“You’re wearing a jumper, that is Muggle clothes,” Ron pointed out.
“I don’t care!” Ginny yelled from the other side of her bedroom door, in front of which they were all assembled. “We’re all finally going out and I want to wear my dress!”
“Yeah, Weasley, you heard her,” Malfoy said, looking terribly pleased with himself. “She wants to wear her dress. It’s stylish. Actually, I think I’ll go put on my nice shirt.”
Everyone else seemed to be looking forward to the outing. Harry wished he could say the same, but he just kept quiet while everybody debated on proper attire in the Muggle world and thought, again, that he’d promised himself never to go back. It wasn’t his world, it never had been, he was never going to be trapped there again.
It would only be for a little while. He’d search for the Horcrux and then go.
They had to wait a bit more and then Ginny came out smoothing down her little dress and her curls, tiny earrings winking in her ears, and Malfoy joined them at the bottom of the stairs wearing that ridiculous shirt he’d bought with Ginny’s dress. Harry wondered if he should actually be letting them loose on an unsuspecting Muggle public.
They all trooped outside the gate, Malfoy and Ginny still looking jauntily happy about their outing. Harry doubted they’d be this pleased if they knew what kind of place they were going to.
“Everyone sort of—Ron and I know where we’re going, so try to follow us,” he said.
“I cannot Apparate,” Ginny reminded him, and he and Malfoy flanked her and solved that problem.
He didn’t want to go, didn’t want to go, but he had to, and slowly but surely, Privet Drive came more into focus. Grey streets he hated, neat hedges he hated, people’s nice little cars zipping by and no place for Harry, and there never had been. There was a prize-winning flowerbed in Privet Drive Number One. Harry wanted to be anywhere else.
Ron seized Hermione’s hand as soon as they had all arrived, and got her to point out things like lamp posts. Hermione looked as if she was having fun telling him things, and Harry suspected Ron might not be impelled by deep curiosity about all things Muggle.
Ron was impelled by brotherly protectiveness, however. He looked over his shoulder and saw Malfoy with his arm around Ginny, and immediately came back to collect her.
“C’mon,” he said. “Hermione knows loads of interesting stuff.”
Ginny rolled her eyes at him and Malfoy said, “Don’t part me from Girl Weasley, it tears my soul” but they let go of each other easily enough. They were both apparently too enraptured by the exotic picket fences and semi-detached houses to mind.
Without really thinking about it, Harry fell into step beside Malfoy, who was busy gazing around with an air of great interest and did not even look at him.
“This isn’t like the pictures in my Muggle Studies book,” Malfoy announced. “There were much nicer houses in my book. My favourite was called Buckingham Palace. Why couldn’t you live somewhere like Buckingham Palace?”
“Er. Sorry to disappoint,” Harry said.
He slanted a look over at him. “And I’m teasing you,” he added, rolling his eyes. “God. So,” he added, “What’re your Muggles like?”
“They’re not,” Harry began, and then gave it up. “There’s just my uncle and my aunt and my cousin Dudley. They’re—” he looked at Malfoy, who had his eyebrows raised interrogatively and seemed only a little distracted by the sudden advent of an ice-cream truck. Malfoy still wore his jeans and too-tight shirt like a costume he was having a spot of fun with, not to mention the Horcrux, gleaming in plain sight against the dark blue material. It seemed impossible suddenly to explain the Dursleys or anyone like them to Malfoy, impossible to relate one to the other, and then he suddenly remembered a time when he had done just that.”When I first met you,” he said, “you reminded me of my cousin.”
“Oh,” said Malfoy. “So you don’t get on with him, then.”
Harry remembered, for a vivid moment, being eight years old and having Piers Polkiss holding his arms while Dudley punched him in the stomach. He’d fallen afterwards, the tarmac scraping his hands and knees, and vomited on the playground.
“Not really,” he answered.
He stopped and wanted to say something about how Malfoy had never actually made him vomit, or something, to soften the starkness of the way Malfoy had been immediately able to say ‘so you don’t get on with him,’ but the thought of Number Four Privet Drive was dragging on all his thoughts like chains.
“Oh, a letter box!” Malfoy exclaimed, instantly distracted. “I’ve always wanted to see one. I think they’re so sad.”
“Er—what?” Harry asked, and found himself smiling somehow. “What are you talking about, Malfoy?”
“Don’t you know, Potter? Muggles have to deliver letters to people in these boxes. They have to go from house to house delivering them, they’re no better than owls!”
“I—I hadn’t ever really thought of postmen as oppressed before,” Harry said.
Malfoy turned his head to keep the symbol of postmen’s miserable degradation in view, and Harry looked back with him and then looked ahead, and saw Number Four without expecting to. The smile snapped off his face.
There was the smooth grass of the lawn in front, there was the door with its bright fresh paint, and the doorstep where Harry had fetched up, like a piece of driftwood washed up by the sea, something totally unexpected and unwanted from another world. He didn’t belong there, never had, didn’t want to go back. He did not want to see them again. He’d cut all ties.
He’d had no ties to cut.
“You look a bit funny, Potter,” Malfoy said. His voice was cool: Harry thought it might just be an observation.
Even if Malfoy did not feel inclined to mock him, Harry did not want to be any weaker in front of Malfoy than he had been already.
“Right,” he said clearly, and the others all turned back at the sound of his voice. “My aunt stays at home and Wednesday is my cousin’s half day, but with any luck Aunt Petunia will be out at her tennis club and Dudley will be on the streets with his gang of yobs, so I’ll just knock on the door twice and then spell it open. Let’s be quick and try to get through this before they come back, they won’t be happy to see me.”
