Of Details and Dungbombs, I Know a Thing or Two

George Weasley had never expected to find himself in such an unenviable and uncomfortable quandary, and yet, here he crouched behind a wardrobe in the Room of Requirement, hamstrings burning with exertion. He dared not rise for fear that his creaking joints would betray him to the other occupant of the room; a bead of sweat trickled down the bridge of his nose, and he longed to wipe it away, but the Sorting Hat was in his left hand, and the right was busily steadying him in his perilous and agonizing crouch, and so he settled for wrinkling his nose in a futile attempt to hasten its meandering descent.

A fine pickle you've gotten yourself into, George, chided the shrill voice of his mother. Lurking behind a wardrobe like a common housebreaker. How did you get yourself into this mess?

Yes, drawled a laconic voice inside his head, and he was startled by a bristling, convulsive twitch from the tattered hat clutched in his sweaty hand. How did we arrive at this particular bailiwick, Mr. Weasley? I certainly don't recall volunteering to hunker behind a wardrobe and suffer the indignity of being throttled between your fingers.

Oh, do shut it. The rebuke was nearly out of his mouth before he remembered himself and smothered the retort behind tightly closed lips.

There was another indignant spasm from the hat. I will not shut it, it said imperiously, and an image arose in his mind of Professor McGonagall, prim and forbidding behind her square spectacles. It is a legitimate question given the ridiculous circumstances in which we now find ourselves.

He opened his mouth to argue the point and found that he couldn't. The only defense he could muster was that this wasn't at all what he had had in mind when he'd entered the Room of Requirement. He'd thought to meander among the endless maze of broken and ancient, yet fascinating bric a brac that cluttered this secret warren, let his fingers run over the myriad shapes-the whorls of a newel post that had once decorated some long-forgotten stair, the flawed oval of a cracked, cataracted mirror, the stubby, rounded belly of a tarnished spittoon.

His affection for the little things had come from his father, with his love of all things Muggle. Dad loved to examine his Muggle artifacts in the quiet cloister of his garden shed, puzzle over the minutiae of a electrical socket or a torch with the heavy, earthy scent of loam and fertilizer in the close air like the musk of a great and ancient beast. George could still remember peering around the corner of the garden shed as his father hunched over his latest prize and muttered to himself of its secrets. That the secrets were seldom momentous on the rare occasions when they chose to reveal themselves to his patiently prying fingers never deterred his father. For Dad, to know had been enough.

Mum...Mum was different. She was smart, and she was fierce as a badger, and she was as Gryffindor as Godric himself. She had reared seven children on nothing but a low-level Ministry salary and iron-spined determination, and he loved her dearly, but there was a Slytherin thread intertwined in her Gryffindor fiber, a kernel of Slytherin ambition that drove her to ignore the details in favor of the bigger picture. For Molly Weasley, a dream was all well and good, but what mattered was the end result.

She had scolded and prodded Dad for years about the need for advancement within the Ministry, waved her greasy ladle at him as she stood over a pot of stew and lectured him about his responsibilities to his family and the realities of seven children, and Dad, shielded from the brunt of her assault by the pages of The Daily Prophet, would nod and grunt and murmur "Yes, Molly, dear," as he riffled the pages. The arguments had grown old long before he and Fred had drawn their first breaths, and Dad knew how to weather them. Sometimes, he would make a vague promise to see about a promotion or to throw away his Muggle artifacts, but the promotion never came, and the box of Muggle trinkets retained its pride of place in the garden shed.

His mother could never understand Dad's refusal to uproot himself from his cramped office in the bowels of the Ministry and seek lusher pastures, and she often stamped around the kitchen or parlor in a fulminating high dudgeon, snapping her dishtowel and holding outraged conversations with the empty room about her Arthur's inexplicable lack of motivation.

But George understood it perfectly well because he had seen Dad puttering happily around the garden shed on weekend afternoons when he should have been de-gnoming the garden and clapping his hands in glee when the cipher of a Muggle geegaw had been broken at last.

