Jewel of the Harem: The Grindelwald Continuum Book One

Chapter 13.

Consent.

There's a valley of sorrow in my soul
Where every night I hear the thunder roll
Like the sound of a distant gun
Over all the damage I have done
And the shadows filling up this land
Are the ones I built with my own hand...
There's a river of darkness in my blood
And through every vein I feel the flood.

--Emmylou Harris, Prayer in Open D.

A man's got to know his limitations.

--Clint Eastwood, High Plains Drifter.

A/N: "Requiem for Draco's Dream" is up at AT. Check it out if you haven't already.

http://www.astronomytower.org/restrictedsection/fic.php?fic=at:/authors/anise/RFDD.html

When you get to the end of this chapter, there's also a brand spankin' new special treat waiting for you at the Astronomy Tower! Keep reading to find out.

There is wonderful fanart of Pansy and Narcissa in the PoF group by the immensely talented StarEyes for this chapter... just click on the link a couple of pages down. And of Pansy and Draco in the hypocaust... THEN, there's also unbelievably amazing fanart for the infamous "When Draco Can't Sleep" sequence near the end. Trust me, D/G shippers, you do NOT want to miss that one. Don't worry! It's PG-13! (The art is, anyway.)

For all who were concerned that Draco was getting too fluffy and was shortly going to dissolve into a pastel marshmallow...this has all been part of a plan; an evil plan, of course, mwah ha. Draco Malfoy at Yule 1996 is the result of many factors, events, and interactions with people that have occurred in the JotH universe since the end of GoF, some positive, some not. In the next several chapters, a lot of these (although not all, not YET) will be revealed. They wouldn't have happened at all if not for the fact that Voldemort fell too far ever to rise again in May 1995, when Harry defeated him during the third task. However, the true inciting incident, to borrow a screenwriting term, happened during Christmas 1995. And that's what this chapter is about. The RESEARCH done for this... (whimpers) I thought long and hard about the portrayal of Lucius Malfoy and the Malfoys in general that we start to see in this chapter, and I think it's really hinted at in canon. Too long to go into here. Email me if you really want to know why I think so. I couldn't resist describing Michelangelo Antonioni's classic Godfather lighting in the library scene. Every filmed gangster scene since then has ripped it off, and now I have, too. ;) And find the GWTW quote for ten points...

A word to the wise:I just read an incredibly fluffy D/H fic and I think it traumatized me; it was like swimming through a vat of cotton candy. Maybe it influenced "Consent" by driving it further towards non-fluffiness. And JotH's 1995-era Draco is pretty non-fluffy, although he does have his scruples, as he finds out in this chapter. I'm sorta trying to provide a warning without giving away what happens (which is probably making you expect something a lot worse than what does happen,) but you need to be prepared for an extremely non-redeemed Draco. Please understand, though, that nothing is gratuitous. It's all here for a reason. Blaise Zabini's bed-elf is borrowed from Essayel's fics, originally invented by Camilla Bloom. ;) And many thanks to Kevin for much-needed insight into the, ahem, aforementioned WDCS scene, which helps the chapter to so richly earn its R and WAS edited down from a version that cannot be posted here. (He'd DIE if he knew I was thanking him by name in a fanfic.)

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At the end of 1995, at the Yule celebrations at Malfoy Manor to which Draco's dream took him, and the source of his searing memories of his sixteenth birthday, it was, for the Malfoys, the best of times, and the worst of times. Their master, Lord Voldemort, had fallen too far to ever rise again; that was true. Yet they had clawed their way from suspect lineage and shady dealings to true respectability, crowned by the presence of Narcissa von Drachen at Lucius Malfoy's side. Their wealth and influence were formidable. Draco was proving satisfactory in every way, a worthy heir to the legacy left by Michel and Gabriel. There was still much that might be redeemed, and many plans that might be shaped and tried. Whatever failings the Malfoys possessed, lack of adaptability was not one of them. Without that quality, they would never have attained the heights they had.

For the old guard of the wizarding aristocracy in Britain, however, it was the end of an age. For the world had changed, and they had not changed with it. They had always known that their Muggle counterparts, no matter how rich, no matter how titled, were upstarts when put up side by side with them. They themselves were unknown to all but a chosen few, and absent from the pages of Debrett's Peerage, but in the olden days, they had stood in the shadows behind thrones, and wielded the true power. Royalty might fade and fail; the ruling class might come and go, but they were inviolate. Or so they still liked to believe. But this was not quite the truth, and even they were being forced to realize it, however reluctantly. Otherwise, as they tended to remind each other, a jumped-up peasant like Lucius Malfoy would still be scratching a living from the rocky soil of the Pyrenees.

They dressed alike, spoke alike, and moved alike; played the same games, attended the same shooting parties and dinner parties and formal balls and intimate gatherings at country places. Their handwriting, on parchment stamped with ancient family seals, was elegantly similar. They all behaved as if they had shared the same nanny, and that was not so far from the truth, since only the very best line of house-elves had ever served their class. Yet their contradictions were legion. In them, the modern and the medieval walked hand in hand, sometimes intertwined in ways that might have been difficult for a late twentieth-century Muggle to imagine. They sent their children to co-educational schools, but technology of any kind was forbidden to them, including computers, fax machines, copiers, and even mechanical pencils. They travelled across continents in the twinkling of an eye, but wrote on parchment with quill pens and regarded cars and airplanes with a mixture of horror and scorn.

Witches had no future but marriage, and they were, to say the least, not encouraged to pursue careers. Those were for the dreadfully common, such as the dreary fifth cousin of the Earl of Kildare, what-was-her-name, Minerva McGonagall? There was always respectable work for women's hands, such as arranging hospital benefits designed to aid the unfortunates at St. Mungo's, or organizing tea dances for the Society for the Protection of Orphaned Pure-Blooded Children. And then there were the dinner parties, and the formal balls, and the fact that house-elves simply weren't what they used to be. Women, too, were the secret-keepers, guarding any unpleasant family truths about alcoholism, drug addiction, madness, homosexuality, the occasional werewolf or vampire who would surface in the best of families, and any vague Muggle or halfbreed ancestry. That was quite, quite enough work for them to do. And yet one of the ancient rights that witches had once enjoyed did remain, and it was probably the last, although only the upper class of purebloods still clung to it. They shared their bodies with whomever they chose, although this generally manifested itself as rampant, bored promiscuity. But it was acceptable, so long as it was kept discreet, and sexual activity started early.

And they believed themselves to be the last guardians of old ways, old times. But they had forgotten much more than they knew about what the old ways had truly been, and the old magic. In truth, they had drifted further than they could have imagined from what they had once been, in the days of Druids and sacred oaks, of Avalon and Arthur, before the Romans had come to their land. Now, some of them followed dark paths, and some did not. Some had despised Voldemort as the worst sort of upstart, and some had enslaved themselves to him, seeing him as the salvation of purebloods. Some of them were despairing at the Dark Lord's fall, and some of them were glad, but all were unsettled, not knowing who-- or what-- might replace him.

Insular, snobbish, and fearful, they were a testament to that curious world which had produced them, the upper-crust wizarding aristocracy of Great Britain in its fading days. And always, the Malfoys were on the outside looking in at these people. But they, the class that had written so much of the secret history of the world, knew that the world as it had been threatened to close. For some reason that nobody as yet understood, Lucius Malfoy held the key. So even as they despised him, they came to his parties, and gave gifts to his son.

Some of this, Draco understood. Most of it, he did not. At least, not then. Yet even if he did not understand, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that, deep in his bones, he knew.

At any rate, it was to this night that Draco's dreams had come, this night of his birthday one year before. It was a night, a week, and a month that he tried never to think of in his waking life, the end of 1995, and the beginning of 1996. But then his dreams had seemed to run wild since he stepped through the tower and into the sixteenth century a few days before. He thought of that, vaguely, as he fell into sleep, one arm around Ginny Weasley, breathing in the smell of her hair, still flowerlike. It had begun after he walked with the tall, dark man in the forest, the one whose cloak whipped around him, even though there was no wind, and whose dark eyes were fathomless. Lord Morpheus. Oneiros. The King of Dreams. He reached out his hand and touched me, and my dreams have done their own will ever since... if only I could really remember what happened when he did... But sleep claimed Draco then, and his dreams went their own way, and remembered something else.

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Draco sat very still, legs curled under him in the window seat of his room at Malfoy Manor, carefully laying out a game of chess with the carved soapstone pieces on the green marble board. He looked past the drawn green velvet drapes with their heavy cloth-of-gold swags to the snow-covered fields beyond, slowly toying with the pawns. They were starting to grumble.

"This is the nineteenth game you've begun today, dear," the white queen pointed out as he pushed her from square to square. "Do you think you'll finish this one?"

"When I want your opinion, I'll ask for it," he said absently.

"Humph." She contented herself with a sniff. All of the white pieces tended to have attitude problems, since it amused Draco to invariably lay out his solitary chess games so that black won.

The painting his mother had given him for his birthday hung on the opposite wall, and Draco gazed at it, rolling the chess knights in his fingers. Roses, roses in every shade of pink and white and red and peach, their great daubs of color hot, fleshlike, shocking, the stems stabs of green, their forms twisted and almost tormented, yet striving for grace and somehow achieving it. The sight was at once soothing and violent, comforting and disturbing. It was one of the artworks that Vincent van Gogh had sold to wizards near Auvers before his death, one of those that Muggles had never seen or catalogued. It made him want to draw, but he still felt too restless to even open a sketchbook.

The faint sounds of music, of laughter, of subdued chattering filtered up to this room from the rest of the house. From attic to dungeons, every room had been turned out for the party. And, as always, it was an enormous party. The invitations had arrived at the homes of the guests weeks before, engraved in silver ink on heavy green linen paper, a tiny green butterfly flitting out of each when it was opened. The cream-laid envelopes with the silver Malfoy crest didn't include a request for a response. If one were asked, one attended.

There were probably well over a hundred people here now, Draco thought, and that was only because the guest list had been severely curtailed, as it always was. He'd sat in the front turret room earlier that evening and watched the procession of carriages pull up the drive, watched the people disgorged from them. He recognized most of the teenagers better than he would have liked to do. There was Goyle, and behind him, Crabbe, both looking remarkably sullen at being bundled into dress robes. Crabbe absolutely had to be almost two metres high by now; Draco wondered idly if the other boy ever planned to stop growing. There was Blaise Zabini, looking very suave in something tailored and black as he helped Xanthia Morgan out of a carriage. Draco had been forced to make it quite clear to Blaise that year that he had no plans to vacate their fifth-year shared room every time Xanthia was in a slutty mood. A word to the wise was sufficient; a not-so-veiled reference to Lucius Malfoy's displeasure at his son continually enduring disturbed sleep had been enough to make Blaise gulp, and start looking for unused dungeons. Never mind that there was less and less sleep to disturb; he wasn't about to go blabbing his problems to Blaise or anyone else...And there was Sadina von Tussel... David Lestrange... Thomas Nott. Then Zabini turned towards someone else stepping down from the carriage, his hand lingering on her arm. A dark head tossed in a certain coquettish way that its owner invariably thought was irresistible; a petite, graceful body, a silvery laugh Draco could hear wafting up to him through the brittle, cold night air. Pansy Parkinson. If there was any sight in the world calculated to make him want to stay locked in the turret all night long, that was it. But, of course, he couldn't.

They'd barely spoken another word to each other for the rest of the train trip a few days before, and he'd seen her off at King's Cross with a deep sense of thankfulness that he'd have nearly a week's respite from her, at least. But even after Draco had come home, his head never would leave off aching. He'd allowed an estate healer-elf to bandage his wrist properly and then lain on his bed, looking up at the carved wooden underside of its canopy. He would have far preferred to go to Linz for the holidays, but such was apparently not to be, and although he did wonder why not, he was too tired to try his normal circuitous routes of finding out that sort of information. Draco felt weirdly exhausted after the train journey, as if he'd had to get out and push the cars the entire way. The image of Ginny Weasley glaring up at him would not leave his mind, and he kept replaying and replaying that moment when her bravado had turned to fear. There was some subtle aspect of it that continued to escape him, and so tormented his inner eye without ceasing.

Narcissa had brought him the guest list to approve just before they left for Lourdes. They were in the library, and she took it from the desk and tapped it with a quill. The parchment kept expanding and expanding until it made Draco feel dizzy just to look at it, yet he kept reading the list, feeling as if he were performing some unending nightmarish task in a dream. This was his responsibility, and this sort of thing would increasingly become so, he supposed. He didn't have anything to say about the adults, of course; Draco couldn't have cared less one way or the other about that anyway, but rather his schoolmates, the children of his mother's friends and his father's acquaintances. "S'all right, Mother," he said, rubbing his head. "So far as I can see." Draco grimaced at Pansy Parkinson's name; how he wished he could bar her from coming within a kilometre of the place, but he didn't think he could quite get away with that one. Narcissa had returned to the hall to supervising the house-elves at their packing then, and Lucius looked questioningly at his son.

"Nothing," mumbled Draco. "It's nothing."

"Is there anyone we've failed to include?"

He had a sudden, absolutely mad impulse to say, "Ginny Weasley." This anti-migraine charm must have stranger side effects than he thought.

"Or perhaps, " Lucius continued, "someone on the guest list that you don't wish to see?"

"No," said Draco, less than convincingly. But his father continued to look at him, and he recognized as the particular look that demanded honesty. He weighed his options, and decided that it was worth a try. "I'd enjoy a rather happier birthday if I didn't have to have Pansy Parkinson there."

"Ah." Lucius measured Draco with a glance. This was the look that always made him feel as if he had no secrets, that nothing could be hidden from his father, nothing concealed. It made his head ache more fiercely than ever. "Have the two of you... quarrelled?" Lucius continued.

"Not exactly."

"It doesn't matter. The Parkinsons need to be included, at any rate."

"Well... why?"

Silence, in which Lucius merely continued to look at him, one eyebrow raised.

"I'm sorry, Father," Draco mumbled, feeling anything but. A tiny, spiked hammer pounded between his eyes, behind his forehead, each stroke more vicious than the last.

"For what, precisely?"

"I don't know. Where's the rest of that Naproxis potion?"