He looked at Ron and Hermione while he said that, because they already knew and they were sympathetic without making him feel bad about it: he could count on them.
“Wait,” Malfoy said, his voice still cool and unreadable. “If they won’t—will they let you in? Don’t Muggles have little, I don’t know, spyholes?”
“You suggesting we just break in, Malfoy?” The idea had a certain appeal. Harry could picture Aunt Petunia’s face if her door suddenly flew open and wizards poured into her hall.
“No,” Malfoy said, rolling his eyes. “How old’s your cousin?”
“Seventeen,” Harry said warily. “So what?”
Malfoy held out his hands like a ringmaster in the circus, presenting his next act. “So—step forward, Girl Weasley.”
When they rang the doorbell of Number Four, then, it was Ginny standing in front, beaming, curls glinting in the faint misted sunlight, her sundress flaring around her legs in the slight breeze. When the door opened a crack, on the chain, she beamed and said, “Hi, my name’s Ginny and I’m collecting for—”
The door was thrown open really, really fast, and Harry leaned over Ginny’s shoulder to slap a palm against it.
“Hey there, Big D.”
Dudley almost got the door closed. He put his weight behind the shove, and while Harry was used to Dudley outweighing him, he wasn’t used to the weight being composed mainly of muscle. He grunted and stuck his foot in the door and if Ron hadn’t pushed forward and lent his weight against the door, it would have closed in their faces.
“Go away!” Dudley panted. “You said you were going away—you said you were never coming back—”
“Don’t think I wouldn’t rather be anywhere else,” Harry snarled. “I won’t stay long. I might’ve left something here I need. Let me come in, and—”
“You must be joking!” Dudley snapped. “Five of you? Let five of you—things in here, especially that one—the redhaired one, one of those who left sweets meant to kill me? Fat chance!”
“Fred and George were not trying to kill you,” Ron said indignantly.
“I wouldn’t bet any substantial sums of money on that,” Malfoy said from behind them.
“You know,” Harry said, pulling out his wand with his free hand. “I don’t actually have to ask.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s just like you!” Dudley shouted. “Waving around your stupid freak stick, you think you’re so much better than the rest of us—”
“No, of course we don’t!” Hermione exclaimed. “Harry, put that away! Really, Dudley, I’m Muggleborn myself—”
“You’re what?” Dudley said. “I don’t speak freak and I don’t care what you are, either, just get—off—my doorstep—”
He made a redoubled effort to shut the door and Harry and Ron had to shove back, swearing, just as hard, and Hermione spoke over the sounds.
“What I mean,” she explained earnestly, “is that my parents can’t do magic and that none of us would ever dream of using magic against you—Harry, put that away!—and of course none of us would dream of considering ourselves superior to you—”
“I do,” Malfoy put in. “I’m just saying.”
“You see!” Dudley said, sounding somewhat hysterical. “You see, I knew it!”
“You’re not helping us at all!” Hermione hissed. “And Harry, please put that away! None of the rest of us think—”
“That’s rich,” Dudley sneered. “Every time one of your lot breaks in here I almost choke to death or get a tail or some crazy old codger tries to throw drink at our heads—”
Hearing Dudley talk about Dumbledore like that made Harry go cold with rage. He stopped shoving.
“Let us in right now, Dudley,” he ordered. “I can open the door anytime I like, and you know it. Besides, you think your mum would be pleased if all the neighbours saw me and a group of other kids making a scene on your doorstep? Let us in. I swear we’ll go away as soon as we find what we want. I wouldn’t stay if you paid me.”
Harry wasn’t sure if it was the threat of magic or the neighbours that made Dudley stop shoving at the door quite so hard.
“Okay. Okay, then. You can come in. If you give me all your wands,” he said after a minute.
“Oh, you must be joking!” Harry snapped.
At that point he was grabbed by the back of his t-shirt and pulled backwards for an urgent consultation with Hermione.
“Harry,” Hermione said in a low voice. “Clearly, Dudley’s scared—this would be a good time to have some wizard and Muggle co-operation, you know, we shouldn’t terrorise him—”
“Us terrorise him?” Harry demanded. “He wants our wands so he can bloody well terrorise us!”
“Harry,” Hermione said. “We’re on the side fighting for the Muggles. I won’t force my way in when I can be let in. Not when all he’s asked is that we make ourselves equal to him.”
If Hermione’d grown up with Dudley, she’d know that he wasn’t trying to even any odds. He liked them all stacked in his favour, but currently the odds were stacked in Harry’s favour, and Hermione, who’d hexed McLaggen, would never have argued for him if she wasn’t being soft on him like she’d been on the house elves, because she didn’t think it was fair—
He looked at Hermione’s set, stubborn expression and thought: because it wasn’t fair. Any more than Dudley beating Harry up because he was bigger.
“Fine,” he bit out. “Fine. Dudley, we’ll give you our wands, but if you try anything—”
“I won’t,” Dudley said from behind the door. “You can’t want to get out any more than I want to see you leave.”
Ron, Hermione and Ginny silently handed Harry their wands. Ginny had apparently stuck hers down her bra, and everyone raised their eyebrows at her when she slid it out and handed it over.
Then Harry turned to Malfoy. He was expecting a fight, but Malfoy only hesitated for a moment, then sneered: “Like I’m really afraid of a Muggle” and handed it over.