By George, he would exclaim, and then he would laugh at his unintended little joke. I've figured it out! Come here, Georgie, and see what I've found. Isn't it splendid?

And George would forsake his crouch and clamber onto his father's lap for a closer look at the Muggle gadget his father held. No matter how unusual the gadget, though, he would always be more interested in the joy writ large upon his father's face, a joy that made a mockery of his thinning hair and careworn eyes and made him young again, if only for an instant. With the joy would come an epiphany: his father stayed in the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office, not because he was stubborn or indifferent to the struggle of his brood, but because he understood that a life without joy wasn't a life worth living. Considering the way Percy had turned out, he thought Dad was right.

Later, when he heard his mother tamping down her bitter disappointment with her furious footfalls, he would smile ruefully and wish that he could tell her the truth that he had learned in the garden shed. But he had known that even if he could have mustered the courage to offer the truth to her in a whisper and a cupped palm against her waiting ear, she would never have believed him. So he had said nothing for the sake of the family peace.

His mother would have been surprised to learn of his affinity for the textures and shapes of the objects his fingers touched. As far as she was concerned, he and Fred delighted only in the rending of things and the subsequent chaos such unmaking caused, not in the quieter act of creation. He supposed she had come to that conclusion from years of listening to the explosions and grinding bellows that had so often shaken the Burrow to its roots, and he was in no hurry to enlighten her. It was fun to keep secrets from those who prided themselves on knowing everything.

But delight in them he did. He saw just as much with his fingers as he did with his eyes, a bizarre kinesthesis between sight and touch that had served him well. After all, in order to best know how to dismantle a thing, one must first know how it had come to be, to trace the joints, joists, and seams that made it whole. So, before he destroyed a chair or a chest or assembled a trick wand, he immersed himself in all its parts, turned them over in his fingers and rolled them over the lined plains of his palms. He memorized their heft and their smell and the sounds made as each component sought and found its home within, without, or on top of another. When it was whole, he would hold it up to the light and study it and allow his lips to curl in fleeting satisfaction. And then his thoughts would turn to its destruction.

Take a Dungbomb, for instance. Delightful, Dungbombs. One could disrupt a single lesson beyond all hope of resumption, and their mere presence on Hogwarts' hallowed grounds was enough to send Filch into calipering paroxysms of knobbly-fisted, dirty-nailed outrage. More than once in his days as a pupil, he and Fred had peered around the corner like a mischievous, two-headed hydra and watched as Filch had shambled down the corridor with a mop in one swollen-knuckled hand, kicking a dented bucket and muttering dark imprecations against a "bloody pair of ginger-headed idiots."

Yet, for all the entertainment it provided, a Dungbomb was a testament to simple devilry, little more than a drawstring bag, some stitching, and a dollop of concentrated Stinksap. It was the holy trinity of merry bedlam, simple enough that a child could make it. He knew it was so because he had Fred had been children when they'd first conjured the idea over a game of Exploding Snap in the parlor and raced into their room to ponder the whys and wherefores, two halves and two heads pressed together to make a gleeful whole.

Ah, but it wasn't so simple, after all. Three was more than three when circumstances demanded it. Yes, there was a drawstring bag, but how big of a bag? Too big, and it would be conspicuous, but too small, and its promised bang would be reduced to a bit of unpleasant pong, the sort most often emitted by dyspeptic dogs and unwelcome relatives. What of the Stinksap? Too much, and the Dungbomb became dangerously volatile and prone to explosion in hand or trouser pocket. You had to mind the stitching, too. Careless seam work led to leakage and customer dissatisfaction, and as a businessman, customer dissatisfaction was the last problem he needed.

Customers were what had drawn him to this time capsule of stone in the first place. The hodgepodge of curios and broken belongings served as a lush breeding ground for new product ideas and improvements to existing merchandise, and he came here whenever he could, though circumstance had afforded him far fewer opportunities for clandestine browsing of late. It was the one thing he missed about his student days.

