“I want to be absolutely clear on this,” Harry said. “You’re telling me that you lost my children in the sewers?”
Professor Araminta von Bosau, headmistress of Durmstrang, looked confused and distressed by how badly Harry was taking this.
“Does this happen often in Durmstrang?” Harry demanded.
“Every now and then,” Professor von Bosau said. She looked up at Harry’s face and added quickly: “It’s very regrettable, of course.”
“They’ve been gone for twenty-four hours and you haven’t sent a search party after them!”
Professor von Bosau gave him a reproachful look. “Be reasonable, Mr Potter. My staff are extremely busy and besides that, what use would they be against giant alligators?”
“Yes, about that,” Harry said between his teeth. “Why does Durmstrang have giant alligators in its sewers?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. Why does Hogwarts have giant spiders in its environs? These things happen.” Professor von Bosau was starting to look distinctly miffed. “Mr Potter, I understand that you’re upset—”
“You lost my children in the sewers! The sewers which are crawling with giant alligators!”
Harry paced the room for the fourth time, giving the portraits of Durmstrang’s former headmasters and headmistresses a filthy look. The portraits looked at Harry as if they thought he was making a big fuss over nothing as well.
“Let us hope this experience will be character-building,” Professor von Bosau said with an attempt at cheerfulness. “Meanwhile, I have contacted the Aurors’ department, and I have no doubt that they will send a splendid team along shortly. Would you care for tea?”
“Professor,” Harry said. “You can take your teapot and—”
“Mr Potter, I beg you to be calm!”
“I’m not calm,” Harry snapped. “I—I’m wasting time here. I’m going after my boys. Send the Aurors after us when they arrive. Don’t let them wait for tea.”
“I cannot possibly allow you to go on your own!”
“I’m a trained Auror, Professor,” Harry said with much-tried patience.
“Yes,” said von Bosau. “But you’re not as young as you once were!”
“I’m thirty-seven.”
Von Bosau peered up at him. “Are you really? You look older. You must have a very stressful lifestyle.”
“Not lately,” Harry said.
He opened his mouth to say something else, but decided he’d just be wasting his time some more. Al and James were lost somewhere under this great damp maze of a school and they would be waiting for him to rescue them.
He knew he shouldn’t have let them go on this exchange programme. But Al had been so set on it. And of course, he knew why that was.
“I do hope that this won’t affect your opinion of our exchange programme,” Professor von Bosau said, looking genuinely concerned for the first time. “I do think that international magical relations should be improved through our children and that inter-school co-operation is vital in working towards that end. Boys will be boys, after all, and if we all got worked up every time children went on a little midnight expedition to investigate the alligators where would we be?”
Harry made for the door.
“I do hope you won’t hold Durmstrang responsible for this unfortunate incident!” Professor von Bosau called after him.
“No,” Harry said grimly, wrenching the door open. “I know who’s responsible.”
He’d been worried before he ever sent Al off to Hogwarts. It wasn’t that Harry had favourites—he would never, a good father loved all his children equally and of course he did—but Al was different. Al and Harry were special with each other.
Al wasn’t like James and Lily, who had always been OK, who had never been or seemed to have a problem. James and Lily were good-looking and athletic and made friends easily and Harry was very proud of them. Just glimpsing their heads from his study window, James’ black and Lily’s red hair flying, seeing them race around the Quidditch pitch in the garden, made him smile.
Al was usually in the study with Harry, though. He was quiet when Harry needed to get work done.
He’d been a sickly baby, which had worried Ginny and made Harry panic. He wasn’t the best with babies and their alarmingly fragile heads, and he’d been afraid to go near Al in case he broke him somehow. But Ginny had handled that: Ginny had been brilliant with them all when they were babies. Al had been fine, though he was more—delicate than the others, always catching colds and nervy. He was fine with family, of course, but whenever guests were around he got all shy and didn’t talk, and things weren’t quite right between him and Ginny.
It was Hermione who clued Harry in on what was wrong.
“Al reminds Ginny of how she used to be when she was little,” Hermione’d said one day, when they had a barbecue going in Ron and Hermione’s garden. “You know, awkward and shy, too many elbows.”
She gave Ron an affectionate smile from across the garden and Ron tucked Hugo under his arm and waved at her.
“It unsettles her a bit—she feels like she’s come a long way and she doesn’t like to be reminded of how she was,” Hermione went on. “Plus I think she’s a little—afraid to be fond of Al. There was that whole business with Tom Riddle’s diary—I think she felt she wasn’t safe being that way, and what with Albus being a bit more fragile and easily hurt than the others…”
“Well,” Harry said, frowning over at Al’s tufty dark head. “What should I do?”
“You have to be there for him,” Hermione said gently.
“‘Course,” Harry told her. Of course he would—that was what fathers did, he’d always been determined to be there for all of them, whatever they needed, but they were all so young and Ginny was so good with James and Lily, and he wasn’t sure—but of course, whatever it took. He’d do it.
It had been easier than he thought it would be. James and Lily, they preferred to sit on Ginny’s lap or beside her while she read to them, Harry had offered to do it a few times but it’d seemed to fall a bit flat. He tried with Al, asked him to sit with him or walk with him sometimes, it didn’t seem like enough, he wished he could’ve done something bigger, more dramatic, and made all Al’s problems vanish—but it seemed to work.
Al blossomed under the attention. From then on he stuck close to Harry and poured out everything to him, went to him and took his hand rather than his mother’s when they were all out for the day.
Harry still remembered the first time he’d come home from work late—which happened too much, he knew that—and found Al passed out on the stairs. Ginny had come out of their bedroom and watched him scoop Al up.
“Waited up for me,” Harry had explained, trying to sound casual and not terribly pleased. “Little rascal.”
He didn’t think Ginny had been fooled.
James and Lily had both spent lots of nights away from home before Hogwarts, but Al found it hard to make friends, and being away from home made him anxious. He’d stayed over with Rose once, had a nightmare about the house burning down without him, and Harry’d had to come over at two in the morning and collect him. Harry had spent a lot of time worrying about how he’d get on in Hogwarts, had talked it over with Ginny night after night.
Al had been really excited to go, though. Of course, when he became too excited he tended to get sick. Harry’d spent a lot of Quidditch games with Al vomiting in the bathroom.
Al had been sick pretty much all night before he went to Hogwarts, and then James hadn’t helped teasing him about being put in Slytherin. He’d been a bag of nerves when he’d walked onto that train. Harry knew he’d be all right: he’d been sure that Al would love Hogwarts, that it’d be good for him, but he was still relieved when the first letters from the boys arrived home.
There were three: one from James and one from Al to the whole family, and then another from Al marked To Dad: PRIVATE! which Harry had put into his jacket to keep for later.
James’ Owl had begun: Dear Mum and Dad, You never listen to me even though I am always right. That little nit Al got himself Sorted into Slytherin.
“Oh, my God,” Harry’d said. He’d told Al there was nothing wrong with it, and of course there wasn’t, but he’d been counting on James to look after Al in Gryffindor and—and anyway, Al in Slytherin, it was ridiculous, how did they even do the Sorting these days?
He’d calmed down a bit when he and Ginny read Al’s letter. Al seemed perfectly happy, saying that he’d made friends and he really liked Hogwarts and he was wearing the jumpers Ginny’d knitted for him over his robes like he’d promised.
