Draco meant to go back to the Cabinet after dinner, but Ginny decided to corner him and talk his ear off about her love life. It was almost soothing while he was trying not to think about death. Apparently she and her man had been having trouble for a while.
Draco wasn’t surprised. She’d experienced Ravenclaw loving, it was obvious Dean Thomas could never satisfy her.
“It’s just,” she said. “You know, Hermione said to me, last year, that if I—you know, got over being freakishly shy around Harry and maybe dated a few other boys, he’d—he might notice me. He kind of likes people who stand out, you know.”
Draco felt a little guilty and also had an extra-strong pang of missing Hermione, scheming wench that she was.
“And I don’t know, I’ve just, I’ve fancied Harry for so long,” Ginny said hopelessly. “I get all irritable with Dean and it’s not his fault, I know that—”
“It’s probably his fault a bit,” Draco soothed. “Very irritating, Gryffindors.”
“I don’t,” said Ginny. “I don’t really know what to do.”
“Well,” Draco hesitated. “I mean, personally I think the relationship is doomed. Gryffindor men, you know, they’re savages. Professor Hagrid used to be a Gryffindor, they should all be put in huts and kept away from drink and matches. But you might try giving the relationship a try as a proper relationship in its own right, and give up on using it to attract Potter.”
Ginny bit her lip. “I suppose I might.”
“Or you could try Ravenclaws again,” Draco suggested. “Kevin Entwistle is a lonely, lonely man.”
Ginny laughed and hit him. About then Dean joined them and gave Ginny an awkward kiss and Draco an awkward nod of acknowledging that he was friends with Dean’s girlfriend. Draco gave him the glasses look of moderate disdain.
They all started talking about the Tutshill Tornados and why Dean was a madman, Ginny said fondly, for still minding about football when none of the players were allowed to fly. They were still talking when they reached the door of the Gryffindor common room.
“Want to come in, Draco?” Ginny asked hospitably.
Draco peeped in and saw no sign of Potter, but Ron Weasley being ferociously upbraided for sexual misconduct by his girlfriend.
“All right.”
As they were getting in, Ginny thanked Dean for helping her in. Draco thought they might be able to stagger on for a while, even if they were handicapped by Gryffindority.
It turned out that Lavender believed Ron had been having it off with Hermione in the boys’ dormitory. Everyone watched Weasley splutter indignantly with interest.
“Harry was there the whole time!” Ron shouted.
“Scandalous!” Draco murmured, highly entertained.
Lavender slapped Weasley in the face. Draco loved a girl with spirit.
Unfortunately, then Lavender started weeping and Weasley started apologising and everything got rather tedious, and Draco’s exhaustion made his eyelids droop. He would just close them for a minute…
He woke up to the sound of someone climbing into the portrait hole at four o’clock in the morning. He yawned and stretched and found Potter staring at him.
“I guess the luck hasn’t totally worn off,” Potter said quietly.
“You’re raving,” Draco informed him. “Did you know?”
“Not that I’m complaining,” Potter said, “but what’re you doing here?”
Draco scorned to tell a lie, and couldn’t think of one anyway. “I was advising Ginny Weasley on her love life,” he explained with dignity. “Applying to me was an obvious sign of Gryffindor intelligence, since Cho and Terry both chucked me with a thud that could’ve been heard in Wales.”
Potter looked immediately interested. “I didn’t know Boot had chucked you.”
“Last year,” Draco answered. He suddenly remembered making sure Potter didn’t know on the train, but honestly, did gossip sail clear over the man’s head? “Wait,” he said severely. “You thought I was messing around behind my boyfriend’s back? With—” he made a distressed gesture that could’ve meant ‘you’ or ‘alligators’—“and with twelve year old girls? My God! I wish I had the energy.”
“I just,” Potter said. “I don’t know how the—the guy thing works, I’m glad—”
“Terry’s with Smith now,” Draco went on, determined to show Potter exactly how much he missed while staring off into space and thinking of his celebrity or whatever. “Whatever,” he added, in case Potter pitied him. “Good call. Chose the blond who wasn’t losing his looks.”
“Smith?” Potter demanded, sounding revolted. “Don’t be thick. Smith can’t possibly be compared with you.”
He stopped and looked horrifically embarrassed.
Draco cursed his own vainglorious passion for compliments. “I wish,” he blurted. “I wish you weren’t Harry Potter.”
Which would leave Potter just as some incredibly self-centred person with terrible hair and problems interacting in normal human society. Which Draco wanted because, what, in that case he’d consider—no, no. Of course not. He wasn’t insane.
“What’s wrong with me?” Potter asked, sounding upset.
“How long d’you have?” Draco inquired. “Because I could compile a list.”
“You never let up for one minute, do you?” Potter demanded.
Draco looked at him and realised he was angry. Draco had blithely walked right into one of Harry Potter’s enormous legendary strops.
Draco should’ve been Sorted into Hufflepuff. It was becoming very clear.
“I don’t understand you at all,” Potter raged. “And I’m trying to, I really am, but it’s hard—”
“It’s not my fault you were born without empathy!”
“And tonight I was talking to Dumbledore and I was thinking about killing Voldemort—”
“Killing the Dark Lord?” Draco demanded. “The powerful immortal Dark Lord who’s killing people all over the countryside? That Dark Lord? You’re sixteen years old! You’re not even old enough to Apparate! Don’t be insane, you’ll only get yourself killed—”
“Like you care!” Potter shouted. “Anyway, I have to do it, Voldemort will keep hunting me, but it makes a difference that I’ll face him—that I’ll choose it—”
“No it doesn’t,” Draco yelled. “It doesn’t make any difference! Because either way you’ll be dead, and whether you chose it or not won’t matter! And I don’t—”
He didn’t want anyone to die. But that was just as unrealistic as Potter’s dreams.
“I’ll kill him,” Potter said. “I want to. And I’ll—” he stopped, and swallowed. “I’ll kill anyone who stands with him. I have to. Do you have any idea how worried I am that you’ll do something stupid and you won’t have—I’ve been trying to understand and maybe I would understand, and I—but it couldn’t make any difference! Not if you do something unforgivable. It can’t.”
