After Kreacher had traipsed away happily to clean the toilets for the glorious advent of Malfoy or whatever, Malfoy insisted that they go immediately to the attics.
“It’s obviously where Kreacher has all the good stuff stashed,” he said. “We need to go get it down.”
“It’s easy for you to say,” Harry grumbled. “The whole house wants to have your pureblood babies. I might get murdered by a temperamental Black family teapot.”
“I shall protect you,” Malfoy promised grandly.
After they climbed several more flights of stairs and one very small, clearly tailored for house elves, flight of stairs, they found themselves in a dark, vaulted room. Harry scanned the ceiling for bats, and then lifted his wand and said “Lumos” just as Malfoy reached out in the shadows and brought a whole stack of boxes toppling onto their heads.
“That was brilliant, Malfoy,” Harry said, struggling free only to find Malfoy collapsed sideways on a pile of boxes and laughing his fool head off. “What? What is it?”
“Um, I think we upset a box of clothing,” Malfoy said, biting his lips.
“No, really?” Harry said, throwing off some kind of strange over-robes waistcoat affair. “Do tell.”
“And, um, I think you have Great-Aunt Wally’s delicates on your head,” said Malfoy, and threw back his own head and laughed like a hyena.
“Oh my God!” Harry tried to knock off Mrs Black’s yellowed-lace brasserie, which then got caught on his glasses. Malfoy laughed and laughed. “I’m glad you found that so amusing,” Harry said, once he’d got it off.
“Oh, me too,” Malfoy agreed blandly.
Harry rolled his eyes. It was funny, actually, this whole business of having Malfoy be relaxed, and having the option of both of them ending up laughing. It was still new enough to surprise him—look at this thing we can do!—and weird, but it was more than all right to know that when Malfoy, as he inevitably would, did an impression of Harry Potter With Bra On Head, Harry would probably be able to laugh.
“Anyway, don’t complain,” Malfoy said. “This is the most action you’ve got since you last saw my girlfriend.”
“She’s not your girlfriend, Malfoy,” Harry reminded him. “Er,” he said hastily. “Not that I’m trying to steal Pansy away or anything. I mean, I’m sure she’s—great, but she’s not really—”
Malfoy tipped up another box and a gleaming river of metal poured out with a few faint chimes. They’d apparently found the family silver.
“Yes, yes,” Malfoy said dismissively. “I understand, you’re all about Girl Weasley and her radiant red hair and all the millions of babies you’ll have. And Fleur and Bill will have. And Granger and Weasley will have, world of redheads without end, every Weasley a multitude—”
“Except for Charlie,” Harry said absently. He’d found a whole lot of family photographs he’d thought Sirius had thrown out, and he was trying to find Cytherea Black the dancing girl.
He looked up to find Malfoy with dust rising from his ruffled hair like a halo, looking rather offended.
“Why not Charles?” he demanded. “He’s the best of the lot, in my opinion. I mean, certainly, he does have his dragons thing, but I’m certain there are a lot of women who would enjoy Roumania. Roumanian women, for a start,” he added thoughtfully.
Harry seriously wondered why he ever opened his mouth. “Er,” he said. “Sure. If, um—I thought you knew—Charlie liked women. Roumanian or otherwise.”
“What?” Malfoy asked. “Really? I had no idea! I wonder why Charles didn’t tell me?” He scowled. “He is a false friend. I like to know things. You know, Pansy tells me there’s a new boy working in the Three Broomsticks, maybe Charles should be informed—”
“I’d heard that, too,” Harry said.
“And since when do you know everything?” Malfoy asked. “You don’t even know people’s names! The world’s all gone wrong! Oh, this is a real cobra snakeskin, we should put it in the drawing room.”
“Well, Hermione told me everything, actually,” Harry confessed, leaving alone this revelation that Malfoy believed a snake skin was every drawing room’s must-have accessory.
“The world makes sense again,” Malfoy said. “Still, I do think Charlie could have told me.”
