Cold Heart

Beginning

Children are such cruel little beasts, everything is so simple to them. Yes, no; hard, soft (rough, tender); love, indifference (they haven't usually learned yet about love, hate, but I think this one has, so perhaps he will set me free).

There was a moment when I could have had him, when I could have had both of them, but I hesitated. The one I wanted, yes, but my son too? They both stared at me, their lips parting. His tongue crept out to lick at his upper lip before he sucked on the lower, but he was not teasing. My son, too, his lips pale pink instead of the other's red, was equally fascinated. Then they looked away from me, towards each other, and smiled, and it was too late.

Ending

I must have sat there for a long time, my son lying across my knees, his head supported in the crook of my elbow. One of his hands I held. The other was in his lover's grip, close to his lips, so that between sobs and cries he could kiss it.

That boy knelt at my feet, but not as I would have wanted him. He had slid sideways and was pressed against my legs, one arm wrapped around me to support himself, his head leaning against my thigh. Between mumbling kisses on to my son's cold hand he spoke to me, though if I had not known the words by heart I would never have understood them, so ragged his voice was from such long crying.

"You didn't need to do that.... I would have done what you wanted.... Anything, for him, anything but what you did...."

Too late now, my child. Too late for all of us.

When the room became quiet I was surprised, and looked up because I wondered if he was dead too. I wished it was possible to die of grief, but I did not think so. For him, perhaps, but not for me. I was condemned to remain trapped on the rock Remorse in the rising waters of the sea Regret, with nothing to look forward to but those cold waters and that stormy sky, and a long dissolution.

He had moved back, no longer kneeling, but sat with his arms wrapped rigidly around his bent knees. His eyes were on my wand, where it had fallen to the floor.

Perhaps I smiled, a very little. I did not otherwise move, as he picked it up and lifted his head to look at me, my wand levelled in a steady hand. For all his distress, he was strong enough to do it. I encouraged him.

"Thank you, Harry."

Something moved in the green gaze, still brilliant despite the reddened eyes and lids, and I understood he did not mean to stay alone. And why should I deny him that? There was a gift I could give him, though, which might keep him alive, for a while, at least. My son would have liked that, and I found I wanted it. So I was still capable of wanting something.

"There is something you need to have, first." No point in saying 'something I want to give you.' Rightly, he would not care.

After a long staring pause he lowered my wand, though he still held it ready for use. He had seen I would not try to prevent him.

"In the lower right hand drawer of my desk," I tilted my head sideways, towards it, "you will find a sheaf of parchment sheets, sewn together. It's not bound, but it is complete. A Malfoy legacy. Read it. You will need it; you can use it. You will use it. I never knew if I would, but you are capable."

I added, "There is no lock on the drawer, but to open it you must press my wand to it and say those words: 'A Malfoy legacy'. Use it for my son, if not for me."

He looked at me again for a long time. Probably thinking was difficult for him. Then he stood up, went to my desk, and opened the drawer as I had bidden him. He took out the book I had done so much research for, laboured so long over, never knowing if it would be a complete waste of time. He looked at it, flipped pages, turned them back, then read for a while.

He put it on the desk carefully and picked up the wand again.

