I.04

For five days, Harry went to the Ministry building at least twice a week, to speak with people about work. Some were less receptive than others. Often he ran into Percy, Mr Weasley, Minster Shacklebolt, and several he'd spent years with at Hogwarts. They wished to spend time in his company, 'to hear all the news'. Such a phrase translated easily into 'listening to the wonderful life of others while I have nothing to say about my own life' for Harry. He dreaded being asked round for tea, to dinner, or having to go to lunch with the Minister at Pompardo's, a fabulously, ridiculously posh Italian restaurant within the sleekest realms of Muggle London.

But while at Pompardo's, dining on linguini and discussing the current galleon to pound exchange rate, Harry met Eva St Eve and Ambrutus Brutus. A striking couple, tall, dark, fair-eyed, imposing, impossible to ignore. He couldn't believe, after swallowing his linguini down with a sip of red wine, that he mistook them, at first, for Muggles. They sat at an intimate table for two along the back of the restaurant. And only at their departure from that table did they deign to greet the Minister. Their attention lasted a rude length of time on Harry's scar. He felt it prickle, along with heat in his cheeks, under their Hungarian eyes.

After an eternity of embarrassment, Ambrutus Brutus faced the Minister. 'We have had much difficulty finding a suitable residence for us in this city, Minister.'

Eva St Eve's notable alto quickly listed the problems. 'This place, it has no room. This other place, it has too much room. This place, it have bad kitchen. This other, it fall apart. And this place, it smell. Nothing suited for me and husband in this London of yours, Minister.'

Harry didn't know what made him think of it, but he spoke up then. 'I have a house. It's not really for sale, and it's not an estate exactly, but I'd love to be rid of it.'

In less than a fortnight, Harry had Grimmauld Place sold to the Hungarians. Relief as he'd forgotten it carried him to the stable grounds of happiness, lasting days. He had made some money from the sale, had shoved it in his Gringott's vault, and pondered what to do with his life. Staying aimless disturbed his health, and for a while he nursed a lingering cough and cold that no herb sent from Neville Longbottom, no broth of Molly Weasley's, could conquer.

In the spring of what would be his twenty-first year, he discovered that his wealth and idleness, his popularity and gregariousness, had made him the first playboy of the wizarding world.

It wouldn't do. It simply wouldn't do at all.

-x-

He thrashed about in misery. Woe marked him as an ally. He hid at the Leaky Cauldron during the day. He talked idly with Tom. He visited with shopkeepers in Diagon Alley. He even roamed the dark, narrow paths of Knockturn Alley. He saw Ambrutus Brutus and Eva St Eve, and hid from them, ashamed that they'd think him a socialite. They were already having extravagant parties at Grimmauld Place, and the Daily Prophet often had them in the social column. He avoided the famous and the rich, going so far in avoidance to disguise fame in himself.

He pretended to be a child again. On sunny days of early spring, he ate sundaes at Florean Fortescue's, typically with a book propped in front of him, either muggle or wizard written. Non-fiction was his love, and history of the Hogwarts Founders his hobby. He could not forget the Headdress of Ravenclaw, the Cup of Hufflepuff, the Locket of Slytherin, and the Sword of Gryffindor. The fancy developed to write his own book someday, a non-fiction title, nothing at all like a biography. Just a book. Nothing pretentious or boring. But something to do while he waited for the world to welcome him again. Whenever that should be.

He supposed the sun would burn out before people forgot who he was.

Or the moon would fail to rise before he would let himself forget.

He felt like the only one who suffered in his post-Restoration identity. But a small part of him knew he was not. There was at least one other.

-x-

The main ingredient of Wiltshire countryside is unobtrusive little hills, visible best from the distance, as in the middle of a stark, empty plain. But the plains were plentiful, the hills infrequent, and the latter rolled away, everlasting mint in hue, like giant leprechauns dozing on their backs. Perhaps the bucolic view saved Malfoy Manor from complete abandonment.

