Part Eight : Shadow


He is waiting in the shadows, as expected, with his hands jammed in his pockets. It might just be a trick of the fading light, but I think he smiles briefly when he catches sight of me. "You came," he says coolly, strands of summer twilight woven in that hair of softest coal. "I didn't know if you would."

The slightest shrug is tossed between us, and this time he smiles for sure. The shadows part at his grin. "Well, I did," I reply.

"Good. Come on. They're over here."

It is a ragged little party waiting for us, dominated by low whispers and hollow grins. Some I recognize; some I do not. They all seem to recognize me. It is hardly startling when Dumbledore approaches us and lays a hand on my shoulder, though I shy away from the comfort. All of their gazes are fixed solidly upon my every motion.

"Draco," says Dumbledore, quietly. "Thank you for joining us tonight."

Nothing seems appropriate, so I remain silent. What am I to say, you're welcome?

"How do we know he's not a spy?" The voice hangs on the evening air, unidentifiable.

He shifts at my side, cool as the starlit sky, dusky skin and crooked glasses and shadow-drenched robes. His voice, when it comes, is calm and reassuring like the midnight sea. (Your lips on mine, smoke and toffee and flower petal silk; why am I the intoxicated one? Why am I the only one reeling and melting and craving your taste again?) His hair is so dark and coal-soft that I think it must be a thief of light, stealing it away to bring the night on. "I will vouch for him."

"And if you're wrong?" The same voice, or perhaps another, persists.

Potter gives a pale, pale smile. "Then I'll pay the price."

"And will we, too, pay?"

"Enough." Sirius stands, the shadows tumbling around him as he moves towards us. I remember seeing his haggard face on the cover of the Daily Prophet, the words "Pardoned!" blazoned across the bottom. His eyes had shifted towards me, wary, suspicious. He seems more at ease now, resting one hand on Harry's shoulder. "I'll vouch for him too, if Harry trusts him."

But he doesn't trust me, I want to insist, at least for Potter's sake, when his voice whispers again beside me and he says, "I do."

"Just because-" the voice starts, once again, when Dumbledore intercedes.

"Shall we begin?" he asks in a pleasant tone and the murmurs subside. "As you all know," Dumbledore says, "last week Azkaban fell to Voldemort's forces. The Dementors left to join him last year and we managed to either move the prisoners to another location or keep them from rejoining Voldemort, but a few weren't-"

"You mean you killed them," a new voice says, accusingly. I peer towards it and find someone both different and stunningly familiar. Her hair clamors around her face like lustrous shadow, insidious curtain of obsidian. She is looking directly at Potter, not Dumbledore, and he is returning the heavy gaze.

(Ice. Winter's ice, out of place in this summer twilight, a cold feeling of dread like melting ice cubes trickling down my back. Don't look like that, Potter; don't stare like you're falling into winter again.) He smiles, completely without feeling. "Yes, Cho. We killed them. They were murderers, Death Eaters. Are you sorry?"

"You're a murderer, too," she shoots back. The rest of us seem frozen in the chill of their glares. "Does that mean we should kill you?"

"Maybe you should," he says quietly. I can see the tension gathering around him, the rigidity of his figure. "But you won't."

"Because we aren't all as heartless as you."

His eyes snap and he seems about to say something potentially caustic, but Sirius places a restraining hand once more on his shoulder and murmurs something I cannot hear. Potter frowns and turns away.

"We tried to keep it as little of a victory as possible," Dumbledore continues. His voice fades in my ears as I gaze at the older girl with empty shadows in her eyes. (My mother was so tiny and fragile in that hospital bed, the cursed Muggle machines beeping and blinking around her. An ethereal creature of mist and magic, before she yellowed to a monster and once more faded to smoke and shadow and nothing at all. What are you, Cho Chang? What diseases of grief and inward battles rob your soul?)

"Malfoy," Harry hisses, quietly, and I start. His voice never fails to intrude through my introspection. "I thought you came here to listen."

"Are you listening?" I retort, voice low.

He looks at me and can't resist a half-smile, then turns away. We are both gazing at Cho, I with curiosity and he with barely veiled resentment. And, I think, Potter used to look that way at me.