“Oh, what,” Draco demanded, trembling. “You can do all this for the memory of your parents and I can’t do anything for mine? What’s there to understand? You want revenge, and I want revenge, and I want them to be safe—”
“He’s killing little kids all over the country!” Potter shouted. “It’s not just about revenge! He has to be stopped! And your choices, they’re all bad, it’s all bad and it’s hard but—there’s a right choice and a wrong choice. I don’t know how you can’t see that.”
“You’ve never been able to see anyone’s point of view but your own!” Draco snapped, and slammed out of the stupid portrait door.
He didn’t want to stay there arguing with Potter. He didn’t want to think about Voldemort killing little kids. Draco supposed he was, and that he wouldn’t hesitate to kill Mother, or Draco, or anyone. Did Potter think that was some sort of incentive to stand up to Voldemort?
Draco had to fix the Vanishing Cabinet or they were all doomed.
As for Potter, he was doomed no matter what.
He couldn’t get Potter’s stupid words out of his own stupid head. It was more proof that he was going insane. The house elf hallucinations had only been the beginning.
Do you have any idea how worried I am that you’ll do something stupid?
Draco thought of that about when he was using a saw, and almost cut off his own hand. Then he swore and threw it at the wall.
God, God, God.
He was happy for a moment when Katie Bell came back to school, completely healthy, but on the whole May was hell.
And then he got a letter from Aunt Bella, saying that the Dark Lord was growing impatient, and he knew what that meant. She added that she wanted to see him next Hogsmeade weekend.
Draco felt a pang of sheer, physical terror.
Aunt Bella would do anything to him that Voldemort told her to do. And the Cabinet wasn’t working, wasn’t even close to working, he didn’t know how to make it work, and he was tired all the time.
He sat through classes that day in a daze, finding his hands shaking when he turned over books. Terry and Anthony united to form a protective front between him and the world, and he wanted to speak and tell them how much he appreciated it, but he was afraid that if he opened his mouth he would be sick.
He sat through lunch and the smell of food, and the sound of everyone’s cheerful unsuspecting voices, made him feel even more like being sick. He felt cold, too: he wished he was sick, and his mother was here, and he wasn’t just alone and disgustingly, contemptibly frightened.
Instead of dinner, he went and he found the ghost of the murdered girl. She was kind to him, seemed lonely and terribly glad to see him, and Draco thought maybe that was what death was like, far away from any exchange of love, cold and lonely. Like being in prison: like life was for Dad.
He opened his mouth to say hello and burst into fierce, ugly tears. He couldn’t stand up by himself: had to stand braced against the sink and cry as if he was vomiting, in a helpless jerking stream, choking on them and trying to talk at once.
“I can’t, I can’t think of what to do,” Draco gasped, and his voice came out shuddering like his whole body was, shaking like a hurt trapped animal. “I have to do it and—Mother’s there in a nest of them and I’m—I’m letting everyone down, and I’m so confused all the time and I don’t want to die—”
“That would be a pity,” crooned Myrtle. “But if you did, you’d be welcome to share my toilet.”
Draco was so desperate he was grateful. He would’ve said so, but he couldn’t stop crying, huge hacking sobs. God, if Dad could see him now, he’d be so ashamed.
“Don’t,” Myrtle whispered kindly. “Don’t. Tell me what’s wrong—I can help you—”
“No one can help me,” Draco cried out. He gripped the sink with shaking hands, couldn’t let go, or he’d fall down. “I can’t do it, I can’t! It won’t work and unless I do it soon, he says he’ll kill me…”
He hiccoughed, shuddered and tried to meet his own swollen eyes in the cracked mirror.
That was when he saw Potter.
Potter, standing in the doorway, Potter who had started all the humiliations of Draco’s life. Draco was snivelling like a little girl and Potter was there like he was always there.
Draco wanted to kill him, or to die, or something. He wheeled around with his wand and he just wanted to Obliviate Potter or hurt him or somehow make this not have happened…
A lamp broke beside Potter, and Potter’s eyes narrowed—famous Potter strops, Draco thought dimly, and that was fine, he wanted Potter to be angry and not confusing him, he wanted to be angry and not confused. Potter threw a jinx and he blocked it with a sort of savage satisfaction.
Myrtle was screaming somewhere behind the roaring in Draco’s ears. He couldn’t care, he just watched Potter’s face wiped clean of worry and fear by fury, and dodged a Leg-Locker curse that hit the cistern. Water erupted into the room and Potter went down, and all Draco wanted to do was shut his mouth, take advantage of this moment of weakness and show him that he was sure, he’d made his choice.
He lifted his wand and cried, “Cruci—”
Potter roared: “Sectumsempra!”
There was no pain.
Just a moment of sheer, blinding shock and the terrible sick sound of skin tearing, the feeling that the world had been torn in half like a piece of paper.
Then he wavered, fell back and fell down. He didn’t feel the impact when his back hit the floor, either, just saw the ceiling and then Potter’s face. His wand was gone, somewhere: there was blood in his eyes, veiling his sight. He gasped, couldn’t breathe, clawed feebly at his chest and found torn skin, his fingers touching something slippery.
God, he was so scared, and he couldn’t stop shaking and shaking, every jerk a violent move away from the pain and panic that came roaring in. He wasn’t going to get a chance to try and save Mum, he wouldn’t ever be able to save anyone, he was going to die here on a bathroom floor.
“No,” Potter was saying. “No, I didn’t—oh God, Malfoy! Help! Help!”
The ghost was screaming, Potter’s desperate face was receding, and then Professor Snape was there, his wand out, and Draco felt the pain flare out, much worse, a moment of screaming agony as skin knitted and the blood was squeezed to an ooze. He felt Professor Snape’s hands, oddly gentle, wiping his face.
He whispered the charm three times, and then put his arm around Draco and got him to his feet. The whole world still seemed distant and Draco clung to him, unashamed. Professor Snape put a strong arm around him and said something about the hospital wing and how it might be possible to avoid scarring.
Scarring. Draco wanted to have hysterics but he was terrified that his chest would split open again if he moved incautiously, that the miracle of being saved would be undone.
“And you, Potter,” Snape snarled. “You wait here for me.”