The house of cold stone had transformed to a house of cold memories. In the long sunset of an April evening, when Draco forced himself to return, the manor waited, dark and massive and insidious, waiting to swallow him whole. No light burned in the front windows. And, even before self-imposed exile, he had stopped using the front entrance, for its unrelenting bleakness and staining remembrances. Only in the back of the house, from the kitchens and music room, did he find cosy windows and chimneys smoking. On other storeys, those above the first, the wavy glass panes caught bits of moon and stars, and faraway lights through the trees, but that was all. It reflected light as well as life. It rejected joy.

The door rattled on weakened, damaged hinges, and closed with an acrimonious thump behind the billowing tails of his sorriest robes. He scrubbed the soles of his shoes on a wretched mat in the oval side hall, while the new routine of his daily return played out.

Buckles hobbled in from the kitchens, the light from behind casting the house-elf's shadow as a lengthy, cretinous shape against a floor of tumbled marble. He hobbled now, not because of age, but from an injury sustained during a siege on the manor. Buckles admitted he'd gotten in the way when they came to arrest Master Malfoy, demanded that the Young Master provide clothes, as a means of dismissal, for Buckles certainly deserved nothing less. But Buckles had been part of Draco's childhood, a reminder of pleasanter days, days he had not thought would be so fleeting, nor so missed. The first real stirring of pity touched Draco, in the deliberate hell of becoming master of the manor, and he allowed Buckles to stay on, for this one piece of the past to remain undiluted by the unforgivable mutations of war.

'Good evening, Young Master,' greeted Buckles in his Wiltshire lilt, a bit less on the R's than normal, yet softer to the ears. From behind his long back, the elf produced a bundle of envelopes, most the off-white of parchment used frequently in the wizarding world, and some with fantastic colours. 'Lots of post come for you today. Owls flying 'bout in the owlery all the livelong, Young Master.'

'Thank you, Buckles,' Draco said absently, ignoring the letters in favour of removing a dampened travelling cloak. 'Could you set them on the table just there? I'd like to get into something that doesn't stink of London rain, if I may.'

Buckles hurriedly laid the letters aside and helped his master with the change of garments. 'And how was Young Master's return to the office, to new job? Did Young Master like it very well?'

'It is much the same as I was doing before, Buckles.'

'Yes, sir.'

'It will take getting used to.'

'Buckles imagines so, sir.' Buckles tilted his head forward, thoughts of the war searing, and was relieved to find distraction from minute puddles on the floor. 'I see Young Master has been too long out in the rain. Should Young Master like Buckles to make him some tea? Or perhaps Affinity can warm up some stew, or make tasty shepherd's pie?'

'Yes,' Draco said, still distracted, as he'd been all day, 'yes, um, splendid. I'm starving. I missed lunch. Could you have Affinity mend this for me, you think?' He used a mischievous forefinger to poke through a hole in the right elbow of his travelling robe.

Holding up the garment, in his short height, so that the hems trailed along the floor, Buckles examined the robe with the well-trained eye of a thousand butlers. 'Certainly, sir. May Buckles enquire as to how this came about? Torn clean through! Threads feazed! Did Young Master get unluckily caught in a tree branch on his way home? Did Young Master not Apparate as well as he usually does?'

Draco still sneered with the best of them, and he sneered triumphantly toward Buckles, but with a hint of humour. 'You know how the mind treats you sometimes, Buckles. One minute, you're focused intently, and the next—utter chaos in the grey matter. Yes,' he nodded once, trying not to do so emphatically, 'yes, I Apparated very poorly.'

'But Young Master was distracted. Young master is lucky he did not splinch himself, sir. Shall Buckles bring Young Master tea?'

Draco returned to the round granite-topped table in the centre of the hall to claim the stack of post. It was enormously weighty in his hand, and thick between his fingers. So much post on Mondays. And, of all the post, only one or two personal notes, the rest newsletters or lengthier periodicals. Some delivery owls still did not know where Mistress Malfoy currently resided. 'No, brew us up some coffee, would you, Buckles? And some of that fancy American cream. What is it called—?'

'Halfing-half, sir,' provided Buckles, coming close enough to the proper name. 'Affinity has just received some from an owl post order today, Young Master. Buckles will bring it to you in the music room, sir. The fire is laid there, and the room is warmed.'