To be fair, your customers weren't the only reason you came here, pointed out the Sorting Hat. Your mother had a sight more to do with it, I think. That you ended up here was merely happy chance.

George fought the urge to squeeze the ragged point of the Hat until it screamed. He had taken it from the Headmaster's office as a petulant lark after his mum had ordered him out so that the senior members of the Order could discuss important matters "not meant for young ears." Young, as if he were still a child in sagging nappies, in need of her cosseting. Heat had risen in his neck and cheeks and prickled in his hairline, shame and resentment and the kiln heat of patriotic need. He'd opened his mouth to remonstrate, but she'd been too loud and too persistent, and in the end, she'd won just as she always did, worn him down with endless sound and fury. And because he couldn't override her, he'd snatched the Hat and fled before anyone could stop him.

It had been stupid and childish, an empty act of defiance, but he hadn't cared. It had been better than nothing, a single, flailing strike against the apron strings that bound him like Prometheus' chains to her smothering, fluttering, plump mother's hands. If he could not resist by the strength of his intellect or the might of his wand, then he would wield the one weapon that was surest and truest in his hands-his humor, icing sugar and copper shavings, sweet and bitter and galling as vinegar.

Now he wished he'd left the Hat alone. It was warm and impossibly solid in his grip, and it shuddered as though it were breathing. There was a strong, steady pulse beneath the second knuckle of each finger that bore an unsettling and unpleasant resemblance to a heartbeat, and in the back of his mind, he wondered what he would see if he were brave enough to lift it up and peer inside the gaping rend that served as its mouth.

Guts, he thought grimly. I'd see guts, pink and steaming and grey like uncooked sausages. I'd see the peristaltic rush of blood through thick, blue arteries and tiny, pinprick capillaries. It would be like that time Fred accidentally stepped on Ron's Puffskein when we were playing tag and crushed it. Its insides became outsides, and in the ten seconds before Ron's brain caught up with his eyes and he started screaming, we could see everything, even the spasmodic beating of its ruined, exposed heart. It was horrible and nauseating and mesmerizing all at once, and I still think about it when I read an obituary in The Daily Prophet. It's what death looks like.

You've a vivid imagination, young Master Weasley, mused the Sorting Hat in its McGonagall voice. But no. There be no blood in these threads of mine; only cotton woven when the Saxons still roamed the earth on bloody-hooved steeds and wizards and Muggles had not yet learned enmity, and a pinch of magic that time has forgotten, a spark of animus granted me by my Maker.

And who would that be? he asked, intrigued despite his bristling annoyance.

The Hat merely smiled. He felt the fabric crease between his fingers. Ah. Light and teasing. That is the question, isn't it? But we were discussing you. Bee in your bonnet, Mr. Weasley?

Of course there was. He was seventeen, a man now, and yet his mother refused to see him as such. To her, he was still an impotent boy in need of her coddling. Rubbish. He was no more a child than Charlie or Bill were. His education in the ravages of war and the price He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's crusade had exacted had begun the day Harry Potter had returned to the Hogwarts Quidditch pitch with Cedric Diggory cradled in his arms like a broken doll. It had come hard on the hoarse, keening wails of Mr. Diggory as he hunched over his son's body and rocked in time to his own cries, scooping up Cedric's gangly, unwieldy limbs as though he could put them together again, make them function as they had just half an hour before.

It had continued the following morning in the Hogwarts infirmary, where Harry had sat white and bland as the sheets that had covered his legs, drawn and silent as if he soul had joined Diggory's on the flight to heaven and forgotten to bid his body farewell. It had manifested itself in Harry's tears and in the choked, hitching sobs that had escaped the muffling confines of his mother's robes and made him want to look anywhere but at Harry. It had been in the sack of Galleons Cedric's death had earned, and the guilty, sickened happiness he'd felt when Harry had slipped the sack into his hand with cold fingers.