Harry pushed all the wands around the door to Dudley. “Don’t mess with them,” he said. “Or I’ll get the twins back to get you. And come back and open the door quick, or I’ll get everyone to start singing the songs with obscene lyrics Aunt Petunia’s always talking about.”
The thought of their wands clutched in Dudley’s meaty paws actually made Harry feel a little ill. He left the doorstep to Ginny and Ron, and stood a step back, and concentrated on how this would all be over soon.
Malfoy pushed a shoulder against Harry’s, because he’d never known when to stop pestering. “Hey,” he said. “Hey,” he said again, so Harry looked at him, and Malfoy grinned. “So, these songs with obscene lyrics,” he said. “Shouldn’t you teach us them? I think it’s important to be prepared.”
“I think you’re ridiculous, Malfoy,” Harry returned, rolling his eyes and grinning back a bit.
He was about to expand on this theme when Dudley opened the door. He was standing there wiping his brow.
They’d clearly interrupted him on one of his marathon weight-lifting sessions. There was music playing louder than Aunt Petunia would’ve liked blaring from the living room, Dudley wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his big shoulders and broad chest were shining with sweat.
He was eyeing them all with dark suspicion. Out of the corner of his eye, Harry saw that for some reason Malfoy was still grinning.
“Like me?” he said in an undertone. “Well, I must say, Potter, I’m kind of flattered. Actually—I hope this isn’t too much of a shock for you—I don’t really, you know, work out—”
Harry elbowed him. “Shut up.”
Dudley crossed his arms over his chest. “Ron and Hermione,” he said, nodding to them as if they’d confirmed his worst fears. “Harry yelps about you guys sometimes when he’s talking about real friends and so on. And—you look like one of the big redhaired lot as well—”
“I’m Ginny Weasley,” Ginny said dangerously.
Dudley ignored her. Their love was clearly not going to be the kind that lasted a lifetime.
“And you,” he went on, giving Malfoy a scathing once-over. “You must be Cedric.”
“Beg pardon?” Malfoy asked. “Who’s Cedric? My name’s Malfoy. Draco Malfoy.”
Dudley stared. “That’s not a name. That’s like saying you’re Podfrond, king of the elves. What is the matter with you people?”
Malfoy scowled. “I happen to like my name. And the elves have no king. The elves need no king. They’re ruled from the outside: elves are included in the wizard hierarchy.”
“I disagree entirely, they only need our support to become entirely autonomous—”
“Jesus wept,” said Dudley.
“What do you think he should call himself?” Harry put in. “Big M?”
“Oh, get in here before someone sees you people,” Dudley said, opening the door. “Thank God you’re not wearing your dresses.”
“What’re you even doing here?” Harry muttered as they moved in. Dudley clearly hadn’t been at school all day: he wasn’t in uniform.
Dudley’s mouth twisted. “Suspended,” he said shortly. “Bloody Smeltings. Caught me smoking hash.”
“Clever,” Harry remarked.
Once they were all in, Ginny and Malfoy sidled towards the noise of the music. Dudley went into the living room where, thankfully, he found and put on his shirt.
Malfoy and Ginny were staring in awe. Not, again thankfully, at Dudley’s toned physique.
“It’s called a television,” Malfoy whispered.
Ron passed Harry to stand beside Ginny in an enraptured line. “Amazing,” Ron whispered. “How do they shrink the Muggles without magic? How do they pick out the ones to shrink and keep behind glass?”
“It’s not rocket science,” Dudley said, looking very uneasy. “It’s Top of the Pops.”
“Top of the Pops,” Ginny murmured, as if it was a mantra.
They all drew closer to the television, like moths to a flame. Ron knelt down and tapped at the glass.
“Hi, little Muggles,” he said. “Hi, tiny little Muggles, over here.”
“Oh don’t be ridiculous, Weasley,” Malfoy said. “Obviously the glass is soundproof, otherwise how could they concentrate? Think, man!”
“Get these people out of my house,” Dudley hissed.
“Right, everyone, honestly!” Hermione said. “We need to split up and go through the house. Remember, we’re looking for anything that might possibly be associated with Gryffindor! And if anyone sees anything that looks at all Ravenclaw, we take that too.”
Dudley looked lost, and the three in front of the television looked terribly bereaved and betrayed. Harry went over and turned off the television, to piteous sounds of appeal.
“C’mon.”
“You’re a mean person, Potter. I’ve always said it. You’re a mean person who is just being mean,” said Malfoy. “I’ll look in the kitchen.”
Everyone started to hunt properly, Hermione going for the bookshelves and Ron starting to look under sofa cushions for a Horcrux. Ginny called out questions from the bathroom, like whether she should tip out the pot-pourri.
Dudley went into the kitchen to fix himself a snack, and once Harry was done narrowly examining every ornament on the Dursleys’ mantelpiece he thought he should go in and make sure he wasn’t killing Malfoy.
Malfoy was rifling through the drawers and Dudley was making a peanut butter sandwich. Malfoy appeared to have struck up a conversation. Harry was amazed for a moment, and then he realised how Malfoy was being: he was being a guest, like he was at the Burrow.
“Of course magic isn’t just about people choking you to death on sweets, that was the Weasley twins and there’s something wrong with them, like the fact they’re completely out of their horrible little minds. Magic is useful for everything.” Malfoy gave up briefly on his search for a lion-shaped corkscrew or whatever, and tilted his head in Dudley’s direction. “I can show you.”
Dudley dropped his knife. “You’re not supposed to be able to do magic without your little stick!”
