“Dad, I know this looks bad, but I can totally explain everything,” James said earnestly.
James was the image of the first James, except for one thing: he had Ginny’s big, velvety brown eyes. He was trying to use them to good effect, but Harry had got wise to that particular trick when James was four years old.
It was extremely unlikely to work when Harry was confronted with the sight of James’s most spectacular misdemeanour yet. There seemed to be about fifteen children, crammed into a dim alcove of the sewers. He ran his eye over them and saw a couple of boys whom he devoutly hoped James wasn’t trying to add to his strange thirteen-year-old harem, and then he was caught short by a flash of bushy red hair.
“Rose?” Harry exclaimed.
“Oh well, it was worth a try,” Rose Weasley said with a sigh, and climbed to her feet. She was wearing her pyjamas, as all the children were but being Rose she was also clutching a notepad and a quill. “Hello, Uncle Harry.”
“Rose, you are not even supposed to be in Durmstrang,” Harry said helplessly. “Ron and Hermione agreed on this. They’re getting Owls from Hogwarts every week. They showed me the Owls!”
Rose adjusted her spectacles—Harry and James both wore glasses, but Rose definitely wore spectacles. Harry suspected her of secretly being Percy’s child, somehow switched at birth with young Petrarch Weasley.
“Well obviously, Uncle Harry,” she said. “But you wouldn’t want me to miss an educational experience like this because of Dad’s irrational prejudices, would you? Of course you wouldn’t. I did not wish to cause them any concern: I forged my permission slip and prepared those Owls for them with the greatest of care, and nobody would be any the wiser if it wasn’t for James’s completely irresponsible behaviour.”
“Rose,” James said pleadingly, “not in front of my women.”
“Not to mention the totally unreasonable actions of Scorpius,” Rose went on with sweeping disapproval.
Harry perked up a bit.
“Insisting on chasing after Albus instead of alerting the authorities as was clearly right and proper,” Rose continued, and Harry deflated. “Let me tell you all about it,” said Rose.
Apparently James had been boasting about his many heroic deeds in the halls of Hogwarts and had won himself many admirers among the impressionable young ladies at Durmstrang. Harry was marginally relieved to gather that the couple of boys were the ladies’ irate cast-off suitors.
He was less relieved to hear that James had got carried away one night and declared his intention of battling the monster alligators of Durmstrang.
“With what, may I ask, young man?” Harry demanded.
“I don’t know,” James answered vaguely. “I thought something would turn up.”
Harry’s accusing glare made James cry: “It’s the pressure to live up to your legacy, Dad! It makes me act out!”
Unfortunately for James, Harry had got wise to that little trick when James was seven. Anyway, whatever Harry had once done with monsters and sewers, he’d never tried to bring along a fan club.
“I am amazed by the foolishness of your actions, James, and the quite dreadful danger in which you have placed others by sheer thoughtlessness. We are very disappointed in you and rest assured there will be consequences,” Rose announced.
“Yes,” said Harry “—what Rose said. Exactly.”
“You are king of the tools,” Score chipped in.
“But don’t think you’re not in trouble for deceiving your parents, Rose,” Harry said sternly. Rose gave him a look over her spectacles that suggested she was disappointed in Harry, too.
The ladies of Durmstrang seemed to have become extremely disenchanted with James, especially since Score’s provisions had been very stretched among all of them and had by now disappeared entirely. Everyone crowded around Malfoy’s bag and urgently requested sandwiches.
“Caviar, Dad,” Scorpius requested. “It’s my favourite.”
Malfoy smiled fondly down at him. “I know. I made sure the house elves packed dozens.”
Funny that Harry’d consistently got tuna, then.
“One for Potter too,” Score stipulated.
“I’m not all that hungr—” Al began.
“You will eat,” Score said, his tone brooking no argument.
“Okay,” Al said peaceably.
Then Malfoy saw one of the children diving like maddened scavengers for his bag properly, and his voice changed. “Bettina?” he said to a tiny Chinese doll of a girl. “Led astray by a Gryffindor! What would your father say?”
Bettina trembled, a fragile gossamer creature who looked like a good strong wind, let alone a mutant alligator, might do her some damage. “Uncle Draco, please don’t tell him,” she whispered. “I was wrong, I see that now. That boy’s no good, no good at all—”
Malfoy saw Harry’s inquiring glance and nodded at the tiny girl. “Potter. Bettina Goyle.”
Bettina’s mouth formed an O and she went and hid behind Malfoy, eyeing Harry with what seemed to be one part awe and three parts fear. Harry tried to think of something to say besides ‘You don’t exactly take after your father, do you?’ and settled with just nodding, which seemed to alarm Bettina further.
“Cute as a button,” James said. “Crazy for me.”
“You are in so much trouble, young man,” Harry told him.
“That is so unfair! You’ve forgotten what it’s like to be young and in love, Dad.”
“And who exactly are you in love with, James?”
“I am in love with love,” James declared. “I am a poet at heart.”
Harry noticed that a few girls sighed at James’s lofty statement, and sighed inwardly. Obviously this kind of stuff skipped a generation.
“See, Dad,” Score said. “I told you he was a tool.”
Malfoy sighed. “Sometimes I wish you would extend your vocabulary a little.”
Once everyone was fed Rose proposed that they get going. It was then Harry realised he had no idea how to get back.
“I had the tracking spell,” Malfoy said. “You couldn’t bring a map of the sewers?”
“You’re the one who’s so big on planning,” Harry snapped. “You couldn’t plan our way out of here?”
They’d stopped there because of the sixteen sets of wide childish eyes fixed on them, and the realisation that they had to be the adults and take charge of this situation, and not bicker.
