Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

***

Things go from bad to worse. After his summons to McGonagall's office, he gets another summons, this time from Granger. They need to talk, her note says, and it gives him a place and time. And then it promptly dissolves into smoke. Oh, she's taking no chances with the infamous Malfoy penchant for blackmail, he can see. He's for it, all right. And deserves it, seconds a voice in his head that sounds remarkably like the Headmistress.

He can imagine what she's going to say. No, on second thought, he only has a possible list of topics, none of which are good news. Well, there is something for that. He does have a handful of things in his arsenal, for all that he's in complete disgrace with everyone. He knows that, because the tutorial with Longbottom was thoroughly professional, and conducted at ten paces. And they're Longbottom and Malfoy, now. He's been shut out. Longbottom isn't going to touch him, unless it's at a distance of half the room, and with fireproof tongs.

That ensemble that she really likes is still in his possession, somehow. He puts it on—the black tunic and the very short black straight skirt—and then his school robes on top of it. From his extensive observation on the London streets, he gathers that in the last six hundred years, it's changed genders. He knows that it's deadly wrong but still attractive, and that had best be his look. It seemed to fix her attention, and he's going to need all the help he can get in distracting her.

They're actually meeting on her ground. She's done something with the room defenses; the Floo is still blocked off, but the room actually lets him walk in. She greets him and turns to prepare tea. While she's waving her wand over the kettle to make it steam, he closes the door, unfastens his robes, and slides them off. When she turns to hand him a cup of tea, he's standing before her dressed just as she liked before. Seduction itself.

She isn't particularly well-defended on that side, not having had much in the way of seduction attempts in past. (He conjectures that Weasley never went to trouble. McLaggen looks to have been simply a lout, and Krum was so enamored that he could barely remember his English.) He smiles and says something about making it up to her.

She tries to start a reasonable conversation, but he steps forward and kisses her, and then says he's going to apologize. What he did was inexcusable, but he's going to make it up to her on bended knee. He takes the teacup out of her hand and sets it down on the desk, and moves in on her until she's leaning backward against the desk.

She doesn't protest overmuch when he kisses his way down to her belly and unzips her jeans. She altogether ceases making sense at all (that's good) once he's started doing what he learned so well from Granger herself and from the mystery girl, Granger's dead lover. The stone floor is cold, and it hurts his knees but he figures he's a penitent anyway, right? And this is not about his discomfort, but about putting in her a better frame of mind.

He never would have thought of using Polyjuice that way. Well, Granger has a subtle and perverse mind, which is actually quite attractive, and she also has what he's decided is a quite admirable lack of scruple when it comes to getting what she wants. Which appears to be working in his favor just now. She likes what he's doing.

Yes, she likes it very much, to judge from the way she's moving.

The only problem is that at the end, she calls him by the wrong name. No mistaking it, either. "Tonks."

He already has a horrible suspicion.

"You called me by the wrong name."

He asks her, already half suspecting the answer, "Who is Tonks?" Because there's Andromeda Tonks, who is very much alive, and then there's Andromeda's daughter, who's dead, and he knows who killed her—or at least who got the assignment to do so. And Tonks is not a wizarding surname, so there aren't any other candidates.

"Why did you think you needed to bribe me with sex?"

Oh, clever, Granger. Answer a question with a question.

"It's the standard reward for rescuing the damsel in distress. I assume it also applies to the handsome prince." He smirks, because that's as much of an answer as that question is going to get as long as she refuses him an answer to his.

"Neville and I did it on principle," she said. "Just as I gave the Ministry trouble about Azkaban on principle. Just as I made the ruckus about the house elves on principle. And you knew that."

"So virtue is rewarded, Granger. I didn't hear you complaining just now. And I'm not complaining either." He looks down, pinches the bridge of his nose, then looks up at her, and the words escape him before he even thinks to hold them back. "Even if you like it best when I'm someone else."

