AN: Sorry all, I published this a couple of days ago, but as you may know, is having some problems at the moment so this both didn't show up and got deleted, I believe. A little more on some of Lukas's yearmates here. Let me know if there are any that catch your eye!

Lukas stared out across the gentle slopes of the Hogwarts fields with dread a weight towing on his heart. The Gryffindors stamped across the verdant grass, huddled together like some beastly beetle, and the sounds of their joking and laughter carried to the Slytherins on the wind, lifting several sneers across aristocratic lips.

They'd be here soon, and when they were here, it would start.

"Merlin, Lukas, you look morose. You look like someone's died."

Lukas pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth. With a little force, he pinned the glower on Draco Malfoy, who stood to his right looking downright friendly. Four days ago, he would have taken a spot someway down the rough line of Slytherins and laughed at the mudblood jokes his friends made without even trying to keep them under their breath. Three days ago, he'd arrived at breakfast early and sat down right beside Lukas and things had changed entirely.

Lukas had been reading a book covering the magical theory for second year charms. He hadn't worked through all the first-year material yet, but he was ahead on magical theory and he was sick of practicing whistling charms. When Malfoy took the seat beside him, Lukas slapped the book closed and glanced up and down the Slytherin table. Three people sat along the whole length.

Malfoy's voice was timid when he spoke, his blond head ducked as if it might make his presence less … well, there. "May I sit with you?"

Lukas shrugged. Malfoy's face froze in a mask of uncertainty and resisting a grin, Lukas let him agonise for a moment before nodding. Malfoy let out a great sigh, colour flushing back into his pasty cheeks, and he shoved his plate back to make room for a thick modern tome. Scraps of parchment marked several pages at odd intervals. Lukas eyed it but clearly it was something to do with why he was here, so it wasn't worth writing a note to find out early.

"May I talk to you about something?" Malfoy made a dramatic show of whispering and cupping the shape of his mouth away from the rest of the hall, as if anyone cared what he had to say. A smile twitching at his lips, Lukas waited a beat before nodding. "Well… You see…" Malfoy ducked his head, and he rubbed his finger against the cover of the tome. It gave a little squeak "I wrote to my father to ask about my so-called uncle, and he took ages to get back to me and I know he—"

Where his voice had lifted to petulance, he broke off abruptly with a nervous glance at Lukas. Really, this was hilarious. Looked like little Malfoy had clocked onto Lukas's big, bad heritage.

"Sorry," Malfoy said. "The point is when he wrote back, he said that you were lying, which I had expected because it's really completely unbelievable, but he also told me never to ask him about that again and he was very insistent that he'd never had a brother, so naturally, I—well, looked into it myself. And I found this."

Draco's finger trailed over the scraps of parchment, until he reached one about halfway through. The book slapped open against the table, baring a double spread brick wall of teeny text, which honestly looked like the most boring thing Lukas had ever seen. No book worth reading jammed text in that tight together. A few pictures broke up the glacier of print, one portrait dominating beneath a header each. Lukas recognised the first name and face – Rodolphus Lestrange – but he recognised the second set far better. He woke up beside that face every morning.

Lukas pulled the book towards him. Jack's page in this book – and Jack wouldn't like that they'd headed it 'Jaxus Malfoy' at all – blathered on about his place in the Malfoy family and his role as a Death Eater. A blurry picture of a masked figure in black robes sat in the very bottom corner beside a small diagram of the Malfoy family tree. The line descending from Abraxas Malfoy and Lilia Orrell clearly split in two – the second branch touched Jack's name and the other led neatly to Lucius Malfoy, Draco's father.

Malfoy tapped the large picture of Jack heading the page. "Is that the man you were talking about?"

Jack looked no more than seventeen in the picture, and he was dressed in a set of stiff formal robes that looked utterly bizarre on him. It couldn't be anyone but Jack though, shifting around in discomfort and tugging at his sleeves. Lukas had never seen him look more unhappy … or perhaps not unhappy. Wizarding photos captured emotion far better than muggle, but it still hadn't managed to capture a trace of anything but exhaustion in Jack's dull, glazed eyes.

Lukas looked up at Malfoy and nodded once, sharply.

"Are you sure?"

Lukas flipped the page over and promptly burst out laughing so loud that he drew the attention of the entire sparse, early-breakfast crowd. Lukas clapped his hand to his mouth, stemming it to wheezy giggles, and tapped one of the new pictures.

God knew where the author had found it. Jack hated having photos taken of him, except it didn't look like he had the awareness to mind this one, or even to know someone had taken it. Not that Lukas could really tell why the other subject of the photo hadn't objected.

