Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling owns everything.
Thanks so much to MissChloetta and Maria for reviewing the last chapter! As always, this one's for you!
Harry Potter and the Unholy Grails
Bloodlines
Minerva McGonagall had had a rather uneventful first day as official Headmistress of Hogwarts, all things considered. Apart from the usual first year homesickness attacks, some inter-house squabbling and an incident with a suit of armor on the sixth floor, the day had been downright peaceful. Night had fallen outside the castle, and now the Headmistress was looking forward to a nice cup of tea and perhaps a chat with the portraits in her office.
Later she would tell Professor Flitwick that she knew it couldn't last, but for all that she was expecting something to happen, she was still surprised when the flames flared unbidden in the grate in her office. She was even more surprised when two figures stepped out of the fire, and even more surprised to see who they where.
Harry Potter stomped out of the fireplace, one arm cradled against his body and the other around the waist of Draco Malfoy. Draco Malfoy. The Death Eater was exceptionally pale, and bleeding from a cut on his cheek. Both were rather dirty, and of course they were covered in soot.
"Hello Professor," Harry smiled tensely, releasing Draco and rubbing his wrist. "Sorry to butt in like this, but we needed to see Madame Pomfrey."
"I, well, Draco Malfoy, Mr. Potter?" McGonagall asked weakly.
"Don't worry, he's not a Death Eater anymore. If you wouldn't mind asking Remus about it, my wrist is really hurting and I think Draco really needs chocolate or something…."
"Yes, yes, of course. I'll alert Poppy. I trust you two can both make it to the Hospital Wing?"
Harry nodded, and he helped Draco, who was now shaking violently, shuffle off to the Hospital Wing. After a few seconds of surprise, Mme Pomfrey actually laughed.
"And here I was thinking I wouldn't be seeing you this year, Mr. Potter!" she said, smiling. Harry grinned weakly back. Madame Pomfrey fixed their cuts and Harry's wrist an instant, but insisted that they eat some chocolate and recommended that Draco stay the night so she could give him a dreamless sleep.
"He's been through a terrible mental ordeal," she said simply, but didn't press for details, "He needs to rest his mind."
Harry saw Draco to sleep, then he Apparated back to Godric's Hollow to collect the books they had left before walking into town to get his motorbike. By the time he had flown home to Grimmauld Place he barely had the energy to greet Remus and Tonks before he fell onto the living room couch and immediately fell asleep.
Harry discovered the next day that the damage to Draco's mind was much worse than Madame Pomfrey had admitted to Harry at first. While she was fairly confident that no lasting damage had been done, Draco would need several days in the Hospital Wing before he would be fit to leave.
Professor McGonagall was there when the matron informed Harry of this. "That means," the Headmistress told him, "that I will have to require you to stay here too. Mr. Malfoy is your responsibility, and I do not have the time or resources to guard a Death Eater right now, Potter, though who I would have to protect from whom seem debatable. Most of this school would like to send a hex your new friend's way for what he did last year." She looked as if she were one of them.
"I'll suppose I'll be sleeping in the Hospital Wing, then?" Harry asked, resignedly.
"Don't be ridiculous!" Madame Pomfrey said immediately, "I need my beds for patients!"
"You will be staying in Gryffindor Tower, of course, Mr. Potter." Proffessor McGonagall said easily, "I sent Dobby the house elf to get some of your things and bring them to your old dormitory. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm meeting with the Head of the Auror Office in five minutes." She said, already walking down the ward.
'Great,' Harry thought, envisioning himself explaining to his Gryffindor friends why he was at school but not at school, all the while dressed like Dobby. Madame Pomfrey had disappeared, and Draco was still sleeping. Harry's stomach growled, and he realized he hadn't eaten since yesterday morning.
"Kreacher?" He asked into the empty ward. The elf popped into existence next to him instantly, holding a large greasy pot and a ball of steel wool. He glared at Harry, bowing only ever so slightly.
"Master calls me?" he asked, scathingly.
"Yes," Harry said, "I want you to bring me breakfast in the Gryffindor common room in ten minutes."
Kreacher smiled a malevolent smile.
