Under a Dragon Moon

UNDER A DRAGON MOON

by Wemyss

a Sequel to Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn

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The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

- Milton, Paradise Lost

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

- Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Dreams surely are difficult, confusing, and not everything in them is brought to pass for mankind. For fleeting dreams have two gates: one is fashioned of horn and one of ivory. Those which pass through the one of sawn ivory are deceptive, bringing tidings which come to nought, but those which issue from the one of polished horn bring true results when a mortal sees them.

- Homer, The Odyssey

Hope is a waking dream.

- Aristotle, per Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.

- Nietzsche

... Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.

- The Authorised Version, Habakkuk ii. 2.

The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.

- Thucydides

Trackway and Camp and City lost,
Salt Marsh where now is corn --
Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease,
And so was England born!

- Kipling

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1. Old Arts That Cease

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When we sleep, when we dream, we are at once in both realms, and in neither. In all realms, and in none. We are in the marches, the borderlands, the debatable lands between what is and what is not - or is not yet: far from the fields we know.

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Hermione was adamantly of the opinion that it all came about due to the attempted - and, as it happened, very nearly successful, and narrowly averted - murder of Blaise's mum.

Like the greater part of Hermione's adamant opinions, this contention was logical, supported by fact, plausible, syllogistically valid, and only partly true.

Also like the greater part by far of Hermione's convictions, this notion - duly popularised and bastardised - swiftly became orthodoxy, became indeed part of the Official History and the common knowledge, of the Wizarding world: to Harry's and Draco's mingled amusement and satisfaction. Both of them, individually and as a couple, had long learnt the uses of half-truths, popular delusions, and the madness of crowds.

It was much simpler to let everyone, even those who ought damned well to have known better, believe that the real and final exoneration of Draco Malfoy had been a side-benefit of the investigation into Signora Zabini's endangering.

That this popular certainty conflicted with the public's equal certainty that Harry had known what he was doing when he'd taken up with Malfoy even before the War ended, that 'Malfoy must be all right, then, if Our Harry says so', was immaterial. Wizard and Muggle alike, the English are notorious for believing logic to be unreasonable, and for their ability to hold, and hold firmly, any number of logically contradictory views, the more so when they are considering their heroes. And as Tom Riddle had determined as an ickle Slytherin firstie, long ago, Wizards positively ask to be gulled, being fatally eager to believe as many impossible things before breakfast as can be told them: Wizards are far more gullible than Muggles. The average Wizard, the Witch on the proverbial Clapham Knight Bus, was precisely not the model of the reasonable person.

Ron knew, in the way that Ron simply knew things - in the fashion in which, say, he knew what an opponent's next move was going to be, or at what point his checkmate of that opponent had become inevitable - that it had begun with or just after Dumbledore's death. He knew this because he knew Harry, his cast of thought, his quality of mind, and he knew the unspoken arguments in Harry's tentative questions, the eloquent silences in Harry's unsure and halting musings.

Ron knew this, as he knew most things, in ways that he could not possibly articulate to his own, much less to Hermione's, satisfaction. But no matter: what mattered was that he knew. Knew, and could factor, and could work with or around, could incorporate in the Great Game. Knew, and could accept.

It was sufficient, that Ron knew and accepted; even if it was not what they knew, Ron's knowing and his acceptance more than sufficed for Draco and for Harry.

Ginny had known in her heart - the heart that has its reasons that reason knows not of - that it had begun long before for Harry and Draco, perhaps even before the two of them had boarded, with Ron and Hermione and all the rest of that far-famed year, the Hogwarts Express of long ago.

In their hearts, Harry and Draco knew beyond reason that Ginny's reasons were sound.

Albus Dumbledore had known by means beyond the knowledge of lesser Wizards what was and had been and was yet to be. He had also known that there is Free Will and that Fate is an ignis fatuus. He had known when Harry and Draco had first shared precognitive dreams, and he had tried before his death to guide them to acceptance of, not their Fate, but their potentialities, their prospects.

He had failed at that moment, but in the hour of his death he had sealed his task, saving a brand from the burning and holding open the door of a better future, making all things new. And by means they knew they could not fully fathom and need not question, Harry and Draco, after, understood what Albus had, in all ways, comprehended.

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When we sleep, when we dream, we are at once in both realms, and in neither. In all realms, and in none. We are in the marches, the borderlands, the debatable lands between what is and what is not - or is not yet: far from the fields we know.

These are the dreams and some of the days of Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, as the crisis of the ages overshadows them, and the world's last night.

They had failed, once before, failed themselves and their world, failed Albus, failed all. They had failed in their waking lives after coming so near triumph in dreams. Now the too-vast orb of the world's fate was poised, balanced, trembling, upon the merest point of agate, suspended, pendant, pending upon their choices. And they slept. A hundred miles and more from each other, they slept, and met in dreams, and in dreams was decided the future of the world.

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It was a regal name, Prince, the name of his mother's fathers: regal, at least, by the sound of it. And Snape was the site of a castle that had seen born one of the eighth Henry's queens.

Of course, Snape was also the name of a mire and a village by the mire, near Bedale, whence Tobias's savage forebears had coom t'work in mill. And the Princes of Knippax were hardly a royal company, either, even if magical.

But then, Gaunt was a princely-sounding name, was it not, and Peverell quite bleeding posh, and those primitive, filthy, inbred beasts had been of Salazar's own distant getting. And the Riddles were industrialists from nowhere, shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in a few short, Muggle-brief generations, all brass and no breeding.

His mother had insisted that he be christened 'Severus' - which had enraged his father, but, then, most things had. His father had wanted him to be named 'Saul'. Or 'Alf', after Tobias's uncle from whom they'd expectations. Even so, the traditions of Northern nomenclature were such that Eileen had prevailed: after all, Yorkshire, particularly in the West Riding and the North Riding, before the Muggles at Westminster had mucked up all the old bounds, was hardly a stranger to farm labourers christened Marmaduke. Perhaps that was why Eileen had got her way, at the font, in the face of Tobias's furious class-consciousness and his resentful hatred of anything that sounded like 'putting on airs' or toadying t'gentry (or, as he'd have put it, 'any suchlike'). It was the last time she'd got - 'gotten', she'd've said - her way on anything, that much was certain - 'any road', as Tobias himself might have said.

Well before Severus had left Spinner's End, he'd begun training himself to observe such distinctions, and to change his speech. By the time he'd reached Hogsmeade, a hyper-aware and guarded child, he had long since eradicated such vulgarisms. He had learnt to call pudding and looking-glasses and napkins by their correct names. He had drilled himself to say 'there were many' rather than 'there was many', to use 'ago' where every instinct bred in him would have had him say 'since', to use 'something' for 'summat' and 'most' for 'main'. He had not used 'while' for 'until' or forgotten to insert that unnatural definite article in his speech (I must always remember, it's 'down to the mill', never 'down t'mill', never, never) since his tenth summer (since he were ten year old), and he could hardly recall, now, the Tilley lamp and the dolly-tub and bath nights in the 'back-kitchen'.

In his first year, in Slytherin, he had kept his head down and his mouth shut - and his eyes and ears open. This was accounted a laudable thing in a Slytherin firstie, in any case. He had studied feverishly, particularly observing all that Slughorn could teach him - and not only, not even most importantly, from books or in his set work. No: he had studied style, and greedily had he listened for every rhythm of the Great Slug's speech, every rotundity of Old Slugger's vowels. He had studied the cut of The Slug's robes as sedulously as ever he had the properties of wolfsbane. He was resolved that he would find the key, the secret, the magical shortcut, that he would puzzle out the mystery. He had lashed himself to adapt, schooled himself to assimilate, spurred himself to rise above the shabbiness of his origins.

And when he returned to Hogwarts for his second year, he was certain that he was ready to speak and not to stay silent for fear his very vowels would betray him. He had learnt flair, after all, and the actor's ability to project and sway and seduce, with modulated tones and in orotund accent.

And they'd seen right through him, and mocked him the more, the posh bastards, the plummy-voiced toffs, the toffee-nosed bastards. Some were kind enough not to say so openly: Sluggers, for one. Some pretended not to notice: Regulus, more than anyone. Some had their own reasons for not mocking him to his face: Lucius, who barely knew him in any case, but who - as the grandson of a near-Squib collateral who'd been plucked from a suburban aspidistra pot to change his name by deed poll and marry the sole Malfoy heiress and preserve the line - was not a little parvenu and non-U himself. But Regulus's brother, the great beast, and his flash pals (especially that arrogant bugger Potter), had revelled in taunting him, his not-quite robes and his strangulated genteel vowels and his quasi-RADA pronunciations.

The orphanage-raised son of a Wizarding line fallen into squalor and yokel savagery, sired by the gormless son of a raw Northern mill-owner turned squire, was the first Wizard he ever met, bar Lucius, who understood.

Or partly understood. There was a piquant irony in the Dark Lord's blind spot, that a man who had lived a life of hiding and literally burying his own antecedents, a sort of Wizarding 'Baron Corvo', a fantasist with a fantasist's false peerage title, did not see that Severus was deep-dyed in deception. It was even more ludicrous, really, than that Lucius Not-Quite Malfoy never saw that Severus was a series of masks over masks, a man who held up a mirror to the world before his countenance, so that all who saw him saw only a reflection of themselves.

Funny that even in Wizard-dom, the class system and its resentments could help create rebels and traitors and would-be tyrants. Funny that even in Wizard-dom, the class system and its resentments could be the womb of spies, double- and treble-agents, men who had lived so many lies so thoroughly and so long that not even they remembered quite who they were at bottom.

Funny that after all that, after the actor's role in a social comedy that had run longer than most West End productions, the carefully schooled persona and the meretricious airs and graces, he should now be back in the dingy, squalid, common surroundings of his mill-town youth, in Spinner's End. Funny that after all that, he had his greatest deception left to pull off, his greatest role to fill.

Well. Enough of this bootless reminiscence. It was time once again for the buskin, cloak, and mask, time for the greasepaint, time to tread the boards once more.

And when the curtain was rung down, would there be any left to applaud?

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When we sleep, when we dream, we are at once in both realms, and in neither. In all realms, and in none. We are in the marches, the borderlands, the debatable lands between what is and what is not - or is not yet: far from the fields we know.

These are the dreams and some of the days of Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, as the crisis of the ages overshadows them, and the world's last night.

But which are whose, now? And which are dreams, and which, days? What is future, present, past? What is true vision, and what, nightmare?

To this question they return no answer. They do not answer it; they do not ask it. They hardly know to ask.