Harry was barely out the door, though, before he tore open Al’s private Owl and glanced over it: to his relief, it was long and it all seemed to be little things, like the breathless chattering way Al talked when he was happy, stories he’d thought up and dreams he’d had and adventures with his new friends.
Harry had let out a deep relieved breath, then started the letter properly and wished he could take the breath back.
Dear Dad, Al had written. Don’t listen to whatever James has written. I’m really glad that I got Sorted into Slytherin. It’s brilliant here, and Dad, it was just like you said, making friends was so easy. On the train there I met the coolest boy.
Harry’s headache had started on the next line, which was: His name is Scorpius Malfoy.
It wasn’t that Harry held a parent’s mistakes against a child. Or a grandparent’s, considering that Lucius Malfoy had been a considerably nastier piece of work than Draco Malfoy had ever managed. It was just the thought of his Al in that house of all houses, friends with that boy of all boys. He couldn’t have been well brought up.
Al was so trusting, so prone to wandering right into danger after James. He still had a white scar across his eyebrow from the time James persuaded him to walk the mantelpiece as if he was a pirate’s captive walking the plank. It would be so easy for someone to hurt Al. He’d never had a proper friend if you didn’t count Rose, who talked to him as if she was a teacher.
Mind you, Rose talked to Harry as if she was a teacher.
If Scorpius Malfoy was at all like his father—and he’d been the spit of him, as Harry recalled with a vicious twisting feeling somewhere in his intestines—the thought of Al’s face at the first piece of malice, the thought of how destroyed Al would be if someone he admired was cruel to him… Harry couldn’t quite deal with the thought. He didn’t know what to do.
Al’s letter was so happy. Harry read it with an increasing sense of gloom. He was brimming with news about Slytherin and he and Scorpius had bagged beds next to each other, and the prefects were really nice and Scorpius had told him a story about Portugal that he was sure Dad would be interested in, and he was going to have Quidditch lessons tomorrow and he was nervous but Scorpius said he needn’t be because Scorpius was excellent at Quidditch and he would show Al how and Harry’s headache really wasn’t getting any better.
There was nothing he could do, except wish that Malfoy had sent his boy to Durmstrang like half the Slytherins from Harry’s year had done with their kids and wait to see the slightest sign of unhappiness in Al’s letters, ready to rush in and pick up the pieces. Harry wrote him careful letters about getting to know everyone and making lots of friends.
Al wrote back long, long letters detailing, basically, how the Nations of the World Had Gathered Together To Acclaim Scorpius Malfoy As Their God King. Harry started skimming them a bit because it made him feel a bit nauseous.
He’d been so worried about how Al would cope in Hogwarts that he hadn’t considered how he would cope without Al.
To his surprise, he missed him a lot. He’d got used to Al on the stairs waiting for him, Al in the study telling him long stories while he filled out the pointless reports that the Aurors’ department were so keen on. Sometimes he wished Ron hadn’t asked Hermione to help set up the new system: apparently the efficiency was devastating but sometimes Harry was tempted to run amok among the filing cabinets.
He worked slightly longer hours—well, he had to make sure he was ahead of the pushy young up and comers, after all—and he quietly arranged for Al’s favourite Quidditch team the Tutshill Tornados to visit Hogwarts. Al wrote him an enthusiastic letter of thanks.
It was good to see him at Christmas. He looked well and happy still, as if he was eating regularly. He assured Ginny that he hadn’t caught any colds and leaned against Harry at the dinner table while James talked. James, apparently inspired by Teddy Lupin’s romance, had discovered girls and would not shut up about them.
“And this one in Hufflepuff, she’s got these cute pigtails, Mum,” James was saying, when Lily told him to pipe down and asked Al to tell her all about Hogwarts.
Al leaned forward and said: “Well, the Quidditch is very exciting.”
“Is it, Al?” Harry said, smiling fondly.
Al turned to him, bright-faced. “D’you know, Scorpius is on the Quidditch team! Even though he’s in first year! Isn’t that amazing!”
”… Amazing,” Harry said flatly.
“Everyone says he’s really really good,” Al said. “I helped make banners for him. He’s the Seeker.”
“He’s a git,” James said in a bored voice. Harry gave his eldest-born and right-thinking son an approving look. At least James hadn’t been fooled: at least someone was looking out for Al.
“You’re just saying that because our team beat yours,” Al said hotly. “Ha ha ha. Scorpius said you weren’t even a challenge.”
“Sounds a lovely boy,” Ginny said dryly.
“Everyone calls him Score now because of him being so excellent at Quidditch,” Al said proudly. “Which is a pity,” he added after a moment. “Because I think Scorpius is a really nice name.”
Everyone gave Al a funny look then. Al seemed blissfully oblivious.
“So when a couple of the houses had an inter-house dance, I danced with the most girls of anybody,” James reported.
“Score says that we’re going to win the House Cup,” Al continued.
“Bet you won’t!” James said.
Al gave James the calm look of a man with a trump card. “Score says,” he repeated patiently.
James would look after him, Harry told himself again. There was a possibility, however slight, that Malfoy’s offspring wasn’t completely loathsome. Little Scorpius had a mother, after all.
Al’s letters home stayed happy, and he came home for the summer looking better than when he’d left.
And promptly stopped eating.
Ginny was worried and a bit insulted about Al’s sudden aversion to her cooking, and Harry panicked in the study and tried to work out what was wrong until he saw Al woefully refusing to play a pick-up Quidditch match with James and James’s friends Carl and Vespasian, slumping back into his chair in Harry’s study, too tragic and malnourished even to chatter, and Harry finally realised that Al was pining.
“Mum wrote that James could invite anyone home he liked,” Al said in a small voice. “But neither of you wrote that to me.”
“Er,” Harry said. “Well, what a shame. Maybe you can have a friend over next summer, I’m sure that—that everyone has plans now.”
“They do,” Al told him. “Score is going to stay with Marvin and Claudius, and they’re all going to have fun and maybe Score will decide he likes one of them better than me.”
Harry cleared his throat. “I’m sure he won’t.”
Al brightened fractionally. “That’s true. Score and me are best friends. I asked him if he wanted to be and d’you know what he said, Dad?”
“What did he say, Al?”
Al glowed. “He said okay!”
“Big of him,” said Harry.
On Al’s birthday in mid-July a present arrived via eagle owl. It was a grey cashmere jumper and Ginny said she knew from just looking at it that it was hideously expensive, and added that it was kind of inappropriately fancy for a twelve-year-old boy. Particularly one as small and inclined to get stuck in hedges and fireplaces as Al.
Al wore it all the time. He even wore it to bed. Scorpius Malfoy, Harry noticed, hadn’t even enclosed a note. Al had been writing him letters all summer.
“Dad,” Al said shyly at one point. Harry was so used to Al’s wistful silence that he jumped. “Would you take me to Knockturn Alley?”
Harry almost choked. “No, Al, I will not! Why do you want to go there? Who told you about that place?”
“Score,” Al said, infusing one syllable with a world of passionate yearning. “He said it was really cool. His birthday’s in August, you see, and I was thinking—”
Harry looked over at his small son. He hadn’t known that Scorpius Malfoy was even younger than Al: Al was clearly unhappy, and Scorpius had sent a present, inappropriate and all as it had been, and maybe—maybe Scorpius didn’t even like his parents. Maybe he was like Sirius.
“Tell you what, Al,” he said. “Owl him and ask him to come stay after his birthday, and you two can pick a present out together.”
Al lit up. “Really, Dad?”
