Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn

Warned of God in a Dream

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

- Philip Larkin

Self-trust is the essence of heroism.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Transcendentalist

Calculation never made a hero.

- Jno Henry, Cardinal Newman

I would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision.

- Henry David Thoreau, American Transcendentalist

The legacy of heroes is the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example.

- Disraeli

The whole earth is the tomb of heroic men, and their story is not given only on stone over their clay, but abides everywhere, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's lives.

- Pericles

We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat.

- Victoria RI

Duty is the most sublime word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more. You should never wish to do less.

- American (Confederate) General RE Lee

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

- Burke

Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer.

and,

Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

and,

The price of greatness is responsibility.

- Churchill

The last temptation for the Hero, having achieved enlightenment, is to remain in Nirvana and withdraw from the world of men.

- Jos Campbell, American mythologist

_______________________________

i. Draco in Fear

These were not dreams. These were night terrors. He would crawl through sewers if necessary to make them stop.

_______________________________

ii. Harry in Longing

A Draco, redeemed? An ally for the Light? A Draco friendly, and more than friendly? An end, at last, not merely to a rivalry that had consumed far too much of his strength and attention, but to the aching loneliness that beset him? If only these were but real, and more than dreams....

_______________________________

iii. Dumbledore Is of Two Minds

'The Man is nothing', said Flaubert to George Sand, 'the Work, everything.'

But when Man and Work were the same?

To intervene were fatal. To conclude that the matter was out of his hands were a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In the watches of the night, an old man paced, wearily, bowed with a burden too great for mortal strength.

_______________________________

iv. Descendit ad Inferos

Once again, the dreams. Once again, as ever, framed by the scene of the two of them, wounded but alive, meditating the uses of victory amidst the groans of the wounded and the dying.

'Now we both have what we wanted. And we can do as we damned well please. That is what victory is, Harry. And that is what was worth fighting for.'

And Harry remembered the words of a seer from years before: neither may live while the other survives.... Perhaps, now, it would be possible to get on with life: to live, at last.

_______________________________

All, all in dreams of an unimaginable future.... In a dank and darksome catacomb, Unplottable and vile, stinking of death....

'Well, well,' said Voldemort, in a reedy and mocking voice. 'The former Draco Malfoy has deigned to shower upon us the privilege of his company.'

'"Shower" being the mot juste,' Draco sneered back. 'And I must say, if all your meetings are held in crypts and churchyards, you'd do well to take a shower once in a way. Not to mention that you want a house-elf or two: the place is a bit whiff.'

Lucius strode forward and backhanded him.

'Lucius. Fancy meeting you here. I was given to understand, from all your statements to the Ministry and the Press, that you had no ties to Riddle, here.'

Lucius raised his hand again, his face furious, engorged with hot blood. Voldemort stopped him. 'Heel, Lucius.'

Draco raised a mocking eyebrow. 'Oh, good dog; do you get a liver treat, now?'

'You begin to weary me,' Voldemort drawled. 'It's an impressive enough front, child, but you would do well to drop it. Can you not imagine why you are here?'

'Frankly, Tommy, I cannot. Not even you are so great a fool as to think I would betray those I have chosen to stand with, or that I would willingly join your pathetic rabble.' Draco's voice rang with cold contempt: so far, to his relief, his oldest and best-broken-in mask of all was holding, concealing the cold fear that congealed in his every vein. Cautiously, with his thumb tucked into his fist, so as not to draw attention, he stroked the Ravenclaw ring on his finger, pleading silently for help, for rescue.

Voldemort cackled. '"Willingly", boy? No, not that....'

_______________________________

Outside the wards of Hogwarts, beneath the spot whence Draco vanished.

Harry stood with Snape, McGonagall, and Dumbledore. The two professors had placed their wand-tips gently against his temples, and the headmaster faced him, his own wand lightly touching Harry's forehead.

'The Ring of Ravenclaw is calling you, Harry. Send your mind out along your bond, and Draco will be saved.'

_______________________________

In the catacomb of dreams.

'Did you think, you pathetic child, that my Death Eaters are a club you may join or casually refuse, as you choose? Did you mistake them for an Old Boys's association, perhaps, of Slytherins and congenial colleagues? Did you think the Dark Mark a sort of blazer badge, a cap, a club tie?'

Voldemort stood and peered down at Draco. A flare of witch-light illuminated the features within the hood. With mounting revulsion, Draco noted that the lids around those red eyes were now devoid of lashes, that the pupils, long since inhuman, had ceased even to be mammalian, and that the very skin surrounding those burning, reptilian eyes seemed increasingly to resemble scales. The right eye briefly occluded, and it was all Draco could do not to be sick: he would have taken his oath that Voldemort had developed a saurian 'third eyelid'.

Certainly, the creature now before him had come a long way from the darkly handsome youth that had been Tom Riddle of Hogwarts. Draco wished never to know how far, or by what paths.

'Such courage,' Voldemort sneered. 'And such folly. You ought have been a Gryffindor. But, then - the little Weasley bitch was. She wanted to be: I wanted a host capable of holding on until my reincarnation was complete. And I should have had that, had not Potter meddled.'

'Oh, go fuck yourself, Mudblood.'

'Crucio,' Voldemort shrieked, all control lost in a flash.

_______________________________

Outside Hogwarts's bounds.

Draco,

Harry thought, urgently. Come to me, Draco. Come home. I'm here. I'm here for you. Come home.

_______________________________

In the catacomb of dreams.

'Still not "willing", eh? But you see, it doesn't matter. You little fool. This isn't a club. The Dark Mark isn't a set of cufflinks or a First XI cap. Your will is not at issue, and even if it were, you are a child, a peaky little schoolboy, and your father gives you to me willingly, avidly. Not for my acceptance, not for my trust, but for my use and my command. You are all, all, cattle, and the Dark Mark is a brand!

'And when you are branded, my little bull-calf, or perhaps, soon, my little stirk, your will ceases to be of moment, and it certainly shan't interpose itself against any "betrayal" of your luckless little friends. You'll bring me Potter if I ask; you'll kill your own mother, if I ask.

'Lucius. I will allow you to do the honours. Oh, don't get your hopes up, my little pet: I don't fully trust your loving father with a wand, not for this. Your darling Auntie Bella will assist him. Malfoy! Lestrange! Wands out. I shall say the spell.'

Voldemort began to chant. He never finished. Draco felt Rowena's Ring burn upon his finger like cold iron. There was a sudden flash of blinding light and a crash as of thunder, and Lucius and Bellatrix were hurled back against the rude walls of the chamber, screaming in agony. When Voldemort and his Death Eaters could see again, Draco was gone.

_______________________________

Outside Hogwarts.

There was a rush of as of a mighty wind and a roll as of thunder, and Draco appeared from nothingness and fell into Harry's arms.

'Draco? God, Draco. It's all right, I have you. I have you.' Careless of the Headmaster and the two professors, Harry had clasped Draco to him, and was murmuring tenderly into Draco's silken hair.

'Harry?' Dumbledore was gentle, but uncompromising. 'Let me see him. Draco, my dear boy. Are you well?'

Draco nodded, shuddered, and then managed to collect himself. 'Riddle. Lucius. Bellatrix. And the lot of them. I was to be given the Mark.'

'And so, in a sense, I believe you shall find that you were,' Dumbledore smiled. Draco and Harry gasped, McGonagall clicked her tongue, and Snape choked. Dumbledore swiftly stripped Draco's sleeve. Hovering just above Draco's inner forearm, where the Dark Mark would have gone, was a wholly different mark, three-dimensional, projected, impalpable, like a Muggle hologram. It was a silver phoenix on its bed of flames, with its right wing having a golden lily on it and its left a golden lightning bolt in red flames: or, as the Headmaster recited as he examined it, 'a phoenix argent inflamed proper, its dexter wing charged with a fleur de lis or, and its sinister, a thunderbolt or, inflamed proper': 'very intriguing, my dear boy', Dumbledore chortled.

'Harry?' Dumbledore's eyes were twinkling merrily. 'Would you be so kind as to roll up your sleeve as well?' Reluctantly, Harry did so, and they all looked with wonder at Harry's new 'Mark': two dragons segreant combatant vert, fleury or, armed, barbed, and langued of the second, flamant proper, engorged of a coronet of the second, supporting a thunderbolt of the second, inflamed proper: that is, two green dragons in a fighting posture, facing one another, venting red flames at every orifice, their claws, tail spikes, and tongues golden and their bodies scattered with golden lilies, wearing gold collars in the shape of crowns, and between their claws the same gold lightning bolt wreathed in fire as appeared now upon Draco's arm.