“Have you told him?” Harry asked thoughtlessly.
Malfoy turned the snake skin over in his hands, not looking up, but Harry saw a blush crest the tops of his cheeks. “No I haven’t, because there mightn’t be anything to tell,” Malfoy snapped. “I told you I’m not sure, Potter.”
“Okay,” Harry said. “Sorry.” He found a picture of Malfoy, who looked about three, and a Mrs Black who looked older than her portrait. Malfoy was sitting in her lap and he did indeed have hair down to his shoulders, which Harry thought probably accounted for a lot of Malfoy’s attitude problems in later life. “So you never guessed,” Harry said, turning the picture over in his hands. “About Charlie. I mean, he never—”
“What?” Malfoy said.
“Oh, um,” Harry said. “Never mind.”
“You know,” Malfoy observed rather testily, “the common misconception that men of a certain persuasion will just make random leaps at anyone is actually an ignorant and indeed offensive—”
“That’s not what I meant!” Harry protested. “I just thought, you know. Charlie likes you.”
“Are you trying to set me up?” Malfoy demanded in a sudden burst of random and baseless paranoia.
“No!” Harry exclaimed. “Of course not, I mean, you said you were confused—”
“You said we were never going to talk about this again,” Malfoy said rather plaintively.
“—Actually I think it would be a terrible plan, he’s much too old, it would be—terrible—”
“I would have liked to never talk about this again,” Malfoy went on wistfully.
“I just wanted to, you know, sort of put you on your guard, well, in case Charlie did—”
“Oh, so what you’re doing, in actual fact,” Malfoy said, “is trying to protect my virtue.”
“That’s—no,” Harry said definitely, because that sounded incredibly stupid.
“Because I have to tell you, Potter, you’ve kind of already missed the boat on that one,” Malfoy went on. “Sorry to ruin any illusions. Furthermore, this entire big-brother idea you seem to have picked up is absurd, since I am a whole month older than you.”
“I do not,” Harry said between his teeth, “think of you as my little brother.”
“Good,” Malfoy informed him shortly. “Cousins will do. And I think it’s true, to some degree,” he went on. “Chances are, anyway. The Potters were purebloods.”
Harry was about to mention that this purebloods all being related thing was freakish and terrible, when the awful thought he might be related to Ginny occurred to him and struck him momentarily dumb.
Meanwhile, Malfoy returned to the subject of Charlie. “Besides which he is older, and used to teaching people my age.”
“Well, not used to it,” Harry said. “He can’t be. He’s just started doing it. And I think—”
He was trying to think of some non-horrifying way to mention the way Charlie’s ears went red when someone said Malfoy’s name, but Malfoy cut him off with a dismissively waved hand.
“Clearly, you haven’t been thinking all that much. Or possibly it’s just that you’ve never had much practise,” Malfoy said pityingly. Harry made a face at him and Malfoy wrinkled his nose back before airing out an old lace tablecloth and becoming lost in the material. “I realise that you may not have noticed,” Malfoy said in a muffled voice from under the lace, “but your suggestion is a blithering one for yet another reason: Charles and I are not exactly playing in the same Quidditch league, if you take my meaning.”
“Well,” said Harry, in dread that this was going to be some sort of explicit homosexual euphemism, “well—no. I don’t, er—take it.” He stopped and then said in a horrified rush: “Your meaning! I don’t take your meaning!”
Malfoy emerged triumphant from the tablecloth, folding it up and adding it to the drawing room pile along with the snakeskin. Then he found a tiny alarm clock with a silver snake for a clock hand, and added it to a pile which Harry thought was probably for Malfoy’s new bedroom. “Charles,” Malfoy said, “and God help me I thought that I would be preserved from ever saying such a thing about a Weasley, is very attractive. I mean, not my type,” he added hastily, “I really honestly hadn’t ever considered it—”
“I didn’t think you had!” Harry said.