Lucius snapped his fingers in the direction of a house elf without looking at it. With a nod and a slight pop, the elf disappeared. "If you're going to be sorry for anything, Draco," he said, "you ought to be sorry that you've never learned the correct protocol for these sorts of events. There are those who must be invited, regardless of what our personal feelings may be in regards to them. This is the kind of thing you're going to need to learn, you know."

"Yes. I know." Hopefully, the elf would hurry up.

Lucius looked at his son appraisingly. "You only learn what interests you, don't you, Draco?"

The boy flushed. "Well... I suppose so."

"That's not precisely news to me," Lucius said. "Or to anyone else who's ever seen your grades."

Draco toyed with a little gyroscopic elf on the library desk, next to the quills. It turned and nearly toppled, righting itself with a faint giggle. "So what does that mean?" he asked the inlaid parquet floor. "Am I stupid? Is that it, is that what you're trying to say, Father?"

"No... you're anything but stupid, although there was a time when I wondered if--" Lucius hesitated. "Do you remember the summer you were nine years old, when Narcissa took you into London to be tested?"

"Yes." The trip to the private offices of the Muggle psychiatrists on Harley Street had been fun, as Draco recalled; most of the tests had been more like playing games, and all of them had been easy. "Those were intelligence tests, weren't they?"

"How did you know?"

"It wsn't very difficult to figure out, Father. Do give me some credit." Draco rolled the elf over, tickling it with his finger. "But nobody ever told me what any of the results were-- so I thought that meant, well--"

" I didn't particularly want news to get about our circle that I'd sent my son for Muggle intelligence testing," said Lucius. "The wizarding world has never devised adequate tests in that area. But a wise man is never unwilling to use what his inferiors have to offer. You're old enough now, I think, to understand the need for discretion. At least, I sincerely hope so."

"So are you going to tell me what the results were?" Draco asked truculently, trying to hide the interest in his voice.

"I don't remember all of them anymore, not offhand. But your full-scale intelligence quotient was, as I recall, over one hundred eighty."

"And that's--" Damn, he should know what that score meant. He was sure that Ziggy had mentioned something about intelligence testing during one of the long conversations they'd had in the von Drachen library, that summer. But modern Muggle studies really never had interested him in the slightest, and although Draco cudgelled his brain, he could remember nothing. "Well, it's good, isn't it? Means I'm not stupid?"

"I believe you already knew that." Lucius looked shrewdly at his son. "You're brilliant, Draco. You have what might well be the finest mind I've ever encountered."

It was perhaps the second or third compliment his father had ever given him in all his life. At the shock of hearing it, Draco could think of no words to say in reply.

"But you have no discipline," Lucius continued. "Mental, or any other sort. No order. No organization. And I am afraid that you may be attacked through your weaknesses, one day."

Draco could think of nothing to say to that, either. Fortunately, the elf reappeared at that very moment, holding a smoking goblet of something very dark that smelled like the inside of a drawerfull of socks that had been soaked in a peat swamp and then put away dirty. He held his nose and gulped it down. It didn't help much.

It had been something less than a satisfying Christmas. He'd had what seemed like one long migraine headache the entire time he was in Lourdes, and had spent virtually every moment either lying down in a dark room with a wet cloth over his head or walking aimlessly around the town, exploring the hills and caves, avoiding other people as much as possible. There was only one other person who he remembered from that time, and although it might have been a retroactive memory only, shaped by what was to happen such a short time later, Draco didn't think so.

He'd been walking through the grotto where Muggles believed that some demi-goddess or other of theirs had once appeared to a rather dim-witted peasant girl named Bernadette. The outer part of it was always infested by idiotic tourists, of course, but there was an inner sanctum known only to wizarding folk, a cave with many passageways branching off it. One of them led to an underground road that wound under the mountains, terminating high in the Basque region, at Beauxbatons. But there was a sunny spot overlooking a grotto where he liked to sit, protected from the wind, rather warm on these unusually sunny days, wishing he'd thought to bring his sketchbook. He was sitting there on Christmas afternoon when he saw her, picking her way up the path .

He recognized her at once. She'd been introduced to him two days before, when they'd arrived. "Draco, cheri, this is your cousin. Marie-France Tessier," Jacqueline D'Aubigny-Tessier, the matriarch of the clan, had called to him over the din and hubbub of the entire extended Tessier family seemingly crowded into the rambling kitchen of the house perched on a hill above the town of Lourdes. "You have not met her before. We had lost touch with her for more years than I care to recall; I had nearly forgotten her existence entirely, can you believe it! But now she has returned to us from her home in St.Tropez for the holidays-- I found her again by the merest chance; she was guest curator at the Lourdes museum, and we had gone to see the exhibit-- non, non, Annette, the souffle is not yet ready to come out of the oven--" And Jacqueline had bustled off, leaving Draco with this unknown cousin of his, this Marie-France Tessier. She was tall, nearly as tall as he, dressed in simple, elegant robes of dark blue, and her hair fell about her shoulders in waves. Auburn, with golden highlights. Her eyes were a very dark brown, but they, too, had golden lights in them, and her face was the face of a little cat, with very wide cheekbones and very pointed chin. He didn't know what to do; his head had already begun to throb after the journey, and he had never felt less like introducing himself to anyone. Marie-France leaned her head towards his. Should he allow her to kiss him on both cheeks, like a child? Or was he supposed to kiss her hand? Wasn't there some way to get this over with? He became aware that she was looking at him curiously, studying him really, scanning his face, his hair, and, dropping her eyes a little, his body, those bitter-chocolate eyes of hers seeming to see through his black wool robes.

Draco could feel himself flushing. He sure as hell hoped she didn't expect any welcome-to-the-family speeches, as he didn't know if he could string two words together, at the moment. Thank all the gods the kitchen was as crowded as it was, really, as that meant he didn't have to move. He'd probably stumble over his own feet. How awkward he felt. And, of coure, how awkward he always had felt, that year, around girls. Not that this Marie-France Tessier was a girl, because he could see that she wasn't, but the way she was looking at him, that measured, appraising gaze... It reminded him of all the fumbling, inarticulate moments around the girls of Hogwarts, the times when he couldn't think of what to say, when his tongue seemed to have grown too big for his mouth, when the pounding of his heart and the rushing of blood to inconvenient places had seemed to strip him of all powers of speech. And the worst part of all was that he had to hide it. It had been his dirty little secret, this reaction of his. He couldn't dissolve into a stammering adolescent puddle like Neville Longbottom, or Colin Creevey, or Ron Weasley did around girls. Others might have that dubious luxury, but he did not. A Malfoy didn't behave that way, or allow such feelings to overtake him. A Malfoy was always in control, no matter how determined his body seemed to be to betray him. Draco believed that he had successfully hidden it all beneath a surface so smooth, so cold and haughty, that there was not a mark to be seen. No-one had ever guessed his secret; he was sure of it. Except for Pansy, and he hated her all the more for it.

Earlier that autumn, they'd all been standing about in the corridor between classes one day; there'd been some sort of gridlock further up, one that he later learned was caused by Crabbe and Goyle shaking down Neville Longbottom for a number of chocolate frogs he supposedly had that they wanted, or some such idiotic thing. He'd ended up next to a gaggle of Gryffindors somehow-- they were going to Double Potions, that was it. Ginny Weasley had been almost right next to him, and she was showing something to Granger, a new pair of aluminium earrings charmed or maybe only painted to look silver, he thought. Her shy pride in them was almost painful. Draco remembered thinking that he never saw her in anything that looked new; everything she owned was shabby and second-hand, but she tossed her head and showed off the cheap, pretty earrings, and his eye was drawn to their sparkling circlets next to the creamy skin of her jaw. And her brother had caught him looking.

"You keep your eyes to yourself, Malfoy," he'd said in a low, dangerous voice, and Draco had replied, "I don't know how you think you can see anything with your own eyes glued to Granger's bum the way they are," or some such. And Ron Weasley had flushed an unattractive shade of brick red. Several more insults had been traded, ending with "No girl would ever touch you for any reason besides your filthy money, Malfoy, or any bloke either-- is that why Crabbe and Goyle hang about with you all the time?" Draco had drawn his wand reflexively; Weasley had done the same; Granger had bleated something about the inadvisability of breaking school rules by using magic in the halls, and Ginny-- Ginny had only looked at them all. But the gridlock had broken up then, and Pansy had come along to grab Draco's arm and start propelling him down the hall in that possessive way of hers. He'd shaken her off, unable to endure the feel of her fingers on him just then. Is that why you touch me? he'd wanted to blurt out at her. Because you have to? Because of the Malfoy money; because my father wants this, and yours as well? And is it why you'll never let me do what I'd like to do to you? Because you couldn't bear it, not really wanting me any more than I really want you? He was supposed to meet her in the fields behind the Quidditch pitch that afternoon, ostensibly for a walk, since the weather was still so warm. Although he knew how these walks always tended to turn out, and even though they were frustrating in the extreme, since she never let him do more than a little snogging in the broom shed, he'd never been able to resist the opportunity before. But Pansy waited among the rustling weed stalks until the first stars came out that night, and Draco never appeared. The next day, however, he had done so, despising his own weakness.

As always, a shudder had run down his back when he'd thought of Pansy, that old familiar feeling of frustrated desire, thwarted lust, and a longing to run as fast and as far as he could and keep going until his legs gave out from under him. A surge went through him then as he stood in the Tessier kitchen, and he started, glancing down at his wrist, where the sensation had begun. He saw Marie-France Tessier's smooth, pale fingers on his skin. She'd shaken his hand. A little smile played about her lips. He looked at her for a troubled instant and then jerked his hand back, knowing how ungracious it must seem. "Cousin," he said. It was the very least he could do, but it was the most also.

And now he did it again, seeing her on the path leading from the shrine of Lourdes, the path only wizards knew. "Cousin," he called, and she turned and waved, smiling. He wondered why she did not walk back towards him. There was no telling why, but he wanted her to. Perhaps he wanted a better look at her dark chocolate eyes, to see if there were really flecks of gold in them. The shape of her face was hauntingly familiar, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it. If he could examine it closely, Draco was sure that the mystery would be cleared up. And that way she had of walking, bold, yet graceful... he had seen that somewhere before, too. But he only caught a glimpse of the sun off the gold highlights in her coppery hair before she turned back to the path around the grotto. A second later, Draco saw his mother following Marie-France, laughing about something, throwing her head back so that her hair was a shining yellow cap. How rarely Narcissa Malfoy ever laughed about anything; it was almost shocking to see. The two of them seemed to have liked each other's company since the moment they'd met and learned that they were cousins by marriage. They certainly took many walks together, and he frequently saw his cousin's auburn head next to his mother's gold one as they talked. That must be why Marie-France had done no more than acknowledge him; she was on one last walk with her new friend...

But Draco had watched her walk away until there was nothing left to see, feeling, for some reason he could not define, that something remained unfinished.

And now he sat in the windowseat of his old room at Malfoy Manor, playing restlessly with the chess pieces, knowing that it was only a matter of time before someone was sent up to find him. Layer upon layer of memory thrummed through his head like train cars on separate tracks, and he tried to sort through them, to shake them down into some sort of order. Big things were about to happen; he felt it in his bones. Draco wanted to be prepared. But the footsteps that came towards him were so soft, so catlike, that he was too deep in thought to even hear them. Once he realized who was coming towards him, it was too late, and he somehow thought that this failure of attention didn't bode well.

"Playing by yourself?" asked an all too familiar and far from welcome voice.

He glanced up and across the room. "Oh. It's you. I should have guessed they'd send you."

"Nobody sent me. I just came."

"Well, you can just go."

Pansy Parkinson grinned at him, mockingly. "Why does this remind me of your eleventh birthday party?"

"I don't know. Wasn't that the time I tried to push you into the fishpond?" asked Draco.

"No, it was the time you threw the entire cake at me, and then ran off and hid somewhere. They did send me to find you that time. But not this time. You're still a brat, Draco, you know."

"Well, you're still a little bitch," he replied pleasantly. "You always were, Pansy." He remembered that birthday party now. She'd asked him where his little redheaded Muggle girlfriend was, the one whose family had been forced to leave after his father found out he'd been walking with her in the village. Draco never had known how Pansy learned about that. From listening behind doors, doubtless.

Pansy didn't reply, but the sound of her soft laughter spilled over him. She paused in the doorway, her hand on the carved wooden door. "Aren't you going to invite me in?"

"I doubt it would do any good if I said no."

And she did come in, sitting on his bed across from the window seat, very close to him. She tucked her feet under her and rested her chin on her hands, looking up at him.

Draco said nothing. He wished to hell he'd known how to rearrange the magical carvings on the door of his room so that they looked like part of the corridor walls; she'd never have found him then, but only Lucius Malfoy knew how to do that. Yet he kept looking at her, unwillingly. She was dressed all in pink, and the golden butterflies in her hair were enamelled pink as well; they were enchanted so that their wings fluttered as if in a constant slight breeze. It was the perfect color for her; as much as he loathed the girl herself, he had to admit that she was lovely tonight; all big dark eyes and graceful little hands and shimmering dark hair. There was, again, something different about her, something restless, jerky, almost abandoned. He thought it again, as he had thought it on the train.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked.

"Because I want to," he replied.

"So it's your birthday and you'll do what you want to do?"

"Why should today be different from any other day?"

She laughed, and the butterflies pinned into her hair danced about her head.

The ballroom had been the Great Hall when Malfoy Manor was remodelled into a timber-framed country home in the fifteenth century, and although it had been modernized considerably and split into smaller rooms, it was still in the oldest part of the house, and was cold and drafty despite all the Calorium charms that could be mustered. The decor was elegant, muted, and refined, pale blue-grey silk covered the walls, discreet music filtered from the minstrel's gallery surrounded by a Screening charm, hiding the singing forest nymphs from view, and soft, shaded lamps hovered in mid-air, casting their shadows over the guests mingling on the floor of sparkling white Cararra marble. At ten o'clock, the butterflies were released from the ceiling, dancing frail and luminous through the air, trailing green fairy dust behind them. Like soap bubbles, they dissolved as they came into contact with any solid object. They had played about Pansy's head for several moments, confused by the silvery-pink butterflies that were pinned there. She'd laughed and laughed then, too. So charming, everybody said. So frightfully clever, and original. Narcissa had outdone herself this time. And he had continuously felt all eyes turning towards him, him and Pansy, and could nearly read the thoughts going through everyone's head. Such a charming couple. He supposed that they did make an attractive picture; she so dark, he so fair, his silvery head bent over hers as she looked up at him with her black-cherry eyes.