Draco passed through the second hall, heels clicking, and bobbed his head in a dismissive yet grateful manner towards Buckles. In turn, the house-elf bowed, but did not leave the hall until Young Master had disappeared fully into the music room.

The area carpets, ancient, threadbare things, finally quieted his footfalls when he reached his favourite sitting room. A shapely room with two window-seats looking to the side garden, whose giant vistas provided the last threads of magnificent sunset hues, pinks and limes and eye-burning oranges, and the thin branches of naked trees standing as dormant sentries black and opaque against spring's twilight, and the sliver of a shimmering moon hanging beside a bright planet. Draco inhaled deeply, the pause to absorb the prospect affecting his taut nerves; when the breath came into him, he caught the scents of burning wood, brewing coffee, must from the manor's dusty corners, and oil from Malfoy portraits. But mostly the burning wood, a comforting scent reminding him of Christmas holidays, both at home when he was a boy, and at Hogwarts during his impressionable years.

The glass panes were thin and had been disenchanted to keep out winter weather, and Draco was chilled as he stood. He moved a little, aiming for the sitting chair near the fire, opposite a twin.

Draco flopped into it, all arms and legs like a spider flattening himself against an enemy. He'd come home, and endured the solitary quiet.

Affinity brought coffee. Quiet about it, liking to be unseen, as she'd always been. She belonged to Narcissa, from years when both were younger, woman and house-elf, and it was natural that Narcissa should want to have the house-elf as she started establishing her own home. Draco watched as a cup was poured for him. How many times he'd seen it done in his life, by that very elf, he could not count. One day, he supposed they would rather be with Narcissa than 'the Young Master'. And off they would be, because Draco cared too much for them to speak it. To utter the hurt was a wound itself. They would go because he was too much of a coward to ask them to stay.

'Everything all right, Young Master?'

'Thank you, Affinity,' was all he said. The house-elf's enquiry was not ignored, only forgotten by choice. He did this with enquiries that had no true answer, or that could not be answered concisely in fewer than a handful of words.

He took the coffee to a secretary in the drafting room, in the back corner of the manor. On a sheet of parchment, Draco fashioned a falsely uplifting, rather simpering letter to his mother.

He wanted to write about visiting again, but it seemed impossible. He had just returned. Everyone knew. Everyone who read the Prophet knew. Everyone working at the Ministry knew. And to leave so suddenly, he would appear a quitter, a cheat, a runaway, a reject. None was he, but appearances were deception's best tool. Narcissa still cared about those sorts of things. Lucius, too.

Malfoy hadn't time for such social frivolity. He felt the cold of the drawing room draping its ponderous cloak about him. He shivered, sealed the letter, and rushed off to find his owl high in the attic. It was second nature now to take the back staircase, to avoid the drawing room, with its acrid, detrimental memories. He certainly had so little time. As the cold grew worse, the odours thicker, so grew shorter his days.

Demons would be faced. But, for now, just the simple act of sending a letter. He patted the head of his family's owl, imbuing his gratefulness into the bird. And he thought, once again, 'Not this day. Not just yet.'

He wasn't ready.

The bird flew off confidently. It knew its way, its purpose. Draco folded his arms across his middle, envious of feathers and purpose and liberty.

-x-

I.07

Rain came in April, and London gleamed in twinkling night lights. Harry realised that he could no longer avoid the invitations from the Hungarians, and he would have to attend a party at the old headquarters for the disbanded but remembered Order of the Phoenix.

He thought and dreamed to himself as he dressed that night in his musty Leaky Cauldron room, the same room he'd stayed the summer before his third year at Hogwarts. He thought he would at least know someone at the party, that would be a given. He knew everyone, and, naturally, everyone knew him. He dreamed of going fashionably late, leaving nightmarishly early, and not reading the Prophet the next day, to be sure his name was not among the bold type-face in the social column.

The column lay open on his bed. He put it away before departing, his eyes catching again the ellipses of a centre paragraph, the fragment sentences, the names in bold.

