Threads

Threads: Chapter 5

Harry knew that nobody could call him observant and in fact, people were wont to call him the opposite, which he thought harsh but not without a core of truth. Nevertheless, it would not be possible to share such a small space as a lighthouse deck with such a large personality as Draco Malfoy and miss the fact that he was nervous. He emanated a sort of furious fragile tension. It wasn't really in Harry's nature to think in similes, but he would have felt some recognition if he had seen a malignant tropical spider in the middle of a large and sensitive web.

It wasn't clear whether Draco was hunting or hunted, if Harry was honest with himself. He wouldn't be particularly surprised if the pale boy turned around and made a probably very slick attempt to push him off the platform. On the other hand, he was there with them in this circular trap of a building and by his own admission he had as much to hide from as they did.

This train of thought was following the twisted and branching sort of track that made Harry wish for Hermione. So when he opened his eyes, squinting against the sun, and heard Draco say irritably, "What's up with Granger then?" he had a brief moment of paralysing certainty that the other boy was a Legilimens. You never knew with Malfoys.

"What do you mean, what's up?" he stammered, sitting up hurriedly from his sprawled position on the wall around the deck. Draco raised his eyebrows.

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

"It's called raising your eyebrows. Today it means: are you deaf? On other days it means other things. You'll have plenty of time to work it out."

Harry jumped hurriedly off the wall. "There was a noise? Hermione? Is she OK?"

Draco looked resigned, but said only, "You know even I can't see through stone floors, Potter."

Harry ran.

**

"Ok, enough." said James Potter, turning over and trying to look cross. "You can sigh as much as you like, I am not getting out of bed to get you things to eat." There was no response from his wife, so he reached out and prodded her pale back, smiling to himself. "Oi. Lily."

Then she turned over and he stopped, surprised, because her face was mottled and shiny with tears. "Hey! What's going on?" He touched the wetness of her cheek in bewilderment. "Lily?"

She pushed his hand away. "Don't, please."

James stared at her. "What? Don't touch you? Are you crazy? Has something happened to you?"

"No. I mean, I don't know. I can't do all this, James."

James sat up in bed and looked carefully at her. She lay on her side, hands protectively over the bare white bulge that was her middle. She was not the kind of woman who bloomed in pregnancy; she was sallow with fatigue and her face and feet were soft and swollen. James thought she was beautiful. He said in a new gentle voice, "Come on then, what can't you do? I always thought you were pretty good at whatever you turned your hand to."

She sniffed. "Hiding. The baby. The war." She gave a desperate little laugh. "I don't even know which I'm more scared of. We're too young for all this; I never meant to be married at twenty one, with a baby for God's sake..." She looked at her husband's face and stopped short. "What?"

"Are you saying you regret it?" James said carefully. "Is that where this is going?"

Lily knew the signs of his legendary temper and she said sharply, "No. I don't regret it, don't let's be ridiculous just because it's the middle of the night and I'm awash with hormones."

James looked expectantly at her.

"I just don't know what I'm doing," she said wonderingly. "This wasn't in the plan for us, was it? All the things we were going to do, travel and be great Aurors and..." She hoisted herself up to a sitting position, and suddenly the bizarreness of her round bulk on those bony girlish arms made James have to bite down on the kind of sentimentality he usually despised. He reached across and kissed the side of her face, and then he bent and kissed the top of the bump and Lily gave a faint laugh.

"There'll be ways to do all that," he promised her.

**

Ron and Ginny sat in the narrow space between two tall bookshelves and thought. Ron didn't like the Library but there were few places to find privacy at Hogwarts and it made him think of Hermione and homework and safe normal things. He had a scrap of parchment on his knees on which were written two columns of names in his careful backwards-slanting hand.

He looked at the first column of names again, in which there were the names of the four Marauders and Lily Evans. Next to the name James Potter he had written Harry. And now there were four blank spaces.