"Hagrid is currently rallying the giants for a return strike in Wales." Dumbledore's words surface once more in my thoughts. "Remus is waiting with reinforcements, if necessary."

I tune him out again. In reality, I don't care what pathetic fronts are being put on all across the UK. I really don't. I will follow Potter wherever Dumbledore insanely sends him, and that's what matters. Not Voldemort. Not my father. Not Dumbledore. Not this war.

Him.

"Dumbledore," a voice says, and I look up to Cho's pale face. "You haven't said anything about yesterday." Potter frowns and I can tell that he doesn't know what she's talking about, either. Sirius sighs deeply behind us and I glance up, startled into curiosity.

"Yesterday?" His voice trails shadows through the summer sky with its dusky faded velvet. They are harsh trails, like the rents of a cat's claws in such fabric. Bitterly sarcastic, Potter is now, and the rest of us can do little but watch. "What happened yesterday, Cho? Did you accidentally step on a spider?"

I wonder where and when this enmity has sprung from, but I really don't need to wonder. I remember witnessing their exchanges in the halls, the clipped and heavy sympathy in his voice, the almost horrified and trembling fear in hers. And then she is speaking again and there is little time for any of us to wonder. "Actually, Harry," she returns, voice wavering but just as cruel, "yesterday your precious godfather killed twelve people."

The clearing is silent until he twists, the pain visible on his features, and stares at Sirius. (Transparent, you are, Potter. Always have been. Do you think I don't see the shifting expressions on your face? Do you think no one else does? Or am I just an expert at reading them by now?) "S-Sirius?" he croaks.

"Oh, no," Cho continues, a crazy look in her eyes. She looks as if the words pouring from her mouth can no longer be stopped, no more than someone's long-pent tears can be repressed. "And they weren't just those murderous Death Eaters you love to kill. They were Muggles. Innocent Muggles, innocent bystanders. Just like-"

"That will be enough." He does not raise his voice, Dumbledore, but his tone trembles with power enough to quiet us all. Cho subsides.

"Sirius?" Potter whispers, this time so softly that only Sirius and I catch his words. "What happened?"

"We were in London," he says, and all of us hang on his words like unshakable shadows. "It was late, not many people were on the train, and we were being followed."

"We?" Potter seems the only other one able to speak.

"Cho, Mundungus, and I. We'd gone to retrieve something from Dumbledore." His eyes snap, fists clenched at his sides, daring anyone to question what. I wonder, absently, silently, why Cho had gone. "Five Death Eaters were pursuing us. We had to create a distraction."

"So you killed twelve people?" a voice demands, shifting from the shadows. Its owner is hidden. "Should have stayed in Azkaban." This is said lower, but still clearly.

"No!" Sirius' voice rings through the clearing and I have to shift my gaze his way, a bit startled by the color flushing his cheeks. "Cho was knocked unconscious, she doesn't know what happened. If you want proof that I'm telling the truth, owl Mundungus in London. He's still clearing it with the press. Their leader, a man by the name of Gorman McDonald, had the nine Muggles held captive. He said - oh, sod this, why am I telling you? You won't forgive me anyway. Twelve bloody people died, yes. Now say what you like."

I watch Potter watch Sirius turn away and feel, unexpectedly, my own pang of apology. Perhaps it's really Potter's, but it runs through me with the beat of my heart. "It wasn't your fault, Sirius," he says blindly.

"It's over now," is all that Sirius replies with. And then, "We weren't going to mention it. Damn. Damn her for bringing it up."

Potter does not disagree.

Later, we wait together under the shifting canopy of late evening sky and the latticework of flowering trees. Sirius is talking expressively to Dumbledore, who is nodding quite coolly, and Potter has insisted upon my waiting with him. Only we aren't waiting. He's striding over to speak with the girl leaning against an opposing tree, and he's dragging me with him.

"You didn't have to act so surprised," Cho says. She is not smirking as I might expect, and there is no satisfaction in her eyes. They are cold and dimmed, no flickering fireflies lighting up that midnight sky. "You already knew he was a murderer."

"Don't talk about Sirius that way. He is not."