"This arrangement … it's a big complication. Politically and otherwise." She's thinking, damn her, and he can feel a whole unspoken paragraph in the pause that follows, and he can well imagine what's in it. He's never felt so bleak or icy in his life. A complication. Here he was thinking she was being discreet and it turns out that she's embarrassed by him.

"Thanks a lot. It's so reassuring to be someone's complication." He pauses, thinking about where he's going to be in a few months, and he feels so sorry for himself he could cry, but he won't give her the satisfaction. "At least that thought won't be food for the Dementors."

She blurts out, "And what about Neville? Because to be blunt, there are some things about your technique that suggest you did your practice run with a man. And he's my friend…"

Only a Gryffindor could twist jealousy around into the shape of noble indignation on behalf of a friend. Bloody hypocrite. And he's lost that one, too, hasn't he? Longbottom won't be speaking to him ever again, not unless it's official. He doesn't understand how so much can have come apart in the course of a mere twenty-four hours.

"Your friend. You're so bloody disinterested, aren't you? You just want to save him from the dirty likes of me. That's why you spent an hour fucking him senseless and saying 'Oh, Neville!'" She winces. He's playing dirty and knows it. It's going to be over in a minute or two, so it doesn't matter. May as well say it all now, since he's lost both of them. "Only it wasn't him, it was me. And when the Polyjuice wore off, and it was rotten Malfoy again, I could see how disappointed you were."

He feels the skin on his face tighten as he glares at her. Please let tears not come; it feels so much more comfortable to be attacking, and damn her, he will have an answer. "And who the hell is Tonks? Because that name is familiar…"

Her eyes flash fury and she's shouting, "You inbreds don't keep track, do you? Blast somebody off the family tapestry and they're gone. Blast them off the face of the earth and forget their bloody name."

"What did you call me, Granger?"

"Oh come on, Malfoy, why don't you call me what you've been thinking all along? Do you think I don't catch you almost saying it? As if I didn't know your lot wanted me dead. As if I'm ever going to be able to forget it."

It hasn't done any good, has it? It's not his fault if he was raised with that word, and if truth be told, cherished it as a weapon these many years. He feels cold all over and he's biting his lips. He glares at her. It's all over. And there's nothing he can do about it. And he'd best not make her lose her temper, because she's got a wand and he hasn't. Even if he had brought it with him, it's not as if a feeble Lumos is going to help him against what she could hurl at him.

She closes her eyes and takes a breath before she speaks.

"Malfoy, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that."

Well, that's a first. He would never have expected Granger to admit she was wrong about anything.

"I shouldn't have called you an inbred. I don't even believe blood status means anything, and I was the one who asked for no more insults." There's another pause, and she adds, "And I shouldn't have taunted you." And then, in a very soft voice, almost tender, she says, "And I'm sorry I called you by the wrong name. That's inexcusable."

Then she looks at him, and confirms it. "Tonks was your cousin. The one who married Remus Lupin. The one that Bellatrix killed." There are tears in her eyes. "You know, we never did… She wasn't ever my lover in life. I don't think she even knew how I felt. Or if she did, I was just a kid with a crush on her."

He licks his lips, and swallows. Somehow that hurts even more than the idea she used him to resurrect a lost lover.

"Like you with the portrait-girl." She looks at him with a tiny smile, as if actually seeing something she might like. "With Emily." A pause, and then she adds, "And I'm sorry that I treated you better when you were being Neville."

He looks at her. May as well say it aloud, because everybody knows it. "You're in love with Neville."

Unbelievably, she looks astonished. No one can possibly be this thick, or fail to know that her face is an utterly truthful transcript of her every thought. If ever there was someone in desperate need of Occlumency, it's Granger.

He says with some irritation, "And I would know even without the Polyjuice. I can see the way you look at him. I bet everybody can see it. Probably even Potter has a clue."