"How charming their children will be," one party guest had whispered to another, an unamiable-looking and elderly black-robed lady who peered at them through a diamond-encrusted lorgnette.

"Hmmph," the latter had finally said. "All redheads, mark my word."

That was the only thing that had happened all night to make Draco smile.

Every other boy in the room was presenting his dance partner with a little bud vase containing one perfect apricot rose, a golden butterfly with emerald-outlined wings perched on it. They had been formed through a Lepidoptera charm during the flight of the enchanted butterflies, and the adults agreed that this was a charming touch; Narcissa was a genius at arranging these sorts of things, simply a genius. She understood the old ways, and modified them to change with changing times. As if the butterfly release had been a signal-- and, indeed, it had, of sorts-- the lights dimmed further, and the music reached an interlude of silence. People began to leave the ballroom in twos, strolling out towards the formal gardens with their hedge maze and rows of pear trees kept in magical bloom, or in male and female groups, their attention straying from the remaining couples.

Blaise handed his bud vase to Xanthia, and their fingers brushed against one another for a long time; her dark blue eyes conveying a message that was rather clear. Essentially the same message conveyed by bitches in heat to male dogs, Draco decided. Thomas Nott and Millicent Bulstrode, who gave him a very direct look without a hint of coyness, and laughed softly... she certainly had lost a lot of weight that year, Millicent had... David Lestrange to Sadina, whose smirking stare in return made Milicent and Xanthia's overtures look subtle. But then this, too, was a remnant of older, franker rituals. The green-gemmed butterflies fluttered to the necklines of the girls' robes and attached themselves there, sparkling against their bare upper bosoms.

And Pansy, Pansy looking up at him. Pansy's eyes wide and moist with expectation. Pansy already holding out her hand for the little bud vase. But Draco couldn't give it to her.

"Apricot isn't your color. And emeralds aren't your stones," he'd said. "They don't go with your skin, or your hair."

Her mouth had fallen open a little, and then her eyes had narrowed, taking in the fact that he looked beyond her without seeing her. "Everyone is watching," she said in a low, measured tone of voice. "Give it to me, Draco." She put her hand on his wrist, urging it towards her.

"No," he said, not understanding himself what strange stubbornness had seized him. He only knew that when he'd thought of seeing the emerald butterfly on Pansy, it had seemed jarringly wrong, somehow. Draco glanced around and saw that several couples had ended up in dim corners, or slipped into one of the smaller rooms. Behind a door, David was adjusting the butterfly at Sadina's neck slowly, lingeringly, his fingers dipping into her bodice. Pansy saw it, too, and caught his eye with a look meant to be possessive, he supposed. But he was thinking of how the emerald wings would softly beat against the alabaster skin of another chest, leading down into the swell of the girl's breasts, and how red-gold curls would fall over the glittering green stones. An image only, an instant seized from normal time, a moment of madness that touched nothing outside itself. Draco had many such. They meant nothing.

Lucius Malfoy was strolling towards the archway with Narcissa on his arm, the silvery head next to the golden one, and Draco cast his eyes, briefly, in their direction. His mother was impassive as always, but then her face remained serenely unreadable through everything, no matter what. War, famine, and pestilence might rage, but Narcissa Malfoy would only give them a measured look, and then return to deadheading her roses. His father's face was much the same, but Draco always felt that whatever went on beneath that perfect surface was almost close enough to touch. The expression of the elder Malfoy was more enigmatic than usual tonight, however, and Draco studied it quickly, trying figure out what his father wanted in this instance. For him to give the vase to Pansy, doubtless. She was what Lucius wanted for him, and long had been; there was some sort of agreement between their two families, never explicitly explained to him, hovering in the background...

"Excuse me, Pansy," Draco murmured.

"What?" She stared at him. "What on earth do you mean? Where are you going?"

In answer, he began to push past her.

"You can't simply leave. You can't."

"Watch me." He left her standing in the middle of the floor, mouth unattractively agape.

"Get your dirty shoes off my bedspread," he said now.

"As you like." Pansy rose to her feet and pirouetted around the room, her long dark hair swaying behind her. "There was a little more dancing after you left," she said. "Some lovely waltzes. One-two-three, one-two-three..." She was wearing one of the butterflies at the neck of her gown anyway, he saw now. As he had suspected, the green was dull against her skin and the pink of the bodice. "Blaise gave it to me," she giggled. "Oh, he liked pinning it on me."

"If you're trying to make me jealous, it's not working," he said.

She smiled at him, her eyes tip-tilted. "Wouldn't you like to know what else he's given me?"

Draco did look up at that. "What are you talking about, Pansy?"

Shrugging, she crossed the room. "Nothing."

"I do wish you'd go away. I don't want to see you."

In answer, she plopped down next to him on the window seat, studying the chess board. "Want to play?"

"No."

"I'm quite good, you know."

He swept the pieces off. "I'm tired of games."

"So what would you like to do?"

"I'd like you to leave."

She shook her head. "No, that's not an answer to my question; that's what you want me to do. And I'm not going to anyway, so there's no point in asking. What do you want to do?"

"That's it. I've had it. Out." Draco leaned forward and grasped her by the waist with some vague idea of throwing her out of the room by main force, but she turned towards him and moved closer and somehow he was kissing her. She was passive and pliant, and when he bent her back on the seat and reached for the top buttons of her robe, she didn't stop him. When he shoved down the top part to bare her nearly to the waist, she only moved back a little further, against the wall, to allow him easier access. Her breasts were small and hard in his hands. He wasn't sure if touching them was really the pleasurable part, or if it was simply the triumph of getting the upper hand with her, of getting further with her than she generally allowed him to do. Whatever it was, it was very pleasant.

"Would it make you jealous, if I'd done something with Blaise?" she whispered.

"Nope." He kissed the side of her neck. "Do you like that?"

She shrugged. "It's all right, I suppose. Would you tell me something?"

"Maybe. I don't know."

"You don't like me, do you, Draco?"

"Not at all. Never have." Experimentally, he nipped at her. She pulled away a little but showed no other reaction.

"It doesn't matter, I just wondered. Don't do that. Your teeth are too sharp. So if you don't like me, why do you care if I like what you do to me?"

She seemed genuinely curious. He wondered if he should give her an honest answer. The problem was that he didn't have any clear idea himself of what the answer actually might be. "Does Zabini care?"

"Not really."

"Well, I don't want to be like that lowlife Blaise Zabini then, that's why. All those damn Sicilians are practically Mudbloods anyway," Draco said. It was an echo of something he'd heard his father say repeatedly.

Her eyes were mocking. "And I suppose you think that if you made me feel something when nobody else had, you'd score a point over me. That's it, isn't it?"

"Perhaps." He kissed her lips, thinking that they were too thin, too small. "But I'm not going to waste too much of my time on a hopeless endeavor. You're cold, Pansy. You're like ice. I don't think anyone could warm you up. And that's why I don't believe you for a second about Blaise Zabini or anybody else."

She put her arms around him, not replying.

"Don't do that," he said. "I don't want you touching me. I'll do the touching, thank you."

"You're cold, too," she said, dropping her hands from his waist. "You're colder than I'll ever be, but in a different way, one that's even worse."

""I'm not." Draco pulled away from her. "I'm not, I-- You don't know me, Pansy. Not at all. You only think you do."

"Well, maybe you're right about that." She yawned, covering her mouth with a tiny, pretty hand, the fingernails stained a deep pink. So you're the Ice King and I'm the Arctic Queen, then-- what a pair we'll make, Draco."

The thought made him shudder. "All the gods together forbid."

"We won't have a choice. You know that. Nobody ever talks it about in so many words, but you know, and so do I."

"Shut your mouth for a minute, can't you?" It was more than he could bear to hear her talking about that in her light, careless voice. He had been moving further and further towards her as they'd been talking, and at last he was kneeling between her legs. Less than gently, he shoved them apart with one knee.

"Wait--what are you doing?" Pansy tried to sit up, but Draco's greater weight was holding her down.

His voice lowered, and turned into something that was almost a purr. "Oh, Pansy, I think you know. You're not so thick as all that. You haven't given me my birthday present yet..."

"It's not officially your birthday for another hour."

"How'd you know that?" Draco asked, startled.

Pansy shrugged. "Oh-- I don't know. I heard somewhere that you were born at midnight, I suppose."

"Well, isn't it close enough? Come on, Pansy, give me a little something..."

She cocked her head to one side, clearly thinking it over. "All right, a bit more," she said.

"There have to be some side benefits to this damn thing, after all," Draco said as he began to lift her robes. In truth, what she'd said about Blaise Zabini had shaken him badly. Could it be true? He'd said he wasn't jealous and that was certainly the truth, but if she actually let Zabini shag her when she scarcely allowed him, Draco, to get beyond a bit of snogging... ah, that pricked pride, it did indeed.

She let him touch his lips to her bared breasts and run his hands up her inner thighs. "No more," she said then, coolly slapping them away. "Not yet. That's enough just now."

"Is it," he replied. "Is it really. You know, I don't think it is."

Pansy's eyes widened a little, and she opened her mouth. Draco clamped his hand over it with a sudden, violent movement. "If you're trying to decide whether to scream," he whispered, nuzzling her ear, "don't waste your breath. This room has permanent Silencing charms placed on it, has done for years now... And do you think anybody could hear us all the way up here even if it didn't? All the guests are still downstairs."

Ah, now her face showed a bit of emotion! Of course, it was fear and perhaps some hatred as well, but he'd take what he could get.

"If you screamed, Pansy," he continued, "well, it's cheap and melodramatic, for one thing, and not a single soul will come to your aid. All you would accomplish would be to give yourself a very sore throat." Draco loosened his hand and trailed a finger down her neck "You do have a very pretty throat, Pansy."

"You wouldn't," she said. He noted with pleasure that her voice shook badly, even though she was obviously trying to control it.

"Wouldn't I?" He ran one hand even further up her thigh, nearly to the silky fabric of her pink knickers and the warm core of her underneath them, feeling the trembling of her body, although she was clearly trying to hide it. Pansy made a sudden attempt to squirm away, and he raised up to his knees on the window seat and pinned her against the wall without much effort. Draco could feel how much stronger he was than she, and that sensation aroused him more than anything else had done. Deliberately, with all the crudity he could muster, he rubbed his trouser-clad erection between her thighs, hard, pressing the strong lean muscles in his legs against hers. A part of him was standing back and watching in horror, unable to believe that he was sinking this far. Another part was urging him onwards. A third seemed to consist of a tiny, faint voice screaming at him to stop, stop, was he going to allow her to push him into this terrible thing? And it was that third voice that won out at last, and that pulled him back from her.

Pansy's face was deadly white, and she seemed about to burst into tears. "Please don't," she whispered.

"What was that?"

"Please, Draco. Don't."

"Again."

"Please."

He released her immediately, and she clutched at the curtains, almost falling to the floor. But she kept contorting her face as if trying to keep from crying, obviously determined not to do it in front of him. At the sight, a powerful wave of self-disgust ran through him, swiftly followed by another, this one aimed at the very existence of the first. Damn it, thought Draco, he had nothing to be sorry for. If he'd forced her, he probably could have gotten away with it, although he'd never be sure. It would have been hushed up, as such things always were. His father's influence would very likely have saved him from suffering any consequences. Pansy ought to be properly grateful to him for not following through on what he'd begun. Not that she would be, of course.

"Dry up. I wasn't going to do anything," he told her.

"Weren't you?" she said in a low voice, her face turned away from him. "Looked like you were planning a rape, from what I could see."

He bit his lip, considering. "I wouldn't do that, Pansy," Draco finally said. "Not even to you."

"Then why--"

He smirked. "I wanted to hear you plead a little. That's all. Merlin knows, I'll never hear that from you in any other way."

She pulled her elbows up on her crossed knees. "You're an utter bastard, Draco Malfoy."

"You bring out the worst in me, Pansy." He looked at her curiously. "Do you actually want this? Us, I mean?"

Pansy made a strange, noncommital gesture, a sort of guarded shrug. She watched him keenly from beneath her stubby black lashes. It's as if she's not willing to say, either way, thought Draco. It's as if she's waiting to find out what I'm going to say... or what I know...

"Why?" he persisted. "You'd never see anything but the worst of me. You must know that."

Her smile grew mocking again. "So you're saying there's more?"

He turned back to the window, looking out over the gardens it was too dark to see. "You'll never know."

Draco didn't speak to her again, and after a few moments he heard the door open, and then close.

There ought to be a circular path worn into this floor, he thought, from all the time I've spent pacing it. Draco actually paused to glance down at the enchanted Persian carpet in his bedroom, but the warp and woof were still intact, the nap raised and gleaming. Back and forth, back and forth he went as if trying to escape. Merlin, but how he wanted to get out of this house right now. He could still hear the sounds of the party from below; through Silencing charms and also some trick of acoustics in the manor, he could hear the revellers on the first floor even though they couldn't hear him. The morons were apparently never going to shut up and go to their beds. Or to each other's beds. It was just after the feast of Yule, when all was said and done, and there were those among the aristocracy and landed wizarding gentry who still followed the old ways.

But even if he did manage to slip out, using one of the many ways he knew, it would solve nothing. He thought that he probably couldn't manage it, anyway. The hidden passageways changed so often; he'd have to learn them all over again over the Christmas hols if he wanted to use them, most likely. What I really want to do, Draco thought, is to escape myself. He paced, and paced, and remembered what he had done to Pansy, and despised the memory. What weakness, to allow her to get to him that way. He wasn't going to permit her to drive him into darkness; he was perfectly capable of getting there by himself...

And then, for no reason at all, he thought of Ginny's golden eyes on the Hogwarts train less than a week before, and how near he had come to laying hands on her. His mother's china-blue eyes, gazing levelly at him, that night in the ballroom... and his father's. They were all looks that seemed to weigh and measure him, and to find him wanting, each in their own peculiar set of scales.