“Not in Knockturn Alley, mind,” Harry said.
“Oh thank you,” Al breathed. “Dad, it’s going to be so much fun. You’ll really like him, I promise! I’ll be really good till then!”
“Just let your mum wash that jumper a bit more often,” Harry said. “That’s all I ask.”
Al had scampered off to write Scorpius upon the instant. Harry had comforted himself thinking that summer was well advanced, and Scorpius probably wouldn’t come. He couldn’t even be bothered to write, after all.
But Scorpius did come.
The grille that separated the dungeons of Durmstrang from the sewers lifted easily. It was as if they wanted children to go climbing into it and meet alligators, Harry thought grimly. He pulled it back over him as he landed in an inch of dirty water with a splash, and stared around the slimy dark tunnels, trying to think of which way Al and James might have chosen to go.
Of course, this wouldn’t have been Al or James’s idea.
Harry drew his wand, holding it at the ready in case of giant alligators, chose a tunnel at random, and completely and entirely blamed Score Malfoy.
Scorpius had written that he’d arrive in the early morning of August the fourth, so of course Al had spent the night of August the third getting sick. In between violent bouts of vomiting he’d run to the windows, because James had been awful and told him that the next day technically started at midnight.
Harry gave up on the attempt to persuade Al that Scorpius was unlikely to arrive at three in the morning and, seeing that nothing would convince Al to give up his vigil, he gave him hot milk and went to bed himself. He woke up at eight and went down to find Al passed out on the kitchen sofa, which was exactly what he’d expected, and a tall blond boy making coffee, which wasn’t.
Harry’s first outraged thought was that little Scorpius Malfoy wasn’t little at all: he’d shot up in the last year. He looked fourteen: what was he doing hanging around with Al?
Then Scorpius Malfoy slanted a wintry grey glance over his shoulder at Harry. He looked distinctly unimpressed.
Harry was very forcibly reminded of his father.
Scorpius came over and formally offered a hand. “Hello, sir. I’m Scorpius.”
Harry felt a complete fool shaking a twelve year old’s hand, but he did it. He noted that Scorpius’ voice had broken with the growth spurt, and the boy’s drawl was so pronounced that it was practically a speech impediment. When he said his own name it sounded like Parseltongue.
“Hello there,” Harry said awkwardly.
Scorpius went back to making coffee. “Potter’s asleep,” he remarked in that deep drawl, which Harry actually found a bit tricky to understand. “Are we doing something special today? He always gets like this when he’s overexcited.”
Harry wondered darkly if Scorpius was actually amused by the fact that Al made himself sick.
“You should’ve seen him when the Tornados came to the school,” Scorpius continued. “He was so ill that he had to spend the whole day in the infirmary. Never saw the team.”
“He didn’t mention that,” Harry exclaimed.
Scorpius gave him a superior look. No, Harry realised, this kid wasn’t like Sirius: this kid was Malfoy all over again.
“And—what, you call him Potter?” Harry demanded. “Er—what do you call James?”
“I call him ‘that tool,’” said Scorpius calmly.
As Harry choked on air and outrage that this child obviously thought he could waltz in here and say anything he damn well pleased, Al stirred and Harry’s gaze turned to his son, lifting a sleep-pink face and blinking currently-shining green eyes. Sometimes Harry wished that Al wore glasses: his face looked so unprotected without them.
“Dad!” Al said in a piercing whisper. “Score is coming today!”
“I’m here, twit,” Score drawled, and strolled to the sofa with two cups of coffee in hand. The child even walked straight-backed, steps precise, like he’d had deportment lessons. “You let me in yourself and then actually fainted on the sofa.”
“Hi Score,” Al said, radiant. “I did not faint.”
“Sure,” Score—there was no other word but drawled, he never did anything else. He sat down beside Al and when Al collapsed with exhaustion against his shoulder, he hit Al in the knee with a coffee cup. “Drink this,” he commanded. “It’s good for you.”
Sugar and caffeine at this hour would probably make Al hyper, not that Scorpius cared, obviously.
“Okay,” Al said, and Score nodded with satisfaction and Harry realised that, oh God, Malfoy’s kid thought of his kid as his Crabbe or Goyle.
He was glad when James came down, and Score and he exchanged hostile looks. James spent breakfast bristling like an angry cat as Al swayed and Score drawled.
Lily fell in love with Score at once, but that was just Lily’s way. She was distracted from her pursuit by the advent of the milkman and went off to flirt with him instead.
“Potter says you like Quidditch,” Score informed Harry condescendingly over his fifth cup of coffee, and added: “I’m the youngest Seeker in a century.”
Harry coughed. “I think you’ll find you’re not.”
“I am,” Score said. “I was a month younger than you were. I’m the youngest Seeker in a century and a half, actually. Dad looked it up.”
“I bet he did,” Harry said.
“That’s why they call him Score,” Al told them all with massively misguided pride.
“Sometimes,” Scorpius said, examining his nails, “they call me the Boy Who Scored.”
Harry could feel himself starting a migraine. Fortunately after breakfast Scorpius ordered Al in the most high-handed way to his room, where Al crashed out and Scorpius read Flying through the Ages.
The next day Scorpius and James got into a fight and had to be dragged apart with James howling insults, Scorpius calling him a tool about four thousand times, and Al pleading and carrying on at the top of his voice. Harry was so entirely in sympathy with James that he’d have had a hard time disciplining him. If Lily hadn’t become overexcited and burst into tears, causing mass panic, things could have become unpleasant.
The house was a very tense place for a week. Al and Scorpius spent all their time in Al’s room, where Harry could hear Al talking nineteen to the dozen. Harry wondered how on earth Al could start half his sentences with ‘Score says’ when Score only bothered to drawl out one word to fifty of Al’s. Mealtimes were like a war zone with the table as the disputed territory: James, Vespasian and Carl giving Score the evil eye as Al tried to be friends with everyone and Score eyed everyone with cool distaste.
The shopping trip when Al insisted on buying friendship bracelets for them both haunted Harry’s dreams a bit.
Harry had also dreaded Score refusing to wear his, but Score did wear it, even though he looked doubtful about this decision. “My dad wears a necklace,” he said eventually. “So that’s all right.”
Scorpius talked about his father a lot. He had a silver-framed picture of his parents that he kept on Al’s desk, but he never talked about his mother: Harry got the feeling that possibly things weren’t all right there.
The picture showed Malfoy and his wife on holiday somewhere, with sun and sand, Malfoy’s wife dressed in camouflage gear and looking annoyed about something. Harry couldn’t remember her name, but he knew she was Portuguese and—naturally—a pureblood, which was probably why Malfoy had married her, since she was a good ten years older than Malfoy and her rather stern face wasn’t anything to write home about. Score might have got the height from her.
Having Malfoy smirking from a silver frame in his son’s room wasn’t fun, either. Harry counted the days until Score was due home, and then Al came to him beaming with the news that Score had invited him back.
Harry had thought it mightn’t be a bad idea. The thought of Al in that place—where Hermione had been tortured—made him shudder, but… Al would see Score’s father, then, and see how they lived. Al was sweet and trusting, but he was very quick. It might make him take a few steps back.
He let Al go. When Al returned, he took one look at Al’s face and knew it hadn’t worked.
“I had so much fun,” Al confided later, sidling up to Harry so James wouldn’t hear. “Mr Malfoy is so cool! He does impressions!”
Harry could’ve wept for his poor deluded child.
“Does Scorpius not do impressions?”