She looks stricken, as if expecting a blow. It would be so easy to tell her that Longbottom doesn't like her, except that's just the sort of thing she expects from him. And she'll find out the contrary soon enough, because he has a good guess that Longbottom will be declaring himself soon, now that his dirty little secret is safely out of the way. He really doesn't need her as an enemy. May as well do his rival and ex-lover full justice. And there is that small matter of the life debt.

"I thought Longbottom was such a duffer, for years and years. Never could understand why you kept saving him from himself. And this year he and the Weaselette and Loony were just suicidally stupid. I honestly didn't think they were going to live out the year. Forget that. I didn't think I was going to live out the year." He shakes his head. "And then he kills the damned snake. You cannot imagine how much I hated that snake." She shudders involuntarily, and he remembers that she has nightmares about the snake. "And then he saves me from those little monsters, and patches me up, and makes a fuss with McGonagall about keeping me safe. I heard him. He's impressive when he decides to be. And then he keeps visiting me in the hospital wing as if I were his long-lost brother and not some Death Eater slime."

"Not bad, for somebody you bullied every chance you got."

"I know." He looks at her. "And you're not bad either, considering what I've said to you. And done, when I could get away with it. Or worse, not done when I should have. Even if I still have no clue as to what I could have done without getting killed, because by the time I had the thought it was too fucking late."

She looks at him and nods.

"So the duffer and the bushy-haired one are my knights in shining armor. And Potty and the Weasel. Not at all how I thought any of this would turn out." He laughs, remembering the daydreams he had about how it was all going to end happily with his father and the Dark Lord in charge—and just how well that worked out in practice.

She persists, "So are you doing something with Neville? Because you are rather skilled in a certain department and it gives me the suspicion you've had a lot of recent practice."

Granger knows, or she wouldn't be asking that way.

"I think you know the answer to that. And thank you for the compliment. I do try."

She looks at him. "And what you asked me to do, he refused you."

May as well confess, since she's either guessed it or had the whole story from Longbottom. "He didn't think it was a good idea. I think I understand why, now. Not that I didn't thoroughly enjoy it when you did it. You were scary. But that's what I was raised to admire: the capably ferocious and ferociously capable. And the wild, and the Dark. Raw power. Which you have in abundance."

She falls silent, and he realizes that he's just compared her to Bellatrix Lestrange. Not in so many words, but she can't miss the implication, and in her world, that's not a compliment.

He continues, "And you know that I have none, or almost none, so it surprised me that you wanted me at all. I'm scarcely normal any more." It isn't until the words are out of his mouth that he realizes how abject that sounds.

"Where I come from, you're still privileged. You can fly." She actually smiles as she says, "I think we're both intrigued by the exotic. We admitted as much on Halloween night."

"Do I look like her in these clothes?" Except for the picture of the Auror in tattered jeans and the skinny little girl, he has no idea what she looked like, and anyway, she was a shape-shifter.

"No. But you do look disturbingly attractive. As yourself. Scary though that is to contemplate." Then quite unexpectedly, she takes him in her arms and draws him down on the bed. She kisses him on the neck and caresses him through the delicious fabric of the tunic. "You look better in those things than I ever could." Strokes his hair, which relaxes him in spite of himself; she knows that's something he likes. It's him she's touching. Him, not the heroic dead Auror on whom she had a hopeless crush, or Longbottom. She's tracing his ribcage, his collarbones, the line of his jaw; every caress says, this, says, here and now, says, you, not someone else. And she's looking right at him, without rancor, not in challenge but in recognition.

Then she says, with unexpected tenderness, "Draco, you are extraordinarily stupid and impulsive." Calmly, as if merely stating facts. "You may have hung us all. All for the sake of ticking off Nigel, who really isn't worth that kind of trouble."

As it happens, she's more right than she knows.