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It rang in his brain interminably, a trip-hammer sound, or sound perhaps of hammer on anvil, forging something unknown and unknowable that he could not quite see, a weapon or an engine of destruction, something ominous, portentous, dire.

It is our choices that show us as we are.

Our choices between what is easy, and what is right.

It is easy to believe we know what is right.

It is easy to believe we are choosing what is right when we are choosing what is easiest: easiest to imagine, to believe, to comprehend.

He was Dumbledore's man, through and through. That had been the right choice. But he must choose now for himself, without Albus's guidance, without Albus's training, without Albus's experience, without Albus's wisdom.

It was not easy. It was not right.

Even Albus had been wrong, upon occasion. And when he had been, it had not been easy to right him.

He had spent that last year with Albus, when he could have learnt so much, half-somnambulant. It had been the easiest course in the face of something that could never be put right, and which, too easily, no one had regarded rightly, his guilt and grief over the easy, wrong choices he had made, and that had cost Sirius his life - and him, Sirius.

Albus and others had tried to ease him. It had been easiest. It had not, he thought now, been the right course. Albus surely knew - had known - by bitter experience that it was not easy to live with consequences, to shoulder the burden of command, but surely it was right to do.

That burden was now his, not because it was easy, not perhaps because it was right, but because he had been chosen. Chosen, not by any prophecy, not by any Fate, not indeed by Riddle: chosen by Albus to carry on. Not because he was the best man for the job - he was almost yet a boy, hardly a man at all - but because he, and he more than any others, was Albus's man. Through and through. It might be right, it might come right at the end. It was not going to be easy.

What was certain was that he had to accept the responsibilities of his choices, and their consequences. It would have been easy to grasp at one last moment, a semblance of normality, some pretence of an easy life: return to Hogwarts as a student amongst students, walking out with Ginny, demanding to be treated as an adult yet letting the adults try to avert the impending fall of night. It would never have been right, nor been felt as right, nor felt right: it should have been someone else's life, an easy, storybook life for a storybook character.

It had been fatally easy, and had seemed right, to dog Malfoy's steps rather to try to prevent and turn him, to do what Albus, atop that accursed tower, had done. And it had accomplished precisely nothing to the purpose. It had quite probably caused more harm.

It would be fatally easy, it could be made to seem so right, to forget the end and objective of all and go after that double-dyed traitor, that unutterable bastard, Snape. But it would accomplish precisely nothing to the purpose. It would quite probably cause more harm. It would distract from the mission: find and destroy the Horcruxes, and then take Voldemort out, for ever. For - in all senses - good.

It would not be easy, but it would be only right, that he bear the consequences of his actions and inactions as he did so.

Madam Bones and Madam Vance would never now help preside over an irenic post-War world, now, a post-War world still reasonably whole after a short and clean war. It had been easy, there in Albus's office, when hate and suspicion had confronted no more than a dubiously prophetic dream, to cloak him in right indignation and refuse to try to heal the breach with Malfoy. Had he done so, would Madam Vance and Madam Bones be dead? Would Susan still have an aunt and Arthur an ally? Would the Ministry now be at his side and watching his back under a Minister Bones, rather than ranged all but against him under Scrimgeour?

Had he done so, would Bill bear the corrupt and corrupting marks of Greyback's insane malice? Would Draco and Narcissa - not Malfoy and his mother, but Draco and Cissy, with Andromeda and Tonks the last salvageable remnants of Sirius's house and kindred - be safe in their ancestral seat, assisting the Order?

Would Albus be alive?

It was not easy to ask these questions, nor to answer them. But it was right, and right that he face the consequences of his choices.

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There is an ancient charter market, a Bird Market, in Sacile, and a festival of birdsong has grown up around it. In August, the country 'round Sacile sees the Osei Hunters's Festival, and everything smells of powder and dogs and woodsmoke.

In Riva del Garda, in August, they celebrate the Night of Fairy Tales; in June's bee-drowsy days, days heavy with birdsong and the febrile growth of the short alpine Summer, Lomaso holds its Mountain Celebration.

In the Val di Fiemme, in September, at Molina di Fiemme, the Woodcutters's Festival ends the celebration of all things green and growing that the arrival of the masked 'Matoci' in Valfloriana begins, in the first blustery days of the earliest Springtide.

Then the sun sinks and the days shorten, and in January, in Cavalese, the Procession of the Witches is held, commemorating the witch trials and the burnings at Doss del Rizzol in 1505, a commemoration that culminates in the re-enactment of the trials and the sentencing in the parish park, at the Banco del Reson.

Blaise had long since recognised that the mere Englishry in which he had been brought up and that was incarnated in his beloved Justin, was the equal of all the drama of the ancestral Zabini lands. The operatic, over-the-top evil of the past few years had tempered him, as it had most of the victors, into an Augustan, cherishing the homely and the placid and the peaceable; glorying in restraint and chaste orderliness. He had come to appreciate the sometimes stodgy and unimaginative sheer goodness of his husband, even as he had remained in many ways Justin's flamboyant negation, the one preening in daring, chic Wizarding wear from the Russo-Florentine designers Dolya & Gagana amidst all the sensible, muted, and bespoke tweeds, the disco ball hung defiantly from the hammer-beamed ceilings, the peacock amidst a charm of lesser fowl.

His intentions were pure: a filial visit to his mother, and a chance to show off Justin, and to show Justin the various wonders whence the Zabinis had come, and the wondrous places they still called home, for all their long residence in England.

He had forgotten what road it is that is paved with good intentions. Curious, for a man who knew exactly where, in a wood near Florence, there was an ancient cave-mouth with certain ancient writing carved upon its arch: Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.

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As the two remaining heirs male of the House of Black, as combining the lineages, traditions, and riches of the Potters and the Malfoys as well (as Sirius had said, long ago, all the old families are intermarried to the point of entanglement), they found themselves with ample with which to occupy themselves, in rebuilding and recovering, in the preservation of property.

They'd two houses in town in addition to Grimmauld Place, one just off Wilton Crescent in Belgravia for when Draco was feeling the call of Society and one, to which the finger of taste had last been applied in the days of the second George, as Unplottable and hidden away as Grimmauld Place itself, tucked away somewhere between Long Acre and Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, Westminster WC2, for when Draco was being a theatre and arts queen.

They'd Walliston House near Houston in Renfrewshire, at Kilpeter, with its Stud and its gardens, its grazing and its shooting and its near access to the Wizarding links of Old Ranfurly.

They'd Fording Cottage outside Turriff, with its salmon, grilse, and sea trout fishing, the revered Inverkeithy fishings.

They'd a snug farm, Wester Duncolm Farm, in Fife, its arable worked by hand, hip deep in Wizarding barley that Ogden's - now in partnership with the Potter dominance in Wizarding cider and perry - reserved for its finest singlemalt firewhiskies.

They'd an elegant Adam town house, Cowie House, named for the last Witch of the burgh, Auld Meggie Cowie, in Montrose, and a trim, chastely Georgian town house, rebuilt from a XIVth Century town mansion, in Elgin, the Garden of Scotland, backing upon the Oakwood to the West of the burgh.

They'd interests in Staffs and the Black Country - the true Black Country, centred on Atrum Old Hall, the country of the House of Black. They'd interests in Wales as well, in the Vale of Morgan that had known both the steps of Harald Hvalpuf, Harald Whale-Spout, and his daughter Helga, and the long and blameless line of the Evanses.

And most of all, they'd Pottersfield House in Somerset, with its ancient orchards. They'd Wyvern House and Godric's. They'd the Manor, now purified and lustrated by their magics, with assistance from Nev and his roots in the magic of the natural order and from Tonks as incarnating the female principle of the Black bloodline. They'd the ancient Potter interest in Bowman Wright's Sons plc, the Potter cider and perry interest, and the Potteries that made the mortars and pestles, the trenchers and teapots, the firkins and flagons, half the magical small wares of the Wizarding world.

Especially, they had their own small manor, under the eaves of Grovely Wood and the Great Ridge, one to which they were both tied by remote ties of blood: as Sirius had said, long ago, all the old families are intermarried to the point of entanglement.

Malfoy Manor, duly purified, reflected its owners's more playful moods; Sutton Littlecombe, and the sub-manor house at Starveall, stayed preserved as in amber, being precisely as they wished them in all particulars; but if ever there were a Wizarding dwelling that reflected its master's mood, it was Pottersfield.

And so, when Draco came home from a much-resented day-trip to London, to un-bugger a Ministry cock-up, he knew immediately that all was not well.

Some people fell back on comfort food in times of stress: simple nursery dishes, broad beans and bacon. Only in a Wizarding household might the entire interior morph into a farmhouse, kitchen and all: which is where, amidst brick and brass, surrounding by slumbering heaps of dogs of all breeds and sizes, he found Harry.

'Petunia, I imagine?'

Harry raised his head, wearily, and nodded. His eyes were red-rimmed.

'Thank God she's reached the point at which she no longer registers - or at least fears, or sees anything odd about - House-Elves. It was too much to ask of Arabella and Molly.'

'And of you.'

'She's my aunt, Draco. My mother's sister. My only tie to my parents. I have to do this....'

'And you have done. More than she merited -'

'Draco. Please, love. No.'

'She never treated you well.'

'She took me in. She protected me. She didn't wish to do, she resented it, but she did her duty. And she's paid for it. Her husband, her son. She had her reasons for hating our world. Yet she still did her duty, however grudgingly, and look at what she's got out of it.'

'Yes, survival, because if she'd not done, if you'd been left unprotected, the Darkness would have fallen, and she'd be as dead and damned as Vernon and Dudley and everyone else, Muggle or magical. And, if it comes to duty, you're doing yours and a bit over, seeing to it she has 'round the clock care.'

'She talks. Constantly. About nothing. And it's all pronouns and vagueness, you couldn't respond if she gave you a chance. Sheer dementia.'

'She doesn't recognise you at all anymore? Or even mistake you for, ah, James?'

'She lives in a world without proper names, of things or of people. At least she no longer asks for Vernon and Dudley.'

'Harry. Love. Drop it. You cannot continue feeling guilty about their deaths, you weren't responsible for them -'

'When has that ever stopped me?'

'Yes, well, that is rather the problem, isn't it.'

'Sometimes ... sometimes I think the adder-faced old bastard won, after all.'

'If he had done, you'd not be here to whinge about it. Do come along, get up, get moving, I'm not about to allow you to sit here in a funk -'

'Comfort sex?'

Draco smirked at him. 'If you earn it. First, though, a good fly should get you back to whatever passes for normal with you, Potter. And do change the décor back, I had it perfectly set up as exemplifying rural and gentlemanly elegance suitable for a feature in Urbs et Rus.'