“Well, good, because I hadn’t. But objectively, yes. Certainly. With the rugged and the dragons and the arms and so on. Very nice,” Malfoy said in a flat sort of way, sounding either deathly embarrassed or bored enough to make an observation on the weather. “So you needn’t fret about my virtue anymore,” he said, flashing an exceptionally wicked grin at the word ‘virtue.’
Harry really did not understand why Malfoy thinking Charlie was good-looking was supposed to help at all, but he went no further with it because discussing the whole business was mortifying and terrible. At about the same time that Malfoy found a snow globe with four sides—and thus technically more of a snow square—Harry remembered Malfoy’s little ‘not exactly Blaise Zabini’ comment and Mrs Weasley’s constant ‘funny-looking’ comments and realised that what Malfoy in his circular way was trying to say was that Charlie was out of his league.
“Potter,” Malfoy said. “Potter! Pay attention to me!”
“Sorry,” Harry said. “What?”
“Look at this,” commanded Malfoy, and threw himself easily backwards on the folded tablecloth, head hitting a table-cloth-covered spot by Harry’s elbow. He turned the snow cube around in his hands and Harry saw the little wizard inside move, as Malfoy turned the cube, into each of the four seasons. On one side there was snow falling like it might in any snow globe, and then on another side there were autumn leaves falling, then sun shining, then rain and budding plants. “Pretty,” Malfoy said, turning it over and over between his palms. Summer side up, it spilled light over his face and he smiled. “Do you want this?”
“No,” Harry said indulgently. “You have it.”
Malfoy looked pleased with himself and added the square to what was now definitely his bedroom pile. Then he got up and went over to a shape Harry couldn’t really see: in the dimness he thought there was a big canvas rectangle, and then Malfoy flipped it around in one hand, and wiped the dust carefully off, so they could all see the portrait underneath.
Under the dust were four sleeping children in fancy robes. Malfoy stepped away from the picture as if it had burned him and Harry scrambled up to get a closer look, because he could not believe what he saw.
Close up, some of them were not children at all. The older ones were girls, one with black hair and one with gold, in their mid to late teens. The boys, one with black hair and one with gold as well, looked about ten or twelve at the oldest.
Harry didn’t have to look Malfoy’s suddenly grey face to recognise Narcissa. She hadn’t changed that much. It wasn’t the sight of her that made his heart sink, though, it was the older boy, the one with black hair falling into his face in an artistic sort of fan even though he was fast asleep and snoring a bit. Harry would’ve been hard put to recognise him if he hadn’t seen inside Snape’s Pensieve, but he had.
Just then Narcissa’s delicate painted face stirred into wakefulness, and she hid a yawn behind one small hand. “How do you do?” she asked in a cool sort of way.
Then she reached out and gave the blond boy’s shoulder a quick shake. He looked like Narcissa, only since he was a boy he made Harry think of Malfoy, except he didn’t have Malfoy’s sharp nose and when he opened his eyes they were calm sweet blue.
“Hi,” he said, and smiled Malfoy’s getting-around-people bright smile, then yawned impossibly wide.
“Regulus, have some manners, we’re on display,” Narcissa Black reprimanded him in a low voice. “And stop Sirius making that fearful racket.”
Regulus obligingly elbowed Sirius in the face.
“Wh-what? ‘M awake,” Sirius mumbled, his voice surprisingly deep for a twelve year old. “Oh look, people!” he added brightly. He shook the dark lovely girl sleeping in his lap. “Bella,” he said. “Bella, wake up, we have company.”
Bellatrix Black, beautiful and serene as if she had never had an evil thought in her life, slept on.
“Cissy,” Sirius said in a voice edged with panic. “She won’t wake up.”
“Don’t worry, Sirius,” Narcissa said calmly. “She’s probably not dead yet.”
This seemed to cheer Sirius up. “Ha!” he exclaimed, bestowing a white flashing grin on one and all. “She must be ancient if we’re all dead. She must be a crone. I bet this is hundreds and hundreds of years in the future, I bet she looks like a wizened old monkey in a dress.” He squinted out cheerfully at Harry, who felt his throat contract when Sirius’ face lit up. “You know,” he said, “that boy looks like James. I bet he’s James’ descendant. Hi, James’ descendant!”