***

Thursday night. There's a routine to Thursday nights, which has worked out over the course of the last few months. On the second and fourth Thursdays of the month, Longbottom leaves after his last class in the greenhouse, about four o'clock, and goes to late night visiting hours at St. Mungo's, and from there to his Gran's, to return mid-morning on Friday. Granger is never on the castle grounds on Thursday nights, since she's "off site," likely in that Muggle house, and then at the Muggle job. He's heard her complaining to Longbottom about tedious Friday meetings that don't sound as if they're at the Ministry, because she uses a shocking amount of Muggle-speak in talking about what goes on. May as well be speaking Mermish for all the sense he gets from it.

He's surprised to hear footsteps outside his door at five o'clock on the second Thursday of December. He doesn't think, and opens the door, for which he will curse himself for a very long time.

It isn't Granger. Nor Longbottom. Nor, for that matter, anyone he wanted to see on a Thursday night or any time.

Twelve little Hufflepuff faces, one of whom he recognizes all too well: sea green eyes and reddish hair. She's taller than she was in May, but still quite recognizably the same little girl who led the attack on him then. Five of them get between him and the door almost immediately, cutting off escape, and the other seven seize him bodily and drag him out into the hall.

There seems to be complete agreement this time about what's going to happen. No arguing about what they're going to do to him. Bloody Hufflepuffs and their consensus; he'll bet the last knut in the family vault that they've talked this one over, and rehearsed.

Seven of them are holding him down, and one of them is yanking quite unnecessarily hard on his hair, so that his eyes water. The ringleader and her four lieutenants are looking down at him. She says in her still childish voice, "It seems the Auror didn't show up." Smiles. "And no one is going to be opening that door till morning. Mr. Longbottom doesn't come back until ten o'clock in the morning."

One of the boys continues, "It's five o'clock now, so that's seventeen hours." He smirks. "You can get a bit of work done in seventeen hours."

He has a good idea of what kind of work they have in mind, and flinches.

"Coward," another boy says, "we haven't even touched you yet."

"No," the girl says, "this time it's not about touching. In fact, by the time we're done, nobody's going to want to touch you. They'll be putting on gloves to haul you away. What's left of you."

She smiles, and she looks just like Bella. Bella on the battlefield, taunting Molly Weasley. Bella at her ease, full of the joy of power, with an easy victim close to hand.

"Like Mr. Longbottom's parents," she says. "And we're going to settle the score on that one right now."

There's barely a breath before the first Crucio hits him.

Everyone says the pain is indescribable. They're right. It's an eternity of pain, pain stretched out to the far corners of the world, pain inescapable. His body thrashes, trying to get away from the hot irons, the toothache, whatever it is—and fails, of course, because it's his own nervous system generating that. He doesn't feel it when his head hits the wall or his shoulder nearly dislocates trying to wrench free from the thing burning him.

Nor does he hear himself screaming until he's released from the spell and his voice is still reacting to the pain. It's inhumanly high, not his voice at all but a crushed animal in its last agony.

"Coward," says the boy who said it before. The brat doesn't know what he's talking about. Everybody screams under Cruciatus. Dolohov and Rowle did, his father did, Granger did. Not to mention Yaxley and Snape and everybody else that the Dark Lord tortured.

He's drenched in sweat, gasping in relief. Who knew how close to pleasure the absence of pain could be?

The girl looks down at him and smiles. "We're well trained," she says. "The Carrows did a very thorough job with us, they did. Thanks to your lot."

He knows he shouldn't ask, but this makes no bloody sense. "Why are you doing this?"

She smiles and says, "What's your name?" He stares at her, and suddenly the agony surges through him again. As abruptly, it cuts off. He'd heard neither the second Crucio nor the Finite Incantatem. "Your name," she says.

He swallows and says, "Draco Malfoy."

She smiles, all sweetness and light. "Well, there's your reason." The resemblance to Bella isn't in features or voice, but in the sense of no limits, the pleasure of knowing that one isn't going to stop at any of the usual barriers.

They hit him with it again.

He comes back to himself, and they let him rest.