Even as they gazed at the marks, they receded, vanished, hid themselves; but, as Dumbledore explained, did not and would never leave them. 'Those who have eyes to see,' he smiled, 'will see - when the time is ripe.

'You must have done them great damage, Draco.'

'Sir? I did nothing, except try not to whimper aloud.'

'Ah, but you did not need to do anything save hold on. As you did, until your bond saved you. But damage you surely did them. Any attempt to mark you against your bond, which had already marked you, was - shall we say, "bound" - to retort upon them.'

'There was.... There was a flash and a thunderclap, and Lucius and Bellatrix were thrown back.'

'Ah, yes. I'm certain they were, and quite nastily, too, I trust and hope. Well, I doubt you'll need anything from Poppy, but Harry may as well walk you to the infirmary; it's the walk with Harry you want, I think, and it's that that ought do you the most good in any case.'

_______________________________

In a dream-future, after battle and Domdaniel and the start of their adult careers.

Over the years, Draco and Harry had learnt more about each other - and themselves - than they had ever imagined they would do. The knowledge was more than the superficial: that, for example, Harry could reduce Draco to writhing incoherence with the merest touch upon Draco's nipples, or that Harry arched like a strung bow when Draco put a tongue in his ear, and could do no more than gibber, or the way in which Draco flushed rose-pink from his cheekbones to the point of his jaw and from his clavicle to his sternum when Things Got Heated - which Harry, fondly, called Draco's 'pink triangle', or the endearing face that Harry made at Certain Climactic Moments, or that nothing meant more to either of them - or was more erotic to them - than tenderness and kisses during intimacy, or that both had been left, by their childhood experiences, with similar inhibitions regarding touch and trust, which they confronted and overcame through their play. No, the knowledge was much less superficial, more intimate, than that. Harry had learnt and come to accept that Draco was simply incapable of not scheming, almost unconsciously; only the ends, the objects, had changed. Draco had realised that Harry hid a mind almost as calculating as his own, but attuned to very different goals and tactics, and that Harry's vaunted understanding of the motives of others never extended to Harry's own. Harry would never understand himself; but then, he didn't need to do: Draco was there to do that for him.

Over the years, also, Draco had undertaken the social education of Harry Potter, though he had wisely, instinctually, realised that he nor Harry wished to change Harry fundamentally. After all, it was the open, gloriously unsophisticated Harry with whom Draco had fallen in love so many years before, and Draco was of no mind to lose that Harry. But - equally instinctually - Draco had recognised, before ever it was broached by others, that Harry was now, simply by virtue of being who he was, and having done all that he had done, the axis upon which Wizarding Britain revolved; and he was determined that Harry should never want influence, or be disregarded because of his very innocence.

Fundamentally, of course, Harry remained Harry, and Draco asked nothing better. If Harry now knew his way around a menu and a wine list, he was also yet the Harry who was best content with a pie and a pint, with bread and cheese and kisses; and, as Draco well knew, the mass of the Wizarding world, as much as Draco himself, loved Harry's popular instincts, his being unaffectedly and honestly a man of the people. Harry remained, in character and in style, a charming mix of the Muggle and the magical - charming, and reassuring, given his undoubted powers - and a Wizarding world that had now embraced pro-Muggle attitudes and now despised 'pureblood' rhetoric loved him for it. But at least, Draco congratulated himself, his beloved now had style. He didn't particularly like to dance, save with Draco, at home, but he could do, now, without embarrassment to himself or injury to his partner. He had learnt to mask his boredom at social functions, and could when called upon give a toast or a speech, self-deprecating, brief, simply worded, but with an inartful eloquence that charmed as it persuaded. And if the combined efforts of Draco and Remus Lupin had never quite managed to give him much appreciation of highbrow music, Harry had certainly fallen headlong for Lupin's beloved mainstream and trad jazz. From this, there had evolved the public Harry, straightforward and self-deprecating, always a step away from the spotlight's edge and all the more loveable for it, a solid and reassuring figure with the popular touch. A possessive and consumerist Harry who had been consumed, possessed, by his own wealth and power and position would have been intolerable, as well as unthinkable; a Harry who possessed wealth, power, and position, and was unaffected by it, was the natural leader of the magical world.

And Draco also knew, though he would admit it to no one, that the Harry who liked swing and the standards, the Harry whose face shone with happiness when the dinner jacket was on the back of a chair and his collar undone, tie loose, was a devilishly attractive Harry. Hermione approved, stylistically; she had long preceded Draco to the conclusion that the Wizarding world was always, culturally, a few decades behind Muggle styles. Draco remembered a visit, in the first aftermath of war, to St Mungo's, when the Grangers had come along, and how, afterwards, they had observed that the hospital, bereft, naturally, of Muggle technology, its sisters starched and silent on their rounds, was a vision from the Muggle Thirties; and how they had talked long into the evening, after, about the retrograde feel of his world, from wireless to class attitudes.

In that somewhat backwards-looking society, the new Harry: mildly transatlantic in style, from a world of martinis and swing bands, a Harry with a touch of the duke of Windsor and of Leslie Howard and of Cary Grant about him: in that mildly retro-styled world, the new Harry fit perfectly - even if Draco did, once in a way, mutter something about his feeling he was 'married to Peter Lawford'. But Hermione's approval of the mature Harry was purely amicable. What Draco privately cherished was the fact that the re-styled Harry was an erotic delight, perfectly edible, even more attractive now than in his early youth.

_______________________________

Hogwarts in dreams, after a DA meeting, in the Room of Requirement, the innermost circle having stayed behind.

'I have never been so shit-scared in my life,' Draco said quietly.

'Cousin? Is this - 's that bothering you, mate?'

'Well, Christ, Ron. I was almost whimpering.'

'But you didn't.' Neville's voice was firm.

'But I was terrified.'

'Well, right, mate,' Ron said, in disbelief. 'Not even I ever said, in your ferrety days, that you were a total idiot. Of course you had the wind up.'

'I do,' Harry said, 'all the time.'

Draco gaped at him.

'People without fear are mad,' Luna said. 'Or have a hag godmother, of course. But mostly it's an endocrine malfunction.'

Neville stepped in whilst the others were carefully not goggling at Luna. 'She's right, really. Happen there are folk as don't feel fear, because their adrenaline doesn't work as it ought. But they're rare. Courage isn't being fearless. It's doing what has to be done when you're afraid, whiles you're afraid, in spite of your being afraid.'

Harry smiled affectionately, and pulled Neville into a purely brotherly hug. 'You, Nev, should have been the one. It ought always to have been you. Not me.'

Neville blushed, and knocked over the ink.

_______________________________

Number twelve, Grimmauld Place: in the dream-summer before Harry left the Dursleys and Draco joined the Light.

'I'll give you a game, Ron.' Lupin's smile was kindly, but there was a twinkle in his eye that was vaguely reminiscent of Dumbledore's.

And Lupin had done: a better game of wizard's chess than any Ron had had in some time. Ron had been rattled from the start, when Lupin had insisted - as Sirius's survivor, he said - on playing Black, and then when he had insisted - in tribute to Harry and Lily, he said - in responding to Ron's e4 (King's pawn) opening by forcing Ron to the Evans Gambit variant of the giuco piano. But Ron had regrouped and settled in, determined not to let himself be rattled by psychological warfare carried out by a werewolf; he was on the verge of checking, with mate in three moves, when someone appeared in the doorway.

Someone lounging.

Someone drawling.

Someone with white-gold hair, grey eyes, and a twisted smirk.

Someone who had abso-bloody-lutely no business at number twelve, Grimmauld Place.

'Mind if I watch, Weasel? I've never seen hedgehogs and hippopotami as played by a wolf and a weasel....'

Scattering the board and the pieces (to their vocal outrage, including a bishop's anathema and challenges to mortal combat from both of White's knights), Ron leapt up and went for that tantalising column of throat. Lupin grabbed him and restrained him, as Someone scuttled away. 'Let me go, Remus! The wards - Death Eaters - Malfoy -'

Before Remus could reply, a new figure appeared, stumbling and harried-seeming, breathless - it seemed - from running to the sound of the fight: a new figure peering around in the doorway, a well-known and trusted figure, with emerald eyes, untameable hair, and a telltale scar.

'Harry!' Ron tore loose from Remus's grip. 'We have to - Malfoy was - the Ferret just showed up -'

'Ron! Stop. Sit down. That wasn't Malfoy.'