“Minor delay, children,” Malfoy said. “Let’s all blame it on Potter. I think that’s fair.”
Harry would’ve objected, but it was clear the kids had taken to Malfoy and he was making them feel safe. Harry could protect them, he thought they knew that, but he wasn’t any good at reassuring them or putting his arms around them and he certainly wasn’t about to do any ridiculous impressions for them. They’d all laughed at Malfoy’s Professor Longbottom, though James had loyally tried to hide it.
The kids were worn out from days of hunger and stress. They hadn’t walked long before Harry and Malfoy glanced at each other and reached a silent decision it was best to have the children rested and relaxed, to let them sleep now, thinking the adults had it all under control.
Malfoy pretty much disappeared under a heap of children trying to sleep near a comforting adult presence. Score had to use his elbow viciously a few times to get the right shoulder, and Bettina Goyle was pretty much in his lap. James had three girls, the few but faithful, resting against him and looked rather pleased with himself.
Harry walked a perimeter and secured it, setting up a few traps for any alligators that might come for his charges. He was walking the perimeter again, testing for weaknesses, when Al trotted up to him. He was almost lost in Malfoy’s coat, the big black sleeves flapping around his arms as if he was a tiny flightless crow.
“What’re you doing?” Harry asked. “Shouldn’t you be with—Score, or something?”
“Nah,” Al said. “He’s with his dad.” He looked up, eyes so wide they looked like traffic lights. “I thought I’d come be with you.”
“Well,” Harry said. “Well, if you want.”
Al took his hand again, leaning against him. Harry wished he was a bit younger, so Harry could pick him up and carry him about just because he was tired: then it wouldn’t be an emotional thing and it wouldn’t embarrass Al or Harry himself.
“Why’d you go after James, Al?” Harry asked, throat sticking on words of tenderness. He held on to his son’s small hand, almost lost in Malfoy’s coat sleeve. “You know better than that by now. You haven’t done something like that in years.”
“I know,” said Al, his voice small and somehow precise, as if he was searching for the absolutely correct words. “But you see, Dad, it’s very important that people here don’t think I’m scared.”
“Who cares what they think, Al?”
His son’s small face was screwed up with thought. “Well, Dad, it is important,” he said. “You can’t just tell people things. You have to show them, and—involve them. That’s how they understand.”
“If they don’t understand that you’re great already,” Harry said. “The hell with them.”
“What’s the point of sending people to hell?” said Al mildly. He was so good, and so insecure: it broke Harry’s heart.
“Why would anyone think you were scared, anyway?” Harry asked. “If the kids in Durmstrang are being rotten to you, Al—”
“No, they’re not,” Al said quickly. “I’m really glad I came here. I want to go to Beauxbatons next.”
“If you get lost in some kind of swamp, I will leave you to be eaten by giant French flamingos,” Harry said. “Except I won’t really.”
“I know,” Al said. “You’d come get me. I’m learning Russian, now. Score is teaching me: he is really good at languages because he is bilingual. I know some Portuguese too, but it is army Portuguese and Score says that I should probably watch it around grown-ups. It drives James mad when we talk it in front of him, it is hilarious.”
“I know Portuguese,” Harry told him. “Picked it up while I was over there. I’ll teach you some more if you want.”
Al beamed. “Then I could write to you in Portuguese! My letters could be really secret then. You don’t show them to anyone, do you?” he asked in sudden fear. “Not even Mum. My plans are very secret.”
Harry couldn’t recall plans, just a torrent of never-ending idolatry for Score Malfoy, but Albus looked worried so he shook his head firmly.
“I’ve kept them safe. You can trust me.”
“I know, Dad,” Al said, and smiled up at him again, that sweet chipped-tooth grin, and Harry thought of that skeleton under the water, and thought of what he would’ve done, and felt wrecked by how much he loved him.
“Come on, Al,” he said. “Get some rest. You can lean on me. If you like.”
Al curled up against him in a little ball of tufty black hair and enormous black coat, his hands curled around Harry’s jacket, and went to sleep. Harry was obscurely gratified when Rose trailed sleepily over to them and took over Harry’s other shoulder. Her spectacles dropped almost off her small nose as she slept. Once Al was asleep Harry stroked his hair a little, but the movement disturbed Rose.
“Whu?” she said, peering and moving from sleep to disapproval in a moment.
“Nothing,” Harry murmured. “Go to sleep, Rosie. You’re safe now.”
Harry woke up to warmth, opened his eyes a slit and grinned to see that James had crept up on them sometime in the night, and was almost lulled back to sleep by the musical sound of children singing.
Then he actually absorbed the words.
“The Dark Lord came that day
And they asked who’d stay
And Slytherin ran away!”
There was a pause, and then a boy’s voice said: “What house are you in, Potter?”
“I think you know that, Franz,” Al’s small voice replied steadily.
Every muscle in Harry’s body coiled for a spring. He was just about to put Rose gently aside and go deal with that child when James seized him by the shirt.
“Dad,” he whispered urgently. “It’s totally frowned on to beat up kids when you’re forty.”
“Thirty-seven, and—”
“Same thing,” said James.
“And,” Harry said between his teeth, “I am not going to beat up that kid.” He was almost sure. “I’m just going to teach him a lesson.”
“And what good’s that going to be?” James hissed. “You want him to shut up just because Harry Potter told him to?”
“I want him to shut up,” Harry said. “I don’t much care why.”
“Al does.” Harry tried to pry James off his shirt, but James hung on. “Look,” James said in a low, rapid voice. “Al has all his stupid git ideas, you know? Think about it, Dad! He knows whose kid he is. He could use that himself if he wanted to—I have—”
“Oh, have you?” said Harry.