“No,” Al said, staring. “Why would you think that?”
“No reason,” said Harry. “Too careful of his own dignity, is he?”
“Score is very dignified,” Al agreed happily. “D’you know what some of the girls call him, Dad? The Ice Prince of Slytherin!”
Harry was truly appalled.
“Did you know, Mr Malfoy was in Slytherin.”
“I did know that,” Harry said. “Yeah.”
“I wonder if they called him that,” Al speculated.
“They didn’t,” Harry said with finality, and did not add that had they done so, Harry would have probably been violently ill.
“Mr Malfoy said I can come back next year!”
“Did he,” said Harry, and wondered what Malfoy thought he was playing at.
Next summer seemed unimportant compared to the debate over the exchange term to be spent in Durmstrang, which Score had already signed up for and which Al was therefore set on. Ginny gave in when Al started threatening to keep a diary so he could write poetry about how unhappy he was in it.
Harry gave in when James said he wanted to go too. None of James’s friends were going: Harry knew that James had only offered so he’d be there to guard his brother.
When you dragged his attention away from the ladies, James was a good, good boy. Harry had let them both go, and now somehow Scorpius Malfoy had got them all lost down here in the dark underbelly of Durmstrang with alligators, and Harry had to find them.
Harry splashed mordantly through the grimy water as he went around another labyrinthine turn, ignoring the gleam of rats’ eyes as they scurried past and mentally composing the mother of all lectures to that supercilious little brat.
He walked right into the dark shape, swore and then when he heard the other person swearing, swore again.
“Oh God,” Harry said, once he was temporarily out of curses.
“Oh, perfect,” Malfoy spat, face twisting with the effort of trying to grimace and sneer at once. “Potter?”
“Malfoy,” Harry said grimly. “What’re you doing here?”
In the grey half-light of the sewers he saw that Malfoy looked just as he had on the platform more than a year ago: coat buttoned up to his throat, hairline slightly receding, evidently not pleased to see him. But then, Malfoy never really changed.
“What do you think I’m doing here, Potter?” Malfoy demanded. “Out for a stroll? Taking the sewer air? I presume I’m here for the same reason you are: my child is lost in this Godforsaken place and the ravingly incompetent headmistress seems content to leave him to be eaten by reptiles.”
“Oh,” Harry said. “Well—I’m dealing with it. You can go home.”
Malfoy gave him a death glare. “I have no intention,” he said, speaking each word as if he was stabbing someone, “of leaving this place without Scorpius. You may do exactly as you please.”
“Right,” said Harry, and thought about this for a minute. He certainly didn’t need Malfoy slowing him down, nor did he need to spend another minute in Malfoy’s company. “Well,” he said slowly. “I suppose we should split up then. The sewers are big and we’ll cover more ground. I’ll send up sparks when I find the children.”
It was the perfect solution. He did not know why Malfoy felt called to make that terminally annoyed sound in the back of his throat.
Nor did he have time to waste finding out. “Okay then,” he said, and went past Malfoy. “See you later.”
Malfoy nodded and Harry strode on a few steps before he heard Malfoy clear his throat and then say, with what appeared to be some difficulty: “Wait.”
Harry turned. “What?”
Malfoy’s face looked strained. “I—I have a tracking spell on Scorpius,” he said between clenched teeth. “You’re going the wrong way. You’d better come with me.”
“You have a tracking spell on your kid?” Harry demanded, so as not to think about the rest of it. “Why?”
“Because children can get into very dangerous situations!” Malfoy snapped. “As for instance, this one.”
“All right. So where is he?”
“It’s not all that specific,” Malfoy said crossly. “That would be an invasion of his privacy. I just know when I’m getting closer or further away. And this way is closer, so let’s go.”
He plunged on ahead, not looking back to see if Harry was following. Harry cursed the whole situation and went after him, making sure to draw level so he wasn’t actually trailing along in Malfoy’s wake.
“Can you tell how far he is?”
Malfoy’s pointed chin was set. “Pretty far,” he said. “Come on.”
“Fine, but you don’t have to take that tone with me,” Harry snapped. “After all, your kid is the one who led my boys into this mess.”
“Oh, really?” Malfoy said dangerously. “And how did you work that one out, Potter?”
Harry’s voice rose. “I think it’s pretty obvious.”
“I see you’re displaying your usual brilliance,” Malfoy drawled. “Scorpius would never get into this sort of trouble on his own: my child happens to be level-headed and intelligent and he’s clearly been endangered by the recklessness of your hell-born brat—”
“Al?” Harry snarled. “Are you insane? That’s the most ridiculous—”
“No, not Al,” Malfoy snarled back with a withering look. “Albus is a nice child,” he added grudgingly. “Though God knows where he gets it from. Whereas from all Scorpius tells me, the other baby Potter is an absolute chip off the old block, and I have no doubt that this is all his doing.”
Harry snorted. “You think that Scorpius followed James? Scorpius wouldn’t spit on James if he was on fire.”
Malfoy looked mistily proud. “Naturally not. I think Albus followed the other baby Potter—”
“James,” Harry hissed.
“There are so many of them,” Malfoy said. “I find it hard to keep the names straight. Anyway, I think that Scorpius followed Al, since it must have been clear to him that Al would be eaten by alligators without him, and therefore this is all your pernicious eldest-born’s fault. I hope you’re prepared to discipline him.”
“Maybe I will,” Harry said darkly. “Maybe I’ll punish him by calling him a totally absurd name like Scorpius.”
He was vaguely startled when Malfoy went pink, colour rising on both cheeks as if he’d been slapped. He’d become so used to seeing Scorpius remain entirely unruffled by whatever James and the others threw at him that he’d somehow recalled the everyday Malfoy of drawling and elaborate unconcern and revised history so that he’d forgotten how easy it was to break that façade into a thousand pieces.
“Don’t blame me for that,” Malfoy muttered. “His mother chose it. I wanted to call him Jack.”
“Jack?” Harry repeated doubtfully.
“I think Jack is a nice name,” Malfoy told him, looking offended. “A little bit exotic, and it wouldn’t have given him any trouble at school. After being lumbered with something like Draco, I wasn’t going to do that to my son. Which is more than I can say for you, with your James and Lily and Albus—”
“Funny, I thought you didn’t know their names.”
“—Imaginative, I must say,” Malfoy continued, going pink again. “Did your wife have any say in their names? Do you permit her to speak at all?”
“Don’t you dare say a word against my wife,” Harry said.
“I wasn’t,” said Malfoy, and stamped on through the water.
“I would’ve been happy to let her choose names,” Harry said furiously after a minute.
Malfoy maintained an obviously disbelieving silence.
Harry broke. “She wanted to call James Pigwidgeon, all right? I couldn’t let her do that to the kids. I would have let her—”
He stopped there because Malfoy was sniggering.
“You know what? Shut up,” said Harry. “At least Ginny is there for the kids. Where’s your wife?”
“She’s in Portugal,” Malfoy answered shortly, his whole face twisting.
So there was something wrong, then. There must be, for Malfoy’s wife to be in Portugal. The ceasefire there was looking kind of unsteady about now. Harry’d been sent over to Portugal as part of the special Aurors’ division during the first ceasefire sixteen years ago. He’d seen what had happened in the aftermath of the coup, when the Portuguese Ministry suborned a family of wandmakers and suddenly every witch and wizard in Portugal had found themselves trapped, with unreliable wands and no choice but to obey the new absolute rule of the Ministry.
