While Lucius Malfoy stood hidden in fog and a cheap cloak, eavesdropping on Remus Lupin and Padfoot in a London park, out on the grounds of Hogwarts castle, Ronald Malfoy led Pansy Parkinson by the hand toward the Lake.
She held onto him with both hands. He was strange today, serious. He kept slipping into this seriousness ever since his birthday, the same week Dumbledore left the school. She clung closer and closer to him as they moved toward the cold, dark water, clamping both her hands around the dip below his bicep as the ground beneath her feet turned wet and wobbly.
"Almost there," he said. "Mind your footing. It's a bit swampy, I'm afraid."
Just as he said it, her foot sank into a waterlogged bit of sod, straight through to the mud beneath. She squealed as the freezing, dirty groundwater soaked through her shoe.
"Oh no," he said, pulling her onto the high, dry turf on which he stood. "Enough of that," he said, one arm around her shoulders, the other sweeping behind her knees, lifting her, dirty shoe and all, off the ground.
She laughed at him. "I've abused my walking privileges, have I?"
He smirked as he set off, cradling her like he was her bridegroom, striding away from the marshy ground. "Just snuggle in and enjoy it."
She did, pleased that his seriousness was warming away. It was almost worth the wet foot. Still she teased, "Are you taking me to the lake to leave me as an offering for the merpeople?"
"The last thing I'm doing out here is leaving you," he said, a little serious again. "No, I'm taking you to see something. We're nearly there."
As he spoke, she brushed her lips along his jaw.
His steps quickened, as if he was racing against her kisses. "Right, here we are."
He tipped her to stand on firm, dry ground again. They were in a small lea between the shore of the lake and a copse of paper birch trees waving tiny newly budded leaves. The thready early grass was spring green, not a lawn but natural meadow, unmown and dappled with tiny purple flowers.
"Isn't this a pretty spot," Pansy said.
Ronald stood beside her, nodding over the lea. "I looked and looked," he said. "I wanted to bring you flowers. You know - to do something special for you, something to show you I like you besides snogging you. I mean, I love kissing you. You know that, but - flowers are nice too. Aren't they?"
She laughed gently at his rambling, stepping out of her wet shoe and bending to strip off her sock. "So you got me a whole field of them?"
He braced her arm, steadying her as she worked on her foot. "Yeah, I guess I did. There's nowhere to buy any at school, and I didn't feel right about nicking something from the greenhouses for you. And it's so early in the year, hardly anything is in bloom for me to gather. So I had Neville give me some leads on where to find something, and I wound up here."
He waved across the lea. "These are some kind of wild violet. I would have picked you a bouquet of them and brought it back to school - I mean, especially if I knew you were going to get soggy on the way. But they're so delicate I was worried they'd wilt right away. And they just kind of belong here, where they are."
On one foot, she hopped in front of him, slung her arm around his neck. "Yes, it's better that you brought me to them."
He glanced down at her bare foot hovering over the grass. "Is it really? You know, I've seen Hermione dry clothing with a spell before. I wish I could remember how it goes."
Pansy scoffed. "We don't need her. Here, hang my sock on that bush. The sun and wind work just fine too."
He did as she asked, taking her by the hand as he returned. He sank into the grass, legs crossed, and set Pansy in his lap, his warm hands closing around her cold, bare foot.
Her arms wound around his neck again, her dark eyes blinking at him. "What is it, Ron? You've been a bit off for days. Is it Dumbledore, your parents, Potter?"
He sighed. "Sort of all that but, not really. Pansy-love, you remember, when we first started all of this, in the room, with the table, and the staring?"
Of course she did.
He went on. "I came to you looking for a connection to a girl like I'd never had before. And it was easy with you. You're beautiful as anything, but that wasn't all of it. You were - you were already mine before I ever touched you."
She nestled closer to him, her shoulder against his chest. "That was because I'd liked you from afar for so long. I'd been trailing along behind you for months, even if you hadn't noticed until Draco stood me up in front of you."
He tried to smooth her hair with his cheek, but he was old enough now that the short whiskers on his face snagged slightly as he moved. "I hate to think of you liking me and me not noticing. What an awful waste."
She caressed his rough cheek with her hand. "That's not something you should be sorry for today. What is it? And if you think I haven't noticed that you haven't kissed me yet this outing, you're wrong."