“Well, wandless magic is hard,” Malfoy agreed, “but everyone can do little things. Didn’t Potter, when you were younger—didn’t anything odd ever happen?”
Dudley’s eyes met Harry’s, and Harry could see they were both thinking of the time at the zoo, with the snake.
Malfoy sat on Aunt Petunia’s meticulously cleaned kitchen counter, drawing his long legs up after him. “Well, obviously proper wizarding children are brought up with a little more control. We’re taught to do a few tiny things.”
“I found a little yellow—object,” Ginny announced triumphantly, marching in.
Harry tactfully removed the air freshener from her hands and shook his head. Ginny looked briefly chagrined, then cocked her head and said, “What’re you up to, Malfoy?”
“Doing a Safety First Charm,” Malfoy answered.
“Oh, that’s kid’s stuff,” Ginny said, looking disappointed.
“Well, I know, but he’s a Muggle, and anyway I don’t have my wand. Besides, Mother drummed it into me: I was always off somewhere and she used to have the horrors thinking I was going to crash my broom in a quarry and lie there for days with a broken leg. Right, let me remember—” Malfoy frowned at his cupped hands, pale brow scrunched up.
Dudley had put down his sandwich and was watching, warily but closely.
“Call for water,” said Malfoy, and then there was a play of light on water, coming from his cupped hands and playing over his intent face. “Call for food. Call for fire.” Bread and then a lick of flame wavered between his fingers. “Call for help.” There was a little scarlet light, suddenly, beamed up to the ceiling. “And wait for me to find you,” Malfoy finished.
Ginny, examining a wooden spoon for any Gryffindor qualities it might possess, said, “Mum used to add ‘and don’t you dare play with that fire this means you Fred Weasley.’”
At that point, Harry had to put his head in the cupboard and clatter around distinctly non-Gryffindor pots and pans. When he looked up, Ginny was squinting doubtfully into a bottle of washing up liquid, and Dudley and Malfoy were gone.
“Malfoy went to search upstairs,” Ginny said distantly, squeezing the bottle so iridescent bubbles came out. “Your cousin followed him: I think he has the wands hidden up there somewhere and he doesn’t want to risk us finding them, the wimp.”
Harry’d better get up to them: Dudley wouldn’t hit girls and Ron was big enough to take care of himself: Malfoy was the skinny one with the big mouth on him. He paused a moment and told Ginny that there probably wasn’t a Horcrux in the Fairy liquid.
“Nah, I know,” Ginny said comfortably, elbows resting on the sink and bubbles in her hair. “I just think they’re nice.”
When Harry bounded up the stairs, he found Malfoy in Dudley’s room, not exactly being beaten to within an inch of his life. He was standing on one of Dudley’s chairs, rifling through his bookcase—which was mainly filled with video games—and Dudley, while not looking exactly friendly, had his arms crossed over his chest and an expression of cautious interest on his face.
He seemed to be attempting manly bonding.
“So that redhead,” he said. “You seeing her?”
“Not my type,” Malfoy answered absently.
“I’d have her with a side of chips any day,” Dudley remarked. “Fancy the one with the big hair, then?”
“More my type, yeah,” Malfoy said. “Still wouldn’t, though, and not just because Weasley would smother me in my sleep.”
Malfoy would pick Hermione over Ginny? Malfoy was so weird: Harry’d had no idea.
“Why’re you wearing a great big necklace, anyway?” were Dudley’s next words. “It makes you look like a fag.”
“A what? I’m sorry, I don’t speak Muggle,” Malfoy said placidly. “And this is a very important piece of Dark Magic, I’ll have you know. It’s a part of the Dark Lord’s soul, and it’s enchanted so I can’t take it off.”
“Not even in the shower?”
“That’s why I’m glad the Dark Lord didn’t put his soul bits in anything that was just gold-plated,” Malfoy said.
Dudley looked entirely nonplussed and not a little disturbed by the talk of souls and Dark Lords, but he wasn’t blocking his ears or anything. He bit his lip and after a pause for intense thought, spoke again.
“Can you—show me a little more magic?” he asked.
“Ahem,” said Harry, and Dudley looked as if he’d just been caught soliciting.
Malfoy looked entirely unruffled. “Oh, Potter,” he drawled. “Look, I found something. It’s a book about magic! And it’s got a lion on the front!”
He picked out a volume from of Dudley’s large selection of unread books, high on the shelves he didn’t care about reaching, and displayed it proudly.
Harry regarded The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with some amusement. “Uh—no, Malfoy, I know what that is.”
“I didn’t quite catch before—Is your name Mallory?” Dudley inquired, his tone indicating that he found this even more sketchy than the great big necklace.
“Malfoy,” Malfoy corrected.
Dudley didn’t look as if he found this much better, but he apparently decided that Harry was the one who needed glaring at. “Should’ve known you’d come up here,” he said. “Looking for your little freak stick, are you? Well, you can’t have it!”
He rummaged around his chest of drawers and came up with their wands clenched in his big hands, stalking out to find another cunning hiding place.
“Whatever, Big D,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. Malfoy was scanning the shelves, frowning a little. He had the locket out, the chain twined around his fingers, nibbling absently on the gold oval of the locket. “Hey,” Harry said. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to put Dark Objects in your mouth?”
He froze in dismay immediately after he said it: he’d just meant it as—sort of a joke, Malfoy was always at the locket, Harry didn’t mind it so much anymore, but what had possessed him to mention Malfoy’s mother?