As he came towards me I gathered my son up in my arms and pressed a kiss on his cold mouth, quite free of colour now. I was glad I had been able to close the grey eyes. I would have liked to have one last glimpse of the other, for whom I had done this, however much I told myself I had not meant to, but Draco was more important. I waited for the words and the green.....

~~~~LM~~HP~~DM~~~~

Flash.

I watched for just a second as his body slid from the chair, then I dropped his wand and sprang to catch the other body slipping free of his hold.

I ended on the floor tangled with both of them. It seemed right, and I lay there for a while, holding Draco, kissing his mouth, until I found myself kissing Lucius's pale lips too, and fondling that beautiful hair. No more fantasies now of playing with it in bed.

Then I got myself up onto my knees and lifted Draco. It was hard; he was my height, about my weight, and no longer able to help me. In the end I did what I had seen on Muggle television, and slid his body across my shoulder. Then I was able, just, to rise, using Lucius's chair to drag myself upright. I carried him over to the long couch that lay before the open window, through which the light spring breeze still blew, in which the sunshine and the shadows of the trees outside still played together. Sunlight turned his tumbled hair to silver gilt, and shadow to pale ash.

When I had settled him I returned to Lucius. I could not, indeed would not, lift him, but I straightened his body, tidied his robes, and combed out his hair with my fingers till it lay round his shoulders as he would, no doubt, have liked. I folded his hands over his breast (though I did not put his wand in them, like a warrior's sword), wondering if that was done in the wizarding world. I had seen dead wizards, but never laid neatly out. Then I tried to close his eyes. Like his mouth, they seemed to smile a little. Eventually I sat there with my fingers holding the eyelids lightly down, for a few minutes, while I thought about kissing them.

Instead I went over to Draco and kissed his eyelids, and stroked the raw mark on his throat, the mark of the magical bindings that so suddenly had killed him. I could see now that Lucius had not meant to do that, but the ropes had lashed from his wand to Draco's wrists, and forced them back, towards each other - and the ropes had lain across his throat. He had not even choked or tried to speak; something had broken or been crushed in that moment of intolerable pressure before Lucius cried out, "Finite Incantatem!" Too many syllables. Too late.

I tried a couple of healing spells, and even Reparo, but the mark remained. Dead bodies do not heal, it seems, and bruises are always so much more difficult than cuts, or even breaks. Perhaps it was beyond my skill.

I left him and returned to Lucius and said what I needed to say. "Thank you for reminding me."

Reminding me that it would have been intolerable to realise, too late, that if the next person into the room was a tall thin snake look-alike with rough-scaled skin and red eyes, I would have made him a very happy monster if he found three bodies on the floor.

I wondered about setting fire to the place, but it seemed stupid to do so before I was sure I could get outside the wards Lucius had called on to keep us in, and thoughtless to do so if Narcissa was in the house. To say nothing of the house elves.

I took Lucius's beautifully penned manuscript, packed with invaluable, incredible information, and shrank it so it would fit in my breast pocket easily. I put several charms on it to make sure it would not fall out, or get lost, or be taken from me. Last of all I retrieved my own wand from where Lucius had put it and restored it to its pocket in my robes. I already had his, and Draco's, and I did not mean to confess to them or to surrender them.

Beginning

I walked through the wards with no trouble. Perhaps their master's death brought them down. Then I Apparated back to the Hogwarts boundaries. We were not supposed to do that. We were not supposed to know how, but my godfather had taught several of us, and Professor Dumbledore had turned a headmasterly blind eye to the danger of it.

Now was not a time to think of Draco, or to regret that we had used the skill to find a greater privacy than we would have had at school. If I thought how stupid we had been I would start crying again.

I went looking for the Headmaster, but of course I met Professor Snape first. He looked at me with suspicion - on a Hogsmeade weekend students do not generally return to the school in midafternoon of a beautiful spring day looking as if they had cried themselves blind. I did not feel like arguing with him, or having points taken from Gryffindor - how trivial to be thinking of that now.

To avoid his own tendency to cling to trivia I said, "I need to see Professor Dumbledore, something for the Order, Professor; it's very urgent. Can you tell me if he's in his office?"

Snape grunted something disobliging, but he escorted me there, and opened the revolving staircase for me. He also followed me up, of course, but the Headmaster dealt with that, once he saw I had something truly urgent to say. Most politely he asked Snape to wait outside, and Snape left as grudgingly as he could without being openly rude.

"Professor Dumbledore, is there any reason we have to wait for Voldemort to gather more followers, to injure more innocents, to be ready to attack us? Can't we attack him ourselves, soon?"

The old man sighed, and his blue eyes looked at me - through me, as it so often felt, at some place no one else could see. "Harry. Harry, you're our key, but we must wait for the door to be in place, for the lock to present itself."

I did not feel like mysticism. I said shortly, "I want to be more than a luck piece, Professor. Instead of being in the right place at a fairly suitable time, and incredibly lucky, when he makes his next attempt, I want to plan out and execute an attack and bring him down, at a time and place of my, or our, choosing."

"How will you do that, Harry?" He did not sound concerned, but he had the courtesy to sound sincerely interested.

"Lucius Malfoy showed me the door, and the lock. I am not the key, but the one to use the key. He made the key, and he gave it to me. I will use it, as he wished. Professor Dumbledore, I need to consider what he gave me, to study it. I may need a lot of help to use his key. It's a record of all the spells Voldemort performed, over the years, to make himself what he is. It's a guide to undoing those spells, for ever. Will you help me, or must I act alone, again?"

He did not blink at that. In the past we might have thought ourselves acting alone, but it always seemed to turn out that the old man knew perfectly well what was going on. For a long time I had been hoping he had not known everything, or even as much as he pretended to know. That would have made him responsible for Ginny, and for Cedric, and for Mr Moody, and for lesser but still terrible things that had happened to other people. For myself, I wanted no more of it; my conscience was not so hardy.

"I always help those who are loyal to me."

That did not seem good enough, but it might have to do. Perhaps he would regard loyalty to my dead parents, to my dead friend and lover, to my dead enemy, to my living friends, as sufficient.

Ending

I went away to study the Malfoy legacy, and in the end I used it as its maker had hoped someone would, or believed someone should.

Now I'm going back to Malfoy Manor, to see if it is true that there are new ghosts there. I'm not going to kill myself, but I would like to live very quietly with my dead. Narcissa has agreed to give me houseroom, and will not be staying much longer, in any case. I have done what I was born to do, and have no other responsibilities now.