Abruptly, he stopped in the middle of the floor. He could bear this no longer. There was one place he thought he could still go to escape, however temporary that escape might be. Although he had not been there in years, he still remembered the way down. He picked up his winter cloak and walked silently out into the hall.

And it was still the same. He pried up the loose floorboard at the very back of the hall closet just next to his room and then let himself down into the darkness. It was a shorter drop and a lower ceiling than he remembered, but then the last time he'd been there, he'd been considerably smaller. Just after fourth year, Draco thought, when he'd gotten into so much trouble for letting his guard down and permitting Potter and the Weasley brats to hex him on the Hogwarts train. "Lumos," he whispered, and the tip of his wand flared into light. He began to walk.

Malfoy Manor was incredibly old, as all houses of the wizarding aristocracy did tend to be. It had certainly stood during Roman times, and beneath its floors was a hypocaust, the heating system that the Romans had developed. That had been long abandoned, of course, and was now much larger than Muggle hypocausts had ever been, since the house-elves used it. Occasionally, one would hurry by, casting Draco a scared, sidelong look. He waved them on before they could start fawning on him and asking him what he wanted, and they quickly left him alone, attuned as the best house-elves always were to the desires of their masters. It was cool and dry and dark there, the only light the flickering shadows cast by his wand, and it felt utterly alone. He wondered why he had stopped coming down here. It had been his refuge so often when he was a child.

Then he heard voices drifting down from the floor above. Since the hypocaust had been expanded past its original function, it actually went between every floor, and he was now just below the third. This was another trick of the house; not a magical one, he'd researched that very question when he was nine years old, out of curiosity. The way that Roman hypocausts had been constructed meant that anybody in them could hear every single word spoken by people on the floor directly above.

The map of Malfoy Manor traced itself in his head; he had known this vast house in every detail when he was a small child, but it was all too easy to forget when he returned here only for holidays. Like Hogwarts, too, it had certain rooms that appeared and disappeared, corridors that vanished, sometimes as you were walking down them, staircases that led to nowhere. And a clock tower. But the tower always made Draco feel a little uneasy, and he never went there. The hypocaust didn't lead there anyway, since it wasn't connected to the house. Directions come back to him as he began to walk, and he passed under the rooms of the manor, feeling the old sense of ownership, of omnipotence.

He went beneath the bedrooms, each with its own antechamber and withdrawing room. Most of them were empty, although not all. Quite a few squeaking bedsprings, he noticed. Apparently, some guests were starting the traditional Yule celebrations already. Draco sighed at that sound, wistfully remembering certain stories that Blaise Zabini had been telling the entire Slytherin boys' dormitory all that autumn about receiving a bed-elf for his sixteenth birthday. Now that would have been a bloody good present; really, even Van Gogh couldn't measure up to it. Supposedly, bed-elves took on whatever form you wished, and performed however you pleased, as Zabini had informed them all in great detail. Wouldn't that be nice. I'm not exactly sure what mine would be, thought Draco, but she wouldn't look a thing like Pansy. That, I know. Red hair, I think, long and wavy, with a lot of gold in it. Golden eyes. Nice big tits, of course, rather long legs... and something about her face, something mysterious. As if she had a secret that she wouldn't tell to anyone, ever, but maybe I could find it out, if I tried. Belatedly, Draco realized that he had just described Ginny Weasley. He could not escape the uneasy feeling that this might not be a good thing. Well, so fucking what if I did! I'll think what I like.

He passed beneath the ballroom, mostly deserted now, and then under the front hall. A few guests lingered; there was a bit of desultory chitchat. His mother's soft, low, accented voice. "Goodnight. You're so kind. So good of you to come. Are you sure you will not be staying? Goodnight." "Lovely party." "Simply lovely." Draco wandered a little further, hearing other voices. "Were you at Cordelia's on the twenty-fourth?" "No, we were at Grace's dinner party." "You didn't miss a thing. Taytsie was there, and Binkie, and that dreadful Hildy Teck with the lorgnette." "I can't believe she's still alive. Two hundred if she's a day." "She's gotten absolutely dotty." "Hush-- I thought I saw her a moment ago." "Poor Elspeth and Emily." Trills of silvery laughter. Draco moved on. He went past morning-rooms and receiving-rooms, drawing rooms and studies, parlours and guest rooms, pausing to listen to conversations when he heard them, feeling more and more detached from everything around him. That was the problem with the hypocaust. He remembered it now. Nothing had ever made him feel so lonely as this eavesdropping in the dark

He passed down a long corridor and heard voices clearly from above, female ones. He was just below the gallery, Draco realized after a moment's thought. Leaning against the wall, he listened, hoping to hear something interesting. High heels clattered on the stone floors and then paused.

"Aunt Hildy?" The voice was loud and filled with a coaxing firmness. "Wouldn't you like to come downstairs now? It's so dreadfully cold and draughty up here."

"Not in the least," came the reply. "And I don't need the pair of you child-minding me."

"But, aunt, dear," said a third voice. "You'll catch your death."

"Don't you wish, Emily! You don't know the contents of my last will and testament nearly so well as you think you do." It was an imperious voice, crotchety and piercing, and after a moment's thought Draco placed it as ancient Hildegarde Teck, one of the very old guard of the wizarding aristocracy. A relative of Millicent Bulstrode's, he thought. She was the same woman who had pronounced the prediction that Draco and Pansy's children would invariably be redheads. No doubt about it, she was a horrible old dragon, but she secretly rather amused him.

"Oh, Aunt Hildy! You will say such terrible things." The first voice laughed mirthlessly. Elspeth Biddle, Draco thought, Hildy Teck's grand-niece, several times removed. The other then, must be Emily Biddle-Battenberg, her cousin.

"I'm afraid we're stuck here," sighed Elspeth. "When Aunty takes it upon herself to be contrary, she can't be budged with a Levitation spell."

"I suppose you're right," replied Emily. "Lovely party, don't you think?"

"Yes, very. Narcissa's so terribly clever at these sorts of things."

"And she's so exquisite tonight," murmured Emily. "I'm mad about the color hyacinth; makes me look anaemic--"

"It does, rather," said Elspeth.

"It isn't necessary to agree quite so quickly, Elspeth. But our hostess certainly can pull it off. I do so hate to be stuck up here, missing things-- Aunt?" Emily raised her voice. "Are you quite sure you wouldn't like to go down?"

"Yes, I'm sure! Lucius Malfoy may be an impertinent upstart of the worst sort," replied Hildy, "but his collection of post-Impressionist art remains unsurpassed. Now leave me be. I'll let you know when I'm ready to go."

There was a pause, broken only by the pattering of Hildy Teck's tiny feet, which she always seemed to cram into ridiculously small shoes. "Aunt Hildy is an appalling snob, you know," said Elspeth. "But I suppose she's right about our host."

"Mmmm," replied her cousin, giggling. "Lucius Malfoy. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know."

"So I've heard."

" But it's odd-- on meeting him, one only sees that he seems so devoted to his wife," said Emily. "Not at all what you would expect."

"Aunt Hildy once said something interesting about him," said Elspeth thoughtfully. "'The way that Lucius Malfoy seems at any given moment is precisely how he wishes to appear, you may be sure of that. But it means no more, and no less, than appearance.'"

"I suppose she also said some variation of 'not our class, darling'?"

"Oh, of course. Aunty's so predictable, and so old-fashioned," said Elspeth. "Narcissa's got all the breeding that pair needs. The Malfoys always were purebloods, after all. What else can matter? I've always been quite open-minded on the subject. you know."

"How very charitable of you, Elly. To keep your... mind...open for Lucius Malfoy," said Emily, and much giggling ensued. "So she's got the class, and he's got the brass?"

"Very much so."

"They appear to be an ideally suited couple."

"Just an act, Emily. Just an act."

"Really." Both were silent for a moment.

Draco shifted uneasily, listening to them. Of course they didn't have the slightest idea what they were talking about, he assured himself. They were a pair of tarts passing on silly gossip they'd heard. It was ridiculous to become angry about it.

"What I wonder," said Emily, "is if the younger Malfoy will be another of the same sort."

"Draco?"

"Yes, Draco. How old is he now?"

"Sixteen. These parties of Narcissa's are always held on his birthday, didn't you know that? And yes, doubtless he will be. They're all cut from the same cloth, these Malfoys," said Elspeth.

"Sixteen," said Emily musingly. "It's such a delicious age. So... unspoiled."

"You certainly weren't unspoiled at sixteen; do you really think he is?"

Shit, they were still talking about him! Draco flushed bright red, and was deeply thankful that nobody could see him.

"I'll bet he is. There's a certain look about him," replied Emily. "I can always tell. That 'I don't know a thing, but I'm just dying to be taught' look."

"Oh Emily, you're as bad as you ever were," said Elspeth.

"Don't try to tell me that's a cradle you wouldn't be happy to rob."

"Well, that's more in your line, dear... but do you suppose it's true, what they say about men with large hands?"

"In my experience, yes," said Emily. "And that boy's hands are rather enormous, aren't they?" The two women snickered together like schoolgirls.

There had to be a limit to how deeply anybody could blush. Draco honestly wondered if his face was glowing in the dark. Although-- well. He'd never guessed that Elspeth and Emily Biddle were so... perceptive. They don't know how right they are about me, he thought, unable to repress a smirk. Yes, it could honestly be said that to hear himself discussed in such terms by them was mortifying and flattering in equal measure.

Of course, they were both his mother's age or thereabouts; they must be, he knew they'd been at Hogwarts with her. But he couldn't help thinking that they were very attractive women, at that. Emily, especially, with her dark hair upswept in a chignon, and her sophisticated, elegant carriage, and her deep blue eyes. He'd seen her in pale grey robes with long fur-trimmed sleeves and a gray fox fur collar earlier that evening, and when she'd greeted him in the ballroom, it did seem that she'd pressed her arm rather close to his chest. He really hadn't been able to help looking down that soft furry collar into her firm cleavage. Draco let his fancy run free for a few moments over the idea of long, dull afternoons that might be enlivened by visits to the neighbours, and the fact that discretion would doubtless be much easier over the holidays, at home, than at school, where everyone knew everything. And that the Biddle place was really very close to Malfoy Manor. It was insane, of course, but he realized that he was still keyed up over Pansy. He had pulled himself back from her, but his desires were running at least as high as before. But this was only talk, no more to be taken seriously than the gossip; surely Emily Biddle hadn't really meant that she would actually ... well... had she?

"I wonder, ought we to be a little quieter?" Emily asked her cousin. "Aunty's become positively gaga since I saw her last. I wouldn't trust her not to repeat anything we said."

"Don't worry about her; she's deaf as a post. Can't possibly understand anything you say unless you write it down. Honestly, if it weren't for the fact that she we can't leave the old bat because she wanders off by herself, I'd--"

The indignant pitter-patter of little feet, coming towards the pair. "I heard that!"

"Oh dear," sighed Elspeth. "Aunty, we-- we only meant to let you enjoy the artworks, we were having a bit of a gossip, that's all."

"Were you," sniffed Hildy. "What sort of a gossip can the pair of you get up to, with the little that you know. I know. I've lived through the reign of two queens and six kings, and I know. "

"Yes, of course you do, aunty dear," said Emily soothingly, adding under her breath, "Now we're in for it, Elly-- you've set her off good and proper."

"In my day," said Hildy, "we knew who everyone was; who their people were, where they came from. Parvenus like the Malfoys could never even have been considered for inclusion among us. Yes, yes, I know they're pure-bloods. Doesn't matter. They're bounders, every man jack of them. Michel, Gabriel, Lucius-- I suppose when they reached the youngest they'd run out of angels' names. Dreadful name to saddle a child with, Draco. He'll be no different. They are all the same. All common, all criminals, all soiling what we have preserved for so long. They are everything that is wrong with what the world has become." Her voice quavered. "The world is changing, and has changed. What has happened to us, we who were the power behind thrones? In the old days, the Malfoys would have remained in that dirty French village they came from, no matter how much money they had. Nothing but ill-gotten gains, anyway. That I should be in their house now, that I should live to see my people crawling to them for favours-- I would never have believed it, never..."

"Aunty," Elspeth said in a soothing voice, "come downstairs, do."

"Yes..." said Hildy. "Yes. I want to see dear Narcissa. She still remembers the old ways. She still knows how to keep secrets. How I wish she had not allied herself to that devil Lucius, but then it was neither her choice nor her fault. I suppose that is the only hope for the child Draco, his mother's blood... She is one of the few people I care to see anymore, the very few, and that includes the pair of you. Let go my arm. I can walk perfectly well." And the footsteps pattered down the corridor of the gallery, until Draco could hear them no longer.

Eavesdroppers often hear many highly instructive things, memory jeered at him from some unknown source. Gossip, only gossip. None of them knew anything. They all ought to have their tongues hexed in knots! But, and the thought slipped into his mind, but Hildy Teck's so very old... maybe there are things she does know. I'll bet anything she knows where my mother really comes from, that she-- and I-- are of the ancient line of Bavaria... wonder if it's safe, really... but I suppose I have to say one thing for that old guard of the aristocracy, they never tell what they know. They close the ranks, and keep secrets.

Draco realized that he was perspiring, even though the hypocaust had become quite cold. He wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, and kept walking.

Something was driving him, and he did not know what it was. He didn't know if he'd ever felt so restless, so rebellious. Against what, he could not have said. But he took a flight of winding stone stairs down to the lowest level and roamed the oldest part of the hypocaust, pausing sometimes to look at the ancient frescos on the walls, or the intricate inlaid tiles on floor and ceiling, feeling more and more like a ghost appointed to haunt this house.

He had gone so far, in fact, that he was no longer sure of exactly where he was. Draco stopped, attempting to get his bearings. A Directional spell wouldn't be any help; it wouldn't be keyed to the manor. He simply had to remember. He'd almost never been back here; there was never really any reason to come to this part of the first floor. Underneath the unused back drawing rooms. That's where he was. From here, a set of little corridors and porches led to the gardens. Draco was about to turn back when he heard the voices.

Even his excellent hearing could catch nothing clearly, and that was what first caught his attention and his curiousity. Two people were whispering urgently, obviously trying not to be overheard. What was going on? He crouched right beneath them, straining to hear.