He recognizes the rhythm; they're leaving a wait between bouts so that he has time to dread the next one, and to feel what the absence of pain is. He tries not to shiver, but it's impossible; his whole body is trembling. The boy who called him coward laughs.

He knows that it never mattered what Bella's victims did. Whether they were stoic or they broke down in tears and screaming, she took them all to the same place in the end, and it wasn't a matter of their will, but hers, when she administered the death-blow, though she did enjoy withholding it when they begged for it.

Except that none of these children have learned the Killing Curse. They were only teaching that to the sixth- and seventh-years. So they're not going to kill him, unless they do it by non-magical means, or by some chain of events that ends up killing him.

"It's only five-thirty," says another boy, making a great show of checking his watch.

"And we're going to take turns," says one of the ones holding him down. "So nobody's going to get tired." Adds, "Some of us skived off class with Mr. Longbottom and slept all day. We wanted to be sure we'd make it all night."

He's just registered the significance of that when the torture curse hits him again.

When the pain recedes this time he's shaking uncontrollably, and he makes the mistake of thinking about his mother. That makes tears start into his eyes, not for his pain but for hers. What she'll think when they find the wrecked shell in the morning. He wishes he didn't remember Bella's lovingly detailed narrative of the torture of Frank and Alice Longbottom. Three torturers, two victims, and they had most of a night. When the Aurors found them, there wasn't anything human left…

He blinks so they don't see the tears, because that will set them off the same way that his blood did. He just knows that. He remembers that. He knows it from the other side of the transaction.

But I never meant to torture anybody…

No, but he does know about inflicting pain, and somehow it's worse to know this when he's lying on the floor staring up at the circle of twelve that has him at their mercy.

And part of the game was humiliation. He'd already known about reducing victims to tears, but Bella told him about piss and shit and letting them lie there in it; it was she who told them how they'd take turns torturing one of the pair, as the other watched and listened, helpless to intervene…

Gods, why did he ever listen to that poisonous stuff? He's shaking, too, thinking about how much of that script the Carrows conveyed to their students without ever teaching it formally. Gods. Except there are no gods; it's just an expression. And Merlin is dead. Circe. Nimue. Anyone he might call on; it's just rhetoric. Noise. Something to say.

Sometimes, at the end, they'd be screaming for their mothers. "The last thing to go away," Bella said with a dark smile. "They still think mama is going to come for them and save them from the big bad witch." She'd smile even wider, showing teeth, and he'd have a flash of what it was the Muggles must fear.

Hold off crying as long as he can, he thinks. And that will buy him what? A little reprieve from frenzy, but will it matter? Seventeen hours under Cruciatus is eternity. Bella again, damn her to hell: she and Rodolphus and Barty destroyed the Longbottoms in well under eight hours. That was with taking turns, and all of the psychological torture in between. If the parents were anything like the son, they were bloody tough. Disassembling Frank and Alice would not have been easy. Whereas he…

He's a dead man. Or worse than dead. He wishes he could manage a wandless Avada--on himself—or that Granger had killed him in the hospital wing after all. Granger.

"Don't you dare say her name," the girl says. And the next bout begins.

An eternity of pain.

He doesn't even feel the minor pain where he's thrashed against the wall. His clothes are sticking to him, and he can smell the stink of sweat. Fear. Pain. The stench of a sickbed or a dungeon. They've decided, apparently, against stripping him this time, because his own clothes are going to be disgusting enough by the time they're done with him. No, do not think about that. Keep the mind blank. Breathe. He's very carefully breathing when the next bout hits him.

It lasts forever, wavers in the middle, then drops out in a brief Finite. Takes up again—Crucio, but this time in a different voice. Ye gods, they're working in shifts. It's not going to let up. His torturer has the strength of twelve. Twelve against one, and that one helpless… His scream chokes off in a sob. He tries to calm himself down, but his breathing is working against him—great gulps of air and weeping that racks his chest.