“We are not talking about me,” James said airily. “Focus, Dad! This is Al’s choice.”
Harry looked over his shoulder, briefly abandoning the attempt to wrestle James for his shirt, and didn’t care about Al’s choice. Two of the Durmstrang boys were there, towering over the small form of Albus, and one of them chose this moment to give him a terrific shove in the back. Al stumbled and might’ve fallen, if the other kid hadn’t shoved him in the other direction.
“Don’t fight, do you, Albus Severus,” said the kid, and Harry recognised the voice as Soon To Be Deceased Franz’s.
“No,” Albus said, voice going unsteady with another shove. James hung onto Harry’s shirt with his entire body weight.
“Slytherins don’t, of course,” Franz jeered. “Cowards’ house. Everyone knows that. All the other houses stayed and fought—everyone in Durmstrang would’ve stayed—but your lot ran. Bet you would too. Wouldn’t you, Potter?”
Harry’d heard the stupid skipping rhymes, of course. He’d heard James teasing Al about Slytherin, and he hadn’t thought much about it: they were just reporting fact, after all. There hadn’t been one student left at the Slytherin table.
He should’ve felt guilty about that, maybe, but all he felt just now was towering protective rage that said: No. Not my kid.
“That’s it,” Harry said. “Let me go at once, James!”
“It’s as good as over now, anyway,” James said, and let go of Harry’s shirt at the exact moment Harry saw Scorpius Malfoy bearing down on Franz like a tiny blond vision of death.
He caught Al’s elbow and held him steady, and then shoved Franz hard.
“Score, no!” Al snapped.
Scorpius’s lip curled. “I’m not going to hit him,” he drawled, and narrowed his eyes to slits, making his drawl even colder and slower. “I’m Score Malfoy,” he said. “Perhaps you’ve heard of my cunning plans?”
“I’m sure that we can resolve this by talking,” Al said.
“I don’t know what it is,” Score said reflectively. “They just always go terribly, terribly wrong.”
“It’s probably all just a misunderstanding,” Al went on.
“So if you even breathe wrong in Potter’s direction, I shall try to exact revenge on you,” Score assured them, his drawl heavy with menace. “It’ll be a simple schoolboy scheme. I won’t mean any real harm.”
“I know we’re all devoted to the cause of inter-school co-operation,” Al said.
“Nobody will be more upset than me when it all gets so tragically out of hand,” Score said. “Except perhaps you, because—”
“—And harmony,” Al said. “Harmony’s important.”
“—you will be wearing your intestines as hair ribbons,” Score said with sepulchral satisfaction. “Clear?”
“I hope we can all be friends,” Al concluded. “What d’you think?”
Franz and his friend looked very confused and a little afraid for their lives. At some point, the quality of Scorpius’s glare suggested, he would acquire a uniquely Malfoyian super power and turn them to stone with his sneer alone.
“Maybe you need time to think it over,” Al said cheerfully. “Come on, Score.”
Al walked away and Score followed him, pausing only to make a graphic slitting-throat gesture and throw a final sneer. On the whole, Harry was in complete sympathy.
It was only then, with Al removed from any sort of danger, that Harry noticed that Malfoy was awake. He had Bettina Goyle actually in his lap by now, clinging to him, and he was white as paper.
Franz and his nameless friend were ostracized thoroughly from the small children’s court of impressions and laughter that Malfoy had established the day before. Harry knew that they were children and he and Malfoy were grown men, and he was still glad. He was still seething as he walked after them, guarding the rear from alligators.
“And why didn’t you go help out your brother, James?” he demanded at one point.
“Because Score Malfoy is a crazy territorial git, is why,” James said. “Anyway, that’s not Al’s plan. He wants to like, show everyone what Slytherin can do. Durmstrang is sort of, the next step of the plan? It is totally mortifying in school, Dad, he goes and sits at the Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff tables and tells people to mingle: he is asking to get hassled.”
“Does he get hassled at the Gryffindor table, James?” Harry asked.
“Dad!” said James. “Like I’d let anyone. Come on. He’s my brother.”
Harry let himself breathe. “‘Course,” he said. “Sorry, James.”
James rumpled his hair back and winked. “I’m the only Gryffindor who gets to hassle Al. Honestly.”
“And before Al was Sorted,” Harry said. “You know, when you were saying he might get Sorted into Slytherin, that kind of thing. Did you make a lot of cracks like that at school, in your first year?”
James bit his lip. “Everybody did it, Dad.”
And that was the situation his Al had walked into, all unknowing. Harry felt another flare of that blind rage. Not my kid.
“And then there’s Score Malfoy,” Harry said slowly. “Why didn’t you tell me about—that they were friends?”
“Um,” James said, giving him a look over his glasses that said Dad was being insane. “I thought you might’ve picked it up from him coming round the house, Dad? He wasn’t there as my friend,” James added on a strange sullen note, kicking at the sewer water. “Plus there’s Al yammering on about him all the time, Score says this, Score says that, Score thinks they should have lilies and organdie at the wedding. I thought it was kind of obvious.”
“Right,” said Harry. “Wait. James, can I ask you another question?”
“One more, Dad,” James said. “It’s great talking to you and all, but Franz has his eye on one of my ladies. Eternal vigilance!”
They should never have taught James that catchphrase.
“If you didn’t come to Durmstrang to protect your brother from—well, why did you come?”
Once more his eldest born gave him a look that said James was doubting his father’s sanity.
“Three words, Dad,” he said. “Hot foreign chicks. Come on!”