"Only bring me food they are serving at breakfast Kreacher," Harry added, imaging the elf bringing up food from Nearly Headless Nick's deathday party, "and no poisoning it or doin anything to it that will hurt me."
Kreacher stopped smiling. Glaring again, he bowed quickly and disappeared.
Ten minutes later Harry was sitting in the empty common room eating eggs on toast. Just as he had counted on, everyone was at breakfast enjoying the spread for the first time since June. This left him to eat and think in peace.
Now that he was stuck at Hogwarts, he thought, he'd have to find a way to continue his search for the Horcruxes without leaving the grounds. He still had the Horcrux with him, and planned to show it to Hermione as soon as she came back from breakfast. It was more likely than not that she would know something about the artifact. She might even be able to figure out what it had done to Draco, because Harry still wasn't sure.
Other than that, Harry thought he would keep looking for the wizard, or witch, R.A.B. Of the three remaining Horcruxes, the locket, the cup and the snake, Harry felt that he was closest to finding the first one. To do that, he would have to find R.A.B.
Lastly, and Harry thought this would be the hardest of all, he had resolved to talk to Dean Thomas about the woman in Godric's Hollow. He could not shake the feeling that this was important, if only to Dean, but the black boy had not quite forgiven Harry for stealing Ginny from him last year. Harry did not know how kindly he would take to Harry delving into his past.
His thoughts were interrupted as the portrait hole opened. Harry paused, a piece of bacon halfway to his mouth. A group of very tiny first year girls clambered into the room, and then stopped dead as they saw Harry. They seemed to recognize him immediately, as one girl nudged the others and pointed at Harry's scar wordlessly. Harry grinned sarcastically at them, and they burst into giggles and ran past him up to the girls dorms, undoubtedly to gibber about meeting the Chosen One.
Just as Harry had sunken his teeth into his bacon, the portrait swung open again. Harry as immensely pleased to see that it was Ron, Hermione and Neville this time. They stared at each other for a second, and then Ron burst out laughing.
"Harry, if you're trying not to go to school, you aren't doing a very good job. It hasn't even been a full day!" He slid over the back of Harry's couch, landed beside him and took a piece of toast.
"Harry, what are you doing here? Not that it's not great to see you, but," she began.
"I can't explain here," Harry said, grabbing his breakfast and standing. He looked at Ron, who had stood too, still munching Harry's toast. "Is the dorm empty?"
"Should be," Ron said thickly, "Seamus and Dean challenged Terry Boot and some other Ravenclaw to a game of gobbstones, so they shouldn't be back for a bit. Unless the game goes really badly…"
"Excellent," Harry said, bid a kind farewell to Neville and lead the Ron and Hermione upstairs. It was odd being back so soon, as he had thought he would never be again. At the foot of his old four-poster bed lay a small pile of his most brightly coloured robes and several mismatched pairs of socks. Ron laughed again.
"Who picked out those clothes? Dobby?"
Harry gave him a grim look, and Ron laughed even harder. Deciding to ignore him for the time being, Harry turned to Hermione and launched into an explanation of all that had happened the previous day.
By the end of the story neither of them was laughing anymore.
"Wow, Harry," Ron said in awe.
"Harry," Hermione said, "from what you said, it sounds like the piece of soul in the mirror took Draco over bit by bit. Kind of how the diary got more and more control of Ginny over time, until he took all the life from her completely. I think, had you not forced Draco to fight, the soul would have eventually taken him over completely, and Malfoy would have become Voldemort with Malfoy's body."
Harry shuddered.
"It's a very clever way to enchant the Horcrux, because once you picked it up you would never destroy it. In fact, you'd kill to stop others from destroying it," Hermione continued. She got up. "I think I'll go see if I can find a book about it in the Library before I go to Ancient Runes.
Ron rolled his eyes at her retreating back. "We haven't even had a class yet and she's already off there. One day I swear I'll come in and she'll have set up a camping tent in the A to R scetion."
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Harry spent the next several days hanging around the library, more even than Hermione, but only because she had classes to attend. He was looking for two things. First, and mention of R.A.B. that he could find. So far he had turned up nothing.