He breathed out a laugh, tilting his head forward to rest against hers. "It's just that, after we spent my whole birthday snogging, I got worried - worried that I might lose that special personal connection to you. I mean, kissing you is the best, and touching you, when I get my hands up the back of your shirt, next to your skin, it's - "
"Alright, Ronald. That's what's not wrong. What's the rest?" she prodded.
He cleared his throat. "Right. The thing is, left to its own devices, my body would take over adoring you in place of my heart. If I let it, it might become our whole connection, and then we wouldn't be Ron and Pansy anymore. We'd be Ronald bleeding Malfoy and his latest conquest. And I won't have that. So I'm doing things like this now." He plucked a single violet from the turf, traced the slope of her nose with it. "Things that let my heart adore you."
She pounced, catching him unguarded, knocking him onto his back in the grass and flowers. With a hand planted on the ground on either side of his head, she hovered over him. "Did Granger tell you to say all of that?"
He scoffed through a smile. "No!"
"Oh, come on, Ron," she said.
"No, I thought of it myself. I don't want you for a snogging partner - well, I do but - you know what I mean. I want you as my girl. My whole girl."
As he'd spoken, she had been descending slowly toward him, her hair brushing his face on either side of his mouth. He still held the plucked violet between them, still tracing the contours of her brow and cheekbones.
She wanted to tell him something that could not possibly be true yet. How could anyone keep from saying it when they felt like this? A single word, just one syllable, it was on her lips as she descended toward him. But instead, she said, "Chess."
His eyes had closed but he opened them now. "What?'
She dropped a light kiss on his cheek. "Teach me to play chess. I already know the basics, but teach me for real, so I can beat an average player." She kissed him again, just as lightly on the mouth. "Please, Ron."
"An average player? That's everyone in the school but me," he smirked.
She smiled archly in return. "Well, good. You can connect with me over chess lessons, the way I connected with you over kissing lessons."
He gave a low laugh, lifting his head toward hers. "Wouldn't that be nice?"
She clamped her palm over his mouth, teasing again. "Shouldn't we go back to the castle and get started? Do you want to play as black or white?"
He made a sound between a growl and laugh as he rolled over, lowering her onto the grass, penning her in with his arms from above. "We can't go until either the sun dries your sock, or one of us remembers that drying charm."
She raised both her hands to hold his face. "Alright," she said as she pulled him close. "We can lie here and admire these flowers until then. Or something like that…"
"Something like that," Ronald whispered into her mouth as her eyes closed.
As Ronald Malfoy was carrying Pansy Parkinson into a meadow of flowers, Draco Malfoy was arriving at Severus Snape's dungeon office for Occlumency lessons. He hadn't known if Harry Potter would be continuing now that Dumbledore had gone, but there Potter was, rushing down the stairs almost late and visibly flustered - red-faced and glowering.
"What's happened to you?" Draco asked as Potter landed in front of Snape's closed door.
Potter just shook his head.
Draco raised an eyebrow. "It's Cho Chang, isn't it? I saw her hanging around upstairs. Did the pair of you have a spat?"
Potter slung his book bag higher on his shoulder. "Look, Malfoy, just because you're with Hermione now doesn't mean you're welcome to interrogate me in her absence, alright?"
Draco whistled. "Definitely had a spat with Chang."
"Just open the door - "
"I haven't knocked - "
But Potter had already thrown it open. Snape was inside, standing over the school's Pensieve, drawing long, silver strands from his temple. The boys' rash, uninvited entry hadn't broken his concentration, and he stood still, his back to them as he dropped one strand into the Pensieve, and then another.
Draco was apologizing as he turned to face them. Potter was not.
"Nevermind, Mr. Malfoy," Snape said. "Shut the door, Potter. Now, I will be testing you myself today, none of your messy, squalling, practicing on each other - "
The door was opening again, Millicent Bulstrode stumbling in, calling Snape's name and rushing through an explanation about Montague being back, having turned up stuck in a toilet, or some such nonsense.
"Headmistress Umbridge said to find you, Professor. He's still trapped and in awful shape. Please, Sir," she finished.