They walked and Malfoy thought they were getting closer to the school. Harry wasn’t sure whether he was just saying it for the children, so he drew Malfoy aside to ask him.
“No,” Malfoy said, glaring. “I calculated it. With my mind. There’s a slope going up that used to be going down, and I’m estimating distances here. Thank you for your inquiry! I want to go set the wards now,” he added. “If alligators arrive feed those poisonous little brats to them.”
He gave Franz and his Nameless Companion a venomous look. The boys were actually starting to look really scared: Harry felt a pang of conscience mix with the ferocious furious desire to avenge Al.
“Steady on, Malfoy,” he said, with an effort.
“No,” Malfoy said. “No, I don’t think I will. It’s not your house, okay? You know nothing about it! So shut your fat mouth.”
He kept his voice low and cast a covert glance around to make sure that the children didn’t see the adults were fighting, and then gave Harry the same look he’d given Franz.
“Hey!” Harry said, outraged. “It was my son they were pushing around this morning. Don’t forget that.”
“I don’t,” Malfoy said curtly. “It’s Al’s fight too. But it’s not yours. You haven’t been much concerned with the plight of Slytherin for a good twenty years, so don’t go putting on martyred airs now. What do you think Bettina Goyle is doing here? Goyle lives in England! Half the people I went to school with, my friends, sent their kids to school overseas so they wouldn’t have to put up with torture. Heard that charming song? There are about a hundred of them, and all of them say the same thing: Slytherin ran.”
“Slytherin did,” Harry reminded him.
“Oh, the hell with you,” Malfoy spat, and whirled.
Harry heard Al’s voice in his head, small: What’s the point of sending people to hell?, reached out and grabbed Malfoy’s wrist. “Stop,” he said. “I don’t—”
Malfoy wrenched his wrist away and stared at Harry hatefully, his chest rising and falling hard.
“Pansy Parkinson teaches in Durmstrang now,” he said in a voice like broken ice, cold and sharp. “She moved countries when she was seventeen years old, away from her family and all her friends. Until Bettina came here and Goyle told me, I didn’t—I didn’t know where she’d gone. She had to come away from it all, because she was scared and she didn’t see why your life should be worth more than hers and her friends’ and she said so, and then you went out and practically died and she couldn’t live with herself. You don’t know what it’s like to do things wrong before you’ve even left school and not be able to take it back for your whole life, Potter. You cannot possibly understand.”
“I didn’t hold it against her,” Harry said. “I didn’t give it a second thought.”
“The privilege of the magnanimous victors,” Malfoy said smoothly. “How nice for you. As for Goyle and—and—they were bad at everything in school, their whole lives, and then there were spells which needed pure force and they were good at them and they were praised for it and they were used to following my lead and I was being stupid, and they were scared and trapped and they weren’t like that, all right? Not all the time, just then, just in the crisis. But that’s what the Aurors told Cr-Crabbe’s mother he was, when they came to tell her he was dead. A coward. A torturer, a traitor. That’s all he’s remembered as, and Goyle couldn’t send his daughter to Hogwarts.”
Malfoy was rubbing his wrist convulsively, as if he wanted to scrub Harry’s touch off.
“I didn’t force them to torture people,” Harry said. “Nobody did that. You didn’t do that. It was their choice.”
“And what choice did they have?” Malfoy demanded, his eyes blazing. “When were we—no, I’m sorry, that’s not right. I did things: I joined, I chose: if they blame me, they’re right. But them—my friends—my house, when were they ever offered a different choice? Anyone invite them into the precious DA? Anyone offer them entry into that bloody secret room in the last year? We were shut out! We had a head of house who was too busy crawling to Gryffindors to pay a blind bit of attention to us, we were left to the wolves!”
“McGonagall said that it was time for Slytherin to pick a side!”
“When did she say that?” Malfoy demanded. “No Slytherin I know remembers her saying that. We remember her telling us to get out.”
“She said any student of age could stay—”
“Some of their parents were Death Eaters! They’d never been given the slightest reason to believe they would be welcome on a different side, they didn’t even have friends on that side and on the other side were their families! Would it have killed her to say to the house that was as good as leaderless that we didn’t have to go—that it wasn’t too late to pick a different side? Theo Nott has wished he stayed for twenty years. There were others like him.”
Harry tried to look back over twenty years, but it was all a mess, they’d all been so desperate. He’d done his best, and won. That was the main thing, he’d thought, he still thought.
“McGonagall was about to hurl herself and her students against Death Eaters,” he snarled. “I was seventeen years old and a couple of hours later I went like a pig to the slaughter in the Death Eaters’ camp. If we got a few things wrong, if we weren’t all that careful of the Slytherins’ precious feelings, we had no time and hardly any hope! I don’t blame myself and I don’t blame her.”
He expected another accusation to be hurled at his head, but Malfoy only looked wretched and furious.
“I know,” he said. “Everyone had—a lot on their minds. Everyone was trying to do something. Maybe nobody’s to blame. I don’t know. But I know Slytherin got screwed and sometimes thinking about it makes me so angry that I want to blame you all.” His mouth twisted. “And hearing stupid little children sing their stupid little rhymes doesn’t help.”
“There I’m with you,” Harry said, and Malfoy came a couple of mouth-twists closer to a smile.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Well,” Harry said. “Okay.”
“Albus Severus,” Malfoy said. “I thought—I did hear rumours that Professor Snape was, that he wasn’t what he seemed, that it was all a big double bluff. And then Al told me his name, and I thought—it must be true.”
“Yeah,” Harry answered. “Yeah, it was.”