His second query was proving more successful, however. He had looked through old newspapers and school records to find out more about the "Dean" that Angelica Thomas had told him of in Godric's Hollow. According to Hogwart's records, a Dean Walker had attended Hogwarts about the same time as Harry's parents. In fact, he had been on the Gryffindor's Quidditch team with his father the year they had won the cup, playing as a Keeper.
Leafing through old papers, Harry had discovered a marriage notice announcing that Dean Walker had married a Muggle woman, who name was not mentioned. Several years later there was a death announcement for "Dean Walker, Sr." in the Prophet, placed by his parents. He had been killed by Lord Voldemort's Death Eaters.
Sure as he was that this man must be related to his friend Dean, Harry did not have proof until the fourth day of his stay at Hogwarts. After Dean Walker died, it seemed that the Walker family dropped out of wizarding society. After some pestering, Harry managed to procure a stack of old papers from Mme Pince. Sifting through them that morning, Harry found and official Change of Name notice in a twelve-year-old London Bugle, "to Mr. Dean Walker Sr., notifying him that his son 'Dean Walker Jr.' would be legally adopted by 'Mr. Denis Thomas' and have his name changed to 'Dean Thomas' in two months unless he should place an official objection". This struck Harry as odd because Dean Walker had been dead for nearly five years at the time of this notice.
Feeling certain he was right now, Harry decided to pay Dean's mother a visit. Slyly, he had sneaked a look at the address that Dean sent a letter to his mother to the previous night. It took Harry barely half an hour to walk into Hogsmeade, apparate to the Thomas' London neighbourhood and find the house number.
It was only as he stood, hand poised to knock on the door, that he wondered what he was doing. What on Earth was he going to say to this woman? Then he wondered if he should say anything at all. It really wasn't his business, after all. Why did he care if Dean's mother had never told him who his real father was?
Still, the same feeling that this was important pressed on Harry's mind, willing his hand to rap on the door. Harry decided to trust his instincts; they seemed to be right more often than not these days. He knocked. A slender, tall black woman answered the door.
"Mrs. Thomas?" The woman nodded. "Hi…I'm Harry Potter…May I come in?"
Four hours later Harry found himself in the Headmistress' office once again, wondering how he always managed to put his feet into trouble. It turned out that Mrs. Thomas had not known her husband was a wizard at all, which explained why Dean thought he was Muggle-born. She did not even know he had died. He had simply walked out one day and never returned, telling her that he could no longer be with her and to take care of Dean. She had assumed it was another woman, as her niece, Angelica Thomas, had said.
Once Professor McGonagall had got over his leaving Hogwarts when she had forbidden him to and then causing trouble, she had kindly invited the stunned Mr. and Mrs. Thomas to her office and shared all the recollections he had of Dean Walker the wizard. Dean Thomas, Harry's classmate, was there too, listening wide-eyed to both Harry and McGonagall.
"He was in the Order of the Pheonix the first time it was formed," McGonagall was saying carefully to Mrs. Thomas, "and he told us one day that he was hiding a fugitive Death Eater, though he would not say who, and that he had decided to leave you and your son so that you would be safe. Voldemort would not have bothered with Dean's, forgive me, Muggle wife or half-blood son. He was killed not long after that."
Mr. Thomas was patting his wife's back, and she was crying silently into her hands. Harry mentally slapped himself: trust him to drag up unintentionally painfully family history. He was practically a magnet for it after all.
At that moment, however, Mrs. Thomas looked up, "Thank you s-so m-much for telling me Minerva, Harry. It's comforting to know he never stopped loving me or Dean, even after so m-many years. I'm s-sorry I n-never told you D-Dean," she looked tearfully at her son.
Dean was still looking at Professor McGonagall, but at his mother's words he turned. His face was full of an unexpected, blazing pride. "It's OK Mum," he said, "you didn't know the real story yourself anyway. It's great to know my biological father as such a brave man, instead of as a cheater."
"Oh, wait until I tell Angelica," said Mrs. Thomas, a faint smile on her face, "she always knew something was funny about Dean's magic tricks, they were almost real magic, she said."