'Ponce.'

'Vulgarian.'

'Poofter.'

'Robe-lifter.'

'We're well suited.'

'Yes, yes, Potter, accio your damned Firebolt and bin the sappiness.'

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Harry could still hear in damnably perfect memory something Tom Riddle had said before his long-overdue death.

'Yes. "Let the thing be destroyed", precisely. The thing. The disease. Well, that is why it's so - apt, shall we say? For use on Mudbloods. It's simply the eradication of disease.

'Oh, I know you pretend not to see it, you pretend not to agree, but - as you lay dying, of course, I shall certainly not be letting you live - you will come to understand at the last, and all who come after will recognise it. I am engaged, my dear Mr Potter, my dear, dear Harry (I may call you Harry, mayn't I?), in a great, cleansing work, that is all.'
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'Actually, Harry, most - well, most civilised werewolves: not Greyback's deluded lot - do quite like Chinese food, and would prefer to eat at a Chinese restaurant than at, oh, Wilton's or Simpson's or Lindsay House. Mind you, I do find Lee Ho Fook's to be rather overrated, but, then, I've never been one for the Soho style....'

'Why?'

'Soho? Well -'

'No, Remus, why Chinese restaurants rather than a saddle of mutton or a cut off the joint at those posh places?'

'Chopsticks, Harry. No one hands you silver cutlery at a Chinese restaurant.'

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Regulus Black. The Notorious RAB. He'd been clever. He must have been, surely, to steal the locket, to know to steal the locket, to have heard of the Horcruxes at all.

But had he been clever enough? Had the locket he had stolen been a Horcrux any more than had the innocent one with which he replaced it?

Albus had gone through agonies in that foul, wretched cave, seeing, feeling terrors that seemed to live ever-present and unfaded in the potion in which the locket had lain drowned.

Had that been the true Horcrux? Had Albus, in the end, taken into himself, ingested, and thus disposed of one-seventh of Tom Riddle's decayed soul?
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'Hermione's being bloody-minded again.'

'Ron?'

'Apparently. I suggested Chinese take-away. She said all she wanted to get her teeth into just now was, in her precise words, "fried Won-Won".' Remus laughed.

'Remus?'

'Sorry, I was just picturing little pastry Rons filled with prawn mixture.'
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'I hear they've a place in Scotland. And went to school there. I don't believe either is a Scotsman, though.'

'Hmm. I rather consider that everyone owns a Scotch grandmother, conveniently dead, to be trotted out anecdotally on ceremonial occasions, for whiskies or when there's a Highland regiment in garrison in the town.'

'Mr Potter, I do hear, is from over-away in Somerset, for all that he spent his younger years near London, in those suburbs - my, they're horrid, those suburbs, I see them from the up train to town when I go up for the sales, all poky and mean.'

'Ribbon-built dog-kennels,' said Lady Penruddocke-Wyndham-Ludlow-Bruges, roundly. She was a foursquare, tweedy widow faced in brick, relict of Lt-Col Sir Gerald Noel Geoffrey Penruddocke-Wyndham-Ludlow-Bruges, KCB, DSO, MC, and bar, late the Light Infantry. It was a commonplace in the village that Lady P could out-parade-ground her late husband's best barks, without trying. 'If he's a Potter, then, he's from the North and West of that county, anywhere from Shepton Mallet to Bridgwater and over to Exmoor. South of there and East, well up into Frome, it would be Crocker.'

'And Mr Malfoy, then? They do say he's Wiltshire born and Wiltshire bred, though I've never heard of any such name in the county, and he doesn't exactly fit the rest of the rhyme, now, does he?' It was perfectly true that Draco was not the model of the native Moonraker, Wiltzheer born an' Wiltzheer bred, Strong i' th' arm and thick in th' head.

'Perhaps he had to change his name. I say nothing against the man, but there's no denying it, old schoolmates they may be, and distant cousins to boot, but it's quite clear that they've more reasons than that for living together, if you take my meaning, and perhaps his family -'

Lady P snorted. 'Good God, Mrs Cundit, no one thinks anything of that in this day and time, not to the point of disowning a son, even in Service families. In any event, the matter is closed -' which, thanks to her fiat, it would henceforth be, or she'd know the reason why - 'he may well have a better reason than that for any change of name. They do both have the OM, you know, and it's not in the civil division.' This fact was common knowledge in the parish, thanks to the Royal Mail and the fact that the English do make an effort to address their correspondents with some nod towards correct form. The village sub-post-office was a conscientiously quaint one, well-deserving of the prizes it regularly won in competition with other rural sub-POs, but privacy was a foreign commodity there, and the sub-postmistress, old Mrs Bramble, was notoriously a pillar of indiscretion. Letters addressed to Harry and Draco, with the post-nominal letters 'OM' (for, of course, the Order of Merlin), had not gone un-noted or unremarked even if the Muggles had leapt to the natural conclusion that both were holders of the Order of Merit. 'We may not know what they did or what ranks they held - clearly, they are SIS types, or possibly domestic Security Service wallahs - but that they have held the Queen's commission and been honoured with the OM is quite sufficient. Besides, they're the only two men in the choir who can sing in tune. Now: have we enough greenery on the decani side? Mrs Pothecary, would you step back into the nave, please, and cast an eye over it for balance?'

'Intelligence?' Old Miss Hiscox was not about to be diverted, even by Lady P. 'I wonder. There's certainly been less mischief in the parish since they arrived, and Pococke -' the jobbing gardener who was an inexhaustible fount of misinformation - 'mentioned, whilst making a poor fist of my borders, that the two gentlemen do have a weekly pint with Superintendent Maidment at the Bell. I wonder, indeed I do wonder, if they are not responsible for the recent peaceful tenor of our ways.'

'Quite likely,' said Lady P, 'it's certainly not due to that fool Maidment, much less to DI Badder: the divisional CID couldn't manage to bring a case against a stoat in a hen-run.' This was unfair, but Lady P had a longstanding and exceedingly convoluted quarrel with the whole of the County Constabulary, involving a setter who'd torn away the trouser-seat of a doubtless thieving trespasser, a stolen brooch, some missing plate, and three local chavs still lounging about the streets rather than being bunged up in gaol on her own personal suss. Or, for that matter, hanged: Lady P was a woman of decided, and decidedly old-fashioned, views. 'If they are indulging a trick of the old rage, I say the best of British to them, and let's all hope the amateur sleuths are more nearly up to the task than the fools we're lumbered with in that infant school for idiot children that they call the station on Russell Street.'

---------------------------------
'Christ,' Remus muttered. 'It's Carry On, Hogwarts.'

'Or Last of the Summer Butterbeer.'

'Are You Being Hexed?'

'I always knew that "DA" really stood for Dad's Army.'

---------------------------------
'It's the Venetians. Finally. And Flinch.'

'HARRY!' Trust Hermione to twig immediately - and disapprove.

Draco rolled his eyes. 'My dear Dr Granger-Weasley, it's their traditional jest, not ours. Who are we to presume to disapprove? If Blaise and Tony wish to call one another "Moor" and "Merchant", "Othello" and "Shylock", it's a trifle patronising to tell them they mustn't, lest they offend the delicate sensibilities of the common or garden Guardian--reader.'

'But they oughtn't! It's wrong!'

Dean wriggled out from his position on the lawn beneath a slumbering Seamus, far enough to be heard clearly. 'Hermione ... up to them, really, innit? They're not House-Elves.'

Hermione drew in her breath, sharply, preparatory to let fly in her most penetrating and peahen-like tones. Before she could speak, however, she found herself being seized from behind, lifted off her feet, spun 'round, borne back in a tango-dancer's dip, and soundly kissed. By the time she had recovered, Blaise had already passed her by, slinking as usual, and Justin and Tony in turn were mumbling their hullos.

'Must you always ponce about as if you were on a catwalk at Milan, Blaise?'

Blaise casually slid his wrap-around, mirrored spiv-glasses down his nose, the better to give Draco a superior look.

'Draco, darling, someday, I will yet seduce you into embracing your inner Euro-trash. Although if I were in a seducing mood -'

'None of that,' Harry, Draco, and Justin all said, in unison.

'Good afternoon, darlings. Dean, love, have you already shagged the Shameless One altogether out?'

'He'll wake the minute we start unpacking the tea-basket.'

'Wha'?' Seamus had rolled off of Dean and started to sit up, on cue.

'Back to sleep, love, no picnic yet.'

'The devil you say,' Seamus said, protesting, but he was subsiding already, sun-drunk and sleepy.

'Tony, good to see you. Eleanor not with us?'

'Hullo, Harry. No, she has a committee meeting, I'm a bachelor for the day. I see no Snape?'

'No, of course not. You're still not speaking to the greasy old bastard, then?'

'When he ceases talking rubbish and celebrating Rachel Corrie, I will educate him. After that, perhaps, I shall forgive him. Perhaps.'

'I reckon,' said Neville, gently, 'that education is t'key. Our Severus gets his opinions from worst sources, and his judgement has never been reliable. Well, just look at t'Death-Eater phase he went through as lad.'

Draco winced.

'He's a simple, working-class anti-Semite, in the Ernie Bevin mode, is what he is,' said Remus, with a shrug. 'It's no excuse, but he knows little better - as yet.'

Hermione had been on the verge of shrieking at them all, but this diverted her.

'I ought to have known,' said she, berating herself for not having been as clever as she might have been. 'He was always so well-spoken, but - that time he spat on the pitch! Ugh, how low! Most vulgar!'

'Don't be so irremediably middle-class, Hermione.' Draco's drawl was at its plummiest. 'That was the most don't-give-a-damn aristocratic moment of Severus's life. When you ought to have known, assuming you couldn't tell from his careful aping of Slughorn's manner in a desperate effort to obscure his origins, was when you lot tracked him to that appalling little house in that appalling little mill-town.

'Tony, old man, I'm sorry to hear, though, that he's been an exceptionally offensive ass.'

'And I am astounded,' said Hermione, the bit between her teeth, 'that you object to Snape but not to the equally objectionable "jests" from these idiots. Honestly -'

'Hermione!'

She ignored Ron, and plunged on. 'I mean, really! The Moor and the Merchant of Venice? How can you bear it?'