Jack was out. No question about that. Slumped against a brick wall while the daylight lit him in dazzling splendour and weeds growing out of the paving slabs around him. An empty vodka bottle was nestled beside a particularly virulent dandelion, but the vacant grin pasted across his face was like nothing Lukas had seen on him before. Not drunk, not high, not anything, and especially not with the way the veins creeping up his throat had turned so dark they stood out like brand in the sepia image.

'Jaxus Malfoy sighted with the notorious necromancer Erebus,' the caption read, and at first glance, the figure crouched beside Jack looked unerringly like himself. Older, though, but certainly not old enough to have been Lukas's great-uncle. His face was smooth and crystal bright, hardly older than Jack, and it was easy to see. In the picture, his pale eyes fixed on the camera lens, sharp lines of his grin and a predatory cant to his head. His fingers drew along Jack's thigh and just before they reached the top, Erebus winked and blew a kiss to the camera.

Then his face changed in a blink. Like a wild horror, Erebus gnashed his teeth, lunging forward. A jerk went through the shot, and an explosion of black magic fractured it to stars.

Lukas flipped the page back and wrote a quick note to Malfoy. 'That's him alright. I trust this goes no further, or there'll be consequences.'

Malfoy held Lukas's eyes for a long time after he read the note, something cool and intent behind them as they flickered over Lukas's face. Lukas held his gaze with a grin until Malfoy said, "You look a lot like your Great-Uncle."

'I've heard we're very similar.'

Malfoy nodded slowly and his eyes trailed back down to the picture of Jack. "He doesn't look very much like Father."

The corner of Lukas's lips twitched. Jack would be pleased to hear that. Now what about little Malfoy looking miffed? That's what the downturned tightness around his lips was, wasn't it? New family, but nothing to hook him yet, and it would make Jack happy if Malfoy didn't hate him at first glance, at least. Lukas tapped his pen against the notepad until he found it.

'You walk like him.' Malfoy's eyes widened as he read that bit. 'I didn't know you were his nephew, but you walk just the same.'

Like a cocky asshole was the part Lukas didn't add, but Malfoy looked pleased enough with it.

"Okay…" Malfoy's eyes trailed down to the family tree, and any brightening vanished into deep. Lucius's marriage to Narcissa Black was marked, but there was an empty space where Draco would sit now. "Why would Father lie to me about that?"

'Jack said they hated each other. I think your father may have disowned him entirely.'

Lucius couldn't disown Jack in actuality – the Lord had the right to disown anyone but a parent or a sibling, due to some sort of archaic laws – so Jack was still a Malfoy, though disowned in all but the most official manner.

"Hm… I still don't see why he shouldn't tell me. I mean what if my…" Draco's fingers twitched on the edge of the page, "my uncle tried to contact me? He's more likely to do that than talk to my father if you're in my year and he knows you."

'Did you tell your father I knew him?'

"Well yes. How else would I bring it up?" Draco sat up, the trace of unease vanishing from his face as he put on a pompous voice that sounded like no more than a theatrical version of his own. "'Oh, Father, I'd just wondered if I had an uncle I'd never known about. No, no reason for asking, it just came to me in a dream, you see.' Merlin, he'd have me sent straight to Healer Montague."

Lukas snickered despite himself, and no matter the grimace that stirred behind it. Not ideal, but Lucius probably wouldn't want anything about Jack getting dug up again. No problems then. Hopefully.

"Anyway," Malfoy said, slapping the book closed, "I'd like to say that I do believe you then, even if it does sound ridiculous, and I'm very sorry for treating you like a mudblood. Can we start afresh?"

Malfoy held out his hand, a small, expectant smile on his lips. Lukas considered turning back to his book or laughing in the boy's face, but it was Jack's nephew. Preconceptions, Lucky. Less preconceptions. Did it count as preconceptions if Malfoy had been insulting him all year? Regardless, he was Jack's nephew, and he did seem amusing. Maybe Lukas could get some more fun out of him.

Yes… Lukas pasted on a pleasant smile and shook Malfoy's hand. The thin callouses on his own scraped across the boy's fresh, untouched skin.

Since then, the kid hadn't left his bloody side. Lukas really couldn't work out what he had that everyone else in the year didn't – Urquhart and Rowle and Yaxley were rich as shit, Gallus was so charming he almost had Lukas going googly eyes, and Draco and Higgs bounced off each other. No matter that though, Draco stuck to Lukas like glue.

It was maybe Jack, but more probably Erebus and the Black lineage. Which meant Lukas had been pinned for political favour, and he didn't like that one bit. At least Draco was alright anyway.