. . . The Witchtower reports that Draco Malfoy has returned from the Continent, and has accepted an undisclosed position at the Ministry of Magic . . .

And, more to Harry's chagrin than the announcement of Malfoy's return:

. . . Rumour buzzes as to whether or not Harry Potter is going to attend the spring ball given by Madam St Eve and Sir Brutus. Too bad for those of us not invited to this elite event . . .

Harry folded the paper along its predetermined seams, and binned it on the way out the door.

-x-

I.08

His was not the only umbrella in the crural stand of the great hall of Number 12. He eyed the stand with misgiving as the house-elf took his cloak. The house had been sold to the Hungarians as it was, furniture and doxies and mould. Having not seen it since the sale, Harry bordered on anxious to witness stark changes.

Very little had changed, he espied. Very little indeed.

But it no longer felt like his home. He no longer expected Sirius to fly down the stairs, Remus Lupin at the tails of his godfather's obscenely orange-red house robes, or to find Mrs Weasley cleaning the draperies in one of its three parlours.

The memories were still there. He'd forgotten to check them as he entered. And the globular eyes of the house-elf watched him expectantly, but no house-elf was keen on taking memories and hanging them in the coat room.

He passed the curtained portrait of Mrs Black. She, who'd never admired any member of the Order, who'd hated her son and despised Remus Lupin, had found a likable new owner in Sir Brutus. And Harry was left to imagine what had been done with the Black Family Tree. He'd heard rumour from Percy, who'd heard it from Penelope, who'd heard it from goodness knows who, that Sir Brutus had fashioned new wallboard over the Tree. The room would be like new. History buried beneath. Harry had a notion Sirius would approve. 'That is where history belongs,' he imagined his godfather saying. 'Buried, out of sight, out of reach. And the only way to find it is by digging for it. And only those that really want to know it will put forth the effort.'

He shuffled on, awkward and aching, till he reached the waterfall of voices on the second floor. Food and wine and candlelight, gentle on his senses, greeted him before a friendly face found him.

'Good to see you, Harry!'

He found his hand held. 'Oh hello, Penelope. You're looking very nice.'

Penelope Clearwater, Percy's co-habiting significant other, seemed to understand that she looked best in blue, her hair every bit as long and curly as Harry remembered from school. She'd grown taller, it felt to Harry that everyone was taller than he, but her mind was as serious and sharp as ever. Harry had seen a photograph of her on Percy's office desk.

'You look nice yourself! I've heard from Percy you've been spotted at the Ministry rather frequently, but I keep missing you, it seems! Well, I'm happy to have you here now! Come along, let's find Percy. Are you hungry at all? They have the most disgusting food, and by disgusting I mean rich, should you want something.'

'Not just now, thanks. There are a lot of people here.' They wended through the crowd, so stuffed that he barely noticed the change in the parlour walls, the subtle shine to new brass light fixtures, the fluffiness of sofas not yet broken in.

'Aren't there! Half the wizards and witches of the Isles, I imagine. Ah, there's Percy, clear across the room!'

People he only caught vague glimpses of wished him good evening, and he was able to return the words often, but less often accompanied by a name, and sometimes he had only a chance to breathe a surname, nothing more. Jewels twinkled, robes of velvet shone in wealthy lustre, silks gleamed in bright shades, and everywhere was the tinkling of merry laughter like fairy bells.

'Hello, Harry,' Percy said as they neared, 'nice to see you've accepted the invitation. All of Britain is here! Isn't this a marvellous party? I hear they're going to sponsor the Restoration Day celebrations this year. I can see why! They came here from Rotterdam, and before that lived in Vienna. They had some trouble in Vienna. Someone broke into their house.'

'Really?' Penelope had apparently missed this story if her sententious boyfriend had issued it before. 'I never heard. When was this?'

'Oh years back. Two and a half years ago, I think. I only remember it because Dad worked part of the case.'

'How much was taken?'

'Nothing valuable that Madam St Eve wanted returned. Dad was secretly disappointed. He hoped to be called on to find one of their curiosities in a Muggle antique shop. They have so many oddities.'