There had been refresher courses, too, reminders that had come when least expected. Like in the soles of bare feet as they minced across the frozen floor of Grimmauld Place and stumbled in the darkness toward a door shocked, sleep-encrusted eyes could not see. Or in the surreal sight of his father lying, pale and helpless, in a bed on the St. Mungo's Closed Ward, bandages wrapped about his middle to hide the pair of puncture marks from which blood seeped in a steady, truculent ooze. That night, he had learned that someday was always closer than he liked to think, and the possibility that he would one day bury his father had jolted him to his core.

And if yet more lessons in the cruel vagaries of war were needed, he had but to count the chairs around the kitchen table at the Burrow. There were eight where there had once been nine, and though its absence was no longer overtly visible, it was still keenly felt in his mother's perpetually dewy eyes when owls went unanswered and lovingly knitted sweaters were returned, unopened, and the stony set of his father's face whenever Percy's name was mentioned.

If all else failed, he could always turn to the children who came to the joke shop. Their eyes were hard and haunted as they wandered among the assortment of brightly colored pleasures to be had for mere Knuts and Sickles and Galleons, and as time and the war ground inexorably onward, the light of unadorned delight shone in them more and more rarely, until he had begun to despair of seeing it at all, and when he did, it meant more to him than the bright clink of coins passed from grubby, fierce fist to outstretched palm.

The worst were the ones who came the first time with fathers or mothers or brothers and darted gaily from wonder to wonder like hummingbirds in a field of flowers, and then returned a second time, alone. The first time it had happened, he had asked why it was so, and the second, but he had long since stopped asking. The answer was always the same, even for the ones who did not speak, and he had never been designed for grief.

So Mum could bloody well stow her high-minded and heavy-handed talk of innocence. There was none any longer. Not for him or anyone else. They had all been scorched and battered, and he was tired of tucking his chin and weathering the blows as they came. He wanted to fight, to deal a few blows of his own before the end. Why shouldn't he? Wasn't that what Mum had done when faced with the challenge lain before her in the guise of her brothers' waxen, dead faces? Wasn't that precisely what she and Dad were doing now? It was certainly neither more nor less than what Ginny had done with her blazing heroics alongside Harry and Neville Longbottom, of all people, in the Department of Mysteries.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light, murmured the Hat, and though he hadn't the foggiest idea why the Hat had said it, the phrase resonated in the sensitive tips of his fingers and settled at the base of his spine.

Yes.

That was exactly what he wanted to do. He wanted to kick and scream and leave his mark in the dust of the earth, whether it be in the gaudy, red smear of sacrifice or in the indelible proof of his small victory. If he was to be on the losing end, and his name was to grace the rolls of the dead and the venerated lost, then he hoped that he went to his death with a jaunty grin, or better yet, with arms thrown wide and laughter on his lips and a fullisade of Dungbombs as his herald.

Instead, he was crouching behind a wardrobe on burning haunches, watching the illustrious Draco Malfoy blub into his robes like a homesick first-year. He was huddled on a moth-eaten divan wedged between an oil lamp shaped like a witch's thigh that had probably once belonged to Argus Filch and a Victrola that sprouted from the floor and thrust its tarnished, brass petals toward him with pouty insistence. His back was to him, but he could still see the platinum locks of trademark Malfoy hair and the slender, sharp spars of shoulderblades over the alarmingly fuschia upholstery of the divan. The latter rose and fell in a jerky, tremulous rhythm, and the silence was punctuated by thick, slurping huffs, mud pulled through a clogged U-bend.

Wait 'til Fred gets an earful of this, he thought with incredulous glee. Then, But what could that poncy little git have to blub about?

Well, said the Hat with laconic amusement, his father is rotting in Azkaban.

The thought cheered George immensely. He could think of no better place for Lucius Malfoy to be than within the grey, damp walls of Azkaban, that bloodless womb in the middle of the North Sea that took life rather than gave it. In Azkaban, there was no recognition of rank and titles, and even if their had been, the Dementors had no eyes with which to see them. One man was as rich as another so long as he had memories to surrender, and when the eaters of souls could scrape no more joy from the minds and hearts of their captives, they were left to wither and rot in the fetid stink of their own forgetting.