One of the voices caught on itself, and broke into a sob, so that he could now hear it was a female voice. Whoever she was, she began to cry bitterly, softly, hopelessly.

"Shh," said the other voice, raising itself just slightly, so that Draco could hear it was male.

"I don't understand," the first voice said. "I've done everything you've told me to do and waited all this time, and now because she's turned up, you're saying--"

"Shhh."

"You're going to desert me now," the first voice said. "I know you will. You don't need me anymore." Then she started to cry again.

Draco's eyes widened. Pansy! That was nothing, however, compared to the shock he felt when the second voice spoke once more.

"I won't do any such thing. You know I won't." The male voice was stern in a sort of absent way, as if it came from someone who was used to commanding, and to being obeyed. Yet it was tender, too, with a note of concern. Draco could scarcely think of a time when he had ever heard it sound that way, but he knew it very well. It was his father's voice. "Only trust me," said Lucius Malfoy. "Do you trust me, Pansy?"

Pansy only sniffled.

" I ask you again, Pansy... do you trust me?" The question had an edge to it now.

"I-- I--" She faltered. "I don't know anymore."

"I see." His father's voice hardened. "I see. This... development disturbs me greatly, Pansy."

Not another word was exchanged, but Draco could hear his father's footsteps, moving away across the floor. There was the sound of soft, hopeless sobs. A few minutes later, Pansy also left the room.

Draco stood beneath the empty back drawing room for a long time, his mind full of what he had just heard. Then he, too, walked on.

The hypocaust had shafts leading up to the surface at several points.One of these terminated in a small gazebo in an unused part of the garden at the rear of the manor. The bare branches of the vines running across it clattered in the winter wind. Leaning against one wall, Draco shivered, wrapping his cloak more tightly around him, staring out at the barren and deserted tangle of overgrowth. A door slammed behind him; he heard it faintly over the wind. There was a figure running from the house, and he was less than surprised to recognize it as Pansy.

She jumped back when she saw him, staggering against the door of the little summerhouse. "Oh!" she breathed. "I didn't expect-- what are you doing here?"

"I live here, remember?"

Pansy didn't reply. She swiped at her nose with the back of her hand.

"But you. What the hell were you just doing?" Draco asked, his voice low and dangerous.

"What?" She glanced up at him. Her makeup was running down her face in little black streams, he saw, and her eyes were red and puffy.

"I heard you talking to my father, in one of the back drawing rooms. What was that all about?"

Pansy started slightly. "You-- you heard us?" she asked in a panicky way.

He tipped her face up to his with a none-too-gentle finger on her chin. "You're bloody right I heard you." Briefly, he wondered if it would be more effective to pretend he knew exactly what they'd been talking about; if he'd be likely to find out more from her that way. The problem was that he hadn't heard enough to really tell anything about the topic of their conversation. "Were you telling him about what happened? Between us?" he finally settled for asking. "Because you're even thicker than you look if you think that was likely to get you anywhere."

"Oh! No. It wasn't about that. It was nothing, really, Draco, just-- nothing." She sighed. He studied her face, especially her dark, bloodshot eyes. They looked tired and lifeless, but there was no deception in them. He couldn't avoid thinking that she was telling the truth. Really, he ought to press her a bit more, try to find out exactly what had happened with her and his father, but somehow he couldn't bring himself to do it.

As they stood in silence, the first strokes of the great bell in the Malfoy clock tower rang out through the clear winter air. Pansy seemed about to speak. "Hush," said Draco, laying a hand on her arm. Nine...ten...eleven... twelve. He let out all his breath in a long sigh. "There. I'm officially sixteen years old."

Pansy ran a hand over her face, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "Yes-- that's right. Of course..." Her words trailed off and an abstracted frown came over her face.

"Why'd you come out here, anyway?" he asked.

She sat down on the broken marble bench. "To be alone." She wrapped her arms around her knees and stared off into space, into the empty garden.

Draco got up. He had never seen Pansy like this and didn't begin to know how to react to it; if she had been nasty to him, he could have held onto his coldness towards her, but her sad, pensive face made him feel something almost like... guilt. "Well, I expect you don't want to see me just now," he said, "so I'll leave you to it."

She grasped at his arm as he walked by her. "No. Don't go. Please-- don't go, Draco."

Surprised, he looked down at her. "What's all this about?"

"I suppose I don't want to be alone after all." She tried to laugh. "I just want to get away from all this, right away-- is there anywhere to go? I'd stay here but--" Pansy shivered, wrapping her cloak more closely about herself "-- it's so cold. Do you know of anywhere?"

"Maybe," Draco said, still staring at her in disbelief. He fought down an urge to ask her where the real Pansy Parkinson had got to.

"Please, just take me someplace, anyplace. Take me where you were going. I'll-- I'll do anything if you will."

He was about to refuse; to shake her detaining hand off his arm; he didn't like the feel of her fingers on him, and there was something clutching and frantic about her that made him nervous. But the thought of going back into the dark hypocaust alone brought on an overpowering wave of loneliness. No denying it, he'd been glad to see another human being just then, even if it was her. And-- Draco ground his teeth together at having to admit this-- although he hated the bitch, he was perhaps a little ashamed of the way he'd treated Pansy earlier. No, if he was to be honest with himself, just remembering it made him feel as if he'd lifted a corner into his own soul and uncovered something dark and ugly, like a mass of squirming insects exposed to light. He felt a faint, visceral sickness when he thought of it. It's no good, he thought. I suppose it's just nerves, but I can't help it. There are some weaknesses we cannot control. I could never do that to a girl, no, not even Pansy, no matter how bloody angry she makes me. Or anyone else, I think... Faint memories came back to him of the darkest rumours he'd heard about what happened during certain Death Eater rituals, things he had tried to forget as soon as he learned them, things that had frightened him so deeply that he could not sleep after overhearing vague hints and veiled discussions about them. Things that the participants had to do to captives. Sometimes torture, sometimes murder, and sometimes... worse. How Draco hoped that he was never put to that sort of test. Deep in his bones, he feared he would fail, or be unable to try.

He wanted to be alone again, or perhaps only wanted to want it. But if he was, his thoughts would overwhelm him. So he turned to her and said, "All right. Follow behind me, and be quiet." It was penance.

"What's this?" Pansy asked as he led her into the entrance of the hypocaust. It was deserted and derelict at this side of the house, not well maintained, not used by the house elves. If it had ever been a refuge for him, it wasn't anymore, Draco thought. I really don't give a damn if she knows about it now. Suppose I cared more when I was ten years old...

"Goes all the way under the house," he said shortly.

"I can hear voices." She glanced up at the ceiling. "It's people talking upstairs, isn't it?"

"Yes. That's how the acoustics work."

"Interesting..." She pulled a bottle from her cloak. "Want some?" Pansy leaned closer when she spoke to him, and he smelled something sharp and yeasty on her breath. Looking down, he saw the label. Ye Olde McGillicuddy's Uisequebaugh. Aged 1,500 Years. "I pinched it from upstairs," she told him.

"You've rather been at it," Draco said, noting the diminished level in the bottle.

She shrugged. "Do you want it, or not?"

In answer, he yanked it out of her hand and swallowed deeply, coughing when the whisky hit the pit of his stomach like a hot rock. After a few moments, however, warmth spread through his veins, and the world seemed brighter. Ah, this was what he needed.

"I want to get absolutely stinking drunk tonight," Draco said. "Care to come along?"

"We'll see what we can do," she replied, smiling.

They passed the bottle back and forth between them as Draco led her down the long, twisting passageway. "Anywhere in particular you want to go?" he asked.

She cocked her head to one side. "Does this run under the library?"

He wondered why she wanted to go there. But the level of whisky had dipped considerably by then, and Draco couldn't bring himself to care much. He felt almost insanely restless, as if Pansy's mood all that night had seeped into him, on top of what he had already been feeling. They walked on for awhile, and at last he paused beneath a low ceiling tiled with a scene of mermaids. Draco put a finger to his lips, and they stood quietly, hearing the soft murmurs from above.

"Can't really hear anything," said Pansy.

"You can't hear quite as well as from other parts of the house," Draco whispered. "But there's a consolation prize of sorts-- if you get right up to the ceiling and find exactly the right tile, you can see a bit. There's a trapdoor in the library floor with a loose piece in it." The floor of the hypocaust seemed to be swaying back and forth as he boosted Pansy up a tiny flight of stairs carved directly into the wall, and he stumbled and almost dropped her.

"Watch it, can't you!" she hissed angrily.

"You can just get up there by yourself if you don't want my help," he retorted, trying to steady his movements. His speech still sounded unslurred, but no doubt about it, motor control had been the first thing to go.

When she was perched on the top stair, Draco scrambled up beside her. They had to press so closely together that he felt her small, light body at every point. Her elbows and knees were digging into him; she was even thinner than usual, and he wondered if she'd been eating properly. "You ought to put on a bit of weight, Pansy," he said. "You'll dry up and blow away if you aren't careful."

"Shh," she said. "I want to hear."

But there was nothing to hear, at least for the moment. They were looking into a back room of the library, a study really. The decor was excessively masculine, the walls panelled in dark oak, the ebony and teak furniture upholstered in leather. It was nearly as dark as the hypocaust, and Draco had to blink a few times before he clearly saw what was going on. Damn, time to renew that anti-myopia charm again or he'd wind up wearing glasses like Potter. His sight had never been as flawless as his hearing.

It was a fairly small room, with several doors leading off the far wall. One led to an alcove with a bed; Draco knew that his father sometimes snatched a few hours of sleep here, when he'd been working through the night at his desk.One led to some lower level of the dungeons, one went back to the main room of the library, and a couple were the sorts of doors that constantly appeared and disappeared; Draco had often wondered where they led, but had never been able to open them. The little study was dominated by a long, low, round table, inlaid with swirling designs in jet and mother-of-pearl, and circling it were a number of men, mostly silent, all watching Lucius Malfoy, who was at the head of the table holding forth about something. Draco had read through L'Morte d'Arthur by the time he was six years old, but he'd never understood that rot about the egalitarianism of round tables. The head of this one was rather clear-- wherever his father was sitting. There were little pools of light spilling down from above, illuminating the tops of heads, noses, and chins; casting everything else into shadow. He heard murmurs, but no more; they were speaking too softly. There was Carolo Zabini. Peter Pettigrew, of course; Draco thought that he was actually living in the carriage house of the manor these days. Thank all the gods he had to keep out of sight and hadn't been at the party. Crabbe and Goyle, senior, Parkinson, McNair, Avery and Nott, Lestrange, and a few others. The inner circle. They'd met in this room all through his childhood, at Malfoy Manor. And he'd spied on them before, using the hypocaust, mostly, although he was never supposed to. It had been a long time, though, Draco realized, since he'd seen them all gathered together in one place. A tremor ran through him. There was power in this room, and he sensed it. The moment stood on some sort of cusp. If only he could hear what was going on.

Carolo Zabini was leaning forward, hissing something at Lucius Malfoy, waving his hands in the other man's face. Lucius didn't turn a hair, only shook his head. Now Draco saw that Zabini was stabbing his finger into the other man's chest. How dare that dirty underbred Sicilian lay hands on his father! He started up, involuntarily, not knowing what he was even thinking of doing, but Pansy grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back down, shaking her head. She was right; they couldn't risk being seen. The pair at the table subsided slightly, but the rest sat very silent, watching them keenly.

"I have resolved matters," said Lucius. "As I had to. No thanks to you, Zabini."

"I don't give a fuck what you think you've done! I don't want outsiders brought in on this thing."

"I've explained why this was necessary once. I shan't do so again."

"Then why nae use the other?" asked MacNair, at the other end of the table. "At least we know all about who she is. I believe we could control her, if it came tae that."

"The Weasley girl?" Lucius gave a short, sharp, humorless laugh. "Surely you're joking."

The voices quieted, then, became low and furious. Draco could no longer hear what they were saying. "The lass hae possiblities," MacNair insisted in a raised tone after a few minutes. "I hae always thought so. After she went into the Chamber of Secrets at Hogwarts--" Lucius frowned, lowering his hand to the table in a gesture for silence, and the intense whispering began again.

"Is that actually true?" hissed Pansy. "Oh, I heard it was one of the students, but her?"

"Didn't you know that?" Draco did not take his eyes from the peephole.

"No." She began to giggle very softly, her eyes shining with amusement. "What a laugh, Draco, what a laugh! So it was little Ginny Weasley in the Chamber of Secrets that year..."

He experienced a short-lived but intense desire to push her off the stairs to the floor far below. Of course, Pansy was so drunk that she might not even feel it. Pity.

"The point is, it's too dangerous," continued Carolo Zabini in a louder voice. "Who is she, anyway? We don't really know anything about her."

She... her? He felt a fool for allowing Pansy to distract him; the real question was, who the hell were they talking about? And why had Ginny Weasley's name been brought up in the first place? Draco's brow furrowed.

"We're just asking for trouble." Zabini continued, glaring at Lucius across the table.

"It's no longer your concern," the other man replied.

"People don't know how to keep a goddamn code of silence anymore. There used to be honor. There used to be omerta. There used to be--"

"Don't speak bloody Italian to me, you peasant," said Lucius, and then somehow both men had gotten out of their chairs, almost faster than sight, advancing on each other, and Draco was struggling to get to the loose tile in the floor that led up to the study, barely even feeling Pansy's insubstantial hands trying to pull him back.

"No-- don't!"she hissed frantically. "See, it's all right-- they've got him."

And indeed Crabbe and Goyle had flanked Carolo Zabini like two blocks of rough-hewn granite, each taking one of his arms in their ham-like fingers, and Pettigrew had gotten to his feet and was whining something about loyalty; the whole table was whispering and hissing furiously, like a nest of snakes. Draco strained his ears to hear every scrap of what they were saying; he almost could. He could feel how important it was, as if streams of magic were coming off their every word. But then Pansy was pulling him down, away from the peephole in the tiles. "They'll see you," she whispered. "You have to be more careful; you were much too close."