'What? Of course it sodding was, y'think I don't know every filthy whisker on that ferret? We have to get -'

'Sit DOWN, Ron. Merlin's balls, you're useless.'

'WHAT?'

'You're supposed to be my strategic genius, and all it takes is one glimpse of a schoolboy enemy to make you forget everything and throw a tantrum? Ron, if you don't get a grip on yourself and learn some control, you're no good to me, to the DA, or to the Order! You'll succeed only in getting someone killed. One of your brothers, or Ginny, or me. Or Hermione.'

'Sod that for a game of soldiers, the security wards -'

Remus grasped Ron firmly by the shoulders and spun him round to face him. 'Are unbreached, and this house is unplottable. And, by the way, Harry is no more here than Draco was.'

'WHAT?' Ron slewed around to see a grinning Tonks complete her metamorphosis.

'REMUS!' Ron was redder than his hair, with sheer fury, his fists clenched ominously. 'LUPIN, YOU SON OF A BITCH!'

'Actually, I wasn't born a werewolf -'

'You fucking bastard! If you wanted to win a chess game that badly -'

'This,' Tonks said, with sudden, unexpected gravity, 'has nothing to do with chess, Ronniekins. And Professor Lupin knows what stakes we are playing for and what the game is.'

'Bloody fucking hell,' Ron said, the fight going out of him, leaving him weak and shaking. He sank into a chair, Lupin soothingly patting his shoulder.

'We couldn't, I'm afraid,' Lupin said softly, 'think of a better way to make certain the lesson was driven home. What Tonks said in her guise as Harry is, lamentably, true. All your cool genius and your chess-player's gift for strategy goes clean out the window when, dear God, a markedly unimportant adolescent appears in your peripheral vision. I could sneak up behind you on the top of the Astronomy Tower and yell, "Snape!" - and they'd be scraping the remains of a startled Ron Weasley off the gravel surround below. Ron, you don't realise how important you are to all of us. Not only as a friend, and as Harry's companion and protector, but for the role you have to play in this war. We simply cannot afford to let you go on like this. We couldn't afford to lose you because of something as silly as your seeing a Malfoy on the battlefield and forgetting everything else, say.'

'How. How can I, um. Damn.'

'Cool head, hot heart: that is what you are at the chessboard, Ron, and that is what we need you to be in the war to come. And, by the bye, if you were wondering, Harry needs to learn, and is learning, similar lessons, similar restraint, similar discipline. Albus is simply too overburdened already to do this. Severus - well, it would never work, even though he is the best of us all at this subject. So I'm afraid it's down to us, to Tonks and me. Tomorrow, Ron, at nine, right after brekker, we begin your lessons in Occlumency, Legilimency, and meditation techniques.'

_______________________________

Hogwarts in dreams, after Draco's return, un-Marked.

'What was it like? For you? Realising, I mean.'

Draco and Harry had been determined to begin the long process of creating a firm foundation, not built on sand, for friendship, and for whatever else might come. Both knew it would not be easy. Neither was willing to quit. And each was insistent that, magical bonds or no magical bonds, whatever might transpire would be earned, not assumed, not fated.

Harry hadn't thought that it would be this difficult, though.

'You needn't answer if it's too much -'

'No, Draco. I do. It wants answering, and the earlier, the better.' Harry sighed. 'Vernon and Petunia ... they make a fetish, really, of normality. Freakishness is the worst thing imaginable, to them. And of course, magic is freakish in their eyes.

'When. When I realised that, um, I was, well, gay. All the things they'd said over the years, all the hateful things, came rushing back. Filling my ears, my mind. How worthless I was, how great a freak, how abnormal.

'But Seamus and Dean. Ron. Hermione. Nev and Ginny and Luna. They all said the same thing. That the last time the Dursleys were in a rage, calling me these things, was when I found out I was a wizard. Something they saw as freakish, but that was natural to me, was part of me, was who I was, inborn in me. Something that made me whole, that I embraced, that made me special, not freakish: special. Why, they asked, was this any different?

'And in the end, I realised it wasn't any different. That it was exactly like that, like my magic. Something to embrace; an integral part of who I am.'

_______________________________

Number four, Privet Drive, in the dream-summer before Harry left the Dursleys and Draco joined the Light.

There was a sharp crack and a sudden clamour as a man in black robes apparated into the Dursleys's sitting-room (or, to be frank, their appallingly non-U 'lounge').

'Potter! Come here immediately!'

'WHAT THE DEVIL DO YOU MEAN COMING INTO MY HOME IN THIS MANNER?'

'Silencio!' Snape looked at Vernon Dursley, now rendered magically mute, with the contempt he commonly reserved for one of Neville's essays in potions-making. 'I have not the time, the inclination, or the patience for you, Muggle. POTTER! Ah. There you are.'

'Professor Snape?'

'No, it's Voldemort, polyjuiced. Don't stand about gaping, Potter. We have work to do. You - Muggles. Go away. The kitchen, perhaps. We'll be an hour here, and I shall be returning daily for some weeks at this hour.'

Dudley could no more have spoken than could the silenced Vernon, but Petunia was made of sterner stuff. 'How dare you order me about in this manner in my own home?'

'He could,' came a mild voice from behind them all, 'have been rather more courteous, Petunia, I admit, but you must excuse the urgency. It would be best that you obey him.' Dumbledore stepped into the sitting-room, his eyes unwontedly, alarmingly, grave. 'Harry, my dear boy.' He turned back to the Dursleys. 'I really must ask you to do as Professor Snape has urged, and to be patient with the need for daily lessons here for Harry. None of the neighbours, I assure you, will notice anything amiss. Whereas, should the lessons not be held....'

'That sounds almost like blackmail, Headmaster.' Snape's voice was approving, and he and Harry both slid their eyes over to watch the play of emotions on Petunia's and Vernon's faces.

'Not at all, Severus. Petunia would not wish Dudley - and the neighbourhood - to encounter Dementors again, I know, and the lessons we shall be giving Harry will aid in preventing such Dark occurrences....'

With a startled meep, the Dursleys skittered away into their kitchen, obviously terrified.

'Professor Dumbledore?'

'I owe you an explanation, Harry, I know. Professor Snape, Mr Moody, and myself will be assisting you in developing mental discipline, even beyond the techniques of Occlumency and Legilimency - yes, it is time you were trained as a Legilimens. It is imperative that, if we are not to keep things from you, that you be able to keep them secret yourself.'

'But. Sir.'

'Yes, Harry?'

'If I am keeping secrets for, well. Tactical reasons, as Col Bellowes said. Then I'll be doing to the rest of the Order, and the DA, precisely what I complained of your doing to me. I had not realised how hypocritical I was in thinking that way, then.'

Snape looked at the boy with a sudden access of grudging respect.

'You were upset at the time - and justly upset, Harry. But you must recognise that you have long done towards Ron and Hermione exactly what I had felt impelled to do as it regarded you. Tell me, Harry. Are you afraid? When the issue is joined, when Riddle is active, when you find yourself facing him, when you think of facing him? Be honest, please: there's no shame in your answer.'

Harry hung his head. 'Yeah. I mean, yes, sir. I am. Bloody terrified, mostly. I seem to spend most of my time with the wind up.'

Snape's expression was peculiar. After rapid consideration, Harry was forced to conclude that his potions professor was attempting to smile.

'You are more intelligent than I had credited,' Snape said, his mouth still twisted in that strange rictus. 'Only a fool - or a Gryffindor, which comes mostly to the same thing - would not be terrified.'

'And, Harry?' Dumbledore's voice was gentle. 'Do you hide these fears and feelings from your friends? Your professors and mentors? From me?'

Harry nodded.

'You do so, do you not, because you wish not to cause them pain. To overburden them. Because you care about them. And also because you feel it is your duty to keep their spirits up and not to alarm them or sap the courage they want if they are to fight beside you. Is that not so?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Then you too now realise what I have endured, and why both affection and duty so often urged me to keep you better shielded than perhaps I ought to have done. You understand the loneliness of command.'

_______________________________

Hogwarts in dreams, after Draco's return, un-Marked.

'Harry, I do understand. You're leery of it. You're not used to it, you never had affection from your bloody aunt and uncle as you ought have had ... and you've an unshakeable conviction that anyone you care for is thereby put in danger.

'But you've not made me a target: I made myself a target, independently. Whether or not what I hope happens between us should ever happen, I am, through my own acts, already as high up Tommy-Boy's list as anyone can be who's not you or Dumbledore. Right up there with Ron and Hermione. So ... well, can you at least stop pummelling yourself over that obstacle to our being, well, close?'