Some witches and wizards had learned how to use guns and started a guerrilla revolt. It had got very ugly for a while—so ugly that even now, four ceasefires later, there were still constant eruptions into violence.
Harry’d presumed Malfoy’s wife was one of the early refugees from Portugal and that she’d never go back. Things must have gone really wrong—though it was to be expected, of course, the poor woman had to put up with Malfoy. Unless she was just as arrogant as he was, and thought that things like safety laws applied to other people and she was entitled to a holiday even in a danger zone.
Now that Harry recalled, he thought he’d even met Malfoy and the woman who was going to be his wife in Portugal sixteen years ago, at the embassy. Harry had been having his own problems at the time, but he remembered Malfoy acting like an idiot and his own disgust that they were having canapés and dancing while people died in the streets.
“Where’s your precious wife, then?” Malfoy demanded, his voice ugly now. “If she’s always there for the kids.”
“She’s in St Mungo’s,” Harry answered shortly. “She’s having a baby.”
Malfoy, who had hesitated at the first part of Harry’s sentence, looked as if he had never heard anything so impossibly vulgar.
“What, another one?”
“Shut up,” Harry said in a bleak, vicious voice, and for a wonder Malfoy did.
Harry wasn’t all that sure about the baby himself. He’d thought—they’d agreed that three was enough, but Lily was going to Hogwarts next year and Ginny hated the idea of an empty nest. And now Ginny wasn’t doing all that well, wasn’t as young as she had been, and Lily was at Ron and Hermione’s and Harry had to get Al and James back before Ginny knew anything had happened.
They walked on in silence for some time, though Harry could practically feel Malfoy getting edgy and ready to speak. Scorpius was quiet enough, you could say that much for him, and Harry’d forgotten that Malfoy was always on about something.
Malfoy didn’t speak. They kept walking until Harry was exhausted and Malfoy was faltering, and then Harry said: “We should stop. Won’t do them any good if we’re half dead by the time we get to them.”
For a wonder, Malfoy didn’t argue. He sat down on one of the slimy ledges the sewers had to offer and shrugged off his large bag, reaching inside it for what appeared to be a sandwich. Harry became extremely aware that he was starving.
“You brought a picnic lunch?”
“I brought a bag that can hold anything, and obviously I packed food,” Malfoy said in a lofty voice.
Harry narrowed his eyes. “You stole that idea from Hermione.”
“I improved the idea,” Malfoy corrected him snottily. “That’s what the enterprising and intelligent among us do.”
It didn’t seem worth arguing about, so Harry cut to the chase and said: “Give me a sandwich.”
There was a long moment of silence. Silence seemed longer out here in the sewers, time pressed flat by wet stone.
Then Malfoy raised his eyebrows and asked: “Why should I?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Malfoy, because I saved the world that one time? And your life.”
“Yes,” Malfoy drawled. “But what have you done for me lately?”
Harry stared at him in outrage. Malfoy looked like he wanted, very badly, to laugh. Then he bit down on his lip and flipped Harry a sandwich.
Harry tore into the bread with his teeth. It wasn’t even a very good sandwich.
Harry woke to Malfoy’s imperious hand pulling at his shoulder and the terrible awareness that his sons were lost, and he’d been sleeping on filthy stone in a sewer and wasn’t as young as he’d like to be.
“Enough lounging about, Potter,” Malfoy commanded. “Scorpius and Al could be in danger. As could the other baby Potter,” he added after a moment.
“James.”
“Fine,” Malfoy said. “Come on.” He wheeled around and strode down one of three—to Harry’s eyes interchangeable—tunnels. “This way,” he said over his shoulder.
“Fine,” Harry said to his back.
He made sure to draw level with Malfoy this time, too. Malfoy glanced over at him, face unreadable aside from the fact he was worrying at his lip, and eventually he spoke and Harry braced himself for more bloody unpleasantness.
Malfoy said in the nastiest voice Harry could imagine: “I—apologise for my behaviour earlier.”
“What?” Harry said, staring. “What?”
“Yes,” Malfoy answered, his gaze fixed straight ahead and his voice not getting any more pleasant. “I am—I apologise. I realise that I—owe you a lot,” he said, in a tone better suited to expressing a desire to rip out Harry’s lungs and set them on fire. “Including my current health and happiness. I think I may be somewhat overwrought by Scorpius’s disappearance.”
“Okay,” Harry said. “Well, er. You’re welcome, for your health and, uh, happiness.”
He did think that if Malfoy was grateful, he needn’t act like the mere sight of Harry was so very painful. It was a bit insulting.
“I am happy,” Malfoy told him, responding more to the tone than the words. “I have a fulfilling job and a lot of money and a brilliant and brave wife and the most perfect child in the universe. I’m not in the best of moods just at present, but once Scorpius is safe and I am removed from your presence and—once I’ve had some kind of wash, because these sewers are frankly disgusting—well, then everything will be wonderful! Thank you for saving the world,” he almost spat. “I really appreciate it.”
“Jesus, Malfoy,” said Harry. “Don’t strain yourself.” He added: “So do you keep the most perfect child in the universe in the attics or something? Because I’ve met Scorpius, and frankly—”
“Don’t you dare say a word against my son!” Malfoy shouted.
“You called James a hell-born brat!”
“I already apologised for all of that!”
“Oh my God,” said Harry. “Why are you even here?”
He meant it in the sense of, what had he ever done to deserve this, why God why, but Malfoy—as was his way—obviously chose to take it personally. His pale face looked even more pinched and unhappy.
“I realise,” he said, in that horrible stilted polite voice, “that you have a perfect right to think anything you like about me. But whatever else I might do, I would never leave my son in danger.”
Harry thought for a moment of Narcissa Malfoy and her absolute willingness to see either Voldemort or himself in hell for her son’s sake, and the way Malfoy used to go up in smoke every time someone said a word against his parents. He’d never thought about Malfoy’s attitude towards Scorpius, but he supposed that furiously intent love made a certain amount of sense.
“I didn’t think you would,” Harry muttered. “I don’t think anything about you, anyway. I never think about you at all.”
He’d meant that to come out as more conciliatory. Malfoy’s look and reply were both icy in the extreme.
“Same here.”
“Anyway,” Harry ploughed on. “I didn’t do any of it to be thanked. Particularly not twenty years after the fact. You can be rude to me if you like.”
“Thank you,” Malfoy said, sounding suddenly gracious. “I believe I shall.”
Harry fully expected him to begin on that at once, but just then a rat brushed by Malfoy’s boot and Malfoy was absorbed making terrible faces and obviously having a silent, private conniption about the filth in which he found himself.
“Wait,” Harry said. “What job d’you have, anyway? I never heard about you having a job.”
“This is because you’re not supposed to talk about being an Unspeakable, Potter,” Malfoy told him in condescending tones, while sending suspicious looks over his shoulder as if the rat might decide to return.
Nobody knew what the Unspeakables did, of course: just that sometimes even the Ministry had to answer to them. The Aurors got intelligence reports from them and sometimes had to ask for stuff from them: passage into danger zones, special weapons, that sort of thing. Harry’s requests were always instantly approved, which he’d regarded as sheer luck.
Given the fact that Malfoy had just expressed a certain grudging amount of gratitude, he was now rethinking this.
“Oh,” Harry said.
“Not quite as glamorous as being an Auror, of course,” said Malfoy, who seemed determined to take everything personally. “But it does have the advantage of not needing a partner.”