Her husband and son laughed, but McGonagall said quickly, "You can't tell your sister, she's a Muggle. She doesn't know about magic yet, does she?"
"No. No, I suppose not."
Harry cleared his throat. He had avoided mentioning his run-in with Angelica until now, but knew that the truth would come out sooner or later anyway. They all looked at him. "She may, actually."
McGonagall rounded on him. "May what, Potter?"
"Um, know. About…magic." He scratched his nose and looked at the floor. He explained awkwardly of his meeting with Dean's cousin. By the end of the story McGonagall looked halfway between amused and livid.
"Potter, seeing as you are not a member of Gryffindor house, or a student enrolled at my school I cannot punish you short of handing you over to the authorities." Everyone in the room, not just Harry, began to protest immediately. McGonagall sighed, "Which of course I am not going to do, but I must warn you Potter, try to stay on the right side of the law. Once again the Ministry seems to want to get on your good side and are letting you get away with breaking minor laws, but do not give them enough material for them to blackmail you. Do you understand me?"
Harry nodded, mollified. Just then there was a bit of a flurry of movement as a former Headmaster that Harry knew was called Everard dashed back into his portrait among the others along the wall.
"Excuse me Professor McGonagall, but the Minster has just dissapparated from the Ministry, he'll be here in a moments. It seems there has been a goblin rebellion in the North, that is to say up here, and so he wants to talk to you about additional security," the little man said, looking apologetically at Harry and the Thomas family.
"Oh my, well thank you Everard," McGonagall's eyes twitched to the window, as if expecting to see an army of goblins marching up the lawn. "Mrs. Thomas, if you wish I can send summons to your neice, as well as your ex-husband's siblings. Do you wish to speak to them?"
Mrs. Thomas nodded tremulously, Dean's head bobbing empathetically beside her. McGonagall got to her feet, and everyone followed suit.
"Lovely," said McGonagall distractedly, eyes on the window again. This time something really was striding up the lawn, but it was not Goblins. It was Rufus Scrimgeour. "We have a perfect room up on the seventh floor that I'm sure can suit itself to your needs. Mr. Thomas," McGonagall looked at Dean, and she was definitely smiling now, "I believe you know the place?"
Harry knew she was talking about the Room of Requirement, and smiling at the fact that Dean knew of the room because of his involvement in the DA two years previously. The Minster was nearly at the oak front doors to the castle. "Professor," Harry asked, "may I go back to the hospital wing now?"
McGonagall nodded, escorting Dean and his parents out of the room. Harry ducked out after them. Hearing the Minster's delegation coming up the stairs on the other side of the hall, Harry quickly turned tail and ducked behind a tapestry. He ran two flights up the concealed stair behind it, arrived in the third floor Charms corridor and slowed to a walk. At the end of the hall were the large double doors leading into the hospital wing.
The lunch bell rang, and Harry jumped a bit. Sixth year students streamed out from Flitwick's class and away from him. Harry spotted Ginny's bright mane in the crowd, but she did not look around. Not for the first time that week, Harry was suddenly overwhelmed by how separate he was from the school. Last year that bell would have sent him scurrying off to lunch at Gryffindor table. Last year he would have called out to Ginny and walked hand-in-hand down with her.
This year Harry turned instead toward the double doors again. Pushing them open, he entered the brightly lit ward. He was met with a surprise.
"Potter, come here! I'm bored!" A voice said loudly as he entered. It was Draco, awake and smiling for the first time in days. Harry strode down the ward.
"Draco! When did you wake up?" He plunked himself into the chair beside Draco's bed.
"Only just a few hours ago. What the bloody hell did you do to me Potter? Pomfrey says you won't tell her a thing."
Harry hesitated, "How much to you remember? Do you know…why we were there?"
Draco nodded darkly, "Yeah, that I remember. I remember removing all the spells, looking at that mirror, and then nothing else until this morning."
Harry explained for severa minutes all that had transpired in Godric's Hollow. Draco listened carefully. At the end he asked, "So we did destroy it then?"