'I also buggered up your relationship with your father.'

'I have no father.'

'Look, Draco, I hold no brief for Lucius Malfoy. I fully expect that sooner or later, one of us is going to kill the other. But that's the point. It's not that you've broken with your family, Sirius did that when he was sixteen and my grandparents took him in. But Sirius never had to confront both the prospect of facing his own father in battle and the likelihood that my father or one of the other Marauders - much less, say, Remus - would be the one to finish off the head of the House of Black. I can't do that to you -'

'Harry. If Regulus hadn't come to his senses and tried to escape, for all that it got him killed, Sirius would have had, in all likelihood, to have faced off against his own brother in the first war. And had it been Lupin who then struck Regulus down, do you truly conceive that Sirius would have ceased to care for Remus as he did? As it was, the two of them faced off against Bellatrix. Which rather puts paid to your adorably innocent fretting about the effect of civil wars upon family ties, I might add. It's not as if Lucius, or Bella, would stay their wands against a blood relation, after all.'

'I know,' Harry said, crisply. 'I have not forgotten who is responsible for Sirius's being taken from us.'

'Oh, hell, darling, I'm sorry. I didn't mean -'

'It's all right. I'm not made of Meissen.'

'I know. It's simply that.... Bugger. Look, what I mean to say, damn it, is. I am the one who - knowingly, wittingly, and deliberately - got shut of Lucius and came over to the Light. And come to that, buggered up Lucius's life expectancy. The Hangleton Horror is after me now, certainly, but I doubt I'll ever have to face Lucius on the field of battle: Old Scaly-Face will kill him first for the carelessness.... Oh. Harry! I have an idea. Could you call a DA meeting?'

'Of course.'

'Soon?'

'Immediately, if you need.'

'Let's.'

_______________________________

Number four, Privet Drive, in the dream-summer before Harry left the Dursleys and Draco joined the Light.

'Perhaps, Harry, the most difficult thing I was ever forced to do was to keep you with the Dursleys. Arabella did her best, as did others you do not know of, but of course we knew that you were not treated well. Any other child ... I could never have countenanced leaving any other child in these circumstances. Without love, almost without contact, deprived of affection and the simplest human touch that was not a slap or a beating. Daily, I agonised over it, and wished to remove you: to the Burrow, to the Diggory's, to the Bones's, to the Tonks's, to my own care. But all these things you were forced to endure were as nothing compared to your life. Although her family and protectors were more loving than yours, even as her fate was darker, I could not help but think of another child, a non-magical child, who was forced to hide in such a manner from a very similar evil: your Muggle school, I think, may have given you to know of the history of Anne Frank? All other considerations had to go to the wall compared with the necessity of keeping you alive, here, with the protections of your mother's blood and kin. Not - as you might, alas, be tempted to think - because of your destiny, or some calculation that you would be used as a weapon. But because James and Lily died for you, so that you might live; and because we who saw you in the ruins of that house could not but love and weep for you. We could not let their sacrifice go for naught. At all costs, they deserved that we keep you alive.'

_______________________________

Hogwarts in dreams, after a DA meeting, in the Room of Requirement, the innermost circle having stayed behind.

'Right. I was talking about things with Harry, and something occurred to me. You all know that when I scarpered and came over to the Light, I nicked Daddy Dearest's pensieve. Which happened to be rather full. I'm not sure if you realise why that is. The corpse-gnawing crowd use - well, until now, they have used - pensieves as a storage for incriminating memories when there's a job of work on, or the Aurors or the Order are on their heels. The point is to be able to defeat Veritaserum: they can honestly chirp "I don't recall" all day long if captured and interrogated. The danger, of course, is that if such a pensieve is ever recovered.... I see you see the point. Well, it occurs to me that Little Tommy Wannabe must be a bit miffed now, with the loss of Lucius's evidence. And if I know old Adder-britches, which, for my sins, I do, he won't believe anything my loving Papa says about what incriminating evidence was and wasn't in the pensieve. Now, I should think, at this point, all the Death Nibblers are torn between using and not using their own pensieves - if, indeed, their oh-so-brilliant leader hasn't issued some shrieking, hysterical orders on the subject. And if they daren't use them, then the consequences of capturing a few of the sods alive -'

'Bloody brilliant,' Ron said, with a grim smile.

Draco smiled back, and ducked his head. 'Thank you, Cousin Ron. I'll want to brainstorm this with you and Cousin Ginny, and Tony, and Blaise, later. But. Without going into great detail about how Harry and I got onto the subject -' Draco had kept his head down, screening his face, and thus missed the smirks that most of the DA were now sporting, to Harry's pink-blushing embarrassment - 'we were discussing the issue of my having, someday, to square off against Lucius.'

The smiles faded, and several DA members winced in sympathy. Luna was staring past him, humming something complex and pre-Baroque.

'I pointed out that after this latest gaffe, Lucius would be luckier than I really anticipate if he lived to meet us on any future field. The Grand High Slowworm Of All Dark Gittery is quite likely to take out his frustrations on Lucius, thanks to this. I am. I. There remains a small part of me that regrets the probable death of the man who sired me. But that regret is nothing compared to the relief that floods me when I consider that none here, and Harry and I most of all, shan't, probably, be forced to kill him directly, face to face.'

Harry stood and went over to Draco, and put a comforting arm around his waist. They exchanged no words, but words were unnecessary. Draco smuggled in to Harry's side, and went on.

'Thinking objectively, it then occurred to me - at which point I requested Harry summon this session - that this was a lesson to bear in mind for the future. It is an elegant - dare I say, a Slytherin - solution, in a way, and - personal feelings aside - mere justice; they get what they are owed, they reap what they have sown. It occurs to me, that is, that we can get the Dark Twat to knock off his own. We can spread dissent, alarm, and confusion. Frame his followers and have him kill them off for us, in a purge. Bellowes tells me, in a quick dash through the Library, that the German Muggle dictator Hitler had his spies do just this to the Russian Muggle dictator Stalin, leading the latter to liquidate most of his best Army commanders.

'For example: Harry might write to, say, Nott's father, thank him for the warning, tell him that in return for it that Harry'll see that Theo is protected when the Light wins, use a charm on the parchment so that no one but Mr Nott can read it - but bugger up the charm and make sure the owl is intercepted. Hell, we could inculpate the elder Nott, exculpate Sev ("and thanks for warning me against Snape, I knew he was still a DE at heart"), and generally put the cat amongst the pigeons.'

Tony Goldstein nodded. 'Tactically, in fact, someone not known to sympathise with us could request from a Death Eater parent or uncle a stock of parchment that would appear to "take" such a charm but be spelled always to be readable by anyone bearing a Dark Mark. Or of course we could manufacture such parchment ourselves but create a false provenance of that sort, by reference in the letter itself: boasting, say, of our shrewdness in nicking the parchment from a Slytherin. A double-bluff.'

'Splendid,' Draco said, raising his eyes to meet Tony's. Then his face fell. 'Tony?'

'I said it was tactically brilliant.'

'And I heard your unspoken reservations. Would you care to speak them?'

'My reservations are moral, not tactical, operational, or strategic.'

Ron tried to break the tension with humour. 'I see old Bellowes has had quite a few readers of late. We're beginning to sound like Muggle General Staff officers.'

Draco was not, perhaps surprisingly, affronted; he seemed, rather, hurt, and bewildered. 'Tony.... I know I'm not exactly a saint, but. What am I missing?'

Tony started to speak, paused, and looked over to Harry. 'Harry? Before I answer Draco, I believe that you had plans for calling a DA session for another reason, before Draco requested this meeting. Perhaps we might address that first?'

Harry nodded, and squeezed Draco's waist reassuringly. 'I think you're right, Tony. Let's all sit down.'

_______________________________

Number four, Privet Drive, in the dream-summer before Harry left the Dursleys and Draco joined the Light.

'There are other forms of magical folk than the wizards whom you know of, Harry.'

'Magical beings, sir? Like the Veela?'

'Not beings, Harry: folk. It is not of magical beings, my dear boy, that I speak. I mean magical humans, no more and no less, of the same order as are wizards. Indeed, one may class them as wizards, but they do little or no spell-work, neither do they commonly use their wands - though they may be gifted in such magic as well. Your mother's family, my dear Harry, was, after all, Welsh. And the conventions for Welsh names are not as we English use, whether Muggle or magical.'

'Sir? I thought. Well, I thought that my mother's family weren't wizards. I mean, not magical.'