The raving git.
He must have looked at Harry’s reports. Well, he was technically allowed to do so if he was an Unspeakable, it might even be part of his job, but that didn’t matter because it was none of his business.
He’d always planned on Ron as a partner. Things would have been fine, then. But Ron had almost instantly shown incredible aptitude for training, he’d revolutionised the Auror training camps, he was far too good to waste in the field, and so Harry was left with a series of increasingly useless idiots who yelped endlessly about committing suicide and waiting for back-up and filling out stupid forms.
Quite a long series. Of which Malfoy was obviously perfectly aware.
“It’s true, being an Auror is pretty glamorous and high-profile,” Harry said, aware he was being ridiculous but still stung and unable for a moment to help being stupid. “Which is why I’m glad I’m not losing my hair.”
He more or less expected Malfoy to laugh that off, but Malfoy went instant, indignant pink.
“I’m not losing my hair!”
“Did I say you were?” Harry asked. “Sore point, is it?”
“No it isn’t, because I’m not,” Malfoy said. “And if I was—which I’m not!—it’s not like time has been kind to you people, now is it?” His voice took on a certain delighted malice. “What with your wife being the image of her mother.”
Harry opened his mouth to defend Ginny, and then realised that any attempt to defend Ginny would mean insulting Molly, and ground his teeth.
Malfoy seemed to be enjoying himself now. “And Weasley’s totally absurd moustache, which makes him look like a redheaded sea lion—”
Harry had advised Ron about that moustache. Hermione had, very vehemently, advised Ron about that moustache. Ron loved it, though: he thought it made him look debonair.
“Not to mention you, O Middle-Aged One Who Lived,” Malfoy continued. “I must say, I’d rather be losing my hair—if I was which I’m not!—than have all those premature lines. Feeling a little off colour, Potter? Been ill? Your face is just a trifle marked by the furrows of time—”
That was when a pipe in the sewers burst and water hit Malfoy in the face.
“Whoops,” Harry said placidly. “Got very strong wandless magic. Sorry about that.”
Malfoy spat and then spat again. “Bleagh,” he said, and then spat a third time. “Ugh. Oh my God, this is the most repulsive place in the world. It must be awful for Scorpius: I presume your children are more used to squalor.”
“I swear to God, Malfoy,” Harry began, and then they turned a corner and saw the slope downwards of the sewers, so sharp that it formed a wet black ledge, and the small black shape huddled at the bottom, almost hidden under the cascading water.
Malfoy made a low, terrible sound.
Harry forced the world to make sense by splitting it brutally apart, into small reasonable pieces. He had to get down there and see: that was the first thing to do, everything after that would have to wait.
The ledge would have been a long way to fall for a child, but for a grown man it wasn’t too hard to jump. Harry landed with a splash and then heard Malfoy jump behind him: Malfoy staggered, making the water wash around their legs, and Harry glanced back to make sure that he hadn’t broken an ankle or something, and so that he could look away from the small shape.
Malfoy was leaning against the wall: he looked at Harry with wide, terrified eyes. His hands were trembling.
“I can’t,” he said in a dry voice that was trembling as well. “Potter. I c-can’t look.”
“I’ll look,” Harry said, and went over to the end of that ledge, put his hand into the water and turned the shape over.
It was an old skeleton, in ancient school robes. It was nothing that could have been any of the boys.
Harry shut his eyes and was deeply, quietly thankful for a moment.
Then he said over his shoulder, his voice almost steady: “It’s all right. It’s been here a long time—it’s not one of them.”
“Oh,” Malfoy said, in a small voice. Then he said, his voice changing and becoming cool, planning: “But it was a child once. These sewers are—come on. Let’s not waste time here. This is the right way.”
Left to himself, Harry would have stayed leaning against the ledge, being thankful. But Malfoy was right, and besides he had to follow him, Malfoy was the one with the tracking spell. That was good thinking, Harry thought: he was going to put a spell on every one of the children. Even the baby, when the baby was born. This was never, never going to happen again.
Malfoy was still trembling a little when Harry caught up with him.
“You all right?” Harry asked in a guarded sort of way. Well, he told himself, he couldn’t handle Malfoy going into fits on top of everything else.
“Perfectly.” Malfoy laughed, which was almost as horrible a sound as his polite voice. “Just a coward. But you knew that.”
Harry thought about the instant of paralysing dread as his fingers touched the sodden, disintegrating mass of an old school robe.
“Don’t be stupider than you can help,” he said shortly. “I was scared as hell, too.”
Malfoy’s shoulders eased considerably. “It—this place won’t bother Scorpius too much,” he said, as if he was trying to reassure himself. “He’s seen skeletons before.”
“Er—he has?”
“In Portugal,” Malfoy said briefly. “His mother used to have deserters shot and thrown in a ditch outside the camp.”
“She what?” Harry said.
Malfoy gave him a look that was almost amused. “Potter,” he said. “Do you actually not know who Béatriz is?”
Béatriz, that was it.
“Er,” Harry said. “Your wife?”
“There is that,” Malfoy conceded. “She also happens to be Béatriz Oliveira da Costa.” He looked at Harry, and obviously seeing Harry’s blank expression he added: “General Costa?”
“The, ah,” Harry said. “The commander of the Portuguese guerrilla army?”
“That’d be the one,” said Malfoy.
“Jesus,” said Harry.
He remembered vaguely that the commander of the guerrillas was a woman. Recollections of campfire tales started to rise murkily through time towards him: the general’s reputation was that of a woman with a savage, brutal temper, the kind who shot first and then asked questions after she’d had you thrown in the ditch. She must be coming on for fifty now, and the fraying threads of the ceasefire were held together in her iron fist. Not a lady to cross, the consensus had been.
So, probably the General wasn’t in Portugal on holiday, then.
Harry remembered the stern face in Scorpius’s silver frame with slightly more foreboding than before.
“Jesus,” he said again. “How’d that happen?”
“I have no idea,” Malfoy told him. “God was merciful. Everyone else was afraid she’d shoot them.”
It took Harry a moment to realise that Malfoy had misunderstood the question, and that if he rephrased it he’d probably sound like he was insulting Malfoy’s wife.
Given that Malfoy had just insulted his wife it seemed fair enough, but Harry remembered Malfoy’s terror a few minutes ago and didn’t quite have the heart.
“You weren’t afraid she’d shoot you?”
“Oh, I was,” Malfoy said. “But I was afraid of almost everything. It evened out.”
“Does, er. Does Béatriz know about Scorpius?”
“No,” Malfoy said in a distant voice. “We brought him back to England so he could be safe: so he could go to Hogwarts and have a normal life. She’s counting on me to keep him safe, I know she is. She doesn’t write—well, she never did, Scorpius takes after her, they can barely string four words together on paper. She’s very—she’s very focused, and we’re far away. Sometimes I think she’s forgotten we exist, but she trusted me with Scorpius. I couldn’t write and let her know I failed.”
It occurred to Harry that since Malfoy was actually telling him this, Malfoy might be in shock, but he wasn’t going to stop searching so Malfoy could have a lie down or whatever. Their sons were out there: Malfoy could still walk, so they were walking.
“It’s good, anyway,” Malfoy said. “Scorpius knows not to go anywhere without provisions. They won’t starve down there.”
It hadn’t even occurred to Harry. He sent up a prayer that Al wasn’t vomiting up precious food with the excitement, and that Scorpius wasn’t letting James starve.