Tony gave her a long, level look. 'In order to avoid the expulsion of Jewry from England, it was my people who developed the means of making areas not merely unnoticeable by Muggles, but wholly Unplottable. I can reel off the incidents of my people's long persecution as if reciting the sacred words of Torah. Do not imagine for one moment, Dr Granger-Weasley, that I take lightly what has been done to me and mine over millennia. That Blaise and I, as co-heirs of the eldest Wizarding merchant bank in the three kingdoms, are sufficiently comfortable to jest with one another in these terms, and to allow our closest friends to share in that jest, is not a matter for your judgement. Any more than are the private jests between Witches a matter for Wizards to criticise, I may add.'

Hermione blushed, faintly, her hand flying to her mouth to cover its 'O' of surprise and sudden understanding.

'Hermione, darling,' said Blaise, insinuatingly as ever, 'you perverse, married, heterosexual people -' Blaise shuddered, dramatically - 'have your own jokes and jargon. We anointed and majestic queens are not precisely unknown to persecution and denigration, either, you know, but we reclaim the insults and use them within the family for fun. And, carissima, if you are
expecting some sort of racial sensitivity and solidarity on my part ... well, really, darling. That's so Muggle-born. What Dean and I have in common is that we are Wizards -'

'Not to mention -'

'RON!'

'- Well, yes, Ronniecakes, that, also. As for the accidental quality of colour, though, I am no more likely to feel some grand, emotional fraternity for Dean on that basis than ... oh, well, put it this way, luvvy. I'm about as into racial categories as were Dumas père and Pushkin. We simply do not think that way, in our world, although I must say I did once have a curious experience with a closed-minded croupier at the Wizarding tables in Monte.'

Justin snorted. 'You also once had a curious experience with a very open-minded -'

'Not in front of the children, caro, Hermione's blushing again.'

Ron shook his head. 'Right. So everyone means well, everyone has exhibited adequate, if unneeded, concern for one another's sensitivities, and we've all said hullo. Now: can we bloody eat? There's tinned tongue and a rabbit cider hot pot calling my name.'

Hermione had many great qualities to balance her faults. Her greatest saving grace, without which she would long since have gone mad, was her ability to laugh at herself. She did so now, sinking down onto the lush turf next Ron. When she got her breath, she answered the mild questioning she saw in her friends's eyes. 'All right,' she gasped out, 'but if you find knitted balaclavas in your rooms, you lot, I expect you to wear them and act liberated. Pass
the ginger-beer, Ron.'

'Careful, Ronald,' said Luna, who had ignored the conversation to this point in favour of watching things unseen in the coppice. 'There might be nargles.'

---------------------------------
'Oh, that was Lupin all over. Mild, douce, soft-spoken, yet somehow, as I've said, always the last Wizard standing. Sirius and James Potter were, after all, cousins - all the Pureblood families are related - and shared a brain, if not always a particularly stable one. They picked up Pettigrew along the way, casually, and used him. The werewolf came along after. Those who have chosen to canonise them after their dramatic deaths imagine them to have been paragons, which, darling, is utter balls. They could be complete shits, and quite often were. On the other hand, they did have their qualities, including an utter absence of fear and a rather simplistic sense of honour: they were the complete young scions of a warrior caste. I don't believe James Potter knew what fear was until he met the Evans girl. He learnt swiftly after that, I may say, she was not woman with whom to trifle. Severus, of course, saw and yet sees them as simple bullies, tout court, and with reason. Harry's aunt felt much the same way, and with very nearly as much reason. But that is also folly, if partly true - Regulus, for example ... well, we shan't discuss that. But this notion that your wolfish friend was powerless to stop them, suborned, blackmailed, forced to look the other way even as a prefect.... Lupin has always had a fatal need to be liked, that is true. But there are ways and ways of enforcing discipline, you know, and Potter's occasional kicking was not that of one who had the whip-hand of Lupin, but contrariwise. Eventually, even James Potter and Sirius managed to notice that something far worse than detentions or lost House points befell them in short order after they crossed the line, every time: the fine, Italian hand of Master Lupin. They couldn't pin it on him, they couldn't, naturally, even admit to the malefactions that had caused their comeuppance to be visited upon them, but they did eventually grasp the relationship between cause and effect. They respected him greatly - and feared him not a little, by the end. Yet the appearances were preserved, and they all remained friends: they knew better than to quarrel. And now they are dead heroes, and Lupin still stands, honoured and alive both, with his head ducked shyly and his diffidence carefully displayed and his claws into a second successive member of the House of Black.'

'Mummy?'

'Learn from him, my little dragon. And if you wish at all to understand that odd heroic husband of yours, do try and come to a real understanding of James Potter as he truly was, and of Lily Evans, and of Sirius.'

Narcissa thought back to that incident, many years before: the one time Remus Lupin had not made James Potter pay for a misdeed, although Sirius had certainly paid in full. Lupin had looked on, his eyes lupine and predatory, as Potter had said those monumentally foolish words to Evans, after the latest round of his feud with Severus: 'Don't make me hex you.'

Idiot Gryffindor. Lupin had known immediately - everyone had known, save that fool Potter - that Potter had just called down his own Nemesis. Being hexed by Potter and his gang had been Severus's worst memory, perhaps, but what had come after, even though those outside Gryffindor tower had heard of it only as rumour, ought by rights to have been Severus's fondest recollection. No, Evans had not been a witch to cross, and Potter was perhaps fortunate to have lived long enough, after her legendary response to that threat, to mend his ways, surrender to her, and die only later, if at the hands of a more ignoble foe.

---------------------------------
Harry, growing up in a cupboard in darkest suburbia, and Draco, as a scion of an inland county, were oddly free of the British mania for the sea, but they had taken to boating on inland waterways with enthusiasm. When they announced that they, along with Nev, Remus, and Ron, were off for a few weeks of poking about the Somerset Levels on the River Parrett, Hermione had dissolved into gales of immoderate laughter.

'Five men in a boat? To say nothing of the dog?'

'Mental,' Ron mouthed at the others, from behind his wife's back - not that she didn't catch him at it, of course.

'More like idle days on the Yann,' said Remus. He'd finally managed to get Hermione to read Dunsany to the children, but she had never grown fond of the Anglo-Irish fantasist. Today, however, she was too amused at them to do anything save brush Remus off.

They stood there, each typical of himself: Harry pleasantly down at heel yet evidently a gentleman, and as evidently competent to take the tiller without throwing his weight about; Remus casual and superficially amused, with a brittle amusement that could crack at any moment, already filtering the trip yet to come through a lens of humane letters, uneasy with his more direct involvement in the sensory world, brandishing literature as a shield and as a mark of his humanity, distancing himself from any smack of animal nature;
Draco a trifle too well-turned out, looking disdainful, ready to mock his own pleasure and theirs if it would serve to hide his uncertainties; Neville, forthright, downright, who cared nothing for society, having no inkling of why he should give a damn, and bore his considerable authority lightly, rural and rooted in all ways; and, sidling over to stand beside Harry, athletic even now, carelessly ragged and scruffy, Ron, the protector, the family man and fond father, brash, seemingly uncomplicated, and planning devilment all the while.

She loved them so.

'Go, then,' she said, shooing them away, still laughing. 'I'll get Colin to Disillusion himself and take candid snaps when you are off your guard. Merlin,' said she, 'it's too perfect: Ratty, Mole, Otter, and Mr Badger, messing about with boats. I'll stay home with Little Portly and the rest, shall I, and keep them away from the weir.' She gestured at Draco. 'Do not let Toad of Toad Hall jump ship and steal a motorcar, whatever you do.'

Ron shrugged, eloquently. He would never understand this wife of his.

---------------------------------
'Harry!'

'Um. Yes, love?' Harry was wary: Draco's tone had been sharp, and had had more than a touch of Molly-Weasley-on-a-tear in it.

'Why didn't you tell me? Hmm?'

Oh, bugger, Harry thought.

'Tell you -?'

'Your nose is peeling and flaking.'

'Look, if this is another of your lectures on exfoliating -'

'HARRY JAMES POTTER!'

Inconsequently, Harry reflected on the oddity of Remus's having managed to blarney his parents into naming him, in effect, after a Muggle jazz trumpeter. Well, it was time to face the music now.

'Um. Sunburn?'

'It's winter.'

'Windburn?'

'It's a dead calm, and it's been snowing for days, and not even you have been out of doors much in this.'

'Dry heat in the house, then? Too close to the hearth?'

'Harry....'

'Look, I didn't even notice until it had broken and was past praying for, all right?'

'A likely story! Up, up, get moving, it's into bed with you -'

'Damn it, Draco -'

'Harry, if you have a fever on my watch, it will be because I gave it you, do you understand me?'

'Thank you, Miss Peggy Lee.'

Draco said nothing, for a long, long moment. 'You're quite certain you are fully recovered?'

'Um. Yeah. It was too slight to notice, until it broke, and that was this morning.'

'You are quite, quite well, then?'

'Hale and hearty.'

'Then, Potter, you'd better run.'

As he took off at a rate of knots, Harry reflected that he ought really to have known better than to have made that Peggy Lee crack.

---------------------------------
When, after the War, Draco and Hermione - of all unlikely teams - had embarked upon exposing the Wizarding world's most cherished lies and illusions, the nonsense that was blood status, Hermione had unaccountably failed to anticipate that she would become a research subject as well as a researcher. It had been all she could do to keep her dignity - and her temper - when her best, Muggle-raised friends - Dean and Harry, particularly - had found it amusing that her mother's maiden surname had been Buckett (with two 'T's on the end, thank you), but she supposed it was inevitable that they would ask if it was called as 'bouquet', and if she had an Aunt Hyacinth (although, honestly, Remus wanted to know better than to chuckle about Dickensian police inspectors and Bleak House and Jarndyce v Jarndyce). But it was when she'd revealed that her father's mother had been a Puckle before her marriage that things had got interesting.

Remus had pounced. After three weeks's worth of correspondence with her parents, she had given him what they knew, and he'd disappeared into various Muggle libraries and record offices, muttering about Sussex, Lewes, Dymchurch, and Romney Marsh.

When he had emerged, he had stopped at Pottersfield long enough to seize Draco and carry him away to Hogwarts and the library, and a month after that, the two of them had come back, capering like fools - or Morris dancers, as if there were any difference - waving rolls of parchment.

'Well?'

'Granger's an old enough Wizarding name,' Draco had crowed, 'but Puckle ... well!'

'Plain as the nose on your face,' said Remus, chortling annoyingly. 'Cross those lines, and with a great-gran from the Marsh, and Merlin's your uncle. Pett or Whitgift, it's all one.

'May one ask,' asked Hermione, through clenched teeth - and it takes a good deal to cause the daughter of two dentists to succumb to that temptation - 'what you two are waffling about?' Her tone had no effect on the two researchers, although it caused Harry and Ron, who'd been having a quiet cuppa with her whilst awaiting Draco's and Remus's return, to keep their heads down and their mouths shut.