Not so superior now, are you, you gutless toerag? It was savage and sweet on his tongue, and for a moment, the sizzling twang of seizing muscles was not so hard to bear. You've finally realized that money can't buy your way out of everything. How trying it must be to see your revered family name shunted from the social pages and the distinguished rolls of wizarding glitterati to the ignominious pantheons of crooks and degenerate reprobates like Mundungus Fletcher and Sirius Black.

Oh, how that last must burn.

No pity for your enemy, Mr. Weasley?

He thought of all the times he and his family had been the butt of Malfoy derision and the years his father and other Ministry officials had spent trying to prove that Malfoy the elder possessed a repository of Dark artifacts. He thought of Ron, who had spent a disgusting afternoon vomiting slugs after an ill-advised but well-intended attempt to defend the honor of Hermione Granger with a broken wand.

No one asked your opinion, you filthy little Mudblood, Draco had sneered, and contempt had dripped from his lips like clotted cream.

It was a contempt learned from his sneering, smirking father, who drifted through the wizarding world as though it were an interesting sideshow created solely for his pleasure, and who rubbed his wealth in the faces of his inferiors with malicious civility, confident that his millions placed him beyond the reach of the law. It was as much a part of the Malfoy legacy as the white-blond hair and the icy, grey eyes.

He wasn't so smug the day Dad gave him a thrashing outside Flourish and Blotts in Ginny's first year. He was disheveled and rumpled and florid with rage, and Dad's fist left a smashing welt on his cheek. Bet that ruined his week, the vain prick. Bet his stint in Azkaban isn't doing any wonders for his cherished complexion, either.

So, no, he had no sympathy for either Malfoy or his esteemed father. As far as he was concerned, the entire nest of serpents could drown in their own pomposity. They had spent so long weaving their shroud of lies and betrayal, and he was not surprised that it had suddenly and gracelessly become their noose. Let it have them all.

"I can't," Draco said suddenly. It was a low moan, anguish and bone-deep misery, and George was so startled by it that he flinched and nearly flopped indecorously onto his backside. "Merlin help me, but I can't. But my father...,"

The blond head disappeared from view, but the guttural lowing continued, and George suspected that Malfoy had folded in upon himself and was resting his forehead upon his knees.

What about your father? he thought eagerly, and pressed forward, the better to hear. Maybe the idiot would spill his guts, and he would have useful information for the Order. If so, his mother would have no choice but to start treating him as an adult.

Be careful, warned the Hat.

Too late, he realized that his left leg had fallen asleep, and as he shifted position, it betrayed him, and he sprawled on the floor in an untidy heap of robes and Sorting Hat.

Malfoy was on his feet in an instant, wand drawn. "Who's there?" he demanded, and then his wildly searching gaze fell on George. "A Weasley. I should have guessed. Vermin love dark, cluttered places, after all. Look at the rubbish heap you live in."

"Sod you, Malfoy."

It was automatic, listless. George was too busy staring at Malfoy's blotchy, tear-stained face. It was normally flawless and possessed of a sharp-featured beauty that lent life to rumors that Malfoy scions had once trysted with Veela lovers, but that delicate fineness had given way to jagged, brittle edges and gaunt, papery hollows at his cheeks and beneath his eyes. The glow of arrogant youth had been replaced with a dull scrim of weariness.

The eyes were the worst. They were glazed marbles inside his pallid face and surrounded by bloodshot irises, and they were stark and dead and filled with rage and bewilderment and a gaping loss that staggered him as he sprawled on the floor, propped on his elbows.

The rage he understood because it had always been there, tucked carefully beneath the cool hauteur and the calculated disdain with which he insulated himself from the touch of the impure, but the bewilderment and loss frightened him. A Malfoy was surer of his place in the world and his inalienable dominion over it than he was of anything else, and to see one untethered from his fulcrum and drifting blindly was...