He seemed alarmed. Montague's parents had been owling him every three hours since their boy had disappeared, frantic and demanding answers. "Right away," Snape agreed. He swirled to face Draco and Potter, speaking almost too quickly for them to understand. "Go one round with one another, then sit and write me six inches of ruled parchment on how the other is coming along, complete with what you can learn from him," his eyes darted to Potter, "if anything."
He was gone, quick as a great black bat, and the boys stood alone in the office. Draco rolled his shoulders. "You want to come at me first, Potter?"
He sneered. "I'm not interested in you." Potter weaved past Draco, approaching the Pensieve Snape had forgotten to empty.
"Leave it," Draco called after him. "Do you even know what that is?"
"Of course I know," Potter answered. "Do you?"
Draco snorted. "Yes. It's part of the furniture in my mother's library."
"Yeah, good for her," Potter said.
"Get away from it, alright?" Draco said. "Whatever he put in there, he meant to keep us from seeing." Draco's blood ran cold as he said it. Snape was close to his parents. What if the memories he'd withdrawn were more awful Death Eater secrets - something even worse than Potter's memory of Draco's father in the cemetery the night the Dark Lord returned?
"All the more reason to look," Potter said.
Draco grabbed at Potter's robes. "Don't look, Potter."
He twisted free. "No. This is how, once and for all, I find out if Snape is trustworthy."
"By being untrustworthy yourself? No, you don't have to do that," Draco said, now standing directly behind Potter as he gazed into the flickering flowing silver fluid. "Remember what the Order keeps telling you. Dumbledore trusts him so - "
"Dumbledore is gone," Potter snapped. "He's been gone for over a week. He's had days to move, to do something. We endangered everyone in the DA to get him to act, and it was all for nothing. It got us nothing but that toad Umbridge as a headmistress."
"A week is hardly any time at all - "
"You can do what you like, Malfoy," Potter roared. "But I'm looking, fast, before he gets back."
With that, Potter plunged his face into the broad, shallow stone basin.
Draco swore. If he shoved Potter away they'd just end up dueling, and frankly, he wasn't sure he was a match for Potter anymore. He'd fought off werewolves and Dementors and the Dark Lord himself and Draco just couldn't be sure he could face someone with that kind of resume. But if he couldn't stop him from outside the Pensieve, maybe he could interrupt him from inside of it.
Taking a deep breath, Draco immersed his face in the basin. The stone bottom dropped away, the space it left rippling like water, swirling with misty silver. He heard voices, young voices like his schoolmates,' and when he turned toward them, there was Potter, standing in the Great Hall watching rows of students writing their OWLs.
Draco scoffed. This was what Snape had been sure to keep hidden from them? The questions from the OWLs, so they couldn't cheat? And there was Potter, trying to cheat anyway, standing beside a boy with a head of messy black hair, gaping at him as he scrawled away at a parchment.
Let him look all he liked, Draco thought. He was thinking back to his body, sending a message to his muscles to straighten up and leave Potter to Pensieve. But something caught his eye, like the flash of platinum. Snape had deposited two memories in the basin, and this must be the second, away from what had captivated Potter in the school.
Snape's second memory was of Narcissa Malfoy. She emerged out of the flash of platinum, the hair at the back of her head bouncing with quick footsteps. Draco watched her as a scene materialized around her. She was younger than Draco had ever known her. Snape was young too, probably in his early twenties, in his prime, almost handsome, and strong enough to carry Narcissa in his arms, bringing her to a bed in a small, grey room. She must have been ill. The light was low and grainy, as if it was barely dawn. He set her down on the edge of the mattress and knelt in front of her, searching her face, his expression scared and open.
"You're sure?" he asked her in a whisper as she squeezed his fingers between hers. "Even now, at any point - just say so and…" He didn't finish, but waited, his eyes wide and black. They were always clutching at each other's hands, in greeting, in parting, when something shocked her and Lucius was out of reach. Draco never thought much of it. No, it was the look on Snape's face that made him shiver.
Narcissa nodded at Snape, her eyes rimmed with red, as if she'd just finished crying. "Yes, Severus, I'm sure. There is, however, one more thing."
Snape's throat bobbed as he swallowed, nodding back at her.
From the pocket of her dress, she drew a cube, a shrunken book which she restored to its full size without having to use her wand. "This may be the last copy of this book in Britain," she said. "Do you know it?"