Harry pulled the mirror out of his pocket. Hermione had examined it carefully these last few days, but had returned it yesterday with assurances it was no longer dangerous. Draco took it warily. Several seconds passed as Draco held the mirror above his face and stared at it, and Harry stared at Draco.
Attempting to get a better look at the mirror, Draco sat up. Harry gasped. There were two long scars across Draco's chest from shoulder to hip. They were old scars, and well healed, but they must have been horrible cuts at one point. They looked like the cross on an old soldier's uniform.
"Draco," Harry breathed, "who did that to you?" In his mind he saw Voldemort, Snape, even Lucius Malfoy, wands raised menacingly over a defenseless Draco.
Draco was looking at him oddly. After several long moments he said quietly, "It was you, Harry. Last year."
Even as he said the words, Harry remembered. Remembered Draco crying in Myrtle's bathroom, remembered them dueling, and remembered using the Prince's Sectumsempra.
Without thinking about it he reached out to touch the scar near Draco's right shoulder. A shock of adrenaline went through him, and his stomach dropped at the contact. Horrified fascination flooded him as his fingers touched the pale pink line, raised ever so slightly from the rest of Draco's soft skin. The blonde's eyes fluttered closed.
"I'm sorry," Harry said, "I didn't know what the curse would do."
Draco opened his eyes, and Harry noticed his pale cheeks were flushed. Still, he looked stern. "You tried out a spell you didn't know the effects of? Potter you idiot. It was probably just written down somewhere wasn't it."
"In my potion's textbook," Harry nodded. "Or I guess I should say, Snape's old textbook."
Draco's face burst into a grin, "So that's how you got so good at potions all of a sudden! Father couldn't believe I was doing more poorly than you…"
His grin faded, and Harry wondered what Lucius Malfoy had done to his son for getting such poor results. He traced his fingers back up Draco's scar and then squeezed his should again. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be Harry," Draco said, a soft smile appearing on his face again. "You saved my life this summer, and it sounds like you did it again a few days ago. I owe you."
Draco was looking at him intently. Harry flushed; he had still not released Draco's shoulder. He went to drop his hand, but Draco caught it with one of his own. Linking their fingers, Draco used his other hand to pull Harry a bit closer by his robes. Now Harry knew he was blushing. What was Draco doing?
The hand fisted in his robes slid up his chest and cupped behind his head, and Harry understood. A thrill of fear and excitement went through him. Draco stared at him for another moment before gently curling his fingers in Harry's tangle of hair and pulling him the rest of the way forward.
Their lips touched gently, and Harry thought his mind might explode from the overload of emotion rushing through him. He unconsciously brought his free hand to rest on the small of Draco's back. The blonde licked Harry's lower lip, making him shiver. He slid his fingers under the light cotton shirt Draco was wearing, spreading his fingers across the other boy's warm back.
The hospital wing door banged open, and Harry leapt up. Draco snatched the nearest magazine and brought it up to hide his face, and Harry resumed the chair, trying to look as bored as his felt he respectably should have been.
Madame Pomfrey came in, holding several books and a bottle of blue potion. Her eyes swept the scene, from the ruffled and blushing Harry to Draco, who was reading Witch Weekly upside-down. Apparently deciding not to ask, she smiled instead, "Hello, Mr. Potter! As you can see Mr. Malfoy is awake. He has shown great improvement, and he will indeed have no lasting damage, though he has no memory of what happened to him as yet."
Harry smiled, "That's great, thank you Madame Pomfrey."
"All in a day's work my boy," she said, looking gratified either way. "Now, Mr. Malfoy, it is time for you to take a sleeping potion."
"Draco emerged from behind his magazine and protested that he had slept enough in the last few days. When the matron refused to give in, he sent Harry a look, and mouthed we need to talk at him. Harry was glad to see some of the same confusion and fear he was feeling reflected in the blonde's eyes, and he nodded.
"Well, Madame Pomfrey, I'll just be off to the library. You should know that the Minister is here right now, so perhaps the curtains ought to be pulled on his bed. Bye, Draco." Harry grinned goofily at them both and then, feeling pleased but confused, left the ward.