Potter scrambled to his feet. “Forget it!” he said. “D’you think I’m leaving him? God, Malfoy, tell me you’re all right. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to, I had no idea what the spell would do—”
“You knew that it said ‘For enemies’! on it!” Snape bellowed.
Potter halted in his fumbling efforts to reach for Draco while catching himself, looking afraid to touch him. “How did you know that?”
“It was I who invented that spell!” Snape roared. “I, the Half-Blood Prince! And you’d dare to root through my book and take my spells for yourself, would you, use them against children, like your filthy father before you—”
“You’re the Half-Blood Prince?” Potter asked, and then sharply: “Sir—Malfoy!”
Draco didn’t know what they were talking about, possibly Snape’s secret drag name or something. The world made no sense, it was fragmenting hopelessly around him and he’d wanted to hang on, save some last shred of dignity by not fainting in front of Potter, but here it was and he could feel his knees sagging, hear Potter and Professor Snape shouting, and then the world went black and quiet.
He woke up in the infimary. He woke gasping, sure there was something terribly wrong, and found that his chest hurt, and Potter was asleep in the chair beside him, holding his hand.
Draco held on and tried to measure his breaths by Potter’s, tried not to scream or panic or ask for his mother.
The pressure of his hand made Potter stir, blink and twitch awake. “God, Malfoy,” he said. “You’re awake.”
“I’m awake and I’m being manhandled, apparently,” Draco snapped, pulling his hand away. “Which part of you almost eviscerating me to death made you think we were going steady?”
Potter went white. “Malfoy,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I—God, I thought I’d killed you.”
Draco thought about staring up at the bathroom ceiling and knowing that it was all over. He’d been so scared, so scared. He never wanted to make anyone else that scared.
“Yeah,” he said, a little shakily. “Me too.”
Potter’s clothes were still wet and bloody, Draco saw with a horrible lurch. He looked as scared and as weary of it as Draco felt. He moved and Draco wondered warily if he was going to try for Draco’s hand again, but Potter only leaned forward and rested his head in his arms on Draco’s bed, near Draco’s chest. Draco stared at the top of Potter’s messy black head and his folded brown forearms.
“I’m so glad you’re okay,” Potter said, in a rough, muffled voice. “I don’t know what I’d have done.”
Sent expensive flowers to the funeral from Azkaban was Draco’s thought, but Dumbledore would probably have gotten the Chosen One off. Said something like ‘Harry’s so manly, he couldn’t be having with sissy boy crying. It was the only thing to do.’
Then it occurred to Draco that he’d never get the chance to say sorry to Katie Bell or Weasley, though he was, he was.
He reached out and touched Potter’s arm. “It’s all right,” he said. “I mean. I know you didn’t mean it.”
Potter looked up, a fearful sort of glance: seeing Potter scared was a very novel experience and Draco didn’t like it as much as he might’ve expected. Though that could have been the recent chest wounds talking.
He put his hand over Draco’s, still looking up. “Malfoy,” he said urgently.
Then Hermione broke into the room. She did not pause for a glance before she hurled herself at the bed, and Potter had to move back sharply to avoid what could have been a disastrous collision.
“Oh, Draco!” she exclaimed, showing alarming signs of wanting to throw herself upon his manly breast. “Oh, Draco, darling, you could have been killed!”
“Never mind, no harm done,” Draco said in a desperate attempt to ward off the inevitable.
The inevitable happened. Hermione burst into explosive tears. He’d missed the way she cried, actually, like an exploding tap spraying water in every direction.
“Draco,” she sobbed out. “I’m sorry for saying bad stuff about your dad, I really am, I’m sorry, I m-might never have got the chance to tell you!”
Draco looked at his bedclothes. “I’m sorry for calling you a you-know-what,” he mumbled.
“I’m sorry for slapping you in the face,” Hermione proceeded tearfully.
“I’m sorry for stealing your OWLs notes to study in bed one night last year,” Draco went on, getting into the spirit of things. “And for telling you Weasley used them to line his owl’s nest. That was a naughty fib.”
“Oh, Draco!” she said, and collapsed very carefully on his chest, kissing him and bedewing his face with tears.
It was all deeply humiliating and awful and Draco patted her back thankfully, put his face against her shoulder.
“Oooh,” Hermione said, disengaging. “I’ll go fetch Terry and Anthony and Vincent and Gregory, they’re in the staff room trying to get the whole story from Professor Snape. And—d’you want me to tell that Pansy Parkinson one? She was asking after you, apparently.” Hermione’s mouth formed a disapproving line. She did not like the fluffy pink quills Pansy used in the library.
Draco brightened. “Yes, do. I like her,” he added defiantly. “She’s a minx.”
Hermione kissed his forehead again, said in a stern voice “Don’t run off” as if Draco was just dying to spring from his bed once her back was turned and embark on madcap adventures, and left.
Draco lay back on the pillows and felt painfully glad.
“I’ve never liked Pansy Parkinson,” Potter said darkly.
“What d’you know about her?” Draco inquired.
Potter scowled. “Stuff. She’s in Slytherin. She’s—she’s obviously all hands. No good, no good at all.” He began to fluff Draco’s pillow in an inexpert but proprietary manner.
Draco smirked. “I see.” He lifted himself slightly so Potter could carry on—Draco liked being ministered too, that was all, he wasn’t particularly fussed over who was ministering. Then he looked at his chest.
“Oh my God,” he said in a high voice. “I’m scarred.”
Potter’s hands stilled. “I know,” he answered with difficulty. “The dittany—didn’t work. I’m sorry.”
“Fetch me a mirror,” Draco commanded. “Oh my God! Mother will have a fit. Is my face scarred?”
“The—” Potter hesitated, looking wretched, and gestured. “The underside of your chin. It is.”
“I like my chin!”
“I’m sorry,” Potter said hopelessly.
“I wasn’t saying it to make you sorry, I told you it was all right, I did attempt an Unforgivable on you, I was saying it because I feel somewhat hysterical! I’m ruined! Ruined!”
“You’re not,” Potter said, still sounding upset for some reason. Draco didn’t see what he had to be upset about.