Ginny peered over his shoulder. "Well, put Hermione next to Lily," she said reasonably. "I don't think we're in any doubt." Ron hesitated. He knew it was true, and yet somehow it was the end of the old order and the start of a new configuration in which he did not know his place. After a moment, Ginny leaned across him and impatiently scrawled "HG" next to Lily's name. "There," she said, satisfied. "That leaves three. One's you."

Ron looked sideways at her. "Sirius?" he suggested uneasily. Ginny considered this doubtfully.

"The thing is," she said after a moment, "Sirius is a Black. I mean, he comes from a big old Dark wizarding family. And then he sort of turned on them and then they hated him, didn't they, remember what Grimmauld Place was like for him?" Ron winced and nodded. "And who else do we know from a big Dark wizarding family? Who's now made good? And they hate him for it?"

"No." said Ron. "I don't believe it. We don't know if he's made good or not. He didn't help Hermione's parents. He's not one of us."

"He saved Hermione," said Ginny sharply. "I'd say that was proof enough for now."

Ron looked at his sister in surprise, but she stared back at him with a new and unusual firmness. After a moment, he reluctantly shook his quill and wrote carefully "Malfoy".

"Oh well," he said after a moment's reflection, "If the worst comes to the worst and the spell wins, at least Malfoy'll come to a sticky end." Ginny, in spite of herself, grinned.

**

The sight before Harry had a sort of Agatha Christie feel to it, though as he was not familiar with bodies in libraries and snow-surrounded country houses he only registered Hermione, on her knees in the middle of the kitchen floor, surrounded by a great pool of dark congealing red.

He flung himself down beside her and the stone and the liquid were cold against his knees, too cold, and Hermione didn't move.

"Hermione!" he said urgently, "What happened? Are you all right? Are you hurt?"

She raised her head and her face was mottled and shiny with tears, and Harry only had a moment to wonder if blood really smelt so strongly of basil before he heard somebody behind him close the door.

"Only if she bleeds spaghetti sauce," remarked Draco with some interest.

Hermione gave him a look of such loathing that for a moment there was silence.

Finally Harry ventured "Hermione? Why don't we get you up and clean this up?" She looked up furiously at him.

"Fine," she said savagely, dragging herself to her feet, sticky saucepan in hand. Harry looked at her in helpless bewilderment.

When it became clear that Harry was not going to leap into useful action, Draco gave a theatrical sigh and picked delicately across the room on the islands of clean floor. "What's up, then, Granger?"

"Why do you care?" she flashed back.

Draco shrugged. "Search me. Although if you're crying because you happened to see, say, a Death Eater scaling the walls I'd be quite interested."

She scowled at him, and said with apparent irrelevance, "I can't cook."

Harry looked at her. "You can't cook?" Something about her face told him this needed to be taken seriously, so he added hastily, "That doesn't matter. Who cares? We'll learn some household magic."

"I won't," said Draco decidedly. Harry gave him a cross look.

But Hermione wasn't listening. "I can't cook," she repeated rather wildly, "Or, you know, do housework or - or look after people or get married or have a baby..." She trailed off, as though she had surprised herself.

Harry stared at her. "Get...? Have a...?" He looked helplessly at Draco, who only raised his eyebrows.

"Stop that," said Harry.

"Oh give the woman a hug, it always shuts them up," said Draco, with his own particular mix of contempt and boredom.

Harry did as he was told. She was stiff and unyielding in his arms. He said doubtfully over the top of her head, "Hermione, for heaven's sake, why are you talking about getting married?"

Hermione sniffed. "Your mother," she muttered. "Lily and James Potter went into hiding, and then they got married, and then she had you. But I'm too young for all that; people don't do all that at eighteen any more. I'm still a child..." She pushed her face savagely into Harry's chest and he felt her tears damp through his T shirt.

He stood for a moment, one hand tentatively on her hair. He wasn't used to comforting Hermione and he was pretty sure he wasn't very good at it.

"You don't think we can break the spell," he said finally.

Hermione shook her head mutely.

Harry sensed he was fighting a losing battle. "Hermione, it doesn't seem to be happening yet. Maybe we'll get a chance. Maybe we can make those active decisions, like Dumbledore said."

"What, like break up?" Hermione stepped back and looked him in the face.