“Hi,” Harry said, and his voice cracked.
“My God,” said Narcissa, forgetting her manners. Her schooled expression broke and she looked vital and lovely. “Did one of us marry into the Potters? That’s what happens when you consort with wishy-washy bleeding heart liberals, Auntie Wally says. Look at their clothes!”
“They’re Muggle clothes,” Sirius informed them with an air of modest pride. “My friend Remus has some in his trunk. They’re not wearing any bell-bottoms though,” he said, looking dissatisfied. “I think bell-bottoms are wicked.” He paused and then said: “Hey, I bet there was a war!”
“Sirius!” Regulus exclaimed, looking distressed.
“I bet there was,” Sirius insisted. “I bet there was a war because the muggleborn rose up and cast off their chains—”
“They’re not in chains,” Narcissa said.
“Chains of oppression,” Sirius went on, scowling. “And there was a glorious revolution and after that everyone was treated equally and everyone wore Muggle clothes and Remus could come round for tea. Vive la revolution! I hope they waited until I grew up, so I could be a soldier too.”
“I wouldn’t want you to be a soldier, Sirius,” said Regulus. “You might get hurt.”
“I don’t think so,” Sirius said, tossing his proud boy’s head. “I’d be much too brave.” He looped an arm around Regulus’ thin shoulders and said: “You’ll see when you get to Hogwarts, squirt. You’ll be in Gryffindor with me and I’ll teach you to be brave. Maybe James and I can get you on the Quidditch team,” he added, in the tones of one promising a great treat. “James and I going to be on the Quidditch team this year,” he confided to Harry, who he seemed to have taken a fancy to. “I expect we’ll be magnificent.”
“Don’t be absurd,” said Narcissa, reaching over and holding Regulus’ hand. “Aunt Wally would have a fit. Regulus is going to be in Slytherin with me, and I shall take care of him. Someone has to be the good son, you know.”
Sirius tilted back on his chair, hands careful in Bellatrix’s hair, holding her balanced. “I don’t see why,” he mumbled.
Regulus looked from Narcissa to Sirius and looked unhappy.
“Hey,” said Sirius, “You people are from the future—I mean, the future is now—so do James and I make it onto the Quidditch team?”
“Yeah,” Harry answered.
“And we’re good?” Sirius prompted.
“Yeah,” Harry said, hearing his voice scrape at the sight of Sirius’ face, just starting out, just young. “You were both—you were both really good.”
He was going to embarrass himself in some way, he was going to have to leave the room, but before he could do either of those things Regulus said: “Are you all right?” and looked at Malfoy.
“Fine,” Malfoy said in a thin voice.
Narcissa gave him an uninterested look and said: “Perhaps you should sit down.”
“I—I can’t—” Malfoy continued, still in that thin taut voice, and then he bolted. One moment he was at Harry’s side, and then the next he was a streak of blond hair and long legs throwing himself at the exit. Harry hurtled after him.
“Wait!” Sirius called. “Don’t go! Tell me about all the things I do when I’m grown up!”
Harry slammed the door.
Malfoy sat down on the tiny, rickety house-elf-sized steps and put his face in his hands. Harry thought for a terrible moment that Malfoy was crying again, and thought for another terrible moment that he didn’t know if he could stop himself joining in.
“My mother never let my portrait be taken,” Malfoy said hoarsely. He lifted his eyes, dry but desperate-looking, and went on: “She said—she said there was time enough when you were grown up. She never said anything about that picture, but she—she didn’t like the idea of me waking up somewhere alone in the future, and being afraid—”
“I didn’t think of him as loving them,” Harry said. “I thought he was like me—that he didn’t have anyone, ever. I thought maybe they were—they didn’t like him, or something.”
