alone in a room for any length of time.

Mum’s embarrassment is tangible, as well. She has begun knitting for lengthy stretches of time—sometimes eight hours in a row—with her head down, counting stitches to avoid having to talk to anyone. Her mood is temperamental recently, and it seems that it takes very little to set her into a foul attitude or a crying jag. He is glad that Tonks has told him that he can go outside if he likes, but there is a terrible uncertainty when he thinks about the world outside Grimmauld Place. It’s a world he hasn’t been a part of in a long time, and except for Tonks’s occasional reports, he knows nothing of what has happened. Tonks doesn’t even give them a full report, Ron suspects, and from her stories it seems there is an uneasy calm permeating the world outside this vacation from the war.

Tonks talks about little things: Cho Chang has been married recently, to a boy from America who bears more than a passing resemblance to Cedric but behaves more like Viktor Krum; the Minister of Magic has declared the first day of every September a day of memorial for those lost in the war; there have been rumours, but no real movement on either side as far as she knows. No one, not even a Muggle, has been injured in a Death Eater attack since before Halloween, despite near hysteria caused by rumours at the time.

Ron is contemplating whether or not to go outside when he opens the broom closet to find Draco Malfoy half dozing under the Shooting Stars. His whitish hair is streaked with dust and his eyelashes flutter on his cheeks peacefully, but when the floorboards creak under Ron’s feet, Malfoy jerks into a sitting position. His eyes are wide and guileless with lack of sleep and something else as he stares up at Ron, his expression like that of a stunned animal. A very wicked plan begins to form in Ron’s mind.

“What are you doing in here?” Ron tries to keep his tone light and conversational.

“I’m hiding. From Harry,” Malfoy elaborates.

“I know one place he won’t find you,” Ron says, extending his hand to the other boy.

::

The potion isn’t there for them to play with—Draco knows this—but with Weasley polyjuiced into his sister and himself polyjuiced into Granger, he also knows that they can have the freedom to leave the house. Draco Malfoy cannot venture into Wizarding society, but Hermione Granger can, and so she does. Weasley takes him around in the neighborhood the first time, and they don’t venture as far away as Diagon Alley. For now, Draco is content to sit in a swing in the park and feel the winter sun on his face. It is all too soon when Weasley’s watch tells him that they must go back before the potion’s effects wear off. As they part to go to their different parts of the house, he makes Weasley—who insists on being called Ron—promise that next time they will go to the Wizarding part of town. Draco wants to know what is happening to his family, and he knows that he won’t find out while he’s stuck in dank old number twelve.

The next time they go out, Ron is himself, but Draco is one of the twins. If anyone thinks it odd that one is going while the other stays, they don’t say anything and the two of them slip out of the oppressive clutch of the house easily. They walk slowly and easily and they make it all the way to the Leaky Cauldron before they realize that it’s just too far for them to walk in one hour. It has taken them twenty-four minutes to get to the pub’s doors and it will take them another twenty-four to get back. If they want to stop anywhere in the Alley next time, they will have to do something else, so on their way back Ron jots the tube schedule down on a piece of paper in his pocket. Fortunately there’s a tube station near the house, and if they are efficient with their time, they will be able to shave ten minutes off of their travel time each way, which leaves just enough time to have a quick peek in a shop window or two, a glance in the Prophet, and a few minutes for delay if the train is late. Draco can’t pretend he isn’t disappointed that he couldn’t go in today, but he gives Ron a hesitant smile and thanks him, anyway, for going out of his way to help him.

The third day, Ron has become his eldest brother and Draco is the girl Weasley again, a grouping that makes his stomach roil when he thinks about it. Again, they slip out the door without complications. By this time, they’ve gone through almost an entire bottle of polyjuice, and Draco has grown used to the taste. There is only enough left for one more trip, he measures, but he wants so badly to poke around in Wizarding London that he doesn’t let himself consider not going today.

The subway ride, paid for by Ron with a few slips of paper charmed to look like Muggle money, is nothing like Draco has ever experienced before. It is crowded, hot even though there is snow outside, and the small cars smell like sweat and stale air. There is a mad woman in the corner who gives off a foul odor and mumbles to herself. He finds himself clinging girlishly to Ron’s arm, and Charlie Weasley’s expressive eyes read warm amusement when he pulls himself away. When the train starts, it is with a jolt that almost knocks him out of Ginny Weasley’s sensible shoes. When it stops, he has to grip Ron’s arm to keep himself from tumbling arse over teakettle onto the dirty, wet ground. It is a very short walk to the pub.