The situation demanded a dramatic moment of silence, but Draco, who had been observing with keen interest, appeared to be tired of being a bystander. "Break up?" he echoed, astonished. "You're together?"

Harry and Hermione both ignored him so he repeated a little louder, "Hello? Together? Really truly, not-just-a-casual-snog-in-the-Charms-classroom, meet-the-parents, full-on-shagging, rings-and-babies together?"

Hermione swung round, slithering only a little on sauce, and gave him a venomous look. "Yes we are. There will be no rings, he has no parents, and there has been no shagging," she hissed. Draco had to admit this demonstrated rapid and impressive grasp of his suggestions but he was not convinced. He waggled his head non-committally and looked at Harry who clearly had not heard a word.

"You think we have to break up?" Harry's eyes were rather glassy.

"You see?" she said hopelessly. "It doesn't work, either way, we've been manipulated by the spell, we can't break up, I mean, we won't, that means we have to..." She swiped angrily at her eyes and saw that Harry had gone perfectly still and silent. "Harry?"

"There must be another way," he said, after a moment.

**

Molly Weasley had a bad feeling about things. She received a great deal of post from her children, all of it in styles that she knew and loved as well as their faces. Bill wrote sporadic long letters in a fine scribbled hand with carefully watered down tales of his latest exploits. Charlie wrote about his dragons by name as if they were people and generally forgot to write about the people at all. Percy wrote meticulous accounts of his week signed "Your loving son," and Fred and George assured her they wrote half a letter each, though she could not have told where one left off and the other started. Ron was amongst the worst letter writers of the family, she thought, in a boyish way. He wrote a painstaking weekly three line missive, completely devoid of useful or interesting information yet somehow full of the essence of Ron. But for two weeks now, there had been no jerky little notes delivered by ageing Hogwarts owls, and Molly knew this was a bad sign.

And then there was Ginny's letter. The specific one which had landed in her morning cup of tea and which, when rescued, read only:

Mum,

Could we meet next weekend? I've got a pass for Hogsmeade and I'd really like to talk to you about something. Hope everything's good at home.

Love, Ginny

As Ginny's letters usually ran to five pages, Molly was pretty sure something was amiss with her two youngest children. She finished her tea, now faintly owl flavoured, and watched in surprise as Ginny's letter activated what seemed to be a Crumbling Charm and collapsed into a little heap of yellowy dust. That was an advanced charm for Ginny, not to mention a paranoid one. And what was wrong with a quick conversation in a fireplace? There was only one reason for Ginny to see her mother in person, and that was for privacy. Or safety. Neither of these thoughts made Molly feel any better.

**

The interior of the lighthouse was a stack of round rooms connected by a tiny cast iron staircase winding a tight spiral through the centre, like an axle through a pile of wheels. After the kitchen, Hermione's was the next down, and she was amused if not surprised to see a hand emerge from the staircase and knock tentatively on the floor.

"Come on up," she said, smiling to herself.

Harry heaved himself up the last couple of stairs and eyed her where she sat in her pyjamas on the ledge of the deeply inset window.

"I could have been Malfoy," he told her severely.

Hermione grinned. "Don't you think I can recognise your hands by now? And he's going to see me in pyjamas sometime. What with sharing a house and all."

Harry looked discomfited but he carried on gamely. "I came up to, um, see if you were all right, I suppose."

Hermione sobered. "That's nice of you."

"And? Are you? I mean, do you think...have you thought about..."

"Oh, Harry, of course I've thought, I don't think I've thought about anything else."

"You seem awfully happy." He looked doubtfully at her.

"Well, I'm not going to let you dump me," she said with admirable simplicity.

Harry's eyes widened. "I wasn't exactly going to dump you," he pointed out.

"Yeah." Hermione's tone of voice was conversational. "I've noticed that about you. Sort of relationship-by-halves. We didn't exactly get together, we aren't exactly a couple, we don't exactly publicise it, now you don't exactly dump me? I don't think so."