He wondered for a moment if he should’ve told more people about Snape. He wasn’t—Snape was dead, it hadn’t seemed to matter that much, and he hadn’t known how to put it. For love of Lily Evans the war was won? He’d thought it was better to let it lie, until he’d woken with that chant in his ears this morning.
“Oh well,” Malfoy said, a painful fraction closer to a smile. “Nobody to blame again, there. He had to desert our house for the—for the bluff, then. He was a hero. I hoped he was. I liked to think that if he could’ve, he would have helped some of them.”
Harry didn’t remember Snape seeming to care one way or another about anyone but his mum, and perhaps Dumbledore. But maybe he had, or maybe he should have.
“He was brave,” he said. “Now for God’s sake, Malfoy, let me do the wards, go off and amuse the kids. They like you better anyway.”
“Good taste, the Durmstrang lot,” Malfoy remarked, smiling at last, a crooked smile, as if weighted and complicated by any number of things, but there.
Harry went off to set up the wards.
The next day Malfoy stopped at a point where the sewers diverged into two tunnels, and was uncertain about which way to go.
The kids were already flagging.
“I’ll go on and check it out,” Harry said. “If the slope’s going up it’s the right way, am I right?”
“You’re right,” said Malfoy.
Harry thought about it for a bit, lingering awkwardly around, and finally decided to ask Al to come with him. He had to talk to him about those Durmstrang boys, and—and about these plans of his, whatever they were.
“I could use someone to walk with me,” he said eventually. “Where’s Al?”
Then he looked and saw that Al was already out for the count, black head pillowed in the crook of Malfoy’s elbow. Malfoy was looking down at him with what seemed to be quizzical surprise.
Harry felt a tug at his own elbow, and looked down into a pair of cold grey eyes.
“Don’t wake Potter,” Score Malfoy said. “I will come with you.”
Harry felt tempted to say that actually he was fine by himself, but Malfoy was watching and Score had shielded Al and given him his father’s coat.
“Ah,” he said. “Thank you.”
Score let go of Harry’s elbow and strode down a tunnel. Harry hadn’t actually picked which one he was planning to go down yet, but it seemed the choice had been made for him. After a few strides Score tossed a glance over his shoulder.
“Are you coming, Mr Potter?” he demanded.
Harry went after him, the sounds of Malfoy and the children fading behind them. Score certainly wasn’t making any sound to compensate for them. He was just striding along, head down, and Harry realised the nature of Score’s precise walk came from the same source as his tone of command. Harry felt a bit uncomfortable for having misjudged the boy, but he couldn’t explain that he’d been looking for an aristocrat and hadn’t seen the army brat.
He was the adult here. He tried to think of something to say, but he’d never really had to encourage Al to talk. He thought about what he’d have said if he was talking to James.
Harry coughed. “So, Score. How are you getting on with the, er, the ladies?”
Score gave him a single withering glance. “Mr Potter, I’m twelve years old.”
“Oh, well,” Harry said. “It’s, er, okay to be a late bloomer.”
Score snorted and it occurred to Harry, quite forcibly, that the Malfoy scion had no manners.
“Are you always this rude?” he demanded.
Score gave him a frosty look. “No,” he drawled. “I just think you’re a tool.”
Malfoy was right, Scorpius did need to learn a new word.
He’d been trying to get Scorpius to talk and unfortunately, it seemed he’d succeeded brilliantly. Score was talking, his drawl becoming more vicious with every word, and there seemed to be no way to shut him up now.
“You make my dad unhappy and everybody talks about you as if you’re some kind of god and I don’t think you even read Potter’s letters,” Score said furiously. “He’s doing all this for you and you don’t even care.”
Harry gave up trying to find a way to say that a hundred issues of ‘The Nations Have Accepted Scorpius Malfoy as their God King’ were quite a slog to get through, and instead snapped: “Doing what?”
“And I’ll tell you something else,” Score said, eyes glittering. “We were all stuck down here and that tool kept saying that you’d come and everyone else believed him but I didn’t want you to come. I never heard any stories about you when I was little and I don’t want to. I don’t need you to come save me, not ever. Everyone says Slytherins are cowards but I’ve never been scared of anything in my whole life. No matter what happened, I knew my dad would come!
“And my dad did come,” Score said with finality. “He always comes. That was what he told me when I was small, when everyone else was wasting their time telling stories about you. He said that he’d always, always be there, and he always is. Everyone else might think they need you to save them, but I don’t need you at all. So there.”
There was a short silence.
“It seems pretty odd to me,” Harry said, his voice clipped, “that with the kind of opinion of me you have, you bothered to make friends with Al at all.”
“I didn’t plan on it,” Score shot back. “I knew your kids were going to be in school and Dad said, don’t let them bother you, and I know that meant he’d’ve preferred me to stay away from them. I was going to. I wasn’t going to talk to them at all.”
Now that Score was talking so much more than Harry had ever heard him talk before, Harry could hear that part of the heavy drawl was a trace of a foreign accent.
“Sounds like an excellent plan,” Harry bit out. “What happened?”
He looked down at the extremely judgemental child, and was astonished to see him smile. If he’d thought about Scorpius’s smile, he would’ve expected a smile like Malfoy’s, complex and crooked and hard to win, but Score smiled easily and almost sweetly.
“Potter defeated me with his weirdness,” Score said. “That’s what happened.”
“I don’t understand.”
Score hesitated and then said: “He came running through all the train carriages. He said he was looking for someone who thought they’d be Sorted into Slytherin. I was—curious. So I said I thought I would be, and Potter told me that he’d been getting sick in the bathroom and thinking about something you said to him on the platform. That Potter was named after a brave Slytherin.”