“I am, too,” he told him. “It’s not like your scars. When people ask you how you got yours, you can say ‘battling evil.’ I’ll have to say ‘in a men’s bathroom.’ Won’t have the same cachet. Besides, scars, they need a certain skin tone, I don’t tan, I go a peculiar mauve shade in the sun, it just won’t work—”
Potter made an odd sound, which turned somehow into laughter. Draco stopped and realised that Potter was clearly more than somewhat hysterical.
He laughed for a few terrible minutes, then gave a sort of groan and buried his face in his hands. “You’re so weird,” he said.
“I beg your pardon,” Draco returned, much affronted.
“You’re so weird,” Potter repeated. “I don’t, I don’t understand you at all. I don’t even know why I like you so much but God, God, I do.”
Thankfully Draco was saved from having to reply to that by the advent of his friends en masse. His relief was only slightly dimmed by Anthony exclaiming, “Oh my God, Draco, are you cutting?”
Aside from almost bleeding to death, the incident in the bathroom sort of improved matters. He had Hermione back, and no matter how afraid he was of her shrewdness it was still so nice to have her feeling his forehead and psychotically assembling his notes.
Terry, too, was worried enough to forget all Draco’s possible iniquities and he spent a lot of time making Draco hot possets. Draco liked that.
Potter’s stalker tendencies, however, were exacerbated by knowing exactly where to find Draco.
“Well,” he said when Draco brought this up, “I do always know where to find you. I have this map that shows me.”
Draco gave him an extremely unnerved look. “Does it have pop-up pictures?” he asked suspiciously.
“That’d be a real help,” Potter said thoughtfully.
Draco’s voice rose dramatically. “In developing your obvious and unsettling voyeuristic inclinations, I imagine so!”
Potter just seemed entirely unaware of when he was being really disturbing. He also did not seem worried about invading the privacy of someone who had never evinced any particular fondness for his company. Every time Draco looked there was Potter, untidy head propped against something, watching him with the intentness of a slightly savage stray who wanted somewhat desperately to follow you home.
He even, somewhat unexpectedly, had the beginnings of a sense of humour. It was very disquieting.
It was easy enough, in the hospital bed, to forget that everything else in the world existed, to feel safe. It wasn’t true, though.
When he was out of the infirmary, he went back to the Room of Requirement.
Potter came after him and instead of shouting and kicking the wall as usual, he said quite quietly, as if he was leaning his head against the wall and had shut his eyes, as if he was tired: “Malfoy. Whatever it is, don’t do it. Please.”
Draco thought of his mother, but he sat down and tried to write Dad a letter instead. He ended up just saying the same thing as he always did when he wrote those letters he couldn’t send: I love you. I’m worried about you. I’m scared.
Please tell me what to do.
Potter couldn’t play Quidditch but obviously he’d transferred his luck to Ginny Weasley via some sort of osmosis, because she won the game by three hundred points and Gryffindor won the House Cup.
“Gryffindor triumphs against all the odds? Well! I for one am shocked, shocked,” Draco remarked.
Ginny seemed to feel that the appropriate way to celebrate was to spend her time constantly snogging Dean Thomas. Draco objected to that sort of thing on the breakfast table, but it was pretty funny seeing Ron Weasley stagger about declaring he had been struck blind.
Apparently what she got up to in the Great Hall was nothing compared to what she did down by the lake.
It was nice that she was happy, he supposed.
He came in one day tired and aching from working on the Cabinet, and found Cho leaning against the mantelpiece and looking rather pleased with herself.
“Hi, Draco,” she said, and blushed.
“Something up?” Draco duly inquired.
“Well,” Cho said. “Well, you know how possessive Michael can be, and I think he was a bit worried about him being still in school while I was out, so he—well, we decided to make it official.”
She showed him her ring. Draco thought it was sad they’d already played Gryffindor. Ginny might well have mistaken the enormous glitter for the Snitch. Corner was so tacky.
“It’s very,” he said, and searched for one of Anthony’s funny little words. “Bling.”
Cho dimpled. She was still cute, Draco thought, far too good for Michael. He hoped the babies would take after her.
“I want to keep my own name, though,” Cho carried on happily.
“So,” Draco said, and paused in horrified fascination. “So you’ll be Cho Chang-Corner, then.”
“Yes!” Cho said.
“Oh,” Draco said. He looked at her sparkling brown eyes, got up and put his arm around her. “Congratulations,” he told her, and kissed her.
For old times’ sake, for choosing him once, for the priceless look on Corner’s face when he walked in. Whatever. He let her go and she smiled at him, and he said, “I hope you’ll be happy.”
They all seemed happy, seemed to have plans: they wanted all sorts of things, and the mist was endless even in summer, and sometimes Draco’s chest hurt and he was not sure if it was in phantom pain or panic. All he wanted to do was escape.
Then he figured out the Vanishing Cabinet.
He was staring it as he had for the entire year, and then somehow, as a nonsense pattern will coalesce into a familiar, recognisable shape, he saw how to do it. He just needed to align it a little differently—it was so simple…
It was better than coming top in class, better than his first kiss. It was escape, him safe, Mother safe, Dad out, everything solved.
The constant weight off his chest lifted: he could have eaten now, or laughed, or slept. He leaped to his feet and went whooping around the room.
Then he got back to work, his hands shaking with the dizzy relief and with his haste, with nothing else. He worked with his mind a blissful blank until it was fixed, done, and then he used the enchanted coins to tell Rosmerta. He knew that on the other side of the cabinet, in Borgin and Burke’s, the Death Eaters were beginning to assemble an invading force.
He kept calm, kept talking into the coin, kept planning. Dumbledore would be back soon, and he had to be lured in. The Dark Mark, then. He cast it and he came back to the room, to pace around inside, to wait.
He’d done it. Nobody had thought he could but he’d done it, and Dad would be so proud, and soon…
They’d be in the school.
The first hint of unease was like a chill, a little quiver he felt he could ignore, a tiny whisper in his mind he wasn’t listening to.
Voldemort had said that Draco should kill Dumbledore, but maybe—maybe he wouldn’t have to, and even if he did, Draco hated him. They’d have a better school without him. If it was only Dumbledore, maybe…
Potter and Ginny and Hermione could get themselves killed tonight. Anthony and Terry could get themselves killed. Anyone could get killed, Crabbe or Goyle or anyone, if they brought Fenrir.