“He was theirs,” Malfoy said. “They wouldn’t have—how could they have not liked him?” He stopped, leaning with his elbows against his knees and his fair head hanging as if sitting up straight was too hard just then. Harry realised he was hunched up too. “If I tell you something,” Malfoy said, “will you take it as hating Muggles or something? Because if you yell at me right now, I swear—”
“No,” Harry promised. “I won’t, I swear.”
“The history books at school tell lies,” Malfoy said. “That whole business of Wendelin the Weird, enchanting herself so the flames wouldn’t hurt—it happened, all right, but it wasn’t all that happened. It’s like Defence Against the Dark Arts, everything all polished up to look nice—there were too many Muggles. There always have been. And they’re not stupid. Of course they got hold of people’s wands, and they snapped them, and they burned the witches and wizards. And we didn’t laugh.”
“What—I don’t understand,” Harry said. “What’s that got to do with—?”
“That’s why the wizarding world is hidden,” Malfoy said. “That’s why, and from then on we learned we had to band together. That’s what—that’s what family is supposed to be. And Mother and your Sirius and—they all just fell apart, and yet at some time, in that time, they were—”
“What?” Harry asked, softly.
“This isn’t the way the House of Black were supposed to be,” Malfoy said. “Toujours pur wasn’t all about blood. They were supposed to be willing to go to the stake for each other!”
Harry thought of Sirius’ brown child hands, careful, gentle, in the tumbled locks of Bellatrix’s black hair.
“Well,” he said. “I don’t—I don’t mean to make you feel bad about this, Malfoy—your mum did go to the stake for you, didn’t she? My mum went to the stake for me.”
“How—I didn’t know that,” Malfoy said.
“Voldemort said she could live if she stepped aside,” Harry said. “She didn’t have to die. She chose to do it. For me.”
Malfoy frowned. “I wonder why the—why Voldemort said she could live?”
“I don’t know,” Harry said, startled. “I never thought of that.”
“Professor Slughorn was always yapping on about your mother being good at charms and things,” Malfoy said. “So—I bet she was the type who researched. I bet she knew what would happen if she shielded you. She invoked your name, right?”
Not Harry, she’d said. Harry nodded.
“That was clever,” Malfoy said. “She couldn’t have known he’d offer to let her stand aside. She must have worked out a trap for him in a second. That’s Slytherin thinking, that is.”
Harry fought the impulse to ask Malfoy to kindly stop insulting his mother, since it was obvious Malfoy thought of it as a compliment.
“I didn’t know Mud—the—” Malfoy floundered for a moment.
“The Muddleborn will do,” Harry said, and lifted his heavy-feeling head enough to catch Malfoy’s smile.
“I didn’t know they saw things like that,” Malfoy said. “Not—going to the stake.” He stopped, and said: “Regulus went to the stake alone, too, and brought this back to his home.”
He touched his locket, and Harry thought of Regulus in the portrait, the only Black face he had ever seen—including Malfoy’s, including Sirius’—that was kind.
“Sirius was,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Sirius was like that, too. He just—he chose a different family.”
He remembered Sirius, saying to Peter Pettigrew, Then you should have died. Died for us, as we would have died for you. Lupin hadn’t spoken the same way. Harry hadn’t thought about it, then, as a language that Sirius had learned at home.
Malfoy turned and looked at Harry properly for a moment, cool eyes searching. “You really liked him, didn’t you,” he said. It wasn’t a question at all: Malfoy got it.
“Yeah,” Harry said. “I did, but.” He stopped. “I didn’t,” he said, and every word was like pulling out a tooth, he didn’t want to go on but he did: “I didn’t—I didn’t know him that well,” he admitted at last. “But he was there and he asked me to live with him and—once Mrs Weasley said that he acted like he’d got his best friend back, and I said, what’s wrong with that, because I thought—”
He’d thought, well, I can do that. He’d wanted to be like his father, and Sirius had loved James, and Harry had—wanted Sirius to love him.
“I wanted him for my family,” Harry said at last. “But he died.”
“I see,” Malfoy said. “I mean, I understand. I think I understand.”