Back on Hogwart's sprawling fields, the Gryffindors had arrived on the flat, neatly trimmed expanse. They lined up opposite the Slytherins under Madam Hooch's instruction and Lukas ended up stood across from a boy he vaguely recalled as McLaggen, some cocky little prick who wouldn't shut up. And Jack's talk on preconceptions could fuck itself, because McLaggen had already made one joke about Lukas's muteness and he'd only been standing there five fucking minutes.

"Well," Hooch snapped to them, "what're you waiting for? Everyone stand beside your broomsticks."

Lukas had already claimed the healthiest broom – only slightly bent and most of its bristles were in place – and he positioned himself to its left. His aura already flexed around him, and it'd take all his control to give himself a semblance of confidence on this thing.

Confidence was key. Already, he could feel everyone's eyes but Draco and Seb's pricking him, and they'd have a field day if little mute, mudblood Lukas fell off his fucking broom.

Madam Hooch stood at the head of the two lines and surveyed the little first-years with yellow, hawk-like eyes. "Stick out your right hand over your broom," she said, "and say 'up!'"

As a little hivemind beast, the first-years stuck out their hands and shouted, "UP!" Only Seb glanced at Lukas to see how he coped, but of course, Lukas had pulled the broom into his hand by a tendril of magic the moment Hooch spoke. The vine bound the bucking length of the stick, but the jolts against his magic still knocked through his wrist in some strange, metaphysical sense. Damn sentient magical objects. It could probably feel fear.

If Lukas hadn't been able to pull his broom up with wandless, he wouldn't have been alone. Most of the class still had a broom resting by their feet. Draco and Seb had both managed it, and so had McLaggen across the field, and the prat's chest puffed up when he looked up and down the line at the Slytherin failures.

Proud Nikita Delaney and surly Felix Yaxley still glowered at their brooms on the ground. Emilio Gallus burst into gales of laughter when on his second try, only the front of his broom jumped and smacked him straight in the face, a sound quickly hushed by Ainsley Urquhart, who had his broom idle and limp in his hand from the first try.

The other Gryffindors had varying levels of success, but McLaggen didn't seem quite so interested in shortcomings from his own house, although he did spare a moment to rib Marcus Vane when the short boy resigned himself to plucking his broom off the ground by hand.

Madam Hooch told them all to mount their brooms then walked up and down the lines with critical eyes, correcting each of her student's grips and stances.

"Now, when I blow my whistle, you kick off from the ground, hard," she said. "Keep your brooms steady, rise a few feet, and then come straight back down by leaning forward slightly. On my whistle — three—two—" McLaggen kicked out at Andrew Kirke, and his chortles as the other boy stumbled almost drowned out the countdown "—One!" Madam Hooch blew on the whistle and the class jumped up.

At this point, the broom jerking and kicking between Lukas's legs sucked up every drizzle of his attention with its greedy pleading for the sky. Swathes of his aura bundled around himself and the broom and he clung on with white-knuckled claws, his mind spiralling upside down and backwards and twisting itself in knots that pulsed across his tunnelled vision.

Oh god, oh god, oh god, where's the fucking ground, I'm gonna fucking fall, how high am I, oh my—

The mental stream cut short as his feet brushed the ground again, and with his conscious kicking back in, Lukas plunged his aura into the earth and anchored himself there. Spurts of soil went in the air, but everyone else was too busy shrieking and whooping about their feet being off the ground to notice.

Oh my god. A loud groan burst from Lukas's lips at the blessed kiss of the ground against the soles of his feet, and in a spasm not quite by his will, his fingers dropped the godforsaken piece of wood to thump against the grass. His heart hammered way, way too fast to be healthy.

"You, boy!" Lukas jumped when Madam Hooch shouted from the far end of the line, a little of his soul probably leaving his body in a puff of blue smoke. Her hawk-eyes pierced him, hands on her hips. "Pick your broom back up. It isn't the end of the lesson yet."

Draco and Seb alighted either side of him, watching him carefully. Lukas scowled. The whole class was staring at him now, and McLaggen's face held a fascinated sort of intrigue.

Slowly, he lifted his finger, a grin crawling onto his lips. "Boys—Hey, boys! Look at Black!" His little group of cronies broke out of their conversations to follow his jabbing finger, all apart from Hector Summerby, a boy with sparkling blue eyes and as pretty as his surname, who was too absorbed in complimenting Demelza Robbins's broomwork to pay attention.