It did occur to Harry that he’d been right about there being something wrong in the Malfoy household, even if he hadn’t known about the whole long-distance forgetful and bloodthirsty general bit.
“Béatriz says that Score is the best scout his age she’s ever seen,” Malfoy said, and Harry recognised the tone he himself used when he was talking about James’s Chasing skills. “He also plays the mandolin extremely well. I think he’s probably a prodigy.”
It struck Harry that the way Malfoy talked about Scorpius was diametrically different from the way Lucius Malfoy had talked about his son in a shop once, as if Draco was in a competition and not doing as well as Lucius had hoped. Malfoy’s tone made it clear that there was no competition: Scorpius had already won, most perfect child in the universe, that sort of thing.
Of course, it’d made little Scorpius grow up kind of insufferable, but it was probably a step in the right direction.
Malfoy boasted about Scorpius for some time. He seemed to have a lot to say on the subject. Harry was all right with listening to it because it kind of reminded him of Al.
God, Al, out here in the cold and dark with skeletons. He must be freaking out. He wouldn’t be able to touch those provisions, Harry thought, and then remembered with an obscure sense of comfort something that had annoyed him very much when it had actually happened: the way that Scorpius became extremely cold and dictatorial whenever Al did not eat what Scorpius considered a sufficient amount.
They did not find the boys before exhaustion made Harry stop again: he didn’t like to think about how long it had been but he knew they had to be sensible, however little he felt like it.
“I think he’s close, now,” Malfoy said in a tired sort of way. He’d lit his wand and propped it up against another ledge. Harry thought this might be so he could watch out for rats.
“Good,” Harry said. Soon: they’d be with the boys soon, the boys would be safe soon. Al just had to hold on a little longer.
Malfoy raised an eyebrow at him, rummaged in his bag and flipped Harry a sandwich. “Eat.”
“Thanks,” Harry said. This sandwich was better than last night’s.
Malfoy shrugged, one-shouldered. “I am fattening you up so that when the alligators come they will go for you first, and Scorpius and I can escape.”
“Take Al and James too,” Harry said. He ate and then after a minute he said: “So how’d you end up in a war zone in Portugal, anyway?”
Malfoy propped his pointed chin in his hand, resting his elbow against a drawn-up knee. “My mother sent me on a Grand Tour,” he said at last. “She wanted to raise my spirits. She’d—You know Father died a year or so after… all that.”
“Yeah,” Harry said guardedly. He hadn’t been very surprised. Lucius Malfoy had not looked well in the aftermath of the war: that was one reason why the new Ministry hadn’t pressed charges. They’d expected him to die. Harry hadn’t much cared.
Malfoy had probably felt somewhat differently.
“It wasn’t a—good year,” Malfoy said. “The house was a ruin and so was Father. So was I, pretty much, and the Ministry kept dropping by for tea and interrogations and Mother was trying to divide her time between Father’s deathbed and my Aunt Andromeda’s house, where she had her grandson to bring up because everyone else in her family was dead.”
Harry had been in Auror training camp at the time, but he’d come whenever he could to see Teddy. He’d just—never been good with babies. Andromeda had always seemed in control, as if she knew exactly what to do. He’d never thought much about the reconciliation between Andromeda and Narcissa.
“I was a great help, of course,” Malfoy said dryly. “I went and had a nervous breakdown. After Father was—dead, Mother sent me off on the Tour and moved in with Aunt Andromeda for a while. I don’t think she could stand to be in the manor any longer. So there I was in a dozen different embassies expected to have a good time and I just… it wasn’t that I was stupid,” he said sharply, and Harry looked at him questioningly.
Malfoy waved a hand. “I mean, I clued in pretty quickly that I’d chosen the wrong side,” he said, with a return of that unpleasant voice though it was significantly less polite. “What with them slaughtering my Muggle Studies teacher in front of me and the D—Voldemort making me torture people. I did want out. I used to lie awake at night and plot different ways out, think up things I could do—but that doesn’t matter much, does it? I never did any of them. My dad was so sick, I couldn’t leave him, the things Voldemort would have done to him—and I was terrified of Voldemort and almost everything else. I know I was a coward, and I—I wanted to make up for it. I got a wand in China, a kind the Portuguese Ministry couldn’t possibly control, and I found out where the guerrilla army was and I offered to help.”
“And then what?” Harry asked.
“Then I helped,” Malfoy said. “It didn’t make much difference.” He made an impatient sound and gestured a few times, as if he could re-shape the story so it went the way he wanted it to. “I don’t—that is, I think it did help, but I realised it wasn’t any use. That wasn’t my war. My parents weren’t at risk, my school wasn’t there to be betrayed. There was so much less at stake: it was easier to be less of a coward. I’d already had my war, and had my chance. I blew it. Whatever I did in Portugal, it didn’t change anything.”
“It was, er, still probably a good thing to do.”
Malfoy did not look as if he was much concerned with this.
“Why’d you stay?” Harry asked.
Malfoy’s face lightened. “By then I’d met Béatriz. I couldn’t leave her,” he said, in just the same way he’d said that he couldn’t leave his father.
Well, Harry supposed that if he’d wanted an answer like ‘to help the oppressed witches and wizards of Portugal!’ he should’ve asked someone else.
Malfoy’s face had darkened again, probably as he remembered the fact that he’d stayed by his wife in a war zone and she didn’t write to him now. Harry remembered the naked fear on Malfoy’s face before Harry turned that dead child over, and braced himself.
“Ginny and I were separated for a while,” he said, looking at the sewer water.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Separated,” Harry repeated. “We had—communication problems,” he said, remembering how the marriage counsellor had put it and then remembering how it had felt, dinner parties with Ron and Hermione when he’d realised that what he wanted was to stay with his friends, who he could talk to, and have Ginny go home alone. Nights when it was just the two of them, staring at each other desperately over a gulf of silence and wondering if they had made a terrible mistake. “She went to her mum’s and I had the Aurors send me to Portugal. Then I came back, and we—learned to talk to each other. It was all right. Things work out.”
He’d never been with anyone else, ever. He’d woken up panicking over what he was going to do, he recalled. He’d got drunk and told his troubles to a woman with a red dress on in Portugal. She’d seemed to more or less agree that he was hopeless.
Malfoy was frowning, an expression that made his nose seem more pointed than ever. “I don’t see how that’s meant to be any sort of consolation to me,” he said, in a voice that was only mediumly snotty. “I’ve never had a problem talking to anyone.”
“Oh, whatever, Malfoy,” Harry said, rolling his eyes.
Malfoy finished his sandwich and reached over to put out his wand, which illuminated his face for a moment: the sewer water had left him with a streak across one cheek and his hair all over the place. One lock was falling into his eyes. For once, he wasn’t wearing an unpleasant expression. It made him look quite different.
“You know, Malfoy,” Harry said abruptly. “If you didn’t slick back your hair in that stupid way, nobody would know you were losing your hair.”
One of Malfoy’s eyebrows rose and he gave Harry a withering look. “I am not losing my hair,” he said in arctic tones. “Which means that I can wear my hair any way I please. Your eyesight’s probably just failing you in your old age, Potter. Failing you even more, I should say.”
“Whatever, Malfoy,” Harry repeated as Malfoy put out the wand, trying to get comfortable on dank stone.
“Or it’s a hallucination,” Malfoy’s voice drifted over to him in the darkness. “Those happen, you know. As your mind fails you in your old age.”