Only surely they wouldn’t. Not to a school.
There was no time for doubt! He and Dad and Mum would all be killed, definitely, he’d been working on this all year, he couldn’t let them all down. He wasn’t a child and he wasn’t a coward.
Draco remembered some of the summer’s research: an item from the Room of Requirement gives you control of the inside of the room.
Draco looked around frantically and seized up a book. He dashed out of the Room and slammed the door behind him, leaned against it for a moment.
He just needed a moment to think.
He was going to do it, of course he was, for Dad, for them all, but perhaps he could warn Anthony at least, Anthony would listen, he could tell him to run. And if he told Crabbe and Goyle to barricade the Slytherins inside, oh, he was going crazy, Professor Snape was a Death Eater and he’d never let anything happen to any of them.
There was a sound from inside the Room. The Death Eaters were coming.
Draco leaned against the wall and put his face in his hands.
There was a voice from inside, saying: “Draco!”
It was Aunt Bella. Draco should let her out. Draco had to open the door, had to do it, for his whole family.
Andromeda is not dead.
What would his mother have wanted him to do, what did it matter. She’d said she would love him no matter what, and she was in danger. Dad was in danger: Dad was counting on him.
“Draco?” called Aunt Bella.
Malfoy, don’t do it. Please.
Shut up, Potter, shut up!
Draco raked his fingers through his hair, pulled at it. He had sworn to do this, he had to, he had no other options. Voldemort would kill his whole family.
He’d succeeded. He’d shown them all.
Aunt Bella’s voice was puzzled, but still glad, loving and glad. “Draco? Open the door, Draco.”
Open the door, Draco.
He was blind with sweat or tears, shaking up against the wall. He did have to do it, he knew he did. Only—Potter, Terry, Hermione, Anthony, Ginny, he had to stop, he had to make a choice, he had to make a sacrifice!
A blood sacrifice. Draco thought of his own blood on the floor of the bathroom, and swallowed down rising bile. His throat stung, his eyes stung.
He threw down the book. He was going to open the door.
Then he was running, running as fast as he could, trying to outrun the possibility of changing his mind, trying to outrun all thought.
He ran up the stairs to the tower, his lungs burning, his mind racing, and burst through the door to the chill of the Astronomy Tower, the cracked flagstones and the sound of Dumbledore’s voice. He was breathing as if he had run the race of his life.
“Do not remove your Cloak,” Dumbledore was saying, just as Draco walked in.
As soon as he did, Potter threw down his Cloak, emerging against the night as if someone had conjured him from a wand.
Dumbledore looked faintly exasperated, but all he said was: “Good evening, Draco.”
Draco was afraid his resolve would fail or his knees would go out from under him, so he said it at once.
“Get the Order of the Phoenix. I have about twenty Death Eaters trapped in the Room of Requirement. Take them—take them to Azkaban or something. That should help, shouldn’t it?
And—and it should mean you owe me something. Get my mother. Get her out fast, hide her. You owe me that.”
And then he stopped, and shook.
Dumbledore looked even more ravaged than he had all this year, cold blue eyes fixed on Draco, black hand curled at his side. Draco had never liked him, and never wanted him to die.
“Well, Draco,” he said. “I must confess you have surprised me.”
Draco wanted to be sick. “Don’t call me that,” he spat. “I’m not one of yours. I never wanted to be one of yours. I don’t like the way you treat Potter: I have no desire to be another of your projects. Just—get on with it. Take them away.”
He wanted to crouch on the floor, put his head on his knees, wait until his mother came.
“Then why did you do it, Draco?” Dumbledore asked.
Draco swallowed again, wiped his wet face. “I don’t know! They were both bloody bad choices,” he said shakily. “But—but one was right.”
He dared to look at Potter for the first time since he’d spoken, afraid he wouldn’t get it out or he’d have a revulsion of feeling or he’d run as far and as fast as he could.
Potter’s face was all lit up. Draco, unexpectedly, felt a little steadier.
“My mother,” he demanded, looking back at Dumbledore.
Dumbledore said, “I’ll see to it now. You have my word.”
He looked at Draco again, slightly puzzled, like a master who had won a game by pure chance, and then he strode, his steps weaving a little, to the door. Potter rushed forward to help him, and Draco stood back and reflected that Dumbledore having a drinking problem would actually explain a lot.
“No, no, Harry,” Dumbledore said. “I assure you this unexpected triumph has greatly heartened me. I shall find Severus myself.”
Draco opened his mouth to speak and then decided Snape wasn’t fool enough to blow his cover, and Draco had sacrificed enough people today.
Had sacrificed Dad. He felt ill again, ill and desperate at the thought of the enormity of what he had done.
But if he’d done the other thing. If he had.
Dumbledore no sooner shut the door behind him than Potter was there, hands under Draco’s elbows. It was unclear to Draco whether Potter was trying to support him or grab him: Potter’s face was close and his eyes were still lit up, his smile bright and trembling at once, weighted with the awkward tenderness he did not seem quite able to master.
“What d’you think you’re doing?” Draco said with difficulty. “Gryffindors, I swear. You can’t just leap at people, you can’t assume things like… I could pull my wand on you.”
“Go ahead,” Potter said, sounding intensely happy.
Draco was not happy, not at all, he was still all over the place, but for the first time he couldn’t find it in himself to resent Potter for having something he didn’t: he was sort of glad.
Still, it did not become a Ravenclaw not to follow through. He took his wand out, even though it trembled in his hands. Potter watched it tremble.
“So—all right,” he said, watching the wand and Draco at once, with concern. He reached out. “Can I?”
Draco lowered his wand a fraction and Potter, who always somehow had a million miles before you even decided to give him an inch, moved in. Draco looked at his intent face, cast green in the light of the Dark Mark, shadows cast on his face by his falling lashes.
“I didn’t think you’d use it,” Potter murmured.
“You’ve always been too freaking arrogant,” Draco told him, hearing a hysterical note in his voice. “That’s—that’s one of your problems. One of many. I told you, I have a list—and, and you have to be polite to my mother!”