When the back wall opens, Draco feels his breath taken away, as if he has never been to the Alley before. It takes all of his willpower to keep himself from gawking in awe as people in multicolor robes rush around. There are owls screeching in Owlops’s window and the excited rush of children’s voices around the Quidditch accessories shop give him such a heartsick pang of longing for his childhood that he stands in the middle of the street blinking back tears before moving on to the next window.

Before long, he finds himself standing in front of the Daily Prophet’s offices. Inside, he can see the print machines running and the papers fold themselves carefully in order, twine snaking around the papers so that the morning owls can carry them off to readers. There is a newsstand in front of the building, and for the first time in almost six months, Draco reads a headline. He feels someone reach into him and carefully scoop his insides out, leaving him hollow. The papers declare proudly, “Malfoy Heir Missing, Presumed Dead. Ministry Seizes Assets.”

This is how Draco learns that his mother is dead.

::

Draco is in a terrible mood. He’s almost worse than he was back at Hogwarts, Harry thinks. Malfoy has taken to calling Hermione a mudblood again, and he avoids Charlie entirely. He makes vague, disparaging comments that impugn Ginny’s honor, and he’s stopped helping Molly with the dishes after dinner, citing that he was “neither born to house elves nor given their awful buggy eyes” so why should he perform their menial tasks? Everyone in the house is getting tired of his behavior, and when Harry says so one night, Malfoy merely snorts loudly and turns away from him.

That night, Harry is awoken by a nightmare—Sirius falling through the veil again, pushed by Bellatrix. There is a queue of Harry’s loved ones, and she pushes them all in, one by one: Remus first, then Ron, Hermione, Ginny. Draco is the last one in line, and Bellatrix looks surprised that he is in the line, but laughs at Harry when Draco’s eyes go cold and he steps through the veil himself. Harry tries to push her through, but suddenly she is a large stone statue of Dumbledore. He looks at Harry with disappointed eyes, and Harry bolts awake, sweating. There are tears on his face, but there is a cool hand on his brow, gently pressing him back into the pillow. Harry cracks his eyes open and sees a blobby white shape leaned over him.

He grabs his glasses and slides them up his nose. Draco looks suddenly nervous, as if he may bolt, and Harry finds himself clutching the other boy’s hand to his chest. “Are,” Draco’s eyes dart up to Harry’s scar, which is probably vivid red against his clammy forehead, “Are you well?”

“Yeah, I think so. Just a nightmare,” Harry tries to grin at Draco, but all he can see is the distant expression from his dream.

“Oh, well then…” Draco tries to slip away, but Harry clutches tighter to his hand. “Unhand me, Potter!” his voice is panicked as he begins to tug on his hand.

“Malfoy,” Harry starts, but continues gently, “Draco…what’s wrong? Why have you been acting like a prat recently? I know this behavior isn’t you.”

“You don’t know me, Potter. You know Alexandre,” Draco’s tone is bitter.

“That’s not true. I know lots of things about you. You went to Hogwarts,” Harry’s voice is sweet, pleading. “You were born in Nantes, France.” Draco shudders and lets Harry pull him to the bed. When he sits down, Harry brings his lips to the shell of Draco’s ear and murmurs, “You’ve never killed anyone in your life, despite what people think.”

The release of tension from Draco’s frame is cathartic, and he curls into Harry’s offered embrace, tucking his head into the crook of Harry’s neck. “My mother is dead,” he informs Harry, who makes soothing circles on his back. He feels childish and slightly patronized, but it is comforting to have Harry take care of him. Harry must be expecting him to cry, he thinks, but he only curls tighter into the dark-haired boy. “Nobody even told me. She’s been dead for weeks.”

“I’m so sorry,” Harry’s breath ghosts over the nape of his neck and he shivers at the sensation. His fingers clench in the arm that is wrapped around him, and Harry tightens his grip. They sit there comfortably for a few minutes as the memory of Alexandre rushes through Harry’s mind. He presses a kiss into Draco’s hair, and Draco stiffens at the contact.

“I should go back to my bed,” he says as he disentangles himself.

“Wait.” Draco stands awkwardly next to Harry’s bed, his nightclothes slightly rumpled and his emotions raw on his face. Harry stands up and slides his fingers to the nape of Draco’s neck, where they play with the short hair there and the boys’ eyes meet reluctantly. Harry presses a kiss to the corner of Draco’s mouth as the blond pulls away, and he settles into his bed as Draco goes to the door. His eyes are luminous with unspoken words when he opens the door and leaves.