"No one's coming for you," said the girl's voice. "We're going to have you all night." Don't let them have any respite. Remind them of their helpless position.

He never understood why the victims begged, because it didn't make any difference, but he hears his voice, scarcely above a whisper, say "… please don't…" He's thinking about how he's going to die here in this dank hallway, mere feet from the place where he thought himself safe, unknown to anyone who cares for him.

"Oh no," said one of the boys. "You don't get to ask for anything. Crucio!"

When it ends this time, he can't help himself, and lies there against the wall, weeping and choking.

The children laugh. "Well, it wasn't hard to make him cry," the ringleader says. "How many more before he shits himself?"

He curses himself for showing weakness too soon, because now they're heading into the second stage of physical humiliation. There are refinements, too, which they will have the leisure to discover.

And then he's quite sure he's hallucinating, because a silvery creature with a playful face and shining eyes swims gracefully across his field of vision, and a voice he thought he'd never hear again says urgently, "Apprentices' corridor, at least ten of them, they're casting Crucio on Malfoy, come in with backup." Bloody hell. Granger.

The silvery illusion does a back-flip and swims away through the wall.

If he's not hallucinating this, he swears he will never call her voice annoying again. Ever.

And there's Neville bloody Longbottom charging in and telling them that they don't do that to anybody, ever. No, he's not hallucinating. It's Longbottom, with his hair clotted with snow—did the duffer never hear of an Impervius Charm?

Granger is covering him—him and Longbottom—and she's casting a shield charm on him. A good one, too, by the shimmer of it; he can barely see what's going on more than a foot ahead of him. Typical Granger: hit any problem with five times the firepower needed.

And that little shyster of a Hufflepuff girl is arguing that Harry Potter cast Crucio on the Carrows and he has the Order of Merlin, and anyway Malfoy is theirs by right, because of what the Death Eaters did to their parents, and what the Carrrows did to them, and then there's Crabbe and Goyle.

Longbottom is squatting down on hunkers now, wand still out, and conducting a bloody seminar on the ethics of revenge with the little bastards. Amazing cheek, they have; they're arguing with him, but nobody's tried to cast another Crucio, and anyway Granger is watching them like a hawk. She's in relaxed but unmistakable combat stance. Anybody that takes a threatening step is going to get it from her.

Longbottom is being sweet reason, and Granger is the threat of raw force. Good cop, bad cop. Rather masterful, in fact. The Aurors should have recruited the two of them.

Longbottom is saying, "All right, let's talk about revenge. Do you know what happened to my parents?"

Six hundred points to Gryffindor for sheer unadulterated guts. No elephants in the parlor for Longbottom.

One of the children volunteers, "Death Eaters got 'em."

"What else do you know?"

How many points to Hufflepuff if the little buggers get it right?

The ringleader volunteers, "It was Bellatrix Lestrange did it." She jerks her head to indicate Draco. "His aunt."

Longbottom says, "Right in one. And I was on my way tonight to see them. They've never recognized me, and I've been visiting them like that all my life."

There's a long pause. Twelve pairs of little predator eyes are darting back and forth from him to Longbottom.

He wonders if Longbottom and Granger will be able to take them if they decide to attack. Granger is standing off to the side; they'll have to divide forces to attack, and Granger isn't taking her eyes off them.

"All my life. If anybody has a 'right of revenge,' I do. But he's not his aunt. Or his father, or his mother. He didn't do that to them."

The girl doesn't relent. "They did it to us. Lots. And they laughed. We're just paying it back." Her voice goes up in annoyance. "You know. You were there. And you're going to let him go free? We don't have anything left."

"Wilhelmina." His voice is very gentle now. "He didn't do that to you."

She answers, "Crabbe and Goyle. But they were his. And he was a prefect. And everybody knows that the bloody Malfoys get away with bloody everything. It's not fair. You sit with him." There's a pause, and then she points to Granger. "And Rita Skeeter in the Prophet says she's sleeping with him. And maybe you too."