He didn’t realise exactly what that conveyed until Potter looked at him again, almost awed. It made no sense that Potter would look at him like that, no sense, no sense at all: Draco didn’t want him to stop.
“I can do that,” Potter told him, his voice low and almost incredulous. “And. Can I—”
They were angling their faces together already: Draco was still shaking, his face was still wet, he was not sure if he was feeling relief or if he was in shock. He held onto Potter as if Potter could anchor him.
He said in a breath, “You can,” and then he was kissing Potter, kissing him, hands still shaking, Dark Mark glittering in the cold summer air. Potter’s mouth was warm, hands sure, touching Draco’s face, his hair, shoulders, the curve of his hips, swift pressing touches that were almost chaste, as if he wanted to make sure that Draco was really there.
The kiss went slow but no less desperate and Draco was gasping with one hand clenched in Potter’s shirt and one holding onto his hair. Potter pressed his lips against Draco’s throat, soft mouth sliding with sudden gentleness over the scar.
Draco shut his eyes and relaxed into Potter’s hands, stopped shaking, and did not stop holding on.
It could not last, clutching Potter on the top of the Astronomy Tower. He had to come down, and see Aunt Bella led away. She went first, her head held high, as was her way: he had to watch her go, watch every step as she refused to look at him. As if he was as dead to her as her sister Andromeda.
He also had to watch Dumbledore smiling benignly at him, which filled him with a sort of dizzy rage, only made worse by the fact he was a little gratified by the man’s attention. Potter had to go and bend solicitously over him, he was all to pieces, he must have been putting back Firewhiskey by the tumbler. At his age!
Snape, though, put down whatever hangover cure he was working on, and turned and looked at Draco.
“Draco,” he said. “I’m very proud.”
Draco smiled bitterly. “Of course you are,” he said, to show Snape he wouldn’t give him away.
Then Snape took him aside and explained matters. Draco was torn between complete indignation and total awe—because, seriously, a double, no, a triple agent playing a dangerous bluff? Snape was already the coolest teacher in school and now he was a super spy?
“Are there any others?” Draco asked excitedly. Possibly there was a fraternity of spies, possibly a network!
“Only Lupin,” Snape replied in a dismissive tone.
“I really think this information would have made things easier if given to me, oh, any time before tonight,” Draco informed him sternly. A sudden thought occurred to him. “What about your Unbreakable Vow?”
He’d forgotten about that, he thought with a chill. If he’d remembered, he might have opened the door, and then… and then.
Snape looked at him with his opaque black eyes. At last, perhaps because he had lied to Draco enough, he said: “Look at the man, Draco.”
Draco turned and looked at Dumbledore, frail, his face almost skull-like with the skin papered too lightly and drawn too tightly over it, that black ruined hand trembling at his side.
“There’s been poison working in his system all year,” Snape continued in a low tone. “Now he’s taken more. We’re doing all we can, but it’s—it’s holding off the inevitable. He’s unlikely to last another six months, and when the time comes—when it comes, I have promised him that I will be the one to end it. The Vow will be kept.”
Draco looked away because he did not want to see Snape’s face, and looked instead at Dumbledore, only to see Potter stooping over him.
“It’ll kill Potter,” he said, with a shock. “He loves him.”
“I must say, when I think of the situation as a whole, Potter’s plight does not inspire me with fluttering solicitude,” Snape said dryly. “That boy is perfectly well able to take care of himself.”
Snape went on mixing potions for his true master, and Draco looked over at the old man’s face until he saw Dumbledore was asleep, and Potter standing somewhat helplessly beside his bed. Then he left Snape’s side and went over to Potter.
Potter hadn’t stopped fighting or let go this whole year. Draco didn’t think, privately, that he was all that good at taking care of himself.
“How’s he doing?” Draco asked, and reached up to tuck back Potter’s hair, which stuck up and tumbled heavily into his eyes, somehow at the same time.
“D’you care?” Potter returned, looking startled. He leaned his face a little into Draco’s hand.
“Certainly,” said Draco. “Don’t you know this whole business was a cunning plan to make him award Ravenclaw the House Cup?”
Potter’s mouth worked and Draco tugged at Potter’s hair a little and then dropped his hand and didn’t really try to hide a tired smile.
“C’mere,” he added, and tugged Potter forward for a light kiss.
Snape dropped his potion.
Potter smiled. “What was that for?”
“It’s my birthday in two days,” Draco informed him. “As you are my new gentleman friend, I’m expecting a really brilliant present. But I realise it is short notice, and so I am prepared to offer incentives to brilliance.”
“I already got you something,” said Potter, smiling a bit more.
“I enjoy ponies and rare first editions,” Draco let him know. He tapped Potter’s hand imperiously and Potter gave him a mildly baffled look. Draco sighed heavily: poor Potter, not his fault, the way all those girls were, he probably just expected a significant other to deposit themselves at his feet. “This means you should hold my hand,” Draco explained. “It’s a gesture.”
It pulled his mother up short for a moment. She arrived with some pink-haired Auror and Professor (Super Spy!) Lupin, clearly having been pulled from her bed. Very clearly, since she was wearing a black negligee.
She’d been taken from the Manor and the promise of honours among the Death Eaters, the return of her husband, and now she was standing in Hogwarts with nothing but her life and a skimpy nightgown.
Draco felt ashamed for the moment when she was staring at him, and then she had him in her arms, pressing her mouth to his hair. “Draco,” she whispered. “Draco. Thank God. Oh, thank God.” An instant later she cast a look over at Potter and said in a much more normal tone, “Really, darling?”
“Sorry, Mother,” said Draco.
That was a good moment, a calming moment.
The only moment of the night when he felt sure, certain beyond a doubt that he had done the right thing, was when they led Fenrir snarling past him.
There were bad moments. Mother said she was filing for divorce and Draco felt so ill and guilty and resentful that he and Potter had a screaming fight and broke up the next day. They got back together eighteen minutes later, when Draco almost tripped over Potter. Who was sitting sullenly on the steps outside Draco’s dormitory.
That night Draco wrote a letter to his father, the last of a year of letters that he would never send.