There was a long pause. Then Malfoy said, “Frankly I think she’d have let me put anything in my mouth when I was younger if it would have shut me up for a second. I think that’s why she taught me how to cook, it was sheer desperation. I was hyper, I had to be stopped. Dark Objects. Baking scones. She’d have resorted to anything.”
Harry couldn’t exactly see Narcissa Malfoy baking scones, but—he was glad, grateful almost, that Malfoy hadn’t made an issue of it.
“You can do scones too? You’ve been holding out on me, Malfoy,” he said, and Malfoy smiled his funny lopsided smile. Harry smiled back, and Malfoy and he glanced at each other, caught in a startled moment: this couldn’t be them actually getting on, not them.
It was, though.
Malfoy looked away and returned to his perusal of the shelves, mouth still a little curved. “Your cousin’s—it’s funny, I thought Muggles would be—different,” he said after a pause. “More different, I mean. My father—I mean, I thought they would be, that’s all. They can’t do anything. I would’ve thought they’d be more angry about—not having magic.” He paused and said: “Is that why he doesn’t like you?”
“Don’t know,” Harry said. “Don’t care, either. I think it’s just that he’s a prat and I was—a lot smaller than he was, he loved making me a punching bag when we were younger and he’s burned because he can’t do it anymore. He’s more your sort of person, I suppose,” he went on, and then clarified hastily: “I mean, not—not like you, but he’s sort of like Crabbe and Goyle, isn’t he?”
At that point Malfoy tipped a shelf full of Dudley’s video games onto his head. Dudley, re-entering at this entirely inappropriate moment, looked hugely delighted.
“Ow! What the hell, Malfoy?”
“What the hell would you know about Crabbe and Goyle?” Malfoy demanded. “You can keep your stupid mouth shut about them. When—when have they ever hurt anyone who didn’t go for them first?”
Harry looked up into Malfoy’s icy, narrowed eyes and tried to think of a time. Well, they’d—they would have gone for Neville that time he’d gone for Malfoy. And they hadn’t—well, they always gave the impression that they’d go for anyone at a moment’s notice.
“They always throw their weight about,” he explained. “Cracking knuckles whenever anyone says a word against you—”
“Because they’re my friends!” Malfoy snapped. “My best friends. Crabbe’s one of the kindest people I know, and you, I don’t think you’ve ever even spoken a word to them—just because they watch out for me when I’m running off at the mouth, them throwing their weight about, what about you—”
“I don’t!”
Malfoy’s mouth twisted. “Sorry for chucking your things about, Dursley,” he said, turning suddenly to Dudley.
Dudley grinned. “Throw anything you like at him.”
“D’you want to know,” Malfoy went on smoothly, “what your cousin’s like at school?”
Dudley obviously recognised the rallying call to a taunting, even though Dudley’s usual preference in opening lines went more like ‘Look at the midget squirm!’ “Sure.”
Malfoy sat down abruptly on the chair, tipped backwards on two legs in a way Harry recognised as a trick of Sirius’—he supposed he’d done it once or twice, sort of picked it up from him, he didn’t do it that often, it wasn’t really a habit—and then adjusted glasses he wasn’t actually wearing. “You have to understand,” he said in a deeper voice that was—all right, it sounded a bit like Harry, Malfoy’s impressions were always savagely accurate, the bastard—“I get special treatment because I am special, that makes it fair. Besides, I can’t be doing anything like my own Potions homework, I have so many things to do. Five p.m., think sadly about my dark destiny. Oh no, woe is me, I’m a marked man—”
“Shut up,” Harry snapped.
“Five thirty, a consultation with the teachers. ‘Oh Harry,’” Malfoy squeaked, crossing his arms over his chest and doing Professor Flitwick. “‘I just don’t think we’re favouring you enough, I don’t ever feel like it’s enough!’ Oh well, says Potter, sighing heavily. That’s true, but you try your best. Don’t worry about it. I bear my burdens bravely.”
Malfoy gave a world-weary sigh. Harry didn’t sound like that.
“That’s classic!” Dudley said, almost crying with laughter. “That’s just like him. Wait till Piers sees this.”
Malfoy shot Harry a venomous triumphant glare. Harry returned the glare with interest.
“I heard a crash!” Hermione’s voice said sharply. “Harry, are you all right? Is Malfoy all right?”
“Oh sure, I’m fine, Malfoy just tipped a shelf on me, that’s all,” Harry shouted downstairs.
There was a very long pause, one that indicated Hermione taking a deep breath before she tackled the stupidity of the world.
“Is having a bit of a tiff with Malfoy really the cleverest thing to do right now, Harry?”
“No it’s not,” Malfoy said sharply, pushing by Harry with a decided shove of his bony shoulder. “Sorry, Dursley. Maybe later I’ll show you Potter and his first girlfriend, wasn’t that a joke—”
Since Dudley had just gone to the loo, he obviously wasn’t even talking to Dudley. He was just storming down the stairs full of rage the way he often did at school, but then he was always flanked by Crabbe and Goyle, anchored by them, and Harry hesitated at the top of the stairs and tried to swallow his fury.
“Look,” Harry said, and then stopped because he had to fight down ‘shut up or I’ll punch you in the face,’ ‘what in God’s name is the matter with you?’ and ‘you were the arrogant git at school, you were.’ “Look,” he said again. “Crabbe and Goyle. I wasn’t really thinking—I was just talking. I didn’t mean to offend you. I don’t know what they’re like. Sorry.”