All roads led to Snape today, apparently. Harry tried to remember exactly what he’d looked like, but the memory swirled away as if someone was stirring the Pensieve. All that came to him was the sight of black, bitter eyes, and a door closing.
“Potter said he thought that if there was someone you thought was brave, then it wasn’t right that people talk about Slytherin the way they do. He said he was going to do something about it.”
So that was the plan: this was Al’s crusade. They’d obviously exposed him to Hermione at a young and impressionable age, and this was the result.
“I didn’t know,” Harry said helplessly.
Score looked like he wanted to kick him. “I knew you didn’t read his letters!”
“At least I write back to him!”
Harry felt ashamed of snarling at a child even before Score went white, in that near-grey way Malfoy did. “I tried,” Score said. “It kept coming out wrong. I sent him a jumper—”
“I’m sorry,” Harry said at once. “He wears it all the time.”
“Good,” Score replied. “He catches cold so easily.”
“Look,” Harry said. “I love him, all right? I don’t always get it right, but I want to.”
He didn’t remember saying he loved Al before, not out loud. It was easier than he’d thought it would be. He’d never told Al: he was sure Al knew.
“Oh well,” Score said, sounding somewhat mollified. “That’s all right, then. Dad says that you should always try, even if you’re scared of failing. He says you should work out what you want to do and then really try.” He paused and added speculatively: “Besides, you never had parents, did you? So I expect it’s quite hard for you to work out. Because your parents are dead,” he added, as if to make things perfectly clear.
“Um,” Harry said.
Score nodded sagely. “My grandfather died before I was born, but I always thought he must’ve been pretty good at it. Being a dad, that is. My dad’s really good, the best, and he must have learned it somewhere.”
“I think your dad picked up a few new things,” Harry said.
Score glanced up at him warily, and then nodded again.
Harry thought he might have an idea about what would make Score Malfoy talk. “So you and Al, you get on pretty well, then?”
Score nodded a third time. “I always wanted a brother, only Mum says she’s a bit old for babies. But that’s all right now.”
“Er, Al already has a brother,” Harry pointed out. And he certainly didn’t talk about James as if he was the glorious sunrise in human form. Harry would have been incredibly disturbed if he had.
“Yes, but he’s a tool,” Score explained patiently.
“You’re not all that keen on tact, are you, Scorpius?”
“No,” Score said frankly. “Mum says I take after her. She says she’d rather shoot them all than use diplomacy. Dad is very good at talking. He used to worry about me saying stuff, tried to coach me for when I got to go to Hogwarts and have friends. But Potter gets it, so that’s all right now too.”
“And your other friends, the ones beside Al?”
“Oh them,” Score said in an uninterested tone. “Yeah, well. Whatever. There are plenty of people around, and nobody ever hassles me about being in Slytherin because I’m tall and better at Quidditch than anybody. Also I would unleash my cunning plans on them.”
“You come by those honestly,” Harry remarked.
“Dad says the plans get better,” Score said. “I hope so, they cause awful messes about now. Weasley got very tetchy about it that one time the sky fell.”
“The sky what?”
“Not the sky,” Score temporised. “Just seemed like that at the time. Just the ceiling of the Great Hall.” He brooded about that for a second, and then offered: “It’d probably be a problem if I made the sky fall when Potter is Minister for Magic.”
“When Al is what?”
“You really need to start reading those letters,” Score Malfoy said, and then enunciated as if Harry was a bit slow. “Minister—for—Magic. You know. So he can—effect social changes, he says. Someone has to take responsibility, he says.”
“He is twelve years old!”
“He’s going to be a prefect first, obviously,” Score said. “Then Head Boy. By then people should be thinking a bit differently about Slytherin. Potter’s plans are good, I think,” he added. “Dad always said to find something I really believed in. I think Potter’s plans might do. And it’s handy that Potter’s campaign trails and stuff will be on in the Quidditch off-season. So I can come with him. He gets sick, you see. He likes me to be with him. It was a shame that time we had to miss the Tornados, though.”
Harry would have started feeling extremely ashamed of himself if he hadn’t been too overcome by the idea of Al becoming Minister for Magic.
“It’s not about choosing sides anymore, Potter says. It’s about making people come together. That’s the plan he told me on the way to Hogwarts. We shook on it. Then he had to go get sick again.” Score blinked up at Harry. “It’s a good plan. Potter’s smart.”
“Tell me more about it.”
“Well,” Score drawled, looking a little exhausted by all the talking but willing to labour until he found the right way to say it. “Well, Potter says—”
And Harry, feeling extremely bewildered but not altogether displeased, walked on and realised he and Scorpius were in fact going the right way and listened to Score deliver a speech that could basically be defined as How the Nations of the World Would Gather Together To Acclaim Al Potter As Their God King.
Then they heard the scream.
“Al,” Harry said, knowing that scream down to his bones, at the same time that Score said: “Potter,” and they both started to run, splashing and stumbling, every moment expecting another scream.
They found stillness. All the children were cowering against the furthest wall except for Al and Franz: Al had clearly knocked Franz flat on his back in the sewer water and was standing in front of him. The sleeve of Malfoy’s coat was torn: Al’s arm was bloody.
In front of them stood Malfoy, wand in hand. There were pieces of alligator painted on the walls, sinking into the sewer water. He turned to the sound of their approach with his lip curled into what was almost a snarl, hair in his eyes, blood on his face. Harry was pretty damn sure it wasn’t his.
Then he saw it was them, and his shoulders relaxed. “I don’t know how you do it, Potter,” he said, his voice strangely calm. “It’s much harder to keep track of them when there’s more than one.”