'Looks like they do,' Harry added, shuffling his gaze round the room. It was filled with knickknacks, most of them resembling ordinary Muggle artefacts: globular art nouveau lamps, paintings in gilded frames, an empire-era sofa, an elaborate brass fireplace fender, and those were just the items within his immediate range.

Percy continued to speak well of Eva St Eve and Ambrutus Brutus. 'It's good of the Hungarians to come to London, of all the places they might have relocated. I think we required the most cheering, didn't we? And here they are, the answer to London's awful weather and our sinking spirits.'

'I'm sure they were sorry they missed the Restoration.' Harry tried to say it politely, as a meaningless comment to direct the conversation.

'Beg your pardon?' Percy had been distracted for the remark. 'How do you like the old house, Harry? Isn't it stunning? Have you had a chance yet to explore their array of collectibles? Rare artefacts from the Muggle world as well as wizarding world. Oh I know what you're thinking, Harry! Dark Arts stuff! Am I right? Well, no Dark Arts memorabilia here! It's mostly old books, or strange, broken things that no longer serve a purpose. Still, what a change from the way the place looked before!'

'Percy, you do go on,' Penelope admonished, discarding an empty wine glass on a hovering tray that slipped its way through the dense populace. 'One might overhear you and think you envious.'

'Oh Penny, my dear, I'm hardly envious. I'm sure Harry thinks our wealthy Hungarians have done very well with this house.'

'They have. It's their home now.' Having nothing else to say but an agreement depressed him.

Eventually, he meandered away, pretence to find Eva St Eve and Ambrutus Brutus and thank them for the invitation. He hoped it wouldn't be embarrassing to show polite gratefulness, after he had dismissed six previous requests.

He wound his way through Grimmauld Place, at times closing his eyes tightly, so he would not have to witness the trampling feet of strangers against the floors of a hated relic.

A hated relic that had once been his. Sirius had been happy here. Lupin had been here. And Snape. Even Dumbledore.

Now only the faint shapes of their ghosts lingered in Harry's memory. He ached for them, but what he ached for could never come again.

-x-

I.09

Snips of conversation floated to him, and the more he heard the more sorry he was that he'd come. He often heard his name.

'Harry Potter . . .'

Followed by snide statements. He knew they were snide. Unforgiving rudeness could only be snide.

'. . . I hear he's been out of work for nearly a year.'

'Can't find a proper job, poor man. . .'

'Why doesn't he try something else for a change?'

'It might do him good to go to the Continent. It worked for that Malfoy boy. . .'

'You'd think the Ministry would do something. . .'

'Sure looks stylish in those robes, doesn't he?'

'Not hurting for money, with the sale of this place. . .'

'He does nothing all day! Just imagine!'

The insults were unintentional, but his ears reddened beneath the cracking whips. Wizards and witches he didn't know, or only knew as passing acquaintances, had judged him. His mind was made up to thank Madam St Eve and Sir Brutus for their hospitality, then immediately depart. He yearned for the quiet, unassuming atmosphere of the Leaky Cauldron, for tea by the fireplace, and toast with butter and jam. . .

-x-

I.10

He had a chance to take the hand of St Eve and Brutus, managed to impart no displeasure at the Spring Soiree, as Eva St Eve christened it, and left them believing he was having the time of his life.

In the entrance hall, the house-elf saw him coming and fetched the still-wet umbrella from the troll-legged stand and collected the damp cloak.

'Is you leaving us so soon, Master Potter?'

Harry tilted his head at the question, imagining in this house-elf's place the image of Kreacher. The old house-elf under his employ, in his baggy, worn cloth, had gone to His Own Place one winter's day two years back, and left the old Black manor utterly, truly lifeless.

The last living tie to Sirius, gone. That winter was colder than the others.

Harry took his effects, donned them, mumbled a thanks, and proudly exited. Should it be the last time he enter and leave Number 12 Grimmauld Place, he wanted those watchful eyes to note the straightness of his shoulders, the strength in his jaw, the cold, calculated, unemotional indifference of his face.

-x-