This clearly threw Malfoy for a bit of a loop. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, well.”
Malfoy at a loss for words was good enough that Harry was really glad he hadn’t punched him in the face.
Harry took a deep breath. “Now could you stop being such a malicious git? If you’re at all capable of that, I mean.”
Malfoy lifted his shoulder. “I suppose,” he said, sounding a little sulky but mostly surprised. “If you stop being such a judgemental prat. If you’re at all capable of that, I mean,” he added, mimicking Harry’s voice again, but smiling properly again too.
Dudley came charging down the stairs with an extra jump on the step over Harry’s cupboard, a habit at least seven years old. He looked around the hall, obviously sensing a change in the atmosphere, and looked disgruntled that he wouldn’t get to see Malfoy’s version of Harry and Cho.
Harry was crying for him on the inside.
Ginny came out of the kitchen and smiled vaguely, obviously entirely unaware that there had ever been a disagreement or that Dudley would have her with a side of chips.
“Nothing in there,” she reported. “Should I look in this cupboard?”
“No,” Harry said sharply. “No, I’d know if something was in there.”
Ginny laughed a bit. “Well, Harry. If you didn’t know what was in the kitchen, how would you—”
He’d never—said anything about it. It wasn’t that he was ashamed of it, or anything, or that he didn’t think Ron or Hermione would be sympathetic, but that was just it, he would’ve told Ron and Hermione, not Ginny. Or Malfoy, who might laugh.
“I slept in there until I was eleven,” he said in a clipped voice. “There’s nothing in there but spiders.”
Harry looked at the wall. He didn’t want to look at any of them, didn’t want to see their expressions. Fine, Malfoy’d been right all those times he’d talked about Harry hanging onto the Weasleys, talked about Harry’s family not wanting him for Christmas.
He only looked away from the wall because there was a noise, and he saw Malfoy’s long legs vanishing inside the door, realised that Malfoy had actually climbed into the cupboard and shut the door behind him.
“Ow, I banged my knee,” Malfoy said in a muffled voice. “It’s too small for a child in here.”
“Malfoy, you lunatic,” Harry said. “Get out of there.”
The cupboard door swung open and Malfoy got out, shaking dust from his fair hair, which went flying in all directions. His eyes were narrowed and fixed on Dudley.
“Were you kept in a cupboard?” he demanded.
“Well,” Dudley said. “Well, no.”
“Just the wizard, then,” Malfoy went on in a cold voice. “Nice.”
“They didn’t do it because I was a wizard,” Harry said. “They did it because—I wasn’t their real kid, they didn’t want me, they never liked me, they never thought I was—”
“Mum and Dad were just trying to stamp it out of him!” Dudley exclaimed. “And I didn’t do it, so you can stop—looking at me that way. I might’ve given him a few slaps because he cheeked me, but—”
“Stamp it out of him?” Malfoy asked, his voice still arctic. “What was next—were they planning to burn it out of him? My father was right about Muggles, they aren’t safe around our kind. Professor Snape can’t talk about his father, either, I—Give me my wand back!”
Dudley didn’t answer in words. He just shifted his big shoulders and looked very ugly for a moment, and Ginny moved from her position beside Harry to get closer to Malfoy.
“Hey, Malfoy,” Harry said hastily. “Calm down. It’s not—it’s not worth it. All Muggles aren’t like that. The Grangers, they love Hermione. It’s not—it’s just them. They’re, it doesn’t matter why they didn’t want me, I’m shot of them now. We just need to—find the Horcrux and then we can get out of here. Right, Malfoy?”
Malfoy stopped glaring malevolently. “Right,” he said after a moment.
Harry went through the cupboards in Aunt Petunia’s pantry, listening to Malfoy and Ginny bicker amiably enough about whether Rowena Ravenclaw could have owned a case for quills, and if so, whether it might have resembled one of Aunt Petunia’s vases.
Malfoy had all sorts of wrongheaded ideas about Muggles, and he hadn’t meant—it hadn’t been a personal defence of Harry, just Malfoy’s ‘kind’, which was kind of terrible.
It had been a personal defence of Crabbe and Goyle, though. It was all right to have it confirmed that Malfoy would stand up for something or somebody he believed in: made Malfoy somewhat more understandable.
“I am the Muggle Studies student around here,” Malfoy argued. “And I got an O in my OWLs, too. That’s not a Horcrux. They call it a microwave.”
That was when the noise erupted from the living room.
“Attack!” Ginny exclaimed tensely.
Dudley, slouching against a wall, stared at her. “No,” he said, as to a slow child. “It’s the television.”
The sound of Top of the Pops was blaring louder than ever. When they came in Ron was standing in front of the television and looking a bit embarrassed.
“Hermione,” he said unconvincingly. “How could you?”
On the screen, there was a band singing and purple and blue glitter around the edges of the stage. The song was just getting started.
Ginny, her arms crossed, started tapping with one foot, and Malfoy laughed and held out his hand to her.
“Come here, Girl Weasley,” he said, and she grinned.
Malfoy grinned back at her as he led her out into the middle of the living room and twirled her out and then into his arms. Ginny laughed and he tipped her backwards: all Harry could see was her mane of red hair touching the carpet and Malfoy’s neck, the feathering of his blond hair against the glittering gold chain at his nape.
They were singing a bit, not really knowing the words, Malfoy’s voice low and Ginny’s sweet. They were playing together. It was funny because Harry’d never really thought of Malfoy as playful before, though it seemed obvious now.