"Oh? We all are. We all are. Look at your hands, Harry. They're stained forever."

"They are not," he says, fainter.

"You can't deny it."

"Why are you here?" Potter demands, my presence shifting behind him like a slithering shadow. Though I will never be he, never be any sort of reflection of him. His voice is raising, dangerously. "Why are you here, then? Why?"

She shrugs. (Pale skin, haunted eyes, hair so dark it almost shines blue against the evening. For a moment they look the same.) "Where else am I to be, Harry? What else am I supposed to do? Maybe I want to give my life for the same cause he did, and then everything won't be such a waste."

"Cho," he says, and his voice is strained. "That was over four years ago."

"Yes, well, it happens every night in my dreams."

"You don't even know what happened!" he exclaims, and his voice is like the stars falling down and shattering into dust.

"And you don't even know what you've become." Her eyes shift to me. They are not filled with bitter hatred, as most from Hogwarts would be, but instead blankly apathetic. (Her hair was brittle and faded amber, pale against the pillow. "I don't know, Draco," she had whispered, looking beyond me into the beeping red eyes of those cursed machines. "Why does it matter whether I'm still here tomorrow?") "You don't know anything."

"Cho!" Someone appears from the shadows and I recognize her as one of the Gryffindor Quidditch players. I don't remember her name, though I think she was in Cho's year. "Come on," she says firmly. "We have to go." Her eyes slip for a moment to Harry's and she looks sorry, though she doesn't speak. Cho follows her wordlessly away.

Twilight has shivered around us and its satiny breath is cool with a hint of seasons to come. "Potter, I'm-"

"Don't." He is looking towards Sirius, who is still talking in a low but forced voice to Dumbledore. "Just don't, Malfoy."

"Why do you hate her?" I ask, instead.

He looks at me, finally, and his eyes are so shatteringly green that I am tempted to look away. "I don't. I don't. Isn't that fucked? I love her. I love her so much that I can't even listen to her voice anymore."

"Haven't you got your feelings a bit mixed up?" I say hesitantly.

"Have I? I don't think so. I hate you; I love Cho. It's simple, really."

"Well," I continue, voice as flickering and uncertain as the fireflies jaunting with their tiny glow through the evening, "if it's all the same to you, then I think I'd rather be hated." (That look in your eyes, so painfully familiar. And yet not for me, those chilling jadestones so accusing I have to catch my breath. Maybe you're right. Maybe hate is apathy and maybe you feel too much. Only I don't think you hate me, either.)

He smiles into the twinkling sky, voice all too carefree. "Have you had a good summer?"

I am startled by the shift, but I only shrug. "I suppose. I went with a family friend to the States for a week. Father didn't have time to take me himself." I glance past him into the darkening trees and add, "A blessing, really."

"I miss it," Potter says. "School, I mean. Talking to you. Sirius is busy a lot, but it's better than the Dursleys."

"Well," I reply, and startle myself by the words, "you can always owl me."

He nods, half-grinning. "Well, if you owl me back, don't send that damn creature of yours. It bites."

"It was trained to." Pause. "And - well, thanks for saying what you said. Earlier." I wonder if it signifies anything that we never have to clarify anything for each other, always comprehending of what the other speaks. I watch him nod again, silently, and can't help myself but say, "Do you really? Trust me, I mean?"

His eyes search mine for a long moment and before I can completely comprehend the moment, he reaches up and gently brushes the hair out of my eyes. (As ethereal and intangible as the dancing shadows and twilight touch, flower petals and indigo clouds and suspended breath.) "Sirius," he says very softly, "is waiting. I should go."

I watch him leave and wonder if I will always be watching him walk away.

"Mr. Malfoy," comes a voice at my shoulder, and I leap around to see Dumbledore's twinkling eyes. Trying to ignore the fact that my heart is racing, I look up coolly and wait. I am fighting back the urge to call him Professor and find that I have little to say. "I am overjoyed that you have chosen to join us."

"Join? I've chosen nothing."

He glances, ever so subtly, towards the two receding figures. Twilight has blurred them about the edges. "Really? We all make choices."

"The right ones?"