'Latent and recessive genes, o wisest of women, latent and recessive genes.' Draco was over the moon.

'See here,' said Remus, unrolling several feet of parchment with careless enthusiasm. It was hard to credit that they were in fact dead sober, although a surreptitious diagnostic charm she'd picked up from Poppy Pomfrey confirmed that they were. 'Your Puckles come originally out of Sussex -Lewes and so on - and went into London to seek their fortunes. Merchants and members of various City livery companies. But every so often, they married back to their Sussex roots. But - even without Marshwomen and those with the Gift - just look at the name, Hermione, the name.'

'I do not see why the name "Puckle" is a source of amusement, thank you.'

'The early spellings, damn it! Look!'

She glared at Malfoy, but looked. 'I see nothing odd. Phonetic orthography was characteristic of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.'

'"Poochyll",' cried Remus. 'It's obvious.' He made a dive for, oddly, the bookcase that held the books for the children, and emerged clasping a well-worn volume that had, predictably, been the gift of Ted the Tinker Tonks.

Kipling. Of course.

He opened it to the first chapter, and read.

'"She is not any common Earth,

"Water or Wood or Air,

"But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,

"Where you and I will fare."

'Yes, yes ... seely Sussex for everlastin' ... ah.

'"Beyond that wood the ground rises and rises for five hundred feet, 'til at last you climb out on the bare top of Beacon Hill, to look over the Pevensey Levels and the Channel and half the naked South Downs" -'

'Remus John Lupin, if you've a point, I suggest you come to it before my patience utterly runs out -'

'But it's plain as - all right, all right, here: "they saw a small, brown, broad-shouldered, pointy-eared person with a snub nose, slanting blue eyes, and a grin that ran right across his freckled face" ... "'Pook's Hill - Puck's Hill - Puck's Hill - Pook's Hill! It's as plain as the nose on my face."'

There was a moment of profound silence, in which the two researchers simply grinned at her as she sank into a chair.

'Well,' Ron said, slowly, 'that does explain the affinity for House-Elves.'

---------------------------------
Slough, Langley, Colnbrooke, Poyle, Little Whinging, Stanwell Moor, Staines.

Motorways, reservoirs, and the appalling noise of Heathrow, and Muggle aeroplanes screaming overhead.

Londis and Costcutters, and the unforgotten echoes of Aunt Petunia's bitter complaints of having to go to Rite Price to find even an excuse for a decent local greengrocer and having to send or all too often go all the way to Slough, to Woodlands Bakery, for proper bread and to Blanchards the butcher, and to Iver for a farm shop and as far as Windsor to find a reliable fishmonger, O'Driscoll's, and how ever did Vernon expect her to manage Gracious Entertaining under these constraints and now that that wretched freak of a boy was off their hands, why ever did they not move to a Lovely Home Commensurate With Their Undoubted Status.

Chavs in Burberry caps and scarves loitering aimlessly 'dahn the High' (the High Street, Aunt Petunia sniffed, Was Not What It Was).

Aunt Petunia clearly yearned increasingly for a move further away, into Berks if possible, or, if in Surrey, to a Better Neighbourhood, south the River. She was hardly a countrywoman, and the Very Idea of leaving the safety of the Home Counties for the Wild Provinces would have frozen her very marrow, but Staines ... the very name sounded vaguely soiled ... and as for the Swans, Staines Massive, Ali G, Hard-Fi: the town was known increasingly for The Worst Elements. It was little wonder that she turned her face resolutely away from Staines and the borough of Spelthorne and the very county of Surrey, even in choosing shops, and fantasised about Gracious Living in Berks (not Slough, of course, but somewhere near Ascot, or Bray, or the Cookhams, say).

For his part, looking at the scenes once bitterly familiar to him, Harry felt himself Disillusioned in more than the magical sense. How meagre it all was, to be sure; how mean, and petty. There had been a village here, once, a Place, a community with its own pride and its own ways. There had been mills and parks, rides and hythes, farms and churches, where now there were only the memories of those things, preserved as in amber by being attached, thoughtlessly and forgetfully, to the names of streets. This had been a Place, once. Now, it was simply a waste-product of meaningless prosperity. The Fox, the Bell, the Anchor, the Crown: no matter how evocative the name, the local public houses were soulless, as if Dementors could suck the genius loci from what had once been a community. There might be horse-brasses - probably imitation - on the walls, but the soil hadn't known the tread of a plough-team in endless years. There might be inferior copies of old hunting prints, but fox, horse, and hound no longer trod this earth, where any earth remained unpaved, un-built-on, breathing. The trophy fish on any wall was painted plaster.

The land was rendered dumb, mute and inglorious, with no magic left in it to answer his own or any Wizard's. Even from the River, only the faintest wisp of magic could now be felt, evanescent as a mist.

Once, this had been a Place. Now, it was simply a waste-product of meaningless, urban prosperity, gimcrack prosperity accidentally engendered by London town.

He watched, sadly, with eyes that had seen too much for his years, and had gained wisdom beyond those years in partial recompense, as Petunia, never seeing his Disillusioned presence, went about her morning round, sourly, her very movements impatient and sharp. He felt a gentle touch on his elbow, and then a warm hand slipping gently into his own. He nodded, and squeezed back, knowing that neither of them could see the other, knowing also that they did not need to see one another to know one another's thoughts. He had said his last farewells to the scenes of his misery. It was time to return to the Summer Country, time to return to the un-built and untainted land that still breathed magic. It was time he and Draco went home, to the home of magic, into the West. They Disapparated, with a crack, hand in hand.

---------------------------------
Draco was flourishing The Quibbler dangerously near to the buttered eggs. 'You must see this, Harry, it's stunning.'

Harry gave him a bleary look over the rim of his cuppa. 'Wozzit?'

'The first ever Page Three Bird - Colin evidently wore Luna down into adopting your Muggle cultural innovations.'

It was far too early in the day for this, Harry reflected. The idea that Luna (Mrs Neville) Longbottom, of all people, had consented to having Page Three Girls in her newspaper, was only less likely than that his lover would be so gleeful about it. He snatched the copy of The Quibbler from Draco's hands, grumbling.

A box above the masthead was loudly proclaiming - literally: he cast a hurried Silencio on it - that The Quibbler was debuting its first ever Page Three Bird. Ignoring Draco's smirk - 'stunning', he'd said: prat - Harry opened the paper. And laughed. And laughed.

Luna had come through for them again, and Colin's cleverness was on full display. All over the Wizarding world that morning, Harry thought as he chortled, Muggle-born and Muggle-raised Wizards would be shaking their heads.

A heroine of the War! The first love of the Boy Who, Well, YOU Know! And still as stunning as ever!

She preened from her photo, basking in the attention.

Our first ever Page Three Bird, setting the standard for those who will follow!

She struck a pose, in the photo, and Harry and Draco laughed fondly.

Luna and Colin had chosen well. If anyone deserved to be the first ever Page Three Bird in the Wizarding world, it was Hedwig. Her photo hooted at them as Hedwig herself, in the flesh, settled on Harry's shoulder.

'That's my girl,' Harry said, as she nibbled his ear.

---------------------------------
'Severus?'

'Ah. Mr Potter. Our political master.'

'Balls, Snape. What the devil are you doing here in Boyle Row?'

'Given that - with the exception of the recording studio in which the Weird Sisters preserve their appalling noise for an unfortunate and misbegotten prosperity, and the offices of Wizarding Heritage, which ought by rights to prevent precisely that - the whole of Boyle Row is given over to tailors's shops, I should have hoped that even the Gryffindor mind might have been able to guess.'

'You buy clothes? Sorry, I'd simply assumed you had the one set of robes and a well-rehearsed cleaning charm.'

'And the very selfsame dingy, grey Y-fronts, I suppose, that your father and dogfather exposed me as wearing? I see your charm as well as your intellect is hereditary.'

'Actually, some of us have grown up, over the years. As some of us, clearly, have not. You will excuse my surprise at the idea that you're varying your monochromatic wardrobe - particularly at Peeves & Fawkes or at Peakes & Ravenclaw or Scrimgeour Filch Avebury or -'

'I see that, to Black's and your father's odious arrogance, you have added Lucius's snobbery. Evidently, you are prospering under your husband's tuition. Be assured, Potter, that I can manage to scrape together Galleons enough to purchase something off the peg, although I'm not in your and Draco's bespoke league.'

'I don't doubt you can manage quite well, Severus. The question is, Why are you suddenly showing an interest in your turn-out? I have no choice, I have to go home to Draco every night, but I never would have taken you for the glass of fashion and the mould of form.'

'As Ginevra Weasley Creevey and your charming husband must have told you, I am to appear shortly before the Wizengamot on charges.'

'Good God, Snape. Now what?'

'I hexed a Muggle.'

'Hardly grounds for a State trial, even with your rather equivocal record.'

'It was John Prescott.'

'In that case, I'm sure Draco will defend you personally. As will Minerva, I'd think, and all their High Tory acquaintance. Whatever possessed you to do such a mad thing?'

'The little man has had the impertinence, as part of his housing plan and overall harrowing of the North, to slate Spinner's End for demolition.'

'Right. Come with me.'

'Am I being remanded into custody to await the hearing, then?'

'Oh, don't be an ass, Severus. I'm taking you to Figg & Wimple.'

'Pray, why so?'

'Introduce you to my tailor. You've earned it.'

'Potter -'

'If you'd hexed Blunkett with it, or Peter Bloody Mandelson, I'd buy you the damned suit as well.'

---------------------------------
Harry, despite the worst the Dursleys had done to him, was, after all, the Potter scion, and fell naturally into - sank into, with relief, as a man sinks into bed after a hard day - his heritage, his ancestral role as a private, country gentleman, and the more private and rural, the better.