Even Dudley’s grinning a bit, and then everyone jumped and Ron leaped to the television set, because the front door had opened, and in came Aunt Petunia, wearing her tennis gear with a small green visor.
“Diddy, dear!” she said. “Who are your fr—”
She stopped when she saw Harry, and went quite pale.
Ron dived for the television and started pressing buttons to make it turn off, and Ginny stared at Aunt Petunia while upside down. Malfoy straightened her up quickly.
Hermione held up her chin, held out her hand and said: “Hello, my name is Hermione Granger. Let me explain why we’re here—”
“Get out,” Petunia said sharply. “Dudley, are you all right? Did they hurt you? Did they force their way in here?”
“No,” Dudley admitted. “But they would’ve, Mum, so I took their freak sticks—”
Aunt Petunia came over to Dudley, who now topped her by half a head, and put her thin, shaky hands p on Dudley’s beefy shoulders. “That was—very good thinking, Diddy, very clever. Well done. Are all these people—you-know-whats?”
“Yeah,” said Dudley.
Petunia lowered her somewhat piercing voice. “Have any of them done anything? Anything at all? Of course you couldn’t know, Diddy, but they can, without their wands—Lily—”
Dudley hesitated fractionally. “No.”
Petunia lowered her voice further. “And they didn’t—entice you in any way, did they? I don’t like the look of that red-haired floozy at all—”
Harry glanced over but nobody in the living room seemed to have heard.
“Uh, no, Mum.”
Petunia gave Dudley another searching, concerned look, then straightened her back and turned to Harry. “What are you doing here?” she asked in a colourless voice. “You said you were going away forever—I thought it was all over—”
“It’s not over,” Harry said. “It’s just getting started.”
The soberly painted walls, with the small still decorous pictures, seemed to be closing in on him. He just wanted to escape.
Petunia’s mouth thinned. “What do you mean by coming here threatening me?” Her voice became stronger. “Threatening my family, with your tagalong band of freaks? You’re not welcome here. You never were.”
“I am not threatening you!” Harry snapped. “You know Voldemort has risen. You know that he’s a threat to all of us, not just wizards, don’t you? You must know his attitude to Muggles. Particularly any Muggles related to me. I’m trying to save everyone, here—”
“Don’t your people have a Ministry?” Petunia demanded. “Doubtless they are all slackers and Tories, but surely they can handle things without the aid of a seventeen year old boy?”
“We all have to do our part,” Harry said. “I think you might have something that could help—”
“Something magical—freakish?” Aunt Petunia looked utterly amazed and affronted. “I do not have anything of the sort! All of you, get out—leave my house at once, at once, you should never have come—”
Her voice had risen to a shrill command: Hermione, whose outstretched hand had dropped, looked almost frightened by such hysterical rudeness from an adult and Harry’s relative. The other three just looked frozen, though Ron was still pressing buttons.
“He killed your sister!” Harry shouted. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you at all?”
Aunt Petunia slapped him.
The crack of her open palm against his face was almost deafening in the sudden silence: Ron had finally manage to turn off the television. Harry stood shaken: he’d been hurt much worse, the sting on his face didn’t seem to matter. It was just that she had never done it before.
“How dare you,” Aunt Petunia exclaimed. “What would you know about Lily? You never knew her, you’re not even like her. When I took you in I thought—it was a chance to get it right, make sure that Lily’s son wasn’t taken away to that disgusting world she thought was so marvellous, so special, the world that got her killed. Only you never understood that, did you, you were always alien—strange—you look just like him, that awful boy. You were always from that other world. And even when I failed and you went, I kept you here, didn’t I? I kept Lily’s son here. I did my duty, and now it’s over. I never wanted you, not for a second. Get out of my house.”
“And if Mum could see all you did,” Harry said between his teeth. “She’d be grateful to you, would she? She’d think you treated me really well.” Aunt Petunia didn’t answer, and he went on. “It wasn’t the wizarding world that killed Mum, it was Voldemort, and I want to make sure he won’t hurt anyone else. So can you just tell me if there was anything on me when you found me on your doorstep? A little—a piece of jewellery, perhaps, or a cup or a dagger or something?”
Aunt Petunia stared at him. “Your sort leave daggers on babies frequently?” she inquired, apparently regaining some composure. “Explains a great deal, I suppose. Wait until I tell Vernon. No, of course there was nothing of the sort, and had there been any daggers I would certainly have thrown them away, we had two young children in the house. There was only the letter.”
Harry heard a sharp intake of breath: he thought from the direction it came from that it was Hermione.
“The letter?” he asked. “Can I see it?”
“Then will you go?” Aunt Petunia bargained sharply.
“I’ll go,” Harry said. “I won’t come back. I swear.”
Aunt Petunia looked at him for a moment, then pursed her lips and nodded briefly.
“Come with me,” she instructed. “The rest of you stay here,” she said in a clear voice. “Diddy, go lock yourself in your room.” She ran her eyes over the others, and Harry saw that past her instinctive fear and disgust she was making the judgement that they were a scruffy lot who probably listened to songs with obscene lyrics in them. “Please do not touch anything in my home. I may well,” she added significantly, “be counting the spoons when I return.”
They had all been still and silent mostly out of sheer ghastly embarrassment, Harry presumed, at having to witness a family scene. At this, however, Malfoy’s mouth twisted and he opened it, obviously about to say something cutting and quite possibly along the lines of being surprised that lowly Muggles had invented spoons.