It was a scant comfort, all things considered. A sour taste splayed across Lukas's tongue as McLaggen's friends burst into laughter. McLaggen rubbed his knuckles beneath his eye and pouted. "Did it scare you, Black? I know it must be strange finding a broom with more personality than you have, but I promise it's more scared of the slimy Slytherin riding it than you are of being about a foot off the ground!"

Seriously, it didn't even make sense, but it didn't change the heat that grew beneath Lukas's collar as the laughter trickled through the rest of the Gryffindors and infected even a few of the other Slytherins with insidious giggles. Lukas's heart still beat too fast, and his head felt too light. Too light and too heavy all at once, a knot of twisting skull and brain that cartwheeled off across the sweet green hills.

It was stupid. If he could just speak then he'd be able to spit something back at McLaggen that'd make the insult just as idiotic as it sounded to Lukas, but he couldn't. A single fucking blessing that Madam Hooch blew her whistle and cut them all off before the sneer growing on Draco's face could turn into a tirade. Last thing he fucking needed was someone shouting at McLaggen for him – it'd only fuel the little prick.

Once the silence settled, Seb sidled up closer to him. "Are you alright, Luke?" he asked in a low voice. "You've gone white."

Lukas shook his head, then realised that was probably the wrong action and gave Seb and a thumbs up. It's okay, but I might have a panic attack if she makes us do that again.

"Right then," Madam Hooch hollered. "Let's do that again." God help me. "This time I want you to hover where you are for a minute before coming back to the ground. On the whistle again. Three—two—one…"

The whistle shrilled and a great, twisting cramp passed through Lukas's chest. I can't. He tried to bend his legs and jump, but his joints were frozen straight, legs little more use than wooden sticks. His aura flailed uselessly in the air around him, bewildered in its semi-sentient way by the conflicting intentions.

In his tunnelled vision, Lukas watched as McLaggen's feet drift up from the floor, the gap of air widening to a gaping maw. When they were level with his eyes, dangling into nothing, Lukas prised open his rigid fingers and let the broom drop.

Yep. Good choice.

He pulled out his notebook and started writing as soon as Madam Hooch strode towards him. He tore the page off and handed it to her before she could gather up any words. 'I'm afraid I don't think this class is for me. Thank you for your time, but I'll return to the castle now.'

He made sure he was halfway across the pitch before she finished reading it, chased by the raucous laughter of the Gryffindor boys.

The first thing Draco and Seb did when they sat down beside him in the Great Hall for dinner was burst into gales of laughter.

"Merlin, Lukas," Draco crowed as he pulled a platter full of sandwiches toward him, "I can't believe you did that! Hooch looked as if she were going to lay an egg!"

Seb already had a dollop of the starchy stew he swore by halfway inside his mouth, so he nodded empathetically around it.

"Seb couldn't believe we've finally found something you're not good at."

Seb swallowed his stew. "And Draco hexed McLaggen on the way back up to the castle." His arch tone toed the line between disappointment and amusement. "It was the bat-bogey hex, but McLaggen thought Ainsley had done it—"

"You know," Draco cut in, "because Ainsley convinced Snape that it'd been McLaggen who'd snuck a glob of Myrtleweed into his potion the other day, and he got detention for it—"

"And you're damnably lucky he did!" Lukas ducked Seb's flailing spoon, a grin broad across his face as he followed the exchange. "I don't know if you saw, but Sprout was lurking over by the greenhouses – she'll have put the lot of them in detention again for fighting."

Lukas wrote a quick note out while Draco ground through his mouthful of sandwich. 'Sounds like I caused some trouble.' The two boys took one look at it and laughed.

"Don't act like it bothers you," Seb said, waggling his spoon at Lukas, and when Lukas gave a nonchalant shrug, Seb groaned and dug back into his stew.

Draco dug his elbow into Lukas's side, and once he'd taken a sip of pumpkin juice, he said, "You should've seen it, Luke. I've never cast such a good bat-bogey. There must have been six of them attacking McLaggen at once, and when me and Seb legged it, they were all screaming at each other. Just beautiful."

'Do you want to sneak into the hospital wing and cast it on him again?'

Big silver sickles could have replaced Draco's eyes as he ogled at the note, sandwich falling away from his mouth, and he exclaimed, "Absolutely!" exactly the same time as Seb groaned, his spoon clashing against the bowl, and said, "Veles, no!"

They went in the end, and even though Seb grumbled the whole way, he ended up casting the spell from the doorway while Draco and Lukas distracted Madam Pomfrey with some oozing boils Lukas had hexed onto Draco's arm.

Eight bats flew out of McLaggen's nose, and his cries of terror followed the three of them as they ran laughing down the hallway.