“It’s all right, Mr Potter,” Scorpius said with restored calm, as unlike Malfoy’s calm as a glacier was unlike thin ice. “Dad used Sectumsempra. He’s very good at that. Practises it all the time.” There was a vaguely worried edge to his voice as he added: “Doesn’t like using it, though.”
Harry’s moment of stunned stillness was broken by James stumbling towards him with his face pale.
“I didn’t,” he said. “Dad, I didn’t see, I would’ve, it all happened so fast. That idiot Franz went wandering and then Al went after him—”
“It’s all right, James,” Harry said automatically, and then Score Malfoy’s voice cut through the air like a scythe.
“Prepare yourself,” he drawled, “for a world of pain.”
James’s hesitating movements went purposeful, eyes going dark behind his glasses. “A universe,” he corrected.
Harry caught Malfoy’s eye and both of them lunged and stopped their sons’ curving descent upon the hapless Franz, seizing their collars and pulling them backwards.
“Thank you, Dad, Mr Malfoy,” said Al, at which point Score’s vehement struggle to free himself from Malfoy’s grasp ceased.
Franz was on his feet by now, looking like he expected death by alligator or cunning plan at any moment. He looked surprised when it was only Al coming towards him, green eyes intent.
“Thank—” he began, and Al shook his black head.
“Don’t thank me,” he said, and reached out with his injured arm and shoved Franz, quite gently. Franz stumbled all the same: Al had left a bloody handprint on his shirt. “Just think,” Al went on quietly. “Think very carefully, before you call a Slytherin a coward again.”
He turned away in the silence and Score came running. Harry knelt down to see Al’s arm and Score started casting healing spells with the calm professionalism of a boy used to war wounds, the skin knitting under his wand.
“Lucky Mr Malfoy’s coat was so big on me, really,” Al said cheerfully. “The alligator mostly went for the big flailing sleeve. Don’t fuss, Score.”
“Don’t move, you idiot,” Score barked.
Al whispered: “So the bloody handprint? Too much?”
“A nice touch, I thought,” Malfoy said in a shaky voice, and Score and Al shared a grin.
“Al!” Harry exclaimed, scandalised.
Al looked at him with wide guileless eyes and smiled that big chipped-tooth grin. “Dad,” he said. “Slytherin, remember?”
Score wiped the blood away from Al’s skin with care, hands as gentle as his voice was decidedly not.
Harry’s evolving dark suspicions about his child and the way his child, now he came to think of it, so often got his own way when it really mattered, were brought up short by the swift anxious way Score then turned to his father.
“Do you want to get sick?” he asked. “It helps Potter.”
“No,” Malfoy answered, his voice back to that fragile calm. “No, Scorpius. I’m perfectly all right. I think I’m going to go wash up a little.”
He turned and walked away. Harry was planning to follow him, have a talk perhaps, but he saw that most of the children seemed to have the same idea and were all coming after them, Score in the lead.
Malfoy had quite an audience as he spelled a puddle of sewer water as clean as he could, and then washed the blood off his face. He was shaking and he ignored them all as he pushed his sleeves up to his elbows and tried to get the blood off his hands.
That was when the shocked gasp echoed through the tunnels from a dozen childish throats.
They all knew what the Dark Mark meant.
Malfoy looked like a hunted animal for a moment, crouched by the pool, the kind of animal that became savage when hunted and went for throats. Then Score strode out in front of Harry and stood before his father, facing the other children down, and Al went with him.
Harry looked around and was not much surprised to see the children filing quickly away from Score’s baleful gaze. Rose, with a silent tact Harry was a bit surprised by, was shepherding them all quietly away and making sure that they didn’t go far. She was also holding terrified-looking Bettina Goyle’s hand.
James was the only child left beside Harry. Score’s eyes narrowed in his direction.
“What’re you looking at?” he spat. “Go on, get lost.”
“I was just,” James began.
Score came down upon him like the wrath of God, shoving at him. “Well, don’t just!”
James shoved back. “I wasn’t even—”
“Yeah, well, mind you don’t!”
“Yeah? Oh yeah?” James said. “Come and have a go, then, if you think—”
There was the sound of a splash and James squawking. Harry transferred his attention to Al, who was standing quietly by Malfoy.
“You don’t look very surprised,” Malfoy observed, pulling his sleeves down with his shaking hands.
“No,” Al said simply. “Me and Score tell each other everything, you see.”
“Ah,” said Malfoy, and then he swallowed and went on: “I don’t mind paying for what I’ve done—well, I do mind, I hate it, but I see that it’s fair. It’s—”
“Not Score,” Al said, certain as the sun. “I’ll see to it. It wasn’t just Slytherin who missed out—everyone missed out on them, too. Slytherin’s starting new again. You’ll see. Everybody’s going to see.”
Incredibly, that called forth Malfoy’s crooked smile. He looked up at Al almost uncertainly. “Going to save the world, then?”
“Nah,” Al said, grinning in return for Malfoy’s smile. “My dad did that. It doesn’t need saving.” He hesitated for a moment, a little shy, and then said: “I’m going to change it.”
That made Malfoy laugh, a bit shakily and not at Al. “Good luck with that.”
Al nodded and slipped away from Malfoy then as he did from grown-ups he didn’t know all that well, back to the refuge of Score, who at the moment seemed to be doing his level best to drown Al’s brother.
“All right, Potter?” Malfoy asked somewhat sharply. “Just taking in the scenery, are we?”
“You know,” Harry said slowly, “I get that you’re all torn up about whatever happened when we were seventeen, but it was a long time ago. Time to let it go, you know? Besides, you’re really starting to annoy me.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Get off the cross, Malfoy, we need the wood,” Harry said heartlessly. “I didn’t save the world just so you could mope about it.”