The others chime in with additional imprecations against his family name, and details from Skeeter's article, which drown out the entrance of Headmistress McGonagall, flanked by two Aurors.

"That will be enough," she says. "You are coming to my office. Now."

Reluctantly they lower their wands.

McGonagall holds out her hand. "Your wands."

They file by her and hand them to her. She nods to the Aurors. "Please accompany them to my office. I will be along momentarily."

McGonagall is fairly amazing too. He supposes that's a prerequisite for running a school, being able to put down insurrections with a glance. He will never say a bad word against McGonagall again, even if she does chill his blood.

There's a quick muttered conference between McGonagall, Granger and Longbottom, and then he's being lifted between the two of them—Mobilicorpus, this time, rather than Muggle-style—and they're walking him to the hospital wing. Once there, Madam Pomfrey examines him, heals the contusions where he thrashed against the wall, and declares him otherwise healthy, for someone who's been under Cruciatus for the better part of an hour.

He learns that he was saved, as it happens, by Neville Longbottom's eternal forgetfulness and Mugglish ways. Neville had forgotten a book he'd meant to study overnight at his Gran's, and rather than Summon it, he and Granger hiked back to the castle, in an ever-thickening snowstorm, to retrieve it from Neville's rooms.

And yes, he's Neville, because he can't but be on a first name basis with someone who so gently takes off his filthy clothes and bathes the wretched sweat from his body, and dresses him again in the softest thing he can find. His best dress robes, as it happens. The ones he wore Halloween night. And then Granger drapes his heaviest travel cloak on top of that, because it's cold in here, as he shivers in the ice palace of utter abandon and terror, thinking about what could have happened, what almost certainly would have happened had they not intervened.

Granger's voice above him is sharp with indignation. "I know she did it," she's saying to Neville. "Ten Galleons says that if they check the duty roster, they'll find her damned name on it. Someone was supposed to be there and wasn't, and this thing smells planned. I should have told McGonagall before, what she was saying three weeks ago when we went to Hogsmeade. She was on the whole time about his family. Including Ginny Weasley wanting to kill Lucius by slow torture. And how half the Auror Department wants to revive Bellatrix by Necromancy and torture her, too, because of your parents and Tonks. And she all but called Narcissa a whore. I really hate it when witches go on that way about their own. Pure sexism." She stops to catch her breath. "She was saying something nasty to him that day I had the broom accident. Had him on the ground and she'd just kicked him in the ankle. I saw it, and she was muttering something and he looked scared."

They're packing his things. He's going to be moving. No more room at Hogwarts; they've decided it's too dangerous.

But where is it that's safer than Hogwarts?

Neville has his overnight things and Granger has gone back to her rooms to collect hers. They're going to accompany him there and get him settled and stay overnight.

Where?

"Longbottom House, Roughlee-in-Pendle, Lancashire," Neville announces, as he steps into the Floo in the Headmistress's office. Once Neville is gone, Granger takes his arm and they step through together as she announces the same destination. The usual dizzying whirl of other hearths goes by in the darkness, and they stumble out of a huge fieldstone fireplace into a cavernous kitchen.

A voice at least as dry as McGonagall's, except the accent is Lancashire rather than Scots, greets them.

"Well, easier than the last emergency. At least this one's not a toddler."

Neville steps back into the Floo and returns a second time with Draco's school trunk, broom, and Potions cauldron. Draco sits down in one of the straight wooden chairs in Gran's kitchen and shivers. Granger rubs his arms through his heavy cloak.

"Good work, lass," Neville's Gran says to Granger. "You'd have made quite an Auror, if Minerva McGonagall is to be trusted." Which Draco guesses is the very Olympus of compliments from Mrs. Longbottom.

The three of them accompany him upstairs, and Neville sits at the edge of the bed to give him the cup of Dreamless Sleep. Before he slips into the darkness, he's quite sure he feels someone kiss him on the forehead.

***