::

Draco’s mind is a mess of half-formed ideas, so when Ron suggests they make another trip out to Diagon Alley, he is all for it. He’s still reeling from the news of his mother’s death, from the press of Harry’s lips to his own, and from the knowledge that the three galleons he carries are the last of the Malfoy estate. He doesn’t pay attention as Ron buys the transport tickets with his charmed paper, or when he ushers him into the car. In fact, it is several stops later, near Piccadilly Circus when he realizes that Ron isn’t with him at all. None of the names on the chart look familiar, and all of the stations look the same to him. He realizes with a start that he is lost in Muggle London, and will soon change back into himself. In his mind’s eye he can see himself standing in the middle of a crowd of Muggles, the frilly pink jumper he is wearing highlighting his own knobby knees. He imagines that the yellow hair ribbons he is wearing in the Weaslette’s hair will clash horribly with his own hair, and that the blouse will stretch uncomfortably over his own shoulders. He could never have imagined that Ron—Weasel—would do this to him, but thinking back he suspects he should have known.

He is near Marylebone Station when the cramps hit him, and when the doors open he shoves his way through the crowd, pleading feminine problems. Once in the cubicle, he doubles over in agony as the changes occur. His skin shifts over muscles that grow firmer than they were before. The hair on the back of his neck prickles with the feeling of skin that doesn’t quite fit. The tendons around his joints shift strangely, stretching and relaxing until he is quite suddenly himself again, standing in the girls’ toilets at the Underground station. Ginny Weasley’s socks have pooled around his ankles; he no longer has her stocky calves to hold them up. Her skirt is slipping off of his bony hips, and he is glad to be able to tug tighter the belt he’s worn today. The shirt he is wearing is pulled taut over his broad, distinctly male shoulders, and the darts in the bust make it sag awkwardly in the front. The brassiere he’d charmed from handkerchiefs still fits because it is also charmed to fit, but it is a strange and entirely unwelcome sensation to feel the cloth straining to lift flesh that isn’t there. He glances down and is immensely grateful for the first time that he is both shorter and thinner than the Weaslette, because the skirt and jumper he is wearing have combined to make him look like a young, if terribly flat chested, schoolgirl. He uses the hair ribbons as garters on the tall socks and as he ventures out of the cubicle, no one takes any notice of him.

He wanders aimlessly out into the city, feeling overwhelmed. He has never felt as alone as he does now, dressed as a girl wandering through Muggle London. Draco wanders around the city, taking in the sights and hoping that he will see something familiar until his feet hurt and he can walk no more. He has made it all the way to Charing Cross, and he knows that he cannot be far from King’s Cross and the Hogwarts Express, but even though it would be running this time of year, the train is closed out of fear in the Wizarding world. All around him is a festive jumble of fairy lights, evergreen plants, and fake snow. The streets are filled with dirty slush and water.

Draco realizes that it is close to Yule, the Winter Equinox. He can feel his magic ebbing in him slightly, and he wonders if it is fear, illness, or anxiety that is causing this. He doesn’t even consider another witch or wizard until the enchantment comes over him, and then he’s asleep; the woman scoops him up and carries him into an alley, where they disapparate, leaving behind a ringing echo on the bricks and the faint shape of two high-heeled shoeprints.

::

It takes Ginny around four days to realize that one of her pairs of shoes is gone. When she sees that one of her school skirts is missing, she is sure she has only left it behind at the Burrow. The missing blouse is a case for only mild concern, and the jumper with pink bobbles is worrisome, but likely under the table in some room where her paramour has pulled it off of her. In fact, it takes one specific thing to make her upset about the missing clothing. Two things, actually: her yellow hair ribbons have disappeared.

She looks everywhere in the room she shares with Hermione. Her own jewelry box is emptied seven times before she will believe they aren’t there, and she takes every pair of panties out of the drawer twice, one by one, just to prove that it isn’t where she put them. She searches thoroughly underneath her bed, and then between the mattresses. She pulls all of her clothes out and this is how she notices that there is a lot missing from her wardrobe.

At first, she believes that Hermione has been taking her things. Ginny rifles through everything Hermione owns after this, and though she finds nothing, she is still certain that Hermione has them. She dumps her trunk into the floor, searches every pocket in her wardrobe, and even pulls the sheets off of her bed to search through them but she finds nothing. Leaving the mess in her wake, she goes off to search the house. She’s had trysts in several rooms, so it takes her all day to search those rooms. She even searches rooms she’s never been in, and almost begins to search Kreacher’s nook when Mum comes into the kitchen to make dinner. Mum sends her outside to play in the backyard, where the boys are playing football, and when Ron trips over his own two feet and lands in the bramble bushes, scratching himself up, she forgets the whole issue and laughs herself sick. It isn’t until after dinner, when Hermione is blubbing in the middle of her worldly possessions, that Ginny even remembers she was looking for something.