'And those, Harry, are two different things. And no, before you ask, they were not magical beings of a non-human type.

'Your grandfather and indeed his grandfather were known by the surname Evans, to be sure. But in the old Welsh tradition, they would not have had surnames in the English manner, as my friend the colonel instructed you, but had, rather, patronymics. Lily's great-grandfather, with whom we may take up the tale, would be Evan ap Ivor ap Huw ap -'

'"Ap"?'

'"Son of", dear boy, like the Scottish "Mac". Where was I? Ah, yes. Evan ap Ivor ap Huw ap Owain ap Morcant ap Llewellyn ap Dilwyn ap Cadfael ap Aneurin ap Evan ap Evan ap Alun ap Huw ap Andras ap Gruffydd ap Evan ap Bran ap Evan ap Evan ap Cadwalader ap Huw ap Goronwy ap Trefor ap Evan ap Cadwgawn ap Iddon ap Evan ap Caradog ap Evan ap Drystan ap Rhys ap Evan ap Dafyd ap Einion ap Evan ap Geraint ap Elused ap Heddwyn ap Cadfan ap Hefin ap Dylan ap Hywel ap Iefan ap Evan ap Illtyd ap Ilar ap Madog ap Iorwerth ap Evan ap Meirion ap Cadfael ap Meurig ap Rhodri ap Morcant ap Emyr ap Pedr ap Maldwyn ap Rhisiart ap Merfyn ap Sawyl ap Rhys ap Evan ap Trahaearn ap Sieffre ap Neirin ap Twdwr ap Ofydd ap Wynfor ap Evan ap Gwalchmai ap Macsen ap Iddon ap Bedwyr ap Urien ap Taliesin ap Myrddin.'

'M- Myrddin?'

'Yes, I'm aware of the Anglicised version. But the attribution is legendary, I think: even with wizarding genealogies, and even with the best of dear Bellowes's research, there is always a point at which the mists of the past become impenetrable. But Taliesin of course claimed to be in some ways the heir and in some way the reincarnation of Merlin, so the patronymic may be regarded in that light.'

'But....'

'Come, Harry, I did not mean to distress or to overwhelm you. If I have taught you nothing else, I trust I have taught you that the glory - if any - of our ancestors belongs to them, and it is for each of us to make his own name in the world. Were you the heir of Godric or of Merlin, it would make no difference: you remain Harry, "just Harry", as you have always wished. To believe otherwise, to believe that a name or a pedigree is destiny, is to tread perilously close to the beliefs of the House of Black, of the Malfoys, and even of Tom Riddle. After all, the name Pettigrew is derived from the same source as the word "pedigree" - and who knows how that connexion worked upon Peter's mind and pride of blood, to draw him to the Dark? - yet he was a Gryffindor before he was a traitor. And, if the Weasleys and the Prewetts and the Zabinis do not, such families as Lucius's and indeed Sirius's do show the consequences of inbreeding, coupled with a belief that descent is destiny and that family is fate. These notions of blood and of heirship miss the entire point of your life and story, dear boy.

'No, I tell you these things because you have a right to know them for your own sake. I know you have wondered how it is - even in the light of her great sacrifice - that your mother's blood and kinship protects you, here, in the house of her sister. I know you have wondered what precisely your aunt meant in saying that your Evans grandparents were "so pleased" to have a witch in the family: I assure you that, whatever they may now feel, and however they have adjusted to and even take pride in their children's magic, the Grangers, the Creeveys, and the Finch-Fletchleys were not at first "pleased" when the news struck them like lightning from a clear sky.'

'So the Evans family were wizards?'

'Nooo.... Not ... precisely. They were magical folk, in their way, and Lily was not the first to have wizarding magic, that is true. But - tell me, my dear boy. Have you ever seen Sybill Trelawney use her wand for anything save the most mundane of household magics?'

Harry shook his head, bewildered by this sudden left turn in the conversation.

'Harry. The Evans family's magical tradition, going back at least to Taliesin of the shining brow, is a special and very Welsh one. Latent within their line, appearing in some generations and dormant in others, they have been divinators, Seers, scryers, and bards - poets and bards: a greater magic than any we do at Hogwarts - as well as rulers and lawgivers in their time.

'And if, as I suspect, you have inherited any of those talents, your training in mental disciplines will have benefits to you - and to our world, though you are more than simply a weapon to us, and never doubt that, dear boy - benefits that we cannot yet imagine.

'Let us begin. Severus, Alastor, please come and join us.'

_______________________________

Hogwarts in dreams, after a DA meeting, in the Room of Requirement, the innermost circle having stayed behind.

'Draco.... As Tony noted, we should have been having this meeting within a day or two anyway. There's something that we - and through me, the Order - have to say, want to say, to you. And to Blaise, for that matter, and Tony, though he knows it already, and, oh, several others - you'll see who when you hear why. I ask only that you listen until we are done.

'Hermione?'

'Thank you, Harry. As a Muggleborn, it falls to me to say this. Well, actually, it falls to me because I'm the only one of you to have stayed awake in Binns's classes.' There was a chuckle or two, and several outright laughs. 'Magic and Muggle technology only really began to separate in the XVIth Century. Before that, of course, every astronomer was an astrologer as well, every alchemist, a chemist. Both disciplines, magical and Muggle, are attempts to control the natural world and order it to man's use. Despite this similarity, magic has been feared by most of the non-magical for a very long time, well before the split between magic and technology; we needn't assign blame for that fear. What must be admitted is that the Muggle world has a very sorry record in dealing with wizards, and it is the old, pureblood families who have felt the brunt.'

'Some of us,' Ron said, taking up the tale, 'less than others. Potters, Weasleys, Prewetts and Prewitts, Fletchers. Zabinis, because any eccentricities were dismissed as being the quirks of Lombards and excused because they were important in the City on the Muggle side. Blaise's family has had some rough times over the centuries with Muggles, but not for wizardry.'

'No,' Blaise smiled, ruefully, 'the accusations have centred on usury and papistry. And our partners the Goldsteins, of course, have been persecuted as Jews, not as wizards.'

'In fact,' Harry said, 'it is the rest of the pureblood and especially the Slytherin families, and the Blacks and the Malfoys above all, who have been, from time to time, mobbed, butchered, and burnt.'

'We've deserved it,' Draco snorted. 'Not for being wizards, mind, but for what we've done to Muggles, with or without provocation, over the centuries.'

'That's not the point, though,' Harry said. 'The point is that we have, all of us, on the side of the Light, been bloody hypocritical for a bloody long time. Rather than comprehending the natural reaction of such families as the Blacks and the Malfoys to what Muggles have done to them in the past, we have blamed the victims. We have prejudged people based on their names and bloodlines, which makes us little better than those who go about calling Muggle-borns "Mudbloods". In so doing, we bear some responsibility for the sentiments and fears that allowed Tom Riddle to rise. And all of us in the other Houses have acted abominably towards Slytherin for generations, creating a self-fulfilling stereotype.'

'Harry -'

'Please, Draco. Let me finish. Ron's certainly right that I, at least, have spent a good few hours with Bellowes recently. In recent Muggle history, the "good side" has fought the "bad side" a good few times. And the bad side was bad: dictators running death camps and slave labour camps and committing genocide and all that rot. But the good side was always flawed, too. With racialism. With hypocrisies. Well, we've been no better. Riddle is wrong, wicked, as wrong and as wicked as can be. But our own side isn't perfect, not when you look at our treatment of other magical creatures, not when you consider our petty prejudices, not when you consider that even in this bloody school we have these stupid rivalries over nothing, rivalries that serve only to drive people to the Dark.

'Well, we're not standing for that. After the War, I pledge to you - we all do - and I speak for Arthur in this, he knows and agrees, as does Dumbledore: I swear to you that after the War, there will be changes, and we here will use whatever slight influence we have, to correct these bigotries, to end the feuds, and to do right by other magical beings.'

'"Whatever slight influence you have"? Harry, you darling idiot -'

Draco blushed when the snickers alerted him to his inadvertently revealing adjective.

'You bloody idiot, if we aren't all dead, that means we won. And if we will have won, it will be because you've won. At that point, you're not only the Boy Who Lived, you'll be the Man Who Defeated Voldemort. "Slight influence"? Christ, Harry, everyone at this table will be a hero, and you the greatest of the lot! I think you can count on having the influence to do whatever you damned well please, at that point.'

'Well, we'll see. Um.'