There was a pause.
“I’m sorry about you—about you having to see your mum like that, and—unexpectedly,” Harry said. “If you want, I mean, after you get used to it, you can have the picture for your room.”
Malfoy took possession of this pause in order to breathe, deeply and deliberately, and then he leaned half an inch closer to Harry and sort of jostled him, but gently, so his sharp elbow rested on the inside of Harry’s elbow for a minute.
“If you want to have a bedroom on the second floor too,” he said, his voice sort of sharp. “We could put it in the hall.”
“I’ll do that,” Harry said. “When we’re—when we get used to it.”
“I have to go back in anyway,” Malfoy reflected, leaning away and speaking in a lighter voice. “I want my seasons square.”
“I’ll get it for you,” Harry said, getting up.
“No!” Malfoy snapped, looking up at him as if he was crazy and then, as if he were afraid, at the attic, where the dead were talking behind the door. “Don’t go in there,” he said. “Not yet.”
“D’you want to go back to the Burrow?” Harry asked, and was surprised to find that leaving Grimmauld Place, for once, would mean something besides a simple escape.
Malfoy got up, cracking his back. “Yes I do,” he said. “It’s time for dinner.”
“One more rather depressing point is how good-looking those Blacks were,” Malfoy said as they went to get the Portkey flowerpot. He seemed to have got enough of a grip on this, and now of course he was determined to add his particular Malfoy spin on it. He looked disconsolately at the flowerpot at his feet. “It’s very lowering. A different quirk of genetics and I could have been beautiful as the morning and ruled the school. Everyone would have given me everything I wanted.”
“I would not have,” Harry said very definitely.
“Ah,” said Malfoy, “but you see you would have run away from school at the age of twelve after a chance meeting with my cousin Nymphadora, who by a similar quirk or genetics would also have been beautiful as the morning—a very, very nice morning—to pursue her, do her bidding and be her devoted slave. And troubador,” he added after a second’s thought. “You would’ve had a guitar.”
“See, we’ve been in a gloomy house half the day,” Harry said, “so I know you haven’t been out in the sun too long.” He picked up the flowerpot, caught Malfoy’s arm and went on as the whirl started. “Which leaves me wondering—what the hell is going on?”
The Burrow was ablaze. The little, leaning house that Harry had thought of as a refuge for five years, the Weasley’s home, was burning. Harry looked at the flames licking through the little windows for a moment and then started towards the back door.
Malfoy grabbed his wrist. “Where are you going?”
“Into the house,” Harry said curtly.
“The house,” Malfoy repeated. “That house? The one that’s on fire?”
“Someone might be inside it,” Harry said.
“Yeah, like us,” Malfoy said. “If we go inside and get burned to death by a banshee. Look at that fire, Potter! We need to get someone—”
“There isn’t time,” Harry snapped. “One of the Weasleys could be in there.”
“They might not be! Everyone was out before, they might not have—”
“I won’t take that chance,” Harry said, and pulled his wrist sharply out of Malfoy’s grip.
He heard Malfoy curse and then come after him. He was still grumbling, but the sound of his voice was lost as they got closer to the fire, joining all the other whispers to become a roar. Harry threw open the door and ran inside, up the stairs. The wallpaper was on fire, and he stamped on the carpet to put it out. If the stairs really caught, they would collapse: he needed his Firebolt.
That’d do as a good first place to look. Ron could be in their room.
He nodded in the direction of charge forward as he ran down the hall. He was inside the room before he realised Malfoy was not with him, that he’d peeled off on some mission of his own while the house burned. That was Malfoy for you. He’d be all right, though, he might’ve even decided just to leave. He hadn’t been caught by smoke or fire like Ron could have been, or Hermione, or any of them.
The room was filled with smoke. Harry coughed against it, feeling he was using smoke for air as he shouted hoarsely: “Ron! Ron!”