Draco ... well. The Blacks, for all their Staffordshire holdings, had been resolutely urban, creatures of town, for whom the cosmos was bounded by the metes of Grimmauld Place. (Cousin Nymphadora - 'don't call me that! And I will not be called "Dora", damn it, it makes me think of pub hours and licensing laws and governments that think their purpose is to be the nation's governess!' - had certainly got that gene.) And Lucius? The man had had no sense of place. Or anything else, really. Pretentious, parvenu, non-U bastard. Hermione had said it rather well: 'No one except the sort of witches who devour Bills & Moon robe-rippers think that the upper classes are by definition nice. It's possible, I suppose, that "hearts as pure and fair" beat there, and so on, but when you consider the two usual means of getting into the upper classes.... I mean, honestly, it's all pillage, plunder, and rapine, or toadying and tuft-hunting - or both, with some adultery tossed in - anyway, the point is, it wasn't that Lucius was a shit, it's that he was so vulgar with it. No style at all.' So Draco had not, after all, been brought up to be a pillar of the County and a gentleman farmer, at least not until Aunt Andromeda had got hold of him, with some help from Ted the Tinker Tonks (Orley Farm, down for Harrow and with a prescriptive future of Sandhurst and the Guards after, until he got his Hogwarts letter, and to this day a complete clubman). And thus, when, after the War, Harry had thrown himself into recreating the Potter traditions, Draco, along for the ride, hadn't really known what he'd signed on for: he'd had no idea at all, actually, of what country life involved, but had had, rather, merely a pleasant vision of himself in tweeds, with quaint rural types tugging their forelocks in his general direction.

He'd certainly learnt swiftly, after, and was still learning: thanks in part to Tinker and his formidable Aunt Andy, but, to his initial surprise, mostly from the innately urban but learned Remus Lupin, immersed as Lupin was in local history, and, especially, from Nev, which wasn't quite as surprising as it might have seemed at first blush, once one thought about it, and from his Weasley cousins, who were as deep-rooted in country matters and mores as ever was any oak.

He'd also developed protective and evasive techniques to avoid embarrassment. For example, the increasing inability of the C of E to find sufficient clergy - particularly for rural livings - had finally resulted not only in 'teams' of clerics making the rounds of churches in succession, but of joint services and a rota for choirs and bell-ringers, amongst whom of course were Draco and Harry; Draco had evaded trying to remember names to go with the faces above the dog-collars, and having to try to recall who had what appointment, by taking a leaf from Tinker's book and addressing all C of E priests as 'padre', which had, he considered, a pleasantly officer-and-gentleman ring to it on his lips ... even if it did cause some sniggering when directed at clergywomen (not that Draco considered them validly ordained in any case).

Even so, there remained learning to be had and social pitfalls to blunder into. Draco was inexpressibly glad - literally so, as he would rather have died than have admitted it aloud, even to Harry - that the dictates of rural courtesy kept people from laughing in his face when he dropped a brick (who knew that the countryfolk of Wessex were all natural Gryffindors?).

He and Harry were walking back from, ostensibly, a joint choir practise with another parish's choir, and, truthfully, from a rather lengthier subsequent stop at the pub - the Woolpack, and damned fine its slate of real ales was, too - where they'd been joined by Nev and little Colin Creevey. Colin was only slightly less interested in churches than in music, and he was as uninterested in music as a man could be without being tone-deaf, and Quaker Nev of course had nought save amusement for what the C of E got up to on First Days, but they'd certainly been happy to Apparate down the local and walk a while back, after, with Harry and Draco. They were back within their own parish bounds when they stopped to talk with Mrs Quintyne, an arch, jolly, Rubenesque woman of a lush middle age, who was hanging out her washing in a triumph of hope over experience, under a slaty and lowering sky.

'-- So thik yere motorist winds down his window as he's a-passing constable,' she was saying, 'and shouts at him, "Pig! PIG!" Well, constable's not going to stand for tha-aat, and turns his head to see can he get the registration number of the motorcar, and that's when he collides with the Gloucester Old Spot as is in the road, that the lad were trying to warn him of!'

Their laughter at this well-worn village gossip was interrupted by the first, distant note of the tolling bell. It immediately took on a pattern intimately familiar to Nev and Harry and Draco, as the teller strokes followed in succession, crying the news of a death to the parish 'round. Harry and Nev whipped off their caps, as, after a fatal moment, Draco remembered to do (Colin, of course, was bareheaded in any case), and they stood a moment, heads bowed, wondering. Speculating, as one does. Mrs Quintyne stood with them, counting the strokes that told and tolled the years of the dead, whispering quietly: 'Not Kellows, then ... nor Uzell ... of an age to be Miss Mabbett, she were doing poorly, I hear, but that was nine tellers, so it do be a man as has died ... ah, I know, old Yerbury's gone at last, and a blessing to him it is, suffering as he was.'

She looked at them, keenly, in the sudden stillness. 'I suppose as we'll hear you then in the choir at the funeral? He was a great churchman when he was able to be up and about, was old Farmer Yerbury, and I do know as it will be a fully choral service if there's any right left in all England.'

'I seem to recall,' said Draco, 'that you've a fine voice yourself, Mrs Quintyne, when you favoured us all with the old tunes at the benefit for the village hall renovations. Heaven knows we could use another chorister.' It was the washing that had reminded him to return the compliment, as one of the songs in question - part of a medley from the war years - had been, "(We're Going to Hang Out the) Washing on the Siegfried Line".

'Lord,' said she. 'We're Chapel, Mr Malfoy, and allus have been.'

'I'm sorry - I thought - well, you mentioned the funeral -'

She carefully did not give him a look of affectionate pity. 'I've been to every wedding and burying hereabouts for thirty years - and, oh, but the whole of this country will be there for the Yerburys, poor dears.'

'Thirty years?' Harry affected a look of deep gravity. 'They ought really not to have taken an infant to funerals, that way, you must have been far too young.'

'Oh, go on with you,' said Mrs Quintyne, grinning at his gallantry. 'And poor Yerbury just dead, you did oughtn't make me to laugh, Mister Harry, really you did oughtn't to do.'

There were times, Draco reflected, with some envy, when he could cheerfully have throttled his lover. When, in God's name, had Potter become insinuating and gallant? Didn't enough people already want to cuddle the bugger and pet him and feed him soup? He noticed, and not for the first time, that he remained 'Mr Malfoy' whilst Harry was 'Harry' - even here in his own, Malfoy country.

Bloody Potter.

If the bugger weren't so handsome, sweet, loveable, and good in bed, he'd have half a mind to chuck him.

---------------------------------
Blaise and Justin were, of course, as different as chalk and cheese, for all that they were also the most loving and well-suited couple one could well imagine.

As Draco had once said, 'Blaise daydreams of lounging on the deck of a yacht in the sun, somewhere in the Med, being fed grapes by scantily-clad youths, recovering from a wild night at the gayest disco in Europe. I don't imagine Justin has those urges.'

And, 'No,' Nev had chuckled, 'happen Justin daydreams, 'd involve tweed and beaters and a good day for birds. Nowt t'less, lad, sithee, Justin's daydreams and Blaise's, I wager, both, however different to t'other, will always be of one another. Blaise's dream-yacht'll ever have Justin on it, lounging next him, and Justin's dream-shoot won't be complete save Blaise has t'next stand, and they with matching guns.'

Draco had been wholly unable to keep his countenance, later that day, when Justin had taken them aside, shyly, but with great excitement, to tell them that he'd got Blaise a pair of Holland & Holland 20-bores for Christmas, precisely matched to the pair Justin had inherited from his grandfather.

---------------------------------
Much to Ernie's annoyance, the Prophet, as the events of the War faded in memory, had taken to caricaturing Harry as 'Super-Scar', complete with a costume and a cape and a thunderbolt-symbol on the breast of his tunic. Draco, privately, thought that Ernie's annoyance had a good deal to do with the way in which the most famous member of the Squib branch of the Macmillans had been dubbed 'Supermac' whilst PM, although, Draco admitted, Ernie was as a rule a reliable friend to Harry and might well be incensed purely on Harry's behalf. Harry, for his part, didn't mind the caricature any more than he minded publicity in general, although he became quite angry - much more so than did Draco - when Draco in turn was caricatured as the 'Eminence Grease', or when his other friends were attacked. What all of the veterans took seriously was the spirit of malign revisionism and complacency that was creeping into public life: the whispers, now beginning to be heard even under the light of open day, that the threat of Voldemort had been exaggerated, or that the War had been unnecessary or prosecuted carelessly - not by the Ministry, mind you, but by the Order - or that it had been a war 'of choice' or waged by Harry for revenge, as a sort of twisted sacrifice on the altar of filial piety.... Almost no one - almost no one - yet living really supported what Tom Riddle and his Death Eaters had in fact actually stood for, but people no longer confronted with actual, mind-concentrating fear can revert to rather silly positions, and, now that there was very little left to fear, it was increasingly becoming psychologically intolerable for those who had been wrong about the War at the time: Ministry types and the Prophet, mainly: to continue to celebrate Harry and the Victors and, by implication, admit their own mistakes.

The only good that came of it, Harry and Hermione had agreed, was that the drumbeat of dissent, along with the occasional irruptions of terror from the few remaining, fugitive Death Eaters, kept the Wizarding public as a whole from forgetting the War and its causes entirely: a grudging remembrance that at least assisted the victors in continuing to push through their extraordinary programme of reforms, designed to remake the Wizarding World, re-educate its denizens, and remove the grievances and prejudices that had given rise to a recurrent series of aspiring magical despots.

---------------------------------
'For reasons best known to themselves -' Draco was laying down the law with his usual air of exquisite superiority: which, as Harry well knew, meant the pointy little bugger was feeling a trifle insecure - 'common or garden Americans - and there is nothing so common as an American - prefer Spain to Portugal and France to Italy. Of course they don't like the French, no one does, but they perversely like the country as well as the nosh and the plonk, I've no idea how the Frogs've managed either, really, they can't have palates after spending the meal smoking those ghastly fags of theirs -'

'Point, lad?' Nev was trying manfully not to chuckle at t'Fawce Ferret.

'The point, Longbottom, and I'll thank you not to call me "lad", is, Blaise is determined to drag darling Justin off to the Alto Adige and all that, and the best consolation I can give Flinch-Fetchingly is that at least he'll not be surrounded by Yank trippers.'

'I expect,' said Harry, dryly, 'Blaise will render Justin other and better consolations.'

They were on their way to visit Dean and Seamus at Killderg, having Port-keyed to an inconspicuous bit of woodland on the banks of Fairy Water. Above them, the soft Irish skies breathed peace, and as they rounded a stone wall, Seamus caught sight of them and welcomed them in his own, inimitable way, his Irish parlour tenor tuneful:

Raised on song an' story

Heroes of renown -.

It was, Dean had observed, a pity that Blaise could not have carried a tune in a pail, as otherwise they could have fielded an Old Hogwarts Gay Men's Choir. For some reason, Harry, Draco, Dean, Seamus, and Justin had all turned out to be musically inclined as well as thoroughly bent.

---------------------------------
'HARRY JAMES POTTER!'

'Hullo, Hermione.'

'Would you care to explain to me why -'

'No.'