'What Harry means,' Neville interjected, 'is that, any road, we will be making changes. And no jumped-up Ministry jacks in office who are set in the old ways will stop us.'

'Right. Thanks, Nev.'

'Ta, Harry.'

'So. Now what Tony wanted to say should make sense. Tony?'

'Draco. Wizarding folk are a minority within the larger human community. An oft-persecuted minority. This is a situation with which I am not unfamiliar, you may imagine. Feared. Hunted. Slandered. Slaughtered. And equally so whether we resist and strike back, or do not. You are too intelligent to require that I underline the analogy. My moral reservations regarding your proposition stem from that fact, that history. When the oppressed become oppressors - which may the Holy One continue to keep my people from doing even as they fight for their survival - those who first oppressed them have won, after all. In a fight -'

'Tony, I'm sorry. We'll take the whole notion off the table, you're right, it stoops too low -'

'Please, Draco, let me finish. In a fight for survival, there are weapons and tactics that may be used that must not be used for any lesser cause. On the battlefield, for instance, we all realise that we will have no choice but to use Unforgivables to defend against Riddle's rabble. Harry - may I tell him, Harry?'

'Yes. I had intended to do.'

'Harry and I have discussed this. If worse were to come to worst, as a final ... option ... rather than see Riddle triumphant, Harry - as is another special young man, and as is another great wizard - is prepared, and knows how, to release all his core magic at once. It would destroy everyone in the vicinity, of course, regardless of allegiance. It would destroy Harry, I need hardly say. But it would destroy Riddle forever, and those who survived would be free.'

There was dead silence for the space of three heartbeats before the DA erupted in vehement noise. Hermione, Ron, Ginny, and Draco were loudest in crying out that Harry mustn't even consider such a tactic of self-immolation, and Draco was the loudest of those four. Blaise, Luna, and Tony were silent.

It was Neville who overrode the clamour with a shout: 'SHURRUP! This is war, not a Christmas footin' down t'mill! War. With all the fun of the fair. Harry does this, at the last, then Dumbledore'll do same, and so'll I. As Tony just told you.' He grinned, wryly. 'Nowt to it, really, getting blown up. You've seen me with cauldrons.'

They fell silent. Luna looked at Neville with misty affection.

'Harry.' Draco was pale as milk. 'Does the concept of living to fight another day not get through to you at all?'

It was Tony Goldstein who cut in. 'I said it was an option of last resort.'

'Think like a Slytherin, Draco,' Blaise added.

'I am,' Draco snapped. 'We're the past masters of disengaging and fighting again later.'

'We're also the past masters of taking others down with us when worse does indeed come to worst, and we're trapped.'

'But -'

'And that,' Tony said, quietly, 'is why I raised this issue. No one wishes Harry to have to do that. For that reason, anything we do to even the odds is worth tabling. My point, simply, is this. You have now heard of an option of absolute last resort, and you are all - justly - alarmed.'

'Ach, do my head in,' Seamus muttered.

'But what you have suggested, Draco, is likewise such an option, just as is using the Killing Curse in battle and not until, and I approve it only because the alternatives are worse. Let us do as you suggest. I ask only that we not get inured to it, that we not use it as an easy way out, that we realise what we are doing, and tremble. For, make no mistake: however elegant a solution, however remote in place and time we are from its consequences, however bloodless our hands seem to be, we are, and we must realise we are, killing our enemies, and using Riddle to do our dirty work, which means that their deaths will be agonising.'

_______________________________

In a dream-future, after the death in Dye Urn Alley.

'The Light,' Draco said, with uncommon serenity, 'shall prevail.' He knew he was not speaking in metaphor. They all of them, the veterans, the survivors, spoke but little about the War; yet they remembered, and the memory did not cripple them. Draco knew in his heart that he would never forget, until his last day on earth, the final battle, the almost fey confidence with which they had gone into battle, mocking Riddle and his forces and keeping their own spirits up by singing, with scurrilous emendations by Ron, Draco, and others (surreptitiously including Albus himself), 'Tommy, Make Room For Your Uncle', enraging the enemy and putting them off-balance. He would never forget the white light, pure, radiant, brighter than a thousand suns, that burst from Harry's brow, the scar peeling back on either side, a blasting and scouring and purifying light that destroyed Riddle at the last and left Harry's scar thereafter small and white and almost unnoticeable, no longer flaming and painful, not ever again a source of torment and shame.

No, the Light would prevail.

'And it's a true word you've spoken, Malfoy, darlin', it is.' Seamus was laying it on with a trowel. 'But that we mind us that it is to us to see that the Light gets a bit push, and not sit back and watch.'

'Right,' said Harry, crisply. 'What do you have for us?'

'For that, Harry me lad, you'll want to hear from my guvnor, the Chief Unspeakable.' Arthur Weasley, as Minister for Magic, had broken the impasse that had existed due to Harry's reluctance to act in politics, and had simply enrolled all the surviving Order members - those who weren't already such - as Magical Privy Councillors, and making them members ex officio of the Wizengamot. It was a typically British solution, akin to the Muggle enlistment of vicars, dons, music hall illusionists, Senior Wranglers, forgers, cricketers, and joke-shop owners, as intelligence assets in the war against Hitler. It certainly freed Seamus's hand in dealing with Harry and Draco in the present, and Arthur, in his wisdom, foresaw and had planned for a future in which Neville, Draco, Hermione, Harry, and the rest, took turn about as Minister, Headmaster, Chancellor, Dean, and Chief Warlock - or Witch, Hermione being certain to attain the post at least once.

The neat, trim, quiet man who stepped into Seamus's office through a hidden door was vaguely familiar. Seamus merely grinned, and called him his 'Chief'; it was Harry who suddenly tumbled to it.

'Dung? Mundungus Fletcher?'

'Harry. It's been some time, eh?'

'You're the Chief Unspeakable?'

'In the flesh, my boy, and clean, sober, and in as much of m'right mind as ever I managed.'

'Oh, cunning,' Draco breathed, with pure admiration. 'The perfect cover....'

'It certainly baffled poor old Fudge,' Fletcher laughed. 'He never sussed me out. And it was always such a joy seeing what contortions my cover activities put Albus through, in trying to keep me under cover and out of stir.'

Harry simply threw back his head and laughed until his breath hitched.

_______________________________

In a dream-future, after Domdaniel, at the beginning of their teaching careers at Hogwarts.

They had been persuaded to take the Hogwarts Express, as Lupin once had done, to ease themselves back into their old lives now made new, and to watch over what was certain to be, with the war still a memory for many households, a boisterous new draft of students. Their compartment was at the very front of the carriage, with the prefects's compartment behind it. Harry was the second to arrive in it, finding Ron there, dozing, already.

He grinned, and poked his old friend. 'Mind if I sit here? It's the only staff compartment.'

Ron sniggered, rising, and gave him a hug with one arm whilst ruffling Harry's mop of hair with his free hand - not that it made a difference. They were interrupted by a throat-clearing noise behind them, and a well-known voice. 'Has anyone seen a leaping toadstool? The Herbology Professor,' Hermione said, dryly, 'seems to have lost one.'

Harry laughed, louder and more clearly than he had laughed with anyone, save Draco, since the War, and gathered Hermione into a hug.

'D'you mind, Harry?' Ron was mock-plaintive. 'She's my wife, you know.'

'Tsk, tsk,' came an amused voice from the corridor. 'So. It's true. Harry Potter has returned to Hogwarts. You know, Potter, some wizards are sexier even than that gorgeous - and married - witch you're embracing. I can help you make the right choice, there,' Draco smirked, sauntering in.

Harry grinned wickedly, sat, and pulled his bondmate down into his lap, kissing him passionately. When they broke for air, Harry smiled again: a predatory smile. 'I think I can tell who the sexy sort are for myself, love, thanks.'

The compartment door slid-to behind a new arrival, who surveyed the two couples with wry amusement. 'Now then! Room for a little one?' Neville was more wry than ever. 'I mean, if you've done re-enacting your primal scene, and all.'

They laughed with him, and each in turn embraced him - 'and what t'missus would make of that,' he said, 'God knows' - before he sat down with a grunt. 'So. This is what I'm sent as colleagues. And here I'd thought I'd best move sharp wi' staff afore this! That were my mistake, I see.'

'Never change, Nev,' Harry laughed. His eyes were fond. 'Never, ever change.'

'Ah, but I've done, Harry lad. Now that Snape has t'come down greenhouse for his potions ingredients, sithee, I've whip-hand,' he chuckled, 'and how he does go on about the hard bargains....'