Terrible. Blunt, and hard as a palmstrike against his temple. Oh, Malfoy, I think your light is dying, he thought with giddy horror, and the thought brought him no comfort, only a frantic need to turn his face away and flee. I don't want to see anymore. It makes him too-

Human? the Sorting Hat supplied helpfully.

Oh, that was a road he refused to take, and so he snarled, "Having a good wibble over your father? Getting buggered must be a painful adjustment for him. Does he like the view from between his ankles, then?"

Draco's pale face darkened to an alarming plum. "Don't you dare talk about my father, you stinking blood traitor," he hissed through gritted teeth.

The anger was reassuring, comforting. It was the status quo, and so he stoked it. "Why not? I reckon his pristine bum would fetch a fine price from the other inmates. Good stock, after all. Besides, the filthy bastard got what he deserved."

"He's my father!" Draco shrieked, and spittle flew. "You shut your fucking mouth, you Muggle-fucking bastard," and with that, he drew back his foot and kicked him squarely in the thigh.

The pain was exquisite, and black lotus flowers blossomed in his field of vision, but as he writhed and clutched his cramping quadricep, he was struck by a monstrous epiphany that locked the breath in his lungs.

Draco Malfoy loved his father.

It can't be. Everybody knows that when a Malfoy produces an heir, he unwittingly produces the means and manner of his death. To the son, the father is a resource to be mined and cast aside when he is of no more use, an impediment to greater fortune and glory. Love is a waste of time and cunning, and if there exists any sense of filial regard, it is the story of the scorpion and the frog, a love born of expediency.

Just as everyone knows that the poor are lazy and stupid and indiscriminately profligate, countered the Hat with gentle rebuke. Absolutes can be terrible things, Mr. Weasley, and love is no less powerful when it resides within twisted hearts. Lucius Malfoy is bound and defined by the choices he has made, and his son is bound to him by blood and the memories that bind. Love is blind and vicious and jealous no matter whom it strikes, and it demands choices.

He thought of Percy, then, who had chosen Ministry over family and bureaucracy over kin and hearth. Percy, who had packed his trunk and left without a word while his mother wept in the doorway and clung to his sleeve until he had pulled it away, and who had not deigned to visit his ailing father in the hospital. Percy, who he wanted to punch and kick until those ugly, priggish features were obliterated, and Percy, who he still loved with every fiber of his being.

Because underneath that Percy was another Percy, one that he had known and loved with a ferocity that he would never admit to anyone, not even Fred. A Percy that had passed a year mooning over Penelope Clearwater as he did household chores, and that had patiently taught Ginny rudimentary magic the summer before her first year at Hogwarts, sitting at the spindly kitchen table and demonstrating the proper method of swish and flick, if you please. A younger Percy who had agreed to help him and Fred collect tadpoles from a puddle in front of the Burrow, not because he took delight in chasing the terrified creatures with his cupped hands, but because it was an opportunity to learn.

For that Percy, he would gladly have died, would still die, and it didn't matter if he wore the black of a Death Eaters robes. That Percy was his, and nothing would ever change that. Not even Percy.

My Percy, he thought savagely. Mine.

He was so busy thinking of Percy and the way the puddle and his bare feet had reflected in the glass of his bookish spectacles as he squatted over the tadpoles and observed them with childish curiosity that he did not hear Malfoy utter the spell. He saw only the flash of amber light on the periphery of his vision, and by then, the deed was done.

He found himself standing in the corridor outside the Room of Requirement with the Sorting Hat in his hand and could not say how he had come to be there. His thigh pulsed with a dull ache, and that puzzled him, too. He rubbed it absently with the palm of one hand and stared at the wall where the Room of Requirement had been. He could not shake the idea that he had been inside and seen...something. Something crushing and perplexing and strangely heartbreaking. For some strange reason, he thought of Percy and the shimmering reflection of a puddle in his spectacles.

All rubbish, of course. If he had gone into the Room of Requirement and seen Percy, he would have remembered. He was a man interested in the details. A bit like Dungbombs, really.

He tucked the Sorting Hat beneath his armpit and walked slowly toward the blank wall.

"One, two..."