"No, I wasn't!" he retorted, jarred by the suddenness of being yanked away. The agitated feeling was worse than before, and he wondered dimly what the hell was happening to him. He almost felt as if some sort of undifferentiated magic were flowing through him, desperately trying to find an outlet; a charge looking for its natural opposite. It was like an actual hunger, this need to--to--what? Well, to find out what was going on up there, of course, what they were talking about, what they were planning, he turned the desire towards that, and it surged through him with sudden strength. Draco tried to get back up on the top step. Pansy tugged downwards on his sleeve. He was balancing on one foot, more and more precariously; gravity dropped away beneath him, and the ceiling and floor tiles changed position as he tumbled to the floor, her on top of him. He started to get up, but she was lying full length on him, and in his whisky-impaired state even her slight weight was enough to pin him down.

"Get off me," Draco said, trying to push at her. She twined herself around him like a vine. I don't want this anymore, not from you, he thought fuzzily, but there seemed to be no strength in him to resist her. And then she was kissing him with a wild desperation he had never felt from her before. She had never done this before. Pansy never initiated anything, she merely lay not-quite-passively while he touched and kissed her, as if some unimaginable response might be forthcoming, were Draco skilled enough to call it forth.

Draco was slow to respond at first. In his unexamined heart, he didn't really want her any more than he ever did. As he ruefully thought later, however, the heart had not been the operative muscle in this situation. It took him several moments to process that this was actually happening, as well; all of his reaction times seemed to be drastically slowed. Blaise Zabini and Thomas Nott had sneaked Muggle alchohol into the Slytherin dormitories several times that year and he'd tried it whenever they had, but none of it had ever been as strong as this kobold-brewed whisky; it was fuzzing his mind, dragging his thought processes to a near-standstill. Wait. Why is she doing this? What's going on? Stop, stop. Stop and think, his cerebral cortex told him, thickly, slowly, lumbering to catch up with his body as if covered by an enormous wet blanket. But the instinctive animal part of him did respond, eagerly. Don't listen! Don't stop! Go on! Yes! Sex, she's offering sex! She wants it! You want it! his reptilian brain screeched, urging him forward, driving his mouth against hers, driving him to roll her over and push her up against the tiled wall, lighting up with sparks of savage energy when she started pulling at his robes. Still, the calculating, Malfoy part of him summoned up a feeble protest.

"Do you think this is a good--"

"Shut up," she said, and grabbed between his legs. It was a powerful argument.

Still, he tried one last time. "Pansy, are you sure you really want this?" he whispered, kneeling over her. .

"Yes," she hissed back to him. "I'm sure. Now! Hurry."

He wanted to tell her that it seemed all wrong, that he didn't want to hurry through this, his very first time. He wondered if it was hers. When she had reached for him, it had seemed rather practised, and he would have sworn that she'd known exactly what she was doing. She certainly hadn't learned that by experimenting on him. Pansy hadn't permitted him to do anything along those lines since that afternoon in the stables at the end of August, the one he always tried to forget.

Draco knew that he had wanted something other than this, something slow and luxurious and prolonged, something he could savour and taste and remember in every sweet detail, afterwards. This wasn't how he'd always pictured lovemaking, but then, he thought, what they were about to do really couldn't be dignified by that word. Dogs and bitches are more graceful, hinkypunks are more refined-- oh fuck, why am I doing this? But he knew why. Almost everything in him shrieked out against all of it, the ungracefulness of crouching over Pansy on an ice-cold floor in a hypocaust and lifting her robes, the miserable chill of the room, the goosebumps on her naked thighs, the way the tiles were digging into his knees, the musty, dank smell, and the horrible feeling he got every time he looked down into her face. You're about to make the worst mistake of your life, Malfoy, you fool... But the little bit of him that was not protesting against his own actions was more powerful than all the rest. It propelled him forward, filled him with hot, thick, ferocious desire, and screamed that nothing else mattered, not his doubts, not his distaste, not his dislike. It was the most powerful drive in him, and at last he realized that he had no defences against it.

Her hot, skinny hands were fumbling at his trousers. Draco had fought with the back zipper on her robes and finally gave it up as a bad job, moving on to lift her skirts and pull down her silk knickers. Pink, just as he'd thought. Her chest was half in, half out of the embroidered bodice of the dress, shifting as she reached for him. And despite everything in him that frantically argued against this, oh, the sensation of triumph was amazing, by all the gods, he was finally going to get this, what he'd wanted for so long. So close. Nearly there. He reached for her and she parted her legs for him and--

"What the bloody hell goes on down here?" bellowed a voice.

Draco froze.

Beneath him, Pansy's mouth had dropped open. The makeup had smudged around her eyes, standing out shockingly against the suddenly chalky pallor of her face. They both looked up, towards the source of the voice they'd heard. A head was peering down from the opened trapdoor in the floor.

Robert Parkinson.

Pansy's father had thrown his cloak over her shoulders, hiding the torn pink robes and the ripped zipper Draco had ruined in his unsuccessful haste to get her robes off. She crouched within herself, huddled into a smaller space than ever, and shuffled out of the emptying room. The older man gave him a look of remarkable hatred as he guided his daughter out the door of the library, but Lucius Malfoy was standing at the table, so no words were exchanged. Draco avoided Parkinson's eyes as best he could, and Pansy's. There was still a faint sound of murmuring; he didn't lift his face to see who might still be in the room. Weren't they ever going to leave? Then a hand touched his shoulder, and slowly, slowly, as if viewing the gibbet of his own execution, Draco raised his eyes to his father's face, the sight he feared most in all the world.

Lucius lifted a crystal decanter from a library shelf and poured a glassful of something clear as water, handing it to his son. "Drink," he said, in a voice that brooked no refusal. Draco drank. It burned like fire all the way down his throat, and he choked and coughed. They were alone in the room, he saw now.

"A Sobering potion," said Lucius, replacing the decanter. "The effects are temporary, but they should last long enough."

For what, wondered Draco with the familiar shiver of dread. Well, I'll find out. It only makes it worse to think about what the punishment might be ahead of time, as if I don't know that by now...

"Whisky, I presume?" his father asked, his voice still cool and level.

"Uh..."

"That's how I first knew someone was down there," Lucius said impatiently, taking the glass from Draco's hand. "Smelled like a distillery. Then we all saw that the peephole was open as well."

Draco flushed scarlet. "Yes. We had a bottle of whisky."

"Did you get it out of the kitchens or did she?"

"Pansy did." Draco studied his father's face surreptitiously. No clues there. It was utterly expressionless, the left eyelid drooping a little, as always. "It was her idea," he added in a frantic rush of words. "All of it. I mean, I mean, not just the whisky, but what you saw. She tempted me. She led me on. She started it, the slut. Things never would have gone so far if she hadn't--"

Lucius held up his hand in the gesture that demanded immediate silence. "I already know that," he said. "And--" One corner of his mouth curved up a little, in a strange almost-smile. "I'm not going to blame you for taking advantage of what was so freely offered. I might just as easily blame myself. I should have realized that Pansy was bound to try this. And it shows your instincts are all right, anyway. At one time, I was a bit worried..."

"Sir?" Draco blinked at his father, wondering if maybe both of them were still more than a little drunk.

He looked at his son shrewdly. "You know what I'm talking about, Draco. It happens in a lot of these old wizarding families, the ones who've become inbred, corrupt. I don't want you going that way, but after seeing what I just did, I don't think there's anything to worry about."

"I-- I think I know what you mean." Draco looked down at his interlaced fingers. "No, there's nothing for you to worry about in that direction. But I--" He stopped.

"What is it, Draco?"

Glancing sidelong at his father, Draco realized that the atmosphere, while almost entirely strange to him, was not a threatening one. There'd be no punishment tonight. Perhaps it was even safe to say what he so desperately wanted to say. "Father, can I-- well, speak freely?"

"Please do."

"I know you've always wanted Pansy Parkinson for me--" Draco paused and then continued in a rush of words. "But I don't like her, I never have. It's-- I swear it's not what you were afraid of; I do, er, prefer girls that way, but I can barely endure being in the same room with her most of the time. If I ever have to marry her I'll go mad. We bring out the worst in each other. I can't be with her, I can't, I can't. Isn't there someone else, anyone else, who would please you?"

"Do you have anyone... specific in mind?" Lucius asked silkily.

"Specific?" echoed Draco. "No."

"Are you quite sure?"

"Well-- yes, of course I'm sure. I don't understand what this is all ab--"

"Ginny Weasley, perhaps?"

When he was very small, Draco had found an old book of children's short stories in the Malfoy library, illustrated with pictures of the dreadful fates that awaited little boys and girls who refused to obey their parents. One had related the tale of Kaspar, who wouldn't stay on the path when his father took him hunting in the woods. He ran from the adults, laughing, and stepped into quicksand. Since it was a wizarding edition, the picture was a moving one. The image of little Kaspar screaming and struggling as he sank into the earth that seemed so solid had stayed with Draco for a very long time. He remembered it again, now.

"Pansy Parkinson had a very interesting tale to tell me," Lucius continued. "It concerned certain events that took place on the Hogwarts Express a few days ago. Events she says she witnessed."

"I don't know what she could have been on about." Pansy couldn't have really seen anything, she couldn't have. Draco repeated that sentence to himself over and over.

Lucius shook his head sadly, as if disappointed that such untruthfulness existed in the world. "Apparently she saw you, as she put it, 'groping at that Weasley girl up against the wall of the train, with one hand down the front of her robes.'"

"I-- wasn't," Draco managed to say.

"Really. Well, much as I'd like to trust you on this matter, I'm afraid I can't. She also said she'd caught you looking at Ginny Weasley repeatedly this past year-- watching her, tracking her movements, even following her at times, getting into fights with the youngest Weasley brother over her--"

Draco's jaw dropped. "Pansy's been spying on me? And reporting back to you?"

"I wouldn't put it so indelicately as that. But yes, she's been keeping me informed."

"But I--" Draco dug his nails into his palm, struggling to keep his temper, his smooth, expressionless surface. "Listen to me, Father. I swear I have never touched Ginny Weasley. I've almost never even spoken to her. I literally never laid a hand on her until we met on the train-- accidentally, I might add. And that was only to get back something she'd taken from me. Pansy's going mad."

"Pansy's become less trustworthy than I would like. Indeed, I feel that she's begun to behave, shall we say, erratically," said Lucius. "But she's not losing her mind." In the distance, the clock struck one, a single toll of the great bell in the tower. The sound sent a wave of overpowering weariness through Draco. But the exhaustion only seemed to drag everything forbidden closer to the surface in him, and the Sobering potion only seemed to have skimmed that same surface. Beneath, he was a seething mass of emotions, impossible thoughts, unwise words he longed to blurt out. If he could just get hold of himself a little, have a bit of control--

"Draco, I know."

"What--" he blinked, running a hand over his face "--what do you know, Father?"

"I know that she's exerted a pull over you for some time. The Weasley girl. Now shall we, as Muggles say, lay our cards on the table?" Lucius continued. His next words fell into the silence of the library, each one measured and smooth. "Is she, or is she not, what you really want?"

There was a very long moment of silence. "Yes," Draco finally said. It was madness, he realized, to imagine that he could ever have hidden this from his father. "I know I can't have her. I do know it. I understand it. But, but--" A question formed in his mind. It was one he had wondered about many times. Asking it was like punching his fist through a stone wall. "Why? They're purebloods, the Weasleys. Is it just because they're Muggle-lovers? Or is it more than that?"

Lucius did not answer his son's question directly. That was another trick of his, Draco thought. "I suppose it's inevitable that you would want her," he said. "Some things cannot be avoided. They must be dealt with. There's a Muggle saying; I doubt you've heard it." He leaned back against the desk, propping one of his boots up on a chair. "'A man's got to know his limitations.' Ginny Weasley, I suspect, is one of yours."

"I never thought I'd hear you quoting Muggles, Father," was all that Draco could think of to say.

"If there’s anything I’ve learned in the past year, it’s that wise man finds wisdom wherever it may occur, and makes use of it," said Lucius. "And understand, if the matter were... other than it is... I wouldn't give a damn how you amused yourself with that girl. You're entitled to have what you want, Draco, as long as..."

"What?" whispered Draco, knowing the sentence to be unfinished.

"As long as it's good for you to have it."

"And you don't think Ginny Weasley is good for me to have."

"No," Lucius replied. "I don't."

"I don't understand."

"The girl herself may be innocent in this matter. Or she may not. I don't know. I'll keep her under surveillance as much as possible during the next year; it may necessary to take-- more direct action at some point. But what I fear most is--" Lucius hesitated. "Someone may be using her to try to get to you."

"To get to me?" echoed Draco, perfectly aware that he was beginning to sound like a moron. "Well, that doesn't make any sense. Why would anybody want to do that?"

Lucius turned the empty glass round and round in his hands in a gesture that had something weirdly tentative about it, something undecided. He's trying to decide whether to tell me something, Draco realized. But what?

"Perhaps this is my fault," he said, gazing down at the glass. Draco couldn't quite believe what he had heard at first; it was like hearing Lucius Malfoy declare that he had decided to become a house elf, and where was the tea towel that ought to go around his head? He had a hard time concentrating on what happened next, but he could see that his father seemed to come to a decision, at last. "You've been too long sheltered, Draco. But now there are things that you must understand. We must go somewhere that's safe to speak, where there's no chance of our being overheard. And as you've already proved, this isn't it."

Numbly, Draco arranged his winter wool cloak around his shoulders and followed his father. They walked out into the main room of the library; it was very dark, since most of the torches had dimmed, and the shadowy shelves of books soared up to the ceiling. Lucius stopped and pressed his fingers rhythmically into a wooden carving of a dragon on a bookshelf. He pulled Draco's hand to the same spot and fit his fingers into the faint depressions in the wood. A section of shelving swung outwards, revealing a musty, dimly lit, winding staircase, and he stepped down onto it, motioning for his son to follow him.

On and on they walked. The walls were bare stone, and the floor graded dirt, sending up little puffs of dust with each of their steps. Occasionally, Draco felt some draft of cooler air on one cheek, like the caress of an icy hand, or thought he heard very faint, far-off voices. But when he turned his head to hear them, Lucius said, "Do not let yourself be turned aside. For this is a strange path we take, and you may lose your way if you don't take care..." Shuddering, Draco wondered if the voices he heard were those of those who had walked this path, and who had not taken care. There was some magic bound up in Malfoy Manor that even he wasn't curious enough to explore. They followed the passageway for what seemed like an impossibly long time, and he had begun to think seriously that they must be to the coast by now when a flight of winding stairs rose above them. They climbed to the top and finally came out into a small twelve-sided room. Draco leaned against one wall, catching his breath. Then he glanced around, and wondered why it looked so familiar.