'Always said you were a warm man, Nev,' Draco drawled. 'Here's hoping you get the better of him for years to come. I suspect it will be good for Sev: builds character.'

'He was a character enough already,' Ron quipped.

'And you're teaching, then, Ron?' Neville was blandly inquisitive.

Ron shuddered. 'Christ, no. I'm just a poor, stay-at-home spouse.'

Neville's mouth quirked. 'Castle may stand a few years yet after all, then. If I've not blown it up and Weasley here isn't there to punch stones out the walls, there's hope for us yet.

'Now. You know how they are about mystification and childish secrets. Knew you were coming, but what you're to do is to be a surprise to us all. Not, I hope, to you?'

'No, they did actually tell us what we'd been hired for,' Draco snorted. 'Surprisingly enough. We've been slotted for the posts we had as Adjuncts during our Domdaniel year - and given the same quarters, I'm pleased to say. Doctor Hermione's taking over History of Magic and Muggle Studies, as it happens. I'll be covering Charms and acting as Adjunct Potions Master until Uncle Severus is ready to move wholly over to the Domdaniel side and teach only University-level Potions. And of course, Harry is the new DADA professor.'

'I still think you should do it,' Harry grumbled. 'You're better at it.'

'Balls, darling. In the first place, given my early life, I never want anything to do with the Dark Arts again. In the second, I refuse to teach a course that sounds like a Muggle artistic movement. In the third, the extent to which parents will be reassured by knowing that Harry Potter is teaching DADA to their little darlings, is precisely the extent to which they would have hysterics at the prospect of its being taught by Lucius Malfoy's son. In the fourth, love, is the stark and simple fact that you're the best candidate for the job. Ever since you started the DA as a spotty schoolboy, you've shown a particular gift for teaching in general and for teaching DADA in particular.

'And finally, Charms is bad enough, until Potions falls available; my interests are in the "exact-art-and-subtle-science", not in all this fiddling wand-work.'

'Stands to reason,' Ron said, innocently. 'After all, you always were more "swish" than "flick".'

'WEASLEY, YOU GREAT BERK!'

_______________________________

In a dream-future, after the death in Dye Urn Alley.

'Now what you want to understand, me boyos, is this, that wizarding villains are a stodgy, traditional lot. I know the lot of them, and in my manor, they're old-fashioned to a man.'

'Seamus?'

'Aye?'

'Would you kindly explain how it is that an Irish wizard has come to sound like the average Muggle CID man?'

Seamus just looked at Draco. 'Catch yourself on, y' daft wee eejit. How d'y'think?'

'Your Muggle father?'

'Ach, away on. Mind, me Uncle Padraig is an inspector in the Garda, so he is, but, no. Sure you know that the Muggle government is aware we exist. There's many a squib as has gone to liaise with Special Branch and the Met, there is, and Unspeakables and selected Aurors get twinned on training with some of their mob.'

'Ah.'

'Catch yourself on, Draco, it's you that wants knowing these things, and you a Privy Councillor and all.'

'All right, Seamus. All right.'

'Is that you, then?'

'Yes, yes. Carry on. You were going to tell us about the pattern.'

'Aye. Wait 'til I tell ye. What it is, it's that the villains that are to us, are all for the quiet life. Old-fashioned villains. Stair-dancers, mostly, not even up for breaking and entering. Dead terrified of the Bill, which, sound enough, we're not slack. They come along quietly, most times, blaming their latest stretch of porridge on a grass here or a snout there, and never a grudge against a slop. Why, I've known them to send get-well cards to a busy as is in hospital, I have. They'll nick your back teeth, they will, given half a chance, and there are always the frauds and the forgers. It's work enough protecting the lieges, surely, and no rest for the Sweeney, but as for robbery with violence, or murder, yet, we don't see much of it, and when we do, it's not crime.' Seamus's face soured, and he spat out one of the most detested words in a policeman's vocabulary. 'It's political.'

Harry emitted a hum of surprise.

'Ah, Harry dear, you're forgetting that our world is stuck in the Muggle '30s. There's no drug trade: people who want to poison themselves with potions can do it at home. There's smuggling, of course, but until now, that's been no great worry. Ah, ah: wait for it. And as for killings, it's likelier a burglar gets blasted into flinders by the curses on wards and locks than it is to have a wizard kill another wizard over a few Galleons. We've never had any Krays, and may the saints preserve us from it.

'No, the villains in my manor enjoy life free and easy; the last thing they're wanting, to where the prospect frightens seven shades of shite out from them, is a new Dark Lord.

'And that is why, when we found Flint dead as a clifted porlock in Dye Urn Alley, the alarm bells rang and we had to start looking at things from the feckin' political angle.'

_______________________________

In a dream future, after battle and Domdaniel and the start of their adult careers.

'You could certainly take mine, love. But I think you might wish to do otherwise.'

'What? Why wouldn't I?'

Harry did not answer Draco directly. 'The Weasleys are the senior branch of your line, Bellowes once said. And your mother was a Black, though Sirius, Andromeda, and - I suppose, at the end - Regulus hardly balance out Bella and the rest of the House of Black. You could take any surname you wish, and I'd be pleased and honoured if it were mine.

'But I know you, love. You're a fighter. And I think you'll come to realise that what you most wish to do is to keep your surname: to take the name of Malfoy and redeem it.'

'God, I love you. Come here....'

_______________________________

In a dream-future, after the death in Dye Urn Alley.

Mundungus Fletcher took up the tale. 'When we dragged you two and Ginny Weasley, as the best of our wartime intelligencers, to Dye Urn Alley to see Flint's body, it was, of course, because we had to assume the worst: that the killing was political. You had already been made aware that Flint was a grass, and that the mob he was in and grassing on were not a simple band of villains going about with eyemasks, striped jerseys, and a bag apiece marked "swag". And of course, we knew Flint's political leanings from before the War. But it was not simply that Flint, an informant, had been killed, that so worried us, not even taking that last into account. What gave us the screaming jim-jams was, that the killing suddenly cast a new light on a pattern that was already niggling at Seamus's sense of smell.'

'And an ancient and fish-like smell it was, it was. We'd seen an up-tick in smuggling. Well, in the aftermath of a war, and some things still rationed, and with the Ministry's having tightened the controls on some non-tradable substances, that was no great wonder in itself. Sometimes, sure, Our Masters don't think through all the consequences of the laws they keep adding to the books, now, do they?

'But it was a report from Q Division, south the River, that caught me wee eye. Q Division, well, the Erumpent and Castle district's in their manor, and that's a fence's paradise, and whatever is smuggled in or nicked from the lieges eventually changes hands in Q Division, as near as damn it. That's no news. But when I saw what Q Division had seized, well.... Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph.

'It's time we took a pop down the Docks, though, to E Division. Dung: are you away with us, old squire?'

'Oh, no. Your pigeon, Seamus. I'll be available for questions - and, with luck, with answers - if any of you should need me, but this is yours and yours alone, Shameless. Go on, man, you're burning daylight.'

_______________________________

In a dream-future, as teachers at Hogwarts.

Nev and Luna were on the rota for the week's gathering, which meant Eccles cake (to Gran's own receipt), Chorley cake with extra currants, oatcakes, wimberry pie, treacle toffee and Uncle Joe's Mint Balls, and India tea stewed to opacity in a brown, earthenware pot - and capable of tanning leather.

'Ah,' Neville said, stretching his legs out to toast his slippered feet next the fire. 'That were terrible good. And -' he grinned, and put on his best Hogwarts scholarly diction - 'aren't we fortunate to have had it, after all those years of being threatened by a lunatic whose last name's a word for "sieve"?'

'Calling Old-Uncle-Tom-Knobbleigh-an'-all "lunatics" over-estimates them, Nev, old boy.' Draco was warm, sleepy, full of tea and cake, and cuddled happily in Harry's lap. 'Buggers were hardly human, by that point.'

'Ah. I remember when Harry took him on, that last time. A duel, he said it was, and when Harry refused to bow he barracked his manners. What was it you said, Harry?'

'Oh, I told him the only salute he'd get from me was this,' Harry replied, raising two fingers.

'"Bow to my

master," Tom? I have no master and bow to no man - much less to a beast. You're not even human anymore, you reptilian abortion. You gave up your humanity when you gave up the capacity for love and honour.'

'Love? You fool! What is that to power?'

'It

is power, a "power you know not of": the means of your prophesied destruction, in the part of the prophecy that you never heard of, in fact.'