::

Harry is sure that Draco is upset with him. It feels odd to care so much whether or not Draco Malfoy is upset with him, but all he can remember when he tries to sleep are giddy eyes looking into his, the tentative press of hands against his shoulders, and the feel of warm, slightly chapped lips pressed against his own. All he can think about is the rush of emotions that accompany these memories. When he even thinks about Draco, he can feel himself walking on air.

But Draco obviously doesn’t feel the same mass of conflicting emotions rushing through him at the barest memory of a kiss. He’s been avoiding Harry for weeks, since even before it happened, and since it happened Draco’s not been in the room at all. His bed is un-slept-in and the blankets unmussed. His things do not move and his chair at meals is not filled. Harry knows this is his fault in the same way that he knows that Dumbledore’s death was his fault, and Cedric and Sirius. In a way, he is glad that Draco is angry with him, because now he will not have to worry about him.

Harry isn’t even sure of what he’s feeling. He doesn’t know why something in his stomach aches at the thought of Draco’s white blond hair. He doesn’t understand how his lips can miss something he’s only had three times. This is nothing like it was with Ginny, who was needy and clingy, or with Cho, who was watery. It is nothing like anything he’s ever heard about relationships before, and a lot more like what he felt last year, when he was waiting for Draco to do something. He does feel like that—like he’s waiting, albeit rather impatiently, for Draco to make his actions clear, to explain something to him.

Around him, Grimmauld Place slowly begins to return to normal. Remus is named the new Secret Keeper, and Harry can feel the magic singing in his blood when the ritual is performed in the sitting room. Molly continues to cook and clean and knit, and Harry has already seen at least four Weasley jumpers folded neatly in the bottom of her knitting basket. She winked at him and held her finger to her lips, then quietly went on picking an “R” into the jumper she was working on. Fred and George have left the house to go back to their shop, and Charlie and Ginny work as clerks for them from time to time. Ron and Hermione are fighting again, and she is back to memorizing her text books while Ron practices his chess moves on a charmed set. The only person he sees nothing of is Draco, but then, Draco is avoiding him.

Everything in Harry’s mind seems to cycle back to Draco. He can feel himself becoming obsessed the longer the boy stays away from him, and he decides he must force Draco to acknowledge him. He goes through the small pile of the other boy’s things and finds nothing but the rags he wore into the house and his dragonhide boots. Hidden in a sheath in one of the boots is Draco’s wand, which makes a strange chill creep down his spine. He’s never known any wizard to leave his wand behind as long as this.

This is Harry’s first indication that something is wrong.

::

Ron is surprised when, after over half a week, no one has noticed Malfoy’s absence at the table during meals. He was certain that someone would have said something by now, but there has been utter silence on the subject. Perhaps it has something to do with the dramatic changes in the house, he thinks. With most of the family going back to business as usual, it is easy to ignore a person who seems to beg to be ignored.

It was far easier than he thought it would be to leave Malfoy in Muggle London. He’d seemed distracted, and all Ron had had to do was guide him onto the train. If anyone had noticed the two of them, it would have looked like a big brother making sure his sister made the train. Malfoy had wandered into the car in a stupor and when the doors closed, that was that. Ron still feels a trill of elation when he remembers the sight of the subway taking Malfoy away.

It is Christmas before anyone says anything. Christmas morning before someone notices that the prat is missing. The family is sitting around a tree that Fred and George have brought, and Mum is handing out the presents. Bill and Fleur’s jumpers are sitting wrapped beneath the tree, and Molly stands in front of it, holding one more package, confusion written on her face.

“Draco?” she asks. “Has anyone seen Draco?”

Silence answers her, and Ginny speaks up, “Harry, go tell your boyfriend to get his lazy arse out of bed. We can’t open our presents until everyone is here.”

Harry stammers, his face turning red, about how Draco isn’t his boyfriend. Something cold and hard makes itself known in the pit of Ron’s stomach. It isn’t true, of course, he tells himself. Ginny’s just being a twit.

“Stop trying to deny it and just go wake him up. I know he’s not used to our country manners, but that’s no reason to sleep till noon,” Ginny says firmly.

“But…” Harry begins, “but I don’t know where he is. He’s not been sleeping in our room.”

“What?” Mum’s voice is strange with realization.

“I haven’t seen him at all for at least a week,” Harry declares.

“Not since you locked lips with him, then?” Ginny asks, a fierce sneer twitching at the corner of her lips. The entire room grows silent and Ron’