The book lay in her lap and Snape stayed on his knees in front of her, their heads much too close, as he read its title. "I do not," he said. "But it looks as if it must be on fertility magic."
She smiled wanly. "Yes. Lucius and I have been through all of it. As anyone who knows about the pregnancies I've lost can tell, conception is not the challenge for us. Carrying a baby is where everything goes wrong. By fourteen weeks, all of my pregnancies have withered away. We've done everything we can, almost everything that this and every other book I know can offer, and still," her voice quavered, "nothing but pain and waste."
She hung her head, her shoulders heaving as if she was about to cry again. Snape moaned in sympathy, pushing a lock of her hair behind her ear, bending closer to her face. "Whatever spell you want, I can help," he said.
At his words, her head shot up. "Do you mean it?"
"I said I did."
Her face took on the apologetic pain Draco knew well from times she had steeled herself to ask him for something she considered too much. She was paging through the book. "This one," she said. "Almost unheard of. No one wants it. No one in the royal or pure-blood families who have handed down this book, at any rate."
She turned the book in Snape's direction, so he could read the spell for himself. Draco was stepping forward to read it over his shoulder.
Gravida Triadum
As he read, the room rippled, something like seasickness washing over him.
Snape finished reading first, turning his face up to Narcissa's. "This is the one? This spell where a third, like a second father can seal the pregnancy? Keep it from wasting? If the woman is already with one man's child, but the pregnancy is delicate, doomed, if she takes a second willing man, with this spell…"
"He will preserve it for her - for them," she finished. "The spell will safeguard the pregnancy, keep it safe until the child is ready to live without its mother's body. It's a rare spell because it can bring the child's true paternity into question. Only the truly desperate ever use it."
Snape covered his face with both of his hands, scrubbing his eyes with the pads of his fingers as if to help himself see through a dense fog.
"Please, Severus. It's the best I can do for Lucius. If there's anything there, now..."
To Draco's relief, Snape was closing the book, setting it on the floor. But then he kept his place, on his knees in front of Draco's mother. "One condition only. No one shall ever know."
Narcissa gasped. "But Lucius - "
"He may never be released from the Aurors' custody. If he is, we shall deal with it then. But for now - no one. Especially not your sister, and especially not the child, whoever's it may be." Snape's face remained grave. "Promise me."
She was taking a breath, about to say more when Snape lifted their joined hands and pressed a kiss to the back of her hand, below her knuckles.
His lips stayed pressed to her skin, his head bowed, until she said, "Yes."
Draco staggered backwards, no longer able to deny what all the mad talk about fertility spells was leading to. It was leading to him. He had always suspected Snape had a past connection to his mother, something vaguely scandalous, perhaps as a sweetheart from school, someone she used to kiss in dark corridors. But he'd assumed it was something like Snape's connection to Potter's mother - inappropriate, perhaps, but never anything but innocent, especially since his mother was from the Black family while Snape had a Muggle father.
Yet here was his mother, young, her husband arrested, grieving her lost pregnancies, threatened by the possibility of the Weasleys' having a claim on her future, at war, and looking on with flushed cheeks as Severus Snape turned her palm upward and kissed it, his voice humming, the sing-song tone Snape used only when casting a spell.
It was beginning. Snape's hum was forming into words, not the modified Latin they used at Hogwarts but older words, the ancient Celtic language from the Black family fertility book. Snape broke the line of his song to leave a slow, deep kiss on the fine white skin on Narcissa's inner wrist.
Before he could hear her sigh, Draco barked out a yell, thrashing through the fluid in the Pensieve, the entire scene bending with ripples. He flailed for a door that didn't seem part of the room anymore. Of course it wasn't. This was Snape's memory and his attention was now completely fixed on casting the spell, giving Draco his life, but taking the image Draco once had of his mother - not perfect but always pure.
Draco cinched his eyes shut, yelling, still yelling as the murky feeling about his head vanished and the dank air of the dungeon hit his face. And he was sitting on the floor of the dungeon office, slumped sideways, head to head with Harry Potter, who looked almost as devastated as Draco felt. They'd both been snatched out of the Pensieve at once, and thrown to the floor by Professor Snape himself.
"Out, Potter," he snarled.