The floor was clear. Ron wasn’t there. Harry stopped, eyes smarting, to rummage around his chest and gather up Firebolt, Invisibility Cloak and the sword of Gryffindor. He chucked the Cloak out of the window and tucked the sword in his belt.
Next he went to the living room. Ron and Hermione weren’t there, and nor were Hermione’s books. Harry felt a leap of hope at seeing that. So they had got out, then.
The wall next to Harry’s ear tumbled half down in a sudden leap of fire, and under the roar Harry heard a girl’s voice screaming.
It came from high above. Harry ran up the stairs until suddenly there were no more stairs, just a charred absence, and he kicked off on his Firebolt through the flames. He smelled crackling as he rose and thought in a strange distant way that since Hermione could waterproof his glasses surely she could fireproof his broom, and then he landed hard on the roof and all thoughts melted away.
In the thick of the smoke, on the edge of the roof, stood a girl. Harry saw her red hair flying like a banner through the smoke. He dropped his broom and ran towards her.
“Ginny!” he said. “Thank God, I was worried sick—” His hand closed tight on her arm.
The girl turned and Harry saw her eyes flash red in her thin white face.
“I’m not Ginny,” the banshee whispered, her voice still holding the edge of a scream.
“See,” Harry said. “Actually, I knew that.”
The Order had said that she could not be touched unless she chose, and that she had a penchant for seduction.
He held fast to her arm, and brought the sword down hard.
The banshee turned to smoke and a last scream when she died, and a few bones that looked like bird bones in the fire, which was still hot but suddenly, clearly dying. And from his position on the roof Harry saw red hair from beyond the garden. He ran across the roof, seizing up his Firebolt, and was among the Weasleys in an instant.
“It’s all right,” he said as Ron and Hermione ran to him. “The banshee’s dead, I killed her, the house will be all right, but—” He suddenly realised what was missing in this sea of red. “Where’s Malfoy? Was he here?” Nobody answered and Harry tightened his grip on his singed broom. “I’m going back for him.”
“There are Death Eaters in there as well as a banshee!” Mr Weasley said. “I’ve Owled for help, but—”
Charlie’s voice cut across his mother’s, and said: “Where’s Ginny?”
Voices rose into a collective roar just as the roar of the fire was simmering into silence.
“Oh God,” said Ron.
“She was right behind me,” Hermione said. “I swear, she was right behind me, she just said she was going to get some books—I thought—”
“I’m going back for both of them,” Harry said.
It was not a sound but the sudden complete silence of Mr Weasley, who was the first to see, which silenced them all and made them turn around to see what he saw. Emerging from the smoke and dying flames of the Burrow came Malfoy, and he was carrying Ginny in his arms.
“I think I cut a terribly heroic figure,” Malfoy said. “Pass the sandwiches.”
“While I am grateful for being saved,” Ginny said, “Really, I am—I think it’s traditional to, you know, battle the enemy as well. And I did that.” She tilted her chin and looked proud of herself. Harry couldn’t blame her: taking down two Death Eaters when you were taken by surprise in your burning house wasn’t bad at all. It was just bad luck the last Death Eater had managed to Stun her before he went down.
“I was heroic,” Malfoy insisted. “I had to jump over an enormous sizzling pool of that Bat Bogeys stuff to get to you. I really think that’s the most disgusting spell I’ve ever seen.”
“Only because I’ve caught you with it, too,” said Ginny, holding up her hand for Harry to slap. He reached over and did so, grinning.
“No, it’s because it’s disgusting,” Malfoy said severely. “It’s enormous piles of snot. D’you know what snot is? It’s not attractive, is what it is. If you ever had a chance of stealing my impressionable heart and making off with the Malfoy millions to a tropical island, your plan is now doomed to failure, because forevermore the sight of you will remind me of a puddle of snot with little bats drowning in it. The young men will fight shy if they think you’re going to turn their face into snot bats when they chuck you.”
Not that Ginny had done it when he chucked her, but the thought gave Harry a little pause. He sort of regretted the hand slap.