'Harry -'

'Hermione. I love you. I owe you more than a thousand Wizard Debts could hope to repay. But the War is done and dusted, I'm free now to live my own life, and I don't need it planned out for me, with colour-coded charts.'

'Besides,' Ron sniggered, 'he has Cousin Ferret for that, now, right, mate?' And he flicked his wand, creating the sound of a whip cracking.

'There is still,' said Hermione, through clenched teeth, 'so much to be done, and it won't wait on frivolity. Life is real and life is -'

'Hermione, if you think life is Ernest Macmillan -'

'Oi, mate! Please. 'S my wife, here, I have to live with her after you leave -'

'Harry!'

'Hermione, damn it all, look. I know at least as well as you do that there's a great deal left to be done. I also know that there damned well is, not only time for, but a need for, frivolity. You and I were raised by Muggles, Hermione, we've at least heard the stories of the rationing going on and interminably on, into the Fifties; and the slump and the grey drabness and a victory almost indistinguishable from defeat, whilst the Americans were kicking off their own Elizabethan Age in the flush of victory. People need a sense of normality, the feeling that the War is over, and frankly, so do I. SO ... if Draco and I want to spend the next month getting ready for the village G&S Society production of The Sorcerer -'

'Who's singing what?' Dean looked interested.

'Well,' said Harry, diffidently, '"My name is John Wellington Wells / I'm a dealer in magic and spells -"'

'I suppose Draco's young Alexis Pointdextre?'

'Yes, of course, being a tenor he always bags the romantic leads -'

'HARRY!' Hermione's colour was as high as the C-sharp she had just reached. When she spoke, however, it was slowly, as to a child with whom she was forced to be unbearably patient. 'I do not care if you wish to re-number Grimmauld Place as 70 Simmery Axe. I do not care if you put on a production of The Mikado at Hogwarts -'

'Oh, that was last year,' said Dean, innocently: 'you must have been at one of those boffiny AGMs of yours, Draco sang Nanki-Poo and Harry was the Lord High Executioner, it was hilarious, the choreography for "Bow Down" was based on Gred and Forge doing the creep and crawl back when people thought Harry was the Heir of Slytherin, back in second year -'

'SILENCIO!' Hermione's patience had snapped. 'I DON'T CARE IF YOU WANT TO SPEND NEXT YEAR REHEARSING IOLANTHE, THE POINT IS -'

'The point,' said Harry, crisply, as Hermione looked at him, and then at her wand, in disbelieving shock, 'is that "lordly vengeance will pursue / All kinds of common people who / Oppose our views / Or boldly choose / To offer us offence", and you can leave off looking at your wand as if it's malfunctioned, Hermione, you know damned well I can finite any spell of yours voicelessly and wandlessly. Honestly -' he grinned at her as he used her pet phrase - 'you know better than that, Hermione. No: it's my turn, talking. There's a great deal that wants doing, yes. If we move too slowly, events could outrace us: there are still those not reconciled to the loss of their prejudices and their privileges. But if we move too fast, the recalcitrants and the irreconcilables are given a handle. And therefore, my dearest friend, we are going to proceed calmly, we are going to bloody well exude unassailable confidence, we are going to project that we haven't a care in the world, and we are going to keep to a pace that is neither complaisant nor panicky, all right? And Draco and I are going to participate in Muggle village cricket and Muggle village amateur dramatics and Muggle village G&S Societies and the Muggle parish choir, and make ourselves useful, and be asked to muck-in in the boring daily work. And when we've an idea of how these things work, from the inside, and perhaps been approached about eventually being vestrymen and school governors, we'll sit down with you and Minerva and talk about feeder schools and preppers and pre-preppers - we're not spending Thursdays in Tollard Royal for our health, Hermione - and choir schools and under schools, and also about FE and an Open University over the Floo Network, so that children are never again left ignorant of their magic until they reach their eleventh birthday and adult Witches and Wizards don't stagnate intellectually after Hogwarts and Domdaniel, so that Muggleborns aren't injured by well-meaning NHS doctors who don't recognise accidental magic and bored adults don't dabble in arts best left alone! The devil'd you think all these functions Draco and I attend were in aid of, anyway?'

Hermione flushed a dull colour and began to stammer an apology, but Harry cut her off with a hug even as Ron cut her off with a question. 'Village cricket, Harry?'

'Yes.'

'So Muggles play cricket as adults even though they're not professionals.'

'That's right.' Harry was smirking.

'When do they start playing, I mean, y'know, on organised teams?'

'Oh, they start in well before they're eleven. At the schools that precede their equivalents of Hogwarts.'

Ron's eyes gleamed. 'Bloody brilliant, Harry!'

'Oh, God,' said Hermione. 'I see where this is headed.' There were times when being married to the Editor of Wizden's took a toll on her.

'And all these schools....'

'In addition to village matches, Old Boys have regular fixtures. Playing off their old school ties,' Harry smirked, even Ron and Hermione groaned at the pun. 'And, before you ask, players who may eventually play for their County teams or for England and professionally, are spotted early and developed over years.'

'Harry,' said Hermione, 'I thought our object was education -'

'And what,' asked Ron, 'is the surest way to get your education reforms through? Specifically, darling, what is the sort of prospect that will wholly distract the Old Purebloods League from all other considerations?'

'I cannot believe,' Hermione moaned, 'that the only way to get Wizards to contemplate educational reform is to couch it as a Quidditch-training proposal. No, come to think of it, I can believe it, all too readily, and that's worse still.' She paused, and snorted. 'Mind you, it is funny to think about what the Ofsted or ISC inspectors would make of Hogwarts.'

Harry chortled. 'Hermione, dear, you know me. I do love Quidditch, but what matters is getting the reforms accepted, and I'll use, ah, "any means" to that end.'

'Slytherin in Gryffindor's clothing,' said she, affectionately.

Harry laughed, thinking back to something Albus's portrait had said: My dear Harry, certainly Tom Riddle was a very powerful Wizard, perhaps more powerful than I, he certainly from an early age sought power rather than knowledge, let alone wisdom. It is unlikely, but possible, that when he was here to beg an appointment to staff as the Defence teacher, he might have meddled with the Sorting Hat, at least in terms of its sorting students into his old House. If he had done, then your first knowing defeat of him was on your first night here, at your own sorting.... It is simply ridiculous, however, to imagine that even he had the power to make a Horcrux of it, imposing his will against that of all four Founders.

'Well,' said Harry, smiling, 'there's a reason why, when we thought to make assurance doubly sure and had additional spells put on the Hat, I didn't stand for Gryffindor House.'

'Nor Cousin Ferret for Slytherin,' chuckled Ron. 'Nor us for Gryffindor.'

There had been no nonsense about any refounding of Hogwarts, after the War: the founding was the founding, and the Founders, the Founders, and that was that. But it had been thought as well to reinforce the Sorting Hat's magic, and there had been no question who amongst the victors ought by rights to represent the Houses and their true traditions: Neville, Luna, Justin, and Blaise. Draco and the Trio had by common assent transcended all Houses, after all, having in them traits of more than one House.

'And now Neville's a star,' said Hermione, with a grin.

'Trevor gets more fan-owls.'

'And Lee Jordan, at Spellcast House, and the WWN generally, aren't half laughing. Honestly, the entire Wizarding world grinds to a halt, Sundays at 2.0 and Wednesday at 3.0.'

'That reminds me,' said Harry. 'Nev and all the panellists from Herbologists's Question Time - including Trevor the Toad, of course, we couldn't leave him out, he's the most popular figure on the show - are on board for the re-institution of the Grimmauld Flower Show, this year.'

'Chelsea Flower Show have nothing on you, Harry.'

'Don't you snigger at me, woman, I don't care to have every nob and snob in Wizard-dom tramping about my back garden, but the social fixture makes Draco happy, the flowers make Sprout, Nev, and Molly happy, and the celebration of the "arts of peace" pleases the Ministry no end.'

Ron shook his head. 'You love every minute of it, mate. You're bored stiff without a huge threat to world peace to fight. Main reason you took up with Malfoy was, you're addicted to danger, y'ask me.'

'Oh, sod off, Ronniekins. If all I'd wanted was the excitement of a perpetual tussle, I'd've married Ginny.'

'She'd not've had you, mate. Got you out of her system sharpish, didn't she?'

Harry, laughing, threw a Stinging Hex at him, which Ron blocked with a lazy grin.

'Oh, leave off, you two, it's near time for I'm Sorry, I'm Not on the Floo,' said Dean.

Hermione blushed.

'Ohhhhh, yes,' chortled Harry, rubbing his hands with ostentatious glee. 'Hermione's appearance, isn't it. Nothing like a Ministry stint to fit you for a good game of "Taunton Vale".' That, of course, is the WWN equivalent of "Cheddar Gorge", in which the panel contribute a word each, in turn, to form a coherent sentence - so long as the word is not one that can possibly bring the sentence to an end. It's the comedic equivalent of a politician's address to a party political audience.

'You wait, Harry James Potter. Seamus has put you up for a panel, with special consideration for the limericks.'

Harry shrugged. 'Can't be worse than the week when they had an all-Draco version of Quote, Unquote. At least I can beat anyone hands down at playing "Grimmauld Place" - whatever Mrs Trellis thinks.' This, in turn, is the Wizarding version of "Mornington Crescent" and uses the Apparition Points A to Z issued by the Ministry. The real joke is that, of course, Grimmauld Place is Unplottable.

Dean rolled his eyes, and waved a negligent wand towards the wireless set.

'"-- 'Your surname, please.'

"'Ah. It's ... I'll spell it out. B-O-U-G-G-W-A-R-I-N-G.'

"'Lovely, but I shan't be spelling it when I want you, now, will I? How is it called?'

"'Er. You know how "Mainwaring" is called as "Mannering"?'

"'Yes. What - OH. Oh. Right, then. I'll call you by your Christian name, then. What is that?'

"(Pause.) 'Ah. Roger.'"

Hermione snorted. 'Prats.'

'"And now,"' said Stubby Boardman, richly chuckling, '"as the looovely Ivy tots oop the teams's scores for that sketch - they're on the other side o' the barrier, luv, you'll want to get a leg over - it's time for 'Introducing the Late Arrivals' ... this week, the Auror's Ball."'

'Oh, God,' Harry moaned.

'"Fred Weasley, you first."

'"Madam Hillbolt-Bindham -"

'"--And her son, Watchett."

'"George Weasley, you lot, George Weasley. Now, Hermione Granger-Weasley and Den Creevey."

'"Senior Auror Slytherin...."