Possibly he was still trying to be a polite guest, possibly he did not want to see any more hysterics or delay the business they had come here on, possibly he recalled that Dudley had just lied for him. He shut his mouth.
Aunt Petunia turned sharply and made her way up the stairs, setting her tennis shoes on each step as if she was wearing heels and expected a decisive click. She led the way across the landing to her and Uncle Vernon’s room, and with Harry on her heels she walked over to a cupboard placed high on the left side of the pale-blue walls.
She opened the cupboard, and wordlessly took out her jewellery box. Harry had seen it before, but he had never seen Aunt Petunia lifting out the whole thing, contents and velvet bottom and everything, to reveal a secret compartment.
Aunt Petunia sat down on the floor with her box of secrets, and Harry sat across from her.
On the top was a photo, discoloured with age. Two adults Harry did not recognise were standing up in front of a couple of chairs with two girls in them.
The girls were, quite clearly, Aunt Petunia and Harry’s mother. Aunt Petunia was a gawky-looking adolescent and the girl who would be Lily Potter was a young girl, with bobbed red hair and a roguish grin. Even though she was still a child it was obvious she was going to be the pretty one, but Harry noticed something he never had before, having never seen them together anywhere. They had several features in common—the shape of their jaws, their mouths and foreheads, though the features were put together in a way that made up two entirely different faces.
Petunia had her arm around Lily, one hand pressed flat against her slim shoulder, and Harry remembered how Aunt Petunia had put her hands against Dudley’s shoulders downstairs.
Aunt Petunia caught him looking, gave him a cold glance and turned the photo over. Harry read the scrawl on the back. It said Lily’s 10th birthday.
Before the Hogwarts letter, then. Before anything.
Aunt Petunia sorted through the little compartment with fingers that shook a little. She tipped a yellowed birthday card’s edges and Harry heard a young girl’s voice he remembered from a Pensieve call out: “Happy birthday, Petunia!” Aunt Petunia froze, looking over her shoulder not at Harry but at the door, as if Uncle Vernon might appear there suddenly. Then she flushed, eyed Harry coldly again, and produced a piece of parchment, rolled up in a circle, and handed it to Harry without looking at him.
It felt oddly heavy.
“The letter explained what had happened to Lily,” Aunt Petunia told him in a thin voice. “Your sort wouldn’t send police around to tell us—or whatever you have instead of policemen—”
“Aurors,” said Harry.
“That sounds positively Bolshevik,” Aunt Petunia said, her tone clipped. “Well, they did not come. I suppose letters are all they think Muggles deserve. The letter told me about some outlandish way of keeping you safe that I certainly did not understand, and a barely veiled threat that I did not appreciate. It was signed by that old man who picked you up last year and weighed down by the seal on it, I suppose to keep it from blowing away. I doubt that there’s anything you do not already know in it, but there you have it.”
The seal? Harry thought, and unrolled the letter quickly.
There it was, a slim silver stick with a round device on one end, that could be gripped and pressed into wax. On the circular shape was the depiction of a lion, chased-silver mouth open in a roar.
The seal of Godric Gryffindor.
Perhaps Dumbledore had not been quite sure what it was, and elected to leave it in an already safe place for Harry to find. Perhaps, since Voldemort had never had a chance to seal his Horcrux round with charms, Dumbledore had never realised it was important and simply sent it, as a natural addition to a letter, as a present for Harry.
He had it now. Another Horcrux, the last unidentified Horcrux, and a step forward at last.
He looked over and said, out of the fullness of his suddenly-triumphant heart: “Thanks, Aunt Petunia.”
Aunt Petunia seemed badly startled, looked and then looked at him again. “You have—you have her eyes,” she said after a moment. “Has anyone ever told you that?”
Maybe Aunt Petunia would have realised it before if she’d ever looked directly at Harry.
Harry clenched the seal in one fist. “It’s good to know.” He wanted to say something to her, though, for giving him the Horcrux and keeping his mother’s picture, so he said: “She died for me, you know. Voldemort, he—he came for me and he said she could step out of the way and she could live, but she wouldn’t.”
“That was like her,” Aunt Petunia said immediately. “She was always fearless, Lily. Thoughtless as well, could never keep a guard on her tongue, and when she was little she was always dashing into things, falling down and—and getting hurt.” Aunt Petunia seemed to realise what she was saying, and broke off with a sniff, lips going thin again. “Besides,” she added. “Any mother would have done it.”
“Okay.”
Harry hesitated, not sure what to do or say next. Aunt Petunia was still looking at him, or to be more specific looking into his eyes. He had a thought for a second—he’d never thought of it before, never wanted her to, or if he had he’d been too young to remember—the thought that she might give him a hug.
It wouldn’t erase anything, not being scared sometimes in that dark creaking cupboard, not Aunt Petunia carrying Dudley off to give him treats and pointedly excluding Harry, not that summer the year after he first went to Hogwarts when they didn’t even feed him enough, but it would have meant—something. He would’ve let her.
Aunt Petunia did not do anything of the kind. She looked down at her box and said in a brittle voice: “You have what you came for. And I have your promise to go and never come back.”
Harry felt as if she’d slapped him again. “Right,” he said, the chance of redeeming anything slipping away, if it had ever existed. “Yeah. I will.”
“Good,” Aunt Petunia said. “Get out. I will not help you again. I will not have my family mixed up in this, not in any way.”
“Right,” Harry said again.
He got to his feet and left her on the floor, the box of secrets in her shaking hands, her head bowed over the blank side of her first family’s picture.