They were all sitting companionably in the remains of the Burrow garden. The Order and the Ministry had both arrived rather quickly, along with a mediwitch. Ginny’s scorched cheek being the only casualty, she’d started dispensing sandwiches and now everyone was having an impromptu picnic. There were already sounds of repair coming from the Burrow.
“Scrimgeour will want you in the papers even more now you killed You-Know-Who’s banshee,” Ron commented.
“Tell him my people will Owl his people,” said Harry, and they all laughed, even Malfoy, who was mostly occupied keeping his left arm clamped down against his knee and a weather eye on Mr Weasley. Mr Weasley had been giving him odd looks since he came out of the house, and Malfoy looked acutely aware of the fact that all his shirts had burned, and his Dark Mark was exposed.
Harry wondered if he should offer him his jumper, or if that would make people look for the Mark.
Malfoy was also avoiding Charlie’s eyes.
“Malfoy,” Ginny said in a hopeful voice. “Um. While you were in my room—”
“Stepping over seas of snot,” Malfoy said in a pained, reminiscent tone.
“Yes, but there was a big sack of—of things in my hand, or near my hand. You didn’t happen to notice it, did you?”
“Hmm,” Malfoy said. “A big sack, you say? Sort of sacklike? I think I dropped it out the window.”
Malfoy looked extremely startled when Ginny leaped forward and hugged him, then jumped to her feet and ran for the side of the house. She hadn’t shown that much delight about being rescued from a fiery death.
She came back with the sack cradled in her arms.
“What’s in it?” Hermione inquired, and Ginny hugged the sack closer to her.
“It’s private,” she said, and then glanced over at Harry, a swift look from under her lashes, and said: “I’ll show you sometime, if you like.”
“Er—okay,” said Harry.
“Private,” Malfoy said in a thoughtful tone. “And you’ll show it to him, will you? All right, I’m going to hazard a guess: I heard there was a new line of that flavoured un—”
“Malfoy, don’t make me smack you around on the day you saved my life,” Ginny told him, while Harry felt himself go red and avoided everybody’s eyes. For God’s sake, Mr Weasley was right there, and Mrs Weasley could be right behind them.
“The repairmen say we’ll have to spend at least a couple of days in a hotel,” Mrs Weasley said from right behind them, and Harry was pleased to see Malfoy jump. “After that, though, it should really be as good as new.”
She was holding her clock under one arm. Harry could see that Malfoy was massively gratified she had chosen to save this from the burning wreck of her house, and had decided not to mention that Mrs Weasley’d carried the clock around before Malfoy had fixed it up.
“Of course you shouldn’t stay in a hotel,” Harry said. “You’ll all come to Grimmauld Place.” He remembered a second after he spoke that he had a duty now, even though he couldn’t figure out what it was besides the vague feeling that he was responsible for making Malfoy happy. “Um,” he said, and tried out: “That’s all right with you, isn’t it?”
It had better be all right with him, because Harry was damned if he would ever let the Weasleys go to a hotel when they could stay with him, particularly since there was a good chance that the Burrow had been burned because of Harry and Malfoy and the stupid Horcrux. Still, it’d felt like a gesture worth making.
“What?” said Malfoy, looking around as if Harry was speaking to someone else. Then he said in a rush: “Oh. Yes! It’s—it’s all right with me?”
He gave Harry a doubtful look, as if he thought Harry was completely insane and the wrong answer might set him off, but one corner of his mouth was tucked up and he didn’t look entirely displeased. Harry thought this was a good sign.
They all gathered together what stuff they could, Ginny clinging to her sack of mystery.
Harry looked back at the Burrow as they went, standing blackened but familiar and crooked against the sky. He wouldn’t come back here until the war was over: he wouldn’t risk the Weasleys again, and besides he didn’t think Malfoy would want to.
It was almost November, and he’d brought Malfoy here in August. He was looking at the house, trying to arrange thoughts in his mind about what had happened since then and what he felt about all of it, but just then everyone yelled at him to come on, and he stopped lingering and turned his back on the Burrow.