Harry took hold of the post of Hermione's bed for support. It was a peculiar intimate feeling to be in her bedroom after years of being forbidden from her dormitory and he felt as though the solid floor of their relationship was being pulled from under him - no school, no teachers, no rules.

"You've changed your mind about the spell?" he asked finally.

Hermione shook her head. "It's Dark Magic. It destroys. If we just break up, it will weave that in to the spell and we'll have lost one more good thing. Until we find the key to this thing, there's no point pulling our lives apart."

Harry said with some trepidation, "But we aren't exactly a couple? Isn't that what you said?"

Hermione looked impatient. "Harry, even Ron isn't sure we're a couple. I think we've raised ambiguousity to a fine art."

"But we are one," said Harry, alarmed, "We are one, I just thought it would be easier if - you know - if it wasn't...." He trailed off in confusion. "I saved you a lot of Bubotuber pus letters," he added rather hopelessly.

Hermione came over and gently detached his hand from the bedpost, linking it with hers. "Yes, but it's time to stop all that now. That's where I got to with my thinking."

Harry said slowly, "I just feel like we are running with the spell."

Hermione's face set hard. "Don't fool yourself. We can't act against the spell until we find a way to break out of it or the spell fulfils itself."

"So we might as well be happy whilst we're in it?" Harry stared at her. "Just go with it? Let it happen? Even if it's not real? If it's the spell makes me care about you? It doesn't matter?"

Hermione shook her head at him. "You don't understand. We are the spell now, we're its substance, it's as real as we are and we're as real as it." Harry looked temporarily cross-eyed at this piece of wisdom and her mouth twitched. "What's in the spell is real, you fool, Draco being good is real, you and me are real." She put her arms around him and her bright little mouth against his, and wondered if she kissed him hard enough whether she could make herself believe it.

**

Later, Ron felt a sort of queasiness when he thought about that Wednesday that took him some time to identify as guilt. A lot of things, after all, could have been different had he chosen to go to Hogsmeade. But at that time all he knew was that a surprisingly large part of the past few days had been spent arguing from positions of disadvantage. There was arguing whilst sitting in the hearth with soot up your nose, and there was arguing whilst standing in a freezing lake in imminent danger of death by tentacle. And then there was arguing whilst your little sister had hold of your hair. None of it was acceptable, and there came a time when a man had to make a stand.

"I want you to come with me," said Ginny, giving the hair a meaningful tug. She stood on the step of the girls' staircase so that she was on a level with him and stared hard into his eyes.

Ron scowled at her. "You go. I don't do girly chat. Anyway, you seem to know a lot more than me."

Ginny rolled her eyes. "Oh that's it, is it? Feeling left out in the cold? God, Ron, you can be so pathetic."

Ron stared at her. "That's rich coming from you," he said with perfect candour and his signature lack of tact.

Ginny grinned suddenly. "So? I agree. Despicable. They've gone off without telling you probably because Charlie and Dumbledore made them. But you know perfectly well Harry'll be on the floo to you within hours no matter what Dumbledore's decided. So shut up whinging and come and see Mum with me, because she just isn't going to believe me otherwise."

But Ron shook his head obstinately, felt a sharp pain, remembered the brat that was his sister still had hold of his hair, opened her hot little fingers with one fierce hand and stumped off towards the chess board in the corner. Ginny watched him speculatively for a moment and then shrugged and began to pull on a multitude of Weasley-knitted layers. She made her way across the common room and only stopped when she had reached the portrait to turn around and say, "You need to be careful, Ron. I reckon Peter started out being jealous, too."

By the time Ron had understood and opened his mouth to reply, the portrait was swinging shut behind her.

**

Ron remembered that episode with shame for most of his life, because he could of course have gone with her. It might not have made any difference, after all, because nobody really ever knew what had happened between Ginny leaving Hogwarts and trudging off amongst the trees towards the village and the time when they saw her next, nearly two months later.

**

Next chapter: Search parties for Ginny receive an unexpected addition. Ron gets emotional, Harry gets righteous, Hermione gets feminine and Draco gets introduced to the Bible. Generous helpings of cabin fever all round.