“I do not mope!”
“I can’t have you pitching a fit every other minute,” Harry went on. “I have to work out whether my youngest son is a sweetheart or a mastermind.”
“He can be both,” Malfoy said. “He’s a good kid.” He climbed to his feet, and added: “Your other one, however, is kind of a tool.”
“James is not a tool,” Harry said sternly, and then went to rescue him. James was dripping wet, so Harry gave him his jacket.
“I didn’t even say a word about his father!” James hissed. “Crazy! He’s crazy!”
He accepted the jacket and huddled against Harry a bit too. Rose slept against him that night as well.
The children were a bit wary of Malfoy, but Al and Score sat on either side of him and Bettina clung to him as soon as he returned to her side.
“I don’t care what they say, Uncle Draco. My dad says you’re a hero: he says you saved his life during the war.”
“He did,” Harry said fairly. “I was there.”
Malfoy went pink. Bettina regarded him with shining eyes.
“Of course, Potter had to save both our lives about thirty seconds later,” Malfoy drawled.
“You did, Dad?” James said, lifting his damp head from Harry’s shoulder. His hair was sticking out in all directions and he looked mildly surprised. “I always thought you thought Mr Malfoy was kind of a tool.”
Harry felt it was time for James to learn a life lesson. “It’s not OK to leave someone to die just because you think they’re a tool, James.”
“I would leave you to die,” Score assured James in his deep, unhurried drawl. “Except that it would upset Potter.”
“Same here,” said James.
Malfoy did some more impressions and the children gathered closer to him again, wariness dissipating like memory in time.
Al came back to Harry with Score in tow.
“Dad’s impressions are so mortifying,” Score said, with that easy smile. “I think he’s feeling better.”
“How are you feeling?” asked Harry.
Score blinked at him. “Fine. Dad’s nervy and Mum’s shouty, so I think there should always be someone who, you know, keeps their head.”
“So you’re—Zen about things,” Harry said, frowning, at which point a very pretty little girl with curly hair and glowing brown skin turned her head and said: “Yes?”
They all stared.
“Xenophilia Clio Thomas,” she said. “People call me Zen. Well, they have to, don’t they?”
Harry’d thought Dean and Luna lived in England, and said so.
“Well, yes,” Zen admitted. “But Mum wasn’t all that happy at Hogwarts, you know. She thought it might be nice for me to have friends before I was in fourth year. Of course, Mum also said that these alligators were probably vegetarian and friendly, and I think she might’ve been wrong about that one.”
“Do not worry,” James said grandly. “I will protect you.”
“Tool,” Scorpius said automatically, mostly looking at his father with a shade of concern on his face. Malfoy was offering to sing the children something now, and Scorpius looked pleased.
Then he saw Harry looking.
“Dad’s high-strung,” he said by way of explanation. “We think that’s why he’s losing his hair.”
Unfortunately Malfoy caught that.
“I am not losing my hair, you are all having some kind of mass hallucination from the sewer fumes,” he said. “You should worry about that.”
Later Malfoy sang them a Portuguese lullaby. Score had conceived a cunning plan and Al and Rose had talked it over and figured out how to make it work, and Harry and Malfoy had cast the actual spells because children shouldn’t play with fire. There was a little campfire bobbing on the sewer waters now.
Most of the children were asleep, James and Rose with their heads together and their glasses in a tangled little heap between them. Score and Al were sitting quietly near the fire, having one of their conversations which involved Al talking fifty times more.
“But we can’t stop there, Score, don’t you see? There are the goblins to consider. We have to stop the oppression of the goblins.”
“If you like,” said Scorpius indulgently, clearly regarding stopping the oppression of the goblins as a special treat for Al.
Al sighed, a small sleepy sigh, and settled back comfortably against Scorpius.
Malfoy was still singing, softly: Harry was pretty clear on the fact that Malfoy didn’t know Harry understood Portuguese, and pretty clear that Malfoy was singing to his son alone. He looked at the intent love in the gaze Malfoy had trained on Scorpius, and then surprised the exact same look on Score Malfoy’s face, directed at Al’s tufty black head.
It wasn’t just Slytherin who missed out—everyone missed out on them, too.
Smart kid, his Al.
“Almost there now. Everyone keep their eyes out for the grille,” Malfoy ordered.
“Once we’re there, we’ll Levitate you up,” Harry told the children as they splashed along the last few paces.
“You will,” Malfoy told him briefly. “I have a problem with Levitation charms.”
“There was once a donkey with our provisions on it and a cliff,” Scorpius drawled, apparently under the delusion that he was contributing helpfully to the conversation. “The donkey just went splat. Mum was really annoyed.”
“On second thoughts,” Malfoy said dryly. “Scorpius is my responsibility, and I will Levitate him.”
“Oh, Dad,” Score said, shaking his head and laughing up at him. “I—”
That was when they heard the noise.
“Scorpius,” Malfoy said, cutting him short. “You know what to do!”
Harry already had his wand out: he relaxed a fraction when he felt Malfoy’s shoulder pushed hard against his own and realised that Malfoy did too. He heard Scorpius’s voice issuing commands, Rose giving instructions and Al coaxing the other children away to a safe distance.
“Same plan as before?” Malfoy murmured.
“Got it,” Harry said.
Then the grille exploded from above, bringing down a cloud of dust and small stones.
As the dust cleared, a figure was revealed in a square of light. As through a mist features of classic perfection were revealed, high cheekbones and dramatic good looks accentuated by hair that was currently a deep, electric blue.
“Don’t worry, children, I’m here to rescue you,” said the Auror. “The name’s Lupin. Teddy Lupin.”