Both boys scrambled to their feet. Snape let Potter dart around him unimpeded. He had already bolted back up the stairs to the Entrance Hall while Snape blocked Draco's escape.
"Draco, I'm sorry. You cannot leave yet," Snape said, each of his hands clasped around Draco's arms.
"Yes, I can."
"No, there isn't time. The Pensieve - we will deal with all of it, later. But for now, we need to - "
"No, we don't." Draco wrenched his arms free and made for the door. Snape's footsteps were sounding close behind him, following. Draco's wand was in his hand somehow, and he turned just enough to cast a nonverbal trip jinx, like the one he'd used to catch Harry for Umbridge.
"Draco!" Snape was still calling from where he lay on his stomach on the floor as Draco vaulted up the stairs, across the hall, and out the doors of the castle.
When Ronald and Pansy returned from their walk to the lake, Professor Snape was pacing across the Entrance Hall. "Malfoy!" he shouted at the sight of Ronald. "My office. At once."
Ronald grimaced openly, pecked Pansy goodbye, and scuffed across the stonework, following Snape.
"Where is your brother?" Snape demanded as he locked the door behind Ronald.
"I dunno, Sir. With Hermione Granger, I'd reckon."
Snape sneered. "No, he is not. We've searched everywhere. None of the portraits knows, none of the ghosts, no one."
"Did you ask Harry?" Ronald ventured, thinking of the Map.
Snape waved it away. "Potter is off sulking somewhere too."
"Trouble in Occlumency class again, Sir?" Ronald dared to observe.
Snape swirled full around. "This is no joke, Ronald. The Dark Lord is insisting on a visit from one of the Malfoy sons this evening. He will accept either of you, but Draco is the only one who has been trained on how to conduct himself in the Dark Lord's presence."
Ronald's face blanched white. But he said, "Do it. Send me. You have to. He'll take it out on my parents if you don't. You know he will. And Draco's suffered enough with this already. It's my turn. Send me."
Snape thrashed his head, as if in disgust. "You do not know what you're saying. The Dark Lord will invade your mind, lay bare your secrets, every confidence that fool Potter has ever entrusted to you - it will all be there for his taking."
"He's already in Harry's head. Isn't that the point of all this?" Ronald said, gesturing around the office that served as the Occlumency classroom. "And he won't necessarily walk all over me. Harry says Occlumency is more or less just a really aggressive changing of the subject. I can do that. I can raise a wall of nothing but thoughts of how much I love snogging my girlfriend. That'll back him off. Trust me, I can do it."
It was so stupid, Snape slapped him on the back of the head.
"Ow! Sir, let me try!"
The fire in the hearth flashed, roaring higher, a shrill voice calling from it. "Severus! Send the boy or the charm comes off the snake and it starts hunting Malfoys through the house! You have three minutes. Tick tock!"
Ronald choked on the foul smoke that had come with the message. "What was that?" he rasped.
"Your Auntie Bellatrix," Snape said.
"And the snake - that's the big one Harry saw at the graveyard last year. It's in our house?"
"It is the Dark Lord's familiar. Of course it is in your house along with him - "
"And they're going to turn it loose on my parents if we don't - "
"You cannot go. You are not prepared."
"Tick tock!" the voice shrieked from the fire again.
Ronald wasn't arguing anymore. He was striding toward the fireplace, feeling on the mantle for Snape's pouch of Floo Powder.
"Alright, alright," Snape said. "Be still a moment, and listen."
In an instant, he delivered the same speech he'd given Draco before his last visit to the manor.
Ronald shuddered to hear Pettigrew would be there. "Not Scabbers," he groaned, remembering the rat Percy had given him, the one he'd accepted out of nothing but politeness. It was a bad gift he just couldn't shake.
"If you cannot face Wormtail, how can you ever hope to - "
"I can, I can," he hurried to say.
Snape had just finished turning out Ronald's pockets for anything that might send the Dark Lord into a rage. He took the square of Weasleys' Fever Fudge but let Ronald keep the rest.
"Now, it sounds as if Bellatrix will be at the Floo, waiting as you arrive," Snape said as he picked a tiny purple flower out of Ronald's hair. "Stars preserve you, boy."
Ronald took a handful of powder, and stepped into the fire.