"No one can make the right choices all the time," he replies, though he is smiling at me. "That is for you to say."

"I-" I glance at him, quickly, and realize that I have to know. "What happened to Cho?"

"Miss Chang is, unfortunately, still a victim of staggering grief. She never recovered from Cedric Diggory's untimely death. It is a sad circumstance, yet she was very forceful when she demanded to join us back in her seventh year of school. She is an invaluable asset -"

"She's also a bit off her rocker, wouldn't you say?"

Dumbledore looks down at me in the gathering twilight and does not speak for a long moment. "Not everyone handles grief as well as you."

And I don't know what to say. I don't, because there is something sincerely complimentary in his words, something smacking of acknowledgement and perhaps a twinge of respect. For the first time in my life, I believe, I catch the tiniest glimpse of Potter's undying admiration for the man. "They're terribly cruel to each other," I say simply.

The famously twinkling eyes glint down at me, daring me to smile. "Much like another pair I remember at Hogwarts, always causing disruptions and fights in the halls. An appalling number of detentions." Quiet, lingering amusement in that gaze. "Love and hate do not always live on untouched, you realize."

"I realize," I say grimly.

He rests one hand, ever so briefly, on my shoulder. (This time, I do not shy away.) "Until next time, then?" And he too slips away into the darkness, leaving me with my broom and my thoughts and my own shadows.

I am standing in the dark embrace of an elm, cloaked in the knowledge that my father is off chasing Dark artifacts in Egypt. ("Of course you can't come, boy. I just paid for your visit to New York, and you better have appreciated it. Stay at home and do your homework, or something." Protesting was, as always, futile. "You're the sod who insisted on waiting to join us so you could become useful first," was the answering explosion. "Don't know why the Dark Lord allows, but if you bloody well want to become useful, then get to it!")

So I fly.

I don't know how I get there, but somehow my broom and I find our way to the familiar spot. (Two visits and it is imprinted on the black of my eyelids, branded in the haunted shadows of my soul.) I expect the grass to be withered in the heat and the marble worn, but the ground is softly green when I kneel and the curve of a wing glints eagerly like a slice of the moon.

"I'm sorry," I say, flatly. Someone has put roses on her grave, new ones, unexpectedly fresh. Who could have - who would want - who -

(But I need not wonder. Instinctively, like I know everything else about him, I simply know.)

"Father," I continue, as precisely as if I am writing a letter, "sends his regards. Probably."

What was it Potter had said? It was a feeling you got, simply by being here, something that spoke to him and his endless curiosity. Yes, well, I felt nothing but fatigue and itching irritation. "I am not," I tell her, or rather the cold gravestone that marks her, "a Death Eater."

I do not add the melodramatic, "Yet." I do not look at the stone angel, frozen in the summer heat. I simply stand, look once at the darkened grooves of her name, and walk away.

I take the flowers with me.

If he will come again later and be surprised at the two identical bundles of dying roses on his parents' graves, I shall not ask. If he will act surprised when I owl him, if he will be bitten by my vicious messenger, perhaps I shall find out. If he will meet me in Diagon Alley while my father is still out of the country; if he will stand still in the light, turn round, and not walk away -

The shadows had melted at the brilliance of his smile. His smile. And that embittered glare, bent on someone else.

Home awaits, lofty and empty and lonely and cold. Smoke rises wistfully from its depths, streaming into the sky, and it rather seems like a soul fleeing its decaying body. (Only Malfoy Manor doesn't have a soul. It's had rulers and tyrants and lords, power dreams and riches and extravagancy, but never that.) Yet careening from the clutches of the indigo sky, eyeing the distant lights and marble pillars and overgrown gardens, I think for the first time that the sad old place looks hopeful.

I am already composing words in my mind, seeing my own hand pen them onto the crispness of waiting parchment. And with my feet scraping the grass and my eyes tickling the sky, I walk into the chilling marble emptiness of that towering cage.

Now is to wait. Wait for the scribble in reply, the owl skipping from cloud to cloud and back to my hands. Wait for the smile stolen from Cho, the smile that melts away all the shadows that swallow me, the smile that dissipates them into hazy emerald oblivion.