He paused, and Harry waited for it with a sense of inevitability.
“Fails you even more, I should say,” said Malfoy, and then went to sleep.
Harry woke up first. His back was killing him and when he shook out the jacket he’d been using as a pillow it was covered in green slime.
He still felt he was more sensible than Malfoy, who for some reason had not removed his dark coat and was sleeping with his hair in the slime. It was funny to see Malfoy asleep: a little unsettling. He looked younger.
“Um,” Harry said loudly. “Get up.”
Malfoy tried to snuggle into slimy stone and said something that sounded like ‘whyfor midglet.’
“Malfoy, there’s a rat beside your head.”
Malfoy sat bolt upright and said: “What! Where?”
“Come on, let’s go.”
Malfoy blinked sleepily around at the grey sewers. “Oh God, it wasn’t all some horrible nightmare,” he murmured vaguely, and got up. He was still shaking his head as if to clear it and mumbling sleepy nonsense as they splashed through yet another dank tunnel. “In a better world there would be crumpets,” was one of his offerings. “What distinctly sour-smelling hell is this? I wanted better than sewers and alligators for my only child.”
Harry stopped trying to put the sentences together so they made any kind of sense, and kind of nodded along.
It seemed like it was always twilight in the sewers, as if they were caught in a trap between day and night and time would never move on and they would never find the children. The only sound he could hear was Malfoy’s voice and the fact he was starting to find whiny nonsensical drawling soothing meant that he was going mad on top of everything else.
“I really can’t see how things could get any worse,” Malfoy said darkly. “Unless there were alligators in here with us. Oh wait.”
“We could see a rat king,” Harry volunteered.
There was a long silence.
“I know I’m going to regret asking this,” Malfoy said.
“Well, if a whole lot of rats get their tails all twisted up and stuck together with blood and dirt and—other stuff—”
“Oh God,” Malfoy said in a faint, horrified voice.
“They sort of grow together and form what’s almost a single organism, one huge, stinking seething mass of rats all—” Harry had to stop there and laugh because Malfoy’s face was so appalled.
“There’s something so wrong with you, Potter,” Malfoy said coldly. “All twisted and wrong, like rats’ tails—oh no, I can’t even think about it—” His lips twitched, though not much, as if he had to go through a dozen different tricky steps towards a smile. “Why would you—”
“I’m just trying to educate you,” Harry claimed. “Rat kings are health hazards. It is an Auror’s job to alert the public to hazard—”
Then there was another noise besides Malfoy’s drawl wavering between outrage and amusement: there was a splash.
And Harry was running, as he’d run a thousand times before when all the alarm bells in his head were ringing and he was an Auror and it was his job and it was his life but today it was his sons and there was another difference, too: there was someone running beside him.
“You draw first: you’re faster,” Malfoy said, his voice calm, planning. “I’ll shield you if—”
“Right, got it,” Harry got out, feeling breathless but better somehow, Malfoy’s shoulder solidly behind his. And then they rounded a turn on those endless sewers and there was the gleam of Scorpius’s fair hair and beside him the small dark figure of Al and rearing over them was a beast.
It might have been an alligator once, but now it was a nightmare, something pale from a hundred years of darkness with a thousand crashing sharp teeth, and then Harry lifted his wand and it went flying through the air, his only thought was to get it away from the kids, and there was the sound of a monstrous alligator hitting stone very hard.
Then all was silence.
Al and Score had turned at the sound of Harry’s spell, and seemed transfixed with astonishment. Harry still had his wand raised: Malfoy still had his shoulder behind Harry’s.
The tension of the moment broke and tall, dignified Scorpius Malfoy leaped like a spider monkey as Malfoy went down on his knees in the sewer water. Malfoy buried his face in his son’s shoulder and stroked his hair: Score was clinging around his father’s neck.
“Oh thank God,” Malfoy said in a raw, muffled voice. “I’ve been going crazy, oh thank God—”
“I knew you’d come, Dad,” said Score.
Harry stood there feeling a bit awkward in the presence of emotional displays. He wasn’t much for hugging: Ginny did that. Al hugged him sometimes, though the other two didn’t—he’d hugged him before getting on the Hogwarts Express both years so far, Harry remembered.
He stared into the grey, sewerish middle distance until he felt a touch and almost jumped, then looked down and saw Al slipping his small hand into Harry’s. Al looked up at him, green eyes wide and his smile wider, showing the chipped tooth he’d got from that plunge off the mantelpiece and Harry’s heart turned over as if it had been flipped, as simple and devastating as that.
“I knew you would come too, Dad,” Al said loyally, and then spoiled it by going on: “I thought Mr Malfoy might get here first because of the tracking spell, but I was going to ask him to wait with us for you. I didn’t know you’d be coming together. Have you been having a nice time?”
“We have been out of our minds with worry,” Harry said, more sharply than he’d intended to. “I have been frantic for you and your brother, so—”
Relief turned into fear, dry-mouthed and terrible.
“Al,” he said, and understood how Malfoy had not been able to look at that dead child because he didn’t think he could bring himself to say it. “Al,” he repeated desperately, and then managed it. “Where’s your brother?”
Al gave him a puzzled look and replied: “With the girls.”
Harry stared at him and in their mutually confused silence he heard two imperious Malfoy voices mingled.
“And what the hell d’you think you were doing, Scorpius?”
“It wasn’t me, Dad!” Scorpius protested violently. “It was all that tool James Potter’s fault!”
Malfoy had his child by the shoulders now, and was looking up into Scorpius’s face with pride and devouring love. “Of course it was,” he said. “I never doubted that for a minute. Now tell me—”
“Dad,” Score interrupted, casually commanding. “Give me your coat.”
Malfoy hesitated, and then unbuttoned his coat quickly and handed it to his son. His gaze now seemed to be fixed on the grey, sewerish middle distance: Harry didn’t see what was so embarrassing about having to take off a coat.
Score then forcibly seized Harry’s attention by walking over to them and saying, in his that deep flat voice: “Arms out.”
Al let go of Harry’s hand and obediently held them out, and Score put the coat on him, settling it around Al’s thin shoulders and then buttoning it up to his chin. “Keep that on,” he instructed. “You know you catch cold easily.”
Al beamed. “Thanks, Score.”
Score nodded curtly and strolled back to his father, who turned his head to see his son’s approach.
Grey light caught Malfoy’s naked throat and laid bare a long silver scar, starting from just under his chin and snaking along pale skin until it disappeared under the collar of his shirt.
“Oh,” said Harry.
Oh. The reason Malfoy hadn’t taken off his coat, and the way he always wore it, buttoned tight to his throat as Harry had noticed, even, at the Hogwarts platform more than a year ago, and Harry just hadn’t thought, hadn’t known.
Score’s head turned towards Harry because of the sound, the first time he’d bothered to acknowledge Harry’s presence. He did not look thrilled to see him.
“Oh. It’s you,” he drawled, and moved closer to his father, leaning heavily against him.
Malfoy, looking a little lost, looked anchored by his son’s weight, his wandering avoidant gaze settling on him. He stroked Score’s fair hair once and then said, his voice more relaxed than the set of his shoulders: “Tell me, Scorpius, what the other baby Potter has done.”
Then Harry recalled that there seemed to be something for him to be embarrassed about, and he made a vague gesture. Al, bless him, interpreted correctly and caught his hand again.
Harry said, not without a distinct feeling of foreboding: “What’s all this about your brother and girls?”