Voldemort's face slackened, then tightened as sudden fear gave way to as-sudden rage. 'It is no matter, you little fool! What protection of -

love -' he spat the word - 'that may be in you, runs through my veins now as well: your own failures put it there when your folly got Cedric Diggory killed.'

'Oh, no, Tom. My mother's love was for

me: for you she felt only rightful anger, righteous hate, natural revulsion. That is what courses through your veins, a permanent poison - can't you feel it corrode you even as we speak?'

'YOU WASTE MY TIME WITH YOUR FOLLY! Prepare to die and know, dying, that you have failed, and all that you love dies with you!' He raised his wand....

_______________________________

In a dream-future, after the death in Dye Urn Alley.

The Victorian Era was the bright and confident dawn of the Age of the Engineer. Its monuments still mark the Muggle world: the Suez and Panama Canals, the Brooklyn and Forth Bridges, the Eiffel Tower and the Crystal Palace and the Great Western Railway and the Tube; the memories and successors of steam liners and railroads and mills.

But perhaps the greatest of the great works of that cast-iron age, an age of utter certainty in man's triumph over Nature, is one that few people know of or ever see: the London sewage system. The Embankments that are a result of Sir Joseph William Bazalgette's genius are known, loved, and misunderstood, regarded as civic adornments only; what they are the result of, a massive public works project that cleaned the Thames and ended a series of cholera epidemics that had killed some 30,000 people in the preceding few years, is forgotten.

Unlike his contemporaries: Roebling, Rennie, Brunel, de Lesseps: Bazalgette was not a Muggle. In creating London's modern sewers, he also worked with Wizarding London, with the Ministry and the Wizengamot, and in purifying, sweetening, and re-routing London's underground rivers, country waterways long since paved over by the expansion of the Great Wen, he was attentive to Wizarding needs and understanding of the concept of Wizarding space.

One of those underground rivers was the Fleet, and it is on the subterranean Fleet Basin, on the Isle of Crups, that Wizarding London's Docklands are to be found.

Harry, Draco, and Seamus apparated to Dye Urn Alley, the industrial heart of Wizarding London, where Flint's corpse had been dumped the week before in warning, mockery, and defiance. Silently, they walked down Mist Steps to the docks: to the warren of streets, Indus Street, Dutch Street, that backed on Pad Dock, Bur Dock, Rudd Dock, and the rest. High above them and their southwest, Crutchedfriars Bridge carried Purse Lane eastwards from Fore Square.

'Seamus! You bugger. What brings you here? Ogden's missing a barrel of single-malt in bond?' The wizard who hailed them seemed familiar. 'Harry! Draco Malfoy, good God.'

'Michael Corner! Well, well. It's been a while,' Harry smiled. 'All right, then?'

'Never better, really, though an Auror's lot is traditionally not a happy one. I see you're keeping good company: always well to be in with a director of Ogden's, what? You and Draco here are probably his favourite account, with your cellars. But let's not stand here: come along to my cozy Docklands copper's shop, shall we? Blue light over the doorway, flitterblooms 'round the door, all mod cons, and a tea-kettle always on the hob....'

Once inside Corner's offices, with wards and charms in place, their old Ravenclaw acquaintance dropped the mask. 'Right, then, Seamus. What brings the Unspeakables onto my patch, along with two Privy Councillors who sit on the Wizengamot? Flint and the smuggling, I take it?'

'Got it in one,' Harry said. There was no question who was in charge here, nor any cavil: it was natural, assumed, a part of the created order. 'Who partners you here, Michael?'

'Oh, we're an all Ravenclaw force, here down the docks. You recall Eddie Carmichael? The year above us, and nine 'O's on his OWLs. He's my china.'

'Auror or Unspeakable?'

'Auror only, but cleared to know that Seamus is not merely a distiller. You're obviously allowed to know, so: I'm an Unspeakable, reporting directly to Seamus.'

'Have you everything docketed, or do we need Carmichael in?' Draco's tone was neutral, calculated not to give offence.

'As it happens, I was the one involved, so there's no need for Eddie if you don't care to drag him in.'

'I'd feel safer if he were, ah, on the beat rather than tied up here. The last thing we need is something going pear-shaped whilst we're jawing away.'

'Fair enough, Malfoy. Right, then. Flint and smuggling.'

'Yes,' said Harry. 'And keep it simple, I am but a bluff, hearty Gryffindor of little brain.'

Corner laughed. 'The other one has honking daffs on it. Feel free to pull it if you care to.

'Smuggling, then. I can keep it brief as well as simple. The usual rubbish the villains try and sneak past us is as you'd expect: occamy shells, flying carpets, scheduled beasts and their products.

'What set the bells ringing was two-fold: objects you'd hardly think to smuggle, but coming through - or meant to come through - in such quantities as no one would buy or think to; and objects that by themselves alarmed us. The first category included a staggeringly huge shipment of jobberknoll feathers, which was odd enough in that that's not something you'd normally see smuggled. The second category included runespoor eggs, occamy eggs in quantities that staggered me, and re'em blood.'

'This is not reassuring, Corner.'

'No. But it was the capper that sent me running to Seamus with my tail between my legs. More snake venom of various species than you can measure, moonstones by the pound ... and unicorn blood, lashings of it.'

'Corner,' Draco drawled. 'What you're suggesting could get frightfully ... boring.' The irony was heavier than the mist off the docks. 'Why, one would almost think that someone has plans to raise the dead.'

'You don't say,' Seamus snorted. 'Well, that's why you're the clever one. Raise the dead, restore the mind - perhaps a mind that'd suffered from, oh, I'm guessin' wildly here, I am, but let's say it was from a Dementor's Kiss - and give Chummy's wee pet superhuman stren'th while they're about it.'

'You're as subtle as an Erumpent on heat,' Harry said.

'Or Millicent Bulstrode on heat.'

Draco snorted. 'You're being redundant.'

'Well, it's not Riddle,' Harry said, flatly. 'He's deader than Salazar's snake. There's no raising him.'

'"Harry Potter",' Draco said, in the tones of a WWN advert. '"When he kills 'em, they stay dead. Essence of Potter now available in spray tins, as a doxycide. Four Sickles the ounce".'

'No, Riddle it isn't,' said Seamus, his voice that of one who wishes to break bad news gently. 'Because that's the gravy ring. I said our villains don't go in for much in the way of breaking and entering: they sneak-thieve. Well, I tell a lie. There've been a series of burglaries, now.'

'And what was stolen?'

'Well, that's the thing. The lads thought it was wick. Useless shite to steal.'

'Seamus....'

'Steady on, me ould mucker, here's where it gets craic. Old clothes - never new - used toothbrushes, used hairbrushes.... All right, there are some naff peelers under me, these Aurors, and would you credit, one actually suggested it was a house-elf crime wave? Feckin', mingin' eejit.'

'Whose old rubbish, Seamus? And stop faffing about.'

Seamus looked mournfully at Draco and then at Harry. 'Well, it was some of Lucius's shite, out the Property Room. And. A deal of mankin' old shite that once belonged t' Bellatrix Lestrange.'

'Out of the Ministry's PROPERTY ROOM?'

'Ach, did you come up the Lagan in a bubble, Malfoy? Arthur's a clean broom, he is, but there's always a corner has the Bundimuns eating away at it. And it's not only from there; it's not that we kept your da's and your auntie's smalls as evidence once we saw there were no Dark curses at them. Some of your cousins and such bought them in, ye'd think to burn or bury the damned shite, or at least to reduce the embarrassment of knowin' a kinsman's slippers are in the hands of the pollis; and it was their lumber rooms were raided.'

'Fuck, fuck, fuck. And blast.'

'Calm down, love.' Harry was firmly in control. 'Right, you two. How much money are we talking about here, in cost of smuggling and the acquisition of these items?'

'Christ knows,' Corner said. 'I'd have said it would have taken fortunes on the order of what the two of you have - together.'

'Then that's where we start. Cut off the cash, and the whole thing dies out.'

'Seamus and I have spoken with Gringotts. Arthur has bloody spoken with the little bastards, come to that - and I think he put Tony and Blaise up to trying it on as well. And so far, we've, shall we say, no change out of them. Banking laws, confidentiality, the Goblin code, and all that bollocks: they won't talk to us.'

'They'll damned well talk to me,' Harry said, crisply.

'What a novel idea,' Draco and Michael muttered, in unplanned unison.

Seamus's face was a study in artfully assumed innocence and pleased surprise. 'Why, Harry, acushla, I think they just might.'

'Manipulative bastards,' Harry snorted, looking sternly at the three of them.