There was a great booming sound of ticking. That was the first thing he noticed. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he saw the little table with the clockworks on it, and the long poles attaching them to the interior of the clockface. The dark numbers were outlined against the glowing face from within. The clock tower.

"I didn't think the hypocaust went here." The instant after the words left his lips, Draco realized what he'd said. Well, that proves it. I'm a complete fucking idiot. Or maybe it's just that all the blood's left my brain and still hasn't come back.

"The oldest section does, the one most protected by spells. You could never have found it on your own."

"You mean--" Draco swallowed hard. "You knew I used to come down here? Knew, and never said anything?"

"I've known about it for years." Lucius sat in one of two chairs behind the table, and motioned for Draco to do the same. "I've been driving you-- pretty hard." He hesitated. "I knew you needed a place to go, to be alone, one that you thought I didn't know about. A sanctuary that was your own. Somewhere to go to ground. Without that, it might all have been too much for you. Some of the burdens I placed on you were very heavy ones. But you're a Malfoy; I knew you could take it. And I didn't want to break you, regardless of what you may have thought at times... but it's always been for your sake, Draco. Always."

Draco didn't begin to know how to reply to that. His father didn't speak that way to him, didn't say these things, didn't admit that he might have been wrong about anything, didn't justify what he had done, didn't... didn't... It made him seem human, and Lucius Malfoy wasn't human, damn it, he wasn't. He was like... an immovable granite monolith, one that was never worn down by wind or weather. Draco closed his eyes. He felt as if he'd been hit with a Reversal charm, with no clue as to which way was up.

"You said there were spells," he said, because the silence was almost making him more nervous than the talking had done. "But why? Why would you need them here? It's only an old clock tower; what could there be to protect?"

Lucius rested his elbow on the edge of the table and tapped his chin with a finger. "It's a bit hard to explain. But let me see if I can. If you looked out the window right now, Draco, you might see what you'd expect to see. A winter's night at the end of 1995. Or you might not. You might see this land as it was in the sixteenth century. Or as it will be in the twenty-fourth. You might not see the fields of Kent at all, but the glaciers that once covered this island of Britain, ten thousand years ago... or prehistoric beasts swimming through the ocean, because it was sunk beneath the seas once, too. And not only that. You might also see any number of alternate realities, alternate chains of events, in each of those. This clock tower exists outside of time. And also, one might say, outside of what an orderly progression of time implies. Objective reality."

Against his will, Draco was fascinated. "I didn't know about any of this. We've never learned anything like this at Hogwarts-- How is that possible?"

"There are four known clock towers, one of which actually is at Hogwarts, and they all have that capability. But it's a potential, one that lies sleeping in them until it is awakened by the proper spells. Tenere is one of those. Also, this room must be linked to at least one other room that's entirely in the normal space-time continuum. In this case, it's the oldest, deepest dungeon, the one that lies beneath the hypocaust in the library. If people need to be transported to the tower, it's safer to Portkey them in from that room, or from the outside."

Draco drummed his fingers on the dark wood of the chair, trying to process everything he had heard. The awful restlessness was seeping back, worse than ever. If he was to be honest with himself, it also had a great deal to do with the fact that he hadn't had the chance to complete what he'd begun with Pansy. He had been so close, so very close, and, incredibly, she had been so willing. It had been dangled before his nose, and then it had been snatched away. And Ginny. His father knew about Ginny, and that knowledge was like a relentless drumbeat in Draco's head. But of course he would find out about her. There was no secret that could be kept for long from Lucius Malfoy.

"So why'd you take me in through the hypocaust, then?" he finally asked. "Would it have taken too long to set up a Portkey?"

Lucius shook his head. "There is no time here. Only duration. That's what a Tenere spell does. No matter how long we stay here, when we return it will be the same time as when we left. No, Draco... I needed to see if you could take it."

"If I could take it?" Draco repeated, the familiar faint impossible anger stirring in him. As always, he tried to squelch it, but he was not as successful this time as he usually was. "Well, what if I collapsed on the floor of the hypocaust or something; what if I couldn't take it?"

"I knew you could." His father looked at him, very directly. "You're a Malfoy."

"Right," he mumbled, toying with a loose thread on the cushion of the chair. His head was beginning to pound. "A Malfoy."

"Maybe I have kept certain things from you much longer than I should have done," Lucius said, a thread of ice beginning to enter his voice. "You're certainly not prepared for them now. And that's a pity, because you must be. Things are starting to move. There have been...developments. Challenges await. And you must meet them, ready or not. What's that noise?" He looked up abruptly. "Are you grinding your teeth together?"

"Sorry," Draco muttered. His head was really whirling now, going round and round in big lazy loops, like giant ravens swooping down further and further; the biggest one was gliding down to him and spreading its great black wings and--

"--but that which does not kill you, will make you stronger," his father was saying.

“What?” Draco struggled to pay attention.

“Perhaps I should have let you study nineteenth century Muggle philosophers when you wanted to. Were you listening?"

“I’m listening now,” said Draco curtly. That stabbing pain was beginning behind his left eye.

“Well, that was the Muggle author Friedrich Nietzsche,” said Lucius. "He also made an argument I must admit I approve of very much. Namely, that there is no good or evil, only power and the will to use it. The superior man wields power, and the inferior one yields it...”

His father's sentences were starting to fade by the time he reached the end of them, Draco noticed. I won't pass out. I won't. I won't. He leaned his chin on his cupped hands, trying to balance his elbows on his knees.

"Go to the window and breathe some fresh air. It will help, Draco. Your head needs to be clear for this."

He walked to the eight-sided window, which was slightly ajar. The air was very fresh, and bitingly cold. It did seem to clear Draco's head amazingly. The landscape he could see looked familiar as far as he could tell, which was also a relief. "Father, what's this all about?" he asked, staring out at the smooth, unbroken snow. "Why did you bring me here?"

"This is the only place on the grounds of the manor where we are perfectly safe from being overheard," said Lucius. "So I’d like to tell you a story, Draco."

"What's it about?"

"The Weasleys. And the Malfoys. Our history, separately, and together."

"Oh," was all that Draco trusted himself to say.

"But first there's some background information that you must know. How much have you learned about the wizard battles of the early 1940’s?”

"Er-- a bit. They were led by Lord Grindelwald and the Fascistus, I think… isn’t that how Dumbledore first became known? By defeating him?”

“Yes. Very good. But Lord Grindelwald,” said Lucius, “did not act alone. And I’m not speaking of his followers. He worked in tandem with another wizard. A very dark wizard, and although he was a Mudblood, a very powerful one.” His voice filled with grudging admiration. “Had a certain respect for purebloods, I must admit, although no proper understanding of the true meaning of the word.”

“Why haven’t I heard of this before?” asked Draco, thinking guiltily of all the hours he’d spent doodling with a quill on a piece of parchment in his “Muggle History: The Last 10,000 Years” class last term.

“It is not generally known. Also, this dark wizard did not have an impressive career in the wizarding world. He dropped out of Durmstrang a year short of graduation, studied under that disreputable wizard Hanussen, put about some cock and bull story later that he’d been rejected from Muggle art school in Vienna, and frittered away several years in the Muggle armed forces of Germany. But just afterward—1919, I believe it was—he joined forces with Grindelwald in Branau-am-Inn. In Bavaria. Close to Linz, to the center of the ancient Bavarian magic--and to the von Drachen estate as well as Durmstrang itself, by the way. They swore that each would support the ambitions of the other. As they did. Grindelwald formed the Fascistus Front and began much the same sort of campaign that Lord Voldemort would later lead. And the other wizard sought power in the Muggle world.”

“What?” exclaimed Draco. “A wizard getting power among Muggles? I’ve never thought anyone would—I mean, it’s the most forbidden thing—“

Lucius nodded. “It was a weight too heavy for any human to bear. In the end, it drove him mad. But there is more. You may not have learned this yet, boy, but there is sometimes a connection—a bond, if you will—between events in the wizarding world and events that take place… elsewhere. Such as in the world of Muggles.”

Draco started in surprise. “But you’ve always despised them!”

“And I still do. No less than I ever did. Distasteful as this knowledge is, however, it is a fact, and only fools shrink from facts because they are unpleasant. The wizarding wars begun by Grindelwald were minor. No more than skirmishes, really. But in the Muggle world—“ He stopped. “Have you ever learned of a conflict that enveloped the planet—at least, that part of it that Muggles think they know? The one they refer to as World War Two?”

Draco thought hard but could come up with only the vaguest of impressions. He shook his head. "I'm not interested in anything Muggle past the eighteenth century."

"Well, now is not the time for a history lesson. All you really need to know is that it formed the modern world, and shaped the forces that control it. That war was why America became the world power among Muggles, with that haphazard lot of bloody aborigines and separatists controlling its wizarding world. It's the reason that Muggle Britain is what she is today, a decrepit old hag propped up by that ridiculous underbred ‘royal family.’” He said the last words with disgust. “It's why the wizarding aristocracy of Britain is fading. But none of it had to be. Adolf Hitler—“

“Who?”

“That was the name of the Mudblood wizard. Adolf Hitler very nearly gained control of the entire Muggle world. And he could never have done it without Grindelwald. But Lord Grindelwald could never have done it without the Malfoys."

"You mean that we-- our family," Draco said slowly, "shaped world history? Among both wizards and Muggles?"

"Exactly so."

"But how?"

"If I tried to explain it properly," said Lucius, "we'd be here all night. You don't have the necessary background information, Draco. After the holidays are over, you will learn more. The most important facts, however, are easy enough to understand. Michel and Gabriel Malfoy-- your grandfather, and great-grandfather-- took a magical object from Beauxbatons in the late nineteen-thirties. Understand, the Malfoys had more right to it than the school ever did; it was originally a family artifact, thousands of years ago. The Beauxbatons trustees were the ones who had obtained it illegally, if anything. At any rate, Gabriel wove a series of spells around this object, and used its mystical power to sustain the dark Mudblood wizard. It was the heart of his regime, the soul of his planned empire. And only one thing caused, or could have caused, its collapse."

"Someone stole back the magical artifact," guessed Draco.

Lucius nodded. Perhaps the faintest of smiles curved up his lips, and perhaps not. He seemed, as he so often seemed, on the verge of praise, of approval. Of acceptance. But, as always, no words were said. Draco realized that he'd been holding his breath for some time, and let it out in a long, silent sigh. How the hell does he do it? All he needs to do is look at me that way and I-- I'm not myself anymore, not my own anymore, and I don't think I ever was. There is no thought left in my head but pleasing him.

"The object was stolen in 1944, a year before the collapse of the regime," Lucius continued. "But the end was inevitable as soon as the theft happened. Still, Michel and Gabriel hung on, too honourable to desert the cause to which they had sworn themselves. In the last days of the siege of Berlin, they finally did attempt to escape through the American lines, knowing that no hope remained." His eyes grew hooded. "They were caught."

"Caught?" Draco whispered.

"By the wizarding forces. Fortunately, among the British troops there were several purebloods who were sympathetic to the cause, although they felt it their duty to fight for the Alliance. They helped my father and grandfather to escape. But then came the most shameful betrayal of all." Lucius strode to the window, staring out of it, as if he could not bear to face his son while telling him this part of the story, whatever it was.

"The wizard who had hunted them down and captured them, who had, in fact, pursued them for years," he continued, "committed a crime so terrible that, in my opinion, no punishment could ever be sufficient to atone for it. He must have known that he could not expect a kangaroo court on the wizarding side. So he turned Michel and Gabriel over to--" He paused, took a deep breath, and spat out the next word as if it burned his mouth "--Muggles."

"You mean..." For a moment, Draco could not grasp the enormity of what he had just heard.

"He betrayed them to the Muggle forces that were surrounding the city and capturing prisoners. Their wands had been taken from them; they were utterly defenseless. Imagine the shame and the humiliation, Draco, if you think can bear to do so... Malfoys were locked into a Muggle prisoner-of-war camp, and judged in a Muggle court. They didn't know much, but they knew enough to do what they had no right to do. And finally, the year after the war had ended, Gabriel, my grandfather, was sentenced to death by a Muggle tribunal, and executed for war crimes."

"I-- I don't believe it. I can't... I... wasn't there anything they could have done? Anyone who might have helped them?"

Lucius shook his head. "After the war, everything was in chaos. I can only thank all the gods that I wasn't yet alive to see it. There was no way to help them."

Draco sat in appalled silence, and at last Lucius spoke again. "So Gabriel died, carrying his secrets to the grave, and my father was finally released. He came to England immediately afterwards; the Malfoys had some connections here, such as the Parkinsons. My father never wanted to see France again, and he never did. Although the Tessier branch of the family, of course, did stay there. He bought this house from a very old and utterly impoverished wizarding family, and renamed it Malfoy Manor. He married Maria Pölzl, from the branch that are cousins to the von Drachens. I'm sorry you never knew her, your grandmother... And the old guard of the wizarding aristocracy in Britain despised him until the day he died." He looked up then, and his eyes met Draco's. "As they despise me. As they will probably despise you. But they are insular fools, and never forget that. Our blood is older and purer than any of theirs. And I think perhaps that they know it, and that forms a great part of the reason why they do despise us. But in your veins, Draco--" and he reached for his son's arm, and tapped the white wrist, where the faint shadow of a blue artery pulsed "-- runs the blood of the secret wizard kings of France, the purest royalty in the world. What is theirs, to that?" He gave a long sigh, as if his speech had wearied him, and dropped back into one of the chairs.

Draco turned to rest his chin on the dark oak of his chair, staring unseeingly out the window, into the night. The moon had gone behind a cloud, and if there was anything there that should not have been, it was simply too dark to see it. His mind had been thrown into such a turmoil that it seemed impossible to drag anything coherent out of it; still, he tried. "But there's one thing I don't understand," he said. "Well, a lot of things, I suppose, but the rest of them can wait. Why did you tell me all of this now, Father?"

Lucius Malfoy turned, so that his face was almost entirely in shadow, his eye sockets pools of blackness. "Yes," he said. "That is the most important part of the story... at least for you, at least for now."