'"And his wife, Sodknockingfirst Just."'

'"And Dr Granger-Weasley's fans are mobbing the lovely Ivy at the scoreboard, who is trying desperately to pull off a dozen House-Elves...."'

Dean, by this point, was wheezing helplessly, supine, drumming his heels on the floor. Ron and Harry were laughing too hard to help, and Hermione was a fetching shade of rose.

---------------------------------
'But mate -'

'It's all right, Harry, you don't owe us an explanation -'

'HERMIONE! Bloody hell, he owes us an explanation if he's seriously thinking of hunting up Malfoy when we want to be fighting You-Know-Who!'

'He needn't answer to us -'

'I do, though. No. I do. It's ... look.' Harry sighed. He flicked his wand, and conjured up an image of Draco's face.

'Ugly git,' said Ron, mutinously.

'Look,' said Harry, and twirled his wand, transforming the image into a sort of holographic silhouette.

'He.' Hermione was taken aback. 'He ... he looks rather like Tonks, doesn't he. In the face, I mean.'

'He looks like a bloody ferret, Hermione! Tonks is pretty!'

Harry ground his teeth, and made an arabesque with the tip of his wand. Now, Malfoy's eyes gleamed from the shadowy image, grey and watchful.

'Christ,' said Ron, subdued. 'Sirius's eyes in Tonks's face. I never saw it before.'

'You never looked, Ron,' Hermione snapped at him.

'I. Well.' Harry's voice was pitched very low. 'I only really saw it, well, just before everything went tits-up.' Hermione cleared her throat in a disapproving fashion. 'But, look, do I really need to tell you, either of you, what family means to me? He's your cousin, Ron, just as much as he is Tonks's. Just as he was ... Sirius's. Your family is all the family I have left. Sirius was family, I'm his heir. Malfoy is family.

'Yeah, I know he's hurt us. Well, we've - I've - hurt him, too. I want to take responsibility. I must do.

'And why should I have to tell the chess grandmaster of Hogwarts and the cleverest witch of our age how much good it would do - strategically - to have Malfoy not on Voldemort's side, and perhaps even on our side?'

'Never happen,' muttered Ron.

'Won't know if we don't bloody try, will we! Damn it, Ron. Just - damn it. There are all these reasons we simply must at least try. And the one that you're simply going to have to accept is this: I was there, you know, I know what Dumbledore promised. I'm not Dumbledore, but I am who's left. I have to redeem his pledge, I have to make the attempt, because I'm still Dumbledore's man, through and through. And I have to make the attempt because, well, we've not exactly had just a sudden access of luck, finding Horcruxes, have we?'

'You think Malfoy may have some gen, then?'

'No,' said Remus, from behind them, from his chair by the fire, whence he had been listening in hopes that they would sort this out for themselves. 'He may, but it's unlikely. That's not the point, Ron. Harry's point, and he's quite right, is that this is a quest. You want to have a pure heart, if you wish to undertake a quest.'

'Our hearts are pure!' Ron spoke heatedly. 'We're the bloody good side!'

'If you deny the possibility for growth and reformation? If you judge your fellow Wizards by their bloodlines and their parentage? Or their schoolboy clashes and House rivalries? If this constitutes being the good side, it is no wonder that Giants and centaurs, and werewolves who have never heard of that mad bugger Greyback, are dubious about joining what we designate as the side of Light. And Albus, if he were with us, would say the same.'

'Yeah, well, he was bloody brilliant, wasn't he, trusting Snape all those years -'

'RON WEASLEY!'

'Please, Hermione. Ron, it wasn't for Severus Snape that Albus Dumbledore elected to extend trust, it was for his own sake. Just as it was the right thing, whatever came after, for Harry to prevent me ... and - Sirius ... from killing Pettigrew in the Shrieking Shack. We do not know what may yet come of those actions, but doing what is right rather than what is easy is always the most promising course.

'Harry, you must, of course, do what your conscience dictates. If Albus made a pledge, of course you must redeem it. Whether you care to acknowledge the fact or not, you are now the leader of this fight. And as such, but really simply because you are you, you have my loyalty and my support. If by any means I can help you in finding Draco Malfoy and extending him, once again, the hand that Albus held out to him and that he was on the verge of accepting, on the Tower that night, I shall.'

---------------------------------
'The point is, he's not guilty.'

'That, Mr Potter, is the ultimate issue before this tribunal. It is not for any witness, however ... distinguished ... to determine the fate of the prisoner in the dock.'

'Balls.'

'MR POTTER!'

'Albus Dumbledore made certain pledges to Draco Malfoy. So in my turn have I. You've heard ample evidence to the effect that he was one of the heroes of the fight against Tom "Voldemort" Riddle. It is a waste of time to continue with this farce of a trial -'

'MR POTTER! Are you meaning to show contempt of this Court?'

'I'm trying very hard to conceal it! You shall NOT make a mockery of Albus Dumbledore's word and pledge and honour, nor of mine! Not even were you a properly constituted tribunal rather than yet another damned Ministry show-trial, based on truckling, toadying, and cronyism! I shan't stand for it and' - he gestured towards the stunned spectators in the gallery - 'neither shall the people. There's been nothing but evidence, names, dates, places, and events, in favour of the "prisoner in the dock".' Harry's tone was grimly mocking. 'You lot are cowards about proper names, aren't you. All there's been against Draco Malfoy's obvious innocence has been a load of balls, innuendo, vengefulness, and twaddle about his father! HE'S NOT HIS FATHER! I SHOULD KNOW, RON AND I KILLED THE OLD SHIT OURSELVES!' Before the echo had ceased to ring from the Ministry's marbled walls, Harry leaned forward and spoke again, in a low, dangerous voice, perfectly audible and perfectly chilling. 'If the Ministry are to judge accused persons based on lineage and blood status, then what the hell did I bother to fight Voldemort for? If that is what we stand for, why did so many people die, only to see us left with a choice of soft bigotry over hard? I did not fight Death Eaters and vanquish Voldemort simply to pay off scores and avenge my parents, my godfather, and my friends, but for a greater cause and purpose. Do not dare to cheapen or betray that. If these are the true colours of this Ministry, then I hold you as no better than Voldemort, and I will deal with you as I dealt with him.'

'Is that a threat, Potter?'

'No, you two-Knut cheap imitation of Barty Crouch the Elder, that is a promise. The Wizarding World has too long allowed this sort of petty tyranny and the rule of jumped-up jacks in office whose only merit is who they know and whose arses they've kissed, and there will be an end of it. There shall be reform, and - it begins here. Now.

'Release the prisoner and render a Not Guilty verdict. NOW! I'm not waiting all day.'

'YOU ARE NOT OUR RULER!'

'Neither are you,' Harry spat, rising in his chair and gesturing again at the gallery. 'THEY ARE! And I suspect that, knowing that Albus Dumbledore was of this mind, knowing that Fawkes has tested the prisoner and found him true, knowing that you are the same pathetic lot who bunged up Stan Bloody Shunpike in Azkaban on suss but couldn't keep Bellatrix Black in the damned gaol, they will join in demanding that Draco Malfoy, like Severus Snape, like Sirius Black, be cleared at once, and at least Draco's here and alive to profit by the verdict!'

And from the gallery, in a great gale of sound, there suddenly erupted a chant: 'NOT GUILTY! NOT GUILTY! NOT GUILTY!'

The tribunal, in turmoil, shouted at one another, scuffled, shoved, pulled noses ... and then those who were adamant for Draco's conviction, incontinently fled.

'On behalf of the remaining quorum,' Arthur said, mildly, 'we pronounce Mr Malfoy, "Not Guilty", and adjourn this session.' His look towards the well, where Harry stood, chest heaving, eyes ablaze, was steely. 'Harry, you will report to my office at once. We're going to have a little chat, my boy.'

Harry nodded.

'Oh, and Harry? Bring Draco, will you?' He turned to the suddenly silent gallery. 'I further declare that the office of Minister for Magic is deemed open by the Wizengamot here assembled - hearing no contradiction? Good. The Moot will meet Monday next to debate reforms and a constitutional settlement; in the interim, Kingsley Shacklebolt will serve as Acting Minister. We are adjourned.'

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Draco looked glumly at his miserable, pinchbeck surroundings. He had been vocally displeased with Spinner's End when he and Severus had arrived there. It had been appallingly difficult to deal with Severus afterwards. How was he to have known that this filthy Muggle hovel was Snape's childhood home, or that the late head of Salazar's House had been, of all things, a half-blood?

Linoleum. Really.

And Snape had taken great pleasure in flaying him, verbally. Yet there was no doubt of the truth of Snape's statements. He had failed. He was alive solely thanks to Snape, and an Unbreakable Vow - cast, ironically, by his atrocious aunt. Snape was neither lying nor jesting when he told him that the Dark Lord, the hope of all Purebloods, the restorer of Pureblood Supremacy - or so he promised - was a disgracefully-begat half-blood named Tom Riddle. The Malfoys and the Blacks had been reduced to servitude to a half-blood. And unlike another half-blood whom Draco knew of, the Dark Lord had failed time and again, on each occasion, being regularly beaten back by a handful of Draco's own schoolmates, a doddering old headmaster who had been barmy as any coot, a half-Giant oaf, a litter of weasels, and a seedy werewolf.

Not only were his family clearly backing the wrong horse, the damned gee wasn't even a Thoroughbred.

He had made the mistake of challenging his former Head of House, indulging in the sort of schoolboy backchat that had had none of the consequences in school that it so clearly implicated in a war.

'Begging me for his life? Do you really think Albus Dumbledore was begging for his life, from me or from anyone?' Snape had sneered, at his most contemptuous. 'You are an even greater fool than I feared, you spotty, snivelling little boy. And your folly, your cowardice, your idiotic delay in accepting his offer before my arrival, has condemned us both to play out this farce. Evidently the Dark Lord possesses at least the last rudiments of sense, in refusing you the Mark until you should have passed the test he set you. Which you failed, I remind you, as you have failed test after test, endangering, now, your mother - your father could not in any case be saved - and, now, me. You clot-poll. You spineless, gormless, pigeon-livered dunderhead. You stock-fish. Get out of my sight, before I feel impelled to begin sending 'round to villages to see which is missing its idiot!'

It had been three days after that Snape had, still wordlessly, relented so far as to toss him, as a scrap to a starveling gutter cur, a twist of parchment, in the sprawling yet elegant hand of an old man now dead. The Headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix may be found....

It wasn't going to be easy. Draco could only hope it would be all right.

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END

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In our next chapter, the dream unfolds.