He didn’t know how to let go: never had. Didn’t want to learn. Didn’t want Potter to learn either.
Romilda Vane cornered him at his birthday party on the lawn and asked if it was true Potter had a Hippogriff tattooed on his chest.
Draco regarded her limpidly. “Oh yes,” he replied. “And he can flex his muscles and make it do a little dance.”
Anthony and Terry had to forcibly prevent Draco from staging a dramatic re-enactment of a Hippogriff dancing. Draco might’ve been a little tipsy: well, he was legally an adult that day, after all. It was cause for celebration.
It was probably not cause for celebration that Pansy now had many incriminating pictures of him attempting a song using a spoon as a magical microphone, or that he tried to spin Hermione on the lawn and sent her into the lake.
Everyone came to his party, though. Draco even allowed the Hufflepuffs, since Terry’s secret boyfriend was one and all.
Terry ruined this magnificent gesture by dropping Zacharias Smith the day before Draco’s party.
“He was—I was using him,” Terry said to Draco before Draco’s enormous inebriation had fully taken hold. “It wasn’t okay.”
“Sounds okay to me,” Draco remarked, and then became sentimental. “But it wasn’t like you.”
“I was really scared for you,” Terry continued. “I wish—I wish I’d trusted you more.”
Draco looked into the middle distance. “I wasn’t trustworthy,” he answered. “Anyway. It turned out for the best.”
He smiled, and Terry smiled his hesitant familiar smile back. About that moment Potter gave up on ominous lurking around them, and came to put his arm around Draco’s shoulders. “Hi, Terry,” he said, his voice full of dark suspicion, and tugged Draco closer against him.
Potter was absurd: it was probably incurable at this point. Draco leaned back on his elbows in the sun and tipped his face up.
Somewhere in the distance, and receding fast, Weasley muttered about how he’d known it was coming and he would’ve preferred it if Potter was going out with anyone else. Anyone! He would have accepted anyone!
Fortunately at this point Draco got Crabbe to slip Weasley some more Firewhiskey and the Great Six Year Weasley/Granger Foreplay reached a happy conclusion through the beautiful magic of alcohol.
Weasley was even drunk enough to dance with her and, given the crowd of people dancing on the lawn by then, was able to hide his shame in the crush of other bodies. Ginny was dancing with Dean, Cho with Michael, Pansy (surprisingly) with Anthony and Blaise Zabini (terrifyingly) with Elspeth Moonfeather.
Draco, seated comfortably on the lawn where he could observe his party and be quite sure it was the best one ever, was starting to get very concerned about Goyle.
Meanwhile Potter was talking to Zacharias Smith. Well, Potter was looking away abstractedly while Smith gazed at him with barely concealed longing, but still!
The force of Draco’s narrowed eyes over the glasses glare clearly shamed Potter out of his wandering ways, and he came over to sit by Draco. Draco was about to bring up the subject of Potter being a vile philanderer, but Potter forestalled him by asking if Draco wanted to dance.
He looked steeled to make the endeavour. Draco laughed and laughed.
“Spare me,” he said. “I saw you at the Yule Ball. I’ve been through a lot of traumatic experiences already this year: I want to live.”
Potter shoved him. Draco promptly shoved him back. Potter, who was a vicious Gryffindor and might not have realised how much Draco’d had to drink, shoved him too hard and Draco tipped over.
The lawn was soft, the sun was shining, Potter was hovering over him with his breath coming fast.
Wasn’t a bad birthday, by any means.
“C’mon,” Draco said. “Don’t you know what to do with a boy on his back in the grass when you’ve got him?”
“Well—no,” said Potter. “But I’ve got a few ideas.”
Everything got messy near the end of term. Always had, really. For Dumbledore’s end of term speech Draco supposed they’d all return to the correct house tables.
“D’you think Pansy would like me to sit with her?” Anthony asked wistfully on the morning before the last day of term. “Or—tolerate it, even.”
“Oh baby, baby,” Draco said. “Tolerate me harder.”
Anthony elbowed him in the ribs. “I’d hurt you. Only it’d be a shocking waste of our House points.”
The mention of House points sent Draco into beautiful contemplation of Ravenclaw’s upcoming glorious victory, and the Great Hall’s soon-to-be beautiful swathing in cool delightful blue. Hahaha! Death to Gryffindor!
Metaphorically speaking.
“I still think Slytherin should’ve got house points,” Crabbe said, spooning up porridge in a decided manner. “We helped. Not that I was sure which side we were helping, but I suppose it turned out for the best. I suppose I wouldn’t want to see Goldstein lynched. Not actually lynched.”
“Thank you, sweet Vincent,” said Anthony.
“Or Hermione,” Terry put in.
Crabbe looked thunderstruck. “Hermione’s Muggleborn? Well, I think somebody could have mentioned that to me before!” He glared accusingly around, and then said: “Anyway, if you’d just worked out a way for us to be animals instead we could’ve told Professor Dumbledore about helping. I’m not telling the headmaster that I wore a pinafore for great justice.”
Everyone seemed to be labouring under the delusion that this had been Draco’s plan all along. Draco suppressed a pang of guilt and tried to soothe his conscience with jam.
“Look, I couldn’t arrange you being an Animagus on such short notice,” he informed Crabbe, industriously spreading. “Ravenclaws are only ominiscient gods in training. Anyway, maybe that was my plan. To take all the credit for myself. Devilish cunning!”
Crabbe waited until Draco was finished with his dramatic cackle.
“Not supposed to be cunning, are you?” he pointed out. “That’s our lot. Pass the honey.”
“Well, you know, Vincent,” Anthony said. “I don’t think you and Greg are all that cunning. Sorry.”
Crabbe considered this. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Goyle’s been wearing really subtle make-up for half a year now and nobody’s noticed. That’s pretty cunning.”
There was a terrible silence. Draco really needed to have a talk with Goyle.
The silence was interrupted by the arrival of Potter, whose presence at the Ravenclaw table had become a much more frequent thing since the Great Granger and Weasley Alliance. Oh Hermione, it broke Draco’s heart to see her throwing herself away like this.