"I don't understand."

"But you will, Draco." He steepled his fingers together. "You will. The wizard who committed this betrayal, who hunted down my father and grandfather, who shamed our name and his own, was also the thief who stole the magical artifact that was our heritage, our birthright."

A strange thrill of horror would steal through Draco sometimes during school term, when he was passing through one of the corridors in the Slytherin dungeons. A sudden chill would seize him, as if he'd jumped into a pool of ice and was spinning helplessly in the frozen current, unable even to scream for help. Then he would turn, and find that the gaunt and staring spectre of the Bloody Baron had drifted silently past him, or, on one memorable occasion, through him. Now, he felt that sensation again. He'd always bundled up precognition with fortunetelling and cardreading, idiotic pastimes for the giggling Gryffindor groupies of Professor Trelawney, the vacant Lavender Brown, the vain Parvati Patil. But he thought later that he must have had a flash of it then.

"Who was it?" he croaked.

"His name was William Weasley."

And, I knew it all along. The words fell into the very centre of his chest like stones, or the tolls of a great bell that had taken on form and shape. Suppose that's where my heart would be, he thought, vaguely. If I had one.

Lucius Malfoy kept talking after that, but Draco couldn't quite seem to take it all in. William Weasley, long dead by now, was Arthur Weasley's father, and the grandfather of the rabbit warren of his children. Of Ginny Weasley. Draco's mind seemed to be caught on something very sharp and winking, like the edge of a little knife, at that point, and he missed whatever his father said for several minutes after that. Then something about plans that could not be revealed in their entirety quite yet, but that were coming to fruition. And he, Draco, would take part in all of them, in time.

"But first you must trust me," said Lucius.

He was so tired, so very tired. His head ached and swam; the floor was starting to feel unsteady again. I think the Sobering potion is wearing off...

" Do you trust me?"

Draco remembered when Pansy had hesitated after hearing exactly the same question. He remembered the desperation in her eyes when she had tried to seduce him afterwards. As if she had been cut adrift from everything, and seizing me was her last chance to be anchored. But she failed, I think. I wonder what that means...

"I ask you again, Draco. Do you trust me?"

Lucius looked down slightly, so that his eyes met Draco's. He saw himself reflected in his father's eyes, a little blurred, a little unclear, and found himself glancing back and forth between the reflection and the man. It was impossible to tell the difference. It would be useless, he thought, to even try.

"Yes, Father. I trust you."

And there, there, was one of Lucius Malfoy's rare smiles, the ones that were so hurtfully, impossibly beautiful. In some unplottable place of the Dreamtime, chained to his rock of torture, Loki saw it, and sighed. Nidhogg, the serpent twined among the roots of the world-tree Yggdrasil, dripped venom upon the god, and he writhed in eternal torment. Yet because all times are one in that place, and whatever is, is also what has been and shall be, Loki also walked the worlds in search of Draco Malfoy. If either Lucius or Draco had glanced out of the window of the clock tower at that precise moment, they would have seen both events. For as Lucius had correctly said, the clock tower was outside of both time and space, at least as mortals tend to understand those two things. Loki certainly saw the two mortals as they stood in the little twelve-sided room at the end of a long winter's night in 1995. And he smiled, too, knowing that his quarry was close, and continued on to sixteenth century Leith.

All the way back to his room in the manor, Draco had thought of nothing but how desperately he longed for deep, drugging, dreamless sleep. But the instant he had stumbled to his great four-poster bed, pulled off his robes and shirt and trousers, dropped them into a heap on a floor, and collapsed onto the mattress, his eyelids had snapped open.

The minutes crawled by like tiny itching hexes marching over his skin. Draco stared up at the canopy, tossing and turning restlessly. It seemed impossible to lie still. He flipped onto his side, his back, his other side, sprawled out across the entire bed sideways, his stomach... Ah. So that was the problem. Incredulously, he realized that he was totally exhausted, drained in every nerve and fibre and muscle, filled with anxiety and dread, more than a little drunk, and still horny as hell. Well, it's finally happened. I've become a life support system for a dick!

He felt that he had never before truly understood the incredible power of this urge. It was, in some strange way, as if he'd only reached maturity in the past hour, and left childhood forever behind him. He'd been trying to get Pansy into bed with him for a full year now; he'd kissed other girls, he'd fantasized about them, mentally undressed them, stroked himself as he thought of them in those long nights in the Slytherin dormitory, thanking all the gods for silencing charms around his bedcurtains. And there had been the unacknowledged Ginny-Weasley-in-his-head, the one that was never permitted entrance into the light, that stood forever frozen in his mind and memory. But now Draco knew that he had been a child until this night, playing with the sexual impulse as if it were a toy. He had never known how it could rule him, how it could smash through his mind with such careless ease. He had not been able to resist it. Chance was the only thing that had saved him. The bitterness of his failure was like gall in his mouth. Well, there was only one thing to do about it now. Draco rolled over onto his back.

Wanking off at three in the morning, alone in my bed. Whoopee, he thought sourly. Happy birthday to me. But he was already pulling down his green silk boxers, sighing with relief at the feel of his own hand; at least this was something. Maybe he could sleep after this. Maybe it would keep him from screaming, or crying, or losing his mind. Maybe.

Pictures started drifting through his head as his breathing quickened, as they always did. He generally thought of different girls he knew, or not so much thinking as simply allowing their faces and bodies to flit past his inner eye.Tonight was different, though; he kept picturing roses; great blooms of color falling past him and landing beneath him, savage streaks of red and yellow and gold. Van Gogh's roses. Well, all right... oooh.. this seems to be working... I'll just go with it. The roses were landing on a bed and he looked down at them; there was someone in it. A naked girl, but he couldn't seem to get a fix on exactly who she was, as she kept changing. A bed-elf. Oh yes.

What is your will of me, Master? she asked.

Will you do whatever I want?

For that I was created.

Will you become whomever I wish to see?

Yes, she answered, and then she was Sadina von Tussel, ebony hair falling over creamy tan shoulders, reaching for him, and it was her hand around him instead of his own. Ah yes... that was very nice... or perhaps... Now she had become Xanthia Morgan, with her hot little fingers encircling him... or maybe Millicent, who really was looking good these days... no... Emily Biddle-Battenberg, her long dark hair falling loose and brushing against his thighs as she knelt before him. But none of these images were quite getting him where he needed to go. Draco let his mind wander, and stopped trying to think, as it seemed that tonight that was going to be the key.

How would you have me, Master? asked the elf.

Flat on your back with your legs spread, for a start, he replied, and obediently the elf assumed that position.

Red hair she had now, long and wavy, fanned out on the roses, and her skin was cream and ivory against the peach-colored petals. They had all become apricot roses now, like the ones in the bud vases earlier that night, and a flight of little green-gemmed butterflies fluttered around Draco's head as he knelt between her legs. Her slender white hands reached up to him and pulled him towards her. He saw her face clearly. It was pointed and pretty, like a little cat, the eyes a dark bitter-chocolate, the mouth generous and pink. It was his cousin, Marie-France Tessier.

He was so close, he could feel it, tightening in the base of his spine, ready to let loose, to explode. But just before he lost all control, the vision shifted, and he was no longer looking at Marie-France. It had become the face of Ginny Weasley. Oh no... no... But it was too late; he was past the point of no return. And he was too lonely, too tired, too angry, and too drunk to hide from himself what he wanted anymore; at that moment, if no other, he didn't care. This, then, would serve as his final farewell to her. His impossible desire. His possible destruction, if his father was to be believed.

The sequence in Draco's head surged onwards, and he let the overwhelming sensations of his own fantasy engulf him. The imagined scent of roses filled the room when he lowered himself onto her, and the petals shredded and rolled between their bodies as he forced her back into them again and again and again. He finally felt the release sweeping over him, the tremendous relief, after that whole long night of frustration. Softly, he groaned one word, over and over. A name. "Ginny. Ginny. Oh, Ginny. Yes. Feels so, so good... ah... Ginny..."

It had been a moment's aberration, Draco assured himself afterwards, trying to catch his breath. He'd never think about her that way again.

The resolve lasted exactly a minute and a half.

The second time, he brought her down to the dungeons, the deepest and oldest ones in the manor, the ones that had manacles on the walls, and secured her there, her arms chained high over her head at the wrists, her legs spread apart and chained by the ankles. Her wide golden eyes watched him all the while. Frightened, are you, Weasley? You should be. I can do absolutely anything I want to you, he told her. You're mine. You'll never escape me. I have control, I do. I have it. Her smile mocked him. So what are you going to do, Malfoy? Haul out the medieval torture devices? They're bound to be around here somewhere.

Hmmm. Well, yes, they are, but-- The fantasy had taken an unexpected turn, it seemed. This was Ginny Weasley herself, sarcasm and temper intact, and Draco found that it pleased him much more than the idea of some faceless, mindless bed-elf. I don't think I'll need them, he said. Then he trailed his hands down her breasts, flicking at their raspberry nipples, spanning her waist, coming to rest on her hipbones.

Is that the best you can do? she asked, her eyes mocking him as well.

No, he said, and then he unleashed all the pent-up frustration from what had so nearly happened with Pansy earlier. Draco explored his version of Ginny Weasley in every way his imagination could suggest, learning every inch of her with his hands, his fingers, his mouth, his teeth, his tongue, trying as hard as he could to conjure up the sensations he had never experienced. Aside from those fevered glimpses of Pansy a few hours before, he'd never even seen a naked girl in the flesh. But it didn't seem to matter, not now. His mind became an inferno as he shuddered over and over again with the power of his thoughts; it had never been this intense, this kinesthetic, this real. He lingered obsessively over every imagined detail, and as time stretched on and on Draco heard the clock strike four. Was her skin soft and warm? Maybe it was cool and smooth. Perhaps this was the exact texture of the skin on the underside of her breasts, or the inner part of her thighs-- or perhaps not, and again and again he re-imagined it, and in his mind re-experienced it.

But although he had mapped her body as thoroughly as he could without ever actually having seen it unclothed, Ginny's face was still a vague blur; it would not come clear. Draco wanted to see it, needed to see the expression on it. Suddenly, though, he was afraid of what it would be. He could clearly see that her wrists were going red and white from straining against the handcuffs-- strange, how his mind insisted on showing him this detail. It had to hurt. And oh shit, he realized with a faint thrill of horror that this was what the chains and manacles and leg irons that really were in the dungeons of Malfoy Manor had to have been actually used for, sometimes anyway. Of course. At some point, this must have occurred to a torturer, an inquisitor. Over and over again, most likely.

The memory of Pansy's dark eyes, growing bigger and bigger as he advanced on her in the window seat earlier that evening. The terror in them, when she thought he was going to rape her. His fantasy faltered.

Do you want me? he whispered to the Ginny of his imagination. Could you? She was silent; why was she silent? She was only a part of his mental furniture, of himself really, so why didn't he already know what she would say?

What do you want to hear?she finally asked.

The truth, tell me the truth, damn you. Tell me!

But what if I say no to you?

Draco stopped, painfully, and the moment hung suspended. His desire turned to dust and ashes in his mouth. In his mind's eye, he could no longer look at Ginny Weasley, even as he felt the insanity of this thing, this waiting for the words that were surely shaped by his own thoughts.

I don't know. I don't know. Is that what you're going to say? he asked her.

No. Her eyes closed until there was only a glitter of gold below cinnamon lashes, and she moaned quietly. Don't make me wait any longer, Malfoy.

He pressed forward and took her at last, very, very gently, his hand cradling her head so it didn't knock against the rough stones with each exquisite thrust, and this time she cried out, and the sound of her pleasure seemed to add a far sharper edge to his own. The chains disappeared and her fingernails clawed down his back and her legs were wrapped around his waist; they fell backwards onto a bed that conveniently appeared in the dungeon (well, it is a fantasy, after all, he vaguely thought.)

And that began the third time, which was the most shameful of all, because Ginny was on top now and she held his hands down with her own; she tormented and tantalized him with the movements of her body and oh, oh gods, it wasn't enough, it wasn't enough. He was begging her to show some mercy and put him out of his misery and at last she did and just imagining that was all he needed.

It took a long time to get his breath back after that one. Draco was still wiping sweaty hair off his forehead when the clock struck five. He had to stop; the intensity of it was too much, it had never been like this before. And then he knew the worst thing, the worst part of it, and the thought hit him like the Hogwarts Express, making him sit straight up in bed, gasping for breath a little. The sexual impulse that had attacked him that night, had broadsided him, had knocked him down so that he felt he could never get up again, had all been focussed on a girl he didn't care about. Pansy. What would its power be if it were trained on a girl he really wanted? On... Ginny? But I don't want her, I don't, I can't. I mustn't. That was only a fantasy, late late at night when I knew I'd go mad if I couldn't sleep and she, she who is most forbidden to me, kept popping into my head. It'll never happen again. Never. And at last, as dawn began to steal through the heavy moss-green curtains, he did sleep, restlessly.

And it never did, thought Draco. For all this year of torment, I kept her out of my head, the best I could anyway. Sometimes I couldn't. But I never did that again. Strange. I did other things I knew my father would despise, but never that. No matter how long the endless nights became... Was that when I started having so much trouble sleeping? he wondered. No. It wasn't. That happened the next month. After St. Tropez. After Marie-France Tessier. Oh gods. After Marie-France...

And with that thought, Draco knew that he was moving at the edge of wakefulness, and was no longer wrapped in this long, strange dream. All of his breath seemed to be moving up into his lungs in one desperate breath, and, with a gasp, he sat bolt upright in the huge four-poster bed.

He looked around wildly for a few moments, heart pounding in his ears, and his breathing slowly became more normal. Yes. This was the bed in the bedroom of the little guest house at Melrose Abbey. The same place where he had lain down with Ginny Weasley to go to sleep; how long ago, he wondered. It was the deepest part of the night; everything looked and felt and even smelt late. The air was colder than it had been before, earlier in the evening; he shivered, and wrapped a fur coverlet tightly around his shoulders. He reached down for the other one, too. But it wasn't there. His hand continued feeling along the bed, finding nothing. Slowly, Draco looked down, seeing only rumpled linen sheets, and the depression in the mattress where another body had lain. It had long since grown cold.

Ginny was gone.