Of course, the resulting effect had its benefits. Potter had a funny way of sitting sideways on a bench that had distressed Draco at first (hadn’t even been taught how to sit correctly, probably the story about Muggles was a smokescreen, probably he’d been raised by bears) but which Draco had come to accept. Since it provided Draco with comfortable leaning-against-chest opportunities.
He took one of these opportunities now, and a kiss that left a bit of jam on Potter’s jaw. “Hi.”
“Hey,” said Potter, grinning at him and tucking him in closer. “So. I finished the reading list.”
Draco put down his knife. “Oh, Potter. Oh, you’ve made me so happy. Oh, talk to me about literary criticism, it gets me all hot and bothered.”
“Are you two ever going to, um, start calling each other by your first names?” inquired Anthony, who had no sense for Private and Sexually Charged Reading List Moments.
“Silence, Goldstein,” Draco said with a wave of his hand. “Potter here clearly has a natural sense of decorum.” He paused and rubbed his nose against the side of Potter’s throat. “No-one,” he added, “could be more surprised than me.”
Kevin Entwistle at this point caused a sensation by clearing his throat, putting down his spoon and actually focusing on someone. Namely, Potter.
“I’ve never liked you,” he announced, and then returned to his rapt contemplation of the Hogwarts ceiling.
Potter said into Draco’s ear, “Who is that guy? He’s not in our year, is he?”
Draco turned his head and murmured back, “D’you think—before you vanquished him, I mean—the Dark Lord might have dropped you on your head as a child?”
These sweet nothings complete, Potter returned to the topic of his reading list. “Some of the books were—quite good,” he said warily.
“Go on,” Draco purred.
Potter went a little red, and then said: “And I didn’t have anything else to read. All the copies of Quidditch Through the Ages are out of the library.”
“Oh,” Anthony said with an enlightened air, “that’s what that big pile of books beside your bed is!”
“You’re right, Ravenclaws aren’t cunning,” Draco admitted to Crabbe. “I think now is one of those times you should put your amulet in your mouth, Anthony. I did it out of love, Potter.”
Anthony muttered about inhaler, for the last time, Draco and for some reason, Potter flushed even more and stared at Draco until Draco became uncomfortable.
“What?” he inquired.
“Nothing,” said Potter, ducking his head and smiling at him somewhat helplessly. “So I finished the reading list. So, that means we go flying. That was the deal, right?”
Draco smirked. “Yeah.”
Potter wasn’t bad at the presents side of things, either. Draco did want to try out his new broom.
“Heh,” Draco said. “Horcrux.”
“You should probably stop saying that,” Potter remarked.
They had maps of Godric’s Hollow spread out on the tables of the Room of Requirement, and their brooms in a corner. Draco had anticipated spending less time in the Room now things were settled, but what with the out of house relationship and the having to plot to win the war and everything, that was not turning out to be the case.
“All right,” Draco said, “but don’t believe Romilda Vane if tells you she has a Horcrux for you in her pants.”
The corner of Potter’s mouth twitched. “This is serious, Malfoy.”
“Well, I know,” Draco answered. “Mother wanted us to go to a villa in Greece this summer, I’ll have you know, and I turned her down. Such is my commitment to the cause.”
Well, apparently there were several more Horcruxes—heh heh—to get. And there was bloody Dumbledore, who was failing fast. And Draco wanted to be in England, anyway, it didn’t particularly matter why.
“That’s—good,” Potter said. “Um. We’ll be Owling and things, won’t we?”
“I’d assumed so,” Draco answered with intense suspicion. “Why, what are you trying to say?”
Maybe Potter was all about the chase! Maybe he’d developed an inappropriate attraction to Kevin Entwistle!
“Only—well, Bill Weasley and his girlfriend Fleur are getting married,” Potter went on, looking studiously at the map while his neck went red. “I thought you should come. Um. As my, um, date.”
“Fleur Delacour and a Weasley?” Draco demanded. “Inconceivable! She could speak four languages and had an innate grasp of Magical History, not to mention her transcendent beauty!” He stopped and reflected. “Oh. I mean, yes. But it’s still a wicked waste.”
“Bill’s pretty cool,” said Potter. “He’s got an earring. And long hair, it’s kind of—”
Draco eyed him coldly. “If you leave me for a Weasley, I will hunt you down like a dog in the street.”
“‘M not leaving you for anyone,” Potter said, then flushed, cleared his throat and said hurriedly: “Also will you come with me to Godric’s Hollow?”
Draco, musing on the mysterious allure of the Weasleys, said “Yes,” before he thought about it. Then he did think about it, about parents and Dumbledore and Dad and Mother, and the way Potter was going to get badly hurt, and the war was coming.
“I didn’t,” he said, and almost choked on the words. “Everyone thinks I meant it to happen the way it did. But I only decided to turn over the Death Eaters about—”
“About twenty minutes after they were in the school,” Potter said quietly. “Yeah, I know.”
Draco met his eyes over the table filled with maps, the false locket lying on the table between them. Potter’s gaze was steady.
“You wouldn’t have done anything like that,” Draco said.
“No,” Potter said. “But we’re—different. It’s okay. I get that. Um. I’m trying to get that.”
Draco wondered if it had occurred yet to Potter that Ravenclaw was winning the House Cup, and if he would be as understanding about that. He suspected he might be in for another case of the Potter sulks tomorrow.
He grinned. “So you’ve been hiding my iniquity from general knowledge. Very sneaky.”
“Well,” Potter said, grinning back and smoothing out another map as he did so, looking down and then quickly up at Draco again. “The Sorting Hat did say I’d’ve done well in Slytherin.”
“Oh, really,” said Draco.
They exchanged another smile and Draco pushed up his glasses to see a map better or conceal from himself they were having a sentimental moment or something. He felt tired in a good way from all the flying, tired so when they’d gone through the maps they could relax and he’d have earned some rest.
Not, he added hastily to himself, that they were going to cuddle. Ravenclaws didn’t cuddle. They curled up with a good book and any other good things that came to hand.
The clock struck midnight and, in the name of it being the last day, Draco let himself smile properly at Potter and then, despite all weariness, attempted the sexy glasses look.
“I always thought I’d’ve done well in Slytherin,” he remarked. “But I suppose things worked out all right.”
The End